Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
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12:38 am - The tooth fairy is a cheapskate
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Dusty lost his first baby tooth today at school. The tooth fairy was going to give him a buck for it, but she was out of bills. So he got a quarter. Fuck it, she doesn't need to keep up with inflation.
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(comment on this)
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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
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2:10 am - More movies you need to see
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Moon: Cerebral science fiction. The pacing is slow, but that's exactly how it needs to be. The movie raises the question of what it means to be human. 7.5/10.
Black Dynamite: Hilarious blaxploitation satire. If you were a fan of Dolemite, don't miss this, you jive ass turkey. 8/10.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
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8:57 am - My favorite bands
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Fuck it, I'm bored. These are musicians who for whatever reason (and you'll be scratching your head at some) really speak to me. These are all from my CD collection, since I find a way to buy them (e.g., used) while not giving the RIAA one fucking dime.
Amorphis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85MRmGTRjL8
One of the few bands to radically change their sound but remain awesome.
Black Sabbath: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqy4DTHGqg
Classic. Possibly the only band I like that my mom had in her record collection.
Cake Like: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=13901461
The singer/bassist is Kerry Kenney (now Kenney-Silver), who plays Weigel on Reno 911. These guys only put out 3 albums, all of which were amazing. They started out as art students in NYC whose boyfriends played music and who wanted to do something just for fun, only they had no idea how to play. Their songs (especially on the first album) sound disjointed and almost random due to a lack of traditional song structure, but subtle patterns emerge when you pay attention. I first heard of them when I saw the video for "Suck," and couldn't find anything else by them for years until Jammie showed me around NYC, where I found their second album in a street vendor's box. Thanks, Jammie! I eventually found their other two releases.
Carcass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7oGGud2Jk4
I first saw them as a supporting act for Death and Pestilence, both of whom I already liked. Carcass only played for 30 minutes at the beginning of the concert, but outperformed the two headliners.
Cranes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvlEGMa1wI8
Their early stuff blends classical music with industrial feedback. This is a more acoustic song. I've never been a big fan of Ali's babydoll vocals (her speaking voice isn't nearly as high), but I enjoy the songs anyway. The guitarist uses lots of open chords, providing a musical drone and root to almost everything he plays.
Godflesh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4O34H4OKo
Industrial metal at its finest. I like every song on every album.
Neurosis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmdmnnv2NkY
Neurosis is the soundtrack to the apocalypse. I believe I've mentioned that before. Neurosis almost completely abandons safe chord structures in favor of dissonance.
Orbital: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q25Zx6B5HJA
I absolutely hate house music and most trance as well, but Orbital are the only musicians who can do both (and any other style) and make me enjoy it. They are masters at constructing a song from start to finish and keeping it interesting. This particular track is more DnB than anything else, with elements of other styles. If you remember Lily from #rock, her flat is in the building shot at the very end.
Pestilence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfgqWkgImq8
This will probably be meaningless to everyone else on my friends list, but the reason I find them so engaging is that while most death metal consists of power chords, Pestilence tends to add a lower fourth to theirs. This results in familiar chord structures with something slightly "off" about them: it's because the lowered 4th sounds like it's changing the root note even though it isn't. The overall effect is of an inverted power chord played an octave lower than you expect.
Pink Floyd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT2VPk2Y9mk&fmt=18
David Gilmour is one of the best guitarists on the planet. He's been playing fairly straightforward blues voicing for the last 40 years while keeping it from sounding repetitive or old.
Skinny Puppy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCSxzNMvK5w
I haven't been a fan of their new albums, but I can't get enough of their early material. Every one of them was amazing. Ogre's voice is completely unique.
Slayer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2RGIWw5cM&feature=fvw
Slayer is the only band I know of who have been playing for so long (what is it, 27-28 years?) without mellowing in the slightest. If you need an example of how brutal they still are, look up the live in Glasgow version of this song, which they play exactly as fast as the album version. Where Metallica is like the old man who ends up drooling in a nursing home, Slayer is the one who yells at you to get off his fucking lawn, then throws a hammer at you.
Tori Amos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9zXXPp6WiU
I am one of only two straight guys I know who likes Tori. The melodic structure in this song is incredible--and she's doing it with a simple walking "bass" line of three notes. I didn't like her last album at all and only a few songs from the previous one, which is a shame given the sheer amount of studio and bootleg material I have of hers (we're talking about over 100 hours of music here).
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(comment on this)
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Thursday, November 19th, 2009
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6:23 am
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Monday, November 9th, 2009
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1:38 am - Here's a freebie
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1:26 am
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This song really resonates with me. Not because my parents were particularly screwed up, but because I know so many people whose parents were. This is the best track on "Justice." Hell, I can't even fault Lars on this one, and that's saying something. Very tight playing from the whole band here.
