O Gentle Readers, I would be truly remiss if I did not make it a point to express my elation and sorrow. Sorrow for the loss of Table of Malcontents, and elation that when ToM was slain a glorious monstrosity arose from its fetid corpse to continue to disseminate only the finest cthuloid steampunk propaganda porn available, among other gruesome oddities and fascinating delights.
Be sure to stop by Ectoplasmosis (or “ectomo” for short) and tell them I sent you. ;)
If you’re interested in contributing, they have a twitter account which you can “at” message to send links of interest. (i.e. @ectomo russian steampunk explorer vessel art http://urltea.com/blablablabla)
Help with the layout would also be welcome, as they’re wriggling deparately inside their first carapace, begging to molt into the glorious octobee they know they’re capable of being.
Ever wanted a quick visual representation of a particular set of search options from multiple engines? Search Crystal has you covered. It provides 3 different ways to view search results: clustered, spiraled, and listed. It will show you which engines pull up which results, too. So if Google and MSN are showing the same results, it will show you the difference in ranking. (Note: I have no idea at this time what they base their “rankings” on.)
I can picture this being not only a good tool for things like media seach, but also for SEOs to do a sort of litmus test for certain day-trader type terms on the fly.
As an example I have chosen the always interesting topic of Cthulhu! (It ~is~ Cthulhu Cthursday afterall.)
During these days of Table of Malcontents‘ last stand, every post is to be latched onto and ferverantly shaken like a favorite chew toy. From the incendiary, delightful Ms. Eliza Gauger comes a Noise Du Jour post sure to knock your socks off.
Meet Captian Ahab (no not that one):
Imagine, gentle readers, if Tenacious D played synth instead of guitar, partied hard with Mindless Self Indulgence every weekend, and only performed songs written by Lindsey Lohan. This is Captain Ahab.
The video on tap at ToM is for the song “U Want Me”. I don’t know what to say about the music itself that Eliza didn’t already capture in her very-on-point description. As far as the video goes, it’s safe to say this duo has no qualms about taking some of the most revered and oft-used symbolic gestures for “seriousness” and “artistry” and making it some of the most ridiculous shit imaginable. Running on the beach, wind effects shown in reverse so as to appear “ethereal”, suicide (in a bubble bath, no less) and the rescue from it. (Note: I am not saying suicide is trivial, I am saying that it has already been trivialized and this only goes to illustrate that to the Nth degree.)
The following video is for Captain Ahab’s musical contribution to 2006’s Snakes on a Plane. Entitled Snakes on the Brain, this tune and accompanying video have a look and feel ripped off from the headier, more music-oriented days of MTV. Expect a lot of booty shaking, lyrics that don’t necessarily make sense, and of course, snakes.
Just to keep things brief:
I dreamt I had a fish tank with a few kinds of viscious, snappy fish in it, and a small octopus and some other kind of shellfish or something. I accidentally screwed up the whole aquairum by collapsing one of the sides leaving only a tiny bit of water at the bottom, and nearly crushing the fish. I set everything back up and added in the appropriate salt water for this collection of pirhana like fish. (One looked like one of those clap-trap deals from Donkey Kong Jr.)
Next time I looked into the fish tank, it was full of irridescent octopi. They would look like small, but relatively normal, bluish and reddish octopi, then they would contract and glow in neon colors with cartoon faces. I watched this in fascination, as more were arrising, born out of the dead bodies of the fish that did in fact die because I had broken the tank.
That’s all I remember now. There was so much more. There has been so much more lately but I unfortunately haven’t had time to record the overall details. I have been told I need to watch Until the End of the World. …I can’t imagine why.
Do you long for the days of ‘zines? Running off to follow loud bands who were either extremely concerned or extremely unconcerned with the way of the world? Dressing however you felt like, and sometimes with the express goal of freaking out the normals? Well I more-or-less don’t because I missed the whole thing. I was either too young or too oblivious to know what was up. I was also one of those irritating “good kids” who never really did anything they wanted if it seemed like it might be trouble. …I’ve come a long way, baby, but I digress.
