Your Electro-Acousmatic One-Stop Industrial Zombie Shop

Waldorf Blofeld Bad Encoder Fix

2011-03-19T23:17:00.007-05:00

For over a year some of the knobs on my Blofeld have gotten a bit eccentric. At first it was just a bit of jitter when turning the fourth knob (Osc Level / Filter Env Amount / Env Release / LFO 2 Speed / Matrix Destination / Arp Clock), but eventually it got so bad that turning the knob clockwise would result in it going 2 steps up, 15 steps down, 4 steps up, 10 steps down, etc... until it took 5 minutes just to go from 64 to 90 on the damn thing. I dealt with it for a while, but then some of the other knobs started acting up, including the "Bank" knob which also doubles as a value knob for pretty much every parameter that's not on the front panel. After a bit of frustration I kind of quit programming on the Blofeld. I thought about designing some kind of software editor either in Mainstage or Logic's Environment or Reaktor, but these days I don't have time for anything.

Here's someone else's video demonstrating what my Blofeld was doing:

Originally I had tried opening up the Blofeld and spraying some air underneath the knobs, but that didn't help. Then I asked a friend who does synth repair in New York what he recommended, and he advised spraying some tuner cleaner under the knobs instead of air. That also did not work. A few years ago there was a post on matrixsynth advising replacing the encoders. I looked at the encoders in the Blofeld and decided that was not something I was comfortable doing (and I had built a PAiA 9700s before).

I was kind of stuck. I had this Blofeld that I couldn't really use the way I wanted to, but I couldn't really sell it the way it was for a price that I was willing to settle for.

Luckily, I happened to stumble upon this youtube video which, while not useful in and of itself, included a link to http://synth.stromeko.net/DIY.html, which contained some very useful info about how to fix this problem.

Basically, according to stromeko, the problem was that the encoders needed additional capacitors. He advised capacitors that were "not much larger than 1nF." I checked RadioShack's crappy website and found they don't really measure their capacitors in nF, but I was able to find this chart which shows that 1nF = .001 uF, which RadioShack did carry.

So tonight I went to RadioShack hoping to get seven pairs of .001 uF capacitors, but of course they only had four pair. Whatever. So far only two of my knobs were unusable and another two were just flaky, so that worked. I had big dreams of doing a short, succinct youtube video, but my camera sucks at up close, and the Blofeld's display just does not show up well on it, so FUCK IT.

Long Story Short: I did the mod and my two unusable knobs are now as good as new, and the two flaky knobs are fine too. It's relatively easy to do if you're an experienced amateur like myself (over 40 hours spent soldering on the PAiA 9700s plus a few other projects) and know to watch out for solder bridges and to keep the iron away from anything it shouldn't touch.

So far so good, but if my Blofeld starts smoking or explodes in the next few days, I'll be sure to update.

I tried taking photos, but it didn't work out so well.

Before

After

Access Virus TI OS4

2010-03-27T12:51:00.003-05:00

Access finally added a way to make the Arp serve as a step sequencer for modulation. They also added some nice guitar pedal style distortions and a comb filter.

Os4 by mikeoday

Here's one where I use the arp to modulate pitch in a style similar to old analog modular synths. Way back in college, I got to play with an Arp 2500 and do stuff like this with its 10-step sequencer.

Os4demo2 by mikeoday

Waldorf Blofeld Vs Waldorf Largo

2009-12-16T21:35:00.005-06:00

Waldorf Largo is a soft synth that is similar to the Blofeld, but Waldorf insists it is not a soft synth version of the Blofeld. They are very similar, the only differences are that the 3 Largo oscillators each have a sub-osc, the Blofeld oscillators have a Brilliance parameter, and the Blofeld has a PPG Low Pass filter setting. Pretty much everything else, in my experience, is the same.

I am of the mind that you would either have one or the other, there is no reason to have both. Some would disagree - I think those people have too much money.

I've been thinking about selling my Blofeld and picking up Largo instead. I like the Blofeld, it definitely has its place in the mix, it's by far my brightest synth and I wouldn't want to do without it completely. However, it is a pain in the ass to program. I do not like the layout, and one of my four programming knobs is buggy - if you twist it, say, clockwise, it goes up by about 10, then down by about five, then up another 10, then down another five. It's very annoying. Even without the buggy knob, it takes forever for me to program and tweak a patch, whereas with the Largo demo, I'm throwing shit together in five minutes.

Waldorf has a very generous demo thingy for the Largo where you get to try out the full version for 30 days. You can even bounce it and record it - so say I'm working on a song, I can throw in some Largo stuff, bounce it, and I'll still have it in the mix as an audio file when the 30 days expires. I think that alone would make someone more inclined to buy it.

***

Today I put together some Blofeld vs. Largo comparisons. The idea is to throw something together in Largo, then recreate it exactly in the Blofeld. At first I thought it'd be hard, but it was actually really easy. It's almost like the Largo would be a great sketch pad or visual reference for programming the Blofeld.

The first track is a pad with lots of delay.
Blofeld vs Largo 1 by mikeoday
The Blofeld is first, then Largo right after 2:03. The biggest difference is the delay, the Blofeld delay turns to flat mush, but the Largo delay maintains separation, giving it an animated, rhythmic quality. Largo definitely wins this one, I kind of hate the Blofeld half of this, but I think the Largo half is very nice. There's no compression on either recording.

The second track is an old school EBM percussive bass sound.
Largo vs Blofeld 2 by mikeoday
First half is Largo, second half is Blofeld. For this patch, Blofeld has a bit darker, thicker sound, whereas Largo is brighter and less chunky. This one is a toss up as to which is better, I'd be inclined to go with the Blofeld one, but I have a feeling I'd be rolling off those lows when it came time to mix this down in a track with a kick drum and stuff.

I'm still a bit up in the air at this point. If I did not own a Blofeld, I'd definitely go with the Largo. But if I'm going to go with Largo, I'd definitely want to sell the Blofeld, which would be a huge pain in the ass without the buggy knob, let alone with it.

Because... ZOMBIES!!!

2009-10-17T00:32:00.004-05:00

Plants vs. Zombies from popcap!!!

WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOO!!!

...

I'm retarded.

PS. Popcap sells it for $19.95, but you can get it on Steam for $9.95

DAMN YOU, google maps!!!!

2009-10-03T23:17:00.001-05:00

Thanks to that, we missed the start of the Angelspit concert, plus running around in the cold and the rain made my wife's cold worse.

I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!!!**

**Dear google, please don't delete my free gmail account or my free blogger account. K, thnx, bye.

What comes next?

2009-09-26T23:39:00.002-05:00

Republicans accused liberals of being crooks and thugs. Then they gave us Watergate.

Republicans accused liberals of media bias. Then they gave us the Fox News Channel.

Republicans accused liberals of election fraud. Then they gave us Florida in 2000.

Republicans are now accusing liberals of plotting to create re-education camps and death panels.

What comes next?

Butterflies on Shit

2009-09-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

Say something profound.

"Something profound."

ohGr - Devils in my Details

2009-09-09T00:01:00.002-05:00

This CD actually came out last October, but I never picked it up because none of the music "previews" or whatever really grabbed me. If you listen to the two tracks posted on the ohGr myspace page, you have two songs that both start with weird spoken word things, and when the song starts, the first one "Timebomb" is kind of a samba style thing, and the second one, "Feelin' Chicken" is like circus music with random chicken noises in it. Based on those two songs, it comes off as an album by one of the leaders of the industrial music genre, whose solo work has had kind of an electro/synth-pop flavor to it, apparently doing every other random style of music that is not industrial.

This album was released right after Repo: The Genetic Opera was in limited release in theaters, which niveK Ogre aka ohGr had a role in. Based on these two tracks, it isn't entirely unreasonable to deduce this album is somehow influenced by - well - musical theater or some shit. I also listened to the 30 second samples on Amazon.com, but nothing there really changed my mind. It seemed like, for whatever reason, ohGr decided to do an album of industrial tinged show tunes. That's great, I'll pass.

As time passed, I noticed a lot of industrial reviewers gave the album high marks. Regen Magazine even went to so far as to call it the number one album of 2008. (Angelspit's Blood Death Ivory should be way higher on that list, possibly even number one.) I wanted to check the whole album out, but I didn't feel like spending $10 or whatever in case I hated it. (And I don't fuck around with piracy, no bit torrent, none of that shit). So I put it on the back burner until recently when Gemma and I happened to get an amazon gift certificate from an extended family member of hers.

It's really fucking good.

It's not a collection of songs, it is an album. You listen to it from beginning to end. Each song blends into the next. Unfortunately, the Amazon.com 30 second samples tend to fall on the in-between portions of songs, so you get a lot of Bill Moseley saying weird shit. And "Feelin' Chicken" is probably the last song that should be used to promote this album. It's not bad when it's played in its place on the album, but out of context it's just WTF.

Another thing I love about this album: it opts out of the Loudness War. It's beautifully mixed and mastered. The first track, "Shhh," intentionally lacks the highest frequencies (aka "sparklies") - why? So that when the second track, "Eyecandy," comes in, it has those upper-upper frequencies and it creates DYNAMIC CONTRAST and therefore MAKES AN IMPACT. Y'know, like music is supposed to. Music needs to be quiet sometimes so that the LOUDNESS means something - everyone who mixes and masters knows this and yet we all feel pressured to accommodate record execs (and consumers) and mix for maximum loudness all the time.

Musical "volume," aka dynamics, are not meant to be static, however record execs, radio programmers and consumers are increasingly demanding the music be LOUD all the time. Some Amazon reviewer called this album "poorly mixed." Wrong, bucko, all music should be mixed/mastered like this. The industry standard for movies is an overall dynamic range of 24 dB - meaning that the quietest part of a movie can be 24 dB less than the loudest part of a movie. In music, the standard is inching from 8 dB to 6 dB.

That's bullshit.

Decibels are not a linear measurement, it's logarithmic. That means a dynamic range of 12 dB is NOT twice the range of 6 dB, it's actually exponentially more. So 24 dB of dynamic range is actually far more than even four times that of 6 dB.

What does this mean? It means we're losing a lot of quality and fidelity in music. Why? Well it all started with the idea that, on the radio, the louder track grabbed people's attention and therefore sold more singles/records.

But does that even fucking matter anymore? Who listens to radio for music nowadays? No one I know. And what station is playing ohGr? Probably not a single one, probably not even college radio anymore. So why play the LOUDNESS game? Why not opt out? (I guess in the industrial genre, there's being played at clubs, but I digress...)

So yeah, this album is awesome. The music is great, the mixing/mastering is bold and refreshing, and if you're on the fence about it, my best suggestion is just to listen to the first two tracks, "Shhh," and "Eyecandy" back-to-back.

Logic Pro Pedal Board and Amp Designer demo

2009-09-08T12:52:00.005-05:00

This is the same ~45 second recording I made of my guitar going straight into my MOTU 828mk2, ran through four different Pedal Board/Amp Designer combinations. I'm blown away by how good it sounds, but then I never had a really good, quality amplifier.

GuitarTest by mikeoday

Logic 9: Pedal Board and Amp Designer

2009-09-06T14:19:00.003-05:00

Pretty much awesome.

Anyone want to buy a Fender Roc Pro 1000 Head and Cabinet?

(Not actually mine, just a random image of one I pulled from Google. My actual amp head has a hole cut in the front of it by a previous owner. A very stupid previous owner.)

Apple Logic Pro 9, OS 10.6

2009-09-01T13:44:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I had one of my manic days and ended up running to the Apple store to pick up OS X "Snow Leopard" and Logic Pro 9. I had just paid off some car repairs and felt like "celebrating" by putting some shit on my credit card. I'm such a dick.

OS 10.6 installed flawlessly on Gemma's MacBook. No problems there whatsoever. However, on my iMac, it would not install. The instructions suggested first unplugging all peripheral devices, and I have a lot: Virus, MOTU 828mkII, USB hub, two FireWire external hard drives. I did all that, still no luck. Next suggestion was to run Repair on the hd. It found no problems. Finally, the last suggestion was to erase the hard drive. Fuuuuuuuck.

Even though I put all files that I have created on the external drives (song files, sampler instruments, etc. etc. etc.), that's still a huge pain in the ass. I did it, and once the hard drive was erased, Snow Leopard installed, but then I had to reload everything once again - Firefox, iPhoto, Waldorf Attack, Virus Control... I was working on this shit from 2pm to about 7pm (a lot of that time is failed SL installs.) Then once that was done I had to install Logic Pro 9, which took forever because all the Logic 8 shit was gone. (I also install all the jam pack bullshit, I'm big on sample fuckery/destruction and it's nice to have lying around.)

Anyways, everything's finally working now. I played with Amp Designer - it's actually pretty neat. Not $200 worth of neat, but neat. I haven't done shit with flex time yet, haven't converted an audio region to a sampler instrument. I tried Bounce to track on the Virus, but there's no "real time" option, so it didn't work. That's alright, it is easy enough to just route Virus output to a bus and then use that bus as an input on an audio track. I'm sure bounce to track will be great for other things.

The only bug I've noticed so far is that every time I bounce a project that has a Virus plug-in, even if I bypass the Virus plug-in during the bounce, when I close the project and open a new one the audio is garbage (out of sync or some shit I guess). I have to quit Logic, then relaunch it. Then everything works. It's a minor annoyance and not a show stopper, so I can live, I just hope we get a 9.0.1 update soon.

Since I'm plugging books, I may as well plug some music

2009-08-24T23:02:00.005-05:00

I'm always looking for Industrial (aka Electro, aka EBM, aka etc.) music that doesn't suck. A few weeks ago, I decided to check out some Wumpscut. I'd heard a few Wumpscut tracks, it's hard not to when you're a fan of these genres, but it never really made an impression. I downloaded Wreath of Barbs and Fuckit from Amazon.

Wumpscut doesn't tour or play live shows, it's one guy churning out a studio album a year, plus singles, remixes, etc. Both albums have some good songs, but a lot of the material is just kind of blah - perhaps even underdeveloped. Fuckit is also mastered super loud; I'm willing to bet that if I plugged it into Logic and measured it with the multimeter plug in, the RMS would be -6dbs. I could try to explain why that's bad, but just google "Loudness Wars," and you'll find articles with nice graphs and charts demonstrating why -6dbs is ridiculous.

***

Saturday night I was drinking, surfing the internet and listening to music when I decided that I felt like checking out some music I haven't heard before. I've had pretty good luck discovering new bands via the various remix albums I own. I think I only really buy remix albums of Haujobb and Seabound, but so far, so good - so whatever. I was listening to tracks from Seabound's When Black Meets Blue and decided to check out Die Form. I'd heard the name of the band before, but couldn't place the music. Turns out they've been around since 1979 and have been very active and releasing an album every year or two for more than a decade.

It's kind of weird - which is saying a lot for this genre! Very electronic, with pleasantly abrasive squelches and squeaks, and repeating sequenced EBM bass synth sounds (reminds me of old D.A.F. tracks), with a female soprano singing in a very Classical/operatic style. I would have hated it for that last point when I was 18. It took me a long time to get used to operatic singing in college. Once you listen to enough opera, however, it doesn't come off as obnoxious as it does when you are uninitiated (your mileage my vary).

I decided to go with their Best of XXX and Noir Magnetique albums. Both CDs are super expensive (the "Best of" is over $90!!!), but the mp3 albums are the same price as anything else. I have to wonder, are downloads more profitable than CDs at this point? No cost of plastic, I figure that might help - maybe not. All I know is that I'm much more likely to impulsively download albums than mail order the actual CDs; cost is a factor, but so is instant gratification. On the other hand, I'm also the 1% of the population that actually pays for what I download instead of using torrents and shit like that. I love music, and I love albums instead of just single tracks. In fact, it doesn't matter if someone wrote the best single song in the world ever, if the rest of the songs suck and the album overall sucks, then the band sucks.

Besides, I already have hundreds of CDs and their cases cluttering up my living space. I actually like not having physical trinkets for every fucking thing.

Anyways - overall I like both Die Form albums a lot, but I fully understand if the operatic soprano turns people off. Definitely worth listening to the free samples on their myspace page; start with "Bite of God" if you're not sure you'll like the soprano singing, then expand from there.

Reading is FUN-da-MENTAL

2009-08-22T22:01:00.008-05:00

From 2003 to July 2009, I believe I read a total of 4 novels: Catcher in the Rye, Nightwatch, Daywatch and Twilightwatch. Those aren't the only *books* I read during that time necessarily, just the only works of fiction. Instead, I read a fair amount of textbooks, technical manuals and books about making electronic music. I also read Sun Tzu's The Art of War in June 2009, for whatever that is worth. (Nothing.)

I have two "songs" written, except for lyrics and vocals. For some reason, I'm just at a total loss. I don't really pay attention to lyrics anymore; to me they're just another texture to a track. Words are meaningless. On the other hand, the last thing I want to do is write bad lyrics. I'm not trying to be profound, but I also don't want to be retarded. It probably doesn't help that my favorite genre of music is dominated by Germans for whom English is a second language. (Example lyric from Destroid: "Life is too short for mourn.")

I've had a copy of On Writing by Stephen King sitting around since 2000 or 2001. My mother bought it as a gift for me because she always wanted me to be a writer for some reason. (Writing is probably a far less expensive endeavor than electronic music - and equally unprofitable!) I never bothered with it; I used to read a lot of Stephen King and Clive Barker from the 4th grade up until I was in 9th grade. The last Stephen King book I read was Insomnia, and I didn't even read all of it. I don't think I got halfway through it before putting it down out of boredom. (I guess old people with insomnia and hippie-ass aura shit put me to sleep!)

Sometime after August 1st (I know this because it was after Gemma and I got home from a vacation to Door County, WI with her folks), I read through On Writing for inspiration about lyric writing. (Reading a book about writing prose for inspiration on writing lyrics is pretty assbackwards - but that's just how I roll). I don't know if it helped, but it did get me interested in reading Stephen King again. Sometimes reading about someone's creative process can spark an interest in their output; it happens all the time in music, especially when I was in college studying Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Philip Glass. Along the same lines, reading Tom Shear's blog, Waveformless, has gotten me more interested in listening to Assemblage23 than I had ever been before.

Gemma and I each brought a shitload of books to this marriage. She had a couple of Stephen King books I had not read before. After reading On Writing, I started off with Bag of Bones. I finished it in a few days. I was then going to read The Drawing of the Three, but it turned out that was the second book in King's "Dark Tower Series." Being totally anal, I wanted to read the first book in the series, The Gunslinger, before I read the second book. I had the same neurosis for the X-Men movies. I never really wanted to see them, but I won a DVD of X-Men 3 when I worked for the pork plant. I didn't want to watch the third movie without having seen the first two, so it sat on my shelf for 3 years before I watched it. I still haven't seen X-Men 2, but that's okay because I think X-Men 1 and 3 are ass.

I went to a bookstore to pick up The Gunslinger, as well as The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White (the latter wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little of all things). King mentioned this book in On Writing as an essential tool for writing; his description of its rules of grammar and style caught my attention. One of the "lessons" that made an impression on me is to avoid using adverbs. This intrigued me. In all my years of schooling, from kindergarten up through grad school, I had never heard that piece of advice - yet, once revealed to me, it made a lot of sense. I tried counting the number of adverbs King used in 600 pages while reading Bag of Bones, and I counted four (not saying that's all there is, but he really does avoid them!). The Elements of Style is a great book for anyone who writes or for those who just find the English language interesting; it also has some amusing examples of how we mangle our language.

I found the two books I was looking for at the bookstore and also picked up Gerald's Game on a whim; call me a perv (because I am) but for some reason a horror novel about a woman handcuffed to a bed sounded interesting. In a matter of days, I had read Gerald's Game, The Gunslinger and The Elements of Style. It probably helped that I was sick and ended up taking two days off from work.

Next, I read a copy of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend that I've had lying around for a couple of years. Right before the movie with Will Smith came out, I had asked Gemma to give it to me as a gift, either for our anniversary or for Christmas - I don't remember which. I had just watched The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which was the first movie made that was based on I Am Legend. I finally got around to reading it about a week and a half ago. Then, satisfied that I had read The Gunslinger, I plunged into The Drawing of the Three without fear of missing some crucial plot point from the first book of the Dark Tower Series.

Last Saturday, I caught Hellraiser on TV. This inspired me to reread Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, the novella that Hellraiser is based on. I've had it lying around since I had last read it back when I was in middle school. It's short, under 200 pages, so I finished that in a night. Clive Barker uses a lot more adverbs in his writing than Stephen King does. I hadn't realized it until last weekend, but I had read everything Clive Barker published before 1994 back when I was in middle school. No wonder my mind is so fucked up. (For reference I was in middle school from 1993 to 1995).

Recently, I have taken another trip to the bookstore and picked up the third book in the Dark Tower Series, The Waste Lands, as well as Salem's Lot. I'm reading The Waste Lands right now, but I don't seem all that interested in it and may put it down for Salem's Lot instead. Gemma also has a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I intend to read while I'm on this roll. However, I tried reading it earlier this week and I just wasn't feeling it. It may the language, I don't know.

It's strange, having done so much reading after not really being interested in fiction for such a long time. I had not realized how much I used to read when I was a kid until now. I remember it used to take me weeks to get through a 600 page book, now I can do it in a couple of days. I'm sure college and grad school sharpened my reading skills, but it just feels so weird. It's like being thirsty for years and not realizing it, and then all of sudden drinking a shitload of water; or not running for years and then all of a sudden breaking into a sprint.

As for lyric writing - I still have not written shit.

Logic 9 - Thoughts on the new features

2009-07-26T07:16:00.003-05:00

I'm looking over the "What's New" page for Apple's Logic 9 and decided to post my random thoughts. For science.

"Flex Time" - This is essentially Apple keeping up with the Ableton's and the Digidesign's - it was going to happen eventually. I must admit I am curious about Ableton Live just from word of mouth, but I actually have a demo CD for it lying around from when I bought a UC-33 Evolution MIDI controller and never bothered to install it so - not that curious. The idea of being able to use the "Flex Tool" to click and drag to change the timing of audio without making cuts might be interesting. On the other hand, the ability to "quantize audio" and use "Varispeed" to slow down a track while recording and then speed it up again for playback just seems stupid and evil to me. I'm no virtuoso, but I hate this shit. However, I understand Logic has to put it in there to keep up with ProTools, so there it is. Under this category, "Speed Fades," seem pretty cool - I mean, I've often found inspiration by using the Scissor tool to scrub a track or thought to myself "Oh man, if only there was an easy way to record this!!!" I think this category is what makes the update Logic 9 and not Logic 8.5, but it's not really stuff that I'm interested in. I give it 5/10.

"Production Tools" - I never even used quick comping in Logic 8, but that's likely to change whenever I actually start laying down vocal tracks so I can't really evaluate the the new editing stuff they show off. However, I've never thought to myself - "Oh man, if only I could import entire tracks and settings from this other song!!!" so that whole "Selective Track Import" seems like a waste of time to me. Selective drum replacing, however, I could see as useful. But the big dick daddy in this category is the "Convert to Sampler," I've wish for that before so I'm actually pretty excited to see it. It's not going to get me to be an early adopter of Logic 9 - shit, money is so tight nothing short of a bag of it falling in my lap from the sky would change that - but maybe after 6 months to a year I'll actually upgrade mainly for this. Bounce in place could be useful, but I tend to just use buses for this kind of thing... a trick I learned from SFLogicNinja. For example, the Virus TI can only be bounced in real time, but what I do once I am happy with my Virus tracks is I'll route the Virus output to Bus 1, then create an audio track whose input is Bus 1 and then just record it. This way I can do one instrument at a time and then apply effects (compression/EQ) independently. Whether I bounce or whether I record it to an audio track, it's real time, and with my current computer (iMac from last year) I've really never had any slow downs or anything like that, whereas with my G4 powerbook and my old Windows98 PC, I would constantly need to bounce tracks down to save processing power in a project. Enough rambling, I'm giving this category 9/10.

