defiantly, maybe

mysterious dungeons of desktop castles of dredmor (the roguelike)

2012-02-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

i suppose that this is a review of sorts, but neither game i want to write about is officially finished, so titling it a "review" in earnest seems a little unfair. of course, if you play indie games at all (which i do) pretty much every fucking game in the universe comes out nowadays in "alpha", "beta", "triad", "delta" and "half-cocked" stages for everyone to buy, and only 2 years later is it revealed that because the game is so not-mainstream it'll never actually be "finished", dude. because actually finishing is for The Man, or something.

so yeah. i want to write a little bit about some roguelikes i've been playing, how a game that forces you to constantly do basic math can still be fun, and how sometimes i get so fucking mad at video games i really just want to kill and eat somebody, anybody, to make the pain stop.

and now that i have scared the absolute SHIT out of you, here we go.

this is a tale of two roguelikes: mysterious castle and desktop dungeons (and, to a lesser extent, dungeons of dredmor). so maybe i should talk first about what the hell a roguelike is, in case you don't know. according to the internet, "The roguelike is a sub-genre ofrole-playing video games, characterized by randomization forreplayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Mostroguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasinglyoffering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls,with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computerroguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitateinteraction with items and the environment. The name of the genrecomes from the 1980 game Rogue." according to game designers, however,a roguelike is "whatever the hell we want it to be becausepeople tend to buy games with words like 'roguelike','procedurally-generated world' and 'permadeath' in the descriptionthis year".

if you're benedict cumberbatch's sherlock holmes, you can probably tell from the capitalization in the first quote that i pasted it in here from wikipedia, while you can probably tell from the lack of capitalization in the second quote that i made it the fuck up. but they're both completely true!

so. i got into roguelikes the way that i got into pretty much anything i've done that's been fun in the last two years except for high-speed sledding: minecraft. among many, many other things, i was drawn to minecraft because of the procedural generation of the gameworld, its stressing of freeform exploration, and the very heavy consequences of failure/death (there's no permadeath, but death is still a huge pain in the ass, unlike in most games nowadays). i hadn't really seen these qualities expressed in a game together before. they were new to me, and they were exciting. never-ending, randomized worlds? fuck yeah! with no map or totally prescriptive goals, so you can just wander but still feel a sense of accomplishment just by surviving? that's how i feel about real life, so YEAH! so when i started to see lots of other games with these buzzwords attached to them (unsurprisingly, shortly after minecraft blew up like a skyscraper-sized creeper), often for 2-3 bucks on steam, i started buying them by the virtual fistful. very quickly, though, this buying spree brought me to wonder if roguelikes were actually supposed to be fun, or if they were instead just some weird mutation of a "game" that you "play" for insanely sadomasochistic people who don't actually know what either of those words mean.

take, for example, dungeons of dredmor (or, as i like to think of it, rageons of ragemor). this is billed as a "beginner's roguelike", so unlike something completely fucking nutballs like rogue or dwarf fortress, dungeons at least acknowledges that there might be a bridge between semi-autistic dungeon-crawl savants and your typical frat boy whose gaming literacy only extends to the best camping spots on the latest iteration of modern warfare's multiplayer maps. dredmor acknowledges this by tricking impressionable gamers with a pretty interface and an interesting presentation style and then it crushes their goddamn skull to a pulp by striking it again and again with a huge microwave while belting out lyrics to korpiklaani songs at the top of its lungs.

dredmor is not a bad game, per se, but it's a game that makes me question if i understand what "game" really means. so much time needs to be spent sorting equipment, digging through loot piles, and interpreting excruciatingly detailed minutiae just to get past the game's first few levels that i felt like i was hooking up an HDTV/DVR combo instead of playing a video game. even on the rare occasion that i succeeded in completing a level (and had paid enough attention to understanding why i succeeded), i was just exhausted afterward. this trailer makes it look both fun and easy, but it was neither of those things for me.

i was intrigued by the game's premise: that a turn-based affair with potentially endless dungeons, heavily randomized loot and a modicum of stat-based strategy could have such a small focus: that you didn't need to command armies and the fate of the multiverse every time you took a turn, that you didn't need to micromanage the grain watering rate and the education levy percentage every time of ever province in your entire civilization every time you took a turn, that turn-based gaming could be a bit more personal than in something like civilization. distilled in such a way, turn-based gaming with a touch of roguelike-ness could be a satisfying puzzle generator. fortunately, the makers of desktop dungeons were apparently thinking the exact same thing.

desktop dungeons has been my favorite go-to activity during writing breaks for something like six months now. for one thing, the game hits that perfect balance between "easy to play" and "difficult to master", and as such, every time the dev team tweaks something or adds something or removes something else, it makes the game (in a sense) completely new without forcing you to relearn the basic rules. also, it does something brilliant by taking the rogue formula and not only making it more accessible but confining play sessions into quick 20-minute dungeon runs. this deals brilliantly with a problem that many devs haven't seemed to notice yet: that procedural generation can easily come to just mean "really huge, boring levels". i've felt this even a bit from time to time in minecraft: you're a player playing a game, ultimately, taking time out from your actual life to get caught up in the game's world, but also to feel the sense of accomplishment you get from, you know, accomplishing something. in minecraft, that "something" is often as simple as finding a new cave, forging a new plate of armor, or just climbing a mountain and checking out the surrounding landscape. often, though, this new breed of procedurally-generated, "open-world" game seems to assume that exploration for the sense of exploration is enough. but it's not. and desktop dungeons realizes that, and shrinks each dungeon adventure down into almost a puzzle-like, single-level encounter that, at the end, you either win or lose. the overworld map and all the game's unlockables make certain that you never lose a sense of the game's scale, but the small levels make sure you're always getting the feedback that makes gaming fun.

mysterious castle, on the other hand, is like a not-quite terrible girlfriend when you're 16 years old: generally i'm unhappy around it, but it offers me something that i can't see to get anywhere else. in the metaphor this "something" would be sex, but in reality, i'm not entirely sure what it is about castle that's so absorbing. it is a game that was originally made for tablets, as is pretty obvious from the tablet-y (but still effective) interface. exploration is a bit more random in this game, but ultimately unsatisfying, because the game so badly wants to hold on to the roguelike aesthetic of "super-difficult, only for maniacs" that it sort of ruins itself. and with that, after about 2000 words, i've finally realized the thesis of all this shit that i'm writing. genre cross-pollination is well in good, in general and in games in particular. but i'm starting to think that making all games a little bit like roguelikes is not a great idea. the genre's qualities are very niche, and they're not something that transfers well. desktop dungeons works because it's a dungeon-crawling game with RPG elements, but it's self-imposed constraints (of scale, of time) make it more of an RPG/puzzle game than an RPG/roguelike. castles is troubling to me because it's actually really visually interesting, the battle system is efficient and intuitive, and fighting/looting is fun. with, say, a leveling mechanic, it would be a neat little RPG. instead, because it's interested in grafting roguelike elements onto its structure, it's something much less fun. every enemy encounter is a new terror: are you going to randomly meet enemies against which you can triumph? or are you going to meet enemies that slaughter you no matter what you do? either of these can happen at any time, without warning. and, because there's really no clear way to make your party stronger, faster, better armored, etc. (aside from random loot drops), there's never a real sense of progression. sure, i eventually got to the point where the absolutely easiest enemies in the game couldn't really effectively destroy me instantly because my new armor was too awesome. but then i just ran into a group of 20 of them instead of a group of 5 and they mutilated me. mysterious castles is like icewind dale if you took out the ability to level up and just threw the player in one of the game's dungeons randomly with no regard for how well-prepared they were.

so basically, i think i'm perturbed by everything suddenly having to be roguelike because all that really seems to mean is "really difficult" and "devoid of ludic rewards". i'm no inexperienced or lazy gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and so while it's possible that i'm just bad at games like dredmor and castle, i think it's much more likely that they're just bad games. they might be good [insert something else], but i don't know what.

that said, i keep coming back to castle for some reason. there's something about the graphical style and the battle system that makes me keep thinking that if i can just get strong enough characters, the difficulty will taper off and i'll be able to enjoy what would otherwise be a really excellent little RPG/dungeon crawl. but i'll probably just quit in rage again 20 minutes from now, braining myself with my own water bottle and screaming obscenities that haven't been invented yet.

two of my favorite diss-related images

2012-02-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

i've been alternating between both of these as my desktop on my work computer for awhile now. they're both pretty interesting visual representations of a lot of the issues i'm writing about in my dissertation with regard to wilderness, civilization, and technology. plus, i took the first one myself. so there's that. the second one is made by someone else and superimposes a bit of minecraft landscape atop what i imagine is probably a 19th century landscape painting.

i've got another post in the pipe for later about roguelikes and why they generally (but not exclusively) enrage me as a genre of video game.

i'm a wheel

2012-02-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

or at least i feel a bit like one.

i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).

way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.

lindsey at the hult center.

we left town late friday morning, and did the usual pullman-to-portland commute, shooting down 395/82 and then through the columbia river gorge. we made a quick stop-off just outside of the city proper to pick up john (who was visiting a friend in eugene, where the show was taking place), and then it was on to the hult center. as always, wilco was stellar. the setlist was a bit obvious, and i was likely a bit crotchety from not having eaten since we'd stopped at burgerville in the dalles early that afternoon, but that was offset somewhat by the fact that we'd stumbled on to second-row tickets.

after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building.

a pizza place with sriracha!

fortunately, john opted to drive back to portland, and so all i had to do for the next two hours was struggle to stay awake as the roadlights flashed by. i think we might have also listened to daft punk's discovery and kid a. upon arriving at john's apartment, i'm pretty sure i was asleep in less than five minutes. which was good, because there would be only a little rest for the wicked.

we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.

it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.

lindsey being dwarfed by bridal veil falls.

our original plan for the day had involved a 2200 foot ascent to a place called devil's rest, over the course of a 3-or-so-mile hike, which we were then planning on retracing back to the parking lot. this hike would take us past some pretty amazing northwest coast basalt cliffs and accompanying waterfalls.

as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.

lindsey and becca in front of another waterfall.

not for any necessary reason, mind you. we're just idiots. some of these idiots (read: me) were even wearing non-hiking shoes which were not happy about supporting my ankles in the least bit. as i type this, my toes are asking me "what were you thinking?!" over and over in the language of PAIN. nonetheless, breathlessly shambling down 1500 feet or so of altitude over 2 miles at a good jogging clip while jumping stones and exposed roots in near-darkness is a good way to make the best of a shortened hiking day.

upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.

i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.

lindsey, john, and becca at a lookout point above bridal veil falls.

we woke up in the morning just before sunrise (due to an early bedtime) and got on the road by 10am, which opened up the whole day for an awesome, meandering drive along the north side of the columbia gorge on WA-14. this was amazing until about the time we reached the dalles bridge, when the road suddenly became covered by fog and stayed that way until we got to richland. eaten lunch at a great mexican restaurant in richland before finishing the drive back to pullman, though, put the perfect exclamation point on our first leg of the wilco-trip.

after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.

by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.

mega(fuck)upload (of problems)

2012-01-31T21:44:00.000-08:00

so this post stems from my reading this article, in which it is revealed that megaupload's legitimate (and illegitimate) user files are soon to be deleted. apparently the department of justice has already (in a frighteningly efficient move for our government) retrieved all the evidence it wants to use against megaupload's CEO/other people and so the rest is just going to be flushed.

as the story goes, this data is ultimately going to be deleted because megaupload has (presumably) megabandwidth bills, and with its assets frozen after the recent government takedown, it's unable to pay those bills any longer. makes sense, in a way: why should the megaupload's internet hosts continue to support their massive bandwidth if megaupload can't make their payments?

the subtext to this whole deal, of course, is that all of those files constitute evidence in the coming case between megaupload and the government, and it's a bit problematic that nobody's stepping in and saying "no, you can't just flush gigabytes of files down the drain in the middle of a case". in fact, one could make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed constitutes a sort-of obstruction of justice on the part of the government. you could even make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed is not terribly unlike burning down an entire neighborhood because you know there's a criminal in one house: from this perspective, those files are the owners' property, and since a lot of people store legit files on megaupload, their hard drive backups, photos of their wedding, etc. are being destroyed indirectly by the government despite the fact that they themselves did nothing wrong.

as i see it, there are big gaping problems with both of these arguments, but at the same time the government's lack of interest in acknowledging that not every single person even marginally associated with megaupload is a criminal is definitely troubling. it is a bit like, as one internet commenter put it, renting a garage on a storage company lot, and then finding out one day that your garage had been torched overnight because the owner of the establishment was laundering money through the business. maybe all you kept in that garage was some old furniture. maybe you had no idea the owner was a criminal. but now your shit's gone, and there doesn't really seem to be any recourse.

maybe this is another one of those new internet-changes-the-way-the-world-works things. after all, if the government's going to make a habit of shutting down online storage sites, the effect that those shutdowns have on the millions of people that use them is going to be immense. and probably something that, legally, the government is allowed to just totally overlook. imagine, if i can be hyperbolic for a moment, a situation in which the government suddenly decides "well, fuck, there sure is a lot of child porn being distributed over facebook. better shut 'er down!" and boom, out go the lights. it's an extreme example to be sure, but two assumptions that underlie it are, i believe, visible in the megaupload case as well: 1) that the "one bad egg ruins it for everybody" approach is justified in cases like these and 2) that it's okay to not be interested in hashing out exactly what "due process" might constitute in terms of determining guilt/potential punishment.

i'm absolutely certain that megaupload's CEO is guilty of whatever our government says he's guilty of, and i'm absolutely certain that the majority of users of megaupload used it to traffic in illegal content. but our law says you have to prove those things in court rather than just assuming that they're true and then acting according, and even if you do prove them, not every megaupload user was "in on it". once again, we've got prominent government offices acting just like they were regarding SOPA and PIPA: like old white guys who are too rich and too busy to bother learning about this newfangled technology, and the result is that they're reacting like megaupload was a physical business, located in a physical building, dealing in physical goods (read: one copy only) with physical customers. and that's just not the case.

but all the blabber isn't really what worries me. what really worries me is this sudden desire to pigeonhole all online storage as bad and infringing. because a lot of the stuff being shared on these sites is legal, and has been posted with the understanding that it will likely be there for awhile. not forever, of course, but take for example a music site called the midnight cafe. i've been following this site for years, as it generally posts a new live music recording every single day (or at least a few times a week) from a variety of different artists. these "bootlegs" are legal recordings, uploaded on the author's own time, just so that they can be freely available for anyone who wants easy access to them. recently, the site posted this, and then shortly after, this. there are a lot of music projects like this out there. another example is the phish spreadsheet, which is the work of one guy who spent a major chunk of his life tracking, tagging, and uploading every single phish show ever recorded into one well-organized spreadsheet (and again these are free, legal recordings) just improve ease of access and to provide a digital archive that could, in theory, last for damn near ever. now i know that most people aren't too keen on phish, but if you know anything about music, you know that they are mostly known for their live performances. this spreadsheet project is in a sense the culmination of thirty years' worth of taping and trading (nowadays done online and through torrents, but originally done for years and years using the mail and actual tapes), and yet if the site that hosts all of these shows is the next to go down, then it's all gone.

oh, not permanently, of course, as i'm sure there are backups of these sorts of things. but what's lost is the worldwide access to the music. i don't much care if someone's birthday photos are going to be lost when megaupload is purged. if you don't backup your personal files locally that's your own fault, as far as i'm concerned. but these sites are used as much more than a backup service for individuals. they're also the hubs of legal, vital online archives and similar communities. and, sure, if one site shuts down, another will always rise to fill its place, but how many times are people going to want to bother uploading 2000 individual phish shows if their hosting site gets taken down every six months?

i'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's definitely more nuanced than the current department of justice/megaupload response looks to be.

how we once are

2012-01-31T13:35:00.000-08:00

this semester, i'm team-teaching a 300-level undergrad course in 20th and 21st century literature with my dissertation director. while "team-teaching" might make it sound like we take turns tagging each other "in" during the class period or like there's a family double dare-esque exchange of flags or some other sort of physical comedy involved, it (unfortunately) actually just means that one week i teach the class, and the next week he teaches it. so pretty much every other week i get to sit in the back row of a sixty-student undergrad lit seminar and just observe the goings-on.

this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.

so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.

during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.

that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.

it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.

*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.

"a meditation on feminism" or, "short skirt, long jacket"

2012-01-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

"the idea of a vernacular gender was widely misunderstood in the antagonistic atmosphere of the 1980s, in the anger that repudiated four thousand years of male sovereignty. men and women are unlike because of their evolution, a matter not to be deplored but to be celebrated and fulfilled, with the caution that power over the other is not part of the difference. roles and duties are divided, but not to make inequality. a vernacular society, divided in many of its social and familial responsibilities and privileges, would be inappropriately dominated by either gender. men and women have different roles int he group, similar but different bodies and psyches, shared but also different satisfactions, desires, fears, and sorrows."
-paul shepard, coming home to the pleistocene

so here's a thing that encapsulates that feeling that all guys occasionally get (or that for some seems to be a constantly-burning fuse of rage in the back of their caveman skulls): the fact that girls are different and that that is sometimes weird.

getting people to accept this is often a lot like trying to get white freshmen from the west side of washington to understand that yes, racism actually still exists, and no, they don't really "get it" because they live in a country and a culture where they are the majority (and no, once having a black friend long ago doesn't fix this). this lack of awareness isn't anyone's fault (except for when it's intentional, like in the case of the hypothetical cavemen referenced above who aren't actually hypothetical because i used to work with some of them), but more a cause of the "everyone's equal!" rhetoric that we superficially layer atop all of our discourse nowadays. now,"everyone's equal!" is a nice sentiment, of course, but the reality is more complex. some races (read: different melanges of cultures than the melange that makes up american white people, with different amounts of melanin in their skin) are different from others in significant ways. women are different from men in significant ways. to completely ignore this is to do violence to one's identity.

it matters to me that i am a man and not a woman. i didn't choose to be a man and i don't (in an abstract sense) prefer it to having gotten to be a woman. but, if someone were to tell me (as my students often do) that men and women are "equal"...well, that's kind of silly, because i'm aware of a lot of ways in which my biological/embodied experience of the world as a man is fundamentally different than that same level of experience is for a woman, and i know that that difference informs my thoughts/actions/what-have-you on less fundamental levels like how often i'm asked to help people move cabinetry or push cars out of snowbanks. telling me men and women are equal is sort of like telling a firefighter who finds meaning in his/her firefighting that "everyone can fight fires equally well!" you just hurt my feelings, man. seriously.

it's sort of like that. sort of.

[reheats cinnamon tea, sips.]

anyway, back to my fun story. so i was walking past valhalla (the horrifically trashy undergrad bar just on the legal side of the border between pullman city and campus proper) the other night, and there was a group of girls crossing in front of the building in front of me. they were clearly bar-hopping, but couldn't have been older than 21 or 22. despite the 20 degree temperatures and freezing wind, they were all dressed in short skirts and those wrap-things that pass for shirts these days (no long jackets were in sight, alas)*.

so, valhalla has recently renovated its top floor. this means that while you can still go drink and make out in its creepy, creepy basement if you so choose, you can also sit upstairs at a table and drink or eat cheeseburgers while you look out the gigantic front window at the sidewalk. well, these girls crossed directly in front of the window, pretty much every curve of each of them either visible or outlined by their clothes tightly enough that there wasn't anything really left to the imagination.

as they walked by, of course, the eyes of every single guy in the bar locked onto them and followed them for the length of the window. they weren't unaware of this, and as they finally passed from view, one of them remarked "ugh. i cannot believe how disgusting that was. i hate how every guy at the bar is always staring at my ass". then they proceeded down the street, turned right, and walked directly into the next bar down.

so basically the point of this post is for me to say: ladies, please explain this to me because it makes no fucking sense.

from my perspective as a guy, this is what i see:

first, i see women expressing disgust at the concept of the bar as a device for men to check them out and then choose their mates from the pool of women available. this disgust makes sense. bars are (generally) disgusting places, with people not on their best behavior. when it comes to men, young twentysomething ones are (generally) disgusting when it comes to their behavior around women. if i was a woman (and we've established that i am in fact, not), i would probably never go into any bar full of twentysomething men after, say, eight o'clock for this reason. but, i've "accepted" the fact that the dating M.O. for most kids nowadays is to go to the bar, get smashed, and try to make out with someone in the hopes that afterwards, when they've regained their inhibitions and their actual personalities, they'll somehow be compatible enough to function in a long-term, non-sex-centric relationship. and so...

second, these girls were obviously engaging in that exact same process, whilst criticizing the grossness of it. they didn't want to be ogled by the guys at valhalla...so why go into the next bar, where the same thing will happen while you are stationary targets for a goodly amount of time?

third, if you're not trying to draw sexual attention to yourself, why dress the way that you're dressed at all? this is sort of the crux, here. i'm forced to assume that maybe dressing scandalously is just a status symbol among young women nowadays? maybe you have to dress this way for your female peers to consider you cool, in the same way that guys apparently have to wear tank tops, basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap for their brahs to think that they're cool. is that it? if that is in fact the case, isn't there some other "cool" way that women could dress amongst themselves that isn't so baldly sexual? i wonder about the side effects of young women essentially parlaying their sexuality into social currency among their "girlfriends" while seemingly assuming that that shift in intention should make that same sexuality suddenly invisible to guys. because it doesn't. obviously.

following this (possible) line of inquiry makes me sad. every single woman i've ever known (including the ones i've found extremely attractive) have had many other qualities that make them potentially "cool" to others besides how physically attractive they are or how revealingly they dress. i certainly don't promote my own sexuality in the way that i dress, and yet i have a lot of friends who respect me (some despite having seen me make a drunken asshole of myself while trying to impress girls at bars in lifetimes past) and at least one person who (for some reason) finds me attractive. so actually trying to get others to respect you without wearing short shorts can work. have we really reached a point where not just any sexuality but egregious, totally public sexuality is assumed to be the primary currency for negotiating social and sexual relationships for the majority of our young women?

i'd like to hear what people (and especially women) think, because i just don't get it. you know, on account of my penis and all.

