New advances in video game stupidity

I noticed a familiar name in the video game news. I clicked the link like I usually do, to see what’s new, to educate myself, to get a sense of where the future is headed. I just almost fell off my chair when I saw the new Spyro title. I can hardly believe this isn’t some kind of glitch in the matrix. I can hardly believe there are investors stupid enough to throw away their money on inane crap like this.

I really enjoyed the first three games in the Playstation-1 series of Spyro The Dragon. The series transitioned to the next series of consoles in a confusing fashion. Mere years after being one of two big Mario-style flagship titles for the PS1, both Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were being treated like faceless commodities sold to the highest bidder. There was one that came out for the Xbox and Gamecube and the PS2, and one that just came out for the PS2 and the Gamecube, no Xbox at all and no explanation. Just random bad luck.

As if this weren’t bad enough there was an attempt at a “revival” of Spyro as a fighting game with scattered little bits of platforming elements left laying around between the violence as if to remind the character he was once relevant. “The Legend of Spyro” titles had excellent voice acting and decent effects, but the controls were asinine for the first two volumes and by then nobody was left who gave a damn. They hustled the third volume out after grandiose hints that a “movie” might be possible when pimping the first two titles - the movie a long since dead end same as the revival.

Drift out another two years and it’s decided that the game, the franchise, the character Spyro himself can’t sustain another title without some serious hedged bets and useless boondoggles. I mean, it might make some kind of sense if the actionless figures serving as anti-piracy dongle here was just a USB stick you had to plug into a port, served as an auxiliary memory card to store your avatar’s progress.

But no. You are required to attach the platform and put an assortment of action figures on the platform. Not just one, but many. The gist of the new Skylanders Spyro Adventure or whatever they call it, is that you need to buy another insanely overpriced $70 title that comes with a proprietary USB device that serves as a platform for your Avatar.

The Avatar is a plastic figurine and you only get ONE get three with the starter kit. An action figure. Or rather IN-action figure, since it just sits there like an anti-piracy dongle while you, you know, actually PLAY this farce. Oh, and that thing plugged into your USB port? It STILL wants AA batteries, despite sucking power already. Does this sound like the future to you?!?!

Wanna feel even more marketed-down-at? There are 30 of these $8 monsters, many retailer-exclusive figures. So there's one you can ONLY get at Target, another one elsewhere, etc. Ready for the collect-them-all zombie-like epidemia of the 1980s? No, neither is anybody else!

If your kid somehow goes nuts for this garbage you can shave off a few measly bucks and buy a 3-pack for $20. Let’s see, 30 x 8 = 240 + 70 = $310 total cost of ownership for the entire package. At list price. Which, mercifully, you won’t see for long.

This is the kind of horrific overmarketing and underplanning that populates bargain bins and thrift store shelves almost as soon as it’s released. After watching all the other kinds of stupid ideas flash in the pan and go bust all these years since Pong and Pac•Man I am literally stupified that this could have gotten past the planning stages. Yet another game that is totally useless without some equally useless attachment? Haven’t we seen how titles with exclusive peripherals fare in this world of everything-else-isn’t-like-this?

With the exception of the Rock Band/Guitar Hero phase of American gamer culture, nobody can remember the last game that had a peripheral which wasn’t a colossal flop unless perhaps we’re talking about the Donkey Kong bongos for the Gamecube. Even then they got ridiculed in stories and reviews for being a kitschy idea bound to fail. So where was that common wisdom when Skylanders came up with this D.O.A. scheme to drive another nail in Spyro’s coffin?

One last note: normally when some toy maker tries to shovel out some piece of cross-marketing like this it at least has a cartoon show or horrifically bad live action thing like the Morphin Power Rangers to hang itself on. Thusfar there is NO teevee cartoon or any other show to hang this bad idea up on. It’s just a really bad idea for three different consoles. Don’t worry if it does happen to interest you, it’s sure to be in bargain bins and clearance racks soon enough just like those DJ Hero turntables are right now...

The mind reels, but I’ve said my piece, and the bargain bin won’t be enough to get me to try this steaming heap of capitalistic flotsam. I'll just go replay the few good Spyro titles they made. You remember? 10-12 years ago!

dodging excuses with reason

So for the most of the last month and a half I've been pivoting between several projects and noticably not updating this here blog or my other places for slapping words online.

I've been keeping myself current with what's going on. The Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everywhere-else movements have brought an almost breath-held bearing-of-witness in my own self.

And that's not from the clips of infuriating, absolutely unwarranted and pathetic behavior of police in dozens of youtube videos and other viral clips. I felt my own incomparable sensations before seeing those.

I've been aware since I first got the ever-less subtle nudge out of the nest when I was still a teenager attempting to finish the previously-enduring rigged-game I was forced to participate in ("if you think you're so smart, kiddo, why dontcha getta jobb? hmmm?") ...that the larger world outside the school system was an even more depressing fixed-carnival of misery and rejection.

I graddyated high skool and vaulted toward college, didn't have enough sense to duck down and take the stupid things about the process in stride for even a little while.

Having not gone-along-to-get-along, I failed out my freshman year and had to return home, tail between my legs, and work for another 2-3 years to get back to where I left off when some asshole stopped the music I'd been learning to.

I partook of some of the clinton-era relative prosperity, worked 2-3 jobs and attended community college and had little to no social life, possessions, status, and pissed away most of my money on cars, repairs, food, rent, and fuel. All with the sense that it was just wasted time till I got back where I belonged, doing what I'd meant to before.

