I’d like to formally recommend the album to anyone interested in film soundtracks or ambient type things in general. “Soundtrack to a Vacant Life” is described basically as it is titled, and while normally a much more aphexy musician, on this album he has toned and tuned everything to the pace of his life. This is a mostly relaxing trip through what I see as a truly grandiose statement of electronic music. This is a project I would do.

This story is a couple weeks old, but I finally finished getting to the album and I really wanted to mention it. This is part of us moving on. Check it out online.

These points are all solid and the idea of real hope in a cynical nightmare government is refreshing unhorrible. What is anyone doing right now but talking anyway? It’s goddamn talking season; we have to hear about these things.

Incidentally, he stole a huge part of this speech from a friend that steals large parts of his speeches. Oh nos plagerism!

Tomorrow could be one of the biggest days in what will be our generation’s history. I talk about it too much already, so I promised I would keep this one brief (I lied). Also please don’t assume I’m jumping on some sort of endorsement bandwagon here, as I totally don’t care about endorsements outside of entertainment and I think it’s important for everyone to talk about this crap with everyone.

It is important that everyone makes time and goes to their polling place and sticks four fingers into the system that has been fucking up their lives for the past few years. The only way to beat this system is to use it; this is a basic fact of American civics.

I want to also note that it is particularly important for anyone under 25 to get the hell off of their lazy asses and just go to their polling places tomorrow and vote. Look up where it is, stop whining about it, and go do it. If you are an older person that cares about the horrors of government and interact with the 18-25s regularly, inspire them. Make it happen.

As for me, I will be representing my home state and the man whose birthday I stole next week (who understood the concept of inspiration as catalyst) by voting for the guy that announced his candidacy in the same place as some of the most eloquently backhanded speeches ever have been delivered.

I have been talking about this quite a lot over there on the twitter, but it’s not about buzzword bingo or hot shit trends or bandwagon bumblefuck. This is about reform that will relieve the poor of the rich’s burden (without empty leftist rhetoric promises). It is about technology not scaring off the elderly Washington geriatrics. It is about SERIOUSLY TECHNOLOGY IT’S THE FUTURE. It is about taking our country back from companies and stockholders by using it against itself. It is about diversity and proving to Negative Nancies™ that our country really has come this far.

I am a skeptic leaning far into the realm of cynicism. That cynicism is a result of the past seven years, and I don’t consider it permanent. I looked into this guy and the whole behind the scenes mess, and I said fuck libertarianism for a couple years if this will actually improve life. I genuinely think it will, and that is after excessive cynical review. I am much more surprised than I am proud to report that the state of Georgia agrees.

It is time to move on and up. This rutwalking can finally end with thinking positive, and I say that with the most respectably desperate tone possible. I already voted for this guy in Illinois, watched what he did after that, and now I’m going to vote for him again. Thank you for listening.

Supplemental: Here is a very detailed, objective assessment of Obama that I admire.

Featuring Vatche Panos as a drug user! JD Ryznar and Hunter Stair live up to the Yacht Rock name. What could happen next? Is it a one shot to tease the masses, or a sign of continuance? Proper link.

Too bad about Jason Lee, especially considering his recent career choices.

I feel that he is more a statesman than a politician.

Designer endorsements…that is classy shit!

(obligatory rhetorical hypothetical: has Black President Fever taken off yet? tidal wave)

You see, the idea is that he can bring people (as in parties, as in stubborn-assed Republicans) together to actually do something and change the bullshit corporate politics that has ruined the planet, as opposed to effectively tossing a faux-communist hyper-partisan leap year our way. Obama is talking about this crazy thing we had in this country back in the day…I think it was called compromise?

Free bonus link!

xkcd too!

Also Ted Kennedy!

Barack may be inspiring, and we may like his ideas, but he hasn’t been in Washington long enough. He hasn’t been stewed and seasoned long enough. We haven’t boiled all the hope out of him.

There’s a lot of connections being made here. It’s seeming less like impractical idealism and more like urgent reality by the day.

Seriously. The roads become much like a pinball machine. Everyone talks about how they next day is already a snow day even though an inch hasn’t stuck and it’s going to stop soon. They talk about being trapped at work and having to sleep there.

It’s hilarious. Oh and certainly a bit more in a few hours than we’ve gotten the past two years.

