My friend Randy (a professional photographer) says he loves the Canon PowerShot A95's color and clarity - I bought the thing on his recommendation, and I've never regretted it. Though I do sometimes wish I could pull a tripod out of my ass on command, the way Adrian Paul manifests his sword - it would have made this image (the purdiest of several) nice and clear.

============

Update, 20060503 @ 1407 : desktop version (1600x1200, 334k) by request.

The Shield (season 1 DVD box set) : Having watched seasons 2-5, it was nice to finally get some context. The cinematography is quite a bit different in the first few episodes, with some great shot composition. While The Shield is easily one of the best cop shows evar, the spastic steadycam work gets on my nerves after awhile... so the fact that it's less epileptic in season one is an added bonus.

Wild Palms (8$ on amazon) : I've called it "Twin Palms" by accident a few times, for good reason. It is a bit like Twin Peaks, if TP was incestuous sci-fi instead of occult murder. More like Twin Peaks season one as opposed to the strung out middle-class luke-warm weakass "weird for the sake of weird" that is the second season (or Northern Exposure or The X-Files). Wild Palms is decent overall, though Kim Cattrall's acting is so fucking awful that I'm left feeling the hammed up over-the-top melodrama was deliberate. Worth it for the William Gibson cameo and Robert Loggia. Oliver Stone was Executive Producer, which may mean something to some people. In my opinion, WP is the most watchable thing he's done since Platoon.

The Sopranos (season 3 and part of season 5) : Good, but not as much fun as The Shield, despite the boobies and blow. Makes me hate the shit out of rich people all over again.

Monty Python's Flying Circus (I've seen the movies and a handful of the sketches, but I just came off of a 35+ episode marathon, so.) : Highlights include the science fiction sketch and The Cycling Tour. Lots of good, lots of awful, lots of awesome. The Kids In The Hall continued the Good tradition, while Saturday Night Live has been keeping the Awful alive for decades.

Six Feet Under (seasons 1, 3, 5) : Fantastically good drama. Probably because I've got my own mental issues (which oscillate from mild to incapacitating), so I really identify with Billy. The gay drama bits are enlightening, while everything else runs from awesome (I love the future-client-as-intro bit) to awful (Ruth and Arthur made for good drama but was so not my scene that I skipped through those bits). Big fan of the "dealing with mental illness and psychological issues" aspect, and Claire vs. Art School makes me really, really glad I hang out with geeks instead of a galleryload of pretentous upper-middle-class shop-at-the-GAP motherfuckers who think menstruating on X-Rays, yanno, means something.

Space : Above And Beyond : A few decent concepts, some great characters, good set design and decent CG weakened by an oscillating sense of direction, unven writing, and the same "we've written ourselves against a wall, let's do something weird and call it a deus ex machina" that kept me away from the X-Files. It's a pretty entertaining series, though the repeated use of insubordination as a plot device (and complete lack of proper military consequences for said) gets tiring, as does the freshmen philosophical masturbation.

Oh, and the AIs look like Klingons with LED acne.

First strip since The Unspeakable (which isn't canon). Yikes.

It's been a given for some number of years that I can juggle two things at a time - ATC and DCR, ATC and 3d modelling (for ATC), ATC and pr0n, ATC and a social life, ATC and PISSPOWERASSCHRIST, half of any one of these and a girlfriend, ATC and _____________. "Fortunately" ATC is currently in Rendering Hell and I don't feel like drawing pr0n or plonking around in Garageband, so.

DCR hasn't been updated due to writers block or any sort of creative constipation - it's been put on hold in order to use that time for other projects, sitting on the back burner as sort of a contingency plan, a "this is what I'll do if I ever get fired, or take a vacation, or whatever."

{Insert a shitload of sentences beginning with or otherwise featuring 'because,' all of which are some form of dodge or avoidance}.

ATC is priority one, everything else is priority two. When The Dualist is done, Dead City Radio becomes ATC (it's a prequel to The Dualist). Until then it gets to take part in The Great Juggling Act that is all non-ATC projects.