Forward another couple of years and the same education I'd started paying for had exploded in cost, with nobody but a scattered few college graduates in my friend circle to testify that there were few, little, and NONE jobs to be had for most of them.

And I lapped it up, leapt before I looked at least financially speaking. With no elder relatives to advise me, I tackled loans that were home-ownership in proportion to what my parents had paid for their in-state college educations.

The truth is beginning to be common knowledge that I, like millions of my fellow Americans, seriously paid double what my parents paid in their college tuition and have consistently gotten less than half the expected career-effectiveness as a result. It doesn't work like it used to, college degrees are the toilet-paper high school degrees and GEDs used to be.

And I pay off that useless baggage to this day, since the in-state school kicked me out without cause. It's not even worth bringing up anymore except to make the point that no matter how much you intend to succeed, without knowing who and where you need to suck up to most, you're never gonna get anywhere.

The experience of college informed me and made me an autodidact, introduced me to many wonderful people. Absolutely nothing else I got there helped me get anything job-related beyond a callback or an interview - beyond getting a toe in the door college was worth nothing.

Flash to circa: now and in 2011 suddenly the news shows, the talking heads, the fearmongers and the hate speakers are even talking about the things that I've always seen as wrong, since my first paychecks and my first disillusionments...

...forgive me for being stunned speechless and left wide-eyed in what may be a never-ending sense of awe, mixed with sadness, mixed with sickness, mixed with relief and a good heap of what-took-you-fuckers-so-long?!?!?!

a staggeringly dumb series of stupid events

Returning to my blog, right where I left it.

I have an old n busted Xbox360 that I bought used because somebody's kid got it banned from XBLA. Big whup, since I couldn't care less about the online aspect. I wanted a device to let me play a few older titles I'd decided I liked. First time a recent game came out that I cared about was Portal 2.

I hate how much new games cost, how stupid the difference between two titles at the ludicrous $59.99 price point can be, in that some will have replay value that lasts years, others are rental-oriented titles that may take 4 hours max.

How could it be that these things are priced the same? When the teenagers, young and ignorant adults with more disposable income than brains are the market. There is no other reason than greed on one side and stupid on the other.

So when it comes to my pocket, my money, I back up every game I buy. I then modify whatever hardware I purchased and own to play the backups, and leave the original in the case so it doesn't get messed up. At $60 for a piece of mass-produced plastic with dyes and binding agents that could be the cheapest possible source material? Not bloody likely I'm gonna pay for it again.

This pattern with previous consoles has led me to a kind of "sample it first" mentality when there are abundant sources for what many will call "pee-rated" games. If I like what I sample, same as music and movies, teevee and books, I'm gonna BUY the official version eventually, even if I find it in a bargain bin, a thrift store, or a pawn shop.

The big difference between me and the early-adopter, mad-spending lunatic: I'm not in any hurry. I'm not 16 anymore. Bulletstorm and Dead Island will still be as l33t, c00l and interesting six months from now as they are today, for me!

I grabbed a relatively new release from the usual sources, loaded the backup dvd+r-DL. The backup tried to run an update and I let it run like a total chump.

It's just that, being a backup, once the update had turncoated and reflashed my dvdrom drive with its asinine Official Firmware, it couldn't read the copy to finish the update, and went into what can only be called "Flake Mode."

Reading around Ye Olde Internette I found a metric ton of other people having similar issues with the most recent games - a sword I barely ducked back several months with the most recent game I'd cared to bother with, something the kiddies call Bulletstorm.

A common theme on forums, torrent sites, elsewhere: "my little brother/ignorant friend put the backup into an older flashed console, it ran the update and now it's just a white screen with an error code on it. My xbox is fux0red, aside from beating my brother/friend senseless, wat do I do?"

I just kept sponging up whatever I could read about the latest issues with m$ "anti-piracy" efforts. I just can't help but laugh deep inside. M$ can't employ the entire internet. They have finite limits to their resources in the "keep ahead of the hax0rz" game. There are simply more of Us than there are of them. And we'll always be one step ahead. They have to keep selling the idea that they're not a slowly sinking ship, leaking blood into the water, but we know what's true.

Capitalism's days are numbered. It doesn't take much imagination to see it. The internet leveled the playing field, and I'll miss all the mom & pop, independent stores that sold groceries, books, records and tapes and music. But I won't miss the relentless pursuit of profit above all else.

The simple truth? After the download temporarily b0rked my xbox, I read about it. I found a solution to return my b0rked box to retail functionality for a hair over $2.

Since I'd already sent for the sata bracket that lets me reflash the drive, making something I already own have more functionality for me, and not less, all that remains to solve this brief interruption in my equilibrium is to take apart my xbox one last time, fashion some external connectivity for the sata port, ensuring that I won't have to disassemble the box the next time it needs a reflash.

Simple truth? I'd rather do it my way, one step ahead of the spider, cheap and cautious, than the gross amounts of ridiculously overpriced spending most people consider worth paying for these experiences. I prefer to pay for my recreation not in gold or dollars, but in effort and knowledge and skills.

untweetable just now

if the TeaPotty ruins America, drives us over default brink, they better learn to sleep with one eye open. They painted this target on THEMSELVES!

talking back to everything

Eddie Murphy was blowing up, going from another SNL guy to big-ticket movie star, in the early 1980s. I went from having no idea who he was, to having seen him without knowing who he was, and then to having friends on the school bus suggest “Raw” to me.