*incidentally, both men's and women's refusal to dress practically for inclement weather is a whole other blog post entirely, dealing with an all-consuming rage that is fueled by my years of winter survival training and prizing of pragmatism over the desire to look "pretty" or "cool" for a large crowd of people who don't even know who you are...i can only hate one thing at once, sadly.

voulez-vous THE BUS?!

2012-01-26T15:19:00.000-08:00

i've got a bunch of half-finished posts about smart things in my queue for today, but instead i'm just going to complain about my life because why else have a blog nobody reads?

i'm extremely tired today, and for once i don't even have a good excuse. i've just stopped sleeping, for some reason.

those of you non-existent readers who know me know that i used to have horrible, terrible insomnia problems. over the last few years, they've pretty much abated, quite possibly as a result of me finally taking the time to get a lot of my other emotional/mental shit together. but for a long time they were quite bad. i mean, i always have been and likely always will be a "night person", and if i continue working in higher education, my night-person-ness will likely continue to be exacerbated by the fact that will always have to take my work home with me and that work will always require the occasional late night. but. for most of my life between the ages of...oh, say fourteen to twenty-four i slept much less than eight hours a night every night, due to stress, overuse of caffeine and just generally being a total nutjob. once i got to wsu, it somehow got even worse because the insomnia collided with a suddenly massive workload. then, i was often working 12-16 hours a day for weeks at a time, but still only sleeping 3-4 hours a lot of the time.

anyway, the point is that it was bad. but, just like that year of college where you drink yourself into oblivion (everyone does that, right?), i didn't really realize how bad until i stopped sleeping again over the last few days. basically, having some time off from being crazy and then returning to it really put into perspective just how crazy i was.

the experience has been extra weird this time because my inability to sleep doesn't really seem to be caused by anything. i mean, i'm stressed over not having a job lined up for fall, and i'm stressed over needing to finish my dissertation, but i feel like those stresses are within normal levels. otherwise, i'm pretty normal-feeling in terms of my brains and my thinkings and my word stuff things go cant gonna be for now

last week, lindsey and i went sledding twice, right after the first and second big snowfalls that we had here in pullman. during the first night, i banged my legs up quite a bit, because right before we went out, the snow turned to rain for a few hours, which built up a thick crust of ice on top of the inches and inches of snow. the result was a sledding surface that was fast, but prone to breaking and catapulting you off the sled onto a sheet of ice with little ice-knives sticking out of it that made ice-holes in your body and caused you ice-pain. it hurt a bit, but i was fucking excited to sled and thought little of it. the next morning, i could barely move. anything. anywhere. so what did i do? go out sledding again the next night, of course. this was on softer snow, but i still added new bruises atop my bruises and was less than happy the next morning. later that same morning, i slipped on a patch of black ice and fell in the parking lot. and i mean fell, as in i saw my feet above my head before i hit the ground. this felt like it had probably broken every bone in my entire body, a feeling that persisted for at least 12 hours. 36 hours later, i still couldn't move my head to the right without pain, and sleeping started getting difficult. now that i think of it, that's probably where the problem started.

three nights ago, i couldn't get to sleep until about 5am, which was unfortunate because i had to get up for class at 7. this seemed a bit odd to me, considering that i should have fallen asleep quickly because i had only slept for about five hours the night before...but i didn't think too much of it. i was much more weirded out the next night when, on 2 hours of sleep i couldn't fall asleep by 6am. a bit confused and panicked, i jammed a ton of melatonin down my face and finally nodded off around 7. i got up at 10:30 or so to go to work, and it felt like it took the melatonin about 12 hours to get out of my system. nonetheless, i managed to spend a decent amount of the day at work, and i even Accomplished Things. then last night, somehow, i didn't fall asleep till 5 again, and i had to get up at 7 to teach.

throughout this entire process, i've been able to feel myself slowly becoming more and more impaired, sort of like getting drunk slowly over three days, but without the part where it's fun and you're screaming obscenities good-naturedly and riding a skateboard uphill backwards naked while on fire.

anyway, i'm not really sure why i spent a ton of time writing all of this. i guess it's a long way of saying that i've finally realizing how much of a difference actually sleeping a decent amount most nights a week makes in making me an emotionally functional, socially useful person. because i am totally not that right now.

also, if i never fall asleep again and die from exhaustion, this will be my pointless, pointless three-day memoir. it will be ALL THAT REMAINS OF MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH WORDS

oh, and also, this entire sleep-deprivation weirdness episode has played out while i've been reading mike doughty's new book the book of drugs, which is a memoir about...well, drugs. it's certainly supposed to be a sad book, mostly (i think), but there's something about lacking sleep that makes drugs (especially nicotine) seem charming. also, listening to lots of soul coughing when you're not even entirely sure that you would pass that self-awareness "mirror test" is not a good idea. i feel like the music is making paint drip out of my hair follicles in all of the primary colors.

i should probably take a nap.

UPDATE: it has been suggested to me by various sources that my sleeplessness might have been caused by the sun. THE SUN! well, fuck the sun, then.

i cover a gillian welch song. in my office, using a shitty webcam. hooray!

2012-01-14T18:14:00.000-08:00

here's what i got up to last night between writing breaks:

if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:

and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:

also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.

things i heard today

2012-01-14T00:54:00.000-08:00

this might become a regular feature, but even if it doesn't...whoo-hoo, today was a whopper for in-public oversharing:

1. [On the Hello Walk, 3:10pm] Girl 1: "I made out with Eric and Mike right after they both threw up...and then once I found out that they had thrown up, it made me throw up. Then I passed out until this morning!" Girl 2: "That's amazing! Awesome!"

2. [Outside Valhalla, 12:10am] Girl 1: "Hey, bitch!" Girl 2: "Yeah?" Girl 1: "Is my ass hanging out?!" Girl 2: "What?!" Girl 1: "Can you see my ass, is it hanging out?" Girl 2: "Umm..." Girl 1: "Is my fucking ass hanging out of my skirt, can you see the bottom part of my ass?!" Girl 2: [Looking] "No, I don't think so..."

3. [D Street, 12:15am] Girl 1: "Katherine! Kate! Kat! Slow down!" Girl 2: "Sorry I'm walking so fast, Mike's got coke at his house and I need to get some before he goes to bed!"

that's when i knew if i stopped running, i would die [/melodrama]

2012-01-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

and that's not some emo-blog metaphor-y statement this time, oh no. it's literally how i felt an hour ago running a five mile loop from my office out along terre view and back.

i do this route pretty often, but i haven't done it recently because, well, it's winter and it gets windy out there, and i can't run in pants because it feels weird. running shorts + winter = bad. BUT...i haven't run much lately because i was home for break for three weeks and i've been slammed with work (and the accompanying stress) since i've been back. so today i came in to work a bit early so i could be sure to finish in time to run before i went home for dinner. i finished at 8pm. unfortunately at that point the animal-brain part of me that thinks mountain climbing in a snowstorm is "fun" took over and i decided i was not only going to run in shorts in weather that "feels like" 15 degrees, i was going to run FIVE FUCKING MILES.

fortunately, i'm in good enough shape at the moment that the physical exertion of running those miles was something i could pretty easily handle. however, exposing a lot of bare skin and a torso that had to power a really busy circulatory system to 15 degree temperatures for the forty-five minutes it took to run that far was a bit tricky.

ultimately, it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one (i.e. it's hard to keep up your morale when you're trying to run and shiver at the same time), and there were a few moments when i thought about turning around...but of course that was at the halfway point, which made things sort of hopeless either way, so i kept going.

note: i'm pretty well trained in winter survival, so i'm smart enough to not actually freeze to death, in case you were wondering that at this point.

on the home stretch, when i reentered the main part of campus by the football stadium, i passed a few large groups of students that were actually rooting for me, which was hilarious, considering the usual (and frequent) comments i get from students about being a "faggot" or a "faerie" or a "homo" (from men and women alike, oddly enough) when i'm running. the first group i passed (a group of girls) actually just shrieked in terror, one yelling "what's wrong with you?!" another yelling "how are you running?! it's so cold!" and another just yelling "fuuuuuuuck!" the next group was mixed-gender, and one of the girls yelled "DO IT!" at me in such a super-intense, drill-sergeant sort of way that i had no choice but to high-five her as i ran by, yelling "YEEEEAH!" in response.

it was a good time. oh, and i finished in 45:55, which is a super fast time for me, even when it's not bloody freezing.

the return of the king

2012-01-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

by "return" i mean "a return to this blog", and by "king" i mean "me".

i've decided to revamp this blog and start using it again, partly because i found an acceptably uncomplicated way to simplify my once oh-so-crowded template and partly because i just got a new android phone and so it just makes sense to migrate everything more firmly to google. plus, blogger integrates with google+ nicely now, so that's fun.

i've left links to ye olde tumblr (the shortest-lived of all my blogs to date!) and my old livejournal (which is still active for some reason) above, in case you discover that you prefer old me to current me (i don't, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course). otherwise, prepare for some more pontificating on meaningless topics, inane babbling about important topics, and probably a little hand-wringing and discussions of personal issues that will probably make you feel a little awkward for having read them on the internet. because that's what i do.

since i posted a bathory video to celebrate the end of my tumblr, i'll post a fila brazilla video to celebrate the beginning of this one. because that totally makes sense. to me, at least. and, as you'll quickly learn, that's all that really matters around here.

change

2010-12-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

so, i made a rather impulsive and hasty decision (treebeard would be discomfited) yesterday to switch my blogging platform to tumblr. the interface is great, it's way easier to set up twitter and facebook forwarding, and hooking it up to my lazyblazers.com domain was super easy. all things that blogger made unnecessarily difficult. plus, now that i'm in the habit of making many short posts rather than many long posts, tumblr appeals to me...not having to navigate all the (admittedly nice) options and menus on blogger will make things easier and faster.

nonetheless, i made something ridiculous like 1,250 posts on this blog over a few years, and a lot of those words and the thoughts and comments generated by them helped get me through a lot of tough times, so it's a bit sad to close the doors on the ol' blogger. then there's the madden 2003 playoff coverage, which was just, like, whoa.

anyway, i'll be on blog.lazyblazers.com still, it'll just point to my tumblr blog now. it's also (amazingly simply) set up to cross-post to facebook and twitter. so if you follow me there, get ready to get frustrated and stop.

also, i'll be leaving this blog open in case i want to come back to it someday, so my little emo corner of the internet here will still be open for business.

confucius once said "only the wisest and stupidest of men ever change". huh.

RIDESHARE - Phish 2000.05.23

2010-11-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

I can't seem to get enough Phish lately, and the Phish shows indulge me by continually being awesome. It's a vicious cycle.

I'm digging through a lot of solid '92-'93 stuff right now, but about a week ago I tumbled to a great '02 show and this amazing '00 one.

Phish 2000 shows, when they're good, hit that spot where it's almost like a 90s-era Phish live mixtape: you get some early 90s shredding, some mid-90s technique, some late-90s funk, and a few Farmhouse tracks jammed out in jaw-dropping ways that only seemed to happen before the hiatus. This show is one of those.

"AC/DC Bag" sounds like it could have come straight from a '92 show, and it moves right into "Wilson", and then, just when you're settling into the groove, out comes "First Tube" to surprise and otherwise stimulate you.

Take, for instance, the "Weekapaug"-less "Mike's" that comes out of "Ya Mar" and goes into "Simple", then "It's Ice" before finishing up the run with "When the Circus Comes". Not only are these segues effective, that combination of songs is just bizarre. Just reading it makes me want to listen again.

Pretty much the entire second set is this way too...and the band jams throughout in a way that's fitting to the setlist...oftentimes you can almost hear them reaching to figure out a way to connect such interestingly disparate material. And that's a good thing. This weird mix doesn't work 100% of the time, but I'd rather listen to a show like this than a perfectly played but paint-by-numbers show any day. I should eat this show.

RIDESHARE - Wilco 2004.11.13

2010-11-02T21:23:00.000-07:00

This review is mega-short because, honestly, I listened to this like 2 weeks ago and after everything that's happened since then, I barely remember it.

Here's the setlist.

Most of the main set was standard 2004-era Ghost tracks, until the end which was a particularly stellar "Poor Places" > "Spiders" match-up.

Also of mention was the first encore's rare "Another Man's Done Gone" and "Candyfloss".

High quality show, but nothing revolutionary if you've already heard some 2004 SBDs.

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.11.1994

2010-10-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

setlist here.

this is the only full show i've gotten to in the last couple of weeks, though i've gotten partially through a pair of fantastic phish shows (2000 and 2002, surprisingly) that i'll review as soon as i find the third disc of each and listen to it.

this show is one of the treasured june '94 phish run, arguably one of the finest months of live music ever done by anyone ever in the universe of history for all time. infinitely.

while i didn't like this show as much as i did the 06.18.94 show, it could still be one of the not-best-ever-but-still-best parts of the best-ever month of 6/94. make sense? let's move on.

this setlist was definitely more interesting. it starts off with some pretty standard rockers ("wilson", "chalkdust torture", and an amazing version of "you enjoy myself"). YEM segues into "rift", and then things really start to pick up. as usual, "rift" live is a little spotty, but "down with disease" and "it's ice" are standouts of the first set. "tela" is an interesting addition; a song i hadn't heard in awhile and that put a smile on my face. but, you know, it's not really known for its jam pyrotechnics. "stash" was a solid, if standard-to-great rocking jam to end the set on.

the "2001" > "antelope" opener was a great way to start the second set. "flufflhead" is one of my favorites, and this was a pretty standard version. the rest of the second set and the "suzy" encore is when things really started to take off and never really let up.

the selection of songs is the attraction here. there's a great variety of songs in the setlist, but not really any terribly exploratory or strange jams to enjoy...most of the show is flat-out rock-jamming, so if that's your thing you'll love this show. it goes without saying that this sort-of-criticism should be considered along with the fact that this is a june '94 show, which means that even if most of the show is straight-up rock, every single note is perfect, all the harmonies are spot-on, and every solo is perfect. so, while i found the 6/18 show more interesting, this one is still better than 90 percent of any other live music (and any other phish) that you'll ever hear.

late saturday night polemic: singlism is stupid and should die in a fire

2010-10-17T02:39:00.000-07:00

so, as i've been made increasingly aware by the internet, there's this thing called "singlism". as many of its proponents point out, it's a stupid word. as i am now going to point out in the most polemical fashion possible, it's also a stupid concept.

it is perhaps telling that in the most coherent and professionally-published piece on singlism i could find (through an admittedly quick google search), there is no concrete example, ever, of how people have been, or will in the future be discriminated against by the fact of their being single. there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how people who are single are frowned upon in the workplace and in life because being single isn't "normal" or whatever, but beyond that i see no reason in any of the reason i've done thus far for organized, militant action on behalf of singles whose lives are judged so pointless in our relationship-obsessed culture that that culture goes out of its way to enact its bias against singles in real-world ways like paying them less (as women are paid less, on average than men) or giving their children lower-quality education (as is generally the case for minority children when compared to whites).

and there's where my first problem arises. it's a purely rhetorical one, to be sure, but i'm still angry and want to rip the heads off of teddy bears: the idea that somehow singlism is on par in severity or in the necessity for social awareness with racism, sexism, or classism is just absolutely ridiculous and is a testament to how transparent those first three things are to most white, upper-middle class americans (generally the people agitating against singlism). is there a set of culturally-reinforced assumptions made on behalf of single people by not-single people? yes, of course. is the practice of group A making up a set of then-culturally-reinforced assumptions about group B based on perceived difference as a way of group A self-reinforcing their already-assumed superiority a practice that's been going on for at least thousands of years, partially as a method of defining community? yes, of course. people in relationships are going to insist that being in a relationship is the norm, the same way that men who get to have better jobs over women are going to insist that it's just normal because to argue otherwise might be to put their own jobs in jeopardy.

i'm not completely insensitive to the singlist plea. i've got a good amount of experience being single myself. now you're thinking: "wow, the dude who insists on hard evidence from the internet is going to prove his point using personal anecdotes?" yes. shut up.

there was a period not long ago at all where i was single for about three years. going into said period, i was pretty aware that it was likely to be a long single period (i.e. i wasn't really interested in dating, didn't think i would be for awhile, and didn't know of anyone that was beating my door down to get a ride in my motor-carriage). as such, i tried to approach it constructively. unlike, say, the last time i was single for an extended period of time, coming out of a long high school relationship that i, in my AWESOME high school naivety (is that a word?) thought was going to last forever. the result was a decent near-year's worth of sullen depression until (of course, you guessed it) i met someone else and got to scurry back to the haven to dated-dom rather than deal with my issues.

anyway, the time was i was most recently single was rough, in a lot of ways. especially the second year or so, which coincided with the time in which most of my friends moved from pullman and i, too socially awkward to really make any new friends, basically spent an entire year or so in my apartment watching movies and playing madden 2003. eventually, though, i decided that four virtual super bowl rings were enough to secure my online legacy and i ventured back out into the world.

i guess my point is that i learned a lot through those years, both about making friends and about dating relationships. i learned a lot about how i had viewed friendships and relationships before and how detrimental my own selfish need for that kind of contact made it so difficult for me to initiate in the first place. interesting thought: if you don't desperately, creepily, intensely need every interaction you engage in to sustain your mental and spiritual health, those interactions get a lot easier, and more fun, and ultimately more fulfilling.

and i wouldn't have learned all that downward-facing-dog-bullshit had i remained in relationships. i had to hit what my old self regarded as the bottom to realize that that bottom was really just a different type of life. aside from the snarky label (which i'll get to in a minute), you could consider me a converted singlist. by the end of my three-year exile into singleland, i was absolutely happy and content to be alone romantically. which was about the time that i met someone and started a relationship that was functional and made me happier than i thought you were supposed to be in relationships (i don't think this was a coincidence). it's cliche (or, as spellcheck suggests, "cloche") to say that you have set the bird free and see if it comes back on it's own, but that's exactly what happened. the minute i stopped needing my life to be a certain way, the minute it became clear it was fine just the way it was.

so how does this tie back to singlism? IT DOESNT

no, i'm just kidding. it does.

"singlism" simultaneously expresses discontent and reinforces the idea that being in a relationship is a status symbol, neither of which actually helps anyone be any happier with their lot in life.

the first of my two complaints is pretty easy to grasp. if you feel the need to express loudly and clearly how perfectly okay you are with being single, to the point of discriminating and/or trash talking people who are in relationships...clearly you're not actually okay with being single. and this goes both ways, lest you think i'm choosing sides: if you really need to brag about how happy you and your SO are to everyone within hearing range, obviously things aren't going that well on some level.

the other complaint is a little more esoteric, but probably more important. i guess the best way to say it is that "singlism", by its very existence as a term and as a way of expressing difference between two perceived-different social groups, simplifies much of the reality of both being single and being in a relationship. it reinforces the idea that the main reason to be in a relationship is because you can be or because you should be - it doesn't matter if you're happy in the relationship, or who the other person is or what they're like or what they're name is...what matters is that you've got a date! on the other side, it casts not-dating as rebellion against the status symbol of dating. if you're not dating, it's not because you've got issues you're refusing to confront, or because maybe, simply, you just don't want to date. no, you're special because you're standing up to the institution! "singlism" just reinforces the idea that dating is the country club, and not-dating is wearing ripped-up jeans and ramones t-shirts...with the added "twist" of saying "hey, the ramones are fucking better than stupid golf anyway!"

if there turns out to be legitimate discrimination in any case (in a professional sense) because of someone's relationship status, then obviously that's bullshit and should be opposed. but i don't see any of that here. what i see is people who want to make a legitimate lifestyle choice a social statement. suddenly, dating or not dating is on the same level with whether you choose to wear a tie to work or a t-shirt, whether you wear dress shoes or converse all-stars. and that's not fair to the actual people you might actually be dating (or not dating), because the reality is that relationships are way more complicated than this stupid binary gives them credit for. it's like reducing politics to two parties just so that everyone has to pick a side. and we can all see how well that's working out...

but i suppose that's a rant for another late saturday night.

DUH-DUUUUUUUUUH!!!

ever wanted to hear a big beat mashup of phish and the dead?

