February 2008 Archives

I got this idea to sample some music from the pre 80s disney animated movies to use in future songs. I remember some of them had really cool and weird sounding choir arrangements, fed through that neat 60's plate reverb and analogue tape stuff. I don't want to pad disney's pockets, so if any of you guys have any of these movies, preferably on VHS, let me know. I wants to borrow em.

For those of you who haven't heard the grim/hilarious news, "we" = Georgians, specifically Atlantans, and "water" = "the life-nourishing substance we [humans] have spent the last two hundred years systematically polluting and using up."

It's all gone. We're fucked. (Well, I live in New York; my parents and two of my brothers are fucked.)

Lil Jon did of course gift us Crunk!!!, a delightful beverage indeed. And I take great pleasure in Itoen's Tea's Tea, which is just tea - really good tea. But somehow I think plentiful water will remain in the near future as essential to human life as it's been over the last, oh I dunno, hundred million years.

Georgia's genius plan to keep its millions of citoyens watery? Invade the fuck out of Tennessee.

I guess Paul and Patrick and Sam and I are gonna have to go down there and wrassle some Chattanoogans or something.

(Thanks to Paul for the article.)

Some genius made a web comic out of the infamously unfunny garfield strips by editing all the garfield out of them. Surprisingly compelling

She must be bored with her singing-dancing-acting-fashiondesigning-babymaking-Ashtangayogapracticing lifestyle. Because she is now a film director too.

At this year's Berlinale Madonna debuted her directing skills in "Filth and Wisdom." I haven't seen it and I'm not sure I want to. (Except for the fact that Gogol Bordello is in it as themselves with Eugene Hutz in a lead role. That does intrigue me somewhat.)

So the Times today reports that religious fluidity in America is way up, which makes me happy, but that, according to Rice University's assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life, "Religion is [still] the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors."

Anyway, here's the breakdown, so you ADHD kids can skip the article itself:

Big losers in the irrational monolithic meme wars of recent years: Catholicism, Protestantism.

Big winners: Syncretic faiths of all kinds. Agnosticism.

Other big winners, according to my extrapolations: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster-ism. Jedi-ism. Clean CSS layouts-ism.

America's biggest families raised by proponents of: Mormonism. Islam.

America's smallest families probably raised by: Infertile nuns who hate babies.

My picks for the "Whatever Happened To...?" file: Zoroastrianism. Mesmerism. Kris Kross (not a religion, but what happened to those guys?).

Craziest shit reported in connection to: Scientology. Self-mummifying monks.

Well, after Sam's post about Spore the other day, I did some investigating to find out if Spore is coming to Mac, my platform of choice these days.

The answer is yes. And no. Mostly no.

Allow me to explain.

According to this EA press release, "Spore for the Mac will be made possible through TransGaming's Cider Portability Engine, with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles."

Without getting too technical, Cider is basically a Windows emulator. "Portability Engine" is code for "Software we use so that we don't actually have to port the game to another platform."

And what all THAT is code for is that Mac users get a third-rate product: Third-rate compatibility, third-rate performance, and if their track record with "past EA Mac titles" is any indication, third-rate support.

The performance issue is one of my biggest pet peeves, and will probably stop me from buying the mac version. Basically, the game will need all the memory, graphics, and CPU power the PC version does, PLUS all the resources needed to run Cider, the 'emulator'.

This means that on a Mac and PC with exactly the same specifications, the game will run much slower on the Mac, just because EA didn't feel like the Mac audience was worth the time and effort to make a real port, but is happy to take Mac user's money just the same.

The third-rate support problem really seals the deal for me. If I get this game, I'm getting the PC version and playing it in boot camp. See, when EA put out Battlefield 2142 for the Mac, they did it on Cider.

The first nasty surprise I got is that it ran about the same on my brand new mac and my four year old PC.

The second nasty surprise I got is when EA released a major patch for 2142 for the PC... and then waited a month to release the patch for the Macs... *EVEN THOUGH THE MACS WERE RUNNING THE EXACT SAME PROGRAM AS THE PCs, ONLY THROUGH CIDER*. So it wound up that all the PCs, and most of the install base, were on the new version... and so none of the Mac people could play on any of the updated servers. For a month.