I remember catching a few minutes of SNL between other things got me a rebuke from my mother. That stuff was dirty, she said, and shouldn’t be allowed on television. That’s why they kept it late at night, and it wasn’t something I should watch, wasn’t for children.

Eventually I saw Raw, but before that I believe he had an album called Eddie Murphy: Comedian. Either that or I’m misremembering it and I’m too lazy to go hustle up a specific answer from wikipedia. But there was a bit called “Black Movie Theaters” about how he, and any other person of similar skin pigmentation, talked back to the movie screen at the theater. And how white people didn’t do that.

I learned very young then, before fifth grade, that not only were the differences between “white” and “black” funny, but that I was either neither or both, and never only one or the other. I couldn’t dance for a damn, but I knew funk when I heard it, and felt music sometimes just listening and sometimes when I helped perform it - ripple through me and make me cry tears of pure unadulterated joy...

The slow lazy drift I’m getting at is that I talk back to The Rachel Maddow Show, I talked back to Politically Incorrect before there was a Real Time with Bill Maher, and I talked back to teevee and movies since I was a kid - when I wasn’t speaking the lines along with my favorite characters like a proto-geek oughtta should’ve.

Kevin Smith, another content producer who gets talked back, laughed with, and invited into my home everyday - recently mentioned the 1990s film Pump Up The Volume. This was probably my first big ugly gratuitous geekout. That movie inspired me in many ways - from memorizing it and repeating it like many friends did The Princess Bride, to recording myself a cassette with the soundtrack of the spoken word segments and the songs missing from the “official” soundtrack album...to the senior project I wrote for an English Teacher where I paraphrased, stole, remixed, sampled, and expanded upon the premise of that film - essentially creating my first work of fan-fiction years before I knew it existed.

I compose these words of remembrance, recollection, reflection and humor as I listen to The Rachel Maddow Show. When that’s over I’ll switch to any of the other parallel tracks that I pay any of my precious attention to. I learned from my mom and her mother that parallel processing is not an abstract but a constant and we do it everyday right here and right now with our own two hands and brainlobes.

(Maddow mentions something about Mitch McConnell speaking into a microphone and I volley my banter back at her: “Are we sure he knew it was a microphone, he’s older than everybody but Harry Reid and John McCain?!?”

And WTF is with nation-building in Afghanistan? You have some swampland, maybe a bridge or a used Edsel to sell me, too? Anybody old enough to remember the last Presidents who tried to sell that lie should be jeering as loudly as possible!

Nobody else has ever succeeded building a nation in Afghanistan, if the people there could’ve built a nation, there would’ve been one when we got there. They call it the Graveyard of Empires for a reason, dammit.

How about building up the infrastructure at HOME for a change? Otherwise the troops will come home to a pock-marked landscape, barren of life, with crumbled fallen bridges and roads so bad you’re better off on the dirt. Let’s see a President acknowledge that reality here on the ground at home right now!)

I’m sure somebody could devise a method by which we could test my retention from what I’m ostensibly “viewing” as I co-process or multi-task but I’m confident of the process and can pause, pivot, and flow around what I’m doing with variable attention to the tasks and inputs currently being accessed, processed, created or otherwise manipulated.

The way most people absorb their media, whatever they choose, may be changing. I don’t know if I’ve been ahead of the curve or behind it, and I’m sure it’s a little of both, but I can’t imagine shoveling more shit into my head. The world tries hard enough to fill it with shit. But Jackass, American Idull, So You Think You Can Shit Your Pants?, who in fuck has time for this braindead bullshit and how in fuck did it ever get popular enough to have more than one fucking episode?

Whenever my time is come, my ticket is punched, and the ending looms nigh, I’d hope that you all can put me on ice and wake me back up when my fellow Americans, humans, earthlings, whatever - they’ve all stopped embarassing themselves so frequently with devotion and attention to things which actively make people stupider.

Until then I’ll still be sitting right here, laughing with Futurama, talking back to Maddow and Colbert, writing stuff I’d be too fanboyishly ashamed to even GIVE to Doug Stanhope, or doing my own strange wobble between dialogue like Kevin Smith, prose like Garrison Keillor, hoping for the style of Piers Anthony, and generally being a premature curmudgeon concocting open-source thought-grenades from mere words and intentions.

Boo! My forked tongue and I are up here, floating about four feet off the ground in a lotus position, a megaphone in one hand, a middle finger in one hand, a sword in one hand, a fat black marker in one hand, sputtering out scrunchy sarcasm, muttering out morose memes, tweeting twisted tracts, fanning out our peacock feathers of anarchy and dissent behind us, casting a shadow over the soapbox on the sidewalk below. And we cast off billions of glowing opinionated filaments tangling in your aura, toying with your misconceptions, seducing your straight-laced-ness, and undoing the mundane wherever they come into contact with it.

I’ll write you a shelf of books, produce and design them myself, leverage a history of interesting stories, promise an almost endless procession of deep and profound conversations, and then I’ll go pick up a guitar and a keyboard (and a head full of samples) and start making half-assed music like I always imagined that someday I would. What you got? Where you at? What you doin? Hit me up...let’s take this sleepy world and spin it like a top!

button action

I remember back when Kevin and Ralph had just started Hollywood Babble-On. Last year. Kevin said something about needing something to close on, close with, a closing slogan, gag, tag line. Some button action was needed, he said.

It really didn't take them that long, busting through as a chart-topping podcast from the very beginning, to come up with several regular segments, a rough shape of each episode, and some tasty, tasty memetic obscenity I need not repeat here.