"Guitar Gear" - From my first impression of Logic 9, this is the category that Apple's marketing seems to be emphasizing the most and I can't understand why. Guitar amp simulation is such a fucking hornet's nest, and as a guitarist who owns a tube amp head, a 4x12 speaker cabinet and a collection of Boss pedals, it just is not for me. Unless the simulations end up being, like, godlike and not just a shitty compromise like every other attempt at amp simulation I just think this is a big waste of time. Now I may be proven wrong on this, it may end up being that these amp simulations and the pedal board effects become the next big thing for electronic music and everyone's going to route their synths and samples through them. Conversely, this combined, with mainstage might usher in a whole new era of guitar bands not using amps. I just think it's highly unlikely. I give this a 3/10.

My over all impression? 5/10 + 9/10 + 3/10 divided by 3 = 5.6/10, so I guess I'm quantitatively more excited about than I initially thought. Mainly that's the Convert Audio Track to Sampler feature, I think. I just look at this like, take out the amp simulations, take out the Flex Time, and give me the new Production Tools category as 8.5. But that's just wishful thinking, that's never been how this whole music software thing works. I've been spoiled by the Access Virus upgrades over the past few years, I think.

Full circle (jerk)

2009-07-24T20:47:00.003-05:00

My first blog post ever was me agonizing over the upgrade to Logic 8 and counting up all the money I've spent on Logic software since I started with Logic 4 back in the day. Now Apple has announced Logic 9. I'm not linking to it. Seriously, fuck off Apple.

Logic 8 came out 2 years ago. It was a huge update, added a bunch of nice shit to Logic and redesigned the interface. It was $200. Now Logic 9 is here and it adds a bunch of guitar amp and pedal simulations. Yay? It is also $200.

Right now, I have everything in my studio working together and playing nicely. Plus I'm broke as hell and work one of the worst jobs in the world. I think it is best if I opt out of this upgrade.

Inevitably I'm going to end up upgrading - it's the nature of the beast. There'll be an update to the Virus software or some shit, and I'll "fucking NEEEEEEEED" Logic 9.

Until then - Fuck off and die, Apple. Just fuck right the fuck off.

Yikes!!!

2009-07-07T00:24:00.004-05:00

Just saw this post on matrixsynth.

Some dude decided to open up his Blofeld and remove one of the knobs to see what decoder was used.

Somehow I don't think that's a good idea.

Blofeld Gripe #1

2009-07-06T10:33:00.004-05:00

The "Play" button should play a note.

The Blofeld is so small it would be awesome just to plug it into an electrical outlet, put on some headphones and make some patches. However, you need some kind of MIDI input to play a note to hear whatever patch you're working on. That means I have to hook up my wife's Micron, connect a MIDI cable, blah blah blah... pretty soon the entire coffee table is taken up by gear.

How awesome would it be if I could just press that button that says "Play" and it actually, y'know, played a freaking note. Just C4 - I'm not asking for anything fancy.

Even something like the Korg Nanokey wouldn't alleviate this; it's USB powered, so then I'd need to hook it up to a laptop, blah blah blah... Once again, the coffee table is full of gear.

I just want to watch bad movies while creating and editing Blofeld sounds. Is that so much to ask?!

Sometimes I make music

2009-06-16T21:01:00.003-05:00

CableTVdemo061609 by mikeoday

Song structure and mixing pretty much set, gonna have to write some lyrics and record some vocals... bounced everything to a single track, then applied Multi-presser and Adaptive Limiter to maximize loudness for showing friends and shit.

Thought Crime Pt. 2 - Electric Bugaloo

2009-06-15T23:56:00.000-05:00

I am accused of the crime of negative thinking. But my thinking isn't really traditional negative thinking as an actual psychologist would define it - it's rational thinking.

***

I often wonder about the opportunity costs of giant corporations. How many more small, independently owned businesses would there be if they were not crowded out by impossibly titanic competitors. It was once assumed that global-mega corps provided more jobs. But when we consider our job market today, doesn't it seem like all they do is consolidate everything so that overall they have less jobs, but they are all concentrated in one area? When I worked at the Pork Plant in Hoosierville-A, we had our own accountants, our own collections guy, our own telesales manager, and a few other things. When the wiener factory moved in, they eliminated those jobs entirely, because they had accountants, collections guys and telesales managers in Indianapolis. Not moved - eliminated. The people they already had in Indy were simply saddled with more work. 84,000 customers worth of more work, I guess.

So now we have less businesses. Never mind the less competition aspect of it, we have a relatively few number of companies, and they're dominant all over the country, if not the world, and they have consolidated their workforce and put a giant-mega office in this community or that community, and they outsource a large percentage of their work to India and China and sometimes Mexico - but could it be that overall they are generating less money for the economy?

We have these gigantic corporations, headed by executives who magically profit personally, even when the businesses they run fail. They are beyond overpaid, and the justification for their pay scale and their golden parachutes is that they need to feel free to take risks and "think outside the box" in order to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Somehow the need to take risks is so great that the last thing we want to do is financially ruin some executive who ran the business into the ground via a shortsighted and failed attempt at innovation. Instead we must all line up and say "yes!" and engage in "positive" thinking (as narrowly defined by corporate needs), so that no one can declare a non-viable solution or business plan as a "bad idea." So they execute it and it fails. Miserably. All of a sudden an entire workforce is held hostage to layoffs because rational thinking and long-term thinking have been narrowly redefined as "negative thinking."

Would it not be better to have more small companies hiring more people overall, with more offices and factories across the country and a higher standard of living for more Americans? Would it not be better to have owners, instead of executives, whose personal finances failed just as much as their comapany's finances failed, who would also be in the same boat as their laid off employees? Would it also not be better to allow one business to fail amongst a myriad of companies so that there is no giant that's "too big to fail?"

If the argument for capitalism is that it is "natural," there is nothing "natural" about the current state of affairs. We do not have capitalism, we do not have socialism, we instead have "corporatism." Corporatism is not capitalism, but it is totalitarian. And like all totalitarianism, it too must die.

Following up on previous two posts

2009-06-12T21:25:00.004-05:00

1) Finished Silent Hill: Homecoming. The sewer crawl, and the rest of the game, became a bit more bearable once I discovered that when you're in your "combat stance," no matter how many enemies are surrounding you, only one will attack you. However, if you are not in your combat stance, like if you're trying to run away, they will all attack you at once. How sporting!

2) Finished a "positive thinking" training module at work. Here's a direct quote - on the subject of responding to criticism it advises saying:

""There may be some areas that could improve." This is a good way of acknowledging that improvement is possible while avoiding committing to changes."

Well, fuck! That sure explains a lot!!!

Silent Hill: Homecoming

2009-06-09T15:20:00.004-05:00

I'm in the middle of this game and it's seriously pissing me off. I loved playing every other game in the Silent Hill series, even less popular efforts like The Room and Origins, but the way this game is going I can see myself abandoning it before I'm even done and that's really saying something.

It's the combat, stupid. Or the stupid combat.

Previous Silent Hill games are known for their unintuitive combat, but there's a relative straight forwardness about it, in my opinion. You whack a monster, you run away, you run back up to it, you whack the monster again, rinse and repeat. Sure, I'm oversimplifying, but what I'm getting at is that it just made sense. The Silent Hill series isn't about the combat, it's about the atmosphere. That's probably why I've beaten every Silent Hill game before this one and I've never finished a Resident Evil game. But in Homecoming, it feels as though every fucking encounter is a round in a fighting game.

The biggest problem is the dodging mechanic. In previous Silent Hill games, there was no "dodge," - not getting hit simply meant moving away out of the monster's reach before you got your ass slapped, thwacked or eviscerated. In Homecoming, you press a button at the right moment to dodge. The problem is, as the game goes on, you can't get a hit in on some of the later monsters without first successfully dodging one of their hits, reducing combat in this game to "Dodge-attack-attack." It gets fucking mind numbing after a while. Plus, you've REALLY got to pay attention to the enemy animations to dodge correctly. Timing your dodges is everything in this game, if you hit the dodge button too early, you won't have enough time to get off a second dodge. This of course means that your first encounter with any new monster is simply getting your ass handed to you while you learn the timing of the animations so you can react correctly.

This is not Silent Hill style game play. This is fucking Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Virtua Fight, etc... I mean, fighting games are great for people who like that shit. There's a whole genre dedicated to dodge-block-parry based on the slightest enemy animation. But who the fuck was asking for that in a Silent Hill game?

Another important aspect to any "survival horror" style game is the option to run away. There's really no running away in Homecoming, every fucking monster you come across needs to be taken out if you want to get past, and it seems like they're all faster than you. If you try to run, you just end up running into more and more monsters and it becomes the closing credits of Benny Hill, with every monster in the level chasing after you in a line. Then you're REALLY fucked, because the only effective way to deal with multiple enemies at once is using firearms, but the one thing they held over from the other Silent Hill games is the scarcity of ammo!

Maybe I'm just frustrated because I'm in the "sewer crawl" level of the game. Sewers are always the worst levels. Silent Hill 1 had a sewer, it sucked. Vampire: Bloodlines would've been a near flawless game if not for the sewer maze. Fallout 3's weakest moments were all the sewers you had to go through. Seriously, sewers suck. Why do game developers love sewers so much? Are they really that much easier to put together than empty streets, dilapidated buildings and metal cage and barbed wire hellscapes?

Dear developers; if you're putting in a sewer level just for the sake of having "variety" over the other levels in your game - just fucking don't! The sewer is a cliche across so many genres and so many games, there's really no variety to be had there. Video games need to take a decade or two off from sewer levels before they become fresh again. The best thing you can do with a sewer level in a video game at this point would be to make it a single, straight corridor with no enemies and have it be over after only 30 seconds walking straight forwards!

Thought Crime

2009-06-07T12:00:00.001-05:00

I used to think Americans' obsession with movie actors was a superficial thing. Now I'm not so sure. It seems more and more of us are demanded to be amateur thespians in our day-to-day low-paying dead-end jobs. In my job at the wiener factory here in Illinois (I was hoping to ditch the wiener factory once and for all when I left Hoosierville A, but the job market being what it is, I ended up transferring...), it seems as though I am somehow going above and beyond simply by being civil, competent and helpful. Now I'm being told that the first point is not enough and the last two don't matter. I must learn to act like every one's best friend. I must learn to act like I'm the pitch man in an infomercial. I must not use the same words or phrases twice with two different customers despite the fact that I have over one hundred interactions a day about the same three things. I must learn to be more casual in my speech, and the examples of how to do so that are given to me, I find impolite and unprofessional.

Simple politeness, competence and a willingness to help go a long way with my customers. I've been complimented so many times simply because the service at the wiener factory is so hideously sub par that it's like I'm doing a huge favor just by doing my job. I understand the need to get the rest of the employees to stop being dicks, but the way to do that is to stop tolerating bullshit, not by instituting lists of phrases to use and words to avoid. For example, I can't say the word "no," or any other "negative" word. That's great for a commercial or a piece of advertising, but all day long, I am supposed to ad-lib scripts in my head that would ordinarily take a troop of marketers, a gaggle of ad execs and a team of lawyers to write a 30-second spot for.

I haven't paid for my wiener deliveries in two months, can you guys just keep the wieners coming for a while longer?

"Nnnn....... uh, we can keep your wieners coming if you pay the outstanding wiener bill!"

That's not what I asked! Listen, you've stopped delivering my wieners today. How about I pay you next Friday and you keep those wiener deliveries coming?

"We canno... uh, we can resume delivery of your wieners if you make a payment right now!"

You are rude and unhelpful.

***

I'm currently experiencing the joy of training modules that are little more than an Orwellian attempt at thought control. Positive people are successful and they never use "negative" statements that involve words like "no" and "not." Negative people who do say things like, "no," "not," "can't," "shouldn't," "unethical" and "illegal," are psychopaths and should be treated like they have a contagious disease.

Since I'm just a cog in the wiener machine, I actually can't do a lot of things - like, for example, extend billing deadlines for customers, or force delivery trucks to go back the same day if the first delivery man threw the wiener delivery down a customer's septic tank. Instead of a simple, straightforward and, in my opinion - respectful and polite - statement saying I cannot do these things, instead I have to dance around the point with a statement of "I can..." do something else. To me, that seems not only rude, but also an insult to the receiving party's intelligence.

I have an appointment today and your wiener delivery driver says I wasn't here when he came by! I've been sitting in front of my house all damn day on a lawn chair drinking beer and pissing in a cup! He's the one who hasn't been here! Can you get someone out here soon, I've got a barbecue and no wieners!!!

"I can get a delivery driver out there next Thursday!"

That's bullshit! I was here! I've got the sheriff, a judge and the fucking mayor sitting here with me and they'll sign a sworn statement!

"These are not the droids you are looking for!"

***

It seems to me like the English language wasn't really meant to bend this way. The word "no" was specifically invented for one purpose, and it fulfills that purpose admirably. Replacing "no" with "I can" comes off as clumsy and long-winded at best, and downright belligerent at worst.

My guess is that this is coming down to us from on high, where middle managers and corporate executives get by every day by saying "yes," and by "playing ball" and "being a team player." It's an entire class of self-selected fakers who don't need to deal with the real world consequences of bad policies and how those policies effect the hundred or so customers I get stuck talking to on a day-to-day basis trying to justify the unjustifiable. Rationality goes out the window in favor of blind "positivity," and pretty soon you've got the same carbon copy personality types infecting the organization and spreading like a virus. They train their HR drones to only hire people who use "affirmative only" statements in the interview. Then they only promote people within the organization who never criticize the way things are currently being done and therefore, nothing is ever improved until the company literally loses millions of dollars over something stupid, and then they scramble to come up with a quick and easy band-aid that doesn't really solve anything.

I am really shocked at the way things go where I work. Our billing system is total garbage - the user interface is worthless. In Hoosierville A, when the pork plant turned into the wiener factory, they switched from one billing system to a second billing system. Now, here in Illinois it's yet another, third, billing system, and this one is the worst of all of them. I make suggestions, and my coworkers and supervisors go, "Is that even possible?"

YES!!!

Other billing systems can update a customer's current balance immediately after a change is made and not take 24 to 48 hours to show the change. They just don't here. And in other billing systems, you can take a payment and it will automatically be applied to that customer's account, you don't need to copy/paste their account number.* Just not here. And you can reverse payments and not tell customers they need to go contact their bank to dispute the payment. Just not here. And other billing systems have a customer's monthly rate, with promos and discounts already figured in, displayed prominently so you don't have to add it all up yourself on a calculator. Just not here. And in other billing systems, I can set up an automatic recurring monthly payment for a customer instead of telling them to do it themselves on the website. Just not here.

I can just imagine if someone like me were at a GM board meeting in the early 2000s.

Our business plan is to continue manufacturing more SUVs and Hummers like it's 19-fucking-99. We're going to eschew smaller cars and do nothing to increase research into fuel efficiency and hybrid technologies, but we'll have our PR people put together some shit that makes it look and sound like we're committing to those technologies even though nothing will ever come of it - at least not out of us!

"That seems like a bad idea in the long term. Research shows that fuel costs are going to increase and consumers are going to want smaller, more fuel efficient cars."

You're never going to get anywhere in this company with language like that, mister!!! Take your NEGATIVITY and go work for some FOREIGN car company, you piece of shit!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!

Or how about AIG?

We are launching a new financial product called derivative assets. What we do is we take a shitload of crappy loans, divide them up, and package the pieces together. That way, even if one borrower defaults on their loan, the other loans are still getting paid.

"But if all the loans are risky, aren't they all at risk of defaulting? Packaging them together doesn't make them any less likely to fail. And you want to sell these to charities and non-profit groups? Is this even ethical?"

You are just not a TEAM PLAYER!!! I can tell by your word choice - and by the faggy foreign hybrid car that you drive - that you actually WANT this company to fail! Why don't you take your concern for long term profits and ethics and go work in academia or something!!!

***

For me, the issue is that there are *real* problems with this company in terms of how it does things. Part of my job requires me to say, "no," sometimes. People can make unreasonable requests about their meat. We honestly can't do certain things, regardless of whether we should be able to do them or not. And if the wiener factory wants me to be an actor 10 hours a day, the least they can do is provide me with a god damn script!

*Side note: This may seem nitpicky at first, but imagine if you called a company that you do business with every month, and you made a payment on your account, only on your next statement your payment was not reflected. You call in and it takes an additional 48 hours or more to straighten out. It all happened because the person you made the payment to pasted the account number of the person s/he was talking to before you in some field. Now repeat this a dozen or more times a day. Literally. Totally avoidable, yet it happens over and over again and probably costs the company millions of dollars a year in man hours spent tracking down these phantom payments and applying them to the correct accounts. Never mind the fact that it makes the company and its employees look totally incompetent, thus encouraging customers to purchase their pork products elsewhere.

Random Post

2009-06-06T14:53:00.002-05:00

1) I'm now old and married and watching waaay too much Mythbusters. I had never seen an episode until I stopped at my in-laws on the way back from our honeymoon in November. Now I'm hooked and have probably seen almost all the episodes from reruns and marathons on the Discovery Channel.

2) Gemma got me an Xbox 360 for Valentine's Day. I'm such a spoiled little shit. I'll be writing up some posts about some of the games I've played like Braid, Fallout 3 and Dead Space. I've also been thinking about writing up some posts about all the Silent Hill games for a while now.

3) My job was horrible, and it's getting worse. It's normally a high turnover type of job, but since the job market's so tight, the wiener factory seems to be taking advantage by making things suck even more. If this company went out of business, I'd eat pancakes on its fucking grave. I can't believe I've been doing this shit for 2 and a half years now. Got a post about that in the works.

This blog is now a picture blog

2009-02-27T22:05:00.003-06:00

I gots nothin' to say.

Rotwang did it.

Poppin' Caps!!!

2009-02-10T09:00:00.000-06:00

This is my EVGA Geforce 7600 GT video card. If you click on the picture and look at the silver cylinders, those are capacitors. About half of them have popped open. Those fibers sticking out? I have no idea, but I did not pull them out. This is exactly how the card looked when I opened up my case after my monitor went black and my PC's POST beeps were BEEEEEEP-beep-beep-beep. (That's 1 long, 3 short = vga is fucked).

Luckily, I'm only about 15 minutes away from a Fry's, so I was able to replace it right away, otherwise I would have been waiting a few days because I'd rather order from NewEgg than go to Best Buy or something like that. Plus, my mail/package delivery here in ChiBurbs is a bit dodgy.

Now, I bought my 7600 GT w/ 256MB of onboard RAM in April of 2007 for $109. So I went to Fry's, and decided to pick up a GeForce 8400 GS w/ 512 MB of RAM for $60. Seems reasonable, right? I mean, 512 MB > 256MB, and 8400 > 7600, so my new card should perform better than my old card, right?

WRONG!!!

I pop that puppy in there, and I set up all the drivers and shit, and I launch AudioSurf and OH MY GOD IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT!!! I dick around, I dick around, I dick around... still shit city. So I start up GTA: San Andreas (still haven't gotten past learning to fly a plane, HA!) and sure enough I go from running all setting at max, to knocking everything down a whole bunch... fuck.

SO then I start doing my research - yeah, totally ass backwards on my part - and according to the charts at http://www.tomshardware.com, the 8400 does indeed perform about HALF as well as the 7600.

WHAT THE FUCK!!!

After dicking around on the net a whole bunch, I've pretty much determined that in Nvidia numbers, X800 > Y600 > Z400, etc, even if Z > Y > X. I don't get it but, whatever.

The big issue is that I'm using a 2 year old motherboard that's only PCI Express x16, and not PCI Express x16 2.0, so I have slimmer pickings of video cards, and an equivalent PCI Express x16 v. 1.0 video card to my 7600 is going to be about... $109!!!!!

DICKS IN A BASKET, FUCK!!!!

Toast fucking: Fucking or being fucked by toast

2009-02-09T20:35:00.002-06:00

WTF is this shit?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!

Goodbye Hoosierville, Hello Illinois!!!

2009-01-10T13:25:00.004-06:00

Here's my first day in Illinois:

Oh well, at least I get to live with my wife now.

My wife is gay for the Horrorclix

2008-12-30T23:07:00.005-06:00

Lucky for me, they've been discontinued and are going by the brick on ebay.

Cthulu monsters vs Clowns

Nothing says "I love you," like 96 little tiny pieces of plastic.

I got (gay) married

2008-11-29T09:36:00.003-06:00

Mike blows his life savings on synthesizers

2008-11-19T22:39:00.001-06:00

Best Talk Show Interview Ever

2008-09-21T23:34:00.003-05:00

Norm McDonald on Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1997.

This is the part when it takes a turn for awesome.

Same old pictures, brand new words

2008-09-19T23:01:00.003-05:00

I steal art to subvert it to my own purposes

2008-09-18T20:14:00.002-05:00

I want to play "Braid"

2008-09-13T15:35:00.005-05:00

Braid is an independently developed platformer that has gotten a lot of attention lately, even from some mainstream media. The hook that sets it apart from other indie platformers on the market is that you can manipulate time in various ways depending on the level; as an example, in some levels you can just rewind time, in others, when you move left-to-right, time goes forward, but when you move right-to-left, time reverses - as illustrated in the video below.

I think that's pretty fucking cool.

Of course any game could have incorporated such a mechanic and still been ho-hum. Apparently what sets Braid apart is that it is really, really fucking good - perhaps even profound. So why am I posting about it instead of playing the fuck out of it?

Because right now it's only available as a download on the Xbox 360.

***

You know what's fucking sad?

I saw that they now had Xbox 360's for $200 and I actually considered picking one up. I mean there's other games I'd be interested in picking up later - Dead Rising, Mass Effect (I hear the PC version is buggy and I'd probably have to upgrade my hardware to run it decently - something I'm not willing to do at this point), but really, even considering to buy a $200 game system to play a $15 game is pretty depraved.

However, the more I looked into the whole Xbox thing, the more disappointing it became. The $200 "Arcade" version of the Xbox 360 does not include a hard drive. I figure I'm going to need that to play a game that's downloaded from the internet. It comes with a 256MB card, but I have found nothing to indicate whether that would be enough for Braid, so I'm going to assume it's not just to be safe.

So I'd need a hard drive - an external 20GB Hard drive for an Xbox 360 is $80. BUT the next Xbox 360 model above the $200 one comes with a 20GB hard drive built in - that model costs $259. Well so much for the $200 Xbox 360!

But wait, there's more!!!

None of the Xbox 360s come with wireless built in, if you want to use a wireless network with your Xbox 360, you need a special Microsoft(TM) Xbox360(TM) wireless adapter!!! While wireless adapters for PCs can be found for as low as $20, the super special wireless adapter for an Xbox 360 is between $80 and $99.

Furthermore, in order to download Braid you need to SUBSCRIBE to Xbox Live Silver or Gold. Oh boy, pay a subscription for the privilege of paying to buy games?!!! Sign me right the fuck up! And beyond that, you can't BUY Braid with REGULAR moneys! Nooooooo!!! You need to exchange your REGULAR moneys for Xbox points... Braid is $15 worth of Xbox points, but Xbox points are bought in increments of $19.99. Figure THAT out.

So yeah, I'm not going to buy an Xbox 360 ever - it's just too complicated. Steam is so easy. Braid is supposed to be available for the PC by the end of the year, but game release dates are what they are, so who knows. I'm willing to impulse buy like a pervert for $200 bucks + 15, but not for 259 + 80 + 19.99. At least I know I have some self-restraint, even if my threshold is perversely high.

Anyways, here's some more Braid.

Terror EBM - Nurzery [Rhymes]

2008-09-09T22:38:00.004-05:00

A friend of mine recently started a blog called Awesome or Sucks, which simply gives one word reviews to new albums - either it's awesome or it sucks. I figured if he can be that brief, I can do one or two sentence reviews of albums I've recently bought - because life is too short to overanalyze pop music.

This caught my attention while I was browsing various Terror EBM bands on amazon.com. I was basically in the mood for something harsh, aggressive and screamy, that wasn't mixed with the same frequency response as a vacuum cleaner and that didn't have vocals that were processed with a deep, rapid chorus effect making it sound like it was underwater (don't do this, it sucks!!!). Nurzery [rhymes] delivered. The production is decent, the song structure doesn't fall on its ass and there's not a single song that sucks on this album - what more could I ask for from the genre? Rated: Awesome.