2010-10-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

i've been a little bit obsessed with this set of remix/mash-ups that i found on soundcloud the other day. all of it's pretty much great - the guy has a great ear (?) for this stuff. if you're in a hurry, though, just check out "a gentle hell" (a trippy version of wilco's "hell is chrome" mashed with thievery corporation), "just break" (jurassic 5 and radiohead), and best of all "freezerflowerfluff" (phish's "tweezer" and "fluffhead" mashed with the dead's "china cat sunflower").
Bonnaroo Booty by mopo

hang it on the fridge 2!: my first ecopoem

2010-10-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

so, i've reading a metric shit-ton of ecopoetry lately and while it's not really my genre (mixing environmental justice and poiesis has never really seemed like a recipe for anything but disaster, but i digress), i thought i'd write a poem mimicking some of the gestures i see in a lot of these poems. let me know what you think!
------------------------------

i'm eleven miles from pasco
traveling south on US-395
when it hits me

this smell that clouds the air
invisibly suffuses my car
slides through the air vents
and dives down my nose

at first contact it's
already too late
it's everywhere

i don't smell it as much as feel it
it punches my sinuses like a double shot of vodka
with slightly rotting sausage floating in it

at this point, my eyes are watering
the factory smokestacks dotting the banks of the columbia
in the distance
reduced to white smudges against a blue sky

after a few moments, my brain assimilates the assault crookedly
responding with both nausea and hunger
to a smell that makes less sense on the level of instinct
than the sensation of having your own arm hacked off

now, at various points in my life you could have rightly called me
hippie
bleeding-heart
inhumanist
vegan
idealist
granola
etc.
and it would have been accurate

but

i wouldn't be exaggerating if i said i would gladly give up
my car
my computer
my apartment
my guitars
my furniture
my bed
my bicycle
my microwave
my refrigerator
my records
my TV
and my shoes

if it would make it so no one on earth would ever
have to smell
that smell
again.

RIDESHARE: Wilco 04.28.2000

2010-10-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

like all the other millenia-era wilco shows i've listened to lately, this one was a grower. at first i spent awhile nearly driving off the road while screwing with my CD player's EQ (the recording, though a SBD, is not necessarily the best, and the vocals are really low in the mix with the odd combination of drums and keys being preeminent). on top of all that, "candyfloss", which is the first song and one of my early-era wilco favorites, starts about 2/3rds of the way through the song. what is it with wilco recordings lately and cutting off the first half of the opening song?

i was considering taking the disc out and playing something else until "i must be high" came on. it was a really interesting version: energetic and folksy, but with that unmistakable post-summerteeth electronic touch. this was a theme throughout the show. some of the best moments of this show are the times when you get to hear a.m. or being there songs sounding more like yankee hotel outtakes than their original versions. another main set highlight was "hotel arizona", hands down my favorite song on being there, recreated into a wholly different animal and yet still just familiar enough to be fascinating.

this band sounds so different than the raucous noise-jam band of even a few years previous. while they're clearly still willing to experiment on stage, they do so with a little bit more patience, and ultimately their sound is better for it. take, for example, "how to fight loneliness", which gets a few little instrumental jams throughout the song. while it might have been "experimental" for the wilco of '97 to scale this quiet, introspective song into a flurry of feedback screams as it neared its end, this wilco peppers the song with quiet but complex instrumental interplay that's just as impressive but that suits the tone of the song. when every single song doesn't end with everyone screaming and guitars catching on fire, it makes the songs in the set more distinguishable and thus makes the show in general a more nuanced experience.

anyway, one of the "loud" highlights, as usual, was "someone else's song", played as a metal dirge. the main set closed with "misunderstood", and most of the double (triple?) encore was mermaid avenue songs. so if you're not a fan of those albums, the second half of this show might be a wash for you. i really dug it, especially, as usual, the "hoodoo voodoo" closer.

if there's one gripe i have about this show it's that, for all the summerteeth material in the setlist, none of the songs were played like summerteeth songs. maybe this was a choice on the band's part, or maybe they simply just didn't have the equipment, but when you hear a song like "can't stand it" (or "candyfloss", or "i'm always in love", etc.) without all the little flourishes that are present on the album version, the song tends to sound less artistically different and more just flat.

RIDESHARE: Phish 06.25.1995

2010-10-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

one more review to dredge up from memory from last week, and then i'll be caught up to what i listened to yesterday. then i can go back to blogging about other things that actually matter.

RIDESHARE is my 2010 version of my old Madden 2003 franchise posts...

this '95 show (setlist here) was a pretty fascinating meld of the technically precise, no-holds-barred '94 sound and the more experimental spacy '96 sound. like, in all the best ways. first of all, the show starts with pretty standard but solid "ya mar" and "AC/DC Bag" (when does "AC/DC" ever really sound any different, anyway?), then immediately jumps into very early versions of "taste" and "theme from the bottom", both of which are instructive and exploratory.

to address my own setlist bias for a moment, i'm basically just in love with the first half of this set. while i could generally take or leave "AC/DC bag", "ya mar", "taste", "theme", "if i could", "divided sky", and "i didn't know" in one set, even if they were terrible versions, would make a killer set in my opinion. and these are far from terrible versions. one of my favorite phish guilty pleasures are the noodle-guitar-and-piano jams at the end of songs like "if i could" and "squirming coil", and this "if i could" brings that jamming in spades.

this show has another great "scent of a mule" with some page pyrotechnics, though "maze" is, well, it's just "maze". i've never really understood the appeal of that song. the "mike's" > "why don't we do it in the road?" > "hold your head up" > "weekapaug" string is probably the highlight of the show. again, i'm biased because i love the "mike's" > "weekapaug" duo as much as i love anything phish, but this version of "mike's" is particularly gnarly ("gnarly" in this case meaning "super dark guitar-led jamming").

overall, this show wasn't on the same level as some of the shows i've previously reviewed as far as setlists go, or as far as playing (there was a lot of technically great jamming, but a few of the songs went on for upwards of 10 minutes without actually really developing any themes or differentiation). however, there were some standout moments (middle of each set) that would be worth another listen.

stun the puppy, burn the whale!

2010-10-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

one of my favorite moments (if not THE favorite moment) of the phish shows i've seen so far...just found some youtube videos of it for the first time.

the last song they played at blossom this past summer was a great version of "squirming coil", which ended, as you can see below, with page alone on stage playing a piano solo. then, he finished, the spotlight went off, and the lights came up for the night. great encore.

two versions of the video, neither of which are amazing quality, but they both do the job :)

hang it on the fridge!: my translation of genesis from 2006

2010-10-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

i did this translation as part of my language project back in 2006. it's translated (if i remember correctly) from king alfred's old english. i don't know if anyone will find this interesting, and i'll be the first to admit that it's not the best translation, but it's certainly closer to the sense of the "original" text than anything we've got today, for what that's worth. my notes in parenthesis:

Also, the serpent was (geappre) than all the other beasts that God had made across the earth; and the serpent said to the woman: ‘Did God forbid you (plural), that you (plural) cannot eat of any tree in Paradise?’ The woman answered: ‘The fruit of the trees which are in Paradise we eat: and of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, God bade us not to eat, not to touch that tree, lest we die.’ Then replied the serpent to the woman: ‘You will not die at all, though you eat of that tree. But God surely knows that your eyes will be opened on the day which you eat of that tree; and you will be then like angels, know both good and evil.’ Then the woman saw that the tree was good to eat from, and it seemed to her beautiful to the eyes and pleasant to sight; and she took of the tree’s fruit and ate, and she gave it to her husband: he ate it. And both their eyes were opened: they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and they made breeches (clothes?).

In response God came and they heard his voice, there he walked in the garden during midday, and Adam and his wife did hide from God’s sight in the midst of the trees of the garden. God called to Adam, and said: ‘Adam, where are you?’ He said: ‘I heard your voice, sire, in the garden, and I was afraid, for I am naked, and I hid.’ God said: ‘How do you say that you were naked, if you have not ate of the tree that I had bade you not to eat of?’ Adam said: ‘That woman that you gave to be with me took of the tree and I ate.’ God said to the woman: ‘Why did you do that?’ She said: ‘The serpent deceived me and I ate.’

God said to the serpent: ‘For this that you did, you are cursed among all cattle and wild beasts. You will go on your breast and eat the earth all the days of your life. I set enmity between you and the woman and your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will (strike?) at his heel.’

To the woman said God also: ‘I multiply your misery in your childbearing; in pain you will bring forth children and you will be under your husband’s authority and he will control you.’ To Adam he said: ‘Because you listened to your wife’s voice and you ate of the tree that I bade you not to eat, your work on the earth will be cursed; in sorrow will you eat of the earth all the days of your life. Thorns and brambles will spring forth, and you will eat the earth’s plants. In the sweat of your face you earn your bread, then you will return to earth, from there you were taken, for you are dust and to dust will return.’

why don't more video games address critical thinking?

2010-10-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

so, after reading this article over breakfast this morning (oats with smuckers' jelly mixed in, as i forgot to buy enough actual fruit to get me through the week), i got to thinking about a few of bogost's points. and, since i'm taking a break from exam-ing this afternoon, i thought i'd blog about them. you know, like a real, old-fashioned blog post.

i really like the way that bogost breaks down and effectively dissolves the idea of a free speech debate around the content of the new medal of honor's use of the taliban as a multiplayer (team? side? what's the right word here?). that the debate boils down to whether or not it is tasteful to include the term "taliban" in the game does in fact illustrate how little of a political point the term's inclusion - or the taliban's inclusion - was meant to make in the first place. what's (maybe) worse, the fact that taking the term out of the game - replacing it with the catch-all term "opposing force" seems to have largely sated the game's critics shows how little the popular view of video games still expect from those games. in a time when so many are ready to fiercely defend video games' status as "art", doesn't it seem strange that the things that still get us talking critically about games most readily are things that are projected onto those games from outside cultural contexts?

as bogost mentions, the inclusion of the taliban in medal of honor could have been a point within the game and therefore also outside the game for discussion regarding the nature of war and the ambiguity of conflict. instead, what you get is the same old "you can play as the bad guy!" bullshit "special" game mechanic, made controversial by a label slapped on it meant to refer to real-world events outside the game, and thus stir association with the controversy attached to those events. the bottom line is that even our most controversial, thought-inspiring games generally refuse to start discussions of their own, and are content to ride on the backs of controversies already being enacted on the culture at large.

example: GTA, the game series best-known for pissing people off in the real world (the fact that it introduced the genre of the sandbox shooter is never nearly as important, somehow). GTA isn't controversial because the game itself forces you, through its gameplay and/or story, to confront interesting moral conundrums or engage in critical thinking. it's controversial because you can shoot hookers and shoot down police helicopters in a fighter jet. so what? i mean, i don't want to derail my point into a different conversation about whether GTA's level of violence is acceptable, but, seriously: so what? how is the conversation about whether or not playing GTA will turn our kids into murderous maniacs a more important conversation to be having than a more basic conversation about why, 30 years after the NES, we're still playing games that only challenge the gamer to mindlessly gun down everything that stands in their way en route to a completely heroic objective in a universe of perfectly black-and-white morality?

games have the ability to generate such a conversation, but they so rarely do. players stomp everything in their way for hours upon hours en route to rescuing the princess, but nobody ever stops to think that, hey, when luke blew up the death star, he was technically killing thousands of potentially innocent people.

does this mean that i think every game in the universe needs to address the metaphysical implications of mortality, or that the next time you boot up your franchise in madden you should have to face maddeningly (no pun intended) complex decisions regarding the emotional repercussions of your fake players' professional sports careers on their marriages? of course not. part of what makes games fun is the magic circle, the idea that there's a border beyond which the game doesn't go. sometimes i shoot a scientist in half-life or blow him up with a pack of explosives simply because i can. precisely because it's something that would be completely outrageous in real life but within the game there are no consequences. games like medal of honor build their appeal on the basis of the idea that you can be one man and single handedly save america from the taliban, or the nazis, or the combine, or whatever. of course that's ridiculous, but that's often why we play.

however, is it too much to ask to want games that are still games, but are smarter? here, as much as i HATE intimating that video games and movies are in pretty much any way related, i think bogost has a good point comparing the criticality of games to that of film. sure, a lot of people go to the movies for explosions, or date movies, films that could hardly be considered "critical thinkers". at the same time, though, you have a movie like avatar becoming the biggest movie of all time. now, say what you will about the mythic, derivative story (aren't all our big stories derived from myths?), at the core of avatar is a film that forces the viewer to consider a lot of post-Columbian assumptions of Western superiority...it's a popcorn flick,but it's also a postcolonial text, albeit one that's fairly obvious and ham-handed. and when people saw it, even people who weren't stuffy lit majors or cultural critics, people fucking talked about it. for months. it started a discussion that likes of which i haven't seen touched off by a movie since The Matrix. which, incidentally, was another movie that worked both on the level of popcorn flick and metaphysical garbage masher. whether or not you thought either of those movies were good, nobody can argue that they don't force the viewer to confront a critical subtext amidst the explosions. people make movies that are all about challenging assumptions, too: brokeback mountain, food, inc., restrepo, and people go see that shit.

yet, then there's video games, sitting forlornly on the fence, complaining that nobody will buy them if people are forced to actually think. the primary difference between movies and games is obvious - interactivity. the interaction the player has with the game has to be enjoyable, or else the player won't come back. but can't you have interaction without casting the player as a Good or Evil in the game world? wouldn't players be more likely to want to play a game if the character they embodied was able to interact more realistically with a more morally ambiguous world? there's a difference between wanting to play in the magic circle because games are fun and wanting to escape into a stupider microcosm of the real world where nothing you ever do is questioned.

i have little to know experience with MMORPGs, but i almost wonder if those types of games simulate a critical reality more than traditional games, because at least within the world of an MMORPG, your actions effect others and you have to acknowledge some level of society.

geesh...i was going to talk about some examples of games, but i see i've gotten way carried away. i guess i'll see if anyone responds to this and then maybe i'll write a part two...

DO NOT HOLD OVER PEOPLE

2010-10-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

i just got a huge kick out of the warning on this coffeemaker, as i instinctively took "do not hold over people" in an emotional sense rather than a physical sense. as in: "if you ever find yourself in a messy breakup argument with your ex-significant other, you CANNOT say 'how can you say i don't love you?! i bought you that coffeemaker!'".

'twas funny to me at least.

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.06.1996

2010-10-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

so after my near-transcendent experience with the '94 shows, i decided to bounce around a bit, and first went back to '96 (i also listened to an '02 show last week, but misplaced the last disc, so i'm sort of waiting to find it before i write anything). this '96 soundboard is a "page show"...you know, one of those shows when, time and time again all of trey's guitar pyrotechnics are completely overshadowed by page just ripping off one absurd keys solo after another. i like these kinds of shows, but if you're one of those fans who only enjoys hours of guitar noodling and nothing else, you probably won't like this one.

sEtlIsT

usually, a show opening with "split open and melt" is not a good omen for me. i don't know what it is about that song, but i've never really enjoyed it. the hook repeats too many times, and the jam at the end is usually too structured to really break into anything interesting. that said, this was a decent version (i.e. better than bad, at least) and the segue into "poor heart" was pretty unexpected and hilarious. this was page madness moment #1. "runaway jim" and "funky bitch" were par for the course, which is to say, awesome. then there was "theme from the bottom", which was page madness moment #2, followed indirectly by "scent of a mule" in which entire warehouses of keyboards and pianos must have been melted to fine ash. the first set closed with a pretty by-the-books "highway to hell", which prompted a horn jam by yours truly.

part of the draw of this show for me comes from the fact that billy breathes has some of my favorite phish songs on it, and here you get to hear a number of those songs in early form, before years of touring sort of formalized the jams that build around them. "theme" was one of those, and the second set brought extremely raw versions of "waste" and "character zero". they weren't the best versions i've ever heard, but it was interesting to hear them so differently. the second set had few standout-type moments otherwise, but was overall a great set of tunes. the show closed with page rocking one more time on "ya mar", and then a cover of hendrix's "fire" that had trey sounding more like '92 or '93 phish than '96.

RIDESHARE - Jeff Tweedy 02.25.2006

2010-10-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

well, hello there. it's been about thirty-five years since the last rideshare...exam-writing has intervened, and lindsey has been going to tri-cities with me often lately, which means that 35-minute "tweezer" jams don't go over as well as when it's just me in an empty car.

these reviews are actually from about a week and a half ago, and so much has happened since then, i don't really remember the content of the shows that well, or even what a "CD" is, really. nonetheless, i'm going to take my best shot at reviewing mr. tweedy's show at mandel hall in chicago, for which the setlist can be found here.

i'm getting to be really fond of starting out these cold, cloudy, morning drives with a mellow wilco or tweedy show, then following it up with a blistering early phish set on my drive back out of the canyon of heat-induced despair otherwise known as tri-cities (despair only because the temperature is like 20 degrees higher there than in pullman due to elevation droppage). anyway, this tweedy show really hit the spot.

it was a great soundboard, and the songs were a great mix of the ones that you can hear in similar incarnation on the sunken treasure dvd (which you should buy if you're a wilco fan at all) and a lot of songs from a ghost is born. hearing really clean, precise solo acoustic versions of tunes like "muzzle of bees", "spiders" and "theologians" was a treat. there were even some surprises among the expected, more "folky" choices in the set: "one by one", "(was i) in your dreams", "bob dylan's 49th beard".

though the third set followed the usual procedure for this particular tour: usually nels and/or glenn joining tweedy onstage for a few songs, the songs for this particular show were a bit of a surprise. getting to hear rearranged versions of "in a future age" and "dash 7" was maybe the highlight of the whole show.

overall, a great combination of a unique setlist, solid sound, and of course a solid performance makes this, for my money, almost as good as the aforementioned sunken treasure audio companion for a collection of solo tweedy tunes.

ye olde recordings have finally be re-upped!

2010-09-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

though my hunt for an easy website design tool and time to make an AWESOME personal/professional website continue to fall through (it's been what, 2 years now?), i've finally found a convenient and non-stupid way to re-up all of my old sessions and records for download.

all hail mediafire!

okay, now i seriously have to go write my exams.

mint medley session available for free download and consumption!

2010-09-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

so in defiance of my coming exams, i found myself staying home saturday afternoon and setting up a recording space in my bathroom. i'd been toying with the idea of using the bathroom to record any guitar-based songs lindsey would want to put on her album, but i'd never actually tested the room to see what it sounded like. so, i decided to take an hour or three and see what a song or two of mine sounded like in there, sung from different parts of the room, sung with the mics shifted around, with the shower curtain open or closed, etc.

by 8pm i had recorded 14 songs.

so, i thought it would be fitting to post them online as a soundcloud session before i disappear into the abyss for three weeks. there aren't any new songs here (i'm mostly working on poems right now, and usually those flesh out into songs eventually, but none have yet), but there are a lot of new covers. here's the whole setlist:

1. Angel From Montgomery (John Prine cover)
2. Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains) (Ryan Adams cover)
3. Dusty Roads
4. The Melody
5. Albuquerque (Neil Young cover)
6. Bob Dylan's 49th Beard (Jeff Tweedy cover)
7. Palace
8. Ripple (Grateful Dead cover)
9. Forget the Flowers (Wilco cover)
10. Hey Sue
11. Sample in a Jar (Phish cover)
12. Box Full of Letters (Wilco cover)
13. Better to Be Loved > Jam > Millie > Shelter From the Storm (Bob Dylan) > Millie
14. Via Chicago (Wilco cover)

and here's the soundcloud widget:
Mint Medley Session by lazyblazers

i accidentally wrote my biography

2010-09-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

so today i was responding to a student's email, trying to dispense sage advice about professionalization, when i realized i'd just written basically my entire life story of the last five years. so i just thought i'd post it here in case anyone cared. it's not especially interestingly written (or interesting in content), but ctrl + v is so easy, why not?
----------------------

As far as the professional stuff goes, I actually got my MA here at WSU (in Pullman). I started my Bachelor's at Kent State University in Ohio, which is about an hour from where I grew up, and I was a computer science and programming major for a few years. It's sort of a cliche story, but basically what ended up happening was that I realized I didn't like my major and all of my elective classes that I had to take to graduate ended up being English classes, as I realized more and more that those were the classes I really liked. That was a bit surprising to me, since I had actually been a terrible English student in high school.

Anyway, I changed my major and graduated with a BA in English and a really crappy book that I had had to write for my undergrad thesis.

As everybody says, there's not a whole lot that you can do with a BA in English (there are some things, but I didn't want to do any of them), so I quit school for a few years and just worked normal minimum-wage type jobs before applying to grad school and ending up at WSU. I picked WSU because they give assistantships to all of their incoming English graduate students. Basically it's a deal where they pay your tuition and you teach introductory writing classes for them while you get your degree. I really liked the idea of getting to work while going to grad school instead of just sitting around reading books all day (ironic, considering what I'm doing right now), so I came here.

I finished the MA in 2007 and missed getting in the Ph.D program by one person, so I stayed on and taught as a faculty instructor for a year and then started the Ph.D program two years ago. So, yeah, I've been an English major all the way through, which in some ways is a really good thing, but also can be a bad thing, I think, especially as doing interdisciplinary work gets more popular.

I actually did my MA thesis on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales...up until about 2007 I was obsessed with pretty much anything written in English before 1500 or so. Then, I think I just got sick of it. I'd been working on the same topic for about five years at that point and I think it just got old. Fortunately, around that time I took a great class here at WSU from two fantastic professors. The class was about the history of travel writing, and it really got me thinking about a lot of things, but primarily it got me thinking about how literary theory and all the wordplay and academic argument that goes with higher education in English literature can actually be paired with real-world concerns. I mean, the stereotypical idea of the English professor is someone who spends all their time reading a bunch of made-up stories by dead white guys and writing articles that explain what those dead white guys meant to say. Now, I'd be lying if I said that I don't enjoy doing that from time to time, but what drove me away from Chaucer in the end was the fact that I couldn't really see how studying it mattered to anyone other than me. I guess ending up at ecocriticism was just a logical progression from there.

I really love ecocriticism because it's so innately connected to real-world concerns, and politics, and policies, and how real people and real cities and real countries live their lives. You can look at something like Carson's Silent Spring and see really easily how that book mattered to our society in really obvious ways, and from there it's easy to see how studying that impact as a graduate student can be important.

