With the exception of the metal screams this is a pretty solid album until "Remember Everything" (Track 8) then it falls apart. It starts to turn into a bunch of generic revenge ballads.
Until that point, again with the exception of the metal screams, the vocals are pretty good. The guitar fills the album with a bunch of crunchy riffs. There is definitely a double pedal that's getting a work out. It's not a great album but it's not disappointing or bad either. It wasn't an exercise in patience to listen to. I was actually digging it.
Then "Remember Everything" happens. The album turns into a childish and if may say it musically boring fuck you to anybody the band thinks done it wrong. Don't get me wrong I think revenge songs can be fun. I love "99 Problems."
The problem with revenge songs though is if you do it wrong you make yourself look like the jackass of the song and that's what these guys did. Even when that's the case I can forgive it when the song is fun enough.
The latter half of American Capitalist just isn't. It just makes the band look like a bunch of whinny little bitches. And I feel bad for them son 'cause I got 99 problems but 'em bitches ain't one.
You know how every couple of blog posts I have to give a disclaimer that I'm a lefty at heart. Guess what?
While I hate Law and Order: SVU, I actually dig the original. I just found it on Netflix and have been treating myself to a few hours of watching "Hang 'em High" McCoy do his thing.
And it reminded me of a point I made in an old ethics essay for a class.
The importance of the presumption of innocence. I "imagine" that that lawyers don't argue guilt or innocence because they have a personal stake in it, but because the certainty of what happened is in question for a jury and they need to hear arguments of both guilt and innocence. That is my snooty way of saying that for a lawyer it shouldn't matter if your client is guilty or not. The truth of the matter is you don't know and you can't know. The best we can do is let a jury decide what probably happened and live with whatever they say.
In most of the episodes of Law and Order what happened is left ambiguous so we can be entertained watching the cops work through case. Just as if we were a jury we don't actually see the crime.
Despite that, because the show is told through the eyes of the prosecuting attorney the audience knows all the suspects are guilty. Hang 'em high McCoy! But do we? Nope. The best we can do is let both the defense and the prosecution present their case and let the jury vote.
In real life, that's what is supposed to happen they vote and you have to have faith that the system worked. The prosecution presented their evidence, the defense presented their evidence, the jury looked at both and came to a reasonable decision.
But because the show follows the prosecution the defense attorneys come off as slime. Their job is keep the criminal out of jail thus subverting justice. That is not their job. They are all part of a system to see justice done and both the prosecution and the defense ultimately have the same job within that system. To present a reasonable depiction of the unknown truth so a jury can come to a reasonable conclusion in the service of justice.
P.S. The ethics essay mentioned argued that the media bonanza surrounding the Menendez case interfered with the presumption of innocence. Don't look at me like that. The research was easier. I had video and all sorts of documentaries.
It was finals week and I was working on that minidocumentary. (Stop with the shameless plug.)
I'll write another blog post about it later but I hate the writing in SVU. Half the time the entire point of the episode is to make a ludicrous ill informed argument and the other half is to deal with horribly written melodrama. It all adds up to make a show that I just a can't take seriously.
P.P.S. I'm not naive I just wrote how I feel the justice system should work I'm wholly aware that sometimes it doesn't happen that way.
This album took me a while to form an opinion on. The most obvious reason for that is that I loved their debut album, Fallen when I was a kid and this one I'm not so hot on. This is a challenging album. I don't mean bad but challenging. See rock's great contribution to music writing is the hook, the catchy repetitive 3 or 4 notes/chords along with a chorus that you can't get out of your head. This album says screw that in favor of more complicated melodies.
Which means that this isn't one of those albums you're going to be singing along to in your car. It is however a very emotional series of ballads that combine many instruments you wouldn't normally think of in a rock album, and what's weird is the guitar is probably going to be the one you pay the least attention too.
Most of the other instruments along with Amy Lee's voice create a wierd creepy, and kind of epically pissed off vibe. Not the bar room brawl saw some dude is hitting on my girl and is just asking for an ass kicking kind of pissed off, but "Don't ever ask me for another favor because we're done. Get out of my life." pissed off. But back to the point I was trying to make, the guitar sounds kind of boring in the middle of all that. The guitar riffs are kind of generic when you put them next to all the other stuff.
I just thought this might be cool to share. I like creating huge Magic the Gathering decks that go right up to the limit of what the Magic Online is designed to handle, 1400 cards. To do this I made this spreedsheet to help get the proportions right. I've been experimenting with using it for smaller decks too. You can change the total number of cards and the category percentages to get card numbers. It also tells you how many cards you should have in deck once you get done with each catagory.
On September 26, 2011 Southfield's City Council voted for the necessary legislation to allow Lawrence Technological University to build a new dormitory. Here is audio of the public hearing and vote.