Holy fuck

2008-08-25T19:46:00.001-05:00

I love the internet

joebidenjoebidenjoebiden

2008-08-23T08:55:00.001-05:00

Well, at least it isn't Evan Bayh.

I do have to wonder, whom would Obama have picked had the whole Russia/Georgia thing not happened? Because I don't think it would have been Joe Biden.

Aaron Rodgers = god

2008-08-21T18:57:00.006-05:00

"Quarterback Aaron Rodgers' training-camp ritual -- strange facial hair -- continues. He's gone from scraggly, unkempt beard to something he found on beards.org called "friendly mutton chops," with a cheesy mustache up next. "This is a tribute to the Civil War generals from the mid-to-late 19th century,"" - unknown source

***

"The new face of the Green Bay Packers is decidedly hairy these days.

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers was sporting unique facial hair Wednesday, featuring mutton chops that flowed into a mustache.

Noting that he was a history major at California-Berkley, Rodgers called the arrangement "a tribute to the Civil War generals from the mid-to-late 19th century."

But it was apparently inspired by a Russian czar. The monotony of training camp probably played a significant role, too.

"I was watching ping-pong on MSNBC in the Olympics, and they showed this ad for this TV show which was going to be about Abe Lincoln and Czar Nicholas, who was the last czar of Russia," Rodgers said. "So anyway, Czar Nicholas had this look. So I was laying in bed, I go, 'That's a sweet look.' So I got up, about 10:30 at night, I shaved my chin and said, 'Hey, if the czar can do it, I can do it."'

But not without the proper research. Rodgers and one of the team's trainers looked up his new look on a Web site, beards.org, and discovered that it had a name: The "friendly mutton chops."

Seriously?

"You know what? In training camp, you've got to go anything you can to make yourself laugh," Rodgers said. "When I came in yesterday, some of the guys were excited about it, so we looked it up."

This isn't the first time Rodgers has had fun with facial hair in the preseason. In 2006, Rodgers grew a mustache and called it "a tribute to all the great people in history that had mustaches. Guys like Tom Selleck and Chuck Norris and Jesus and Ron Burgundy."" - 620AM WTMJ

Cradle of Filth = Banjo Music

2008-08-20T19:01:00.001-05:00

Twiddly twang, twiddly twang, noodley-doodley-doo.

Seriously.

I'm gonna talk some shit about Doctor Who now

2008-08-16T16:03:00.012-05:00

Doctor Who is a British Sci-fi series that ran from 1963 to 1989 and was recently revived in 2005. It is about a time traveling alien/demi-god who travels around time and space with stupid, boring, obnoxious "companions." Mostly girls, once in a while there's a guy thrown in. The secret to the show's longevity is that the main character, simply known as "The Doctor," doesn't die, he "regenerates" twelve times, meaning the show can have up to twelve actors portraying the main character.

I have an OCD uncle who obsessively videotaped all kinds of sci-fi and cult tv shows in the 1980's. He recorded a shitload of Doctor Who reruns off of PBS, and when my pot smokin' dad got a VCR, he "borrowed" the entire run of the fourth and fifth regenerations. (After my parents were divorced, we still had those tapes all the way up to 2003, when my mom moved from Wisconsin to Hoosierville - then we threw them out. Never, ever lend shit to your brother-in-law.)

So I grew up watching the adventures of the fourth doctor, probably the most iconic, played by Captain 'Fro aka Tom Baker and the fifth doctor, Peter Davison, who was most iconic in the PBS favorite All Creatures Great and Small, a boring show about boring farmers and their boring sick animals and the boring farm doctor who cures their boring farm animals. Or some shit like that. God, PBS was fucking boring. If they had such a hard on for British television, why the fuck couldn't they get some Young Ones?! (Oh fuck, Alexei Sayle was in an episode of Doctor Who. I told Rotwang that I was Alexei Sayle. Shit.)

Anyways - Point being, I grew up watching this shit 'cuz my dad would fire up and watch it. And when you're a kid in the 80's in the Midwest and your dad's watching the one TV in the house, you're watching what he's watching. And it sucked. Cardboard scenery, robot dogs that talked like dildos, paper mache bad guys...

Yeah, that's so not awesome.

So anyway, I saw a little bit of the sixth doctor, Colin Baker, (whose 'fro was not quit 'fro-riffic as the fourth doctor's) but PBS quit buying that shit because the show was going down the shitter, even by crap ass Doctor Who standards. There was a seventh doctor at some point and then the BBC canceled the show for being awful. I guess there was an attempt at a revival of the series in 1996 with a Doctor Who movie, but apparently it sucked and that went nowhere.

So in 2005, the BBC brought back Doctor Who. Shit, if they got 26 years out of seven doctors, I guess they figured they could squeeze another 18 out of the remaining five. (Oh shit, does that movie Doctor count? If so, fuck, imagine having 12 lives and having one begin and end in two hours... DAYMN!!!)

I didn't even know this until 2007, when I remember flipping through the guide one boring Sunday afternoon and seeing "Doctor Who" listed on BBC America. "No fucking way," I thought. I assumed they were simply rerunning episodes from the old series. I decided to check it out for a minute for a laugh. Instead I'm confronted by this guy all decked out in black leather being all action-y and shit. Oh and there was an alien with a baby doll face taking a dump while talking to some lady in a public restroom. I should love aliens taking dumps, but for some reason I didn't. I guess it's all in the execution. Bad Taste? Brilliant. Doctor Who? meh... I flipped it off after a few minutes.

Anyway, Rotwang, being the sci-fi nerd that he is, loves this shit. I mean, I own two different copies of The Stuff, so who am I to judge? Yet judge I do. A few weeks ago, I was watching a channel that was NOT the Sci-Fi channel, and they played a commercial for an upcoming episode of Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel and it had FLYING DALEKS.

What the fuck is a dalek? If you don't know, pat yourself on the back. You've gone this far in life without knowing what a dalek is and you should be commended. Daleks are pudding in a robot shell with guns and they talk like dildos. They were made by Davros, a crippled blind guy in a hi tech wheel chair. This knowledge is burned into my brain and I can't get it out. Daleks, like their master, are handicapped. They wheel around. That's it. Oh and they yell, "EXTERMINATE," even though they have a knack for never exterminating any of the stars of the show, like the Doctor or any of his companions.

SO ANYWAY - I see a 30 second spot advertising Doctor Who and there's Daleks flying around space and launching an all out air assault on Earth. Bullshit. The next time I saw Rotwang at work, I was all like, "SO I SEE THAT NOW THE DALEKS ARE FLYING," and continue to disparage the show. Because I'm an ass. To which his response was, "Dude, you've got to see an episode called Blink. I might even lend you the DVD."

There are two things in life that I love. One is a throw-down, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge, and the other is ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY FUCKING HATING THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF SOME-COCKBUCKET-THING. OH YEAH, SNAP INTO A SLIMJIM!!!!!!!

So I took him up on it. But I didn't borrow the DVD. No, I went to YouTube, where you can probably find any Doctor Who episode ever, accompanied by comments from the uploader ranging from polite "This is not meant in any way to infringe on the BBC's copyright," to the more aggressive, "I dare you to take this down, BBC cocksuckers! HAHAHAHA"

So on to the episode.

First thing to talk shit about is the title, "Blink," which in my mind I always think of as "Blank," which rhymes with Drank, which I want to chillax with someday. But there's no Drank to drink here, so right off I'm fucking disappointed.

Next, a plot synopsis. The episode starts off with a young woman taking photos at an abandoned mansion. In one of the rooms, she sees the wallpaper is peeling back and there's writing underneath. She starts peeling the wallpaper, and finds that the writing on the wall is addressed to her. It's telling her to beware of the weeping angels, of which there is a statue of one in the garden right outside the room she's in. SPOOKY.

The young woman goes home to her (female) roommate, sees her roommate's brother naked, and then takes her roommate to the spooky mansion. Stuff happens, then *poof* the roommate is suddenly in 1920. It goes back to modern day, where the photographer chick is met by a spooky young man at the abandoned mansion. It turns out the spooky guy is her roommate's grandson, and he promised his grandmother on her deathbed that he'd deliver this letter. SPOOKY. The letter talks about how great of a life the roommate had in the 1920's onward, and warns the chick to get the fuck out of the mansion.

From here, the photographer chick goes home, depressed that her roommate is gone, and goes to tell the roommate's brother that his sister loves him and shit, since she essentially never saw him again and requested she tell him that in her letter. It turns out, the brother works at a DVD store and he's geeking out over this weird DVD extra that's some guy called "The Doctor" having a one way conversation hinting at the weeping angel statues. "Don't look away from them, don't turn around, don't even blink." SPOOKY. I like spooky. Oh, btw, this Doctor is NOT ACTION MCLeatherPANTS, it's a new Doctor who is even younger - this guy. So apparently Time Lords (the official - and officially GAY - name of The Doctor's race) age in reverse from this:

to this:

I fully expect the twelfth Doctor to be this:

Moving on.

Photographer lady next decides to go to the cops. Because when statues make your friend disappear - and her disappearance is followed immediately by a letter from your friend dated at least twenty years before she disappeared warning you to get the fuck away from those statues - you go to the motherfucking PO-lice. A young detective asks her some questions, leading up to if she'd like to go out for a drink with him. Somehow they end up in the underground garage of the police station, where the Doctor's spaceship, called the Tardis, just so happens to be chillaxing. The Tardis is disguised as an old British police box from the 1950's, there's a series spanning joke about how the "chameleon circuit" of the ship is broken, so it always looks the same. (GOD FUCK IT WHY DO I KNOW THIS!!!) Note to sci-fi writers and Who fans everywhere - if you don't want RETARD jokes made about your SPACESHIP, don't name your SPACESHIP the TARDIS.

Anyways.

Photographer chick gives the detective her phone number for a date and leaves. The detective guy stays in the underground garage, and the weeping angel statues show up to steal the Tardis. The detective guy gets touched and ends up with The Doctor and his latest companion in 1969. At this point, the Doctor explains that the weeping angel statues are the "nicest psychopathic killers in the universe," in that instead of killing you outright, they send you back in time to live out the rest of your life. SPOOKY - kind of, I guess.

Whatever.

Anyways, the Doctor and his latest unnamed companion are stuck in 1969 without their time machine, so they're going to need the detective to live about 40 years and deliver a message to the photographer chick. Good thing she gave him her phone number, because in the present day, immediately after photographer chick leaves, she gets a phone call from forty-years-older detective guy to come meet him in the hospital where he's dying of old age. Turns out that Detective guy became a DVD publisher and managed to sneak the Doctor DVD extras onto 17 DVDs, which were the only 17 DVDs that photographer chick owned a copy of. So she calls up roommate's brother and they decide the best place to go to watch the DVD message again is the SPOOKY mansion crawling with weeping angel statue psychopathic killers. Turns out the DVD extra is a conversation between the Doctor and photographer chick, where the roommate's brother wrote a transcript of the conversation so the future Doctor could use it in the past to try to explain things to the photographer chick.

This is the point where a decent episode takes a shit.

1) When Doctor know-it-all explains every thing about the angel statues, how they're really aliens from such-and-such who turn to stone whenever another living creature looks at them, it just kind of falls flat. I think it'd be better if The Doctor was all, "I have no idea what the fuck, but they only move when you're not looking at them, SO DON'T FUCKING BLINK!!!"

2) The weeping angel statues are nice and spooky up until this point. Then they blow it.

Here's spooky:

This is also spooky:

This is not spooky. This is stupid:

Okay, so here's the part where I give away the ending, so if you're concerned about OMG SPOILERS you've been warned.

Anyways, the reTARDIS is in the basement of the mansion, where there just so happens to be a single light bulb on. Why is there electricity in an abandoned mansion? And who is paying the electric bill? And who is changing the light bulbs? It's not like there can be some kind of caretaker, the place is crawling with homicidal weeping angel statues of death...

Photographer chick and roommate's brother get inside the reTARDIS - which, by the way, is huge on the inside, small on the outside - where the Doctor left instructions for them to press some buttons or some shit so the TARDIS goes back to 1969, but somehow it's programmed to leave photographer chick and roommate's brother behind. I didn't know the reTARDIS could do that, but whatever. It looks like a great "screw you" moment, like the Doctor set them up to be "killed" by the weeping angel statues, but it's actually a trick, because the weeping angels are all gathered around the reTARDIS trying to push it over or some shit, so when it disappears backwards in time, they're all stuck looking at each other. Apparently when they look like they're "weeping," they're really just covering their eyes, because if they look at each other they turn to stone. At one point one of the protagonists says, "they're trapped in stone forever!" to which I say, "yeah, until that fucking light bulb burns out, DUMBASS, then they're going to hunt your ass down and send you back to the motherfucking stone age or some shit."

Anyway, photographer chick and roommate's brother end up as boyfriend and girlfriend, and obsessively chronicle and file their adventures so that one day, a year later, when the Doctor and his companion happen to run by the DVD store the brother guy works at, photographer chick can give them all the info they need because apparently this whole weeping angel thing hasn't happened to them yet. Hence the Doctor has the transcript for the DVD and knows who the photographer chick is and everything in the future - all the way to the year 1969. Or something.

After watching this episode I had to point out to Rotwang how ironic it is that the best episode he recommended to someone critical of the show has as little of the title character as possible in it. I then pointed out all the flaws I listed in my synopsis above as well as the fact that The Doctor just keeps regenerating younger and younger. To which he replied with this image macro:

So whatever.

Oh, and flying Daleks are still fucking bullshit.

Gay for Batman

2008-07-21T21:51:00.002-05:00

Saw "The Dark Knight" yesterday morning... went to an 11:20am Sunday morning showing to avoid the crowds, and it worked.

This movie is worth the hype. Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker is worth the hype.

Don't read about it, don't spoil anything for yourself, just go see it.

It's the only movie I've ever considered seeing a second time in theaters.

Step 1: Shave Eyebrows

2008-07-13T18:15:00.003-05:00

Step 2: Buy $3000 worth of Doepfer Modules.

Step 3: ...

Step 4: Profit!!!

If I sound bitchy, I'm just jealous of that modular synth setup. *drool*

Audiosurfin' Some More

2008-07-12T14:30:00.002-05:00

Lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy...

Audiosurf - Haujobb: Faith in Chaos from mtodead on Vimeo.

Haujobb's "Faith in Chaos" from Vertical Theory. I wanted to post a video of waaay back when I first got Audiosurf, but the video quality on YouTube was so crappy it wasn't worth it.

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Audiosurfin'

2008-07-12T12:16:00.006-05:00

Bird of Prey by Destroid. Destroid is Daniel Myer's (from Haujobb) other band.

Audiosurf - Destroid: Bird of Prey from mtodead on Vimeo.

Pusher Elite Mode.
At the very end I fill up my slots with 24 reds, getting the most points possible in a single match and winning the "Big Kahuna" achievement.

Pusher gets a 100% bonus when your match clears the board, so you may notice that I pass up some good blocks waiting for high value clusters to disappear.

White blocks are an automatic 2000 points, so they're highly desirable, but they don't disappear, they have to fall down the bottom, so collecting them at the wrong time can block your board. Reds are worth the most points, then yellows, greens, blues and purples. Unless there's a cluster of blues and purples that I clear as soon as I collect, I'm hitting the blues and purples by mistake. Sometimes I don't even realize I have them on my board for a few seconds - D'OH!

Music is Bird of Prey by Destroid from their album Loudspeaker. Buy it!

(For those so inclined, you can see what I'm talking about in my last post regarding how horrible YouTube makes this shit look here. I even tried doing the 11 minute trick, and while the vid quality is slightly better than the other YouTube vids I've posted, it's still shit.)

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Terror EBM - Again

2008-07-09T21:41:00.010-05:00

This past weekend I felt like Audiosurf'ing some Terror EBM a.k.a Hellektro a.k.a. Aggrotech. Problem is, the only thing I own in that style is Hocico's Signo de Aberracion, which is awesome and probably one of the best albums of the genre - even if half of it is pseudo-Classical instrumental filler.

So I hear all the kids are doing this new thing called downloading music.

Wait, I mean - LEGALLY!!!

Who the fuck would've thought? I own a Mac, so I fire up the iTunes store and look around. But there's a problem with iTunes... last time I checked, Audiosurf didn't like iTunes's .AAC format, and the workaround was to take your .AAC files downloaded from iTunes and burn it to an audio CD and then rip the audio to .mp3.... no. No. NO. Fuck THAT!!!

I just so happened to have been on Amazon.com listening to 30 second previews of songs on each album anyways, (I swear to god once upon a time I was able to listen to 30 second previews on iTunes but I can't seem to do it now... WTF?)* and I pulled my head out of my ass just long enough to realize Amazon sells music downloads as well!

It turns out Amazon's downloads are already in mp3 format, plus the entire albums are consistently $1 cheaper than iTunes. So I spent the next few hours just previewing tracks of pretty much everything, using amazon's recommended shit to check out new bands I'd never heard of. Originally, I thought I'd end up getting something by Psyclon 9 and Dawn of Ashes, but it turns out I don't really like either band all that much.

In the end, I bought Unter Null's The Failure Epiphany and The Retrosic's Nightcrawler. After playing in Audiosurf for a while, I decided it would be fun to record some videos and post them on YouTube.

YouTube sucks.

Seriously, it makes good looking, well compressed video look like dick. I can record something where the track bounces and YouTube's junk compression quality just kills it. Part of the problem, I guess, is that YouTube displays things at 425x318, but always compresses to 320x240, meaning your video is always "stretched," making it look blocky and craptastic. Now, this doesn't matter for live action shots, it seems, but computer generated stuff tends to come off looking like shit.

So I switched, to Vimeo. I see a lot of other Audiosurf videos posted there, as well as various synthesizer videos over at MatrixSynth (linked to the right). I've never noticed Vimeo videos taking longer to load than YouTube videos, and the picture quality is much better.

So without further adieu - TERROR!!!

Audiosurf - Destroy Me from mtodead on Vimeo.

Audiosurf - Perrey & Kingsley from mtodead on Vimeo.

Postscript: I've been reading up on tricks to get better picture quality on YouTube, and apparently you have to cheat it and make your video 11 minutes long and encode to .flv using some obscure DOS-type utility... blah blah blah. No thanks.

Oh, and apparently there's also this, but I have no idea how they managed to do that.

*Edit: I finally figured out how to do this - you just double click on the song title for a preview. I thought this would've put it in my shopping cart. DOH!!!

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Of Wendigos and Waterways...

2008-07-05T21:00:00.004-05:00

Almost done cleaning off the DVR - granted there were a handful of things that I just said "Fuck it, I'm never going to watch this," and deleted. For example, Eaten Alive (crocodiles? blah.) and The Crazies (Sorry George, but outside the first three "Dead" films, your track record isn't so good).

Ravenous - I had been meaning to see this movie since it came out in 1999, but 1999 - 2005 was when I was in college and didn't really watch many new movies (nor listened to many new CDs). It takes place right after the Mexican-American War, and the protagonist is an American soldier who chose to lie down and play dead rather than fight. As luck would have it, the Mexican soldiers put him on the bottom of a pile of dead Americans at just the right angle that a whole bunch of blood poured directly into his mouth and down his throat. The premise of this movie is that cannibalism makes one supernaturally strong, albeit constantly hungry. The lead character crawls out from under the bodies and singlehandedly captures a Mexican fort. He is honored as a hero at first, but then when he tells his superiors that he captured the fort by playing dead, they decide he's a worthless coward and send him to a remote outpost in Northern California.

The idea that cannibalism = super strength is apparently based off the Native American legend of the Wendigo. In Ravenous, when someone eats another person, they become a Wendigo. They get supernatural strength and are nearly impossible to kill, but always crave human flesh and are never satiated. As luck would have it, the small Californian outpost ends up entangled with another Wendigo, and whereas the protagonist quit eating all meat after his ordeal in the war, this new Wendigo revels in the power derived from eating human flesh. Sure enough, there's only one way to stop the bad guy, and that's to eat more people!

Overall, this movie was pretty good, though for some reason I expected it to be gorier than it actually was. I should also note that the bouncy main theme music was actually used in some Seat Belt PSA they used to play all the time on the Milwaukee buses between 2003 and 2005. Let's see, a PSA about the importance of buckling your child's seat belt properly, what music should we use? I know, how about the theme music from that movie about Pre-Civil War soldiers eating each other!

Wendigo - Larry Fessenden is awesome. He directed this movie and a vampire movie called Habit. Both are low budget indie flicks I caught on IFC. In Habit, a New Yorker goes through a midlife crises, breaks up with his longtime live-in girlfriend to "see other people," and soon finds himself involved with an alluring, enigmatic woman who knows how to get fucking freaky. However, the more time the protagonist spends around her, the sicker and weaker he seems to get. Could she be draining the life out of him? Habit is awesome because the majority of the movie is shot in the areas of New York City that one doesn't usually see in film and on TV. The plot is a little slow, but the interaction between the characters is very engaging.

Wendigo came out after Habit, and is about a family of New Yorkers getting away in the country for a weekend. The main character is their son, who is played by the youngest Malcolm in the Middle urchin before the sitcom hit big. The mother is a psychiatrist and the father is a photographer, so the impetus behind the plot is urban professionals versus the local with a chip on his shoulder. Now this ain't Deliverance or Calvaire, all but one of the locals in this movie are just nice, normal people. It's this one guy, Otis, whom the family butts heads with. The movie starts out with the family hitting a deer in the road. Otis and his two friends were hunting that deer, and when it turns out the deer's antlers got busted in the collision, Otis holds it against the father, who was driving the car. Otis's two friends just laugh it off like normal people, but the dad starts seeing Otis hanging around everywhere they go. Speaking of the dad, the dad in this movie is the single best dad in any movie - ever. He's not abusive in anyway, he's not mean to his son, yet he doesn't come off as sappy and fake. He ends up being the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Oh, did I mention there's a Wendigo in this movie too? In this movie, the Wendigo is simply a spirit that eats and never stops eating. It's also the major flaw in this movie. Really, this movie doesn't need a Wendigo for anything to happen, and the Wendigo itself reminds me of the "Jackolope" sketches from when America's Funniest Home Videos first came out (why do I know this?!!). On the other hand, I guess if this movie didn't have a Wendigo, it wouldn't have been tagged as "horror" and I probably would've never watched it.

Tideland - I loves me some Terry Gilliam. Every movie up until The Brothers Grimm is just pure gold. I grew up on Time Bandits and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In High School, I saw 12 Monkeys, connected it with TB and AotBM and made it a point to see Brazil and The Fisher King. When Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came out, I convinced my mother to take me and my younger sister to see it. Every one of those movies - PURE GOLD. Then he tried to make a Don Quixote movie, ran out of money, did the Brothers Grimm and then Tideland.

When it first came out, people hated Tideland. HATED IT. It's based off a novel, which is apparently one of those novels that is quirky just for the sake of being quirky. The protagonist is a little girl whose heroin addict parents both die, leaving her to fend for herself in a dilapidated house in the middle of rural nowhere. The only people she has contact with are the creepy neighbors, a witch-like sister and a retarded, epileptic brother. The title comes from the fact that the brother likes to pretend he's a captain on a submarine, that the grassy fields are the ocean, and a nearby train is a shark.

Bad things about the movie: 1) Remember the annoying child actress from Silent Hill? Yeah, now you get to see her do a Southern Accent for two hours. 2) I think the reason why people HATED this movie is because a type of "romance" develops between the main character and the (grown up) retarded brother. The last half hour you're just filled with dread that any minute he's going to molest her or something. I mean, it wouldn't be that out of place in a movie that BEGINS with the little girl cooking heroin and shooting it into her father. I've met people who didn't like The Professional because they felt there were undertones of a romantic relationship between Leon and the girl. In Tideland, there are no undertones, they declare their love for one another and imagine themselves married. It's really fucking disturbing.