Of course, all of that isn't to say that studying something like Chaucer or Shakespeare is worthless; I still think a lot of that stuff is fascinating. That travel writing class I took ended in a class backpacking trip to the Selway river that was (instead of just a fun way to end the semester) a really logical extension of the books we'd been reading and all the stuff we'd been studying. When I realized that I could still study lit theory and actually back up that study not with the words of dead white guys but by writing about my own experiences in the woods and in cities and during cross-country trips and that kind of thing, it wasn't a hard decision to switch my focus :)

RIDESHARE: Wilco 02.01.1997

2010-09-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

this one got off to a less-than-auspicious start. i had chosen the disc because it was marked "07.02.01" (i mark CDs in euro-style dating for ease of sorting), and i wanted to hear an '07 show because i love the rawer versions of the sky blue sky songs.

so imagine my surprise when i popped the first disc in and it started in the midst of "misunderstood", then continued through five more being there-era songs. it took about that long for me to realize that i must have forgotten to put the leg on that first "0", making it "97" instead of "07".

so here's the set i got.

much like the phish show i just reviewed, this one taught me the error of my ways, in a sense. i generally don't like bennett-era wilco that much, and have never understood why so many wilco fans insist that the late 90s were the peak of the band. this might be because i really just don't like jay bennett's playing (which is a rant for another day), but for whatever reason, while i occasionally like to put on early, "raw" wilco, i come away with the impression that, for as fun as they are, they really aren't that good.

this show was good.

like i said above, for some reason "misunderstood" cuts in about 2 minutes into the song, and actually the first few songs are a bit unlistenable because someone keeps fiddling (either the sound dude or the taper) with the volume levels and tweedy's voice is nearly inaudible. however, things pick up.

this show's version of "that's not the issue" is one of those versions where it literally sounds to me like all the members of the band are stoned out of their minds and banging on their instruments erratically and totally failing at staying in any time signature or scale; yet, at the same time i'm a little afraid that they're just playing in a scale or something that i'm not familiar with and i'm not cool enough to get it. anyway, this song was sort of a disaster.

everything else is pure being there wilco. loud, clashing guitars, wild alternation between screamed and whispered lyrics, and more feedback than you can shake your pickups at.

things really start to get off the chain when the band finishes "passenger side", only to launch immediately into a "punk" version of the same song. after that, madness ensues, including two versions of "box full of letters", three uncle tupelo songs ("we've been had", "gun", and "the long cut"), which oddly sound like three of the most well-rehearsed songs of the night. the last few songs, including the final "dreamer in my dreams" run around 10 minutes apiece simply because the band never stops banging on guitars, drums, and piano long enough to stop the song and move on to the next one.

this show had an undeniable energy to it, and underneath that the band showed a real ability to not just devolve into screaming and strumming - the nuances of the songs often still come through despite the volume and the reverb. the focus here is being there; if you love that record, you'll love this show. i actually want to go back and listen to the record this weekend now, thanks to this show. though i doubt i'll ever think than any wilco is better than '06 - present wilco, i see the appeal of this kind of show now. i might grab another one from this era to review for next week.

RIDESHARE: Phish 06.18.1994

2010-09-17T19:51:00.000-07:00

so last week i tacitly suggested that maybe '94 phish was not nearly as good as it gets credit for. then i listened to this show the next day and it slapped me across the mouth for my impertinence.

good god. there are bands who can be more technically proficient live than '94 phish, there are bands that can improvise better than '94 phish. but there is no band i've ever heard in my life that can do both at the same time so well as this era of this band. i'd forgotten, and was immediately reminded why people have complained about phish live for 15 years. because they never have been and never will be as flat-out good as they were then. does that mean that they're not worth listening to now? of course not. this summer '94 tour was like catching lightning in a bottle; it's so good you feel like there must be some sort of mystical, ghostly force that decided to infuse the band's instruments with the power to play the music of the cosmos.

no, seriously, it's so good it's driving me to a fucking histrionic breakdown.

anyway, here's the set.

to avoid just bellowing superlatives for ten paragraphs, i'll just hit the really, really high points:

- "rift". this version of "rift" is amazing, and amazingly fast.

- this "AC/DC bag" was so exciting that i broke into spontaneous horn-jamming:

- the entire second half of the first set has no particular standout, but is pretty much the epitome of the improv/technical brilliance i was ranting about above. every song boomerangs out into places you don't expect, with everyone still hitting every note, and then when the do wrap back around to the typical parts of the songs, they do so with a speed and a skill that's rare even for phish.

- maybe my favorite part of this show is the opening of the second set. i very keys-heavy "peaches en regalia", followed by a "bowie" that takes about six minutes to even get started due to three distinct but equally brilliant improv jams the band breaks out in sequence. then, when "bowie" finally hits in earnest, it's one of the best versions i've heard yet, with a groove in the middle that needs to be heard to be believed.

- the other highlight of the second set is "you enjoy myself". for a phish song i've probably heard a few hundred times by now, this version did a great job of throwing in some curves that i still didn't expect, and made a great closing case for this being one of the best shows i've ever heard.

- the encore is simple, short, and perfect in terms of song selection. what else would you end a show like this with besides "tweeprise"?

new (old) poem

2010-09-13T00:44:00.000-07:00

i actually wrote a new poem today. which is not a huge deal, but it also sort of is because i haven't written literally anything new in at least a year, maybe more like a year and a half.

unfortunately for you, i'm not going to post my new poem yet, as i want to look at it in the morning and see if it makes any sense at all, and then i'll pass it along.

however, i've finally gotten this other older poem to a point where i can read it out loud and not feel like it absolutely sucks, so i'm calling it officially finished. so i'll distract you with it while i continue to work on the new one. cheers!
-------------

three peaces

I
talking can terraform
can flatten the tangled
topography of the mind
into flat verdance

i can see what’s coming miles away
nothing jumps out
nobody screams
and even at night the shadows stretch under the moon
but at least i can see the tips of them.

II
the edge of the shore
water running
into
and up
and over the pebbles
pulling them
pushing them
they roll as they rest in that
interminable but
gentle grasp

fireflies at the edges of this scene
at the edges of my fingers
fighting off
cold darkness indefinition
all at once
giving form to everything
while also being cowed by it

the stars are coldhardbright
they eat enough of the sky that
i almost feel like i can grab them
but i won’t
even the utmost beauty
perhaps especially
the utmost beauty
seems perilous to touch out here

i stretch out on the rocks
a million peas with a mattress hidden underneath
from this angle the sky is splintered
by the spidery fingers of a birch tree
leaning out over the beach
from the closest green spot to
the fringe
the edge
the fire’s light
is almost invisible
but i can see the smoke
curling
around the tips of my toes.

III
the moon’s loud enough that it’s night
but not it's night enough to sleep

the riverbed
long since abandoned by anything that could have given it that name
lies
dappling the moonlight into a thousand shades

rose, for love (?)
pearl, for age
silver, for time
blue, for the sky
which is still blue even when it’s too dark to tell.

RIDESHARE - Wilco 02.24.2005

2010-09-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

wow, tuesday was a good day for in-the-car music. it suppose my luck was cosmically meant to balance out the fact that every other aspect of my life was totally and randomly ruined and obliterated yesterday.

as he types, still-drying black fingernail polish dripping onto the keys.

so, on tuesday i pulled a near-perfect ghost is born-era wilco soundboard, and an incredibly varied yet gorgeous '94 phish show. i'll be reviewing the phish later, as i still have one disc left to listen to.

setlist for wilco is here.

so usually what current-era wilco does is center their main set around whatever newer material they're most excited about at the time, and then they follow that with two encores (the definitely-two-encores-all-the-time thing is something i've never really understood, but oh well) that revisit a lot of older, being there-era songs (for all the "old school" fans who apparently want all their wilco to sound exactly the same). that formula normally makes a great show all by itself, but here they twist that formula a bit, and to great effect.

the main set is almost all ghost is born material, and it's played with a mix of screeching, crunchy big guitars and that harrowing screaming noise jamming that the band really started scaling back in '07-'08. '05-'06 is probably my favorite for the band (was there something in the air in 2006?), so i guess i'm biased here, but in this show they play the ghost tracks enough like the studio arrangements to communicate the songs' subtle details while deviating (mostly by making the guitars a little heavier) from those arrangements just enough to make things interesting.

interspersed perfectly with the ghost songs are a few old, toned-down staples, that after the torrents of noise and crunch come like breaths of folky-fresh air. "should have been in love", "always in love", and "shot in the arm" fill in nicely in this role. the main set closes with "reservations" coming out of an absolutely harrowing "poor places" jam, and then segues into an exceptional "spiders".

the first encore goes by pretty much as expected, save for a "misunderstood" that's worth noting, as it's played with the amount of intense noise and dissonance present on the amazing album version, which is something i've rarely heard from '98-'03 wilco.

the second encore is seven songs long, and includes a rendition of "bob dylan's beard" and covers of "comment" and a note-for-note-perfect "don't fear the reaper".

i'm just going to leave it at that. because that's amazing.

on a scale of 1 to 10, this show, like my fender hot rod deluxe amp, goes up to 12.

RIDESHARE - Phish 04.17.1994

2010-09-06T21:42:00.000-07:00

more phish!

for last thursday's drive, i took a trip back to what's generally thought of as the phish golden age: 1994. this is the time when the band (at least in the popular view) had melded together their pre-1994 shredding skills with a new, occasionally more measured and experimental approach, and had, on top of that recently started road-testing a ton of songs that would eventually go on to become phish live staples. interestingly, this show turned out to be about as far from the quintessential '94 phish show as i could have gotten.

setlist here.

so, last time, if you'll recall, i unilaterally decided to declare that phish shows could be split up into two types. this show, out of sheer spite, i'm sure, decided to go dramatically against my proclamation. the setlist was varied, the performances were varied, and everything was, by and large, excellent...though by the end of the show the one significant thing missing was any sense of "flow" (to use an English 101 student term). if i had played this show and then had someone tell me it was actually a mixtape, i wouldn't have been surprised.

the show opened with "loving cup", which is odd in and of itself. "foam" is always a welcome sight, and this version ended too soon. easily one of the highlights of the first set. "divided sky" as the fourth song of the show just confused me. it felt really early to have to digest a 15-minute-plus monster, and the band sounded like they felt the same way. there were no mistakes, per se, but the jamming sort of circled itself over and over for about ten minutes and then we moved on to "mound". similarly to "simple", i pretty much ALWAYS love "mound", and this version was no exception. the "down with disease" > "if i could" run was the best part of the first set. i'm one of the few (apparently) who can't get enough of "if i could", and this particular jam carried that ethereal, almost-but-not-quite-cheesy punch better than most. the transition to "my sweet one" was pretty brilliant, but the rest of the first set itself was nothing to write home (or on your blog) about.

i'd like to reiterate the comments i made last time about "bowie". this version was no different for me: i love it, but i don't know why. "wolfman's" > "uncle pen" was the highlight of the second set for me. a long, drawn-out funky jam following "bowie" was a perfect juxtaposition, and then following that with the tight, composed bluegrass of "uncle pen" made a great one-two (-three?) punch. from there on out, though, the second set (and the encore) were a bit confusing. they were an eclectic mix of pre-1994 and "new" songs, and it really just sounded like the band wasn't really comfortable with getting those two sides of their sound to cohere yet. especially, the encore, which should have some aspect (i think, anyway) of a coda or reprise or just a straight-up balls-out facemelt to it, was pretty flat. "cracklin' rosie" is always fun to hear, but it's never going to make anyone pump their fist in the air. "hold your head up" was actually just page playing the organ riff through once, which lead directly into a pretty by-the-numbers version of "bold as love". and that was that.

overall, and interesting setlist and a few great moments, but there's not much to recommend this show over, say, the previous ones i've reviewed on here. definitely check out the "if i could", though. it's good stuff.

on a scale between a compsognathus and a tyrannosaurus, this one's definitely a styracosaurus.

RIDESHARE - Wilco 11.02.02

2010-09-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

finally, something that's not phish. i've been on a bit of a phish kick lately because that's just what happens to me during late summer for some weird, probably evolutionary reason. my phish hormones start raging and i want to eat bacteria cultures and use my own dreadlocks for clothes. but none of that happens in this universe, because this is the clean-person universe.

well, now that it's fall (at least i'm wearing a hoodie indoors and not sweating), wilco will likely take over. especially because i have to get my wilco fix vicariously this year thanks to the fact that they're not touring the US this fall, leaving with my no choice but to constantly play "the lonely 1" on loop every night while tearing my tweedy posters off the wall, throwing them across the room, and then falling asleep hours later cradling them to my tearstained face and mumbling apologies.

god, i've been reading cracked.com too much.

amidst the blathering, have thee a setlist!

i picked an '02 show to listen to on a cold, dark day because i figured it would be mellow and it seemed to suit the proceedings. little did i know that i'd chosen quite literally the show that plato saw the shadow of on the wall of the cave and he knew he was looking at "mellow".

wilco shows, as is to be expected, generally don't deviate as greatly from one another as phish shows tend to, simply because the songs are mostly pop-rock songs of under four minutes in length. as such, i probably won't talk much about specific tracks in wilco show reviews, but more just about the show in general.

this show started pretty interestingly, with "hesitating beauty" sort of lazily fading in from silence, followed by "one by one". things got about as rollicking as they would ever get with "sunken treasure", and then there was an early pre-ghost is born version of "less than you think", which was pretty much just who i presume to be jay bennett on the keys while tweedy sung over it. pretty great, and lacking the 15 minutes of distortion from the studio version of that track. another highlight was the "war on war"/"kamera" combination...these songs are both mid-tempo slow-rockers in general, and they sound almost indistinguishable if you just have them on in the background, but for some reason i love them both and love hearing them back-to-back even more.

the highlight of the show (maybe) for me was a brief and totally unexpected wilco jam which took place first at the beginning of "how to fight loneliness", then led out of it in the form of a segue into "not for the season", which itself concluded with an epic, multi-minute kotche drum shower.

"poor places" and "reservations" made a good pair of closing songs for the main set, as the static from one led appropriately into the naked-sounding piano chords of the second. after a closing bit of noise-jamming, the encore started with "misunderstood" and continued to be a pretty normal wilco encore, aside from the general mellowness. it's funny how the one thing that always stays the same about wilco is their encore(s). you know you're going to get tons of loud being there songs. it was nice to hear "red-eyed and blue" and "far, far away".

overall this show was very slow and "chill" (as the kids say), and also the soundboard feed is mixed in such a way that often all you can hear is the cymbals, keys, and tweedy's voice, so a lot of times even when the band is clearly playing like they're rocking an arena, it sounds like you're listening to them play on only a piano to a small crowd in a small barn. not bad, but potentially disappointing, depending on what you expect.

this was a show that absolutely epitomizes that just-post-YHF era brooding wilco sound for me. subtract a few style points for all of jay bennett's "i'm soloing even though it's the verse because i don't respect the fact that a song has to have some level of inherent structure because i'm so different", and you have an otherwise great winter '02 show. on a rating scale based on the first five numbers of the fibonacci sequence, this show is a 2.

RIDESHARE - Phish 07.26.98

2010-09-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

RIDESHARE: Phish 07.26.98

i spun this one on tuesday, so i need to do it quick, lest i forget.

i've really been feeling the 97-98 phish lately; something about the wide open spaces of a drive through the southeastern washington desert lends itself to spacey, 30-minute
versions of “also sprach zarathustra”. or the other way around. or something.

anyway, setlist here.

on a five-star scale where zero is a pepperoni pizza and five is a five-cheese pizza, this show would be a three-and-a-half cheese pizza.

the highs were high and the lows weren't low...let's just say there were a few times throughout the show where i caught myself realizing that i hadn't been listening for twenty minutes because i was subconsciously finding the scrub brush more engaging than the music.

"birds of a feather" is a great song and a great opener, and this version was no different...though maybe it was a sign of the show's overall "too little of a good thing" feel in that this "birds" clocked in at about six minutes, about ten minutes shorter than usual. then comes "better believe it baby", which i've heard a number of times already in various TAB shows and, no matter who plays it, i never like it. same thing here. rarely will i just not like a phish song (rather than just a particular night's interpretation of it), but that's the case with this clunker. and it came on while i was puttering through colfax, no less.

there's something that draws me to "bowie". i love the speed and precision of the intro section, especially in earlier years' shows, but then everything always just goes to shit for me in the middle. i don't know why. compared to other phish jams, i always find "bowie" jams to be loud, screechy, hard to follow and generally unpleasant...but the wait up to that last second pay-off somehow always makes me forget the middle section and want to bounce out of my seat (or car) at the end. this one was no different. the "frankie" > "reba" mashup is nicely mellow and hypnotic, while i was a bit let down by the first set closer of "funky bitch" (another one of those few phish songs i just don't like) and "good times bad times", which followed the zeppelin version a little too closely to be interesting.

the second set was marked by some pretty incredibly covers. it opens with "la grange", which i didn't even know that phish ever played, and their version was wonderfully faithful to the zz top original, albeit with a hectic blues-rock jam in the middle. this version of "you enjoy myself" takes a few extra minutes to get started, which i actually really liked...it was interesting to hear them jam out the beginning of the song a bit longer. "albuquerque" was another song that i didn't know phish had ever covered, and as the song started i immediately thought to myself "hmm, this sounds like a neil young song". and then it was and i was all "yeah!" and the guitar was all "skeedly deedly deedly!" and my car was all "vrooooom!"

so there's that.

I LOVE "SIMPLE". that's probably pretty clear by now.

after "simple" was a great version of hendrix's "bold as love" and the show closes with four solid (there's that word again) but not really outstanding songs.

i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most phish shows i listen to or attend fall into one of two categories:
1) band starts out strong, falters near the end of the first set, tries too hard at the beginning of the second set, ends on a great note after recovering
2) band starts slow, slaughters everything for the end of the first set and the beginning of the second, and then ends the show on a decent, but not impressive note.

the first gorge show from last year was definitely a Type 1 show for me, while the second gorge show and this year's blossom show were both Type 2. this tape definitely epitomizes the Type 2.

The Best Road Trip Slideshow Ever

2010-09-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

so i just set up this cool new facebook/twitter/blog linky-thing, and it seems to be working. on the off chance that it actually is, and to indirectly celebrate my 1200th post and 140,000 miles on my car, i thought i would post The Best Road Trip Slideshow Ever.

test post!

2010-09-03T18:41:00.000-07:00

pretend i'm saying something interesting!

or, just check out this photograph of a monkey playing football:

big red and big blue ARE THE SAME THING

2010-09-03T14:55:00.001-07:00

divided christmas sky traveler

2010-09-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

i was just remembering the other afternoon how freaking blown away i was when i first started listening to phish and was SURE i'd heard the middle part of "divided sky" before. eventually i figured out that john popper used phish's melody for his "christmas song", which has listened to every christmas obsessively for almost a decade prior. incidentally, it's the best christmas song ever, pretty much. evidence of awesomeness and synchronicity below.

full blues traveler song:

the relevant part of "divided sky" starts around 4:15:

RIDESHARE: Phish - 12.29.98

2010-08-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

awesome new feature!

to "celebrate" my new job/teaching gig in richland (i refuse to call it tri-cities because you can't be in three places at once), i've decided to institute a new feature on the blog. all summer, i've been carrying out the slow, agonizing, but largely work-un-intensive task of converting all my CDs to digital files, for easier sorting, storing, and backup. just to give you an idea of the enormity of this task: so far i've ripped over 18,000 tracks, and i'm not even close to 1/3rd of the way through all the CDs. it's insane. part of the insanity is my realizing that i have at least 100 live shows on CD that i've never listened to before. this dovetails nicely with the fact that i'm now spending about 10 hours a week in a car by myself.

so...i'll be listening to tons of phish, wilco, and RA shows (big surprise!) over the next few months and i figured i'd do short write-ups on each show as i listen, so that later when i have everything stored digitally, i can remind myself what's worth listening to again and what's not.

let's start with the only full show i got through last thursday: part of Phish's '98 NYE run, a soundboard tape from 12/29.

here's the setlist and link from etree:

Set I
Rock and Roll, Funky Bitch, Punch You In the Eye, Horn, Ginseng Sullivan, Split Open and Melt, Brian & Robert, Guyute, My Soul, Freebird*

Set II
Free, Limb by Limb, Also Sprach Zarathustra**, Boogie on Reggae Woman, You Enjoy Myself E: The Divided Sky

full show rating: ****
***** - that puddle looks a lot like my face...
**** - i'd rather listen to this than do most things.
*** - good.
** - most shows are better, but there are probably some high points.
* - i'm now actually dead from having killed myself from having listened to this.

the show starts with "rock and roll", which i have to admit that i'm partial to lately because it's a song that's been rocked out to the extreme at 2 of the 3 phish shows i've been to. plus, it's just a great opener. this version starts by following the original song quite closely for the first few minutes, and then explodes into a lot of blistering soloing...it's a lot shorter and less exploratory than the versions of the song phish has been playing lately, but it's a great start. it segues into a solid "funky bitch" and then "punch you in the eye", and doesn't really let up until "horn", which is a great song, but hey, it's still "horn" and there's nothing new here. i don't normally like "ginseng sullivan" that much, but maybe it was the driving-through-farmlands i was doing and maybe not...this particular version is really jumpy and yet the playing is really clean, and it's just a damn fun tune at this point in the set. the middle part of the first set is also all solid, but just solid. the set closes with a stellar "my soul" and the always-hilarious a capella version of "freebird" there's not much in this set beyond the first three songs in this set that jumps out, but i really really liked the whole thing...i think part of the greatness comes from the entirely wacky selection of songs, and part comes from the fact that though this show comes from the funk "era" of phish, it's packed with a lot of great blues and rock jams in the first set. it's a truly unique sounding show if you put the tape on expecting it to be a typical '97-'98 show.

the main draw (for most) of the second set will be the YEM set-closer and the following "divided sky" encore, comprising about 45 minutes of music between the two of them. each is (again) a solid version of the song, and i remember how at one point in my phish fandom the idea of these two songs back-to-back would have, by itself, made this show a must-download. however, the real draw for me here was the "also sprach zarathustra", which is the only real moment of space-funk in the entire show, but it's a doozy. things start off very atmospheric and out-there and only get...umm...spacier as time goes on. this performance, combined with the straight-out rock of "free", which is a song that rarely gets jammed out like it does here, makes this second set worth listening to.

all in all, this is a great show for the variety in the setlist, the fact that there aren't any real duds at any point (though i don't like "boogie on reggae woman" myself, the song is performed well here), and for a few very high points. if you're looking for a truly transcendent show, keep looking, but you could do much worse than this one.

summer of the memes

2010-08-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

so i had to explain the "double rainbow song" to a (disgustingly uncultured) friend of mine today, and it reminded me that i'd wanted to write this entry awhile back and then it slipped my mind when i got caught up in fistfighting bears and writing poetry.

this summer was memorable for a lot of reasons (many of which i will someday hopefully get around to writing about before i totally forget about any of them), and somehow the soundtrack to much of the adventure and action was (for some reason) based on three ridiculously addictive/bizarre internet memes.