(And, actually, they're charging more for a worse product. At the time of this writing the PC version is $19.99. The Mac version is twice that. Oh! And I almost forgot. The expansion, Northern Strike, which is required to unlock all the weapons, is not available for Mac and there are no plans to bring out a Mac version - even though it's just a map pack.)

I eventually complained enough that EA gave me a refund... But the fact remains that Cider ports of PC games are phoned-in half-assed products that don't work nearly as well as fully ported software that runs natively on your OS. So when EA says they're releasing Spore using Cider "with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles," don't believe them! As long as they're still using Cider, they haven't gained enough experience.

Once a year we get some of the wealthiest, overexposed people in the entire world into one room so they can spend 4+ glorious hours patting each other on the back so hard it's a wonder they don't come out of there black and blue.

Every movie release is a celebration of how great and fantastic all of these people are! Do we really need an annual recap?

I'm cranky!

Also: still sick.

Also: Did you know that Diablo Cody, writer of Juno, was at the Oscars this year? Did you know that she was discovered on her blog?! Why don't those talent scouts ever come knocking on my door?

... And why don't I have anything good for them to read?

Oh, hell.

Spore looks amazing. This is, at this point, kind of an old video. However, I watched it again today and I am still excited about this game. Coming out on my birthday (9/7/08) this year.

Turkey invaded northern Iraq some time last night to hunt down Kurdish rebels*, and this hilarious photo was one of three the BBC posted to help us irenic hipsters imagine the event.

What the fuck are they wearing? They look like they're part of the Stay-Puff Brigade, about to invade Gum Drop Mountain.

*Kurdish separatists = the Itchy to Turkish nationalists' Scratchy. Kurds, like ethnic Albanians in Serbia (until a couple days ago), Palestinians and the majority of the Armenian people, have been denied a state; Kurds live in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and probably New York City. None of this explains the huge puffy backpacks in the photo.

So, most of you dear readers know that my band has been working on a record since the beginning of December; or, if you count writing and rehearsing the songs, much much longer. It is almost finished thanks to Mike Rugnetta and Bailey Math. Anyway, to let off some art steam I'm doing a project this week on the side. Lets call it a side project. I'm going to try to write and record and mix a 5 song EP in one week. I'm calling it Unforgiveable Birthday, a name boosted from a video project a kid worked on at my job about his birthday falling on 9-11. Hilarious! Wish me luck, I'll be throwing the songs up here as they are finished.

...is depressing. I just rented it up on netflix, because I love Watershipdown and Plague Dogs is the lesser known sequel. Anyway, it's really good, so get it if you can. After doing some brief internet research, it appears there are a few cuts roaming around, but very few uncut releases. However, I found a ten part upload on youtube that has everything left in. Totally brutal.

Though apparently this thing is going around. Nearly everyone I've talked to has had what I have or knows someone who had it. Even my mom, way back in Massachusetts, says that half her office has come down with the same symptoms (and similar duration).

And just a couple weeks ago, I had food poisoning that knocked me out for half a week. I've been joking that Mercury must be in retrograde.

Turns out that it is.

Anyway, for the brief moments I'm coherent and conscious, I've been watching classic Trek on CBS.com. They don't have every episode, but they have a lot of them. For free! Also: Twilight Zone!

While looking for some hilarious Shatner stuff to show Karen, I stumbled across something really magnificent: William Shatner singing Common People by Pulp.

I can't wait until I'm not sick anymore!

I have a sore throat, some aches and pains. I have been eating healthy food, vitamins, and downing lots and lots of liquids. I have a big job that starts tomorrow at 6pm, so I hope I'll feel better by then.

How come I get sick so often?!

Anyway, here is someone else's comic about my public school experience.

Carlee had her going away party this past Friday night at her apartment on Moore St., a place she shared with Bailey, Liz, Carlos, and maybe some other people(?). The population of the apartment expands and contracts (they've had other roommates, Patrick lived there for a spell), but I'm pretty sure those four are the main residents. It was good, there was a big turnout and the apartment was packed with howling bodies by 1:00am. I smoked myself hoarse and drank half a six pack of Yuengling, and left around the time a screaming crowd had formed in a circle surrounding a makeshift flipcup table, warped plywood placed atop an ancient card table with folding legs. The wood was dark with spilled beer and Bailey's booted feet stomped in frothy amber puddles on the floor.