There were many points during this film that I wanted to just stop it and turn it off. It's long, there's a sense of despair, you expect the absolute worst to happen - Requiem for a Dream was great, but I don't really want to see that happen to an eleven-year-old girl.

But the most fucked up thing?

When it was over, I was glad I watched it. It's stomach churning while you watch it, but afterward, I thought to myself, it's another dark fantasy by Terry Gilliam - just as Time Bandits was a dark fantasy, just as Brazil was a dark fantasy, etc. Some of his movies have happy endings, others don't. Maybe the source material wasn't exactly the best thing to adapt, and maybe this would be Gilliam's worst movie had he never done The Brothers Grimm, but even a bad Gilliam movie is better than a lot of other movies out there.

So there, I'm the only Tideland defender I've ever read.

Things that somehow exist but shouldn't: #324

2008-06-29T22:27:00.003-05:00

Posted by user BearJazz at the Something Awful Forums.

1) It's a soundtrack... TO A BOOK!!!

2) Composed by L. Ron Hubbard.

...and one other thing...

2008-06-21T20:53:00.001-05:00

I can't get this song out of my head.

Oh yeah...

2008-06-21T16:52:00.003-05:00

...sometimes I make music.

This is just the typical type of thing I can kind of crap out in an hour. Then I end up spending hours and hours mixing and mastering it for practice. It's a bad habit that I need to break. Instead I should take the time to write out a non-generic piece of music, then not mix and master it unless I actually, y'know, have a reason to.

Of Logic and Ninjas

2008-06-20T21:00:00.005-05:00

My very first post of this blog was about Logic 8. In summary, I started using Logic 4, moved up to Logic 5, Apple bought the company that originally made Logic, Emagic, Logic 6 was Mac-only and I didn't have a Mac at that time, then I got a G4 12" Powerbook when Logic 7 came out. I bought two ~$25 books put out by Apple's training series on how to use Logic 7, and I got pretty fucking good at it. At that point, Logic 7's interface was pretty much the same as Logic 4 and 5's interface.

Then came Logic 8. This is the point at which Apple decided to give the interface the Apple touch. Don't get me wrong, Emagic's Logic was always, always notorious for its "steep learning curve" due to its interface. Some people just "got it," some people never did. I was one of the people that "got" the old Logic interface. I had tried Cubase and Digital Performer, including 4 separate semester-long college courses on the latter, and neither clicked with me the way that Logic did. However, I must concede, Apple's new direction with the Logic interface is probably for the best. The problem is, I have 6 years of Logic and its key commands stuck in my head.

So I have two books, really good books, that I spent about $50 on that are now, for all intents and purposes, completely outdated, and I don't really feel like spending the money on the new Logic 8 books from the same series.

Well just last week, I was fucking around in Logic 8 and found that I couldn't step sequence the way I used to be able to in Logic's Matrix editor. Step sequencing is the most simple, most retarded way of programming a sequence in the world, so it was really fucking frustrating.

Fortunately, I found a series of YouTube videos by a guy calling himself SFLogicNinja that are actually really, really good. SFLogicNinja is apparently a guy named Dave who teaches Logic for some weirdo "music academy" called Pyramind. Whatever. His videos have been great. They're really good for showing the bare bones basics of what Logic 8 can do, which is great for me because I've pretty much found myself re-learning everything I used to know how to do. He teaches the new key commands as they come up in his videos, which helps, plus he goes over some of the old Logic stuff that many found so esoteric, like the infamous Environment, the Transformer Window and Logic's weird ass Touch Tracks. (On the subject of Logic's Environment, I only wish they would go whole hog and incorporate Miller Puckette's Pure Data into it somehow - that would be awesome.)

Browse all of his videos.

It didn't take me long to find the help that I needed with my step sequencing problem - namely that in old Logic, each different editor window "reinvented the wheel," meaning that a lot of the major parameters were on each new window. I needed to change the step sequence resolution from 1/16th notes to 1/32nd notes, something which used to be accessible from the left hand side of the matrix editor.

Apple is going for a more all-encompassing approach with their new UI, so they had stuck my precious note resolution on the bottom - in the transport bar (where you hit start and stop). It seemed fucked up at first, but then I realized, Apple's way has it so that I have the arrange window still in the top half of the screen, the Matrix editor on the bottom half of the screen *when I want it* and the transport bar always, always, always along the very bottom of the screen - therefore the note resolution parameter is always, always, always handy. (Side note: having the transport bar at the bottom is funny because that is Apple's default location for the Dock, but I had already gotten use to moving the Dock to the left hand side of the screen in Logic 7 so that it didn't get in my fucking way...) So in the end, I can kind of see the new way as better, but it all takes getting used to. Fortunately the SFLogicNinja videos are there to get me reacquainted with the new shit.

Curse of the Demon

2008-06-15T12:36:00.005-05:00

Curse of the Demon, aka Night of the Demon - I recorded this over a year ago off of TCM Undergound - back when it didn't suck. A psychiatrist seeking to debunk the paranormal comes up against a cult leader who claims to have the power to conjure demons and set them upon his enemies. Early in the film, we are treated to the appearance of the demon, which, considering this was done in 1957, looks really good. Rather than merely giving us a guy in a rubber suit, the directer, Jacques Tourneur, uses camera tricks and strategically-lit smoke to prevent the demon from looking lame and he succeeds. Furthermore, the story is airtight, the acting is competent and the villain is awesome. Dr. Karswell, the cult leader and conjurer, carries on with an overtly friendly, yet menacing demeanor. There is one particularly effective scene where the protagonist comes upon him hosting a childrens party doing magic tricks and dressed up like a hobo-clown. The conversation that ensues, about Karswell's self-proclaimed power over the occult, while dressed like a clown is one of the best scenes in the movie.

Overall, this is probably the best movie I've subjected myself to in a long time now.

French horror just isn't doing it for me...

2008-06-15T00:54:00.006-05:00

Watched another movie off the DVR tonight - I recorded this one off of Sundance. The movies I tape off of Sundance seem to consistently disappoint, so I'm thinking that from here on out I'm not recording anymore horror movies off that channel.

Sheitan - A French movie; the title means "Satan." The first hour is a bunch of club kids hanging around and being assholes on a farm, the last forty-five minutes is when stuff happens - but (spoiler alert!) no one dies (spoiler alert!)

The gist of the movie, I guess, is that someone's bringing about the birth of the Anti-Christ. Reading the imdb boards (for whatever that's worth), it seems like there is a legitimate case to be made that there's a lot of symbolism and biblical allusion going on in this movie. Being a heathen myself, it all pretty much just went over my head.

If the first hour wasn't so boring, I'd forgive the movie just on atmosphere and general fucked-up'ness alone. However, the build up is far too slow for the (lack of) payoff that's delivered.

Here's a link to Horror-Movie-A-Day's review. This is one of those movies that seems to send one to "the internets" to get other people's take on it. It's strange, but not exactly good. Probably good to see in a group so everyone can discuss/bitch after it's done.

Iron Man touched my butthole

2008-06-13T21:29:00.004-05:00

I finally saw Iron Man this weekend, and it's still at 93% positive with 208 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but I thought it was pretty "meh..." overall. I pointed out in a previous post how that's pretty much the same rating Schindler's List has. I have no idea where all this critical goodwill is coming from. Personally, I prefer Batman Begins.

Iron Man starts out pretty strong, with Robert Downey Jr. fighting against terrorists in Afghanistan. I mean, really, that could've ended up being pretty fucking silly, but I think Iron Man pulled it off tastefully enough. However, once he singlehandedly wins the U.S. war in Afghanistan halfway through the movie, it just kind of loses steam.

Look, CGI is great when used subtly. Give me a man in a suit using CGI effects against an army, make it look good, and it's great. Give me two CGI robots fighting each other, you might as well be watching Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam smacking the shit out of each other. That's why I didn't go watch Transformers, that's why I'm not going to go see The Hulk (redux). I'm not impressed by the fantastical feats of cartoons. That's probably why I don't like anime, even the supposed "good" ones like Akira - it just doesn't impress me.

And that's probably why I'm gay for Batman. Live action. Mano-y-mano. People hitting people, not cartoons. Yeah, I know there's CGI there, but I can't fucking see it, so who cares?! It's awesome!

Meanwhile, I've continued cleaning out the DVR.

The Dark - This movie feels like it was made as a low budget direct-to-DVD movie during downtime on the set of the Silent Hill movie. It even has Sean Bean. Turns out it was made and released a year before it. The overall structure is eerily the same; child disappears, mother goes apeshit trying to find her, father shuffles around in crazy mother's footsteps trying to piece together what's going on. It just begs the question, if this movie was already out when Silent Hill was being made, why the fuck couldn't they have learned from its mistakes?!

The Burning - I have a quest to see every movie that made the UK's "Video Nasty" list. I actually vaguely recall seeing this in high school, either on USA's Up All Night, or TNT's Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs. This is one of a slew of summer camp slasher movies that came out after the success of Friday the 13th. It's hook was that the killer, a groundskeeper named "Cropsy" of all things, was a horribly scarred burn victim. (The other thing it has to differentiate itself from other camper slasher movies of the era is a young Jason Alexander from Seinfeld - with hair!) This movie is good mindless fun, but you've got to think - how hard would it be to kick a burn victim's ass? I don't care if their coming at you with a pair of garden shears, I'm pretty sure just laying your hands on them would be incapacitating, let alone a good, solid punch.

The Black Dahlia - I didn't want to see this, but Gemma's had a hard-on for it ever since it was in theaters. No one really likes this movie, and that's because it's ass. The movie is based off of a fictional novel loosely based on the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Everything but the fact that a girl was murdered and severely mutilated is made up and it all sucks. The photography/cinematography is pretty neat; the movie is made too look like an old photo, but the corpse of the Black Dahlia itself is some CGI abomination seemingly inspired by American J-horror remakes - it really clashes with the rest of the film and not in a good way, in my opinion. The pace of the movie is mind-numbingly slow, the Black Dahlia murder seems to be a minor subplot of the entire movie, and the ending is just total ass and poo smeared together on Wonderbread and served on a paper plate. The best/worst thing about it is that there is something about this movie that just screams, "This was made to be Oscar bait!!!" which is hilarious given just how spectacularly it fails. There's a cheap direct-to-video knock-off of the same name on FearNet right now that is apparently even worse, which is really unfortunate, because this is one of those rare opportunities where an independent film maker with an extremely low budget could have actually have made a better movie.

The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting

2008-05-31T18:22:00.004-05:00

I just watched about 8 hours worth of the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting - because I'm a masochist. There are many Hillary supporters who feel that Barack Obama is a weak candidate for the general election, to which I can only respond; Hillary Clinton is obviously a weaker candidate than Barack Obama, because she is losing to him. There's a sense that somehow, Barack Obama needs to do more than simply beat Hillary Clinton, as though Hillary Clinton were the default candidate - she's not. At this point, there is simply no way she could be the nominee. If she was made the nominee, it will have been through artificial means.

There was a 3 hour "break" in the meeting that was originally supposed to be a lunch break, but apparently ended up being a meeting amongst the committee members on how to finish the event - who would propose what motions that were going to be put to a vote. When they returned from the break, the first thing they did was put forth a motion on seating Florida's delegates at 100%. It was plainly obvious that a large group of Hillary supporters thought that they were announcing the motion had passed, because they flipped the fuck out with cheering and applause. They didn't realize that they were merely doing a sort of "theater" where they were putting the motion up for vote, knowing full well it would be voted down, before introducing a second motion to seat the Florida delegates at half a vote each, which passed unanimously. At that point the Hillary supporters had completely turned on the committee.

Those Hillary supporters are likely gone - done with Barack Obama, done with the Democractic Party. Why? Because Hillary and Harold Ickes and her inside supporters want to cause disruption. Because Hillary Clinton's campaign sucked and she lost what could have been a sure thing - the old "Casey at the Bat" story - classic hubris. Because they feel that even though they majorly flubbed the campaign, they're still entitled to the nomination. Damage has been done and it may yet haunt the Democratic Party in the general election.

However - if the Democratic Party were to somehow swoop in and hand the nomination to Hillary Clinton, the loss to the Democratic Party in the long run would be much greater. Barack Obama represents a new infrastructure for the entire party to win on for generations to come. The old DLC - that's Democratic Leadership Committee, an independent entity separate from the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee - their infrastructure only ever got Bill Clinton elected, and one must keep in mind, both times there was Ross Perot on the ballot. But down-ticket Democratic candidates suffered during their reign, and in the end, it led to total Republican domination of all three branches of government for a few years. There are those who say that the 2006 election year gains were inevitable for the Democratic Party, however I do believe that had the DNC chair been another DLC person, like Terry McAuliffe or Ed Rendell, both of whom are now Hillary supporters this election, they would not have competed in all 50 states like Howard Dean did - and therefore would not have made the extraordinary gains that the Democratic Party made under his leadership. The DLC style Democratic Party was a top down thing that conceded way too many congressional districts to the Republicans. Howard Dean and Barack Obama both represent a ground-up style of funding and organization and their successes in fundraising are unprecedented.

It is really unfortunate, seeing those Hillary supporters led out of the meeting by security screaming their heads off. They're completely ignorant of the issues before the committee, why Florida and Michigan were stripped of delegates, who voted to strip them (Harold Ickes for one, despite his rhetoric today), Hillary Clinton's support of those delegates being stripped, and how inappropriate it really was to even restore any of these delegates when voters in those states were told the election results would not count. Yet they have their opinions, and their assured self-righteousness - somehow if Hillary's not winning, well, someone screwing them. They are completely oblvious to the fact that they are pawns of a failed political campaign grasping at straws.

And, likely, in the general election this fall, they will not be voting. They'll be convinced that Barack Obama somehow stole the nomination from Hillary Clinton - never mind that Hillary Clinton was the one who had all the connections to party insiders and Barack Obama was the outsider. Hillary would practically have to hold a concession speech where she admitted to every dirty trick and tactic she pulled and told her most ardent supporters "I was playing you all like a fiddle during the primary - I wasn't really screwed out of this nomination, I was just acting like a dick so you'd fight harder on my behalf! Now I support Barack Obama and you should too, and I fully apologize for all the shit I pulled on him!" I guarantee her concession speech will have no such self-criticism and no such admission of the propagandist wordplay she used during her campaign - after all, she'll be thinking of 2012.

But even if Barack Obama loses this fall, come 2012 there will be another candidate supported by the grassroots, who will raise more money from small donors than the richest DLC donors could ever match - and Hillary Clinton will find herself losing by even bigger margins in that primary, because she is part of an old-style of Democratic politics that has been discredited and is on its way out. Howard Dean and Barack Obama have created the blueprint for the future of this party - the Clintons are the past. As time passes, those who support the Clintons will be fewer, while the next generation flocks to the next successor.

If the DNC were to give in to Hillary and her supporters and artificially hand her the nomination this year - all that will die for a generation. And she will lose the general election against John McCain as I predicted on this blog way back in February. The party will be completely discredited as an organization able of governing, and she will be irreversibly tainted as the "selected-not-elected" nominee. Scores of would-be Democratic voters will flock to third party candidates or not vote at all - better to tune out than to be complicit. Trust me, I know. In 2000 I was 19 years old and voted for Ralph Nader rather than a Gore/Lieberman ticket. Al Gore ended up being an alright guy in the end, but you wouldn't have known it back then, but Lieberman is now endorsing John McCain. (There you go, DLC fuckers, I was right, you were wrong, unless the purpose of your organization is to get Republicans with D's next their name elected.)

My point, I guess, is that we may be on our way to losing the 2008 election - assuming that those two dozen Hillary supporters/protesters are representative of some larger movement - but it's too late for Hillary to win this and her candidacy will do nothing for the future of the Democratic Party. Win or lose, Barack Obama gives this party a way to win future elections for the rest of my life - something the DLC/Clinton machine never was and never will be capable of.

Mike's Memorial Day Movie Weekend (now with 33% gratuitous rape!)

2008-05-27T18:42:00.006-05:00

Memorial Day weekend gave me an opportunity to watch a bunch of shit I had on my DVR for the past year.

Citizen Kane - caught this on TV a few years back, never watched it "properly" from the beginning to the end. It is considered one of the best movies of all time and for good reason. I can't wait until Michael Bay remakes it - WITH EXPLOSIONS.

Shivers - David Cronenberg's take on the zombie movie genre, but instead of eating you, these zombies want to rape you! It's all the result of a synthetic parasite that looks like the offspring of a turd and a penis that was overcooked in the microwave. This movie does not flinch from its subject matter, instead exploring the full perverted range of its implications. Add in some gross out moments involving an insurance agent who essentially plays mother hen to a brood of newborn parasites and you got something that can only be described as Cronentastic!!!

Calvaire - Weird French movie I taped off of Sundance, the description went something along the lines of "A cabaret singer breaks down in rural Belgium and comes across the town's deranged peasants. A mix of gory violence and black humor." For some reason, I thought cannibals. I was wrong. One - the cabaret singer is a guy who sings for old folks homes - not cabarets. Okay. Two, the peasants are Deliverance-inspired man-rapists. Oh noes! This movie has a dreadful atmosphere and great cinematography/photography and might have been okay except it has a really shitty, half-assed ending.

The Gate - Two 10-year-old boys somehow manage to accidentally perform an elaborate ritual that creates a gate between their world and that of ancient demons that predate light itself. I saw this movie in theaters back in 1987 - meaning I was only 6 years old!!! Two things in it scared the shit out of me back then - a demonic apparition of one of the main characters dad's face melting off and a phone melting on the wall. Apparently as a kid I was bothered by melting, but not by little claymation dudes running around. Or big gigantic anti-climatic claymation dudes. This movie is a bit too day-glo and 80's to really hold up these days, and it has a super sappy sugary sweet happy ending. They should've gone with an ending more akin to Time Bandits - sorry kid, your house is gone, everyone you love is dead and you're all alone in the world. Oh, and it's your fault. Now THAT'S an ending!!!

The House on Haunted Hill (1999 remake) - Some remakes I refuse to watch, some remakes I can't help myself. I love the original House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, and this movie seemed to have the right look that I was willing to at least give it a chance. It's actually pretty decent up until the final 20 minutes. Enough things are changed in this movie so that it's not an outright regurgitation - in this version the "house" was a 1930's era asylum where the evil doctor, played by Jeffrey Combs, was performing grisly experiments and vivisections on his patients. One day they broke free, so the doctor put the place in a (technologically unlikely) lock down mode and 135 people burned to death with no way to escape. The set up provides a great atmosphere for the movie to work with, and Geoffrey Rush plays the part analogous to Vincent Price's - not a bad choice of casting. Unfortunately, they have Chris Kattan playing the wienie comic relief, but it doesn't ruin the movie - the ending does. Gemma called me about 20 minutes before this movie ended and I told her, "the movie's been pretty good up until this point, but I think it's about to take a huge shit on me." And shit it did. They ruin a pretty decent movie with a horrible CGI anti-climax that is about as goofy as the giant claymation dude from The Gate.

Touch of Evil - So I began and ended the weekend with an Orson Welles movie. Touch of Evil is a film noir with Charlton Heston as prominent Mexican law enforcement officer Mike Vargas, and Orson Wells as the racist American police captain Hank Quinlan who uses questionable methods to get arrests and convictions. Vargas is the idealist do-gooder, and when he and Quinlan cross paths, Quinlan decides the only course of action is to make Vargas and his wife out to be drug addicts themselves so that Vargas's accusations hold no weight - with the side effect of possibly letting a prominent drug cartel leader, whose conviction depends upon Vargas's testimony, go free. It's great stuff with some truly tense atmosphere as Quinlan teams up with local crime lord Uncle Joe Grandi and his thugs to go after Vargas's innocent wife - there's some serious knot-in-your-stomach moments to be had there.

Painkiller

2008-05-23T23:46:00.004-05:00

I watch this guy's reviews every week:

I've had my eye on Painkiller for a while now... what's not to like? It's an FPS, it takes place in Hell, and... well that's pretty much it. It used to be $20 on Steam, and I was kind of ambivalent about it. Yeah, I love shooting things and satanic imagery, but really, $20 is a bit much for a cheap thrill. Then I watched Yahtzee's review and thought, "Over 50 distinct varieties of dudes to murder?! OKAY!!!" and sure enough it was only $9.99. Well, shit, I can't say "no" for that price. And apparently neither can a lot of people, because since this review came out on Wednesday, Painkiller has gone from nowhere to the #5 best seller on Steam. Valve even uses a line from Yahtzee's review in the ad banner for Painkiller: "All you really need to know is there is a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning."

There is an old game called Serious Sam that I have never played, but from what I understand, it's simply an FPS whose claim to fame is obscene amounts of monsters in a small amount of space and you have to kill all of them. Painkiller is a lot like that in that each level is essentially made up of several "rooms" and you enter a room, it locks you in, and a shitload of monsters spawn for you to murder. Once you've killed everything in a room, everything unlocks and an arrow helpfully points you to the next area you need to get to - rinse and repeat. As repetitive as it sounds, it actually gets your adrenaline pumping as it essentially throws so many monsters at you at once that you have to constantly keep moving and firing just to stay alive. Furthermore each level seems to have it's own types of monsters with their own special abilities so that it doesn't get old, or hasn't for me yet anyways.

One of my favorite things about video games like this is a wide variety of baddies. One of the weakest points of Bioshock, in my opinion, is that there's so few types of enemies - Thuggish Splicers, Leadhead Splicers, Nitro Splicers, Spider Splicers and Big Daddies. That's really five enemies spread out over a 10 to 20 hour game. Meanwhile, in Painkiller, each level is 15 minutes long and you get two to three different distinct types of enemies.

And that brings up another thing I love about this, it's easy to sit down, play for a few minutes and then quit. I'm getting to the age where I like that kind of thing. Don't get me wrong, I love long, engaging story arcs that make you just want to put a bucket under your desk and play through to the end, but it doesn't jive with real life right now, so it's nice when I can boot up the game, clear a room, save and get on with my day.

So overall, for $10, definitely worth it. $20? Maybe, maybe not, but definitely not worth more than $20.

Woo Hoo!!!

2008-05-11T14:47:00.004-05:00

I doubt she had been using the whole, "Even SNL thinks Obama's getting a free ride from the media line!" since Texas/Ohio, but I'd just love to see her use it now. PWNAGE.

Edit: This is the kind of person Hillary Clinton is.

Speaking of Wes Craven...

2008-05-11T12:00:00.004-05:00

I also recently watched the sequel to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes - The Hills Have Eyes II, not to be confused as a remake of the original The Hills Have Eyes Part II, the sequel to the original The Hills Have Eyes.

I didn't like the original The Hills Have Eyes, but the remake directed by Alexandre Aja was actually pretty good. When the sequel of the remake was in theaters, The Movie Channel, Showtime's retarded little brother network, was playing the original The Hills Have Eyes Part II, so I watched it. It is, quite simply, one of the worst movies ever made.

Consider this: after the success of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven opted to make a sequel for The Hills Have Eyes instead of the sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street. That's like finding a gold mine and deciding to go farm pig shit for a living. Lucky for him, he got plenty of second (and third and fourth) chances - for example, he wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3 (which was really the only good Nightmare sequel until he made New Nightmare.)

The original Hills Have Eyes Part II is about a bunch of dirt bike racers in the desert getting attacked by the left over "mutants" from the first movie - of which there were, I think, two. One was Michael Berryman, the other was "The Reaper," who was not in the original movie and was really kind of a stand in for Papa Jupiter, the father of the mutants from the first movie, who was done blowed up so good that there was no way they could really bring the character back. In addition to that, since the original was made in 1977 and home video was still pretty new in 1985, they had to show the audience some of the things that happened in the original via flashback. Every character that was in the original has flashbacks, including the dog. I'm not joking. I am 110% serious. This movie does indeed include a dog having flashbacks to the previous movie. Wow. Just. Wow.