1) the '60s-era IHOP theme song
this one was introduced on, i think, the first day that john was in pullman. he innocently mentioned that there was some batshit insane video on youtube of an old IHOP commercial, and so, being the connoisseur of batshit insanity that i am, i had to check it out. this is what i saw:

WHAT. IS. HAPPENING.
why the voice? i mean, i understand that going to IHOP is an excuse for dressing up in your sunday best and fucking skipping across a field with a huge cloud of balloons clutched in your trembling fist because IHOP is awesome and if you are NOT caught up in a paroxysm of joy at the prospect of panqueques, there's something wrong with you.
however. this is horrifying. the singing seems to be slightly off-rhythm from the music, and both are insane. also, nobody in this commercial GETS PANCAKES. two people get vaguely italian dishes, one person gets a salad, and the fourth person gets what is obviously a now-extinct giant mollusk pulled from the depths of the sea off the shore of whatever dark, lovecraftian hamlet this IHOP is located in. thanks, IHOP. i not only never want to go to IHOP again now, i never want to go ANYWHERE again.

2) nanerpuss
this was introduced to me by lindsey, on the same day as the above commercial. here's the original:

now that's crazy, but it also has this bizarre, catchy quality to it. the kind of quality that makes you wake up in the middle of the night sweating, screaming that you are the nanerpuss, and - guess what?! - you like pancakes. it gets worse:

are you dead yet? here's my favorite:

this is the one that cracked my world in half. for weeks afterwards i would literally halt in the middle of a busy word day, and unaware if what i myself was doing would shout "I'M WHAT'S KNOWN AS THE NANERPUSS! I AM A BANANANANANANA!!!!" for serious. it was bad.

3) the double rainbow song
i'm not going to explain this one to you if you don't already know it. the first video is the necessary context. the second video is the song. this song was my ringtone all summer because it is awesome, and surprisingly catchy and song-like and good and i like it. you should listen.

all roads lead to fucking

2010-08-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

no, seriously. look at the picture. not photoshopped.

foo, you just got nailed!

2010-08-29T19:38:00.000-07:00

last night, i heroically dealt with squads of armacham soldiers the only way i know how...with a nailgun.

i'm looking at you, valhalla

2010-08-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

if you're in a "dance club" and you ask the DJ to play some new order and they say "who?", it's not actually a dance club.

when it rains, it pours lemonade (that you made from the lemons life gave you)

2010-08-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

so, in my 10619 days of life on earth, i've now locked my keys in my car twice. that means, on any given day, i'm .0188% likely to lock my keys in the car (and 99.98% likely to not). those are pretty good odds. unless, of course, you consider the fact that the last time i locked my keys in the car was almost a year ago today. that means that within the last year, i've actually been .55% likely to lock my keys in the car, up drastically from 0% in the previous 28 years. at the rate i'm currently going, assuming i live to be 70 years old, i will lock my keys in the car 82 more times before my death (the movement of technology away from metal keys towards biometrics notwithstanding).

all this math shit leads to a more important question: is grad school making me lose my mind?

i'm almost certain that i'm stupider than i was five years ago, though i'm not sure exactly if grad school is to blame. all the hookers and blow might have something to do with it, i suppose.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!

2010-08-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

ode to bryan tower (today at 5pm you played "somewhere over the rainbow")

2010-08-15T22:44:00.000-07:00

o great cyclopean eye
you shiver the hot night air with your
burning red glare that throws

rust-colored shadows across the edges of my books like
spilled paint

even on kamiak butte you arrest my slumber
as your unblinking gaze penetrates dreams free of
literary aspirations

now that you are fixed, i once again have will
now that you are fixed, i once again have purpose
now that you are fixed, i once again seek to kindle the fire
of mordor in the hearts of my orc army

the world of men shall fall

OHCRAPITHINKITSTIMETOEATDINNER

why do i even have a twitter account anymore?!

2010-08-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

i used to think twitter was stupid, then i thought it was totally awesome, and now i think it's stupid again. does this mean that i'll eventually again think of it as the proverbial bee's knees (or as today's english students would say, the B's knee's)? or is it dumb and stupid like a broken toy when you're two years old? i haven't checked my twitter feed for eleven days and my life hasn't come to an end. i find i learn a hell of a lot more reading actual articles read through my RSS feed, and if i want to talk to people, i just talk to them in real life.

am i getting old?

why is everything suddenly in sepia tones?

why am i an envelope?!

i'm like your mom's doorbell, everyone gets a turn

2010-08-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

something went horribly wrong in that post title.

anyway, as a way to keep a tenuous hold on the sanity i described so incoherently in the previous post, i'm going to try to force myself to write at least one blog a day from now on. sometimes they might be about things that happened during that specific day, but i'm hoping to actually write some Writey McWriterson things as well. we'll see. if i can set aside an hour every two days to exercise my body, i should be able to set aside the same amount of time to exercise my brains (and my fingers, and my brain's fingers), right?

WRONG.

oh god, my toaster's on fire quick someone throw water on it

crash

there will be a time when time won't come fast enough...

2010-08-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

...but until then, i wouldn't mind it if things slowed down a bit. life is crash-bang-booming through the end of summer and into the beginning of fall, and in pullman that means: 1) 95-degree temperatures every day for the next month and 2) yearly existential dilemma over whether the payoff of my job is really worth the completely insane hours and less-than-minimal pay.

fortunately, #1 is easily mitigated by a few strategically placed $10 box fans.

#2 CAN be easily mitigated by a few strategically placed bottles of wine, but history has shown that that solution is impermanent at best.

author's note: i put slices of kiwi in this giant salad i made a few nights ago and then they rotted the next day, so now i'm eating huge, tasty piles of hearty salad that is really great except the one out of every ten bites that has a brown, rotting chunk of kiwi in it.

every fall, especially now with the advent of facebook, i see a tidal wave of comments, blog posts, and status messages bemoaning the end of summer, discussing one last weekend trip or party before "work" starts, or complaining about how everyone is already "stressing out". i empathize in a sense. i had (as you'll find out in forthcoming posts) pretty much the most fun, adventurous, exciting (and, conveniently, healthiest and cheapest) summer of my life this summer. it was a relief knowing that i can still enjoy life in a really fundamental, kid-with-a-cardboard-box sort of way even though i'm almost 30, and it was also just fun to have so much...fun. god, i always sound so profound when i talk about good things.

so in a sense, i'm sad to see summer go. i'm sad to ramp back up to 14-hour workdays, setting my alarm, and not just being able to say "the hell with it all" every few weeks and disappear into the hills with my tent. there's so much i have left over that i wanted to do this summer that i literally have a Google Doc listing all the places i want to hike to and camp at and climb mountains around next summer. it's a bummer to realize suddenly how enthusiastic you really are about something (traveling, hiking, playing music, you name it) just when you have to chuck it all and get your nose back to (on? in?) the grindstone.

but stress? fear? this terrifying amount of angst that so many of my fellow teachers seem to have? i don't get it. i don't feel stressed at all. either i'll succeed or i won't. i'll work to the utmost of my ability at all of the things i have in front of me before december, and if my bosses don't think i did a good enough job...what else could i have done?

i guess i've kind of always thought that way, at least since i started teaching in 2005. maybe it has something to do with my past working all kinds of crappy jobs while needing to constantly suck up to authority figures in order to keep said crappy jobs. maybe it's the fact that even though it's been five years now, i'm still really grateful to have the job i have, and while there are days that i'd rather sleep in than teach class or write a seminar paper, i've never once woken up with that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach like i used to on a monday morning before heading off to chipotle or the gas station. and that's why i don't get the stressing out. why would you go through the incredibly rigorous process of getting a ph.d if you didn't want to? i mean, sure it's not the most pleasant process in the world, but it's not like things are going to become suddenly simpler when you finish the degree...more than likely you're going to end up doing the same thing you're doing now, somewhere else, with even more pressure on you and maybe a little more money in your pockets. and that's the GOOD option.

i'm not picking on anyone in particular here, and honestly i'm not trying to "pick on" anyone at all. i guess i'm just trying to understand...nobody just stumbles into a job teaching college the way you might stumble into selling cars or managing a chipotle. there's a long, deliberate process involved in people like myself getting ourselves to the stage that we're at. if that process is really destroying your life, do something else instead. challenge is important, but so is being happy.

i'm sad because i'm going to miss all the opportunities i briefly had during the first half of this summer to indulge in some things i don't normally have the luxury of indulging in when working 80 hours a week, but the only thing i'm going to be stressed out about is whether or not my car's going to survive the drive to tri-cities on thursday. and, hell, i'm not even that good of a teacher or student. if anybody SHOULD be worried, it should be me...

dim lights keep the hulk at bay

2010-08-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

it's true. i was reading a study the other day (which i can't link because i forgot to bookmark it and now i can't refind it) that basically showed how any light level that's actually brighter than sunlight (i.e. the interior lighting of pretty much any building in the United States at any given time) is so confusing for the brain that that light level is interpreted similarly to how our brains interpret night-light. the shorter and less shittily-phrased version of that sentence is this: when it's really bright inside, humans' brains think that it's nighttime. this explains a lot about the last 29 years of my life. it also explains why i always fall asleep after turning the lights up real high to keep myself from falling asleep. it ALSO explains why this is my favorite sight to come home to after a long day of work:

i've always liked keeping the lights down rather low, to the point that certain others tend to become exasperated upon entering my office to find that, for the tenth time in a row, it's too dark for them to navigate from one end of the room to the other. in the middle of the afternoon.

of course maybe i'm just a vampire. but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones. just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.

fifa 10 sucks.

2010-07-16T15:58:00.000-07:00

that's pretty much it.

in the wake of the world cup coming to a totally metal, crane-kick-to-the-heart-style end, i was left missing my quadannual injection of football action, and decided that my best recourse (other than watching tons of euro league action on espn3.com in august) would be to get a soccer pc game. it's just efficient, combining hobbies this way.

anyway, i tried the demos for both Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 and EA Sports' FIFA 10. and they both suck. a lot. for years, this absurd argument over whether PES or FIFA is the more "realistic" soccer game has raged among fans of both series and i have to say after spending a few evenings tinkering with various installments in each series post-2005, that most realistic video game soccer can still be found in the FIFA incarnations of 2002-2003.

sure, the control schemes for each of the games nowadays is way more in-depth, and the ball has its own physics system, and as a result, much of what happens on the field looks more like real soccer. but it certainly doesn't play like it. why not? because for some reason even the international versions of each game bow to the hit-hard-hit-fast aesthetics that characterize american sports (and american video games).

first of all, the most glaring, and telling, issue: in neither game can you set the half length to FIFA-standard 45 minutes. the most minutes you can play per half? 10. that's it. and once you start playing the game you'll see why. all the players sprint, all the time. the CPU defense plays in a constant press, to the point that when i clear an attempt on my own goal, every time the only player on the half of the field on which the ball lands is my own goalie. every single possession is a fast-break attempt for a goal. there is no time to set up a real, complicated attack, and no need. the defense plays the midfield not at all, so there's no concern over being challenged until you get almost to the goalie box. your CPU-controlled offensive players all take off downfield as soon as you take possession, as well, so even if you try to force the issue by holding the ball at midfield, pretty much the only options you'll have are tricky through balls above and below the goalie box. the result of this is that the entire game is a trading of dramatic shots on goal and desperate sprints downfield, and more often than not, when goals are scored it's simply because the defense-cum-offense recovered from a change in possession faster than the offense-cum-defense did. it's not unusual, even against a skilled CPU opponent, to have a 10 minute half end with a score like 4-4 or 5-5. once, i altered the game's .ini file in order to force the game to last 45 minutes per half; i shouldn't have bothered. this didn't change the CPU's approach at all. by halftime, my entire team was literally completely exhausted, but that didn't stop the final score from being in the 50s.

this is ridiculous, and what's worse: the purportedly "more realistic" PES suffers from many of the same issues. if you don't believe me, check out this youtube video and see if you could have told the difference between the two games had you not been told which was which:

sure, both teams have awesome graphics, 5 million different teams with real players, and all that jazz...but neither game feels like real football. at all. sure, it feels really cool when you're given exacting control over each shot, pass, through ball, header, corner kick, penalty kick, etc...the controls are incredible, and the ball physics sure beat the hell out of the ol' 2003-era "the ball's magically stuck to your foot!" system. but when you get 25 corner kicks in a half and can cross the entire field in four seconds at a sprint over and over again, and your team expects you to do this as your default play, something's screwy. when you get 50 shots on goal and 25 goals in a half of soccer, something's screwy. and you can't even slow the game down if you want to.

i remember playing FIFA 2003 obsessively after the 2002 world cup. it was when i was first enchanted by soccer, by the rhythm of it, by the fact that it was an interesting alternative to the sports i was used to. it had the speed of basketball, but without the often-boring first 3/4ths of a basketball game, which often features 40 or so scores by each team that largely just function to set up the final 10 or so minutes of action. it had the strategy and interesting minutiae of a football or baseball game, but without the 1 minute of action for every 10 minutes of commentating, huddling, winding up, and commercial-showing. i wouldn't say it instantly became my favorite sport, but i was intrigued.

when i bought FIFA 2003, then, i got these same experiences through the game as i saw on TV. it was a game that took thinking. it wasn't just two teams taking turns shooting broadsides as each other's goal. if you played on anything but the simplest skill level, you spent most of the game (with 45-minute halves) at midfield, fighting for possession. if you got a free kick, or a corner, it was potentially a key to your (likely) 1-0 victory, just like a real game. if there was a breakaway goal, it was due to excellent offensive forethought and/or defensive failure, and not something that happened 30 times in a 10 minute half. for all the game's "ball on rails" handling dynamic, you couldn't just give the ball to a big strong dude and have him run through the entire defense like a freight train, something you can do at will in 2010-era games. if you tried that shit, you'd lose the ball faster than i go through a bottle of tapatio. i remember many an epic game that ended 1-0 or 1-1 after 90 minutes of careful planning, substitutions, formation switches, and the like. many players nowadays (according to the forum threads i read as research) seem revolted by the idea of sitting down for 90 minutes and having to dredge their way through an entire game of video game soccer...but isn't that the point? aren't these games supposed to replicate reality?

i stopped playing madden in 2003 because i started feeling like it was creating an arcade-shooting aesthetic and building it around the rules of football rather than trying to faithfully reproduce the game that, you know, real people actually play. i stopped playing nba live in 2006 for a similar reason. i mean, i understand that part of the point of video games is to put you into situations where you have importance and agency beyond what you feel you have in real life (i.e. games are awesome because you can blow shit up and save the world, which you're unlikely to do in real life unless you're wesley gibson. but i always played sports video games because they allow you a different kind of agency: the agency to be a running back, or a striker, or a home-run king on your favorite real-life team. i thought that was the point...and now when i play sports games i feel like i'm not being allowed that experience anymore. instead, i'm being guided towards a thinly-veiled reimagining of the experience of blasting the demonlord and his hundred henchmen with a rocket launcher when i'm forced to shoot off ten or twenty strategy-less goals per half to keep up with my enemy...i mean, the other team. god forbid you actually have to know a little about how to play a sport to play a sports video game. i mean, you all know that i have nothing against mindless shoot-'em-ups (after all, three of my "Best PC Video Games of All-Time", if you remember, were Unreal Tournament, Doom 2, and Serious Sam), but if i want to play Doom 2, i'll just play Doom 2. i want a soccer game that plays like real soccer and was made after 2003. but apparently that's too much to ask.

new music news! (no, seriously)

2010-07-09T01:09:00.000-07:00

so, you know how this usually goes: i get on the blog once every four or five months and blather on endlessly about all manner of fancy-ass music shit that i have planned. sometimes it's a new album, sometimes, it's being able to afford lots of new equipment, sometimes it's new gigs, sometimes it's a new website. often, it's a combination of these with an extra helping of a vague promise of someday selling albums on iTunes and playing a sold-out Cedar Point concert while riding a rollercoaster.

then, reality sets in and i realize i'm working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (at least during fall and winter, more like 30-40 in the summer) and making 9,000 dollars a year, and nothing ever happens. which is a bummer, because i love making music and i'd love even more to be able to approach it more seriously than i am now. but, to do so would most likely be to fail out of grad school, or at least do less than my best, which would be sort of silly at this point...i mean, i've gone to school for 24 of my 29 years on earth. i might as well finish the last two years with a bang.

anyway, i'm getting off-topic. i really liked my idea of starting a real website last year, and even better i liked my idea of consolidating my photos, essays, poems, songs, and other such fun stuff into one site. so i spent many of my off-hours for a few weeks tooling around with microsoft web expressions, trying to come up with something that represented all those different forms of media effectively. i came up with a few interesting ideas, visually and structurally, but in the end it really just came down to the fact that Facebook is a better media hosting site than what i could build myself. it's easier to upload things to, and it hosts videos and photos directly...much more of both than i would be willing to pay to host for my own site. i can link it to my blog so that every time i post a piece of writing on here, it shows up there, too, and i already have a facebook page for lazy blazers, which gets more visits and listens than my reverbnation page, or my old home page ever did. plus, all of those hosting features are wrapped up with the social networking aspect: any time i change any of the site's content, it immediately informs the 125 people i'm friends with on Facebook. i don't think ceding defeat to Facebook is all that bad; my lazy blazers page is pretty awesome, and besides, a lot of the time i would have spent designing and maintaining a website over the last few months has instead been dedicated to working on collaboration with lindsey, practicing old songs to get them back up to snuff, and playing monday nights at rico's, which is what's more important in the larger picture of music-making anyway.

so yeah...i suck and am lazy and what's the news here again?

thing 1: i'm ditching reverbnation. it's a great site, but it's for people who actually want to super-publicize and make money off of their band. i'd like to do those things, but to have to navigate that intense-as-all-hell menu system with band ratings and street team notifications and all that crazy mumbo-jumbo is not what i ever wanted in a site that i was hosting my music on. it's just intense and crazy. so i switched everything last night over to soundcloud.com. it pretty much just posts your tracks and nothing else, and allows you to post a widget into Facebook and that's it. if people want to come to my page and listen to my music, huzzah. no crazy cross-linkages or multiple clicks or any such bullshit. in case you're interested, the soundcloud page is here. you can access it directly through the lazy blazers page on Facebook (become a fan if you're not already...it won't give you cancer, i promise) or just through my normal Facebook profile as well. i also took down all the links to my youtube videos and am in the process of uploading any and all music-related videos directly to Facebook. basically i figure if i'm ditching plans for a personal music website (at least for now) in favor of Facebook, i might as well host everything there.

thing 2: lindsey's been doing excellent designs for the band recently. in case you haven't seen them yet, they're here, here, and here so far. i really want to cover all my guitars and guitar cases with stickers made from these designs, as well as the possible bumper sticker-size design i'm trying to talk lindsey into drawing.

thing 3: speaking of lindsey, she wants to make an album in the next few months, and i'll be recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz. i might even be playing some guitars and maybe a banjo or mandolin and singing some harmony. i might even have my cake, and also eat it. anyway, her songs are great and i'm really excited to have a copy of them to listen to WHENEVER THE FUCK I FEEL LIKE IT. besides, this fills the gap nicely when you're a guy who wants to write and play and sing new songs, but you suck too much to actually write your own.

thing 4 (the ultimate thing): actually, i have written a song. just yesterday, in fact. it's a little different than the usual guitar-and-singing thing, in that it's a chiptune. that may not be an exactly fair characterization, because i'm not using an actual amiga or commodore or NES to get the sounds...but i am using a bunch of soundfonts and VSTs to get sounds very freaking similar to the original NES sounds (i'm working, at least for now, with NES exclusively, since i grew up on its funky 5-channel music). so yeah. i spent the last few nights reading and downloading software and screwing around with samples, having no idea how to use a DAW or a tracker or anything (seriously, if you clicked on any of those wiki articles, i was reading them for the first time ever about 48 hours ago). i ended up settling on downloading a windows port of linux software called LMMS, which seems to have a lot of the same features and functionality of high-end programs like FL Studio, but for the price of free dollars. then i went here and downloaded tons of NES related sounds and junk. and it turns out, it's really freaking fun composing this stuff. what i REALLY need is a midi-compatible keyboard so i don't have to click each note in by hand with a mouse. but otherwise, it's really great. like a really need something else to halfheartedly screw around doing in my spare time, right? i mean, final fantasy 10 isn't going to beat itself. but. i wrote an original NES song, and if you want to check it out, make with the trip to clicktown:
Ascendancy (Chiptune) by lazyblazers

that is one indolent sport coat!