After the vote regarding Lawrence Technological University, a public hearing was held and relevant legislation voted on regarding the possibility of Golden Corral building in Southfield. Ultimately the Southfield City Council voted against allowing Golden Corral to build at the site they desired. After the vote the mayor spoke on the difficulty restaurants and other businesses may have in coming into the city. Here is audio of the relevant aspects of the September 26, 2011 city council meeting.
Okay it's late at night. I did what I said I was going to do for the day and I'm bored. I should start writing...fiction but I really am not in the mood. To mentally prepare my self for that moment I want to talk a little about "Game", how it got started and where I want to go with it.
Most sports stories artificially create conflict by having the opponent be a total ass.
But I always thought the stories where both teams or players were likable were more well written and at the end of the day more fun.
The second reason was around the time I started thinking up game I was also really getting into science fiction. I was revisiting A Scanner Darkly, Andromeda and Batman Beyond. I loved cyberpunk (Though I still need to read Snow Crash and I only made it partway through Neuromancer) but a lot of stuff perplexed me. The problem is that a lot of the tech in original cyberpunk has come. (wi-fi, the i-phone, the internet) We are more or less living it, but the tone of the life and most of my friends and I lead is nothing like the dark dystopian future cyberpunk portrayed. Oh sure there is some scandal, and I'm broker than I'd like, but even though I may occasionally put on my Deckard face I am nowhere near as cynical as he was, nor do I feel I have a reason to be.
I would always watch cyberpunk movies and go, "Why can't the movie be more about how cool this tech is." And yes I think the internet is cool. I think it's awesome that, if I could afford a shiny new laptop, I could get wi-fi in most public places. I think the idea of augmented reality is cool. I think the idea of downloadable media is cool. The idea that if I get bored on a bus I can within about ten minutes buy and start reading something is cool. (Again if I could afford a kindle. I wasn't lying about the broke thing.)
The problem I always thought was that you needed conflict. A lot of the early cyberpunk was attempting to be allegorical, but as with most science fiction trying to speculate on how society will advance, a lot of those allegories seem dated. Do corporations have too much power in American society? Sure, but to me the idea of Globocorp now seems dated. The same could be said of the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
These tropes provided a lot of the conflict but I think that in a world where a lot of this tech is emerging we can, but don't have to be that far out. If you wanted to you could write an entire story about chronicling an epic flame war and how it affects a small forum where most of the participants kind of know each other.
Or even better write a story where the audience only knows the characters through their online personalities, and can subtlety pick out what's going on in their real life by how they act in character.
Maybe I'll save this for a later story, but the dichotomies between somebody's real life reputation and their online one interests me. That nice guy at work might be a huge troll and that quiet guy in the corner might be one of the best posters on his favorite forum. People act different on the internet than they do in real life, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better. It's almost like we have multiple identities, but didn't we always? People are different work and home too.
Problems and Blocks So why isn't "Game" as far along as I'd like. Firstly and honestly, "Sometimes I just want to be entertained."
Sometimes writing is the most entertaining thing I can think to do. And sometimes it ain't. A good chunk of what I have so far was written when I was bored in some class. As lousy as seems to say, while one day I hope to get paid to write, right now I'm not. I'm mostly doing all of this for shits and giggles, and sometimes I go, "You know what. I can get mo shits mo easily by watching a marathon of The Tribe."
Or better yet Dune. I could also really go for some Alice.
Then there is the "Oh Shinny" affect. All in all, I think I've actually gotten better at applying myself to putting "stuff" out there. But at the end of the day I still get to choose which stuff I get to work on. One day I might go. "I want to write about my magic triumphs." The next I might decide to write about what's going on at city council. The problem is that for something like "Game" or the myriad of other stories I have cooking I need to sit down for an extended uninterrupted time and tell myself that I'm not doing anything else until this gets done. And in reality there is no way that's going to happen I have too much fun stuff and not so fun stuff going on to do that.
Beyond that, and this is the one that's been haunting me, writing action is hard. You have to know exactly where each character is, how they can affect the world around them and how it can affect them. Especially in a non-visual medium that is tough. It sounds easy when I say it like that, but here is an example. Simple scene one guy is shooting a bullet at another guy. You have to know where they are in relation to each other, figure out the basic type of gun, and keep track of how many shots were fired, and figure out if there is any cover or innocent bystanders in the room nay the general area. You need to know all of the plausible ways "shit can hit the fan." It's a lot to keep in your head especially when you've broken off into two or three groups.
Most of what "Game" had been up to that point was me playing two sides of whatever mental conversation I had that day.
Where I want to take it I like characters, and I like the world. I've already gotten started on a pseudo-sequel. I just need to end the match already.
You know those albums our parents speak of as gifts of the gods, The Wall, The White Album, Straight out of Compton, Legend. This is one of those. I've been saying it a lot lately so I don't know if it means as much, but this album is amazing. It's diverse and has something for everybody. It's not about being lumped into a genre it is it's own thing that transcends genre. You go from a crunchy rock riff to an old school rap session between tracks 2 and 3 ("Boarder Crossing" and "Stay the Course") then goes in to a Bob Marley-like ballad ("I've Been Trying').
