Tee Hee

Chuck got a handjob.

guitars...geeks...i like it

i think i've heard of this site, guitargeek.com before, but it's freaking awesome. they have diagrams of people's guitar rig layouts. no brian gibson though :(

here's agata of melt-banana's setup:


although, according to wikipedia, that setup has changed since that interview, but whatever.
if i ever come into some money, i'm gonna get some pedals and be cool.

in other news, i'm getting better at making noise rock in fruityloops. it makes it easy to write songs, then maybe lucas and i can play live over the drumtrack.

Nineteen Ninety Nerds might just get somewhere. if only we didn't have work getting in the damn way. i thought it would be easier to schedule practices with just two people. maybe we'll just have to start sending shit back and forth over the internet. even though we live in the same town, it's hard for us to live in the same time.

the language politics of 'geek'

the word "geek" is appearing a lot in the news. they've even noticed it over at slashdot. i noticed it too, like when the news story i was watching said "blog geeks," and then on that show Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, he said something about geeks.

None of this stuff was particularly mean spirited.

I just feel like, "hey, don't call us that. That's our word."

does that mean the word "geek" needs to mutate?

any suggestions? "gik" ? "geeka"? "gee"? "gook"? whoa now. that bit of ironic racism is already taken i think. so....i give up.

killoggs?

i just found this site called killoggs.com, and it has some pretty interesting random shit, like a link to art by Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt.

i found the site by searching for "ironic racism" in google, but i never found the reference to it.

weird notebook

i found this weird notebook in my apartment. it's small and has those cool elastic straps that keep it closed. anyway, never seen it before. it's got some girls' handwriting in it, on what seems like a totally random page. it looks like it was passed back and forth in class...some discussion about who (out of a list of four suspects, listed on another random page) stole something out of one of the girl's bathrooms.

wtf?

lucas is the most synchronous motherfucker i know

1) he tells someone "snape kills dumbledore," to which they reply "noooo! you bitch!" having never see the ytmnd referencing that.

2) he says "i wish i could put this dollar in the t.v. and get bacon," then, the next commercial starts off with a close-up shot of a dollar being put into a vending machine.

ok...so, you're thinking, yeah, so what? it wouldn't really be impressive if this shit didn't happen all the time with this guy.

the best one, i think, is the melba toast incident. back in college, we went to the cafeteria. lucas looks at the salad bar, sees melba toast, and tries it.

lucas: wow...this is really good.
me: yeah, it's melba toast
lucas: i'm gonna put this is my pockets for later

(ok, that's not the exact dialogue, but you get it)

later that night, we're watching the movie Apt Pupil which isn't all that notable, except that for no fucking reason at all, there's a scene where Ian McKellen looks into the camera and says, "let's have some melba toast."

WTF?

i'm sure he can relate more of these synchronous incidents.

william s. burroughs haiku

william s. burroughs
has tea with dr. benway
a shot is fired.

A Man Can Dream

on my way home from work

i was cold and by the library, so i went in and decided to use my expensive privilege of checking out books. these two relatively new books are really cool so far. if you know me, you probably know that i'm a big fan of deleuze. i recommend these books to anyone interested in complexity theory

...especially deleuze and geophilosophy. it really helps put science in an upfront conversation with philosophy. it also connects signs with materialism (memetics?). and, it deals with questions of structure, agency, and determinism.

Deleuze and Geophilosophy : A Guide and Glossary by Mark Bonta, John Protevi

this book by poststructuralist anarchist theorist Todd May deals with the question "how might one live?" so far, it's just a really good take on what philosophy has had to offer on similar issues like breaking down our preconceived notions and realizing that our subjectivities are products of historical processes (also compatible with memetics).

Gilles Deleuze : An Introduction by Todd May

in other news, i wound up on the cutting room floor for a story on blogs that i was interviewed for by KVAL in eugene, OR. i guess i'm just too weird (looking and thinking), even for eugene.

looking for a safe stance on abortion?

me neither.

Douchebag Tony Blankley just said, on The McLaughlin Group (for no apparent contextual reason) that the only people who should have an opinion on abortion are fetuses. I agree.

Hey fetuses...mind if we abort you? What's that? Speak up. I can't hear you.

I guess they don't mind.

i realize you might be saying "hey, if you apply that logic to people who can't communicate, then it would be okay to kill them."

you might be a humorless douchebag.

i'm still pro-abortion. not every piece of genetic material has a "right" to live. that's absurd. a zygote is a single celled organism, which is just as human as any other single celled organism. whether or not the DNA is human or spider is irrelevant, because it's still one cell. so...when's the next possible definitive point we can define humanity? birth. enough said.

forty years later

November 18, 2005:

In Paris, which has an estimated 200,000 homeless, a series of fires in sub-standard buildings killed 48 immigrants earlier this year. “Actions like these are the only way we can be heard,” said a young woman from the poor suburbs on TV.

For many in the middle class these events mark their first awareness of the degree of poverty in their country. Another teen said, “This is a new 1968, not in the universities, but in the projects.” And another: “We want jobs and we want respect.”

Instead, the government has resorted to a heavy hand. It imposed “fast-track trials,” sentencing in a few days almost 150 youth and adults to detention facilities in trials that lasted minutes.

And on Nov. 8 it invoked a 1955 law used during the Algerian War to put in place a 12-day state of emergency. Le Monde blasted the move as “[sending] to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents.”