2010-07-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

so i was kicking around the idea of building a website for my professional, English-y stuff today (as it occurred to me that I probably wouldn't want to send potential future employers to lazyblazers.com to find my CV), and while checking the availability of benbunting.com, i decided to check the availability of lazyblazers.com as well, just to make sure that it would come up as unavailable. it did, but i also got a list from google of similar domain names, in case i wanted to buy one. here are some of the best they gave me:

slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers

some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!

my smartphone's menus are hilariously intense.

2010-06-24T00:26:00.000-07:00

it always makes me oddly sad when my mom calls when i'm in the middle of a meeting or class or something, because to reject the call, i have to hit this comically huge, bright red "REJECT" button right underneath this picture:

google chrome extensions are better than everything

2010-06-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

so i started using chrome about six months ago, when my firefox became so bloated with (admittedly) awesome plugins that it took netscape-era amounts of time to load. oddly enough, when i uninstalled all but like five plugins, firefox still insisted on sucking. thus, enter chrome. now i have a batmobile's worth of plugins for chrome, including some fiendishly awesome ones (shareaholic, rememberthemilk, gmail+, and chromedbird) and chrome's performance doesn't seem to be effected at all, even when i have like 10 tabs open (which is always). seems that separate-process-for-each-tab was a great idea after all.

that said, i wouldn't recommend running a post-2006 FPS game with graphics maxed out while minimizing a 10-tab chrome window in the background. shit goes down.

anyway, time to go eat thai food. more lightning typing in the future!

speaking of the future: jetpacks?

introductions are in order

2010-06-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

blog, meet ben. ben, meet blog. it's been awhile. welcome back to the internet of opinions.

i had a lot of feelings this summer. most of these feelings were had driving from pullman to canton to kent to nashville to canton to cambridge to sharon to kent to canton to pullman. 7000 more miles to my name.

i'm sort of implying through my tense use above that my summer is over. not nearly; however, the part where i drive around in a car and do fucking awesome things is likely over. and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because as usual, all the travelling was a great experience and gave me some always-necessary and valuable perspective on life that's just not possible to get when you're always in the same place, doing the same thing, even if that place is pullman (awesome!) and that thing is teaching and playing music at bars and eating thai food and having great friends (awesome!).

there have been so many great and noteworthy moments in the last month or two that to do my usual picture-posting-storytelling-thing would result in my absolutely leaving 95% of the coolness out. so i won't. in related news, as i've no doubt mentioned before, i now share almost all of my articles, photos, and videos and such via facebook. i know it's not everyone's favorite platform, but the fact is that almost all my real-life friends are on there and i have the fuck-yeah-tastic shareaholic plugin for chrome which lets me share with everyone in one click. so friend me if you haven't already, because facebook's going to be where the action is. this blog is just going to be where the rambling, semi-coherent madness is.

and on that note, bye for five seconds!

i've already posted this elsewhere, but...

2010-03-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

...it's amazing, so whatever.

Wilco - Country Disappeared - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

some more mixtapes coming EXTREMELY SOON

2010-03-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

by which i mean the next few weeks.

the only thing that ever made people read this blog in the first place (the mixtapes) will resume shortly. i didn't actually get anything written today, as i spent most of the day figuring out how to wrap up my 110 course (i really want to get back in the swing of writing, but i figure that not getting fired for just not teaching my class is more important). but. i have been listening to a lot of new good (the new mike doughty) and bad (phoenix) music. and a lot of that has ended up in a huge fucking folder called "mix" out of which i hope to develop a few new mixes. so keep your eyes peeled (and if you are an insect or something that doesn't have eyelids, just take my suggestion figuratively, and keep looking at this blog).

poems from the glovebox

2010-03-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

so, in the interest of trying to tickle out some new lyrics for a new set of songs, and also in the interest of just provoking me into writing regularly again (and reading), i've decided to force inspiration for some poems by digging through my old glovebox.

okay, that sounds weird.

what i mean is, when i first got my car in '06, i almost immediately took it on a 3500 mile road trip from ohio to the southwest and back, and throughout the course of that trip, for financial reasons, i kept every gas receipt together in my glove box. that's a lot of gas receipts. then, after the trip, for other financial reasons (i.e. not having any money at all) i didn't drive for about nine months. then, the next summer, i went cross-country again and was amused to find all these old gas receipts in my glovebox. anyway, cut to now and massive freaking amounts of gas receipts in my car, many from places i didn't even know i've ever been in (apparently i have been).

i thought it might be a good and interesting start to dig through these old receipts and spit some rhymes about them (so to speak). so i'll be starting tonight or tomorrow. wish me luck. ones that are especially good might end up cross-posted on the lazy blazers page, if i think they might work as songs. which reminds me...if you haven't become a fan of lazy blazers yet, DO IT.

the light at the end of the tunnel is just a train...OF WRITING.

2010-03-26T15:59:00.000-07:00

i'm blogging again. which means, no doubt, that some rough thing, somewhere is slouching towards somewhere else.

my exile from blogland has not been an enforced one, per se, but more just the effect of me getting hooked on twitter and then, through twitter, on facebook. then i discovered the shareaholic plugin for chrome and everything went to hell. see, many of my almost-2,000 (!!!) posts on here in the past have been simply my way of sharing cool videos or songs, or pictures or whatever with my readers (or potential readers), and now that i can share those things on facebook much more easily, and with people who are way more likely to actually see those things and read them (i.e. 150 of my friends), it just makes sense to hang out over there. as much as i have this weird feeling in doing so that i'm doing the internet equivalent of shopping at wal-mart instead of the local haberdashery, it's just much easier and more sensible. also, nowadays i find myself a lot more content and a lot more busy with my work (maybe those two are connected?) than i once was, and so there's much less time and reason for gigantic personal rants.

just for old time's sake, though, here...have a video of a dog eating a police car:

so why am i back? the answer's quite simple, really. i've forgotten how to write. seriously. somehow. even though i read and write for my job, i seem to have forgotten how to do either. and oh, what a horrible time to forget. see, i'm finishing up my last class (probably ever, after 25 years of going to school) and that means two and a half years of dissertation coming my way, starting now. unfortunately, i have no idea where to start. i'm working on revising a paper for publication right now (two, actually), and today after pouring over pages of notes, i realized that i'll essentially have to rewrite most of the paper. that realization completely floored and demoralized me. as if part of writing a paper isn't having to redraw and recast all of your ideas. i seem to remember trashing 25-page chunks of my book at one time and then rewriting them wholesale back in the day, and being able to do so with the understanding that that was just part of being a good writer...you know, the whole "kill your babies" thing. and i believe that's true, just as much for scholarly writing as it is for art-writing. or whatever. so, my current baby is a paper i wrote on heidegger's theory of dwelling and the implications of ubiquitous technology and location-aware technology for that theory. i spend about fifteen pages of this paper (and hours upon hours of crazy scribbling and reading and whatnot) unpacking heidegger and then applying my own twists to what he has to say. however, after a serious workshopping session, i've realized that this paper that i spent probably close to 50 hours on is not actually about heidegger at all. or, at least, it shouldn't be. it's about something much bigger and more important. but something that i have to delete my old work and start over to get at. no big deal, but somehow i've convinced myself that the need to revise is a failure, instead of a natural part of the process.

so here i am, trying to remember how to write. i have a feeling i'll be on here a lot more, at least for a little while. i need to find a way to keep writing and reading, even in my spare time, rediscovering the things that make me enjoy reading and writing and then find a way to work those things into my scholarly writing. or else i'll never survive the dissertation process. i'm starting to realize that.

part of my enjoyment of reading and writing has always been wrapped up in my desire to be able to think of myself as a "writer" type: the sort of person who reads for fun, under a tree, and then sits seriously at a typewriter, pen behind ear, hammering out thoughts serious and funny for the edification of those unable to express such thoughts themselves. but that's not a real motivation. that's a put-on, a costume, something to pose as so people will think i'm cool, or so i know what type of people are "my" people and which aren't. none of that helps actually getting good work done, though. which is why i have to find what parts of the work i really do like, rather than the parts i think i'm supposed to like. i'm a little afraid that i'll earnestly like less than i need to. but maybe not.

regardless, i've got a shitload to read, a shitload to revise, and i'm also feeling a distinct lack of life-quality due to not spending enough time playing music and taking photos. that's a lot to undertake at once, but hell, it's spring. so why not try it all at once?

some thoughts on depression

2010-03-11T15:28:00.000-08:00

so, i was combing through my feed reader this morning, eating myself some breakfast of a soft taco and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (today was a late rising day), and i came across this ProfHacker post. it was really interesting, and i spent the next hour or so chasing links. the primary piece of interest here is this recent article, which suggests that in some respects that depression may be an evolution-like response to various social and personal dilemmas. in short, depression is a sort-of side effect of your brain winding its problem-solving skills into overdrive in order to solve a particularly prickly problem.

really, though, if you're interested at all, you should read the original Times article through, because it's not only interesting, it's exceedingly well-written. better than this blog.

anyway, i really really like ProfHacker; it's a really useful resource for teaching literature and comp, and i love reading their articles pretty much every day. i also haven't written this post to specifically pick on them, but more to pick on the point of view that their particular take on the Times issue seems to be emblematic of.

no, depression is not "romantic" (although "romantic", as per ProfHacker and Kramer is importantly different than "Romantic", as per the original Times article, but i digress); however, the idea that it is potentially constructive for some is an intriguing one, and one that it seems might allow the condition to be a little de-stigmatized. i guess i don't see what's so threatening about seeing depression as partially constructive behavior...maybe there's something comforting about being able to treat it like a mystery ghost that comes and goes, something we don't actively have to try to deal with because, as long as it stays mysterious, we can justify being at its mercy. oddly, one of the objections raised to Thomson and Andrews' argument (from the Times article) is that "romanticizing" depression is a destructive practice reminiscent of the "glamorization" of tuberculosis 200 years ago. i don't get this either. i'd say if there's any romanticization of depression going on, it's embodied in the idea that depression is an undefeatable, inexplicable condition that preys on us at will, and that we can only solve it by throwing medicine at the problem. the statistics provided in the Times article regarding the danger of relapse when taking patients off of depression are pretty compelling.

and, yet, of course, not all-inclusive. i think the most important part of the article is actually when Andrews acknowledges that part of the problem is that "depression" is actually an umbrella term for a number of different symptoms, and, likely, a number of different causes and solutions (something that the ProfHacker response seems to have missed). interestingly, Andrews, i think, would agree with Kramer's assertion that his analytic-rumination hypothesis is limited to a certain audience. precisely because of the assumptions it makes - that depression is a response to solvable problems - it would be useless to those suffering from depression because of a stroke or because of what Kramer calls "late-life" depression. those are problems that no amount of cognition or rumination, i imagine, can surmount. in fact, the Times article - and Andrews, and myself - are all ready and willing to admit that this one solution is not the solution to depression. but if can help some - as Andrews shows that it clearly has - why all the vitriol? why is it so important to not logically confront depression?

some of you know my own experience with depression, because i've written about it on here before, and i won't rehash it in detail. suffice to say that i have, at times, in the past, suffered from a lot of the symptoms of depression (as outlined in the WebMD link provided by ProfHacker). so i suppose i would understand the difference between "ordinary" sadness and depression, if that's worth anything. and i know i would have benefited greatly from having heard what Thomson and Andrews had to say in the past. depression, for me, has always been about wrestling with issues, whether it be a problem i couldn't - or didn't want to - solve, or adjusting to a major change that i had no direct control over in my life. the idea that the depression wasn't a hindrance to, but instead a necessary component of the adjustment process absolutely, certainly would have helped me adjust and get better a lot more quickly. i never got professional help for my own issues - though i thought about a fair amount - because i knew, on some level, that i was dealing with something i would ultimately have to work out on my own. like Andrews' heart-wrenching example, i knew my problems wouldn't be solved by medicine. instead, i just wouldn't care that those problems existed anymore. and encouraging people who can deal with those problems to just take medicine seems reductionist at best, and a lot of other horrible things at worst. i'd never presume to speak for someone else or their issues, and people are all allowed (obviously) to do what they want with their own lives; yet, when you're in the grips of depression, you're not exactly "yourself", per se, and someone else making suggestions about what might make you feel better is naturally going to have more sway over your decision than they might normally. so it has always made me very nervous that so many doctors are so medication-happy.

but that's my personal bias, which is, of course, based on personal experience. but again, if Thomson and Andrews' hypothesis is legitimately helping people, why such hostility towards it? is there something attractive about the idea that our sadness is beyond our control? about the idea that all of our problems should be able to be solved by pills? i don't know. all i do know is that something about the analytic-rumination approach really resonates with me, and i don't think it should be slighted or thrown out because it doesn't play into the idea that depression has to be an illogical, impregnable illness. don't we want solutions to be easier? i think the article makes it pretty clear that even Andrews and Thomson are pretty clear on the fact that his approach won't (and shouldn't) work on everyone, and that people who still need medicine or alternate approaches should get what they need. i don't see this new idea as romantic at all, and in fact the article's author goes to great pains throughout to characterize depression as the horrible malady that it is. so why all the grumbling?

i'm going to stop before i start grumbling, too...

grumble grumble grumble.

review: machinarium

2010-02-23T19:07:00.000-08:00

there is one thing this review exists for: to communicate to you that machinarium is awesome. buy it, play it, love it. potentially impregnate it with your children and then spend the next nine months trying to figure out what sort(s) of sustenance a human/software hybrid child needs. it's that fucking grand.

two things that might exempt you from liking machinarium:
1. Do you hate love?
2. Do you hate the nightmare before christmas?

if your answer to either of those is "yes", then you might dislike machinarium. but you might also not be human, in which case HOW ARE YOU READING THIS?

i digress.

here's what machinarium looks like and sounds like.

i can't get over the way this game looks, the way it moves, and, perhaps most surprisingly, how good the music is. i could pulsate subliminally to the soundtrack all day long.

anyway, the game itself is a semi-standard point-and-click adventure game. you have an inventory, but it never ends up holding more than 3-4 things at once. you can stretch your little robot-guy taller or shrink him shorter if necessary. beyond that, you just move from screen to screen and click on things.

now, i should come clean: i hate "adventure" games. nothing seems less like an adventure to me than clicking through a bunch of 2-D landscape paintings strung together by a cliche narrative. i tried to like myst, i tried to like lots of the myst clones that have come out since. none of them worked for me. machinarium works. despite having more in common than not with games like myst, somehow it's significant enough artistically and - yes - emotionally to warrant a full playthrough (i actually played through the entire game in two sittings, and though it's a short game, it still probably took me about 10 hours to figure everything out, so that's a lot of sitting).

somehow, machinarium sidesteps the dullness of the simple point-and-click and experience that so many adventure games seem to boil down to...part of this is due to the simple (but ingenious) touch of making it so you can only interact with objects (or realize that you can interact with them) if your robot is in arm's reach of them. so, every time you enter a new room, you don't just immediately canvas the whole room with your cursor, waiting for it to turn into a clicky-hand. granted, what you do instead is click around to make the robot walk the circumference of the room, and then check to see if you can click on anything...but somehow this little tweak is significant.

the story, told entirely through little thought bubbles that pop up at opportune times, is also oddly significant. the robot is looking for his robo-girl, and there's an especially poignant moment about halfway through the game when you find said robo-girl, but are unable to rescue her as yet. the two of you trade items through the bars of her cell-like room, and it's simultaneously adorable and sad in a way that i've seen few games manage (indie games or fancy full-on 3-D megacorp games).

the puzzles themselves are hard. not impossible, but hard. they require a lot of clicking, obviously. machinarium also includes two levels of sanctioned "cheating"; at any point, you can click a little thought bubble in the inventory bar, and you get a short pictorial representation of how to solve the puzzle closest to where you're currently standing. if you want more help, you can click on the book icon, but the game forces you to play a little side-scrolling shooter game a la gradius before giving you a hand-sketched book page of how to proceed for the next several steps. interestingly, neither of these tricks will blatantly spell out an answer for you, but they do reduce the stymie-ing effect of some of the games puzzles to more simple visual riddles. other reviewers have complained about this, but i think it's absolutely perfect to be made to run through the mini-game before getting any game hints. if you really want to cheat, just look on the internet. if not, the game's going to force you to work for it. that seems fair. also, the hand-drawn nature of the hints you do get, and their presentation (through the metal-ish book creaking open) are just perfect within the steampunk aesthetic of the game.

i have to say, in response to some of the criticisms i've seen of the game's puzzles, that i didn't find anything in the game too hard. machinarium is actually quite a blessing in the sense that the solutions to the puzzles make sense, unlike in a lot of adventure games. even the few times that i accidentally happened upon a solution, it was clearly a solution that i could have thought of myself logically; i just hadn't. only once in the entire game did i hit upon a solution to a puzzle that didn't make any sense (involving scaring a robot with something that i never would have guessed would scare it in a situation where it was completely unclear that you were even supposed to scare it), but even that one i just got through via random clicking. i never used the walkthrough and only used the hint bubbles once...and i'm bad at these types of games.

so yeah. i love machinarium. you do too, even if you don't know it yet.

i DO love the indie bundle!

2010-02-21T21:01:00.000-08:00

so, as i posted about ad nauseum on facebook and twitter last week, i made an impulse-buy at theindiebundle.com and came away really impressed. the deal was six of the most well-reviewed indie games of the last few years for 20 bucks (the deal's now over, as of yesterday), and while i've really enjoyed the few indie games i've played (mostly world of goo and braid), i bought the bundle more out of a self-imposed professional sense of obligation (i.e. i write about video games for my job, so i should probably check out what's going on in the indie genre) than a desire to really play the games. but i'm glad i did.

first point: "indie games" is a sort of troubling moniker for me. mostly because of the connotations that "indie" has taken on in the last few years. "indie" music and "indie" films, of course, started out at a categorization for music and films made under the radar, for a miniature budget, and outside the constraints of the expectations of big labels or big studios. now, "indie" seems interchangeable with a form of "cool" that implies the kind of anti-establishment chic you can buy at hot topic. "indie" media, by and large, is about as counter-establishment as wearing resin-frame glasses is original at this point (i say this last, of course, with the appropriate amount of tongue in my cheek). but i'm not writing a cultural critique here (and you should be glad for that because i'd probably ramble for the rest of the night and my finally hitting "publish" would break the internet's stupid-ranting filter). all i want to say is that in a lot of ways, "indie" games are still indie. i can say i played an "indie" game without feeling like i'm being disingenuous. and (though this is an unoriginal complaint) most big-budget games nowadays are so starting to look like the regurgitated actionflash garbage that hollywood keeps vomiting out that i'm glad indie games, at least, are still indie. the games i'm going to look at all have their shortcomings, but i'd rather pay 60 bucks for this bundle, warts and all, than pay 60 bucks for another gears of war clone. so yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!!! SUCK IT, GAME PUBLISHERS!!!
no, seriously. as long as companies can get away with shit like this (and don't tell me that people aren't going to buy assassin's creed 2 anyway; they will), i will continue to seek retribution through pointless, ALL-CAPS tirades. now: on to the games.

osmos
i'm loving osmos. i'm finding it occasionally incredibly infuriating - contrary to the game's claims of zen-like calm inducing-ness - but otherwise i'm really liking it. it has the two quintessential indie game charms: 1) a distinct ambiance/production and 2) a really simple but engaging game mechanic. you're a amoeba-mote sort of thing, and you just click the mouse to fly around. you can slow down and speed up time, but this doesn't necessarily effect the gameplay any further than letting you take longer to make decisions when things are moving too fast, or letting you speed to a conclusion when things are moving too slow. the beauty of the game (non-visually speaking) is the simple physics model. the game, fittingly, starts with the "equal-and-opposite" quote from newton, and that's about all you have to understand to play. when you propel yourself, you shoot off a little bit of your body in order to gain momentum. that little bit bounces around, and maybe gloms on to another mote, or eventually finds its way back to you. the point of the game, though there are a few variations in later levels, is basically to just become the biggest mote by absorbing smaller motes and avoiding larger motes. everything else follows from physics: don't propel yourself too much because you'll eject all your mass and won't be big enough to absorb anything. if you're trying to slow down, don't eject a bunch of your mass into the mote in front of you that you want to absorb, because you'll make it bigger. here's a pretty comprehensive gameplay video:

one thing i don't like about this game is that some of the later levels amp up the challenge in sort of unintuitive ways. when there are so many games (indie and otherwise) out there that really cleverly and gradually introduce new challenges (world of goo specifically comes to mind), it seems like a lot of challenges in the later levels of this game are just "challenges" in the sense that you are put in a potentially impossible situation and maybe 1 out of 10 times you're able to worm your way out of it. for example, a few levels require very detailed awareness of how your mass-ejecting effects the rest of the motes in the level; unfortunately, there are so many motes crammed into some of these levels that you can spend 15 minutes meticulously bouncing around in slo-mo, trying to keep from pushing other motes around to the point where they have the opportunity to get larger than you, only to zoom out and realize that you've accidentally created a huge mote on the other side of the screen that you'll never get bigger than. some of these levels, i think, are supposed to be puzzles, but they quickly degenerate into exercises in frequent restarts, and your final success ends up feeling more like luck than skill or planning. overall, though, this game is unique and worth playing; at least until you get about 2/3rds of the way through...after that, only continue if you're prepared to be seriously challenged.

next ip: machinarium

new music posters, thanks to LD

2010-02-20T17:38:00.000-08:00

i just got these as a gift, to use in future music endeavors, and i thought i'd post them because they are FREAKING AWESOME.