Now, in the original Hills Have Eyes movies, the "mutants," aren't really mutants, they're more like cannibalistic hillbillies. Michael Berryman looks a little weird, but not mutant weird, and the rest of them were just dirty bearded people. So think of the original Hills Have Eyes as Deliverance in the desert without any real message aside from "non-violent liberal nerdy guys will totally go apeshit on your ass if you kill their wife, half their family and kidnap their infant."

The remake of The Hills Have Eyes started out right by having the mutants be honest-to-god mutants. Overall it was a decent horror movie, and at the end implied that there was an entire underground village of mutants living in the desert. It also played up the idea that the area was a nuclear test site by having a giant crater as well as a fake town that the mutants lived in. Overall better mutants, better gore, better cinematography, better direction = better movie. Wes Craven produced the remake, but did not direct or write the new script.

So of course, when that did well, they had to make a cash in sequel. This time the script was written by Wes Craven and his son Jonathan. Instead of dirt bike racers, we get National Guard soldiers. Now, I'm no expert on the military or the National Guard, but right off the bat, I got the sneaking suspicion that the writers had no idea what the National Guard was really like and didn't bother to ask anybody.

The movie opens in what appears to be a firefight in the streets of some middle eastern country, but it turns out to be a training exercise - complete with live grenades. Oooohkay! The recruits fail the test, apparently being the 12 or so worst recruits in the entire national guard (maybe they were hoping they'd blow themselves up with those live grenades?) so they're being sent back to base, but first it turns out they have to get some equipment to some scientists in a part of the desert that used to be a nuclear blast zone. Hooray!

So the group, through a series of mishaps mostly due to their own incompetence, gets whittled down to about 3 survivors, and they're battling against a measly four mutants - Rocky, Blindy, Nicey the Helpful Retard, and Rapey McRaperton. Four mutants is a huge letdown after the last movie set up the idea that their could possibly be an entire town of underground mutants. Furthermore, in the remake, Alexandre Aja and his crew used subtle CGI to enhance the latex prosthetics on his mutants, this movie just sticks to latex and it looks like crap.

So yeah, Hills Have Eyes movies, I don't really like them, but I watched them all anyway.

I watched this on purpose.

Wes Craven's "Shocker"

2008-05-10T21:46:00.007-05:00

Oops, I mean

There's a new feature on The Onion's A.V. Club called, "I Watched This on Purpose," where reviewers essentially dig up not-new crappy movies that no one would really watch except on accident, or on cable during a bout of insomnia or else just to be masochistic. I had never seen Shocker before, but I knew it was crappy, yet I recorded it and watched it (six months later) anyway. In other words, I watched this on purpose.

What I didn't know, is that the movie actually starts off pretty decent. An unknown serial killer is breaking into houses and murdering entire families. A young college football star suffers a concussion and has a vision of his mother and siblings being murdered - a bit schlocky, but it works. Of course, it turns out his vision was real and he's the only one who can identify the serial killer. Lucky for him, his dad is a police detective, he wins him over, they eventually catch the bad guy, bad guy goes to the electric chair - hooray, movie over!!!

Oh wait, we're not even halfway through it.

So the premise of the movie is actually that the serial killer is into black magic and electricity, because he's a TV repair man and he uses a soldering iron. So he combines his two interests to come back from the dead as a disembodied spirit who can possess people and manifest himself through electricity.

At first it appears the serial killer (named fucking Horace Pinker of all things) can possess people simply by touching them. That's a pretty powerful ability right there - in fact they made an entire movie off that premise alone, 1998's Fallen starring Denzel Washington; which, while not a great movie, was way better than Shocker. But as the movie goes on, they keep adding to Pinker's repertoire. First he goes from only being able possess people via touch to being able to travel via electrical lines, then he is able to manifest himself physically by absorbing enough electricity, then he's able to transmit himself via television broadcast, then he's able to possess electrical devices... It all ends with a shit-tastic climatic battle wherein the college football hero guy, who might really be Pinker's biological son or some shit, and Pinker battling each other inside a TV across different television shows. First it's a World War 2 documentary, then it's I Love Lucy and it goes on and on until they start showing up in live broadcasts, and they're physically there at the live broadcast, but they're really still in the TV... blergh!

I love horror and I like a fair amount of sci-fi, so I'm not one of those, "that could never happen!" douchebags, but a work needs to at least adhere to its own internal logic - which Shocker does not. It's the equivalent of two kids playing on a playground going, "I shoot fireballs!," "I'm immune to fireballs and I shoot lightening back at you!" "Oh yeah, well I'm immune to lightning!"

After it's revealed that Pinker is pretty much godlike via electricity, including broadcast signals and everything, the hero wins the day by fucking him up with a... VCR remote control? Ooooookay. So he hits the pause button, and the bad guy just pauses. That's a bit of a stretch, I don't see what VCR pause has to do with electricity necessarily but I've gone with you up until this point, Wes, so I might has well wait and see what happens... wait, what? And now, using the fast forward and rewind buttons the hero is... making the bad guy hit himself with things and slam his head against the wall repeatedly? But that doesn't even make any sense, not even based on the fake pseudo-rules that you really didn't even set up all that well...

It's kind of like Wes Craven needed a climax for the movie, so instead of thinking up anything good, he just kind of jacked off all over the script and then filmed it. It makes no sense, it's way too overblown, it looks like crap and it's just stupid. It sucks, because the beginning part, where Horace is just a killer with knife, would've actually made a good slasher movie. But once it goes from "Slasher" to "Shocker," it just becomes more and more crappy, until it ends choking in a pool of its own shit.

Oh, and apparently they're remaking it.

CNN Eats My Balls

2008-05-10T00:04:00.005-05:00

I don't know why, but I constantly check CNN.com. It's the news junkie in me, and for better or worse, CNN has become synonymous with "news." I quit watching the TV channel a decade ago, because it seemed like nothing but celebrity gossip and touchy-feely feel-good bullshit fluff. Polls actually show that whether CNN the channel's rating are up or down, they're always the most visited news website. It's a habit I should break myself of, and yet it's hard to totally divorce myself from checking in for the sake of seeing how the news of the day is being framed in most people's minds.

From Wednesday through Friday morning they had a headline on the main page of CNN.com, "Limbaugh says he wants "weak" Obama." Considering most headlines tend to come and go within hours, giving this headline a prominent spot on the front page for over two days shows that someone decided it was worth emphasizing. The gist of it is that now Limbaugh is saying he thinks Obama is more beatable than Hillary Clinton, because he's been weakened by Jeremiah Wright, bowling, the "bitter" comments, etc. Keep in mind, Limbaugh up until Tuesday had been telling his Republican listeners to vote for Hillary because she was "more beatable" than Obama and for the sake of dragging out the Democratic Party's nomination process.

The fact that he's changing gears after Obama has all but been declared the nominee is simple playground-mentality bullshit. He's pretend he's pulling the strings of millions of Democratic voters, tricking us into making choices that play right into the Republicans' hands. I've always thought that Karl Rove got waaay too much credit for being a Machiavellian "mastermind," simply because a semi-paranoid media and Democratic base saw every decision and circumstance as somehow playing into his schemes. Sometimes shit just happens.

In the case of Limbaugh declaring Obama somehow "weaker" than Hillary after conventional wisdom has declared her candidacy dead, well - bullshit. Money, organization, message - Obama is the stronger candidate. Limbaugh's just playing a part for his audience, making them feel good, he likely doesn't even believe what he's saying.

AND YET CNN LEGITIMIZES IT. Not even some kind of analysis like "before Obama was considered by many pundits to be the presumptive Democratic nominee after Tuesday's election, Limbaugh had been encouraging his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to give an advantage to the Republican Party in the general election." Whatever, I really don't think it matters that much, it just bothers me.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up, is because there's been a headline all day reading, "Clinton holds huge lead in next state." If you read the article, it says there's a poll showing she leads Obama 66 to 23 in West Virginia. No analysis to point out the fact that this isn't going to give her the lead in delegates. Instead they treat it like it could be a turning point in the campaign - it won't be.

Time to bust out the handy dandy Slate calculator.

Okay, so let's take this poll from American Research Group at face value and go ahead and give Clinton 66%. Hell let's give her 66% for Kentucky too, even though I've got a couple of polls that say she wins it by 59% or 62%. Oregon's going to Obama, let's say worst case scenario he squeeks out of that one with 51% of the vote. I don't know what-the-fuck about Puerto Rico, so I left it 50-50 even though it could go 86% for Clinton and still not change a damn thing. As for Montana and South Dakota, there's been no polling that I know of, although conventional wisdom points to those being Obama wins, but I'm leaving it 50-50.

No change.

In fact, let's go into Happy Handjob-land for Hillary after Oregon and say she wins all the delegates in Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota.

Oh hey, Hillary's still behind by 58 delegates!

It's not just this that sets me off about mainstream news and CNN in particular, it's the overall implication that THESE PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEIR TALKING ABOUT HALF THE TIME. Are they biased? Lazy? Ignorant? Sensationalist? Who the fuck can tell anymore?

It's like intelligence has been sent to die a painful death in this country, and there are those who intend to take full advantage of that by spinning and confusing things until the loser of an election becomes the winner.

Oh wait...

Dicks for Jesus

2008-05-08T21:40:00.005-05:00

Happy fun chart No. 1 in this post shows that even if Hillary Clinton wins 85% of the vote in the remaining contests, she still loses in pledged delegates.

The second chart shows that if she breaks 86% in West Virginia and Kentucky, she gets all of those states' delegates and Obama gets none. If she attains 86% then continues on to sweep the rest of states by 85% or better, a winner is she.

This threshold is, of course, impossible.

*****

Word on the internets is that Democratic Party insiders want Clinton to stay in until Oregon, because it is believed she would win West Virginia and Kentucky even without campaigning there - and that being defeated by a candidate who had already conceded would be embarrassing for the nominee.

Whatever.

I wouldn't care if she stayed in until August if she stopped the horseshit. Today she was offered a deal on Michigan, 69 delegates for her, 59 for Obama. Seems generous, I think they should split Florida and Michigan 50-50 each. Clinton turned it down, she wants 72 delegates (55%) and she wants the remaining 45% of the delegates split in half, 39 for Obama, the rest stay Uncommitted.

Horseshit.

I truly don't understand the minds of her supporters. It's like they want a Democratic version of George W. Bush - stubborn, duplicitous, vindictive, arrogant and corrupt. I remember early on, Obama supporters were considered "cult-like." I'm sorry, but at this point, it's the die-hard, dead-ender Hillary supporters who strike me as the cult here. At least the ones who still think she should be the nominee no matter what the pledged delegate count and popular vote say.

Don't get me wrong, my girlfriend preferred Hillary over Obama, but she's sick of it now and doesn't seem to mind Obama being the nominee. My mother ended up voting for Hillary, but said she really had no preference. She had brought up voting early a week or two before the election, so the Sunday before the election here, I said, "Hey, do you want to go early vote?" So we went, but afterwards she had said that if I hadn't said anything she probably would've not voted at all. Oops. Now she thinks that Hillary should just drop out.

It's the people with the glazed over eyes that want to see her win the nomination no matter what - and no matter what means tearing the party in half and bombing the general election. Hillary Clinton, her supporters and the DLC-types have been making a calculation since 1992 that if Democrats run as Republican-Lites, they can just take the Democratic base for granted and bring enough Republicans over to win. In hindsight, I say that this strategy works great when you have a conservative-leaning third party candidate like Ross Perot on the ballot, but otherwise you're fucked. Republican voters vote for Republicans - period.

What hurt Al Gore more in 2000, Ralph Nader on the Green Party ticket, or Joe Lieberman (who is now endorsing John McCain) on his own? Hindsight, hindsight, but as a 2000 Nader voter, I think if Al Gore had been Al Gore, y'know the one he's been since after 2000, and had he chosen any Democrat besides Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller as his VP, maybe he would've won that election - as in won it big enough that no amount of fuckery could've changed the results.

The whole thing's a joke at this point anyway... almost 50% of polled Hillary supporters in the Indiana and North Carolina exit polls said they'd support McCain in the general over Obama. McCain who wants to keep American health care as-is. McCain who wants to keep fighting in Iraq until we don't suffer any more troop casualties, and then stay there 100 more years after that magical goal has been met. McCain who wants to appoint more Supreme Court Justices in the style of Roberts and Alito, who both voted to make it harder for employees to sue their employers for GENDER DISCRIMINATION and who would, despite what they said in their Senate confirmation hearings, overturn Roe Vs. Wade in a heartbeat. Yeah - I can really see that happening.

*****

DVD's I own but haven't watched:

Opera - Dario Argento movie. I want to watch it with the girlfriend, but we never seem to get around to it.

Eraserhead - I need to see this, but for some reason never get around to it.

No Country for Old Men - Gemma just got me this for my birthday. I meant to see it in theaters, even before it won the Oscar. I really, really did.

X-Men 3 - I won this at work. I'd never seen the first two X-Men movies, and I don't like seeing sequels without seeing the originals... and I'm just not that interested in the X-Men.

DVD's I've watched instead:

Superbad - The last time Gemma visited was for my birthday, and we were making birthday cupcakes in the kitchen while my mom and her boyfriend watched this movie. I thought the part where the fat kid talks about how he compulsively drew dicks as a kid was hilarious, so after Gemma left for the weekend, I watched it. The little kid drawing dicks scene is the only worthwhile thing about this movie. I didn't like The 40-Year-Old Virgin either, so I'm pretty much done with these movies.

Batman Begins - Saw this in theaters, caught it on HBO, caught it again on regular TV, bought it on impulse standing in the check out line at Best Buy. Rotwang's right, I'm gay for Batman.

Invader Zim Vols. 1, 2 and 3 - A few years back, my roommate's girlfriend borrowed Vols. 1 and 2 from a friend of hers, and, without realizing it, I had watched all of them. Flash forward to last Valentine's Day and Gemma gave me the box set and I watched all of 1 and 2 again, followed by volume 3. Some day, I'm going to talk like GIR all fucking day at work. I MADE IT MAH-SELF!!!

Day Watch - This movie premiered in Russian theaters on Jan 1st, 2006. April 2006, my girlfriend bought a DVD of it off ebay, not realizing it was a bootleg. (I have a theory at this point that every-fucking-DVD on ebay is a bootleg.) We sat down and watched it and ruined it for ourselves because we loved Night Watch so much. The last 20 minutes of the disc skipped horribly. It was legitimately released in October 2007, so I told Gemma she needed to buy it for me for Xmas. It was exactly the same movie, and, honestly, it's no where near as good as Night Watch. Sorry!

The Stuff - Back in 2005, I got my first DVD player (I had resisted the format for years) and decided I would collect low budget horror movies. I thought I found the jackpot on eBay, all kinds of movies that I couldn't find in stores at really cheap prices. Bootlegs. Every-fucking-DVD on ebay is a bootleg. Every. Fucking. DVD. I bought The Stuff, and it had screens on the back of the case that weren't in the movie!!! I thought my DVD was missing content. So, last fall, I bought a legit copy from Amazon.com (that's where I buy most of my DVDs now - you can find anything and it's reasonably priced). Nope, the movie's just horribly edited. The screens on the back of the bootleg cover must've been outtakes or some shit - I don't know. Oops.

Maybe some other time, I'll post about all the shit I've recorded to my DVR and haven't watched in over a year.

Politics

2008-05-04T12:27:00.004-05:00

Gemma said she had trouble loading the slate.com page I linked in my last post with the delegate calculator, so here are some screen shots.

Guam happened yesterday and broke down to 50-50; but with only four delegates, one candidate would've had to have won 75% over the other to eke out an extra delegate.

The above screen shot shows that even if Clinton wins 69% of the vote in each remaining state, Obama still wins by 5 delegates.

This screen shot shows that if Clinton wins each remaining state by 70% of the vote, only then does she win by 4 delegates. The fact of the matter, however, is that she is NOT GOING TO WIN by anything even approaching 69% of the vote, let alone 70%. She might win West Virginia and Kentucky by close to 60%, however, every time she wins a state by less than 70%, each remaining state needs to be won by something higher than 70%.

Even if she wins every single remaining contest, she needs to win by 70% or more to end up with more pledged delegates than Obama. Add the fact that Obama is favored to win North Carolina and Oregon, add the fact that Indiana is probably going to be closer to 50-50 than 70-30, add the fact that the only state Clinton has won in this entire election by 70% was Arkansas and it becomes apparent that this scenario just isn't going to happen - yet the MEDIA is still acting like this is a close race. It's not.

The only "if" in this race are the Democratic Party's super-delegates, and as time goes on, it is becoming less and less likely that they are interested in propping up a candidate who couldn't even win the primary for the general election.

The problem is, in the meantime Bill and Hillary Clinton are out there stumping and pandering, and essentially labeling the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee as an "out-of-touch," "liberal eltist," etc. etc. etc. These attacks serve no purpose at this point but to encourage the so-called "white working class voters" to vote Republican in the fall, because these attacks ARE NOT going to win the nomination for Hillary Clinton in the short term.

She can't win. The primary race is over. She lost. If she wants to stay in the race until the very end, that's hypothetically fine, but all she is doing at this point is tearing down the Democratic presidential candidate, the Democratic Party-lead congress and, therefore, the Democratic Party itself. If that is going to be what she and Bill do, then the Democratic Party super-delegates should have no qualms about moving en masse towards Obama until he has the 2025 total delegates needed to shut her out of the race.

Iron Man and shit

2008-05-02T21:33:00.004-05:00

Right now, at this moment, Rotten Tomatoes has Iron Man at 94% with 151 reviews.

Ummm... that's Schindler's List territory. Iron Man may kick ass, but come on!!!

I haven't seen Iron Man yet, and I probably won't see it for at least a few weeks, but last year's Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men is at 94% with 196 reviews. (I have that on DVD sitting here, but I haven't watched it yet, 'cuz I'm lame.)

Seriously, there is no way that Iron Man is that good.

***

I live in Hoosierville and we get to weigh in on the Democratic primary in a few days. I've been pro-Obama since about last summer, but I was never a fan of the Clintons' policies, hence why I voted Nader in 2000 (the first election I could vote in). Seven years of Bush is enough to make even a radical lefty like me look back on the Clinton years with nostalgia, but ever since Hillary celebrated "winning" Florida and Michigan, I've just come to despise her more and more. It's more than simple "personality politics" as some bobble heads who get paid way too much to spout bullshit would say - Hillary Clinton's brand of politics is poison for the Democratic Party.

Look at her campaign - they had the money advantage for a long time, they had name recognition, and they had the support of the "Democratic Party Establishment." Remember when Hillary Clinton was the "inevitable" nominee? What happened to that? Why can't she "close the deal" against Obama?

She blew it, pure and simple.

She believed her own hype, surrounded herself with lackeys and spent all her campaign money on "Super Tuesday." She did not have any real organization in the states after the February 5th elections. Her campaign assumed she would have wrapped up the nomination by then and essentially forfeited the entire month of February, which is when Obama made his biggest gains. That series of ~20% victories in a row essentially won him the pledged delegate race.

If that's how Hillary Clinton's primary campaign went, why would anyone expect her to do better in the general election? Isn't conventional wisdom that this election is an "inevitable" win for the Democratic party?

My mother has said she doesn't really care if it's Hillary or Obama, but she's thinking about voting for Hillary. I told her that voting for Hillary is essentially voting for the Democratic Party to split in August, that every time Hillary wins a state, she uses it to question the legitimacy of Obama's nomination and risks splitting the party in half at the convention by usurping the pledged delegate count via coup by superdelegates.

If the superdelegates go for Hillary when Barack has the pledged delegate lead, the Democratic Party will be sundered for at least a generation. Why would the African-American community, the Democratic Party's most reliable voting bloc, continue to support a party that screwed an African-American candidate out of the nomination in favor of a white candidate who performed worse in the primary elections? They may not start voting Republican, but if they just stopped voting at all or moved towards a third party, that would be devastating for non-right wing politics and policy - essentially handing the Republican Party another 20 years of free reign to then destroy our country through bad policy. Furthermore, the under 40 crowd, such as myself, who have so fervently donated to and worked on behalf of the Obama campaign are *not* going to simply shrug their shoulders and do the same for Hillary in that scenario - they may not vote for McCain, but instead they may not vote at all, and may not be there for the next election, either.

The Obama campaign signifies a transformational moment for the Democratic Party. These Obama voters, donors and volunteers can be the foundation for the Democratic Party and for liberal and progressive politics for a lifetime. All my life, it's been playing to the right wing Republican tune, from Reagan to Bush, to Newt Gringrich to Tom Delay, to George W. Bush. Obama can be the first of many election cycles where *we* have the money advantage, the grassroots organizational advantage and the issues advantage.

Not only do I believe that Obama is a better candidate against McCain than Clinton, I think that *even if* Obama were to lose to McCain, this infrastructure would last and carry us to victory in future elections. I've always felt it was better to stay true and lose an election than to win by triangulating and pandering, because when you do that, you end up passing and enacting horrible, horrible shit, and then what's really the point of having won in the first place? Ronald Reagan lost the 1976 primary to Gerald Ford before coming back in 1980 and redefining American politcs for the next 20 years - to the detriment of the majority of Americans today.

If the Democratic Party superdelegates hand the nomination to Clinton when she did worse, that foundation may not be there ever again. If it goes to Obama, whether he wins or loses, it will be established and ready to go for years to come.

My mother's response was, "what if Clinton wins the pledged delegate count?" I told her I, and the majority of Obama supporters would be there for her in the fall and beyond, BUT in order to do that, she's have to win by 70% of the vote in EVERY SINGLE PRIMARY REMAINING. My mother thought I was exaggerating, so I dug up this:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185278/

If you scroll down a bit, there's a pledged delegate calculator for the remaining states in the primary elections. If you set every remaining contest to 69% for Clinton, *still loses the pledged delegate count by 1!*

If you set every remaining contest to 70% for Clinton, only then does she beat Obama by 8 delegates.

EVERY CONTEST THAT SHE DOES NOT WIN WITH 70% OF THE VOTE, SHE ONLY NEEDS A LARGER PERCENT OF THE VOTE IN EACH REMAINING CONTEST.

And that is why, in this point in the game, each vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to undermine the Democratic Party.

Numbers Rock!

2008-04-29T22:16:00.003-05:00

1) As mentioned before, I've been playing GTA: San Andreas a lot lately. The first time I played it was on the PS2 a few years ago, and I just couldn't get into it. I had beaten GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City on the PC and I just can't stand the controls of it on the PS2. Steam recently started offering Rockstar games and had a sale when they were first available, so I downloaded San Andreas 'cuz it was cheap.

It's a lot better on the PC, for me anyway. It was chugging along really great too, I've probably spent 40 hours on it, having fun, goofing off, completing missions...

Then *BAM* - "Hey CJ, go learn to fly a plane!"

Now, I like games that are challenging, but I also think that missions and quests and whatnot in games should be *beatable the first time around.* Even if it's hard as fuck and I end up dying 20 times, I want to be able say after it's all said and done, "I totally could have done that the first time, if I wasn't such a dumbfuck!"

These plane controls... FUCK WHOEVER DESIGNED THIS SHIT. Yeah, gimmicky missions with bad controls are just as much a staple of the GTA games as stealing cars and punching hookers, BUT FUCK!!!

I remember a mission in Vice City where you had to use a toy helicopter to plant bombs in a building being constructed. It sucked, but I got it done in one sitting. In San Andreas, there are the infamous Zero missions, especially the last one where you control a toy helicopter that has to protect Zero's toy car. That was kind of fun, but challenging, and I was able to beat it in two sittings.

I've spent about 3 hours in the past week trying to FLY THIS FUCKING PLANE in a CLOCKWISE CIRCLE and I finally DID IT and then it WANTS ME TO DO THE SAME THING AGAIN, and then LAND.

The controls on this plane fucking suck and I can't for the life of me fly THE DAMN PLANE in a FUCKING CIRCLE a second time.

Most of these missions I'm able to beat on my first try, so I have the sense of momentum in the game, and then FUCK.

FUCK this PLANE and FUCK fucking ROCKSTAR for this MISSION.