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/60130.html

December 1965:

Generalized self-management, "extended to all production and all aspects of social life," would mean the end of the unemployment that affects two million Algerians, but it would also mean the end of the old society in all its aspects, the abolition of all its spiritual and material enslavements and the abolition of its masters. The present fledgling effort toward self-management can be controlled from above only because it consents to exclude below it that majority of the workers who don't participate in it or who are unemployed; and because even within its own enterprises it tolerates the formation of dominating strata of "directors" or management professionals who have worked their way up from the base or been appointed by the state. These managers are the state virus within that which tends to negate the state; they are a compromise. But the time for compromise is past, both for the state power and for the real power of the Algerian workers.

from: "Class Struggles in Algeria" by Mustapha Khayati

Published clandestinely in Algeria as a pamphlet, December 1965; trans. by Ken Knabb

athens

A police cordon separates demonstrators from the Embassy of the United States in central Athens Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005. Protesters gathered in central Athens Thursday to commemorate a 1973 pro-democracy uprising, as 7,000 police braced for possible violence inspired by nightly riots in France. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

A Buy-Cott?

Hugo Chavez, poor people, oil industry profits, etc.
Check it out.

if you're going to give away your ex-presidents...

...don't give them to living ex-presidents. i'm talking about the bush and clinton katrina fund.

instead, check out the common ground collective

that's my soapbox for the minute.

scott stapp and why he sucks

remember that meme about how scott stapp is a douchebag who had his sister drive him to florida to get it on with some girl he met in an airport, but it turned out it was a huge prank. yeah, well, that's a pretty good reason as to why he sucks there.

this whole ad thing, though, prompted this. the thing with the ads..well...are we selling out, i guess is the question.

i think this excerpt from an interview with Henri Lefebvre (who will probably not get an ad) about the Situationists might shed some light:

I remember a whole night spent talking at Guy Debord's place where he was living with Michele Bernstein in a kind of studio near the place I was living on the rue Saint Martin, in a dark room, no lights at all, a veritable. . . a miserable place, but at the same time a place where there was a great deal of strength and radiance in the thinking and the research.

K.R.: They had no money?

H.L.: No.

K.R.: How did they live?

H.L.: No one could figure out how they got by. One day one of my friends (someone to whom I had introduced Debord) asked him, "What do you live on?" And Guy Debord answered very proudly, "I live off my wits." [Laughter.] Actually, he must have had some money; I think that his family wasn't poor. His parents lived on the Cote d'Azur. I don't really think I really know the answer. And also Michele Bernstein had come up with a clever way to make money, or at least a bit of money. Or at least this is what she told me. She said she did horoscopes for horses, which were published in racing magazines. It was extremely funny. She determined the date of birth of the horses and did their horoscopes in order to predict the outcome of the race. And I think there were racing magazines that published them and paid her.

K.R.: So the Situationist slogan "Never work" didn't apply to women?

H.L.: Yes, it did, because this wasn't work. They didn't work; they managed to live without working to quite a large extent -- of course, they had to do something. To do horoscopes for race horses, I suppose, wasn't really work; in any case, I think it was fun to do it, and they didn't really work.

So that pretty much explains my view on it. Of course, this isn't the 60s in Paris, so things don't really work like that anymore. So, we'll make a few dollars (if that) and we'll still have to work.

scott stapp sucks

booyah

organizational issues

so, when we puts ads up, who is going to start that and how are we going to divide the money? i mean, we should divide the money, right?

have you ever?

have you ever had a dream that suddenly turned into what amounts to a trailer for a horror movie, but it's like, a really good horror movie, but since it just kinda blasted into your consciousness from nowhere, it kinda scares you. so, you wake up. but it's a horror movie, so you're not sure if you're awake, or if it's going to be one of those "dream within a dream" routines.

so, i guess i'll just listen to skinny puppy and see what happens.

what in the crap?

what's up with the new version of Nero?

remember Nero...that program you used to use to burn CDs? well, now it's an entire fucking multimedia center clusterfuck. the best part is, the burning tool isn't even part of the typical installation! you have to do a custom install!

at least, that's what i read in some forum. i haven't actually tried that yet, because i just spent half an hour installing it, looking at the ugly ass program that is counterintuitive as fuck, looking at forums for "how the fuck do i burn a cd in nero 7?" then uninstalling it to try again.

i'm thinking i might take a nap before i try again.

no, fuck it. i'll do it now. it'll be a narrative experience.

ok, so i'm in the custom install. it's claiming that Nero Burning ROM is a normal part of the installation...but, whatever. i'm only installing burning rom and the tools related to it.

while i'm waiting for the install, i'd like to say, to software designers everywhere...

QUIT RELEASING NEW VERSIONS OF YOUR SOFTWARE THAT TRY TO FUCK UP THE MEDIA FILE ASSOCIATIONS I ALREADY HAVE!!!
did it ever occur to you that maybe i have my shit set up how i want it and i don't need yet another all-encompassing piece of bullshit. maybe i just want to, you know, do what ever it was that the software used to do in version 1.0

well, now i have to restart for the 3rd time today, so, later.

memes n shit

you like memes n shit, dogg? well, then you came to the right motherfucking place, bitch. yeah, i went there.

Richard Dawkins ain't got shit on me!!

white folks is crazy!

White Folks is Crazy!

And Omega Red killed mah baybee!!