Of course it was shitty frozen rain by the time I left, but that doesn’t matter.

Mr. Pregnant wants nothing but to eat your children at tea. Don’t watch it.

That is the most disgusting code I’ve ever seen on anything that you’re supposed to embed on a webpage, ever. It’s really a damn shame because it’s slick. And I will say this station (Buckethead similar) is the best station I’ve found in a while.

The idea here is that using del.icio.us to do the work for you, it is possible to think about bookmarks, the internet, and navigation in a new way. The old way could be considered a rigid, organizational construct that is a leftover from a few decades of simple, common sense-based professional computing. This new way of approaching it is basically a by-product of the wholesale industry adoption of tagging, which is a construct of a lazy new generation really making computers do the work for them. The sad part is that this time laziness triumphs. Firefox makes it even easier.

If you don’t have a delicious account, go there and sign up, and then in the settings you will want to import or upload your current bookmarks. Don’t feel pressured; it took me about three years to do this.

From here, the flexibility of the system gets pretty insane. You can tag things however you want (for example, I didn’t tag anything old but tag everything new). This contrasts bookmarks in that there was only one place you could put one bookmark without duplicates. Now, you can have one bookmark with an endless amount of ways to organize and find it via infinite tags.

There’s more. You can subscribe to tags and get alerts from fairly specific triggers. You can add people to your network. You can add me and see what I mark. I watch people that I know have an eye for trends and the like. The great downfall of the networking on delicious is that right now (changing in 2.0) there is no simple way of inviting people or adding people; the only way is to visit their profile and hit add.

(Side note: you can bundle tags. This essentially means that you can tag tags. That drives me a little beyond the edge as it’s time to get less organized, not more!)

With all these benefits, a single notable negative trait, and the potential coming from the next version, not even I could continue to stubbornly insist on using browser-based, tagless, single-computer bookmarks. Thus, I recommend to others to join me in moving on (detailed usage video!).

Footnote: they’re called bookmarks, not favorites. That’s simple, settled, ancient terminology (and not even Microsoft can change it).

I have explained these in a video here, while mostly saying “retarded” instead of “absurdist” to piss off the establishment.

First, the newer of the two, Return to Supermans (from channel101):

And what is described as a trailer from the 60s, Italian Spiderman:

Now I know these things are old news, but I just can’t shake the feeling that they’re too related. After further review they’re not nearly as similar as I thought, but just retarded. Hilarious, but retarded.

Also, painful, vcr-edited, clip-sound low-fi is hot shit right now.

• Garth Marenghi’s main character acquires a baby man-eye that drives him a bit crazy.
• Xavier finds himself in the care of seven babies after he steals them, and then solves the mystery of who stole them before he does a phoenix act.
• Tim and Eric introduce their huge collection of cutting edge children, all conditioned and disciplined to be ready to active achievers in the next generation.
• Boondocks hasn’t been getting along this season (unwatchable again this week), taking itself way the fuck too seriously.
• Check the full Tom Goes to the Mayor episode this week entitled “Glass Eyes” to get an eyeful of retardedly serious nonsense.

Stupid serious is a serious phase of hilarity.

I follow up tomorrow.

This is my listening history (via) from the last two years (November 2005 to 2007) of my last.fm records. If you look at the full size version you can see how my phases shift and mutate, and you can see new huge trends like the introduction of a huge variety of post-punk and yacht rock, as well as the Pendulum/Future Prophecies drum and bass explosion.

For this particular graph, red is old things that I have been listening to for a very long time, and the cooler the colors get, the more recently I’ve been playing it. For example, green and beyond is things I’ve started listening to since May of 2006 (when I got the job), the blue stuff basically starts in 2007 after the promotion, and purple things sprout up a couple months ago.

The internet seems to be caving in on itself in a good way. Eventually I will be able to start my college that specializes in study and manipulation of metadata.

I finished hard in about six hours straight though, failing only on Raining Blood, thus sacrificing my shit to SLAYER

Also it’s awesome, but I really explain it in the emovideo if you care about that kind of game, including some problems (I forgot to mention the almost unnoticeable ads), none of which really involved SLAYER

HATE THE NEW LOADING SCREEN AND THE LEAD SINGER HATE HATE HATE

Otherwise new art is good and all that mess. Some of the character exaggerations are for the best, and others aren’t. There’s surprises and disappointments (oh, my Judy, what did you do with your clothes!), and a hell of a lot of new crap to break your hands playing SLAYER

I cannot wait to stick all five fingers way up deep all gross into expert.