Similar to my HB-O obsession, I've been an almost regular viewer of the Rachel Maddow show. I remember her on Air America with Lizz and Chuck guiding us through some rough waters. Keith Olbermann is a stand-up guy with a fresh worldview I wish could be a regular on Real Time with Bill Maher.

I know there's "a story" behind a recent notable change in the ending segment of her show. I just don't care, that's not what interests me about it. Rachel has started closing the show with "the best thing in the world today" as an unmistakeable counterpoint to her former mentor's Worst Persons in the World segments.

Only because the stale, uninspired soundbitten tape-loop of GOP State Television over there at Fox Noize finally made enough pitiful whimpering about Keith's segment, weeks after his MSNBC show had ENDED...only then did any response become as little as an afterthought.

Socially divisive politics, fearmongering and religious blinders aside; anybody who stands up straight in the face of adversity and speaks truth to power without just worrying about their own ass...them's the ones you know you wanna watch. They're the ones acting like you wanna wish you could, given the chance. Canaries in the mines.

Shine truth like a light, get sunshine into all the darkest places. Kill the nastiness beneath all lies underwrit and subsidized by offering-plate monies.

For a Republican Party so utterly terrified of Sharia Law, it sure is redundant, repugnant that they pursue relentlessly a Christian Puritan version of Sharia Law for America. With their every waking moment right here and now in 2011. Just watch them...

Eek! We really digressed and drifted there. I didn't mean to whip out the soapbox and megaphone quite so fast.

Came in here to say/mention/notice that Rachel found her button moment, her button action as Kevin might say.

Of brief note today is that I think I've buttoned up a few large tasks, plates I'd had spinning for 3-4 months at a minimum and for some, closer to 2 years. I'm hoping this turns out to be The Summer Of Names Taken from whut All That Ass We Kicked.

Even just on a personal level, that would be just fine by me. I have two hands, I have new tools, I have a fresh perspective. I'm all about making It Happen. Won't you come along???

American Cellphones Suck, Give Me Something Cheaper, Better, NOW!

Herein Mr. Rantypants goes bazerk! Consider this your only warning.

***

The cellphone market is still absolutely worthless, useless, and every one of you suckers paying for your damn phone over again every month are convincing me the pod people have gotten everybody but me and a few other sturdy souls.

I must admit I’d like an android phone. Now that the apple sheep have worn the very idea of the cellphone into something resembling truly useful and not just a vain and overpriced, underpowered paperweight.

The concept of being able to view maps, inquire about points of interest or necessity while on the move, on the fly, in the car, or walking around a city, this appeals to me very much.

Paying a premium price for the chance to use it everyday when I might actually use it twice a week or less, strikes me as something so stupid I can't even compare those who do it to sheep. Because sheep can be cute.

Not zombies either, because zombies can kick ass. The kind of person who'd pay for the chance to do something he knows he won't is the logistic equivalent of a bucket of boiled assholes.

Tweeting, facebooking, goddamn Nascar and couchpotatovision on my phone? Tigger, please! Shoveling more mass-produced milquetoast muck into your trough for the sheep interests me NONE. Those are doors I’d choose to open very carefully at a distant future date on your device if I choose to make it mine. Pay extra? Nev-ar!

I will not pay more for any feature for one single day before I choose to be ready. Get over yourselves, it’s NEVER been worth $89.99-$149.99 every month for a godphone that won’t work everywhere because America’s cellular (if not our internet) infrastructure is an International Joke.

Someday all these zombie-sheep will wake up and cast your dimwitted capitalistic hubris into the lake, tied to a large stone! And I will still be laughing.

The device should damn well be able to PLAY anything I choose to load or throw at it, nimble as VLC and ready to stop on a dime and let me scratch video back and forth if I choose to. This isn’t rocket surgery.

Phone as camera? Normally I could care less if it takes pictures or video, sure that’s nice and all but I will never pay extra for it.

If it’s there at all it had better be 3mp and capable of video no less than NTSC 640x480 29.97 fps or just don’t bother. Decent zoom is mandatory during video as well as stills, and not locked but zooms in/out DURING recording, and the jitter control better be above-average to amazing, or don’t even bother.

The display had best be large, if not the entire face of the device. No flip phones, no double-wide suppositories. Touchscreen or easy FULL size dialpad and full qwerty, with no slider or crackberry form factor, either. Thin and narrow enough to be pocket sized is absolute, anything bigger invites being smashed by a hammer.

Just like any monthly cost above $29.99 for full internet, unlimited text and free to your mate’s handset regardless of carrier - anyone denying you these basic necessities deserves being hit with a hammer, too!

So just in review, starting from a product called the Samsung Replenish and extrapolating the desired experience, let us state that the product may require a 2-year contract. This is a new concession I have made, it has been a long time coming, and it is marginally acceptable if the rest of my terms are met without complaint.

The monthly rate locked in for the life of the contract, with no overage fees EVER agreed to never ever ever, maxes out at $29.99 for a period of 24 months.

With this fee there is free long distance after 8pm;
unlimited internet use;
unlimited text messages;
optional add-on for video or image messaging
beginning at $2.99 per month for 250 messages;
GPS capabilities at extremely reasonable rates;
option to lock out Nascar and television completely
without express, specific consent;

and an optional $3.99 monthly equipment protection plan that replaces the phone via USPS with tracking/delivery confirmation for your replacement within 48 hours.

Let’s see it, America, right now. Give me what I want, baby! Meet my demands, show me you still know how to do anything better than everybody else does.