Zing.

1. ORORORAS
2. Real Men Don't Wipe
3. The Aye Of The Dong
4. Blivet
5. Main Bus Undervolt
6. Wasteland (total)
7. Bert Goes To Los Angeles
8. Whores Of Doom
9. The I Of The Dong (Horizontal)
10. [Dong]
11. Meatwrench
12. I CAN'T FEEL MY ASS
13. ORORORAS (Funk Mix)

The source of track 11 (WINDBREAKER) isn't credited on the album art. Whoops.

Ben Bloom
1980.03.01-2006.04.18
Heroin Overdose

Keyboardist for Rein[Forced],
Frontman of Agnes Wired For Sound.

Image swiped from this thread posted to the PGHGoth Livejournal community.

I hung out with Ben off and on over the past few years - he was a loud drunk, a great frontman, and a lot of fun to be around.

 

21:02 < solios> Wild Palms is pretty cool.
21:03 <@bda> Cool.
21:03 < solios> yeah.
21:03 < solios> kind of slow start.
21:04 < solios> domestic domestic domestic RHINO domestic domestic domestic party blah blah blah WETWARE TELEPRESENCE HOLOGRAMS HEY LOOK WILLIAM GIBSON
21:06 <@bda> hahaha.
21:06 <@bda> That's the best synopsis of anything ever.

Bought it on Amazon for eight bux after unsuccessfully scrounging around for a torrent for the past year or so. Even if it winds up sucking, David Warner's bits have already made it more than worth the price tag.

Initial impressions : the acting is very uneven (remains to be seen if this is intentional or otherwise), Robert Loggia rocks, and comparisons to Twin Peaks are appropriate on a surface level only.

I'm currently about two and a half hours in and will wait until I've finished watching the miniseries before saying anything else on the subject.

I recently finished watching the 13 eps of Crusade in the JMS-recommended order (see the bottom of this page), and have the following observations:

1. The Excalibur bears an extremely strong resemblance to the Kestrel from Escape Velocity, which in turn looks like a sexed-up streamlined version of the Liberator from Blake's 7. Given the theme of Crusade, I imagine any intentional design "inspiration" is more B7 than EV.

 

Oh, and it has an SDF-1 flavored "main gun" that disables the ship for a minute after firing. The hows of this are explained in A Call To Arms (the setup for Crusade). The effect itself looks like a urine-flavored Death Star beam. Not sure how I feel about that - I like the turret beam cannons and the rack-mounted fighter launch features, but something about the "main gun" feels kind of anime.

2. It was odd seeing the Sheriff from American Gothic as a starship captain, but I got over it quickly - he's a good fit for the part.

3. The compositing is horribly uneven. It ranges from Decent For TV in some places to horrendously shitty in others, and it's frequently the latter - this ranges from the typical Doctor Who-esque would-be-matte-shots-20-years-ago with blue halos to weak audio design to absolutely needless (for example, the gym on the ship is the size of an airplane hangar, obviously a matte/composite, and everyone and all of their exercise equipment is tucked into one tiny little corner of it). These are more nit-picks than anything else, as the show was cancelled almost immediatly - to my understanding, TNT didn't even want to front the cash to finish post production on the episodes that had been filmed.... so it looks like corners were cut.

4. The CG ranges from pretty sweet (ships, hyperspace, etc) to fantastically awful (all character animation, one horribly crappy low-rez shot of a shuttle takeoff from a planet, in which the planet texture map might as well be a 32x32 pixel MS paint bitmap). Galen's homunculus looks like a Poser model. Physical props, however, are pretty damned sweet - the alien-in-a-bubble that eats negative emotions looks gorgeous.

5. There are two hitches with the JMS-recommended viewing order. The first and most obvious is the uniforms, which yo-yo a bit and are officially changed in the last ep of the JMS order. The second is that Lochley shows up and is introduced to Gideon after she gets picked up in a Star Fury, which is jarring from a character-continuity standpoint.