My beloved ToM tipped me off to Operation Phoenix Records, with their already bold “fuck you” attitude towards concise domain names and more up-to-date web design have provided a stunning collection of punk ‘zines. Most of them are donated from kind collectors, and the folks at OPR seem to have dilligently gotten permission to reprint all of them. Whole magazines have been provided as PDFs, and band interviews are provided as regular pages, with acts ranging from GG Alin and Millions of Dead Cops to Black Flag and Nirvana. For your reading pleasure I give you a sneak peek at the GG Alin interview (as it was originally featured in Maximumrocknroll):
MRR: What are your feelings on the bands in NH and Massachusetts?
GG: I don’t fucking know. I’m not in tune to what’s going on at all. I’m not accepted in the scene. I just go about my fuckin’ life and my thing so I don’t really know what’s going on. I can’t even keep track of myself, so how can I know about that?
What’s funny about that is I don’t really know much about the New Hampshire and Massachusetts music scene either, except of course for Turbosloth.
Maybe Logic “is” a hilarious and mind-bending journey into the multi-dimensional life of Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Featuring video spanning 25 years and the best of 100 hours of footage thoroughly tweaked, transmuted and regenerated, Maybe Logic follows the ever-open eye of Pope Bob as he penetrates human illusions exposing the mathematical probabilities and spooky synchronicities of the 8 dimensions of his Universe.
The feature-length documentary features Tom Robbins, RU Sirius, Ivan Stang, Paul Krassner, Valerie Corral and Douglas Rushkoff.
The soundtrack includes music from Boards of Canada, Animals On Wheels, Tarentel, Funki Porcini, The Supplicants, Pullman, Matt Elliott, The Cinematic Orchestra, Ognen Spiroski and Amon Tobin.
This documentary on the lives and times of Robert Anton Wilson was made by Deepleaf Productions. It won Best Documentary Audience Award at the 2004 San Francisco Independent Film Festival. It’s a region-free DVD, and the run time is over 3 hours. There are tons of extras, too. I fully recommend checking out the trailer when you get an opportunity. The only thing that’s mildly discouraging is that it’s a little difficult to hear RAW speak, but that could be an audio quality issue on the trailer. Regardless, when I get my hands on the DVD I’ll go out of my way to watch it with subtitles.
Deepleaf has also put out an audio book of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Exceprts of that audio book are available as a podcast at Deepleaf Audio. The snippet of podcast I listened to is brilliantly narrated. I was not at all impressed with the narrator for The Earth Will Shake, however. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste, but the narrator featured in that snippet (Scot Crisp) had awful rhythm and struck me as completely smarmy and dull. I tend to prefer a physical book anyway. More on all of that after I’ve had an opportunity to read the book.
(Ahem. Added an Amazon Wishlist tracker to the Misc Information page. Just, you know, so everyone’s aware.)
Recently I have been playing around with Twitter. I signed up months and months ago as part of some contest and only recently started using it to assist a friend in figuring out what the big deal was. (Besides, it’s always nice to get your initial awkward moves in a new social tool accomplished under the radar, ne?)
Give it a once over. If you’re new, these are good guidelines utilize. If you’ve been at it for a while, read it and make sure you aren’t guilty of any social service faux paux.
50,000,000 Blank White Pixels for starters. Although I prefer to see it as an exercise in photoshoppery, combined with an unwillingess to stagnate into the blah conformity of constant stress.
My private, LAN-based ShoutCast radio station. I enjoy sharing my musical collection and providing my co-workers and myself with an enjoyable soundscape for the day. Incidentally, the Last.FM stats seen here are coughed up by the box running the Shoutcast. Which means the presented stats aren’t all “me” in the strictest sense.
Work. Always with the work.
I’ve been playing a lot of Pokemon Pearl since I got my hands on the game. The changes they’ve made (like time-sensitive events, better dual-pokemon battles, etc) really add a new level of enjoyment to the standard of gameplay they’ve set up. While I agree with my friend John that the battles themselves are still sort of slow, I’m pretty accustomed to that from years of RPG-type “random encounter” battles. It’s really not that much of a sacrifice. Besides, I got a freaking Abra before I even got my first badge! What’s up now, bitches?! (Incidentally, I don’t have a good place to connect for WiFi play, so no friend code action until I get a real wireless router.)
This blog. Yes it’s true. I spent a few hours last night just slapping social widgets and whatnots into the template. Of course, this template is highly temporary. I have every intention in the world of redoing the entire site to something more cross-browser compatible and attractive… or at least more cross-browser compatible.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time on IRC and a lot of time playing with Twitter. I’m in the mood to absorb ideas and assimilate people into my “circle of contacts”. There are few things I like more than knowing who to ask about certain subjects. The internet is a vast array of tubes crammed with all the information I could ever want, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to just ask somebody about something you’d like to know.