2) Seems like there are no good horror movies hitting theaters anytime soon. That really fucking sucks. There's a new Spanish movie called [REC] that's getting a lot of positive buzz, but I doubt it'll be hitting theaters stateside - ever. Hopefully it won't take long to hit DVD.

Upcoming highlights:

Repo! The Genetic Opera (August) - This is either going to be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. Pluses: Nivek Ogre and lots of gore. Minuses: It's a musical with a bit of an Andrew Lloyd Weber sound (*gag*puke*gag*) and Paris Hilton.

Midnight Meat Train (August) - Best title ever, plus its an adaptation of a short story from one of Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Now if only someone good would adapt The Damnation Game.

Saw V (October) - Because the Saw movies are always decent and I don't regret having seen any of them in theaters. Hopefully this isn't the first one to completely suck.

Hellraiser (January) - The only thing that could top the original movie would be a closer adaptation of Barker's The Hellbound Heart with a bigger budget. I wouldn't even consider this if Clive Barker himself weren't involved.

In other news, I'm disappointed that Guillermo Del Toro is going to be spending the next four years working on a couple of Hobbit movies, I was really looking forward to his adaptation of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and I'm sure "Fruity Little Midgets with Swords: The Movie (Parts 5 and 6)*" is going to delay that. Most Lovecraft movies fall flat on their face, but I'd like to see what he comes up with.

*(Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll fucking see them and they'll be awesome but C'MON!!! Del Toro + Lovecraft!!!!!)

3) I really, really hate my job. I had problems with the way shit was run when it was the pork plant, but the wiener factory higher ups are 100x worse. They outsource so much shit to other companies who don't give a fuck about our customers, it's retarded. There is no accountability in these other offices and I get the sense that people are free to just say and do whatever the fuck they want there. It's total bullshit. I feel like the factory that I work in is the only one in the entire nationwide chain that gives a fuck about anything, and that we're the only ones who even try to solve *legitimate problems* that people have with our... processed meat.

Yeah, some people are deadbeats, some people are assholes, but at the end of the day, paying customers should be able to... properly digest our meat... the way it's supposed to work. When someone has a problem, I shouldn't have to "fill out a ticket" and wait 72 god damn hours for someone in fucking Denver to fix it (or more likely *not*). That wasn't part of the problem solving process before, there's no reason for it to be now.

I think the essential problem is that the Pork Plant was a privately held corporation and the Weiner Factory is a publicly traded stock. As long as the Pork Plant was turning a profit, its dozen or so shareholders were making mad bank, so they didn't feel the need to belligerently FUCK everyone. With the Weiner Factory, they have to dick over everyone, employees and customers alike, just to squeeze a few extra pennies onto the value of each of their MILLIONS of stock shares.

Seriously - some of the crap I've dealt with in the past two months has really, seriously, honestly DEPRESSED me. I hate that word. I grew up in the 90's, when it was *oh so trendy* to be depressed. But for the first time in over a year, I *dread* going to work. I used to be able to jump out of bed and get in the shower, no problem. Now - I absolutely cannot move for at least the first 10 minutes while my alarm goes off - I'm paralyzed. Creatively, I feel flaccid. When I get home from work, I just want to forget everything that happened that day.

If there was more work in my area, I would bail. But I'm saving up money and paying off my student loans for the time being, so as much as I want to get the fuck out of Hoosierland, I don't want to move to another place and not be able to find a job for few months and come back here with less money than when I left.

4) Gemma gave me some CDs for my birthday, one of them was Haujobb's Vertical Mixes, the companion remix album to Vertical Theory. One of the remixes is by Seabound, and I was really looking forward to it, but when I listened to track 7, which is labeled as "Platform (Seabound Remix)" on the back cover, I was disappointed. It wasn't horrible, just kind of "meh." But Damn, I really got into track 8, which was labeled "Metric (Hecq Reemiqs)." The more I listened to track 8, the more I noticed little things. There was the dream beat... and then there was an Oscillator Sync sweep... very similar to something from Seabound's No Sleep Demon CD. And the lyrics... "Is it possible for software to live? You Think. You think you are free. You are a PLATFORM, a presence that could be."

Wait a second. Is there a misprint on the back of the CD?

TO THE INTERNETS!!!

Sure enough, track 07 was "Slide (Glis Remix)," which was labelled on the CD as track 12 - not horrible, just kind of generic futurepop. Track 08 was "Platform (Seabound Remix)," and everything up until the final track on the CD was one track off.

It's a good thing Seabound is one of those bands who are just so good that you can pick them out from everyone else, because otherwise I would've attributed Backlash's remix of S.adow to the very different "Shok's Scrambled Egg Mix," or whatever. The Backlash remix is awesome. A lot of the other tracks on here are awesome as well, the best tracks are the new song "Mind Crush," Haujobb's remixes of "Metric" and "Platform," the aforementioned Seabound remix, the Backlash remix, "Renegades of Noize (Asche Remix)," and "The Noise Institute (1994 Mix by Iszoloscope)." That's just over half the CD right there of "best tracks."

The weakest track? "Metric (Hecq Reemiqs)."

Go fucking figure.

♥ Old School Death Rock ♥

2008-04-16T21:06:00.004-05:00

A Picture of Emptiness

2008-04-10T20:13:00.004-05:00

Working at the wiener factory is like sticking my face in a bowl full of dicks, all day, every day

2008-04-05T00:41:00.008-05:00

1) Earlier this week, I decided I was going to hold off on buying a Waldorf Blofeld for something like a year or more. Then the price jumped up 100 bucks from $699 to $799. Is this supply and demand, or is the US dollar doing that crappy vs the Euro?

2) There's a Little Phatty II coming out that includes an arp and a USB MIDI interface. Is it just me or does this post seem to imply they'll be releasing a patch that will bring the arp to Little Phatty I's?

"The arpeggiator is a firmware feature of Little Phatty OS 2.0, which is currently in progress; I am testing it as we develop it. It will start shipping with the new LP Stage edition version II, which should be out next month. Once that's done we will release an update for all LP Stage Editions which will give them the new features; after that we plan to port it to the Tribute Edition as well."

I sure hope my Little Phatty (Stage Edition) gets an arp - that would rule, then I would have no reason at all to be jealous of the LP II. Being able to sync the LFO to MIDI would be fun, but I can live without it - and as for the whole USB MIDI thing; fuck that, every fucking piece of gear I own now has a USB MIDI interface. I don't have a USB port for every piece of gear I own!

3) I've been playing GTA: San Andreas on the PC lately. I bought it for PS2 way back when - couldn't get into it, then I downloaded it off Steam for PC when it was on sale. I've got to say, I can't play games like GTA on anything but the PC. Same thing with the Hitman games. If Manhunt didn't end up being such a shit fest, I'd be tempted to download that to my PC for $10. I have a feeling that in the level where I left off in Manhunt, I could probably waste every enemy in the level if in two minutes if I was using a mouse and keyboard. Not worth it, however.

4) Back in 2002, I bought a 1024 x 768 15" flat screen monitor. When I moved to Hoosierland in 2006, my aunt gave me an old Compaq 19" CRT monitor that did 1280 x whatever. I'd been using the 15" as a second monitor on my Mac for Logic (pic below).

Doing my best to make my music studio look like an S&M dungeon.

Eventually, the old flat screen began to look so blurry that I decided to retire it. Then, last week, my CRT monitor, which had been cranky for the past few months - skewing and contorting the picture, turning itself off - decided to die, so I needed a new monitor for my PC. I had been wanting to pick up a cheap set of speakers w/ a subwoofer for a while, so I decided to GO SHOPPING.

Now I'm cranking up the sub, cappin' asses in GTA and Audiosurfin' at 1440 x 900 on a 19" widescreen LCD monitor.

Awwwwwww yeah, this is why I suck dicks all day at the wiener factory.

PS - When I'm driving around in GTA cappin' asses and smackin' bitches, I listen to the House music radio station and I really like this song. (Ignore the gay little anime video. I haven't watched it, electing instead to look at another tab in my browser while the music plays in the background. So, if you watch that video, beware. I'm not taking responsibility if there's tentacle rape or any of that shit.)

♥ Germans ♥

2008-03-13T23:02:00.001-05:00

Pit Bulls and Pratfalls

2008-03-11T22:25:00.011-05:00

There was a pit bull loose in my neighborhood. I first saw it on Sunday, it was hanging out in a strip of trees on the other side of a chain link fence. It walked away as I approached, so it wasn't immediately threatening, but I was worried because I walk my two dogs along there once a day. I didn't want my dogs being attacked; I already have enough stress in my life, what with the wiener factory having taken over the pork plant where I work.

I called Hoosierville-A Animal Control, only to find out that they were closed on Sundays. Good thing it wasn't Cujo frothing at the mouth, I guess. I left a message informing them there was a male - not neutered - pit bull roaming around the neighborhood right near a public park where people like me walk their dogs, and people not like me bring their kids.

Monday night, I came home from a grueling day of work at the wiener factory planning on taking my dogs out for a walk, only to find the pit bull running brazenly around my neighborhood - chasing people who were riding their bikes and walking their dogs. I called Hoosierville-A Animal Control again. They were closed. Again. This time I fucked around with their phone menu until it gave me an emergency number. The lady who answered sounded like she had a metal plate in her head. I explained the situation. Loose pit bull. Not neutered. Chasing people.

It'd have to wait until morning.

Okay. I called the Hoosierville-A police non-emergency number. They told me to call Hoosierville-A animal control. Round and round in circles. Just like the pit bull outside my house. He wanted to hump my dogs. Both my dogs are boys. Who the fuck doesn't neuter their dogs, let alone their pit bull? An asshole, that's who.

The only way I was going to walk my dogs that night was to neutralize the pit bull - take him out of the game. It was important I walk my dogs - If I didn't, they would eat me in my sleep. Keep in mind, I work in the wienie factory all day now. I'm delicious.

I used food to lure the pit bull into my backyard. He was starving, I could see his rib cage and his spine through his skin. He was never aggressive - like I said, all he wanted out of my dogs was a quick hump. Not that I didn't mind that, but at least he wasn't looking for a fight.

I locked him in my backyard while I walked my dogs. Then I tried the animal control emergency number again. Metal plate lady answered. I explained I had the pit bull trapped in my backyard. She said there was no way anyone could get him - it was after hours. I asked if there was *anywhere* I could take *him*. She said there was not, and advised me to leave a message on the Hoosierville-A answering machine, that way they'd here my message sooner and get to me first. Tax dollars at work. I left a message, there's a stray pit bull, not neutered, locked in my backyard. Please take him away.

So there I was, with an unwanted overnight guest. It was getting cold, he was whining and howling. I felt bad for him. Plus, my dogs couldn't get over the excitement of having a new friend around and wanted to go out back and play with him. No way. Not going to let my boys get humped by a sketchy drifter.

But there was also no way I was going to be able to sleep that night between the evening visitor howling out back and my boys barking in response. I decided I had to put the pit bull in the garage. I got a leash and spent some time coaxing him close enough that I could slip it over his head. I was afraid the entire time that he would go into pit bull tard-rage mode and attack. He didn't. He wasn't exactly cooperative about going to the garage, despite the emaciation, he was still pretty strong. Little, too. My dogs were about 50% larger than him, but he had it where it counts. Mainly his balls. Seriously, this dog had gigantic balls for his size.

Once in the garage, I gave him some food and water. I know you're not supposed to feed starving dogs, it can make them sicker, but I didn't know what else to do. I got an old cushion and some raggy towels and made him a little bed. He seemed a bit more relaxed. Then I took some pictures to go with the story.

Seriously, those are some fucked-up huge balls.

He was quiet the entire night. I sleep right above the garage - like the Fonz. My boys had no idea he was in there, so they were quiet for the rest of the night as well.

The next morning, I woke up a bit early, something I hate doing, to put the pit bull back in my backyard in case Animal Control came to get him. First I had to let my boys out to do their thing. I kept an eye out the front window the entire time, imagining a worst case scenario where Animal Control comes and takes my dogs instead of the one I want them to take.

Once I had the pit bull out back, it was the same ritual as the night before - the guest was whining and howling, wanting to come in, my boys were freaking out over the new kid that I wasn't allowing them to play with.

Finally, around 9am, Animal Control came by. I wasn't entirely 100% sure our friend was a pit bull, as I am not an expert, so I asked the animal control guy. He said, yeah, that's a pit bull. He really wasn't happy about that fact, but he had no trouble getting him.

It sucks that he's going to get his balls chopped off and possibly be put to sleep. No matter his temperament, I doubt city shelters are that interested in adopting out pit bulls. He seemed like a good dog too, but maybe he just came off as more sweet than he normally was because of his weakened state. I don't know. Part of me wishes I could've kept him around and named him "Gir" after the Invader Zim character, but I've got more than enough dog on my plate. Aside from that, my boys like to play a bit rough, and I don't think a pit bull, especially one whose past I know nothing about, would mesh well with their play style. It's far to0 easy to imagine them playing and him freaking out and clamping on to one of their necks and not letting go.

So overall, a sense of sadness. That, and it really fucking sucks to work in the wiener factory.

I rule this school

2008-03-08T23:29:00.003-06:00

21 blocks on a song by my friend's band, Love Like Deloreans. Hooray!

Pain and Misery

2008-03-04T18:47:00.004-06:00

Oh god....Armageddon is upon us...I feel like I'm living in a country song and my dog just died and my husband just left me for my best friend...actually that would have been preferable. What can I say - it's rough here in Packer country.

In my German class my professor and a couple of kids were arguing that sports are the opiate of the people. What can I say - I'm an artist but I enjoy sports. It's not an either or question. Football is something my family and I actually have in common as well as a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. And it's one thing Wisconsin is known for AND can be proud of, other than brewing and Harley Davidson.

Mit Liebe fuer Brett....

Blofeld (infinity^2)

2008-03-02T16:04:00.004-06:00

New post on MatrixSynth has a youtube video that's about 10mins of someone cycling through the Blofeld presets.

Maybe it will actually be available by the end of March?

"I'd rather be up to my elbows in shit all day than talk to people like you..."

2008-02-29T18:55:00.012-06:00

...perhaps I should become a plumber.

1) the world is insane
It's great and all she has a husband and kid and what not, but, ummm... you have to worry about the motives of someone who'd fuck that.

2) I was going to post an "epilogue" of sorts to my GE Washing Machine Rant. I have a voicemail saved that I was going to record and upload and link to and everything, but I'm lazy. It was left at 7:58am the day of the appointment and essentially goes like this:

"*crunch* *crunch* *crunch* Hello, this is GE. The tech is, uhhh, out of the field today, so you'll have to reschedule. The next available day is, uhhhh, Friday the 22nd (exactly one week later), Bye!"

I have a hunch their stupid online thingy just got sent to some contractor who had a better job that day and that was his wife eating potato chips for breakfast or some shit. Really freaking professional. Luckily my mother had already been talking to some of the people she works with about the whole situation and someone recommended a repair man who was able to meet her THAT DAY after 1pm. Everything is fine now, my clothes are clean, but don't buy GE, 'cuz they eat dicks.

3) Meraud asks for absolution for being too nerdy because he read the Silmarillion and loved it.

I am now asking for absolution for not being nerdy enough.

I read The Watchman and didn't like it.

The first half was righteous enough, but the second half went into La-La Land. For some reason the "we can do anything we can draw!" thing that turns people on to comic books and anime just doesn't work for me.

Gemma was in town and made me go into the comic book store near Roots because she wanted to pick up a HorrorClix booster pack.

My ~~girlfriend~~ fiancee is a 12 year old boy

I have this thing about small, independent stores. I don't like going in them and not buying something. It's weird. I assume the guy at the register is the owner. I feel like I owe him at least a little something for existing in his space and time continuum. They didn't have HorrorClix anymore, Gemma wanted to look around and it seemed like we wouldn't be buying anything.

I am neurotic.

Years ago, I read V for Vendetta and didn't like it. (Spoilers the next paragraph, skip it if you plan on reading/watching the movie.)

I thought the point of it was that V was the lesbian Valerie from the concentration camp. Then I saw the movie that came out a few years ago and loved it. Except for the part where V tortures Evey. That just never worked for me.

So anyway, The Watchmen is supposed to be, like, the pinnacle of the whole "graphic novel" genre. And they're coming out with a movie of it in 2009, so I'm somewhat interested because I liked the V for Vendetta move so much. It was there, it was $20, so I bought it. It turns out Gemma bought a smutty comic called "Purgatory," but I had already been carrying around The Watchmen, and I'm neurotic and didn't want to put it down because I didn't want the guy at the register thinking I snuck it under my coat. I need therapy.

The first half is great, the second half is masturbatory. The ending is poo. Meh.

I read about the Watchmen movie on wikipedia. It turns out Terry Gilliam was once attached to direct, but has since left the project saying it's, "un-film-able." I'm inclined to agree. There are five main characters and the entire narrative is so flashback heavy, I just don't see it working as a movie. Now the guy who is directing it is the guy who did, "300." I haven't seen that yet but I am interested in seeing it someday... for free. Maybe the Watchmen movie will be good, but I don't have high hopes for it and don't really care either way.

4) Audiosurf recently released an update, everything is smoother, it bugs out less, and it seems like they updated some of the graphics. Audiosurf is my new religion.

5) Oh hey, a Blofeld review.

Audiosurf

2008-02-16T19:04:00.007-06:00

There's a bit of buzz about a new game called Audiosurf that was just released on Steam. Apparently it's been in beta for a few months, so a lot of people already knew about it, but I first heard about it today. Basically, Audiosurf reads an mp3 file and then generates a "level" from the song - similar to visualization plug-ins for Windows Media Player and Winamp and shit, only instead of generating it "on the fly," it takes a few seconds to pre-render it before you play it, so it comes off as a bit less random. Once the level is rendered, you then control a little spaceship and try to maximize your points by collecting colored blocks. It probably fits into the same genre as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in terms of being a "rhythm game" where you try to hit things in time with the music.

It essentially has three "modes," of play; Mono, "not-mono" and co-op. Mono is where there are colored blocks and gray blocks, and you want to collect the colored blocks and avoid the gray blocks. The colored blocks are always the same color, so the player doesn't need to worry about color matching. "Not-mono" is simply my term for what seems to be the "regular" style of play, where the blocks are different colors and you have to match them, kind of like Bejeweled or some shit. There are a handful of different "not-mono" spaceships to choose from, each with its own special ability, such as the ability to shuffle the colored blocks you've collected or the ability to pick up a colored block and put it down later, when it will have a better impact on your score. Finally, co-op is what it sounds like; you need a partner and one person has the left two lanes, the other person the right two lanes.

Here are some YouTubes:

Mono - NIN "The Wretched" (remix)
Mono - Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up"
Mono - A-ha "Take On Me"
Colors - Daft Punk "Around the World"
Colors - Dethklok "Murder Train"

It's loads of fun, and only $10 on Steam. I've found that Haujobb songs make the best race tracks. In fact, "Faith in Chaos" from Vertical Theory was so cool, I wanted to make my own video capture and put it on YouTube, but it appears that recording my own video with sound without spending any money is just not going to happen. (I did try a freeware program called CamStudio and it says my soundcard lacks the ability to capture the sound playing out of my speakers. *shrug*)

So if you have $10, thinks this looks fun, and want an excuse to sit in front of the computer listening to music all day, check out Audiosurf.

Politics and Machinery

2008-02-14T19:20:00.005-06:00

Politics:

My post from Jan. 30th was apparently right on the money. I predicted that if Hillary Clinton had less elected delegates than Barack Obama, but still by a close margin, she'd try to get the Michigan and Florida delegates to count - y'know, the Michigan and Florida delegates that she and every other Democratic nominee agreed to screw over in or to pander to Iowa and New Hampshire primary voters. Aces!

What I did not know back then was how the whole Super Delegate thing worked. Apparently the Democratic party decided being totally retarded was totally awesome back in 1968 and set up a primary system wherein elected Democratic politicians and non-elected party activists and insiders get a vote roughly equal to x-thousand primary voters to decide, in their own "judgment," who the Democratic nominee for president would be. Not very democratic, is it?

So Hillary's people are going on TV saying that it would be totally cool and absolutely how the system is supposed to work if she were to, say, end up with less elected delegates than Obama, but convince enough Super Delegates to vote for her anyway that she "won" the nomination. This morning I woke up and turned on MSNBC and was met with Terry McAuliffe telling me that was exactly how "the system" was "supposed to work." At which point I screamed at the TV,

"NOBODY FUCKING WANTS YOU."

Terry McAuliffe is a former Bill Clinton fundraiser who ended up heading the Democratic National Committee from 2000 through 2004 - y'know, the years when Democrats did nothing but lose. So here we are, four years later, after riding what seemed like a never-ending wave of victories since 2006, definitely in part to the Republicans being themselves, but also in part thanks to the leadership of the Democratic National Committee's new chairman, 2004's insurgent presidential nomination candidate, Howard Dean. Dean implemented a 50 state strategy for the Democratic Party which allowed the Democratic Party to make big gains in Congress in the 2006 elections by competing in states and districts that the previous Democratic party establishment would have simply surrendered to the Republicans. Hence, when the Republicans screwed the pooch and voters weren't happy with them, the Democratic Party already had candidates and organizations and shit in place. Had McAuliffe been in charge, a lot of the Democratic challengers would not have had the infrastructure and support to actually compete; even when it turned out that the Republicans were harboring a pederast.

So after just two years of relative AWESOME, the old Clinton folks who failed in 2000 and 2004 are back to get on the gravy train. Here's the problem with that: They're fucked.

Hillary Clinton hasn't lost this race yet, and she may still yet win - legitimately. However, the genie is out of the bottle. She can't take back what she and her lackeys have been saying all week. Die hard Republican voters already think she's an authoritarian, now they're accusations have some merit.

What her campaign has been saying this week is this:

Even if the *voters* choose Barack Obama over me, it is still perfectly legitimate for that to be overridden by my friends and colleagues in the establishment.

That's pretty fucking authoritarian.

So-called moderates and independents will see it that way. And I suspect that young voters and minority voters will see it that way too. The former don't see John McCain as being "that bad," the latter will likely choose to not vote at all or vote for some third party candidate (Nader's already got an exploratory committee going).

Hell, even I recognize just how bad John McCain *really* is, compared to his media hype, but right now even if Hillary wins via the most elected delegates, I sure as fuck don't want to vote for her.

I would think that, especially after the 2000 Presidential election, there's a point where a rational person would say, "Well, maybe I should just hold off here a second. Essentially staging a coup of my own political party might not just be bad for me and my reputation, it might actually be bad for a political party that is the only real opposition in this country to the Republican party." But apparently Hillary and her people are not rational, and apparently they lack ethics, decency and principles. Or they're just Republicans incognito. I've suspected that at points in the past eight years, too.

My prediction - if Hillary is the nominee, whether legit or not, we will lose to John McCain. And that. Fucking. Sucks.

Machinery:

I have a GE washing machine, it's only 4 years old. Last Sunday, it broke. The "basket," where the clothes go in, is apparently no longer held into place by some doo-dad, so when it comes to spin cycle time, it's pretty much just getting thrown around inside the chasis and tossing water everywhere. I'm good with the inside of computers, I'm good with the inside of pig carcasses, but when it comes to the inside of machinery, including cars, I fucking suck and apparently that means I'm a fan of the butt sex - with men.

Instead of a phone number, it gives a website for if you need service. I have my mother go to the website, 'cuz I'm a busy man with all my pig guts and blood and shit, and she schedules an appointment. Apparently they're supposed to call and confirm the appointment. That's good, because the online appointment is for 8am to 5pm. I go to the pork plant at 10am but my mother can be here after 1pm.

Tonight I get the call. It's a fucking recording. "Press 1 to confirm the appointment, press 2 to cancel." Well, fuck, I don't want to cancel, so I press 1. "If you have pets, such as dogs and cats, please put them away (wtf?) for the service call, as they may interfere with or delay the service call." Now I'm pushing zero because I'd like to speak to someone live to narrow down the time frame to something like after 1pm. It continues about the pets, "If this is a problem please call 1-800-blah-blah-blah to cancel. Good bye. *click*"

I'm sitting there with a pen trying to jot down the number it just spit at me. No luck, I had the last four digits in my head, but not the middle three. Fuck. Caller ID gives me nothing, and I'm too stupid to think of *69.