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(comment on this)
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Thursday, November 5th, 2009
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6:45 am
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Sunday, November 1st, 2009
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9:42 pm - \m/ \m/
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2:48 am
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
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3:37 am - Thought for the day
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Monday, October 26th, 2009
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7:41 am - I just got an idea for a prank
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...and if I had lots of free time I'd totally do it: Go into a music store and ask to demo some guitar/amp combo. Play "Smoke on the Water," very poorly. Ask to plug into a more expensive amp. Bust out a 190-BPM shred solo. Say "WOW! I need to save up for THIS one!" *
(* may require actual guitar skill to pull off convincingly)
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(comment on this)
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Saturday, October 24th, 2009
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3:59 am - Damn
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I still can't watch _Borat_ without pausing it long enough to breathe again after extended laughing.
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(comment on this)
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Friday, October 23rd, 2009
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11:58 pm - Errata
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I finally registered mIRC after about 15 years of using it. $10 (http://www.mirc.com/register.php?coupon=MIRC-SWV0-MNKL) seems fair. Even when I was using Slackware as my primary OS, I still ran mIRC via wine. BitchX has its place, but sometimes I want a nice interface too.
We had a quick dinner with Jammie Tuesday night. It was awesome seeing her again, this time with a kid who was awake, but the usually great food at the Chinese buffet was pretty crappy that night. It spent way too long under heat lamps for my taste. Indian buffet next time!
I may be remixing an Infected Mushroom track from the new album, but the album itself is so strange that I don't know if I can do it. As usual, I'm happy at the chance to do it but disappointed that I'm not doing older material.
"Flashforward" is simultaneously pretty good and frustratingly annoying. I don't know how they do it. I think it would be much better without the constant "here's what just happened 10 minutes ago for you idiots who missed it" reminders the writers are throwing in every episode. But then I look on IMDB and find that, yes, there really are people who miss things that are explained 5 times per episode. I have a feeling I'll watch up until the obvious cliffhanger at the end of the first season, then not bother with subsequent episodes.
First parent-teacher conference next Tuesday. I've met Dustin's first-grade teacher but haven't had a chance to talk with her yet. Now's my chance to ask her what the hell "write a doubles fact" meant on his math homework last week, since the phrase and concept had never appeared anywhere before that. He didn't know what it meant, and neither did I. I told him to leave it blank in the hope that she would explain it, but she wrote "not complete" on it instead. Seriously, I have a degree in theoretical mathematics and I can't figure this shit out.
I got a whole 2.5 hours of sleep yesterday. Gonna be a long night.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
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6:48 am - New original song
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
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4:53 am - Hippies
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I was at the store looking for some echinacea tea to help get rid of this swine flu I seem to have had for the last 2 weeks. My preference is the local brand, Celestial Seasonings, but the store only stocked maybe 10 flavors from this local company whose HQ is about 10 miles away, and echinacea wasn't one of them. I ended up getting something from some California company instead. They have a masturbatory blurb on their packaging about how great they are for purchasing renewable energy credits to help the environment.
You know what would help the environment more? Not individually wrapping every tea bag in the fucking box.
Hippies suck, but faux-hippies are even worse.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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7:18 am
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
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10:50 pm - Bah
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I don't work in a gym, I work in a datacenter. So why is it that the entire place smells like someone's crusty fucking sweatsocks when I come to work?
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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4:00 am - Are you fucking kidding me?
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091009/ap_on_re_eu/eu_nobel_peace
Look, I don't really like Obama all that much, but I don't DISLIKE him either. I think he has the potential to do great things for the country if he stops aiming for bipartisanship with a side that will never reciprocate, gets his side to stop dicking around, and goes for the throat. But the Nobel Peace Prize, *two weeks* into his presidency (that's when the nomination cutoff was)? Really?
If Gandhi was previously little-known and then--two weeks after formulating his ideas of non-aggressive protest--won the Peace Prize, I'd call bullshit there too. It's not enough time to gauge a person.
EDIT: after thinking about this for a few moments, I see that while the Committee's deadline was back in February, that doesn't mean they didn't deliberate on the nominees past that date. So it is possible that he won fair and square over the other 204 candidates. I'd like to know who they were. As someone else pointed out, this seems more like a "not being a dick" prize than a peace prize, as a jab against GWB.
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(comment on this)
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Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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12:24 am - fukung.net
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Friday, September 25th, 2009
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9:14 pm
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