fiction is lying.

I guess I’ll mirror stuff I write on last.fm about songs here:

I’m intrigued by this phenomenon of a metal band here and there that are brutal as shit, yet end up being from some odd place (France? metal?) and have lyrics and themes out of left field (the environment? whales?).

A good example of how these out-of-nowhere combinations work very well is Gojira. It’s French technical death metal about environmental subjects. Flying Whales sounds like an Earth Day festival being torn down by whales with chainguns. You’d never think this stuff would be so epic, until you consider the big picture.

I am talking about the band Gojira and song Flying Whales. I’d let you hear it right now if Mog hadn’t got nerfed to uselessness by being bought by Rhapsody. You could say they got owned for being so shitty. The one use of the site is now ruin’d.

Oh, and I don’t feel like crawling all over the place looking for a flash mp3 player or something right this second. It’s always GIVE IT NOW with you people.

Also I’ve been working too much so I got no patience and that’s why I’m not entertaining you.

Could such an oddball but somehow sensible concept have prevented the Civil War? Ron Paul thinks so. After all, every other country did it without a civil war…

Driving from Illinois to Georgia, we saw someone with a Ron Paul bumper sticker somewhere in Tennessee. I didn’t think those existed in real life irlstyles meatspace.

Today the only other place on the street that was open was that huge coffee chain. Dude that is always there was talking Ron Paul with a customer.

Could an internet subculture be much much huger than the mass media portrays it? Yes. Would this be one of those cases? That question is why this is interesting.

The internet, unhappy with its futile Ron Paul spamming campaign, today launched a large flying object into the sky to spam the heavens themselves with Ron Paul mindshare.

This election is comedy gold.

Side note: this site now uses Google Analytics to maximize profits and achieve goals.

The slider on this tag cloud of presidential speeches shows frequency of word usage and obvious trends in big media politics.

The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2007 AD.

Terrorist and Iraq have been the biggest words the past few years (6 years of terrer!), and economy’s been big since the 70s. There’s some very telling things inside these walls of text. It’s like flash cards of four year periods.

Gratuitously overmentioning family for stupid emotional points was invented by Ronald Reagan and crew in 1986! Seriously. It became a buzzword in 1986. It’s only been 20 years. We can overcome the bullshit rhetoric in politics and be real (and still lie about it even). We did it for hundreds of years.

Have a look at Franklin Roosevelt’s third (!) inaugural address (1941) or the social security announcement (1935), or . Those are serious problems. What the fuck do we think we’re doing now? p.s. Those were real speech writers like damn. That shit jerks tears.

(found here)

This sketch from The State was the first time I had been made aware of the idea of pushing a nonsense argument beyond its own limit:

This method has come under frequent use the past couple of years under what has become the insane modern umbrella of serious comedy.

With some comedy we are just past the point of jokes, where a joke can even be past itself, and this is that case. The real emphasis lies in drawing attention to the argument despite its pointlessness. This is a serious matter. This is acting; there’s an art form in excessively pigheaded lying.

Seem familiar? If you work in a bureaucratic environment, this crap tends to happen in real life! Politics? Watch a modern debate and tell me those guys are pushing lies to the point of comedy. They use this beyond circular reasoning crap as a debate tactic. It’s post-ironic.

Don’t get me wrong; Mormons are always nice people. It’s a coincidence probably, but it’s true. Does that immediately qualify the Mormon faith for office? Not without proof that you’re not very serious about it. There are 0 facts in this video:

“Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.”
- Complete Fucking Psycho

This horseshit brand of neo-new age backward talk has no place in government. He wants to reword his way to the White House all of a sudden on the Eloquence Express 101 Line. There shouldn’t be an acknowledgment of god in the public domain, Mitt. That’s not public business. Those are the rules. If elected, it would be part of your job to enforce those rules. Do me a favor; don’t get elected.

MYTH: Religion is serious business and should be discussed in reference to public policy.

FACT: Religion is always a potential platform of candidates that don’t address real issues.

There is not a limit to the separation of church and state; it’s a line. Government is not to go poking it’s nose in religion’s business, so why would religion think it’s place was to poke it’s nose in government?

To paraphrase, shut up. I have written congressmen asking for them to propose a new amendment to the Constitution creating separation of state and Romney. No founder ever wanted that shit anywhere near the office.

If you have the kind of brain aids that makes you constantly need to feed it more things, you might be interested in oddly detailed, guided tours through history. If you’re interested in that or learning how we learned how to learn, you’ll like this:

I know some people could be sensitive and call it dry, but James Burke is a pretty serious cut-up considering his field of study, and I’ve worshiped his books for years. Note that this is part 2 of 5 of episode 1 of 10. This can be a serious fast track to general knowledge of the history of science, and is almost an eerily appropriate primer for skeptical thought and understanding of the scientific process and how it effects history, all under the umbrella of chaos! This is multi-threaded teaching and thinking.

In the closing scenes of The Day the Universe Changed, Burke suggested that a forthcoming revolution in communication and computer technology would allow people all over the world to exchange ideas and opinions instantaneously. Subsequent events seem to have proven him right. His views of the connected nature of history have also been substantiated by recent research in chaos/complexity/network theory.

Essentially anything here is going to be similar or have an even wider berth, but I definitely suggest Connections as it caused a bit of an educational revolution that logically played out to its fullest form on the internet.

Nintendo America didn’t release Super Mario Bros. 2 in the United States because they didn’t think people would buy a game that looked just like the original, and they thought it was too hard (which it is, unless compared to the second half of the first game). Eventually it came along as the Lost Levels in Mario All-Stars, but was it ever really much more than just a damned sequel? Instead, this acid trip got made into a Mario game:

Familiar music (glad they beefed it up for us)? Assuming the lost levels thing isn’t entirely bullshit hearsay, there are a few problems with either the myth or the actual decision Nintendo made.

If you look at other Nintendo Entertainment System series, you see that sequels became a commonplace way to get more games out, and in many cases just make some cash for garbage. But those sequels generally had a few things in common.

1. They sold.
2. They looked very, very similar to their predecessors: Mega Man, Double Dragon, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Dragon Warrior, Adventure Island, etc.
3. They were almost never an entirely different Japanese game in disguise with very few changes.
4. They always warranted unneeded items on lists, or even unneeded lists.

Mario’s a weirdo all because they decided to make his first sequel another goddamn game in disguise.

One of the few major exceptions to this rule, which also follows the “logic” behind the Mario Bro decision, is Zelda. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, looked very little like its predecessor, but maintained Zelda continuity traditions that continue today. Zelda II was, however, insanely difficult.

Zelda stories are like a comic book over the years. The stories come from different places and do different things. Link is a bunch of different dudes. Mario’s just one guy. It seems now that he hasn’t changed at all since Super Mario Bros. 3. Instead, the game engines that drew him did. He’s a brutally minimal example of technological evolution, as are the worlds he lands in. Mario is video games.

Supplemental: To go along with yesterday’s crying about how good adult swim was this week, I wanted to mention another two videos that are retarded for different reasons and involve prototypical, non-Japanese, foreign superhero images.

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.

Each of the big adultswim.com premieres this week are absurdist explorations of male-only parenthood. They’re so goddamn serious about being retarded that they can only be described at cutting-edge-ridingly hip.

• 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.

Google Trends could possibly be lethal in my hands.