From Spring '10

wilco posters from last week

2010-02-20T17:35:00.000-08:00

portland:

From Spring '10

seattle:

From Spring '10

the ben-bear and his mail-order bride.

2010-02-20T17:32:00.000-08:00

yes. i bought a 26" tall care bear on ebay for one dollar. because there's something wrong with me.

From Spring '10

here's something you don't already know: i'm a fan of wilco!

2010-02-13T21:34:00.000-08:00

so partially as a consequence of good timing and needing to go to seattle anyway, i got to see wilco shows #3 and #4 this weekend. they were both fantastic in comparison to wilco shows #1 and #2, which were also fantastic in their own way. so. a little background:

wilco show #1 was in 2008 in spokane, at the opera house. i was in the midst of becoming a wilco fan, but wasn't familiar enough with many of their songs (except the ones on sky blue sky) to really fully appreciate the experience. similar to my first RA concert, appropriately enough, which i hated. well...i didn't hate my first wilco concert, but i certainly liked the fleet foxes (their opening band) much more. wilco #2 was in vienna, va, this summer. it was a solid show, but i was completely exhausted and it was in an amphitheatre, which meant that all of the sonic subtleties that make wilco interesting were obliterated by loud-ass speakers and the fact that i was a football field away from the stage. this week's shows were both in small old-school theatres, both with amazing sound, and one in which i had a seat 20 rows away from the stage, in the center of the room, and the other in which i was literally standing about 12 feet away from tweedy's mic stand. so yeah. that in and of itself made these shows better. but so did lots of other things! joy!

first of all, this band was more energetic throughout the entire show (both nights) than pretty much any band i've ever seen, except maybe picadilly circus in 2004. keep in mind, 5 members of this band are (i think) over 40, and one is almost 55. and they played with an energy that would quite literally but a bunch of coked-out 20 year olds in a black flag cover band to shame. it was amazing.

second, the lighting was amazing. after seeing phish this summer, i was finally made to understand the difference a decent, well thought-out light show can make at a live concert. the lighting for wilco was certainly not chris kuroda-grade lighting (but then again, what is?). but, they had rigged up a really badass textured sort-of-sheet (which you can see in the pictures in my other post) which really interestingly reflected the various types and colors of light back out into the audience all night long. also, there were the weird frankenstein electrodes that were behind and to the sides of the band, that performed all sorts of visual acrobatics for different songs all night. combine this with side-stage lights that threw weird, huge shadows of the band members on the walls of the theatre and an intense fog machine, and it was the best light show i've seen, ever, for a theatre show.

oh, there was also the music, which was good. some highlights:

first night opener = "sunken treasure" > "remember the mountain bed" > "hell is chrome". "sunken treasure" is basically the perfect opener, slow and plodding, but intense, and (in this version) driven by a lonely harmonica during the instrumental breaks. "mountain bed" is (as you might know from previous posts) pretty much my favorite love song ever, so it was great to hear it live, and this version was especially well done. tweedy's voice, especially on night one, was better and clearer than i've ever heard it, and never as much as it was on these first three songs. "hell is chrome" is just chilling, especially with the stage and the front rows of the crowd bathed in undulating red lights throughout.

"bull black nova" was INSANE. the lights were crazy, especially with the electrodes doing an eerie pantomime of an electric chair over the climax of the song while tweedy shrieked "PICK UP!!!" over and over again. the band converted me to a lot of songs from wilco (the album) during these shows, and "one wing" was the first. i've never liked this song much, save for the debut version they played a few years ago, which was a lot more dead-ish, jammy version than what ended up on the album. however, the version they played in portland was absolute, full-on rock and roll. they followed that up immediately with the fastest-tempo version of "shot in the arm" i've ever heard, which ended in an absolute wall of noise and a great visual moment featuring each member of the band cranking out the noise in the best way they could: nels flinging feedback at his amp, pat standing and going at the keyboards ben-folds-style, glenn and tweedy hammering away, and mikael slamming at all his weird sound pads with two huge pillows (yeah, i don't know why either, but it sounded awesome). it was great to hear "side with the seeds" > "at least that's what you said", and later on "far, far away". then they rocked out "sonny feeling", which is a song i unapologetically HATED until a few days ago. now i can at least stand it. both nights they played a run of "sonny feeling" > "hate it here" > "walken" > "i'm the man who loves you" to close their main set, and that was the one part of the show for me that was a little underwhelming. i'm not a huge fan of either of the middle songs, and though "i'm the man who loves you" was excellent both nights, it was sort of an odd run to end the set, especially getting the exact same songs in the exact same order both nights.

as another complaint in that vein, i was really concerned that we'd get essentially the same show both nights, and we almost did. the second night opened with "wilco (the song)", yet another song i didn't like until right that moment, but then we got five songs in the row in basically the same order as we'd gotten them the previous night. they were all great songs (especially, again, "bull black nova"), but it was a little disappointing, considering how many songs the band has in their repertoire. but then we got "radio cure" (!!!) and "pot kettle black" (!!!!!), which made up a bit for it. later, there was also "handshake drugs" and "i'll fight" before the aforementioned four-song run to end the set.

encores both nights were typically intense wilco-rock-encores. scott mcaughey came out both nights (once with peter buck, once with bill frisell) for "california stars". both nights the band opened the encore with buffalo springfield's "broken arrow", and the first night we also got "kingpin" (livin' in...portland...uhhh...oregon..."), and "i'm a wheel" (complete with pat pulling The Who-style guitar windmills). the second night was simultaneously a bit more exciting and disappointing: they played "you never know", then "box full of letters" (upon which i promptly lost my mind), and due to the response of the crowd to "letters", tweedy then said "how'd you guys like it if we played some more old songs?" only to come back a moment later and say "apparently we're out of time". they closed with an amazing "hoodoo voodoo", featuring probably the best moment of the two shows in a guitar duel between pat and nels. so, yeah. fantastic end, but i also would have loved to hear them play a few more A.M.-era songs.

anyway, i continue to be blown away by this band and will definitely be keeping an eye out for any other chance to see them, as somehow they just keep getting better with time.

new road trip/wilco photos

2010-02-13T20:47:00.000-08:00

have a few pictures from wilco/my trip to seattle this week. just because.

the first few, featuring the weirdly calm reflectivity of the columbia river, were taken by LDz:

From Spring '10

next few are of the wilco show in portland...i mostly gave up on trying to get good pictures of the band because of the giant-headed dude in front of me; however, i wanted to get a few pics just to show off the band's awesome frankenstein/tesla lighting setup:

From Spring '10

phish re-review, pt. 2

2010-02-13T20:29:00.000-08:00

night two was the awesome. not that there weren't issues, but the overall effect was a lot more positive than night one. which is odd, because i originally remembered thinking the two nights were of pretty equal quality. but through the "magic" of reliving the shows via recording, i've now decided night two was far better. for whatever that's worth.

anyway, i came into night two having felt that the previous night was one of the best concert-going nights of my life, but also wondering if i could physically (and mentally) take 3 more hours of phish again this soon. the band started off with "mango song", which was pretty much the weirdest opener in the universe and it was so confusing that it took me until the next song, "chalkdust torture", to adjust. fortunately, they almost always blow this song out of the water, and they did here as well. kind of feel like they should have switched the order of these two in the setlist...

next was "middle of the road", which is apparently a mike gordon tune. this was a neat little song, and i hate to sound bitchy, but at this point, i was getting a little sick of first-set songs i didn't know or had never heard. i guess after waiting to hear the band live for 8 years and knowing and loving pretty much all of the 250+ songs they play, it was a little frustrating to hear at least 4-5 songs i didn't even know where there were so many songs i wanted to hear.

next was "tweezer", and as much as i usually love this song, after the first few minutes (with the notable exception of the island tour version) it usually devolves into a serviceable but unremarkable jam. no different this time. it was solidly played, but not nearly as exploratory or interesting as a lot of the late-set jams from night one.

next was "driver"...now, i love "driver", but again, i felt the same way i felt about "sleep" the first night. why play this if you're not in a room with 5 people and an acoustic guitar? i felt like i was at a DMB encore, where a solo acoustic performance is considered some sort of reverential occurrence, for some reason. i guess i just don't get it.

next was "twenty years later". another song i'd never heard, and another sort of workmanlike rendition (much like "joy" from the first night). at this point i'm loving the show, of course (it's still my virgin phish experience), but getting a little leery that if things continue as-is song-selection-wise for much longer, i might go home a little disappointed. fortunately, the next two songs are "ya mar" and "it's ice". "ya mar" is a pretty run-of-the-mill song, technically, but it such a fun, bouncy tune (and the crowd was obviously more familiar with it than a lot of the songs thus far that night) that it was just the right song to get everyone bouncing around and screaming and whatnot again. "it's ice" was a perfect counterpoint: a short, but technically complicated and interesting song that led beautifully into...

..."wolfman's brother". where the first night made me a believer in "down with disease", night two was all about the "wolfman". i've never liked this song much either, however, this night changed my mind. a great near-20-minute funk version, complete with the best glowstick war in the universe, and i still can't help but grin when i listen to the tape of this. great, great moment.

first set ended strong with "character zero" > "run like an antelope". the crowd responded to "antelope" like we'd been waiting since the beginning of the night to jump up and down screaming like maniacs when trey demanded that we "run like an antelope, out of control!"

where i liked second night, first set better than first night, first set, the second night second set was part great, part not-so-great (though it ended on a high note). first we got a 20 minute cover of velvet underground's "rock n roll", which was really fun and unexpected. next was "makisupa policeman", which included a jam where trey and mike switched instruments for a few minutes. then came "alaska", a song which i've desperately tried to like time and time again and just cannot. i'm sorry. then there was "the wedge", which is always a nice pop-ish gem, followed (finally) by "YEM". honestly, i was hoping all weekend for "divided sky", so the opening notes of "YEM" were a little disappointing for me. nonetheless; it was a great version of the song, with an excellent five minute vocal jam at the end.

the closing combination of "backwards down the number line > piper > grind" was fun, but at that point i think all the standing, dancing, heat, and contact high was wearing on me and i sort of felt like we were just waiting for the encore. "backwards" is not a high-energy song by any means, and the transition to "piper" was a little wonky. "grind" was cute, but singing a cappella is about as far from rock as you can get :)

fortunately, the encore was a great (nay, perfect!) way to end a two-night stand: "good times bad times" and "tweezer (reprise)". the encore thus made sure that we were all screaming like mad(wo)men by the end.

ultimately, it was a more enjoyable weekend than i had even hoped, and more than lived up to my live phish expectations. was it the best phish show i've ever heard? no, but the fact that i was finally actually there in the flesh more than made up for some of the lacking technical proficiencies. on the recording, things don't stand up quite as well. the high points and the intensity come across a lot less, and the glitchy playing stands out more. i feel like the recordings do a good job (for better or worse) illustrating the semi-episodic nature of both nights: the good and bad seemed to come in chunks...so i suppose in a way having a recording is nice because i can skip the parts i don't necessarily feel like i need to hear again.

i hope they tour again next summer because i'll totally be there...

phish @ the gorge re-review (finally)

2010-02-13T20:03:00.000-08:00

last weekend, i finally listened to the tapes of the phish gorge shows that i saw this summer, and since i never got around to doing an "official" review at the time, i thought i'd merge a review of the live experience and the recording re-listen. you know. for the hell of it. because i'm not buried under tons of writing for work. oh, wait. yes i am.

anyway, here goes.

night one started off with "down with disease", which was, a bit ironically, one of my least favorite phish songs. imagine my wry amusement when, after seeing phish walk out on stage live for the first time after waiting for 8 years and through a long hiatus, they start playing one of the few songs in their repertoire that i actively dislike. two minutes later, though, i was converted. it was that immediately that i knew that their "reunion" tour was less a gimmick and more a serious attempt to extend the band's legacy. the whole band was pitch-perfect throughout the song, and my first experience with the phish crowd jumping around and dancing joyously will now always be punctuated by trey's guitar riff during the song's first interlude. i remember being dimly aware that i bounced up and down that i was grinning like a giddy idiot already and that i had approximately 6 more hours of phish to go. clearly, i'm a bit biased towards this particular performance of this particular song, but on the recording, it also sounded great.

next up was "ocelot" and "pebbles and marbles". i'm pretty neutral when it comes to "ocelot". it was a solid performance, but whatever. "pebbles and marbles", on the other hand, is one of my favorite phish tunes, and it was the first of a few moments during the show that i was concerned that the boys might have bitten off more than they could chew by choosing such an ambitious setlist. it was great to hear the tune live, but it was a little rough, and on recording, without the crowd's ambiance and excitement, it's downright painful. the band had a lot of trouble with this one.

"possum", as usual, was energetic and a good, solid, simple jamming song to get things back on track, but then it was followed by "sleep". now, i have nothing against "sleep", it's a great, neat little song. but why play it for thousands of people at an amphitheatre? we had made it pretty clear we were there to rock, and yet we get a lead out of the blistering solo at the end of "possum" into "sleep"?

next was "destiny unbound", which i didn't really know (apparently this makes me not a real phish fan). not much to say about this one. "stash" was great, and included a pretty extended, unique jam. unfortunately, its main riff is so distinct that when the notes get flubbed a bit, it really sort of hurts the song for me (it's sort of like trey biffing the arpeggios at the beginning of "YEM"; it's just sort of naturally wince-evoking). yeah, so that happened. and on tape the band's sort-of struggling with parts of the song is even more obvious. fortunately, next up was "sneakin' sally > cavern", which was one of the highlights of the weekend for me. great vocal jam at the end of "sally", straight into the almost-pop of "cavern". live, at the end of the first set i was still absolutely pumped and ready to hear 10-15 more songs i'd never heard in person. on tape, i'm not remembering the show quite as fondly as i maybe once did. a few great moments, but also a few slip-ups at important points in important songs = pretty mediocre first phish set.

set two started with "moma dance > light > taste", a really great start that alleviated most of my discomfort over certain parts of the first set. "moma dance" was a great way to ease into the second set, getting the crowd grooving and letting the band stretch its jamming legs without taking on anything too orchestrated or convoluted. i love "light", especially when it gets the extended intro treatment like it got on this night, and "taste" is pretty much always great.

we had a few seconds to recover from this run of songs before "fluffhead", which is the one song i really wanted to hear and never expected to get to. the band ripped through this one wonderfully, and it's one of the major highlights for me to have on tape and to be able to listen to over and over again. "joy" was next. this was my first time hearing the song, and it's a cute, schmaltzy phish-pop song. not bad, not wonderful. just a good, solid song.

the closing run of the second set was a long "bathtub gin" and "harry hood", followed by a "slave to the traffic light" encore. by itself, this might not have been anything special, but following on the heels of a set that already featured "fluffhead" and extended takes on "moma" and "light", this basically meant a set two/encore run that added up to a handful of songs and about 2 hours of music. phish brought the jam during this part of the show, and hit all the right notes during the composed bits of "fluffhead", "harry", and "slave". neither of those last two have ever really been my favorite phish songs either, but i was converted, especially to "harry", on this particular night. the second set ending with the band climaxing their "harry" jam by belting out the "you can feel good! good! good about hood!" was a pretty epic, great-concert-memory moment.

the band's intensity and their artistry shows through a lot more on the second set recording than on the first, and at the very least i'll be playing the crap out of the back half of this show for a long time.

i'll do a review of the second night as a separate entry, so as not to prolong the typing madness.

what i would look like as a care bear.

2010-02-07T19:35:00.002-08:00

From Spring '10

great (potentially UE-related) graffiti on campus last week.

2010-02-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

From Spring '10

teaching and learning

2010-02-02T15:37:00.000-08:00

so i'm teaching a sort-of lit class for the first time this semester. and it's been great so far. i got to choose the books, and as per the class requirements, they all had to be books published recently. so i picked a lot of books that i simultaneously thought were interesting to talk about based on their own literary merits and were interesting in a cultural context. now not only do i have a class where we can talk about characterization, plot, setting, ethos, believability, immersion, etc., but also race/class/gender/place AND technology, apocalypse, wilderness, conservation, zombies, home, and all that jazz. so. it's a pretty thematically dense discussion class. and it's so fucking fun my eyes want to pop out. of course, they also want to pop out because it's at 9am and i have to get here three days a week before 7am to get prepped for class (they have to submit questions online every morning and i have to be able to read them all and draw up a class plan around them before class starts that day).

anyway, i'm having a lot of fun, and the students in class who enjoy talking and discussing seem to be enjoying themselves. now that i'm over the initial shock of the joy of teaching something i'm actually directly invested in (teaching comp is fun, but it has nothing to do with what i care about directly, and requires that i have an entire "comp" section in my brain that i switch over to each monday, wednesday, and friday), i'm starting to get that nagging doubt in the back of my head that i get every time i remember that nothing in life is perfect. maybe this is just my latent comp pedagogy reflex taking over my brain, but my fear is that i'm not actually teaching these students anything.

granted, the only real goal of this class as it was explained to me was to talk about reading and talk about how it is relevant and important in today's society (BOOOOOOOM!). and i feel like i'm definitely doing that. i guess i'm so used to the lecture model, the skill-teaching model of a class that i feel like a failure just going in, talking about reading, and enjoying myself. it feels too easy. at times, when i'm being easier on myself, i feel like maybe the learning that's taking place in a class like this is really just less tangible that it might be in a comp class (and that's less than it might be in a science class, and so on). i mean, i'm running this class pretty similarly to some of the seminars i've taken in grad school, and i learned more from the discussions in those classes than i have at pretty much any other time in my life (at least in a school environment).

i certainly lecture from time to time briefly about certain character archetypes, or certain literary techniques, and those kinds of things. but these students are all experienced readers. they infer these things if you hint at them. they don't need to learn what the hero's quest is. they can see it, and talk about it, and understand its value and also the value in deviating if you're a writer. i also have lots of small checks built into the class to make sure they're keeping up on the reading and paying attention in class (and two big checks in the form of a midterm and a final). but it's just strange. i've never taught a class like this, and it's odd to have a class that puts most of its value in discussion rather than lecture and regurgitation/revision. it's odd to think that students will come out of this class having read 8 new books, and that's (largely) it. when teaching comp 101 (and even 201), we sort of have this idea impressed upon us that we're the gateway to our students' ability to write at a college level, which in turn is the gateway to the rest of their entire future success. of course, that's aggrandizing and a little ridiculous in some ways, but i guess what i'm getting at is that with the impression we're giving as budding comp teachers, it's easy to convince yourself that you're doing god's work if you have an off day. there's not a lot of room for crisis of purpose. that's not the case anymore.

that said, we're finishing up talking about Snow Crash tomorrow and we'll be moving on to neil gaiman's American Gods on friday. can't wait.

pictures of things i did this weekend

2010-01-26T21:15:00.000-08:00

bought these two donuts, which were both larger than my hand.

From Spring '10

fulfilled my lifelong dream of owning one of those 3 foot tall care bears.

From Spring '10

finally got my turntable working.

From Spring '10

revisiting the gorge

2010-01-21T21:29:00.000-08:00

finally sat down today to take a cold, hard objective listen to the tapes from the phish gorge run this summer. i wanted to see how good they sounded when i wasn't sitting amidst thousands of screaming fans while, well, screaming. i learned lots of fun things. however, i need to take notes for work tomorrow right now, so i'll have the full write-up later. i may also (gasp!) have my first mixtape in quite awhile. something about getting a new (used) cd changer and a turntable has gotten me to go back and start listening to all my old albums again.

pics-b-gone

2010-01-21T21:26:00.000-08:00

as a way of motivating myself to start taking pictures again, i deleted about half of the photos i have up on my picasa account tonight to make room for new ones (i'm down from 92% used space to 43%!). the downside is that a lot of pics linked in old posts on this and my previous blog may no longer work. i'm going to guess that this isn't going to be a crippling emotional blow to anyone, but on the off chance it is, let me know.

twitter is hilarious

2010-01-12T12:31:00.001-08:00

and here's why. check out my twitter follow notifications for yesterday (you may have to click on the image to get a higher resolution).