I’ll be right here, waiting...and not accepting any less than I know you can provide.

Resurrecting Advertising

I know, I know. Any of you actually reading this who've known me in meatspace will say "but don't you hate ads and turn them off any chance you get?"

I do. But bear me out.

I grew up hearing WCCO AM radio in the car because we waz poor white trash who couldn't afford an FM radio, let alone an 8-track deck in the dash, or Star-Trek-worthy unimaginable things like Powered Windows or Air Conditioning. Not for us, nope.

Anyway, WCCO did live spots. Ads read live on air from prepared copy, but often ad-libbed, peppered with topicality, and improved in the process.

Flash forward 2011 and I'm sitting hear listening to Kevin Smith and his lovely wife Jen Schwalbach doing their Plus One Per Diem daily radio show on the internet. (Or a podcast. I think you can get it any way but mainlining it, honestly. And somebody's sure to figure out a way to do that soon enough.)

I do not like ads. I hate it when youtube or hulu or whoever just zaps a totally random-length ad before a clip that may be SHORTER than the damned ad. Hello, stupid! Thy name is Advertising.

But then Kevin and Jen start doing live spots. And they remind me why I didn't mind Boone & Erickson or the Cannon Mess doing their stupid live spots, and I didn't tune them out or turn them off. This sh-t is funny!

Jennifer and Kevin can flub their lines, goof off, laugh, start over, berate each other, support each other. There's so many ways the understanding provided by a background in their Plus One weekly podcast will make these ads transcend their capitalist intent, it's just unreal.

So I say to Fox and whoever else still cares to shovel their advertising shite into prime time teevee: want viewers to stay for the ads? Get your stars to do a few live spots like Lucy and Ricky and Ed Sullivan had to do. Let them have leeway to screw it up or make it better, and people are gonna stay TUNED for that spot.

It's not like you haven't figured this out, youse Ad Media in general. There's great examples of breaking the paradigm more often lately than in previous decades, from this lapsed teevee viewer's perspective.

But I just noticed I don't listen to the streams of Kev/Jen on SIR, I listen to the podcasts. I press pause and step away for a minute, often. So I found myself just now pausing them in the midst of another live spot ad.

And I thought to myself: "Whatsamattayou?" for just a second before noticing that I actually WANT to hear this one.

4 the people who r still alive (work in progress)

THIS is the summer won by BAMFs
half man, half seal

THIS is the summer of BRINGING back the LOVE

maybe we'll actually get to BRING 'EM HOME!

let the sunshine in!

I cannot be the only man unashamed to be so happy he cries

THANK YOU America 4 being MOAR than we expected!

I ain't afraid no more!

We made it through the night!!

an incredible gift of a day to be alive

SO God and Goddess blesst
that everybody, especially minorities

but even the skeptics, the cynics and the trolls
can't help but at least imagine

if not feel it in the marrow of their very bones

what it feels like when America keeps Her promises!

So let's mend our fences
let's put our house in order

then we'll bring our promises
to everyone
everywhere

someday sooner than we thought possible if you'd asked us a week ago.

++++++++++++++++++Happy CINCO!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you artists and bands linked here, for helping keep us sane all this time with your incredible songs.

Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution - It's A Wonderful Life

Steve Earle - Home To Houston

the Honeydogs - 10,000 Years

Soul Asylum - Lately

Son Volt - Jet Pilot

Jason Isbell - Dress Blues

Ben Folds - All U Can Eat

Mike Doughty - Fort Hood

Ani DiFranco - November 4th 2008

Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion - Hurry Up And Wait

help turn "yes we did" into "yes we will!"

A full night. No even slight hint of regret I haven’t gamed yet. Portal 2 will still love me longtime when I get to it.

President Obama reported to the American people that the persons tasked with such soldierly skills have killed Osama Bin Laden. Despite never wishing to cheer at death, I am complicated by emotions.

So despite that cognitive conflict, I hope everyone feels like it's a New Day.



I’ve been moved to tears repeatedly and it don’t matter. It’s a big damn day in America. "We" got Osama Bin Laden. I think that long sigh we're all letting out is a breath we've been holding together for ten whole years.

There are a great many happy people at this moment in NY and DC and everywhere else. It’s hard to keep myself from welling up just thinking about it. Joyful tears indeed.

Yes we did!

And now let me compose contemporaneously to the tune of Pete Seeger's "Bring 'em Home."

“will we bring the troops back home? Yes we will, yes we will!
will we win health care for our elderly? yes we will, yes we will!
will we protect social security? yes we will, yes we will!”

more verses coming...

today's random moment of joy

I know I'm a curmudgeon, a misanthrope, a whiner, full of rhetorical vitriol for the slightest whim.

Doesn't mean it might not be that I'm becoming a recovering-misanthrope.

Toward that end, here then is today's random moment of joy:

Reading my favorite music magazines back inna day, watching the music of The New Pornographers and the Squirrel Nut Zippers make fans out of the writing staff of Spin, if I'm not mistaken, Toast/Cake, the Twin Cities Reader, and CMJ New Music Monthly.






...we now return you to the scheduled programming, already in progress...

two steps forward, one step back & a smack upside the head

I'd make some allusion to that subj/title line about how the nation took 2 steps forward electing Barack Obama President.

[But I'm getting tired. Long day and I dropped my 1000 words a foo different places already. Brain, let me wind down fer a while? Okay? After this post? Alright, we gotta deal. :) ]

Our one step back was the whole DOMA/homophobic laws BS. Of course the other shoe to drop on that score is that the birthers are still hawking snake oil, shuckin and jivin in blackface for all their rhetoric's difference from overt racism.