Yeah. Anyway. Time to stop wasting time and figure out what to do with the rest of today.
I use a few Linux distros at home and at work, and being a half-baked nincompoop, I prefer the shiny new ones that end in “buntu”. The 64-bit version of Kubuntu is what I run at the office, and I have installed my preferred web-browsing application, Firefox 1.5.x, with my favorite themes, and a ton of useful extensions, most of which I need for work.
Among these extensions, there is a slick little application called Sage. This is an RSS reader embedded into Firefox, which is almost unspeakably convenient. I am expected to do research at least some of the time because my job demands it. Therefore, I am subscribed to numerous feeds, some authored by unabashed marketroids in Manhattan, others by squirrelly black-leather-jacket types in exotic places like Prague.
Every once in a great while, the workload becomes, um, constipated. Don’t get me wrong, there’s never a shortage of things to do around the place, but lately we tend to hyperfocus on a few high-priority items at a time - as opposed to taking a more holistic view (as in “HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE HAVE SO MUCH TO DO HOW THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO THIS GIMME A CIGARETTE YOU PEEEN-ARSE YES I KNOW I DON’T SMOKE” etc). It might be perceived as inefficiency but our deliberately selective awareness of imminent doom allows us to actually get things done without the embarrassment of pissing our collective pants in abject terror after suffering massive aneurysms.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Slow day at work. Reason: we have a balky cms built in deprecated php. The code is liberally commented in at least one Central European language, but aside from that, documentation is scant. This cms has the quirky habit of eating posts according to some fiendish glitch. Programmatic functionalities combine with traditional meatbag error and really weird things happen to our precious data. We would like to begin serious repair of the website but there is no way to do this, at this time, without using this cms. (By the way, if you want to know what using our cms is like, imagine if Franz Kafka wrote Catch-22).
So, we must wire Switzerland and tell them to put their finest gnomes to work. By tomorrow, we expect these gnomes to be busily engaged in pulling meaningless strings of ones and zeroes from the mysterious innards of the database and weaving them into more or less normal html.
In the meantime, there’s various personal crises and dramas to fill the available time. All this stuff, on top of a two-long-island-iced-tea lunch and a nasty sugar crash caused by socially mandatory birthday cake, makes me stupidly susceptible to opening up the feedreader and clicking links. As a result I am now fully briefed on a variety of current events in the nerd universe.
First, let’s start off with what we already know. At 9pm EST yesterday, instead of deleting forum spam like a good boy, I was glued to my monitor, drinking a beer and watching as Digg rioted. This was absolutely fascinating. I’ve tried to spam Digg a few times so I know what kind of raw power was needed to unleash something like that, and believe me, the power level over there was waaaaaaaaaaay over nine thousand. A few places like the nefarious Forbes.com (more on those assholes later) were Diggbaiting this story earlier today (reposting a similar story at their own url in an attempt to attract backlinks), and earning upwards of 1000+ diggs. If I was into AdSense arbitrage I would have done the same thing. Digg is famous for funneling huge traffic to popular pages, enough traffic to crush a server. Some of those visitors will click an ad or two. Wash, rinse, repeat - voila! There’s your business model.
What was most interesting was Kevin Rose’s attitude. I was really impressed that he decided to side with the majority of Digg users. Unfortunately this flies in the face of all business sense (wherein you are supposed to avoid getting sued and do nothing except increase shareholder value, regardless of the collateral damage). In the more profit-minded areas of the intarwebs he has been damn near vilified, not so much for taking a stand, but the manner in which he took it. However, this issue involves more than just money. This is a matter of ethics. The future is at stake here, and rather than defer to the corporate interests involved, Kevin Rose did what was right. We won’t know the outcome for a while, but a line has been drawn in the sand, and a million computer enthusiasts are loudly saying with one voice “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
But, I’m beating a dead horse with all this Digg stuff. We all know about that shit. What I am really interested in is space.
Some kids play in the sandbox. We play in the.... litterbox??? The RKNet staff is pleased that you decided to stop by. Currently this is a 1 author project, with periodic guest posts. Contact giania [at symbol] gmail.com if you'd like to play here to.