So now I'm thinking, if he pops in at quarter to 10 tomorrow, I'm going to tell him, "Either come back after 1pm, give me a number so I can call and talk to *someone* to get an appointment in a narrower time frame, or go fuck yourself, because I'm just going to have to eat it and buy a new a washing machine and SEE TO IT THAT I NEVER BUY ANYTHING GE EVER AGAIN!!!"

The problem is this: they're making appliances shoddier nowadays to get you to buy more often. And they're making service calls harder schedule in order to get you to buy a new one instead of repair the one you have. What they don't seem to have figured out at this point is that I'M NOT GOING TO BUY A NEW APPLIANCE FROM THEM IF THIS IS HOW THEY TREAT ME.

Fuck off and die, GE. Just fuck off.

Waldorf Blofeld (part infinity)

2008-02-09T10:46:00.002-06:00

Well, it appears that if you type "Waldorf Blofeld" into Google, one of my previous posts shows up on the first page of results. That's kind of bad - I'm just a pork plant worker in the middle of Indiana who has nothing to do with the Blofeld, but me blogging my anticipation for one is apparently one of the easier-to-find articles out there. I'm surprised there still aren't any user reviews at either Sonic State or Harmony Central, however I've found that some people have apparently gotten theirs and they're all posting to the Waldorf User Forum, which is an old-school style mailing list. You can read the posts in their archive without subscribing to the list, that at least proves it exists out there somewhere and that people seem to be relatively happy with it.

Some of my older Blofeld posts also got some comments:

RikMaxSpeed said...

I recently ordered a Waldorf Blofeld via www.Thomann.de - they expected delivery on Jan 31st, and they have now been told to wait till March 31st. So unfortunately it looks like this little beast is rapidly becoming obsolete :o(

That sucks, but I don't think "obsolete" is the word you're looking for... It definitely did feel like it was never going to come out, but apparently they're out there. I'm sure you'll be getting yours shortly after March 31st, it's obvious at this point that Waldorf had to resort to a production strategy where there was a small initial run (almost a beta test from what some of the bugs sound like), and the orders from that first run are paying for the manufacture of the second run. The money made from selling Blofelds is probably going to be used to finance the manufacture of the Stromberg. Like I said before in this post, I'm not an insider or anything, just a guy who disembowels slaughtered animals for a living, so everything I say is speculation, but it seems pretty plausible at this point, no?

panda said...

hey! i think the snow is going to beat the blofeld out of the gate, but.. its rocking a street tag of about twice the price.. (blofeld 700, snow 1300!)
that almost ends the game if you ask me. if waldorf can actually ship the unit. it will end up on more desk/table tops.

At the Unofficial Virus TI Forum, Access employee Ben Crosland (he demos all the new Virus hardware (TI, Virus Control V.2, Snow) in the NAMM videos you find at Sonic State (except the upcoming Atomizer effect, which was demo'd by Richard Devine)) pretty much stated that Access doesn't see the Snow and the Blofeld as competitive products, essentially because the TI is a hybrid soft synth/hardware synth with audio interface capabilities and the Blofeld is a hardware synth only.

Poster: "So can we expect it to be competitively priced with the Blofeld at $699 USD?"

Ben Crosland: "Why should it be?

Just because they are both small, doesn't mean they should compete directly with each other in price - the Snow has double the polyphony, Total Integration, audio ins, full FX per Part, MIDI out, soundcard functionality etc.

Really, the Snow is an alternative option for those who want a Virus TI, and hence needs to be priced relative to the other models in the range, not to a completely different synth by another manufacturer." - Source.

The way I see it, Waldorf as a company depends on selling X-many Blofelds. When they initially announced the Blofeld at Winter NAMM 2007, they announced twice the polyphony, the ability to edit it via your computer, and a price tag of $500 (see this video). Keep in mind, Waldorf was recently bankrupt and is now technically another company that bought the old one and is trying to restart it. Here it is a year later, they've had to cut some of the features of the Blofeld (no computer editing) and increase the price (although the price increase from $500 to $699 may have something to do with the U.S. dollar sucking butt).

Access is doing fine as a company and has been since 1997. It is simply introducing a low frills version of its current generation synthesizer to gain market penetration at a price point they haven't had since the Access Virus Classic. I don't think Access cares if more Blofelds end up on desktops than Snows because there are already more TI Desktops, Polars and Keyboards in studios than Blofelds and that's unlikely to change. The theory behind the Snow is to offer a $1350 (MSRP, $1250 in actuality) Virus TI for amateurs/hobbyists who can't afford the $2000 Desktop version. (The wrench into this of course is the fact that you can get a Reboxed Desktop for ~$1600 from NovaMusik, but I guess that is neither here nor there to the people involved.)

As for me, personally, I bought a Reboxed TI Polar from NovaMusik right before Virus Control 2.0 increased the price of the TI line, so I'm quite simply not interested in the TI Snow. I am interested in the Waldorf Blofeld because I don't have a Waldorf Q or Microwave, and while I like the sound of both, I never was really interested in paying $500 to $900 for one or the other, but I am willing to pay $700 for a Blofeld which is essentially both with a few more features added on (drive curves *drool*).

However, I am not interested in paying $700 now and not knowing when I will actually have one in my hands, so rather than pre-order one, I'm content to wait until they are readily available here in the States, which may be a long, long time.

Gossipy prediction: The Access TI Snow will be easier to get in the U.S., sooner than the Waldorf Blofeld.

My qualification for making such a prediction: ZERO.

Super Bowel

2008-02-03T21:14:00.001-06:00

To the New York Football Giants - For beating the Packers in the NFC Championship game: I FORGIVE YOU!!!

To the Green Bay Packers - For losing to the Giants in the NFC Championship game: YOU ARE ABSOLVED!!!

I honestly thought the Giants were a shitty football team this season. I honestly thought Eli Manning was only a starting quarterback because of his last name. I am proven wrong and glad for it.

Fuck. The. Patriots.

Appendix

2008-01-30T22:13:00.001-06:00

1) LBJ killed JFK

2) L *B J,* BJ being slang for "blow job."

3) Bill Clinton got a blow job in the oval office.

4) ...

5) Hillary Clinton killed JFK

Thanks to Gemma for inspiring me to blog this.

Addendum

2008-01-30T20:21:00.001-06:00

1) Apparently the Blofeld exists, somewhere, because Waldorf has already released a patch for it. Supposedly it was also at NAMM but strangely enough no one bothered writing about it, but that may be because it's big unveil was at last year's NAMM, not sure if that was the Summer NAMM or the Winter NAMM* I read a rumor somewhere that one prominent U.S. retailer was shipped a whopping four Blofelds - this may not be true at all, however. INTERNETS.

*It was last years Winter NAMM one year ago.

2) This is the scenario by which the Democratic Party will manage to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" in the next presidential election:

A) The following scenario only applies if John McCain is the Republican nominee. He has this undeserved "independent" status in the public consciousness that will make him an appealing alternative to the "independent" and undecided voters that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee lack. If the nominee is Romney, he's toast even if every other Dem candidate dies in a plane crash leaving only Kucinich to run in the general.

B) IF Barack Obama wins the nomination by less delegates than what Hillary Clinton would have won in Michigan and Florida, Hillary Clinton will likely then contest the nomination.

b1) IF - Hillary Clinton gets her Michigan and Florida delegates to count and takes the nomination, a significant number of democratic voters will not vote for her and will say she "stole" the nomination. She will be compared to George W. Bush in the 2000 election and McCain will not inspire the same amount of "hey, we gotta make sure *he* isn't going to be President" as the other possible Repub candidates would. The media will echo this sentiment, and many so-called "independent" voters, as well as the mouth-breather "undecided" voters will go for McCain.

b2) IF - Hillary Clinton *does not* get her delegates to count, the right wing media will claim that Obama is an illegitimate candidate who only won on a technicality. This sentiment will be amplified in the mainstream media in the form of "Rush Limbaugh said..." or "Fox News reports..." Once again, independents and mouth-breathers break for McCain, but Obama loses this more narrowly than scenario b1.

You heard it here first.

However, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination even without the Michigan and Florida delegates counting, she will beat McCain in the general. Same goes for Obama if he beats Hillary by more delegates than what Michigan and Florida would have given her.

Personally, I think scenario b2 is most likely at this point. I have a feeling it is going to be close between Clinton and Obama, and the best chance for a Democratic President in 2008 depends on Hillary not fucking it up for the rest of us. FAT CHANCE!

Post Script: As stupid as it is that the Michigan and Florida delegates did not count in the Democratic primaries, all the presidential candidates agreed to it so as not to piss off Iowa and New Hampshire voters. You can't pander to Iowa and New Hampshire and then turn around and pander to Michigan and Florida... or fuck, maybe you can. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!!!

Personally, I wish the entire Democratic party gave a big FUCK YOU to Iowa and New Hampshire in favor of Michigan and Florida, but I'm a dick like that.

Misc.

2008-01-22T19:22:00.002-06:00

1) Packers lost horribly to the Giants. That's unbelievably disappointing, I didn't consider the Giants a "good" football team this entire season, and I wasn't the only one, but you can't deny it when they beat both the Cowboys and the Packers in their home stadiums. Since the Giants are on a streak of upsets, maybe they could be so kind as to upset the Patriots. I have nothing but respect for the Patriots players, but what kind of retard organization names Bill Belichick "coach of the year," the same year he got a record half a million dollar fine for cheating? It's hard to be impressed by a team going undefeated when we already know that the coaching staff is perfectly willing to break the established rules, and if those videos of opposing teams' hand signals didn't provide an unfair advantage, it wouldn't be against the rules. Fuck you, NFL.

2) Looks to me like the Waldorf Blofeld is toeing the vaporware line. Supposedly they started shipping a month ago, but there are, like, no user reviews *anywhere* of the damn thing. No Waldorf news came out of NAMM last week, so it's hard to know what's going on there. I joked in a Matrixsynth comment that the Access TI Snow would ship before the Blofeld, someone chided me that the Blofeld has already shipped, but I can only say, "has it really?" at this point. Yeah, some people out there seem to have them, but they all seem to be "prototypes" and bound by NDA's or else someone would have fucking posted at least a "first glance" type of review somewhere by now.

3) Haujobb is fucking awesome. Last August I splurged on a car stereo that could play MP3s burnt to a CDR. It was well worth it, because I can burn over six hours of music to a CDR and listen to it on the six hour car ride to Wisconsin. I put together a CD of Haujobb's Vertical Theory, RMX Matrix, Polarity, Solutions for a Small Planet and Homes and Gardens and it just hit the fucking spot. Every one of those albums feels like the best fucking album ever while it is playing. And Meraud sucks balls for thinking Vertical Theory sucks balls.

4) Rotwang lent me The Call of Cthulu, a movie from 2005 made in the style of old silent movies from the 20's and 30's. It was okay, but the picture quality is too crisp and digital, even though its black & white and has fake scratches and what not. I just wish if they were going for the old look, they went all the way instead of just half way - blur up the picture a little, stuff like that. It looks like it was filmed with an HD camera or something. It's pretty much impossible to adapt Lovecraft to a visual medium successfully, the only exception being Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, and I have no idea how many liberties were taken there... The Call of Cthulu is short enough at 47 minutes that you can't really go wrong with it. And I have no idea why imdb decided to feature a 1 star review of a movie that averages 7 stars from the user ratings. It's not the greatest, but it really isn't that bad.

5) This is me whenever Virus Control 2.7 comes out in the Spring.

Oh snap! Midget Synth Fight!!!

2008-01-13T00:44:00.003-06:00

Access Virus TI Snow

Vs.

Waldorf Blofeld

Access Virus TI Snow just showed up on MatrixSynth today. Snow is just like the other Virus TI's, just a new and reduced enclosure/interface. I'm glad I have the Polar - the way I see it, Access already gave the Virus too few knobs... their whole "shift" thing just isn't good. You have to hold down the "shift" button while you edit certain parameters. At the very least, the "shift" should have been a toggle on/off instead of a press and hold button. On the other hand, it's kind of offset by the 3 assignable soft knobs, so... whatever.

It's an interesting trend in hardware synths... Take pre-existing "guts" and put them into a smaller package. The Virus TI line already had the desktop version, so this is like a reduced desktop. The Waldorf Blofeld, on the other hand, is a combination of the Waldorf Q and Microwave synths, so it's not literally the same guts like the Snow is.

Nothing against Waldorf, but I think it would be hi-fucking-larious if the Snow shipped before the Blofeld did. I am curious to see what the price point of the Snow is, just out of morbid curiosity.

New topic: Today's NFC Division Game, Seattle Seahawks vs Green Bay Packers, was the best fucking NFL game I've ever seen.

New Movies - I Am Legend & Sweeny Todd

2008-01-12T10:44:00.001-06:00

Holy crap! I actually left the house and saw a couple of new movies in theaters!

***I Am Legend***

Last Christmas, Gemma gave me The Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, which is a mostly chronological survey of the most important zombie movies in the history of cinema. It's a decent book, except going through the history of zombie movies in a strictly chronological order makes for a couple of rather dull chapters between the White Zombie / I Walked With a Zombie era and the Night of the Living Dead-to-present-day era of zombie movies. It's also annoying in that it summarizes a lot of movies scene-by-scene, up to and including the ending - so the result is that if you've seen the movie, you're already familiar with it and skip a few paragraphs, or if you haven't, you skip a few paragraphs because you don't want the ending spoiled. However, the book has an excellent critical analysis of three of Lucio Fulci's "zombie trilogy" movies; Zombie, The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. If you've already seen those movies, that chapter alone makes it worth the paper its printed on.

The reason I bring it up is because it discussed an earlier movie adaptation of Rich Matheson's I Am Legend called The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. The way the Book of the Dead described it, The Last Man on Earth sounded like a very interesting movie, with Vincent Price as a scientist alone in a city surrounded by slow moving, zombie-esque vampires who were warded off by the traditional vampire banes like mirrors and garlic. The first half of this movie was great and basically showed Price's day-to-day routine as a hunter who goes out during the day to methodically search the town for sleeping vampires, kill them while they are weak and defenseless, and throw their bodies in a giant fire at a leftover town dump site. The second half of The Last Man on Earth got kind of wonky, and the ending was outright retarded and in many ways contradicted everything that was presented about the vampires in the first half. Overall I did not like this movie, but was curious as to whether or not the bad ending (in my opinion anyways) was straight from the book or not; so I put I Am Legend (the book) on my Christmas list and have it sitting next to my bed waiting to be opened. (I'm so glad I have the previous book cover and not the new one with Will Smith on it - not that I particularly dislike Will Smith, but I think that kind of shit just makes a book look like a cheap tie-in, like a Burger King toy or some shit.)

Anways - I Am Legend, the new movie starring Will Smith. First off, I like this one overall better than The Last Man on Earth. (There's also another movie based off the same novel, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, I haven't seen that one yet.) Will Smith's protagonist is a military scientist, so he's a lot more physically fit and a bit more handy with a gun. In this movie, Smith doesn't seem to hunt the "vampires" necessarily, but rather bumps into them from time to time while foraging for non-perishable food or trying to hunt deer in the streets of Manhattan. The vampires this time around are more akin to the zombies of 28 Days Later and the craptastic Dawn of the Dead remake. They're super fast, super strong, super jumpy, but can be taken down with a bullet or strangled to death. The only thing really "vampire" about them is that sunlight kills them.

Whereas the vampires in The Last Man on Earth could talk, and would often come around to the protagonists home at night to taunt him verbally, the vampires in I Am Legend do not speak and appear to have only an animal level of intelligence. The story arc of I Am Legend revolves around one of these vampires apparently having a spark of intelligence and beginning to "get back at" Will Smith for stealing a vampire from his pack for medical experiments. There is some controversy about the look of the vampires in I Am Legend, a lot of people think the vampires look "too CGI," but I really wasn't bothered by their appearance. Perhaps those of us who sat through that CGI-shitfest known as the Star Wars Prequels have had our sense of taste in such matters deadened a bit - I don't know.

Overall I Am Legend is a solid movie, and even though it is easy to draw comparisons between it and movies like 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead, it stands well on its own. The only thing I really hated about this movie is that at the end they introduce this "God has a plan for everything," bullshit out of nowhere. I've lived through almost 8 years of the "God has a plan for everything" presidency, I don't need that kind of bullshit seeping into my horror movies. C'mon Hollywood, I know you love your hookers and blow - Midwesterners would have seen this movie anyway without you pandering to their religious fantasies!

***Sweeny Todd***

Tim Burton can either be brilliant (Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands) or downright retarded (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Rotwang wrote on his blog that he got so annoyed at this movie that he walked out after twenty minutes, but it seems he did not like Edward Scissorhands and therefore suffers from erectile dysfunction.

This movie, visually, is beautiful (Rotwang hates Burton's dreary goth set designs and cinematography, but he wears pink ties, so there's always the chance that his brain interprets color differently than the rest of us), the plot is awesome, the acting is great - but there's a big fat elephant sitting in the room here - it's a fucking musical. And not even a fun Danny Elfman Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride musical, not the kind of musical where the characters mostly talk, then burst into song every once in a while. This is a full on adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim "serious musical theatre" version of Sweeny Todd.

Sondheim is in the tradition of Guilbert and Sullivan and Rodgers and Hammerstein-type musical theatre, the kind that sees itself as the heir to opera. I went to school for music for six years, and got exposed to this kind of stuff, including Sondheim songs and I got to say...

It's

All

So

Gay!

Sorry to use "gay" as a negative descriptor, but, seriously, the only people who like this shit are gay men who love musical theatre and the overweight, mustached hags that love gay men. The music is blander than oatmeal, the lyrics are cliche and the vocal lines are jagged with wide leaps in this perverse attempt to be "new," but they just annoy most normal people. And I like atonalism, but you just can't put atonal song melodies, usually butchered even by the best singers, on top of stock, cliche orchestral arrangements and call it "jazz-influenced."

Musical theatre overall also has this tendency to be too long for no fucking reason. Oh wait, there is a reason, and that's because operas were written to be long, and musical theatre is the runty nephew of opera that's constantly coming by and saying, "Me too! Me too!" In the heyday of opera, people who went to operas wanted to be there all night long to hoot and holler and drink and gamble and solicit prostitutes, etc. etc. etc... they had nothing better to do at home, so they wanted to make a night of it. Their audiences wanted long, drawn out musical numbers that went nowhere and had little if anything to do with the plot. Now we have busy lives and while we all love a good diversion, we don't like it when things drag. Just because something is long doesn't mean it has to drag, and just because something drags doesn't necessarily mean it's long. This is not some horrible crippling of our attention spans due to T.V. or anything, it's Just. Modern. Life. It's different now than it was in the 18th century, and I wouldn't give up any of it because I like wiping my ass and showering and cleanliness overall, thank you very much.

There are operas that have survived hundreds of years and will survive hundreds more. The essential problem of really all contemporary "art music," but especially of musical theatre, is that it is so sure of its place in history - but it will be forgotten in a generation or two. No one likes this shit - and it's not for any lack of intelligence or taste on anyone's part - it's Just. Plain. Bad. - from conception to execution. Only *certain* people, with *certain* predilections for what *should be* "good art" buy into this kind of crap. And they're all either stupid, or just being ironic.

Anyways, Sweeny Todd, if you can ignore the music, is actually a great film, with great atmosphere, great acting and wonderful, wonderful violence. Alan Rickman is brilliant as the villain, Johnny Depp manges to be a few notches above brilliant as the murderous protagonist and I actually like Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, and I only mention that because it seems people think she's the new Lisa Marie, Burton's former girlfriend who really did come off as a talentless hanger on - but I liked HBC is this and I liked her Fight Club, so I have no idea where all the hate is coming from, but I didn't bother sitting through Planet of the Apes.

As I mentioned in my rant above musical theatre likes to drag on, and according to the reviewer at Fangoria, this movie version actually cut out a fair amount of the original version's song numbers and shit, and it's still over two hours long! But really, most of the pacing is pretty decent, except for one extraneous scene where Mrs. Lovett sings about and imagines living in a house by the sea with Sweeny Todd - yeah I understand they're probably trying to portray her motivation for hanging around the guy, but it's just so drawn out and out of place and unnecessary. I can only imagine that the full musical theatre version of it is full of that kind of shit for hours and hours on end.

Overall, if I were crass enough to give movies letter grades, I'd have to do something like this:

Sweeny Todd Music: F
Sweeny Todd everything else: A

which would mathematically work out to a C, but I would give this movie a solid B if I had no other choice, but since I do I would say, see it if you can ignore shitty music sung well for over two hours, but if that kind of thing is deal breaker for you, then don't.

Oh and Rotwang mentioned that he thought HBC couldn't sing, but really, all of Sondheim's vocal lines for women sound like that in my experience, so whatever.

Vengeance Is Mine Now...

2007-12-30T18:54:00.001-06:00

Vengeance part the first:

More coming, when it comes.

Rotwang is obsessed with my gay sex life

2007-12-30T14:02:00.002-06:00

He keeps drawing these comics about Batman and me. Oh, and there's this one about a gay man in love with Dan Marino.

On a completely unrelated topic; Half Life 2: Episode 2 is awesome and definitely worth playing through. I still think Episode 1 was weak, but Episode 2 is solid and has one of the greatest final battles ever. Seriously, if you don't have the Orange Box yet, download Steam and buy it now while it's on sale through the end of the year.

Waldorf Blofeld Synthesizer

2007-12-27T20:18:00.001-06:00

"You only ever post about things you hate." - Gemma

All right, then, here's something I like.

After I bought my Moog Little Phatty, I promised myself, and my girlfriend, that I didn't want/need anymore synthesizers. But at that point, back in August, I hadn't heard of the soon-to-be-released Waldorf Blofeld.

It's tiny, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's loaded with all kinds of fun stuff. All the Waldorf Q waveforms, all the Microwave wavetables, all kinds of routing and modulating possibilities including a step sequencer and an appregiator that is capable of having glide on or off depending on what step it is on... I FUCKIN' NEED THAT!!!

Plus, it sounds like this and this. Extreme Drive Curves!!! I NEED that!!!

Of course, all may not be what it is cracked up to be.

Here's a post from "Totty" at the Virus TI Forum:

"First off I haven't had much time to work with it, but yes it does sound good -
The oscs are sharper than the TI but I need to have a closer go on the wavetables. Obviously it may sound very much like a Micro Q, but having never used one I can't say. Very snappy envs, probably more than the TI and the LFOs do go into orbit! Very nice.

I know it's a cliche, but it is built like a tank! Very solid and sits very well next to my Polar.

It seems a little buggy to me as parameters were self editing!!

However the CD with the manual on it won't load on my mac or pc (scratched disc straight out of the box) and the quick start manual is good tinder for the fire this time of year.

Also there is a load of crap behind the screen (dust / dirt) which I am not happy with so I am gonna send it back. Beware if getting in the UK, you get a 2 prong plug and no adaptor. Luckily my left over adaptor from my Virus C came in handy!"

Yuck! Then a few days later, there was this post at Matrixsynth, accompanied by this YouTube video showing off some buggy behavior by the Blofeld:

Oh noes!!!

So the Waldorf Blofeld might be a buggy piece of shit. I already survived through an Ensoniq Fizmo, so I'm not really inclined to rush out and place an order for this thing until either:

a) Once enough people have them, it turns out only the first few shipped were flawed and everything is fine. (unlikely)

or

b) Waldorf releases an update that fixes these bugs and the early adopters say that all the bugs they encountered before the patch are fixed after the patch. (This process could take a few years.)

As far as I know, the Blofelds aren't shipping in the U.S. yet, so hopefully some Europeans are just getting screwed with a bad first run, but I'm going to have to wait this one out before I even think about picking one up.

Update: Breaking News!!!!

It appears the YouTube video linked above demonstrating some of the Blofeld's bugs has been removed, and the YouTube user's account has been "closed." WTF is going on there?!