On a personal level I'd say today's two steps forward were Stan Rogers and the Jive Aces. Stan's song in question being Barrett's Privateers, a pirate chanty obviously beholden to no nation. The Jive Aces were just blowing bubbles of pure joy with a cover of a song not even their own.

Of course the internet, being the hot tempered redhead it for-sure has to be, points out that enjoying the music of The Jive Aces is some kinda implicit endorsement of Scientology. And despite my caucasoidality I wanna shout "n-gga please!"

I do possess a rancor for the corporate politics that hide behind the CoS and documented cases of what it's done to individuals. But the Catholic Church has probably done more wrong in the continuum of history than Scientology has been around long enough to accomplish. Get it through your heads.

When it's just the music - be it Beck or the Jive Aces, it doesn't automatically mean it's tainted. That's not American, to think that. It just isn't.

Granted somewhere beneath it all there may be a dicey, slippery slope I can on some level admit, but I shall not back off my enjoyment of this one song. Or any Beck song, dammit.

There are times, Anonymous, when your crusade against Scientology seems a tad fascist its ownself. I love your spunky enthusiasm, it makes me smile and honestly your existence alone elevates the level of the debate, but you're not possessed of an utterly level head. (except against Fony. full steam ahead o'er there. I got yer back!)

Your Scientology connection offers at best a 3% doubt that I'll find nothing beneath the precise musicianship of Jive Aces resembling a true and vibrant dynamic creative heart like a Johnny Cash, a Merle Haggard, Mark Olson or Ani DiFranco lurking beneath their skin.

For all the enjoyable ride, I ain't ventured further than the one track. I just discovered it today for fecksake.

Know what, America, let's have a little heart-to-heart here, shall we? We'll walk around the playground of Music Circa Now and I'll be all impolite and point for your own betterment.

See over there? That silver-painted man meditating naked is Stuart Davis, f-ing brilliant rockstar musician and bard among men. Don't spew or anything, but he's a buddhist or something-as-yet-to-be-determined. We'll walk by quick so you don't get any ON YOU...cooties! Ewww!

But ya know what? You big pussy, America?

I heard that the last name Levy might mean Jooo! Hevvinstabetsy! Abandon ship! Wait, didn't we finish a war we didn't start to save Jews? For somebody with an awful lot going for you, America, you can be pretty schizo about Jews. Admit it.

I love the Honeydogs till my dying day and it could make no diff if they were Jewish or Pakistani to this Euro-descended mutt. They are a gift you ought bear witness to, fool. Act like ya know!

I love Low. But somewhere on the scuttlebutt pond I heard whispers they're ... Mormon! Quick, everybody freakout! Oh, that's right, nobody cares...

Brother Prince is a Jehovah's Witness. Despite feeling he betrayed the nondenominational roots I heard in the song New Power Generation, I respect his wishes. btw, shouts out to Brother Isaac from my days at Charter, another JW.

Big whoop. Get your spirit on, Amen, Hallelujah, Shalom Salaam. Om mani padme umm...

Religious TOLERANCE? How about religious indifference??
Try some on, America, do ya good!

Tip of the hat to Jive Aces.

had it up to here with the likes of you ppl

now youtube, comcast, I just want to watch videos with absolute ZERO hiccups and 12-minute-loading-times-for-a-45-second-damn-clip.

I will never care less if you are loading at resolution of 12trillion x 12trillion p - load in the immediate infinite NOW or do not ever, there is NO TRY. You will not be warned again!

I know you two don’t play nice together, and if I let you sit next to each other all you’re gonna do is bicker, fuss and fight.

I honestly don’t care what you like, I’m gonna load every one of these videos I have any interest in - each to its own tab so it can load completely before it gets an iota of my attention.

And if you don’t like it, I don’t think I wanna play with you anymore.
You can just not be my friends, okay? Is this really too much to ask?

stopped in my tracks: "There Goes The Fear" & MIA: Kid Galahad?

No Depression remains a center of like-minded wide-mouthed voracious music consumers. The print magazine was inspiring for a long time. Their transition to the internet thankfully hasn't diluted the magic.

There's a thread in the forum where there's a discussion beginning about "what songs have stopped you in your tracks?"

I remember hearing "World Crashes Down" by Kid Galahad on Brian Oake's Freedom Rock show on Cities 97. I caught perhaps the last 90 seconds but that remained stuck in my head for a week until I heard him play it again and recorded the whole thing. I don't think it took very long for me to import the CD direct from the band's website. It remains a striking, original, energetic album of enjoyable music.

Unfortunately the internet has little further information to offer of what happened to the band since. I ripped my well-preserved CD into itunes in ALAC to give it a fresh whirl after all this time. With the massive influx of new music I've blogged about elsewhere I confess it had slid to the background somehow.

Further on the No Depression forum topic, I remember the first time I heard the Doves song "There Goes The Fear" being an electric experience. I had played their first album a ton of times, appreciating the guitar and vocals and melodies.

When I heard There Goes The Fear I felt like I'd been stripped out of the physical plane and left floating in space like an obelisk from 2001 or something, the music was such a game-changing step-up and wild juggernaut of forward momentum.

Pure joyful spirit of so many bands at their best, distilled into homage and originality at once. Now remember to breathe...

