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02
Jan 12

Tracking Titles

Title tracks have always had a weird appeal for me.

I’m not sure what it is. They come from no different stock, no different area, and sometimes don’t even become singles. And if they are singles, they’re often not a hit. And even when they are, they usually get radio play right behind the popular single.

Some of it’s the common placement on the album, which is right near the middle. The first example up there from Los Campesinos!‘s new album, is the third song on the album, and defines the sound of the rest to a larger degree than the first two. Comfort Eagle, the only Cake song I actually still listen to, is 7th (Out of 11), about the point you’re finding yourself in a slurry of slower-paced songs. It’s a hell of a pick me up.

 

 

Maybe it’s something inherited from other things I consume, media-wise. Titles are always important in books and video games, and therefore the song must have a special weight to it to be the name of the album, even if that’s not actually true.

 

 

This is definitely the same kind of thinking that leads me to arguing about setlists and album placements with people, as if they mean something. All it really does is help things flow better, and the title has nothing to do with that.

 

I’m not really sure what it means, but enjoy the examples above, and I’m going to try to resist my impulse to skip right to the title track in the future. After all, skipping ahead totally screws up the flow of the album.

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15
Oct 11

Realishtic

I’ve read all of DC’s new 52 that I’m interested in so far, and the most pleasant surprise has been Ivan Brandon and Jonathan Vankin’s Men of War. Why? Realishness.

No, that’s not a word.

Often in fiction criticism, people get derided for taking themselves or the fiction too seriously. A good solution for this is realishness, which presents realistic characters in a fantastic situation. From there, no matter how fantastic it gets, it still seems grounded. The characters in Men of War are modern US soldiers – nothing more and nothing less. The way they react to things and what they do to overcome it is the compelling part.

I’ll admit, the first issue was a little over dramatic, falling into some old military fiction tropes, but the second solidified the concept for me. While I’m dropping some other titles in the new 52, I’m definitely keeping up with this one. I just hope it doesn’t get cancelled.

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22
Feb 11

Route 53

I’ve recently switched all the DNS for several of my domain names, mostly those that point to this site, to Amazon Route 53.

There are a few online services that give you a GUI for managing it, but honestly, the best thing I’ve found is cli53, a python script that can do pretty much everything you need, without having to trust your Amazon information to a third party.

I haven’t seen it in too many search results, I certainly took a while to find it, so there you go. Use it!

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11
Oct 10

Good news!

So the eardrops have pretty much completely cleared everything up! Still stuffy as hell, but if I turn my head a certain way, I can actually hear out of my right ear. So no significant damage done, it seems.

Thanks for all the well wishes, even if most of my reactions were paranoia at the ignorance of myself and doctors.

And tomorrow night, heading to a concert. Which may finish clearing it up?

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08
Oct 10

Warning: Gross stuff and whining

So it all started last week after I had a sinus infection. I was out for a day at work, didn’t quite have insurance yet, so I didn’t go to the Doctor, and got better after about two days.

After that, a few days passed with nothing remarkable happening. My ears were a little stuffed up, so I used some earwax remover I’d used before. Turns out that was a huge mistake, though I think that using the ear bulb to get water up there was far worse than the actual medicine. It seems like along the way, something in my ear got damaged, and putting water in it just made it way worse.

At least that’s what I’m assuming right now. My first trip to the Doctor (Since I have insurance now!), on Monday, was mostly inconclusive. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and something for the pain, but the inflammation in my ear was so bad that she couldn’t see if there was any actual damage to the drum. I’ve been working as much as I can, but honestly the pain just gets worse as the day goes on. Not to mention the weirdness from the pain pills.

My second Doctor visit, today, was still inconclusive. There apparently hasn’t been much improvement at all from Monday, which at least matches with my observations. Some more pain pills, and now eardrops await me at the pharmacy in about half an hour, and probably another Doctor’s visit on Sunday.

If I’ve seemed more offline than usual, this is why. I’m looking forward to someone figuring out if I’m permanently deaf in my right ear. If I am, I can get kickass cyborg implants! It just might suck getting there.

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31
Jul 10

Thanks, @JeffParker!

image

I promise I preordered Hulk #25.

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15
Jul 10

Blocking out newstime.

I have a little problem sometimes with attempting to catch up on news and blogs while in the middle of something, so I’m going to try something new.

The last 15 minutes of every hour is going to be devoted to catching up on feeds, news, and any tweets I may have missed. Hopefully this will also allow for a feeling of achievement if I finish what I’m doing before that.

Catching up on stuff is a responsibility too, but swapping back and forth as much as I do usually doesn’t help either. Damn virtual desktops.

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12
Jun 10

Community

Note: I finally got my copy of DO ANYTHING by Warren Ellis, and I wrote this immediately after finishing it.

One of the reason I do what I do, and I try to do what I try to do, is to have a coherent narrative of the videogame industry, here and now, and try to get as diverse a group of opinion and concepts as there can possibly be. This is the strength of community.

While I’m focusing a lot of my efforts on a “local” community, obviously there’s no border for ideas. My dream (Which is mostly a reality in other places) is to have a place where you can come and work, or talk, or hang out, with people who share your metaphors, so you can more easily get the meat of your concepts through to them.

I spent 2 hours today in the comic shop, talking about writers, artists, ideas, and business. One of the reasons that’s so enjoyable is that a shared frame of reference absolutely helps get bigger ideas across. You feel like you’re understood.

Video games have their own narrative already, but it’s really not one of creators and critics, one of designers people follow, and one of only being able to compare something to something no one has played before. But this can exist.

Indie game developers are winning the fight for hearts and minds precisely because we are engaged with our audience, and they see a face when they see a game. They can compare the works of Farbs to the work of Antony Lavelle. And it took me a while to find Antony’s name.

On the other hand, it’s also easy to fall into the Bullshit Bubble when you start having a common language for your dream, hobbies, and/or career. So maybe all this is nonsense. But it’s worth a try.

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25
May 10

Posting over email in wordpress is nice.

After reading Warren Ellis’s recommendations for posting stuff, his comment about wordpress being shit for posting rang pretty true, so I found the codex entry for posting over email and set it up. So technically this is a test, but a useful one. Safely ignored, though!

So, hello internet, I’m from an email.

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27
Apr 10

Terry Childs’s Violations

After reading this post on Slashdot about sysadmin Terry Childs’s conviction, I did some research into what he actually violated and was charged with, and found this:

(5)Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.

While I may be misreading this, it sounds completely insane. As a sysadmin, it implies to me that I cannot deny service to a user that, for example, is downloading risky files, and I need to lock him out and take his computer for a virus scan. If that’s not a violation of explicit and existing company policy, am I liable under this law?

Hell, it implies to me that any time I take a server offline for maintenance, I’m in violation. That’s denying access to authorized users.

I am not a lawyer, but especially in the face of this conviction, California should probably take a look at their language. How the hell are sysadmins there supposed to protect anyone’s privacy or property?

Later I’ll look through Texas’ computer laws, to make sure I’m not being a hypocrite about California.

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