6. I dug the Franklin cameo.

7. The intro sequence is incredibly weak compared to the original B5 series. The upside is that it's a lot shorter, but the CG feels cheap and the music doesn't seem to fit. I slot this in with the compositing - why would TNT want to put up the effort to spitshine the intro to a show they'd already written off? It still spanks the shit out of the Enterprise intro sequence.

8. Galen's pretty cool.

9. Tie for Most Annoying B5 Thing Ever : Byron vs. Visitors from Down the Street, an X-Files parody episode.

10. (Pak'Ma'Ra porn)++

11. Despite the above-mentioned issues, the show has a pretty solid feel to it, builds nicely on the B5 universe, and would have kicked a hell of a lot of ass if it had gone its intended five-year run. Instead it got canned and a few years later we got the what-the-fuckfest of The Legend Of The Rangers.

Eleven tracks clocking in at a total of 50:39. The only shitting on the album occurs in Bungthruster (where it's used to simulate a sort of wet-boots stomp) and in Nightstick Sodomy (for obvious reasons). I'm almost proud of this album - it has its non-sucky moments and it's a lot more structured than previous PPAC releases, with little to no reliance on canned loops.

Album title by PW, Wasteland inspired by mdxi, guitars by BURZUM, textural support from _Lasar, everything else by me.

01. Attrition : Drum-and-Bassy noisy intro thinger.

02. Main Bus Undervolt : Dark noise-techno that turned out surprisingly non-shitty. A textural setup for Wasteland. Track title taken from the Apollo 13 incident (the anniversary of which occurred the same day the track was finalized).

03. Wasteland (Total) : Making techno-industrial history by covering a song I've never even heard, Wasteland is a visualization of the Wikipedia synposis of the 1971 Emerson, Lake & Palmer album Tarkus. Suggested by mdxi, which is why he gets album credit. It's a given that the track, which is excessively techno-noise-jungle-military-industrial, bears zero resemblance to either the original or the intentions of ELP. This is entirely intentional.... and the results are entirely unintentionally nonshitty.

0:13 Impairment (Lead) : A voice (presumably someone on the insertion team) screams PROG ROCK SUCKS! as the choppers come in.
2:28 Evidence Of Structure : A military team explores the site of Tarkus' final battle.
5:18 Robodillo : OMFG TARKUS LIVES (some kind of ZOMBIE ROBOT ARMADILLO THING)
1:52 Manticored : (which then gets its ass kicked, again.)
1:14 Impairment (Follow) : The same complainer on the insertion bitches some more during the extraction.

04. Bungthruster : Semiambient stompnoise, with some wet slurpiness for texture.

05. Planet Of The Americans : More textural noise, with some Bart Simpson, screaming monkeys and gunshots buried in the background for creepiness.

06. Lungenscheisser : Dark ambient noise that goes very well with the back cover of the album.

07. Hydrocodone : Solios reading spam email.

08. Pythagorrhea : A sequence of triangles. Autechre failing geometry.

09. Bert Goes To Los Angeles : Setup for Whores Of Doom, featuring Beavis and Butthead and a variation on the loops and processing of WOD.

10. Whores Of Doom : You people are all whores. Nicely drawn-out dark techno that could be appreciated by anyone who actually likes Velvet Acid Christ or Lords Of Acid.

11. Nightstick Sodomy : Noisescape exit.

As usual, email me if you're interested in actually listening to this shit. There's been some interest at Goth Night and on IRC but so far the inbox is empty. Probably due to the complete lack of non-DCR interweb promotion. :)

(Olyntho Tahara)++

Seven variations on a riff, plus an intro track to transition from "Aye of the Dong" into the block of "I of the Dong" mixes. Composition is something of a parody of the nine THOUSAND mixes of Nine Inch Nails "Perfect Drug" and "Head Like A Hole," as well as KMFDM's habit of releasing The Track And A Bunch Of Minor Variant Remixes You'll Never Listen To Again as a "single."

Kids these days.

Oh, and there's a cartoon dong on the back.