On the album Shadow is giving us himself, everything he digs and everything he is. And god is it good.
The king has died. As a result I expect a flurry of articles about Apple in the coming weeks. When people talk about Apple they can't help but talk about Microsoft. Why hasn't Microsoft, which a decade ago had undeniably better positioning not become the force that Apple has?
When I was a kid and people were talking about the wonders of technology they were talking about all the new ways people could use P.C.s.
In today's culture the P.C. has lost it's mystic. Right now the wonder is all about mobile technology, which is a field, that Microsoft is playing catch up on.
There are a number of things that Microsoft does, and is a leader in, but culturally we take most of them for granted. Nobody cares that the standard word processor taught in schools and colleges was Microsoft Word, which brings me to a secondary point.
Internet Service I loved walking down the software aisle growing up seeing all of these amazing pieces of software that would do cool stuff. I loved Encarta, an entire encyclopedia that was searchable in seconds. I loved Streets and Trips. All of these were premium services. Many of which were supplanted by free services on the internet.
In the days these services were in their prime it was impractical to use their internet equivalents because they either didn't exist, or they were in their infancy like the rest of the internet.
Today however that is not the case. There is less and less of a problem with using the internet for major computing functions. People have access to more bandwidth and many computers automatically sign in to the internet.
The main advantage that services like Microsoft Office, Streets and Trips, and Picture It have over Google Office, Google Maps and Piccasa is disappearing. It used to be a pain to do work over the internet especially since before broadband which is a relatively new development (Broadband over took dial-up only in 2006) people had to either deal with not having a phone connection or get a new line. People needed to be productive while only being online in short bursts. So anything that could be done through local computing was a godsend.
That's not the case anymore. People don't mind working in the cloud as much as they used to. In fact some people welcome minimizing the hard drive space. As a result many of the programs that Microsoft used to create have become obsolete as we move more and more towards doing things on the internet.
See What's Cool and Make it Better Apple didn't create the MP3 player, the Smartphone , or the tablet, but it did find ways to make these products better. If Microsoft wants to better position itself in the marketplace it needs to keep it's ear to the ground and figure out where computing is heading. For example, As mentioned before it seems to be headed for the cloud. Microsoft has the money to develop a web service platform not unlike Google where in clicking a icon in windows would take you to sort of an personalized online desktop where you could access web services and applications developed or at least supported by this cloud interface. If Microsoft did it well they could develop them in a where they worked well together like Apple and Google products already do. The main draw of it would be the interface, having a variety of cloud applications like photo editing and office solutions and in sort of a mini-desktop that could be accessed by tablets, phones, and P.Cs.
Note: This is hopefully what's going on with Windows 8
Short Version Cursing by itself is just words, but an insult is an insult. React accordingly, though keep in mind some people, places and things are acceptable targets. For instance, if anyone is going to yell at me for calling Jeffrey Dahmer a fucking bastard they have problems.
Long Version Goddamn it people, what the fuck happened to us. We were a country that was founded on the idea that for the status quo to change people had to be free to speak their goddamned minds. If that involves some fucking cursing excuse me!
The moment you start taking out what can and can't be said communication starts breaking down.
A word is a word is a word.
Oh I could start getting erudite in my analysis of how totalitarian governments first start by changing the way people think through censorship, indoctrination and propaganda, and that one of our best defenses against the government impeding on the liberties of man are our rights to freely communicate with each other, through the press, speech, and assembly. And that I refuse to start going down the path of new speak because some words can't be said.
But then again ... fuck it.
That wouldn't amuse me, and damn it, it's Saturday night and I want to laugh my ass off.
The truth of matter is that curse words are often the best words to express emotional intensity, anger, joy, sorrow. These are the words we reserve for emotion.
How do people know I've past the breaking point of the shit, I'm willing to deal with?
"Go fuck yourself!"
While rationality is important we should not even consider doing away with one of the most commonly recognized ways we have for communicating and dealing with extreme emotion.
(Wait. I thought you said you weren't going to be erudite about this. Fuck off!) The links of brotherhood and humanity are all tied to our ability to express that which makes us feel and to cut ourselves off from it would do us disservice. I feel. Through that which I feel I fight, and I write. (Stop listening to the bard while you type and speak plain, for if you do not, Miles, your words will miss their aim.)
Our rage, our love, our fear, and anger, these are the things that make us human, that which makes us make us sentient. Our drives and motivations. For whatever our sins, our emotions are what drive our greatest triumphs and failures.
To subdue the ways in which we convey them by removing from our vocabulary the words we use to express them, would rob us of that sentience. For what is a word but, a thought? I have a nature nay a right to feel rage, elation, sorrow and love and express such feelings through words and art. (I said stop listening to The Bard already Miles.)
Therefore I shall say, I feel goddamn great after that.
