Erstwhile Muse

Not originally what I was looking for…

but it'll do to boggle the mind for now.

Holy fucking shit, I've just had a Lakoff moment. The clouds have parted and I have glimpsed into the heart of the beast to grasp the truth behind uber-right wingers hatred of the gays. Their problem? You buttfuckers (and rugmunchers) out there aren't breeding…

But you say gentle reader, we've heard this ridiculous argument before in the all the hullabaloo about DOMA, stupid state amendments barring homosexual marriage, sanctity of the institution, yakkedy-schmackedyblahblahblah… and you would be most correct in that assessment. It's an argument that's always seemed rather ludicrous in light of the rapidly expanding global population.

That's the twist though you see, the warped lens that you have to view this shit through for it to make any semblance of sense; paranoid, xenophobic crazy sense, but a sort of sense nonetheless. It's a rapidly expanding global population, and we can't have that, nosiree. All you gays in America are too busy having non-reproductive sex out there to partake of your God given duty to spawn more honest, native born (white) Americans to act as foot soldiers to drive back the hoards of filthy, islamofascist brown skinned people already swarming across the borders of the EU in an unstoppable tide of heathen flesh.

Think I'm kidding?

We have written off Britain to the Muslims, he says. Come to America.

That is the finishing quote in an article by Johann Hari in which he tags along on a cruise for raving, aging neo-cons thrown by the magazine National Review. The relevant section is about two-thirds of the way into section four of the article where he begins to describe the discussion of Europe being overrun by Muslims because (t)he ‘European races’ i.e., white people—‘are too self-absorbed to breed…’.

So don't you see? (Cranky old rich white politically empowered) Neo-cons don't hate the gays (just) because they find their sexual predilections disgusting, it's because homosexuals' refusal to have (white, non-Muslim) children is an just another way of letting the terrorists win…

Labels: language, politics

DJing without a clutch: Deluxe Edition

or Christ I'm gonna need some more disk space soon....

Now, normally I tend to be a bit of an MP3 snob, I'll admit. I just really don't like to listen to anything of lesser quality than --alt -preset standard LAME VBR files—although apparently even that has been supplanted somewhat as a standard by the audiorati, but I'll be damned if I'm going to try and recode everything at this point—as I can notice a difference when using the Headphones O' Doom. As such, it would take something of extreme interest for me to recommend to someone else that they should go and download a hoard of 128kb CBR MP3s, but trust me, I think this one is worth it.

I'd actually heard about this a couple of years back when the first one was released, but I never got off my butt and did anything about it, so my loss will hopefully be your gain. What I'm referring to is the South By Southwest Festival's annual BitTorrent download of MP3s showcasing bands playing at that years festival. I was reminded of it last night while listening—well, falling asleep—to one of the TWiT netcasts (see sidebar) featuring the dulcet tones of Leo LaPorte. I seem to remember call-ins being involved, so it was likely to be The Tech Guy.

Since I was listening to someone talk about it, and not directly reading the information from a website which could conveniently link to the torrent file in question, I went through a few rounds of searching before I gave up and went to the engine I should have used in the first place , Torrent Scan. Don't get me wrong, I likes me my Google, but when trying to track down a particular torrent file I've found Torrent Scan to be the easiest route most times, especially since it can search some of the better torrent aggregators I've used before such as Torrentspy and isoHunt (these two tend to be my favorites). I was able to find most of the past years files that way, and with the current year's file easily available on the SXSW page (conveniently linked for your pleasure above), I was ready to assault my recently cleared-of-space hard drive with countless more gigs of music files.

So far it looks promising. Some of the more interesting finds from a quick and incomplete survey:

• A few acts I've heard of before such as Aimee Mann, Neko Case, Flogging Molly and The Dresden Dolls.
• Ride on Shooting Star by The Pillows, a.k.a the FLCL theme song.
• Yuppie Pricks, a group who could be the spiritual successors to the Dead Kennedys, with a lead singer that sounds a lot like Jello Biafra after a few singing lessons, and as far as I'm aware of not yet seen as sellouts.
• A weird Japanese band whose name I have forgotten at the moment—I've several thousand files to wade through here, pardon me for losing track of one—that has some very Queen like moments in the instrumentation and pacing of their songs. Case in point, I left the song on loop for several plays, and I rapidly lost track of which part was the end, middle and beginning. Entertaining stuff though….