The Wikipedia entries regarding B5 eventually lead to The Lurker's Guide To Babylon 5, which kicks all of the ass, ever.

Only downside to B5? Byron's a total fucking goober.

Which Babylon 5 Character Are You?

You are Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova! Duty always comes first for you. You are all alone in the world, and you have terrible taste in men, so it seems likely to stay that way. However, for you, being good at your job almost makes up for it.

Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Awfully Livejournalish of me but I've been rewatching B5 lately and the quiz results (almost) fit.

There were two different quizzes on quizilla. I think the second one is slightly more accurate:

Which Babylon 5 character are you most like?

You are Vorlon Ambassador Kosh. People find it very hard to get to know you; you don't seem to follow the ordinary rules. If you ever came out of your shell, you would probably amaze everyone.

Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Hopefully that's the end of blogayness, at least for awhile. :P

01. Point Four Millidans : Explained here. Based on a true story. It's a .4 and not higher due to the lack of INCOMING!.

02. ORORORAS (Funk Mix) : The vocals and poop from ORORORAS with some distortion and new rhythm loops. Think of it as a dance mix gone horribly wrong. Mercifully short.

03. Real Men Don't Wipe : More danceable dookie. This one still cracks me up. I do not apologize for the overcheese - bad IS the goal.

04. Assblower (Buttlord Mix) : Pornish remix of Assblower from the RAW single. More of a complete rebuild than a remix.

05. [Dong] (quiet mix) : Remix of [Dong] from the SHITAKE(R) single. Fewer effects, no TRON sample and a more generalized ambience let the riff out.

06. Slipnut (plug mix) : Another remix from SHITAKE(R) - this one with Tron and Caddyshack samples. More danceish badness.

07. Stop Believing (Union Mix) : A bunch of drunken Pitt tards were karaoking Journey's "Don't Stop (Believing)" on my walk home one night. I grabbed about a minute of it with my camera and used that, sheetmetal, some of BURZUM's guitar work and some other bits to build this, which is as much a "cover" as it is anything else. You won't catch even a smidge of the original song unless you know exactly what to listen for.

08. Cooling Tower No. 1 : Ambient noise sludge mixed out of the eminations of the CMNH climate control system, which had a rod loose or something - it was making a distinctly atypical clanging that had to be put to use.

09. Windbreaker (Gale Force) : Remix of the title track of the Windbreaker single. Same length with a hell of a lot more oomph. Think of it as Windbreaker with a lot more texture.

10. Blivet : Ten pounds of bass in a five pound track. Created by spelling out "BLIVET! o_o" in Garageband, chucking in an 80s drum beat and mucking around extensively with the results. No shitting, no pissing, no other noise - touched up slightly in Soundtrack.

Shoot me an email if you're interested in actually listening to this shit.

21:22 <@xeno> fagbot: xeno's General Theory of Creativity is If you can ignore an idea for 3 days straight, it isn't worth doing.
21:22 <+fagbot> OK, xeno.
21:22 <@xeno> solios: I may need to learn how to Draw by this time next week
21:22 <@xeno> i'll keep you posted :|
21:22 <@solios> hence porn, ppac, atc.
21:22 <@solios> k.
21:22 <@xeno> exactly
21:23 <@solios> PORNPOWERASSCHOSEN?!
21:23 <@xeno> fagbot: solios's General Theory of Creativity is <reply>GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT GET IT OU- ooh, wangbabies.
21:23 <+fagbot> OK, xeno.
21:24 <@solios> \o/
21:24 <@xeno> and as exaggerated as that it is, it is also Entirely Accurate
21:24 <@solios> yes.
21:24 <@solios> :|
21:24 <@solios> xeno++
21:24 <@xeno> you Defrag by Doing.
21:24 <@xeno> i Defrag by !doing
21:24 <@solios> pretty much, yes.
21:24 <@solios> hah.
21:24 <@solios> no.
21:24 <@solios> you Defrag by Beering.
21:24 <@xeno> also, Doing is the best word in the language
21:25 <@solios> !doing is what you Prefer To.
21:25 <@solios> DOING!
21:25 <@xeno> it's like, you knoow, doing, and DO-O-O-O-O-ING! and dong, with an i.
21:25 <@xeno> it's awesome.
21:25 <@solios> fagbot: doing is <reply>rhymes with BOING! BOI-OI-OING!
21:25 <+fagbot> OK, solios.
21:25 <@solios> fagbot: doing is also dong with an i. iDong.
21:25 <+fagbot> okay, solios.
21:26 <@xeno> fagbot: doing is also |<reply>i in the middle of dong.
21:26 <+fagbot> okay, xeno.
21:26 <@xeno> asdfjhsadl
21:26 <@xeno> THE I OF THE DONG.
21:26 <@xeno> ppac
21:26 <@xeno> NOW.
21:26 <@solios> dasfffhkjhgjhff.