I should point out that the YouTube user, Porcu68, had actually posted a handful of YouTube vids demonstrating the Blofeld, and all but the "Bugs" one were actually quite complimentary. Wonder if it's someone who got a hold of a pre-release Blofeld and signed an NDA or what...

Portal

2007-12-24T22:53:00.001-06:00

There's a holiday sale on almost all the games on Steam going until Jan. 1st. 10% to 50% off. I seem to own all the 50% off games already (Vampire: Bloodlines, Stubbs the Zombie, Hitman: Blood Money, I think), but they had 25% off the Orange Box.

To be honest, I kind of resent the Orange Box. I bought Half-Life 2 in March and Episode One in April. The Orange Box came out in October and has those two games plus Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, Portal and Peggle. It's my understanding there was going to be a Black Box that didn't include HL2 and Episode One for a little less, but Valve didn't do that. Now I have an extra license for those two games that I can give as gifts. Oh boy.

Really, I don't care about Episode Two, either. HL2 was great, but I didn't really get into Episode One. I actually played it to the last big fight, not realizing I was at the last big fight, and then quit playing it for a couple months. Then I kind of said to myself, "Well, might as well finish it," and then *BAM* - done in fifteen minutes. Not so much into Team Fortress 2 either. I've said it before; I hate playing multiplayer online games these days.

So why did I buy the Orange Box? Motherfuckin' Portal. I could buy just Portal for $19.95, or I can get the whole damn thing for $37.45. Since Episode Two is $29.95 and I'll still probably play that through someday, it was worth it. I might play TF2 for about 20minutes before I get sick of all the 13 year olds and neckbeards and 13 year olds with neckbeards. Plus I got Peggle, which I had no idea what it was, but it turns out it is stupid fun that I'll probably get an hour or two of enjoyment out of.

But Portal - damn. If it was full length (10+ hours), it'd probably be the game of the year. It's probably one of the most humorous, entertaining, challenging, well-designed games I have ever played, and I am absolutely in love with it right now. I got sent home from the pork plant early today (Christmas Eve), downloaded it, and played it on and off all night and beat it. I think it took me about four hours in all, and while most gamers would complain about the short length, I fucking love it. I had some spare time, I played the game, now I'm done with it and I didn't get stuck or have to go to gamefaqs or any of that shit. I haven't been happier with a video game purchase in a long time.

I enjoy video games as a side hobby - waaay to the side. I work 40 hours a week, I fuck around with music stuff (even though my production this year has been nil, that's a whole 'nother post) and then I have horror movies and video games. I don't *want* these sprawling, 40 hour video games anymore (Knights of the Old Republic will always hold a special place in my heart, but KOTOR2 I really, really should have never played). But I'm not entirely ready to resign myself to PopCap games only.

All I know is, if Manhunt was only four hours long, it would have been one of the best games ever.

Edit: The Onion's A.V. Club lists Portal as the first of their "Best Games of 2007."

Edit2: An amusing video review of the Orange Box.

Ken Russell's "Lair of the White Worm"

2007-12-22T21:27:00.002-06:00

A couple of years ago, Gemma bought me this book:

In case you can't read the title, it's "101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen." There are a lot of good, not-quite-famous movies that I was already familiar with in this book and a fair amount of movies that I had never heard of that I got steered towards thanks to it.

The blue snake-lady is from Ken Russell's "Lair of the White Worm," a movie I've been looking at in video rental stores since I was at least 9 years old. For some reason it is a movie that I would always pick up, look at the back of the box, and put back on the shelf. It's like I have a sixth sense for irredeemable, shit movies.

Ken Russell's best known film is probably the adaptation of The Who's "Tommy." I'm also familiar with his movies "Mahler" and "Altered States," and I also saw "Gothic" once about a million years ago, but I barely remember it. "Mahler" is kind of a sugarcoated biopic of composer Gustav Mahler that I had to sit through in music school (despite it having 0% educational value), and "Altered States," is a weird ass semi-sci-fi flick about a scientist who uses an isolation chamber and some, um, science-y type stuff to regress to a primitive state through reverse evolution. (The climatic scene of "Altered States" actually inspired part of A-Ha's "Take On Me" music video, specifically the part where the cartoon guy slams himself repeatedly against the walls to snap himself into the real world. That's just a stupid little nugget I threw in there in case Rotwang is reading.)

Interestingly enough, I also sat through "Altered States" as part of my musical education, because the film's composer, John Corigliano, at one point gave lessons to my teacher, Ronald Foster. Corigliano wasn't really a "film composer" per se, he only did 3 film scores (the 4th on IMDB is just a film adaptation of an opera he wrote), although the third film score was for "The Red Violin," which is actually a really, good movie that you should definitely see if you haven't yet. And while I'm name dropping, I might as well mention that I did have a half hour "masterclass" style lesson with Corigliano, he is one of the nicest men I've ever met in my life, and now I work in a pork plant... Keep that in mind before you let your children go to music school.

Back on topic: Ken Russell. He has this, "I-wish-I-was-art-house" style about his movies, and this is coming from a guy who loves the concept of art house horror, and sees it in the work of directors like Argento and Fulci. (An art house horror flick to check out if you haven't already: "Eyes Without a Face." Absolutely fucking beautiful.)

Russell's films all have these bad, cheesy dream sequences, with obligatory garish and tacky color schemes. For example, in "Mahler," the title character has a dream where a Wagnerian opera lady, complete with a horned helmet, sings a song to the tune of Wagner's famous "Ride of the Valkyries" that chides Mahler for being Jewish, which instantly inspires him to convert to Catholicism faster than you can say, "Eureeka!" (Oh, and I think during the entire dream, Mahler was trying to have sex with the Wagner-lady.)

Another thing I've noticed about Russell's style is that he sets up these nice, wide shots - then ruins them by doing these shaky, fast zooms. It's an effect not completely unlike some dad doing a quick, shaky zoom-in on his son at a little league game with a camcorder. It never looks good, yet he does it, over and over again. Finally, for some reason, with "Mahler," "Altered States," and "Lair of the White Worm," the cinematography has a definite 1970's PBS look to it, kind of like an episode of "Mystery!" or "All Creatures Great and Small." You can argue that Ken Russell may have been working with small budgets for these films, but I don't think that argument holds water when compared to the cinematography of Argento and Fulci in their late 70s/early 80s heyday, which likely involved even smaller budgets.

So - obviously I'm predisposed to not like a film by Ken Russell for various reasons, why did I watch Lair of the White Worm? Well, for one, the Fangoria book steered me towards some really great movies, like del Toro's "The Devil's Backbone," and recommended so many films that I already loved, like Fulci's "The Beyond," and Brad Anderson's "Session 9," that I figured, shit, if they not only recommend it, but also use it's monster as the single most prominent photo on the cover of the entire freaking book, it just HAS to be good, right? And two: it was fucking free, it aired on IFC a few weeks ago (part of their pretty decent "Grindhouse" film series) and I recorded it.

So onto the movie: it is based on a novel by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and if the movie could be summed up in one picture, this is probably it:

See that orange crap in the background? That is an abstract, visual representation of this movie. I don't know if this was a poster for it when it was in theaters, or if it was the cover of one of its VHS or DVD releases or what. I do know that this was *not* the cover of the VHS version I saw in video stores as a kid, nor is it the current DVD release's cover, which, features Hugh Grant's face according to amazon.com. He plays the third or fourth most important character in the movie, but, hey, he ended up being famous, so let's have *his* face take up 75% of the cover.

So the movie is about a Scottish archeology student who digs up a giant snake skull on the land rented by two chicks whose parents disappeared. The landlord is a wealthy English noble (played by Hugh Grant), whose ancestor is said to have slain a "great white worm" in ye Olden days; an event which the town - or village or whatever - still celebrates to this day with a catchy folk song, accompanied by flashing disco lights. Seriously. Thank you Ken Russell - may the 70's always be with you.

Well once the skull is dug up, in comes a mysterious, rich new neighbor, a sexy lady whom you can tell is sexy because she wears garter belts to hold up her thigh-high stockings which she manages to show off at every opportunity. And she's part snake and can spit poison that will cause you to have day-glo orange colored hallucinations involving the Crucifixion and nuns getting raped by Roman soldiers if you so much as touch a drop of it. Oh and by the way, her snake lady make-up looks way better in still photos than it does when she's actually moving around and shit.

So the plot of the movie revolves around tying together the skull, the mysterious snake woman, Roman-era paganism and the missing parents, and it proceeds in a somewhat predictable manner, except for a stupid twist ending involving a mix up at the chemist shop. BUT, this being a Ken Russell film, we need all the weird, random hallucinations and dream sequences we can get, so that the director can shoot his wannabe-Fellini load all over the audience's collective face. This is best represented by a sequence in the middle of the movie where the rich landlord guy (Hugh Grant) goes to sleep and has a five minute long dream sequence where he's on a plane and all the female characters in the movie are airline stewardesses, and the women are all wearing garter belts and thigh-highs under their stewardess uniforms, which you can see because they are wrestling each other and inadvertently hiking up their skirts in the process. The dream seems to point to some weird conflict wherein Hugh Grant is going to have to choose between the snake lady and the two chicks, but this NEVER HAPPENS. In fact, the only thing this prolonged dream sequence seems to foreshadow is that one of the sisters wears a ring with a crucifix on it, which ultimately does not end up meaning much in the course of the movie. It's like foreshadowing, without actually foreshadowing ANYTHING!

I should also point out that Hugh Grant's character is *not* the hero of the movie, the archeology student is, because he's Scottish - which, of course, means he not only plays the bag pipes, but also has a set on hand. Not only is *this* plot point *not* foreshadowed, there is actually a scene in the movie where his room is being thoroughly searched for a missing giant snake skull - no bagpipes. And in case you don't get what I'm inferring, bag pipes are important to the resolution of this movie.

In gathering info and pictures for this qausi-review, it appears a lot of people file this in the "so-bad-it's-good" category - the wikipedia article on Ken Russell even refers to this movie as a "Hammer spoof." Maybe it's my bias showing, but the things I hated about this movie I hated about other Ken Russell movies, so whether or not I found it funny seems inconsequential.
Maybe my "funny bone" just wasn't working today, or maybe I'm missing something, but I rate this movie: Crap!

I Can't Stop the Chop

2007-12-13T20:37:00.001-06:00

Meraud is far to cuddly for the "Silent Hill" treatment to work.

Here's a more flattering / less lizard-like chop of co-contributor "Gemma."

Dear Meraud,

2007-12-12T22:45:00.001-06:00

Step 1: Right-click, Save Image As...

Step 2: Save to disk

Step 3: New Post or Edit Post, select "Add Image"

Step 4: Under "Add an image from your computer," click "Browse" and choose the file you saved to disk.

Step 5: Once the file is chosen, click on "Upload Image"

Step 6: Profit.

Gay Batman

2007-12-07T19:14:00.002-06:00

Herr Rotwang drew this. I couldn't possibly imagine where he got the idea for it.

I wonder if it has to do with all that Star Trek he watches.

PS. It sure does look like he worked extra hard on Batman's bulge...

PhotoChoppery

2007-11-29T00:34:00.000-06:00

I've been goofing around with the freeware variant of Photoshop called GIMP on-and-off over the past year. Mainly, the only thing I knew how to do was copy/paste, resize images and layer things like my Eye-Teeth-Brain profile icon. Thanks to this Something Awful thread, titled "Let's make Silent Hill photos again!," I've spent the past couple of days learning to make photos more "Silent Hill"-esque.

I should probably take this opportunity to segue into a brief rundown/review of the Silent Hill games, as well as criticism of the Silent Hill movie, but it's late and I need to get some sleep, so I will make a note to do that some other time.

I love it when you’re wrong….

2007-11-25T10:56:00.001-06:00

The release of the final in the Three Mothers series! For the uninitiated, one of the world’s greatest directors, Dario Argento, began this trilogy in 1977 with the classic “Susperia” and followed it in 1980 with “Inferno.” I don’t really know what the deal is or why it took him so long to release “Mother of Tears.”

All I know is that Mike told me that Dario would likely die without completing it. And now Mike is wrong, and that makes me happy. :)

Not necessarily because I want him to be wrong, but because the first two, especially “Inferno,” are some of my favorite movies ever! I love the plot line about three witch sisters, each wreaking havoc in a different city. And they’re absolutely terrifying.

I recommend seeing these as an introduction to Italian horror and Argento in specific, along with other fantastic works such as “Stendhal’s Syndrome” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” both of which feature the lovely Asia Argento. Argento’s use of color and his extremely stylized films make his work an absolute joy when compared with the bland Hollywood stuff.

“La Terza Madre” has already been released in the States, but it’s not playing anywhere near me. I guess I will have to wait for the DVD…Click here for the trailer.

New Blood

2007-11-24T21:32:00.001-06:00

Since all I write about lately seems to be football and video games, I've decided to invite my future-mrs. to write for this blog. Hopefully she'll write about horror movies more than I have and kick start in me my initial desire to write about horror movies.

As for Manhunt, I've gotten to the level where it is essentially a shoot-out in the subway station, and I've put that shit on indefinite hold. Manhunt is not a shooter and the PS2 sucks for shooters (I'm used to mouse point-and-clicking on the PC for shoot-em-ups) so I've instead been playing Lego Star Wars 2. It's fun, but it seems like in an attempt to add to the game above and beyond the original, it has gotten a bit convoluted. Collect enough studs in Story Mode, then collect enough studs in Freeplay mode plus find the hidden red brick - oh and meet the criteria so you collect all four gold bricks in each level, blah blah blah... I loved the minikit building from the first one and having the option to actually play with your minikit vehicles is fun, but it just seems like too much shit has been crammed into it.

And I suck at vehicle levels.

Terror EBM

2007-11-16T22:41:00.001-06:00

I was reading the Dark Sonus forums and came across a post talking about "Terror EBM." Clicking through a few links led me to this video from Dawn of Ashes.

Love the video, music's pretty good... I hate that kind of vocal processing though.

Makes me think... I'd really love to play keys in a "Terror EBM" band.

Manhunt (again)

2007-11-12T00:13:00.001-06:00

An escort mission? In Manhunt? Reeeeally???

In a game where I play a convicted murderer, where the object of the game is to kill as many enemies in as gruesome of fashion as possible, I have to escort someone across the level safely?

In its defense, this is probably one of the best escort levels I've played, in that the escortee can be left in dark corners and doesn't wander off on his own, but still...

C'mon guys, give me a pen and paper and I can storyboard 16 levels of this shit that doesn't involve gimmicky escort levels or guns-only bullshit...

Reviews are coming in for Manhunt 2, the verdict seems to point to mediocre and censored to shit... not worth buying a Wii for certainly, and this is a good thing. I really shouldn't be playing Manhunt 1, so I'll definitely steer clear of Manhunt 2.

Packers vs. Vikings

2007-11-11T14:10:00.002-06:00

3rd Quarter, 27-0, Packers up.

"Well the Green Bay Packers are 17 minutes away from being 8 and 1 for the season, so we're going to bring you a more competitive game, Eagles vs. Redskins!!!"

Fuck you Fox.

Fuck you Hoosierland.

FUCK.

Manhunt

2007-10-25T22:08:00.001-05:00

Thing Number One to get out of the way - I know all I seem to post about are video games. I didn't intend for this to be a video game blog, but whatever, it is what it is. Talking about movies is okay, but takes some research... most movies are, at most, 2 hours. A single video game can take up anywhere from 5 to 40 hours. Experiencing something for 2 hours or less, unless it is both really fresh in my mind AND provoked a STRONG response, such as Rob Zombie's Halloween when I posted about it, I just don't feel like I have much to say about it. For example, I had been wanting to see Stuart Gordon's From Beyond for, like, almost 10 years. Literally. It was only in the last few years that I realized it was out of print. Okay, that's fine, from there I had two choices - buy a Tawainese bootleg off of ebay, spend WAAAAY too much on an old VHS cassette from an Amazon reseller, or wait until it *eventually* got reissued on DVD. I decided to wait, and the wait was worth it - in that when it was finally released on DVD this past September 11th (NEVAR FOGHAT!), it was an unrated directors cut previously not available. So I got it, watched it with the future-mrs., enjoyed it decently enough (the future-mrs. and I gave it a C-)... Not only is Re-Animator obviously waaaay better, but I think I actually enjoyed Castle Freak more... So yeah, pretty anti-climatic, but that's life. I'm glad I watched it, I don't regret buying it, but overall my review is, "meh - it's pretty okay." But to write a full article about a single movie that I've only sat through once just feels kind of weak... I don't know how professional film critics do it, but then most of them are chuckle fucks any ways, so... But it's kind of this crossroads between, I don't feel like I'm doing a movie justice to see it once and then write a response, but I'm also not so much into watching a movie multiple times in a short span of time just for the sake of having something to say on my blog.

As for music... I'm just, not in my skin about that, right now. 6 years of music school, I'm kind of sick of writing about it, and I've decided I'm not going to be a weenie and give academic treatment to the "pop" music that I love. When academics start writing glowing articles about your genre of pop music, it is a death sentence, and the industrial music scene is already on life support as is, so... not going to go there. I also don't feel comfortable writing "reviews" of industrial CDs and what not. When I buy a CD, I already know I will like it, either because I heard it on internet radio, myspace, the band's website or amazon's preview links, or because it is a band I already know and love well enough that I don't *need* to hear a preview (Skinny Puppy). So I could write glowing reviews about bands I already love, or I can talk shit about bands that, for whatever reason, I don't like. Not going there. I'm old, I'm crusty, I'm mature, if I don't like a band, I just don't care anymore. In high school, it's fun to absolutely *hate* on bands and genres, but there's a point where you grow up and work a mundane job and realize, "so-and-so might suck, but they're making their living doing *that*, and I'm making my living doing this bullshit..."

As for politics, I've had an idea to do a brief write up of all the major presidential candidates for the two major parties, but, meh... what does it really matter? I'll probably do it, just because it's 75% written in my head, whereas this post is so far 100% improv...

Which brings me to the subject of this post... Manhunt.
(Warning, longwindedness is a symptom of 6 years of academia. Consult your doctor.)

So in my last post about Psychonauts, I briefly brought up Manhunt... oh, and by the way, I finally did finish Psychonauts... great game, check it out if you haven't already.

Manhunt... gameplay... first off, the only "stealth games" I've played are Hitman 2, Hitman Contracts, Hitman Blood Money and Manhunt. Of course, I've dealt with the pain and frustration of "stealth levels" in many FPS's and platformers, generally where they DO NOT BELONG. I'm not interested in "traditional" stealth games, but I DO like the idea of sneaking up on people and murdering them in horrible ways. Go figure. Of the Hitman games, I've so far only ever finished Hitman 2 for PC. I have Contracts for PS2 and Blood Money for PC. I will definitely finish Blood Money on the PC someday, Contracts on PS2, I don't know. The PS2 interface is vastly inferior for the Hitman games, in my experience.

In mentioning Manhunt in my last post, I decided to "look it up." Read old reviews, glance at some of the "tips and tricks" on gamefaqs.com... My mind is a perverted and vile Rorschach test. I think of something, anything, and I start looking it up online... and I learned something. I never did "get" how to properly play Manhunt. The shadows in Manhunt render you completely invisible. I did not realize this the first time around. I would hide in the shadows, an enemy would turn in my direction, come close to me, be 2 feet away, and I would, for some reason, instinctively run the fuck away. I guess I was holding the game to a higher standard of realism, or something. I only got to the fourth level this way and never finished a level with more than 2 out of 5 stars. I guess I need things EXPLICITLY spelled out for me, because I am a moron. In talking to Herr Rotwang about this, I described it this way; "It's like playing Super Mario Bros., and every time you see a mushroom, you decide to run the fuck away from it because you think it's poisonous." Yeah, I'm that stupid.

So, I decided to give Manhunt another go... I think it's on my mind because I'm kind of wet and creamy about Manhunt 2 using the motion controller on the Wii... I've never played a Wii before, so I may hate the new control scheme, but I must admit that I am intrigued...

I last played this game in September of 2005. Go me! I decided it would be prudent to start all over again from the beginning, and instantly I get 3 stars on the first level. Shadows, it's all about the fucking shadows. I see the light now, and I am a fucking murder machine. I'm now on the 7th level after only a couple sessions, a huge improvement over my first crack at it, and I've got 3 stars on all 6 previous levels. I suck at doing this shit in a timely manner, so I lose my 4th star there, and I'm playing "fetish" difficulty rather than "hardcore," which disqualifies me from getting 5 stars on any level.

So Manhunt isn't as bad as I initially thought... though the gameplay of Manhunt and the Hitman games are in no way "addictive." They're very much games where you play in short bursts, which is good for me... a half hour to an hour of Manhunt, then I get frustrated and do something else. That's much better for me than something like Psychonauts, where I'm glued to the game for 2 or 3 hours at a time. Manhunt is also far more forgiving than Hitman, so it's a good balance overall and I'm enjoying it for now. I hear the later levels are a bitch and a half, so we'll see how I feel about it then. Just as long as there's no escort missions, I should be fine.

Psychonauts

2007-10-16T22:33:00.001-05:00

Downloaded Psychonauts off Steam for $20... seems like everyone talks it up. It's a great game, the gameplay is unbelievably fun and addicting... however, it, like Bioshock, is a great game that ends with a fucking escort mission.

Who has ever played a game and said, "...and my favorite part was the ESCORT MISSION!!! It was totally awesome!!!" NO... NOBODY FREAKING LIKES ESCORT MISSIONS!!!

Yeah, I'm raging against a game that is two years old, but Bioshock pulled the same shit and that was released last month, so...

...I haven't finished Psychonauts yet, I should really spend more time making music and less time playing games. I'm on a bit of a binge lately, I updated my computer back in April/May, went from P4 1.6ghz PC-133 SDRAM with an ati Radeon 9800 to an AMD X2 (4200, whatever that means) with PC-667 RAM (motherboard can handle PC-800) and a Geforce 7600, so I'm kind of catching up with the past few years of PC gaming. Steam has been absolutely addicting for me. I downloaded Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, bought the Dawn of War games before they were available on Steam (if you're like me and hate multiplayer gaming (I hate people, I hate teenagers and I hate assholes) just buy Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. The singe player campaigns for Dawn of War and Winter Assault are totally weak compared to other RTS's. Dark Crusade is actually lots of fun, and you can be all the races in single player but not multiplayer). Then I bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R., didn't like it at all (sorry Phil, real life sucks enough!), Bioshock, Hitman: Blood Money, and finally Psychonauts. I'm still in the middle of Hitman: Blood Money, I like the Hitman games, but I tend to play them a little bit, leave them alone for a while, then come back to them. I'm not really big into "stealth" games, but the premise of the Hitman games is too cool for me to pass up.

So yeah, Psychonauts. Awesome art, awesome setting... best of all, it's a game that is obviously designed around the gameplay. Old school classics, like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, hell, even Donkey Kong and Pac Man, they were all about the gameplay. None of that shit makes any fucking sense, narratively. Narratives and stories and concepts have become primary in the video game industry, some games are just plain not-fun to play - hello S.T.A.L.K.E.R.! Hitman too, although moreso the old games than Blood Money... and fucking Manhunt... oh god. But Psychonauts is just plain fun to play, it's fun to mash the buttons, it's fun to do everything in it.

Except escort that little shit around the meat circus. FUCK YOU PSYCHONAUTS!!!

Anonymous comments now allowed on this blog

2007-10-12T20:17:00.001-05:00

People can now leave anonymous comments. I didn't realize they were not allowed by default. I doubt I've missed anyone, but whatever.

PS.

Haujobb - Vertical Theory. I just recently got this even though it was released in 2003. I saw Haujobb live in Milwaukee when they were touring to promote Polarity in 2002, and this album slipped past my radar... I was in grad school, dirt poor, and not really paying attention to this kind of music. For the past year I've been playing catch up, and this is seriously not only the best Haujobb album since Soultions for a Small Planet/the rmx matrix, it's one of the best industrial/ebm/whatever albums ever. Or at least I think so this week.