Dylan and Michelle are back from their nearly yearlong curious expedition, and it is good to have them back. It's hard for me to articulate what it is they bring to a room, but I hadn't realized how much I missed it until it was finally back. They have been apartment hunting and have settled on an apartment in Greenpoint. They came over for ice cream and a chat the other day, and I asked them about the more personal aspects of their trip as their blog is more academic than anecdotal. I'll let them share details here if they choose to.

In other news, I have quit smoking as of today, February 17th, 2008. I am done smoking for keeps. (Except, perhaps, the occasional hookah with my neighbors. It would be rude not to!) Whenever one of my friends quit, I always say "Real smokers never quit, they just stop for a while." I am determined to prove that I was never a real smoker!

I guess I'll leave it there for now. I think my writing is coming out a little funny today. I'm reading a story in the new issue of A Public Space all about an expedition to the North Pole that is ruined and devestated by rats. I think the narrator's voice is sneaking in to my prose a little bit.

A side note: Albanian pride today in Manhattan! Woo! (Full disclosure: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Albanian party.)

My sister got Karen a cool sweater for Christmas. Here is a picture.

For the past two weeks or so, the site has been in various levels of down-ness. I hope the main site has been accessible and readable to the outside world, but posts haven't really been possible and comments were probably b0rked too. I tried to move the site to another server, but the MT scripts consistantly maxed out the CPU load on their servers and I don't have the balls, know-how, or time to debug it.

So we went back to our old hosts, IX, and had them bring us up to the latest versions of php and mysql and stuff, but it was a hassle to get the DB back up for reasons too boring to get in to here.

Anyway, with any luck the site is back for real for a while and I'll start my post-a-day regimen up again.

I miss everyone! I hope we talk soon.

Well, I thought I was going to post a bunch of stuff today but I didn't. I ended up working all day!

Today I was working on subtitles for Oscar award nominated short films. This was not exciting or creative work. What I spent the day doing was the information-age equivalent of coal mining: data entry.

But! I had a good day, I made money, and I'm happy to be gainfully employed. I'm not complaining, just trying to give you the flavor of my day.

Then we had game night when I got home! My friend Josh came and joined myself, Karen, Patrick, Paul, Carlee, Geoff, and Jess for some rounds of Fluxx, Mafia, contract bridge and Carcassonne.

I am finally learning contract bridge! After everyone left I still wanted to play so bad that I went a few rounds with Autobridge, which was fun and instructive. I'm very excited about playing more in the future. It's tricky to get it going for the first time, because there are so many concepts that are new to me, but now that I've gotten through the basic introduction, I'm beginning to learn and understand all of the advanced material that I've been given by my grandmother. Who, coincidentally, voted for Obama today in Illinois!

Anyway, I don't have much else to say right now. I'm trying to find some places to play contract bridge online but MSN's contract bridge is down for February and other places that require a software download also require windows, so now I'm looking in to java stuff...

I've got work in the morning tomorrow but after that I'm free so I should be posting fun stuff for real later in the day tomorrow.

Thanks for listening!

3 flus, 2 stomach bugs and 2 annoying weeks at work. I'm mister starting symptoms but never get ill enough to sit it out. This is very annoying. Today I had a fever, made someone touch my forehead for a dollar. Now I feel ok. well coughing a lot, and generally shitty, but not as bad as a few hours back. Oh, and Doc, know anything about black mold?

Now, my bathroom ceiling in 3 depressing parts:



I got innovative with the detached door



Landlord is starting to...something...

But I feel like I still owe three entries from those days.

And I will deliver them! Tomorrow.

Tonight's entry is a cop-out entry. But I have lots of photographs from over the weekend, plus an exciting new video! You shall see. You will be glad that you waited.

I was looking at post secret today, and noticed this postcard:

I often read post secret because I think people are fascinating. It's a little glimpse into their lives. This one particularly struck a cord with me, though.