_Lasar : Ambient noise, Pissing
BURZUM : Guitar, Vocals
solios : Trashcan, loops, ambient noise, assbanjo, mangling.

Trivia : This single features vastly less assnoise than previous PPAC releases. This does not mean that we intend to move away from our bowelish roots... but we do need time to generate new source material for future mangling.

[Dong] is a play on the Aphex Twin track [Symbol]. When [Symbol] is viewed in a spectroscope, you get smacked in the face with an image of Richard D. James. We're not nearly that talented - [Dong] uses a crude outline of the PPAC logo as GarageBand loop source.

Rashcan features solios on live percussion - percussion performed by beating a broom handle on a trashcan. BURZUM provides the vocals, which consist of a pitch-shifted and effected bellow of THAT'S NOT A MILK YOU IDIOT!.

Shitake(r) also features BURZUM on vocals and guitar. The gurgling buzz-click IDM-fest is what you get when you feed an .aif of _Lasar pissing (into what sounds like a coffee can) into Soundtrack and slow it down. Soundtrack handles track speed vastly differently than Final Cut Pro does, and this fact is abused on....

Slipnut, named after all the fat fire-plug shaped acne-encrused greasy shits with Slipknot shirts that insist on oozing around Ceremony, cluttering up the place with their suck. Fun with Soundtrack speed adjustments and effects produce the Winterkaltesque noise blast that the track degenerates into.

12:26 -!- mdxi changed the topic of #$ to: "Also, most men find female genitalia a bit scary and just don't look all that closely." | She's stalking you. With her boobs.
12:27 <@ejp> o_O
12:29 <@bda> It is scary.
12:29 <@bda> Vagines, I mean.
12:29 <@bda> er, vaginas.
12:29 <@bda> I mean, it's a squishy, hollow meat tube.
12:37 < mdxi> that's like the inverse of an argument i once had with a female friend, who couldn't understand why guys liked boobs. "THEY'RE JUST SKINBAGS," she yelled, to which I could only reply in kind, "NO THEY'RE NOT YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND"
12:43 <@bda> I'm not saying I don't like vaginas.
12:43 <@bda> They're just kinda scary.
12:43 <@bda> Like a rickety old rollercoaster.
12:44 <@bda> You know the ride is gonna be awesome because there's the added anxiety of not knowing if it's going to collapse and kill you.
12:45 < mdxi> LOCAL MAN, 27, KILLED IN VAGINA COLLAPSE
12:45 <@bda> The dunge^H^H^H^H^Hvagina collapses. You die.
12:48 < y0shi> a gay man who is a former friend of a friend reffered to it as "the bear trap"
12:55 <@ejp> guys like boobs because that's how evolution^WGod^Wa small duck made us
12:55 < y0shi> or course i'd expect there's more to worry about sticking it in a place that wasn't explicity prepared for it
12:55 <@ejp> I agree with bda though, it would suck if they were filled with soggy donuts.

 

CROONER is finished. All tracks on the singles are, in fact, real. The Pitchmix of ORORORAS is actually pretty damned hilarious. All tracks (which are now Properly Tagged) will be made available in the near future, after I either clean up the recent PPAC blogspam or figure out which server the songs will live on.