• flickrvision – Shitty pictures people upload, as it happens. See many cats.
• twittervision – This is stupid mini-updates highlighting all the retarded minutia people think is interesting, but you never see in movies (because no one really wants to hear about or see what people do in the bathroom nineteen times a day). It’s called “micro-vomiting.” I like to watch when it focuses on tons of Japanese updates in succession because I can’t even pretend to read Japanese anymore. This is the pinnacle of the short attention span.
• wikipediavision – This one shows wiki updates by geography. See nerds flex.
• This site focuses just on map hack sites. You could say it updated you on updates from updated sites updating their update feeds or pinging the update pongshooter…calling them mashups the entire time.
• This crazy genius even made a (mac-only thus not valid) screensaver that shows what two of these sites display as updates when other sites make those updates, thus e-stalking the shit out of the entire world at once.
• flagr – This is insanity on a level I am having difficulty decoding. I think I might not understand why people want to use the internet to only ever talk about the real world. Maybe my thirst for meta-data is drastically and dangerously above average.

Is it ok for the internet to never shut up about the real world? Isn’t there more than reality, partially because of the internet?

I want to see a map update visualizer thing for last.fm (and possibly newbtube). That’s an official demand.

Ok, I’m going to admit that I am a bit of a fag for maps. Not necessarily these kinds of maps, but I’m saying I like maps. I kept a world map I had to track earthquakes worldwide for a class up for years. We have maps of Mars in our bedroom right now, framed. I used to draw maps and make out with maps and buy map porn. I was on map mailing lists and went to map tournaments and hung out at map bars. I was map-bashed and publicly ridiculed.

This meta-useless (though undeniably awesome) shit was brought to you by Web 2.0.

Update: I’d also like to see tag clouds for youtube, if anyone’s noticed any.

See for yourself.

What’s going on here? The oink site now links to a google search most likely intended to help you find this page, which links to a huge variety of torrent sites. I’m ok with the terminology “hydra” when applied to torrents.

He even changed the secret shady-as-hell note page, which made the ominous-yet-vaguely written propaganda threat page seem fake. Before it was changed, it was a note from the super-riaa (IFPI + BPI) to the police saying thanks for the help, and had the exact text for the threatening front page in its entirety. How official does that sound? Hopefully I won’t be picked up for plagiarizing this text, which was on the front page after being taken from here:

Pedro,

Many thanks for your assistance with this. Please find attached two logos for IFPI & BPI together with text to be displayed on a new homepage on the ‘Oink’ website. Can the logos be added to the page:

This site has been closed as a result of a criminal investigation by IFPI, BPI, Cleveland Police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police (FIOD ECD) into suspected illegal music distribution.

A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users

Many thanks

Keith

The site was hijacked, literally. This organization had no authority to access or use the domain. Essentially, they pulled exactly the same trick that hacker kids do to sites they vandalize. Hijacking website is generally considered illegal.

This story just gets more weird and twisted as the days pass, but it seems like more sources are becoming respectable in reference to the whole mess.

Here is the best waffle recipe ever (yes, metric; fuck off):

• 50g Egg Yolks
• 15g Sucrose
• 1g Sea Salt
• ½ Vanilla Bean
• 125g Sifted Cake Flour
• 2.5g Baking Powder
• 50g Whole Milk
• 200g Heavy Cream
• 50g Butter (82% fat)
• 10g Dark Rum
• 1 pinch Cream of Tartar
• 45g Egg Whites

Mix wet crap and dry crap together, let it sit for a half hour, then cook in an iron or whatever. Best waffles ever. Seriously.

The Democrats got their asses handed to them, and some handled it well while others flopped. Republicans are up next, and I can’t wait to watch them get completely destroyed by honest questions from a smart, young, and pissed off audience.Then after that, maybe someone I want to elect will be on. This is an appropriate place to mention that I am employed full-time, have no health insurance, and haven’t seen a doctor or dentist in over five years. Makes getting an inhaler (for asthma duh) a little difficult.

(dumb mog)