I think I still have a well-worn piece of vinyl from my single-digit-aged days wherein Big Bird sings "Turn over the record turn over the record turn over the record turn over the record turn over the record turn over the record...RIGHT NOW!"

That was my instinct after hearing There Goes The Fear. AGAIN! AGAIN! Like I was possessed with essence of Teletubby.

I remember being sick enough I had no voice and aches and pains all over my body from flu. I had a great job at the time, loved my cow-orkers and what I was doing. I still called in sick and slept till after 3pm. But then I got up, damn the flu, and drove to Let It Be Records.

Nicollet Mall. 3397439. Or apologies to whomever has that # now, but I still have treasured memories of Kevin Cole doing loving spots for them at the end of his Rock And Roll Wingding show, over the soothing tones of Santo & Johnny's Sleepwalk.

I fetched the 10 inch single for There Goes The Fear. I played it on the way and the way back in my car from a tape I'd recorded off the radio. Then when I got home I played the wax with a ear-to-ear grin on my face, drumming in the air. Then I gave back in to the flu and slept till I got up to go back to work the next day.

But this was the story of a song that meant that much to me. Thanks Doves. Thanks Let It Be, even though you're not there anymore. Thanks No Depression for bringing the story out of me. dare my agnostic self say Thank God for music? yep!

divergent associations

So what does it say about a person if his usual haunts, places he actually logs in, even if only to lurk most of the time, are still wildly divergent?

I frequent AllThingsWeezer, 8BitCollective and NoDepression.com forums. Fifteen years ago I was somewhere between hip-to-shoulder-deep in ReallyDeepThoughts, MagicalArmchair, PrinceMailingList and SCUG.

Just reflecting.

Thank you for helping us help you help us all.

echoes and mojo thump through the brain

I've been trying to ignite the creative flow. I had mostly stopped writing as I once did and sputtered out a bunch of blog posts over the years. It's hard to know if that was due to working a lot, adjusting to being a married person, or any other in a series of challenges thrown in the path of my life.

The only real stories I'd come up with in the time I lived in Rochester MN were few and far between, shared with few if anyone, and served as wild imaginary playgrounds like Robert Heinlein had with the magnificent character Jubal Harshaw.

I have done a couple sprints now, as I've felt they represented for me personally, in the form of two NaNoWriMos. I find that just referring back to having completed the challenge more than once makes me look forward to it again. But I can't do that without wondering, pondering, imagining the future of either of those stacks of paper.

One would aptly describe the concept as Meta. Trying to imagine where a fully formed idea and manuscript has to go, to grow toward, to grow into. To become.

I find that I've been attempting to draw myself out of my shell. There are comforts to be had in hiding, but if I keep doing it all the time, I must entertain the notion that I could die while hidden and never be known. There are still stories to tell. I must find the fire inside to tell them. And it's always been there, it just has a will of its own, as anyone blessed/cursed with their own inner flame can surely attest.

Considering counseling or any help of a psychiatric/psychological kind is a wonderful metaphor. Lucy did it so well in the Charlie Brown/Peanuts strips. (Why it was called Peanuts tho, always bothered me. It had literally NOTHING to do with nuts. Why not call it Socks or Bolts or Feathers?)

Going beyond just thinking about crawling up on some shrink's couch, one can attempt to locate and gain perspective on whatever their issues are. And then surmise what the suggestions of any professional might be. Of course this comes easy for someone who was always psychoanalyzing their friends in high school. Turning that lens of introspection on yourself is certainly one path to madness.

Inspiration has struck from various corners of the world this month. I discovered an incredible ragtime musician named Tom Brier playing music from Yoshi's Island and it blew sparks into my soul. I beat the first Portal game after some struggles that only made me feel stupid for a little while. I then came to fall in love with the song Still Alive from the game. I'm now getting to know Portal 2.

So with the inspirations funneling in and the trend toward crawling out of my shell, I've taken the steps I would imagine suggested to me. I just wrote a brief scene of banter back and forth between two faceless, nameless characters that could well fit into either of my NaNoWriMo-vels inspired by equal parts Kevin Smith dialogue and the general wiseassery of my friends at the breakfast table before hi skool everyday.

You know what tho? This time I didn't consign those words, that back-n-forth between two distinct voices in me head while I stood waiting for my coffee to heat up in the microwave...I didn't drop them in a text file never to be heard from again.

Instead, I posted it straightaway to my deviantArt page, tweeted it, and of course that tweet went to my wordpress and my facebook like ka-pow-zap! So this is me poking my head out of my shell. If there are no ill consequences of these developments, I pledge to continue in that direction.

untweetable EP

oh delete button, what horrors have we kept from unleashing on the world?

knowing how many times I press the delete key, it should probably be the size of the space bar.

how often do insecure people let imaginary criticism keep them from creating anything? the world may never know.

music was invented to give writers a skill to look up to.

untweetable

Mr. President, show us you've learned how to negotiate. Don't give up everything worth fighting for before you sit down at the table. Please.

a brief statement of now-ness

I find the springtime bug has bit. I am cleaning and rearranging, reorganizing the nest. I've applied for work, hopeful that I might gain employment. Some might say I've suffered another birthday, but it actually wasn't all that bad, a pretty decent day itself.

Knowing my ancestry I could've done an entire blog devoted to my personal wellbeing and details of my health (or lack thereof.) But since I've outgrown the urge toward such milquetoast subject matter, I'll instead opine on what's transgressed recentlike.