So how does one go about procuring this massive slab o' musical goodies? It has come to my attention recently that some folks seem to find the whole technology behind BitTorrent a tad intimidating, or they have not yet come across it apart from occasional oblique references in their daily surfing. All of which is terribly confusing to me as I've been using BitTorrent now for quite some time, and it really is a terribly simple thing to use, but I have also recently been reminded how different the world and the internet can look from my rather techno-geeky persepective compared to the average user. So, as a guide for my gentle readers who may not yet have had opportunity to acquaint themselves with the modern method of P2P sharing, I shall put forth the following simple list of appropriate links and tips.

1. Acquire a BitTorrent client. My personal favorite at the moment is µTorrent (pronounced microTorrent), particularly the standalone version as it can be made portable.
2. Start up µTorrent to set up a few options. Particularly, I would suggest turning on DHT by going to Preferences>BitTorrent>Additional BitTorrent Features and click the boxes here to enable these features. I have found having DHT on can help with torrents that have wonky trackers (feel free to ignore the technobabble, but trust me, it helps).
3. Download some .torrent files. You can find links above for the SXSW torrent for this year as well as a search engine specifically dedicated to finding torrents. I'm bored at the moment, so I'll give you a few links for the SXSW files I have found thus far:
• SXSW Showcasing Artists (2005)
• SXSW Showcasing Artists (2006)-Release 1
• SXSW Showcasing Artists (2006)-Release 2
• SXSW Showcasing Artists (2007)-Release 1 [Alternate Link]
4. Start downloading, either by opening the .torrent files in the client, or by telling your browser to open it directly using the client. Make sure you have plenty of space free in whatever drive/directory you choose as the download location, as the totality of these files is around 9.5 gigs of music files.

So there you go, all you need to start clogging up your disk space with an astounding array of music, movies, tv shows, etc. Just don't come complaining to me when you run out of room on your hard drive.

Labels: BitTorrent, language, music, netcasts

Mail man of the dead, and hiring speakers.

I'll admit, for the most part I haven't put a whole lot of effort into thinking about the whole supposed immigration crisis facing our country, mostly because I don't yet see it in terms of a crisis. Most of the time, I could care less if some immigrant (legal or not) wants to come and take a shit job that Americans won't work for the level of pay being offered.

That of course is, as long as it doesn't interfere with the swift acquisition of my coffee, especially if I haven't yet had any of said nectar. Such was not the case this morning as I staggered to Burger King for seared animal flesh, chicken ovum and grated tubers to accompany the much need java.

Corporate America, here's my free tip to you this morning—if you have a shift of workers to cover your morning hours at a fast food establishment, for fuck's sake do not put the person with the weakest grasp on the English language on the fucking register. Hire whomever you want as far as I'm concerned, but do not make me deal with that sort of shit in a precaffeinated haze.

Luckily for those needing to deal with me for the rest of the day, my immediate thoughts of a little corporate restructuring via explosives were lost in a mixture of rapid caffeine intake and my sheer amusement at the sight of a mail truck pulling out of the cemetary across the street. Logically, I know that there is an office located on the cemetary grounds, and it was to the living that mail was being delivered to, but I couldn't help but let out a little cheesy, late-night-horror-movie-marathon inspired Mailman...of the DEAD.

What can I say, between that and They Ate—a note on Lee's refrigerator pertaining to the cats but in which I insist lies a perfect movie title—I'm jonesing for some decent zombie themed entertainment. I should probably get off my butt and get in contact with the folks doing The Book of The Dead, I wouldn't mind being in another low grade B movie production....

Labels: language, random, undead

From the No Duh Department

Subsection: Authoritative INTP Grammarian

So I'm cleaning up my desktop as the first step in a total system cleaning that's in process, when what should I come across but the code from one of those random net quizzes that makes the rounds through people's inboxen. Of course if I remember correctly, this one actually came from a link on meyerweb.com. Folks who know me will probably not find the results too terribly surprising...

You are the grammar Fuhrer. All bow to your
authority. You will crush all the inferior
people under the soles of your jackboots, and
any who question your motives will be
eliminated. Your punishment is being the bane
of every other person's existence, because
you're constantly contradicting stupidity.
Everyone will be gunning for you. Your dreams
of a master race of spellers and grammarians
frighten the masses. You must always watch your
back. If only your power could be used for good
instead of evil.

Now this is not the exact code of course—the original code was a hackneyed mess of <br> tags, and badly formed ones at that for modern HTML/XHTML. It was an easy fix though, I just converted the whole text block over to a <pre> element and let the white space do it's magic. Well, that and I eliminated all the useless <font> tags that were mucked up in there. You know, modern day, standards based, authoritative evangelical markup grammar...hey wait a minute, that sounds strikingly familiar in some context.

Labels: language