I've dusted off the craigslist bargain I found last summer, the M-Audio Keystudio USB keyboard. I plug it into the usb hub and fire up garageband and it plays. But my hard drive needs replacing with a larger one. I can't keep any decent amount of music AND the overbearingly large libraries GB wants on my widdle stock HDD.

It's a constant game of pick-n-choose what I want to remain on that little shoehorn of a hard drive, and it's by-design that apple screwed me out of the proper amount of space to run their bloatware. So whenever the loot allows, I'll snatch up nothing less than a 250gb 2.5in sata laptop drive, perhaps up to 500gb, and drop it in there with my own two hands (and toolbox, of course.)

Till the loot allows such an admittedly minimal purchase, I've taken to training myself to mimic the earworm melody of the ending of Super Mario Bros. 2. The first video game in that series I actually beat by myself.

Among the dozens of useful sources of help at youtube, I found this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NBfxeSFEM and began training my typist's fingers to learn to step over each other on a different kind of keyboard.

More on these developments as time permits. If I might be permitted a slight Stephen-King-ism, even if it is a throwback to writers of a previous century...I think often of thee, dear reader. I will not be away for long...

i think too much

So if the quake and such in Japan affected the whole Earth, its tilt and thus its path through the solar system, has anyone re-ran the calculations for our interstellar near-misses and other trajectories?

I've said to several people now that I imagine there are interns deep inside some institution somewhere running these numbers. None of them report to me, of course. I wonder about it and then guess that I think too much, and try to put it out of my head.

I have a topical juggernaut as-yet-unwritten but warming up in the mental/intellectual bullpen, wreaking bloggish and opinional about how Rachel Maddow is quantitatively different than the television commentators she gets compared to regularly.

Guess you could say that I've been politely witness to right-wing friends of family and distant relations waxing goofily partisan about how Ms. Maddow is no different than their favorites, the Sean Hannitys and Michelle Bachmanns - bottom dwellers in the shallow end of the gene pool.

I keep feeling a strange flavor of silent horror when seeing the huge zombie fandom surrounding Sarah Palin. Intellectual lightweights making their logic-free views a choice that they think everyone, everywhere should have a right to hear about everyday.

Bearing any shred of critical thinking skills in such anti-intellectual times gives anyone with half a mind, aware of how little they know in the scheme of everything that their brief time at college had to offer, shivers of a somehow hopeless, mentally disturbing kind.

Oh mankind, humanity, everything sacred in the great landscape of truth and light, I bear the science-fiction gene that lets me imagine better tomorrows. But there are times when you all do not make it very easy.

untweetable

Anti-women’s rights & anti-abortion groups want to be called “pro-life”?? Disgusting. Wish to make Christianity irrelevant? This is exactly how.

untweetable

unposted tweet #fmjk039

the phrase "make no mistake" is a idiotic collective social tic same as "frickin'" once was. will you all please stop using it now? #kthxbye

dumpster-diving through life

I don't really get much out of doing anything the average way. When I can afford to purchase something at the retail price, I often will attempt to find the "deal" regardless of the time of year. I have friends who inherited the bargain hunter gene, but will only indulge their gift the same days every year when everyone else is taken over by the deal-zombie within us all.

But when I was working regularly enough to get paid enough to have a couple twenties left from the last payday when the next one finally made it around...those times I might splurge, as grandma would say, and buy myself something "new." The few times I've done that, I usually end up feeling hustled. By corporate America, or capitalist Japan, Taiwan or China, regardless I regret buying something manufactured to be replaced within three years. I don't use my devices endlessly, leave them on everyday for dozens of hours, and let my toddlers feed them PB&J sammitches. So my stuff lasts longer than the warranty.

Game consoles are sold below cost, so the first and often yet the third iterations of their hardware are flawed and easily broken, overheat or malfunction at a high rate. Fony had the issues with their initial ps2s. The xbox360's first model became notorious for overheating and getting the "red ring of death" when a design flaw unseated the processor chip from the board at high temps.

Your toiling author here fetched himself a repairable unit for a fraction of the retail price of a new one, paid a competent local to repair said unit, and have a grand total of ONE title to play on the deck. It might have been tweeted that the 360 sounds like somebody left a hairdryer on. Hyperbole or not, it's louder than the ps2 with a hard drive in it. And that's without a hard drive in the 360.

All totaled the expenditure for the experience of playing Portal on something far less laggy than the Intel GMA 950 excuse for a video card, with a wee trade-in at the game store, a shave over $100 with a wired controller and more if I figure in the $11 I spent over 2 years ago on my 1GB memory stick, the only one of several I own that fits in the deep-seated 3rd usb port on the back of the 360 near the ethernet port.

It's noteworthy that the deck in question here for solo offline gaming whenever the whim takes me, has a broken 2nd USB port in the front, no doubt caused by someone knocking the thing over or yanking out a controller cord. I tried to press the usb stick in that port next to my controller and found there's only two prongs left of the port and the middle wafer of the usual female plug is entirely snapped off, absent. Ah the wonders of craigslist dumpster-diving and thrifty methods.

Then after being monumentally unimpressed with the corporate prices imposed and fixed, no doubt, for the wireless controller from macrohard for their console, a deal was nonetheless found for half the retail price and no shipping costs, so grudgingly we lemming'd up to fetch one. The prices they seem to think they're entitled to charge for the games are pretty absurdly high. No game is ever worth more than $20, kids. Anything more and you're just paying premium prices to beta-test it for them.

Onward to teach myself how to make this new piece of property sit, stay, roll over and beg, maybe even do some pretty neat tricks I've read about.