From Spring '10

nerd alert

2010-01-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

i just finished the original Starcraft campaign for what i'm pretty sure is the fifth time (since 2004 or thereabouts). it was as fun as ever, though being so familiar with it makes the last four or five protoss missions (each close to 3 hours long) a bit of a drag. i'm going to jump into the expansion pack and see how far i can get before i have to start work again. it's one of the most (if not the most) ridiculous gaps in my gaming experience that i have never finished Brood War despite being obsessed with the original Starcraft. maybe it's finally time to right this years-long travesty.

wordles

2010-01-05T07:09:00.000-08:00

if anyone else out there does wordles, you can check out mine thus far on this page. they're all based around my various seminar papers except one, which if i remember correctly is based around some series of blog posts i made awhile back.

checking in

2010-01-05T07:05:00.000-08:00

i had thought (mistakenly, obviously) that i would have a lot more time to blog about random, potentially fun things over break.

somehow, i always envision winter break as this wonderful sort of "eye of the storm" moment where i get a chance to recharge before next semester starts and to catch up with everyone in ohio that i don't get to see most of the rest of the year. in reality, it always (ever since WSU shifted their calendar back a week, anyway) ends up being this rush where i get back into town 2 days before christmas, then rush from about the 28th to new year's trying to see everyone that i know in the area outside of canton, then come back home to do all the work i didn't do between christmas and new year's before i fly back to pullman in my last 4-5 days in town.

now, having said that, i've made it all sound much less pleasant than it actually is. it's really great that i'm able to come back home for christmas every year and that i'm also often able to find a lot of time to visit with my friends in the area as well as my family. it's just not what i'd consider a "break". it is what it is, i guess, but it's just always a little disorienting when i get to this point in the break, three days before i fly back home, and realize that i'm really no more rested or calm or relaxed than i was rushing to the airport right before christmas right after turning my grades in.

anyway, it's been a really great break. got to see pretty much my entire extended family over christmas eve and christmas. got to see Avatar again, this time with my parents and brother, and they seemed to like it. i forgot how incredibly huge theaters are here - as in, it actually makes a difference whether you sit in the front or the back. i was spoiled (as usual) by christmas: got a new digitech effects processor pedal, a good starter turntable (can't wait to start buying vinyl instead of CDs), and, mostly importantly, a GPS. like an actual, legit, fancy GPS, not a phone with a GPS unit (though i also got a new phone for renewing my contract). i haven't used it for anything geocache-wise yet; i downloaded a ton of geocache locations for the surrounding area, but then we got a billion inches of snow before i could get out and find any of them. excited to go back and recheck the University of Death caches using it, and to start logging more caches around the pullman/moscow area. there are a lot of 'em.

i didn't get to spend as much time up in kent this break as i normally like to, partially because of the weather and partially just because of what i mentioned before: namely, that i've just been so beat, having fun just hasn't sounded fun...if that makes sense. had a great time over new year's, but after about two days of tromping around kent, it just sounded more fun to sleep in my bed for 12 hours than it did to do anything remotely adventurous. with luck, i'll be able to spend some time up in kent this summer and have a chance to make up for my current lethargy.

watch m. ward rock the universe

2009-12-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

i'm taking a break from syllabus-writing to watch youtube clips, and came across these two which, while not the same performance that i saw in eugene last spring, capture the essence of that performance quite well. the sound is a little wonky halfway through the second one, but if you like guitar, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the first one.

i love "married to the sea"...

2009-12-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

...and here's why.

best response to copenhagen...

2009-12-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

...i've seen thus far is from ben stewart (greenpeace). it's a sign of the times, i think, that i'm looking to greenpeace for reason, but there it is:

"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.

Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.

Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.

Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’

Quite.

This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.

Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.

I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.

I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’

a downer of a first blog for after christmas, but there it is.

MIXTAPE: yankee hotel foxtrot demos compilation

2009-12-11T19:25:00.000-08:00

okay, so i know i promised a new mixtape this week. and i got piled on by work and lack of sleep and i haven't listened to anything new or started piecing tracks together. but one thing i did do was dig into the demo sessions for wilco's yankee hotel foxtrot for the umpteenth time. for some reason, though, this was the first time it really struck me that within the two or three readily available sessions from the recording of the album, there are nine songs that ended up on the cutting room floor. not only is this an album-length number of songs in and of itself, but the quality of the songs all the way around are good enough that, though they might not stand up to the version of YHF that we actually got, they make a solid "album" on their own.

so i figured i'd pick what i thought was the best version of each of these tracks, put them in the order most beseeming a cohesive album, and upload them. this collection actually includes a few of my all-time favorite wilco tracks: "cars can't escape" and "venus stop the train". i also really, really like "not for the season" and "magazine called sunset". to my ears, a lot of these songs actually strike a better balance between pop sensibility and sonic experimentation than the tracks that actually comprise YHF do, which is funny since that's what that album is known for. then there's "venus stop the train", which just stomps on your guts at the end. i included an alternate version of "alone" as a bonus track just because there are three or four versions, and while the one i included earlier in the playlist is most reminiscent of that YHF sound, the other version is also pretty great.

if you're a fan of YHF and haven't heard any of these demos before, i highly recommend getting both sets of demos (one is a 21-track set and i believe the other is an 18-track set). a lot of the tracks that actually ended up on the album are on these demos in multiple incarnations and some are pretty incredibly different ("poor places" comes to mind).

note: the reason i'm making an exception to my usual rule here and uploading more than one song by an artist is because i've seen the sessions these songs are pulled from all over the place online, including a few very well-known wilco trading sites. so i'm assuming this is kosher. if it's not, of course let me know and i'll remove the link to the files right away.

here's the tracklist:
01. Not For the Season (l/k/a Laminated Cat)
02. Magazine Called Sunset
03. Nothing Up My Sleeve
04. Alone
05. Cars Can't Escape
06. Let Me Come Home
07. The Good Part
08. Won't Let You Down
09. Venus Stop the Train

10. Alone (Alternate Version)

here's the tracks.

end of more teaching

2009-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

today is a weird day: the last day of teaching for me for the semester. usually (and especially my first few semesters of teaching) the last day is sort of momentous. i usually feel (even if my students don't, and most could probably likely care less) like we've all sort of come through this long, complicated, unique journey together and it feels sort of awesome to me to reach the end of it. it helps too that all my classes thus far have been portfolio-based, so even the students who participate the least and miss tons of classes or whatever still end up turning in a hefty, significantly involved packet of papers they've written. it's a nice sort of landmark moment in a way and (i'd like to think) even for them it's sort of an encapsulation of everything that they've gone through to get to the end of the class.

as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.

one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.

now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.

lots of music is available for listening in the world

2009-12-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

it's true.

i've been so enmeshed in phish- and wilco-land since early summer (tackling wilco's catalog and live shows with a voracity near that of my once-Cardinals obsession, and geeking out on phish after that transcendent Gorge experience) that i think it's ruining my music life. lately i've hardly been listening to music at all. which is pretty much the opposite of every day of my life for the last 15 years. part of it, of course, is just the business of this semester and the fact that now that i have a lot of friends, i don't spend a lot of time alone in my office. i'm often in my office, but there are also usually seventeen other people in here as well. which is generally awesome. but i feel more bad about blaring music in that case.

i've also realized, though, that i'm in a bit of a musical rut. i haven't been writing, i haven't been listening to anything new, i haven't had (or haven't been making) the time for either. so here i sit, day after day, spinning the same wilco and phish discs over and over again and though they are generally all awesome, admittedly, it's all starting to bleed together. the new mason jennings was a good distraction, and i also actually really like the new norah jones record. the new live gogol bordello disc is great, and all the phish shows from the summer tour are interesting. but i want to hear something i haven't heard before. i'm hoping that over christmas i can spread out a little bit, find out about some new bands. how do you find out about new, unique bands now that "indie" has become mainstream? i don't want to listen to the newest grizzly bear impersonator, i want to hear new, interesting stuff, even if it was written in the 70s.

i'm listening to loose fur right now. it's helping a little. maybe i'll throw on some minus 5 next...

it's christmas time, bitches!

2009-12-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

so, i have a new grain of sand to add to the beach of shameful pop culture admissions i've made on this blog throughout the years. every year i listen to a shitload of new christmas albums in the hope of finding sparkles of brilliance. sure, christmas is a huge, mean, nasty, soulless commercial enterprise, but we all have those warm, fuzzy moments of one christmas or another, either as a child or an adult, or else we wouldn't spend years and money and travel thousands of miles at the most dangerous travelling time of the year every year in hopes of resurrecting those warm, fuzzy moments. right? RIGHT?!

well, most of my warm, fuzzy moments involve christmas music, whether it was the listening to, or the caroling of. and even in the 21st century, sometimes hundreds of years after many of these songs were made, occasionally a version of an old song or even more rarely a completely new christmas song ("all i want for christmas is you", anyone?) comes along that is actually worth listening to. besides, i need something to prop up the leaning tower of my sanity come the end of fall semester each year, and what better way than to listen to a shitload of relaxing christmas music?

so this year, i've listened once again to a decent amount (yes, including bob dylan's christmas album, but i'm not ready emotionally to talk about that yet). not as much as i usually do, but that's okay because early in my survey, i've discovered what is undoubtedly 2009's christmas music masterpiece.

even better, you can download it for free.

this. is. so. awesome.

sure, it's christmas tunes rendered as if through a midi synthesizer or an old NES sound chip, but there are tons of brilliant little moments in here that deserve discovery. this wasn't just thrown together as a sheer gimmick; each song shows a lot of interesting touches and more brilliant little details come out with each listen. check out "god rest ye merry gentlemen" if nothing else. it's ridiculously cool (note for young people: the voice isn't auto-tuned, now get off my lawn!).

also, there's a great, moody version of "greensleeves", which is my favorite christmas song. so that doesn't hurt.

new band name idea.

2009-12-03T23:58:00.001-08:00

"the inevitable heat death of the universe".

mother(fucking) nature!

2009-12-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

so it's been a really nice, mild winter so far in pullman. and for that, i'm grateful. however, in the last three days, the sudden massive drop in temperature has coincided perfectly with the hours and hours i've been spending outside scouting locations for University of Death...and it's freaking cold. it was coincidental enough that i felt compelled to whine about it. in other news, working on the game is way more fun than working on my other papers/projects. in fact, it's quite possibly my favorite thing i've ever done in grad school. it's going to be fun. hopefully it'll be fun for people to play, too. that's sort of the point.

if you want to check it out, click here.

tweetblog!

2009-12-02T21:30:00.000-08:00

it's oddly foggy tonight. i forgot that happens in winter in pullman. i have sad feelings. mike prewett clone is following me home.

warcraft 3: the frozen my-ass in the computer chair for a long, long time

2009-11-30T15:06:00.000-08:00

so, as i've mentioned a few times previously, despite being mega-busy this year, i've still managed to get some pretty fantastic game-playing done after midnight on the nights i can spare a few hours of sleep. this trend has more recently manifested in my manic consumption of Warcraft 3 and it's attendant expansion pack, The Frozen Throne. Having been a huge fan of Orcs and Humans (ah, the old days), Tides of Darkness (even more fun), and of course Starcraft (which is currently my #1 game of all time), i really can't explain why Warcraft 3 came out in 2002 and i'm just now, seven years later, getting around to playing it.

i think part of the problem was that, at the time, i wasn't even that into Starcraft yet. i was, at the time, more obsessed with civ-building games like Medieval: Total War and shoot-and-destroy games like Unreal Tournament and Serious Sam, and mostly i was completely fucking obsessed with Jedi Outcast. actually, i still am. and why not?!

also, what really made me love Starcraft (at the time) was that the battles were so much bigger (actually, everything was much bigger) than in previous Blizzard strategy games. when the marketing push for Warcraft 3 became basically "this is sort of like Diablo, and sort of like Starcraft with smaller battles", i think i just lost interest. i've never liked Diablo and otherwise it sounded like Warcraft 3 would be a regression.

so in a way, i think it's probably better that i came to it when i did, now that i'm a bit better equipped to appreciate nuance in game design, and especially in RTS games. now that there have been enough RTS games released on the PC to (literally) build a second moon for the Earth out of, i've had time to figure out what makes an RTS really worth playing to me. and generally that means i will play Blizzard-made RTS games and not really much else (though i liked Ground Control and Kohan a lot). i can't really articulate what it is about their RTS games that make them so much more fun than others; it's just an immutable law of life, like gravity.

anyway, i really, really liked both Warcraft 3 and the expansion, and am now looking forward even more than before to Starcraft 2. it's also going to be really difficult to not go back and try to beat both games on the Hard difficulty setting instead of doing the work that will allow me to keep my job. but somehow i will persevere.

for now i'm playing the original japanese non-dumbed-down version of Final Fantasy IV, which has a free downloadable fan translation. it's pretty freaking good. considering it's really the game that solidified my obsession with video games, all those years ago the fact that i find a different version of it even more entertaining almost 20 years later (yikes, i'm getting old) is pretty great.

finals "week"

2009-11-29T23:11:00.000-08:00

"week" in quotation marks of course because the last three weeks of pretty much every semester all glom together into one horrific jack-bauer-esque day wherein the standard human ideals of linear time and cause-and-effect become indiscernible and perhaps even non-existent thanks to lack of sleep and overabundance of brain-paralyzing work.

that said, i realized today that this is one of my favorite times of the semester, quite the opposite of the beginning of the semester, which is always my least favorite part. starts of semesters always involve tons of inane paperwork that you've filled out thousands of times before, getting to know your students' names and going through the whole process of introducing them to your class(es) - which you've also done hundreds of times before - memorizing your schedule, buying books, etc. the minutae is enough to drive me absolutely fucking bonkers every time. i mean, i end up with a to-do list with about 25-30 things on it a day, and each of those things takes about 10 minutes to do. that's pretty much my worst nightmare. end-of-the-semester, on the other hand, (or "EotS, OTOH") means there's one thing on the to-do list, and it takes about 3 weeks. sure, it's stressful to have all your grades basically come down to 20 page papers, and to have to write 3-4 of them in a three week period every semester, but there's something calming for me in knowing that (for the most part) i can come into my office every day for the next three weeks and have very little between me and a huge pile of books and notes that i need to transform into seminar papers through sheer force of effort and clever outlining. it's fun. the writing part is the part i like absolutely the best, better than teaching, or reading, or anything. it's why i became an english major in undergrad in the first place. it's just hard to find time for while you're doing a million other things and i have to be forced to do it even when everything else is done. that doesn't mean i don't love it.

maybe it's my long history of playing video games, but i like the idea of just having one last, huge, all-encompassing obstacle in my way. if i'd been in jurassic park, i would have died like nedry, not like gennaro: the tiny, swarming things eating me alive instead of the huge, lumbering t-rex.

i feel like i should be more stressed, but it's hard for me to get stressed about big things, just little things. i mean, ultimately, what happens if i do a shitty job on a paper, or don't finish on time? i mean, the absolute worst thing that could happen at some point would be that i don't graduate. and even that, on a larger holistic-life scale, is pretty insignificant. i mean, i fully intend right now to do this job for the rest of my life, but in reality it probably won't happen that way. i've lived (if i'm lucky) less than half my life at this point. i can't imagine i'll be doing the same thing 30 years from now that i'm doing now. the world just doesn't stay still for that long. so if i have to get a different job, i don't see how that's a completely life-crushing happenstance.

of course, i don't see getting fired or anything actually happening in reality, i'm just talking hypothetically, from the "why get stressed because what's really going to happen if you don't come through?" standpoint. i want to come through, i fully intend to, but if i don't...what? the world won't explode.

not for another 3 years, at least.

and even if it does, we can rest in peace knowing that john cusack survives.

why everyone not using twitter is dumb.

2009-11-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

okay, that's obviously a slight exaggeration. slight. but, people seem to be realizing the usefulness of the twitter platform more and more widely as time goes on. what i've seen with people's reaction to twitter is, i think, the exact same phenomenon that you see whenever a new form of popular media takes hold in the culture: whether it's the cinema, jazz music, the record player, video games, internet chat rooms, etc. there's also a mass of people who explode in consternation and condemnation of this new technology, usually linking it to the devil, or moral decline, or just sheer cussed laziness.

there's always a variant of this more general reaction with new social networking/information aggregating phenomena: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, (to a lesser degree) RSS. there's this idea that these things don't actually serve any useful purpose, that they're usually just abused by people who have problems interacting in the real world, as a way to cushion the impact of real life, or to overly-aggrandize their small accomplishments. sometimes there's some merit to these assertions, just like there's merit to most stereotypes, i'll admit that (okay, do we really need to see 110 pictures of your new baby on facebook? i mean, i want to see one, sure, but the others are probably fine just on your hard drive, just for you). but, what's at the core of these new technologies, what has always been at the core of them, is the development of a new way to aggregate, network, view, and share information. i mean, MySpace (although a bit anachronistic now) helped revolutionize the way companies advertised online, and more specifically the way artists made their music available electronically. facebook accomplishes a lot of the same things, but over an even wider (and less neon-colored) spectrum. RSS and twitter strip away the expectation for you to "put yourself out there" at all. you can just tune in to the stream of information and avoid the egoizing (if that's how you want to see it) completely.

sure, there are always bad, silly things that these technologies are used for, and often they're used for these bad, silly things but the majority of the people who use them. but how is that new? has that facet of human nature (i.e. give someone a soapbox and a megaphone and they'll probably use them, and stupidly) just sudden come to be thanks to the internet? i'm guilty myself of sharing lots of pointless, potentially self-aggrandizing things online that nobody cares about, i'm sure. but at the same time, MySpace let me share a bunch of music online when i was just starting out that allowed me to get feedback and get in touch with other starting musicians that i never would have met otherwise. it let me learn about bands i wouldn't have heard of by reading even independent local magazines. facebook straight up makes it easy to organize social events. i type up what i want to do, where i want to do it, who i want to invite, and BAM, the whole conversation can take place live, right there, much more fluidly and simply than even over email. twitter is just fantastic, like RSS in a tiny box that just gives me pop-up notices and if i don't think that "telling everyone what i ate for lunch" is important (it's usually not, unless it's gourmet grilled cheese) then i DON'T HAVE TO WRITE ANYTHING. if i'm following someone who tweets inanely 21 times a day THEN I CAN STOP FOLLOWING THEM. the information flow control is entirely in your hands, and it's pretty damn easy to learn how to use (except occasionally in the case of facebook, but that's another story), so you can filter out the bad and you can use the good to make you aware of everything you actually want to know. how many of those links you follow and how many twitpics you look at are then entirely up to you within the time constraints you have.

i'm trying not to just whine in the post (even though i'm failing), but things like twitter are (i believe) revolutionizing the way we interact with information, which is more and more becoming a foundational part of our day-to-day lives as more information becomes available and as we (professionally at the very least, if not otherwise) will become more and more responsible for that information. this is why i got into a lot of the stuff i'm currently studying, because it's not going to go away, it's just going to become more and more ubiquitous, and more and more the people who refuse to take part in things like twitter as they come into being are the people who end up having to (not choosing to) give up and join in a few years down the road when it becomes obvious that this stuff isn't going away.

i guess i'm also just naturally curious and figure you might as well get in on the ground floor when something cool comes along.

also, as an unrelated note, i am honest-to-god certain that the sangria's tofu vegetarian burrito is the best food i've ever eaten in my life.

reading NOOOOOOOOOOW!!!

2009-11-24T18:33:00.000-08:00

i'm finally teaching a lit class (sort of) in the spring. it's a reading/discussion based class, and the curriculum seems pretty open (basically i have to use books published after my students were born, so post-1990ish). anyway, i've tried to sprinkle the reading list with a lot of things that will inspire talk about some of (what i see as being) the prominent cultural concerns of the last two decades, like:

1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs

yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.

anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:

Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Novel)

Neil Gaiman, American Gods, (Novel)

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Novel)

Peter Chilson, Disturbance-Loving Species (Short stories)

Frank Miller, 300 (Graphic novel and film)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Novel and film)

Max Brooks, World War Z (Novel)

John Krakauer, Into the Wild (Novel and film)

Note: The film version of The Road may be cut from the schedule due to time constraints and depending on when it becomes available on DVD.

Note 2: I'm really pumped about using WWZ to talk about politics and cultural assumptions, etc. And also zombies.

I'm really excited to teach the class, though at the same time I had to sort of throw this booklist together when in reality there were about 20 more books I wanted to read before choosing which ones I wanted to teach. Apparently they usually offer the class in the fall only, which would have given me the entire summer to decide on books, but instead I got about two weeks. So I'm hoping my choices will work out. I'm just glad to actually be teaching about books. more on this later.

oh my GOD, who left this blog laying here?

2009-11-24T18:04:00.000-08:00

i just found this old thing and dusted it off. seems to work okay.

it's thanksgiving break, which means instead of working 16 hours a day, i'm working like 8-10 hours a day. which means i might get to blog a few times. i spent the weekend in post falls at lindsey's parents house, which was really fun. that place always makes me think of rivendell, for some reason. maybe it's because every time i go there, it's on the heels of some sort of utter madness (the first time it was after the ohio-northwest crossing of 2009, the second time after an 8-day sinus infection). it might also be because there's a sort of relaxingly predictable rhythm to life there, which goes something like this:

1. wake up earlier than usual and eat breakfast (actual breakfast, not just cereal)
2. sit around for a bit and work on my own work (usually grading or something)
3. go do something outside that involves strenuous physical activity
4. return from said activity and make a huge heaping dinner of some sort (eating dinner at actual dinner time)
5. continue working (alternating with watching the history channel) in front of the fireplace
6. at some point in the late evening, go scrounging for food because i ate dinner at actual dinner time
7. eventually fall asleep in front of the fire, wake up, drag self to bed.

it's pretty elven (or elfish, if you want to make tolkien spin in his grave).

other than that, i've been pretty much just working on grad school stuff all semester. in the small breaks that i do have, i've been going out to dinner with people, or watching that 70s show in its entirety with lindsey, or playing some video game because i'm too exhausted to do anything smart. which means i haven't made any progress on any outside interests such as book-writing or song-playing, but i'm willing to put that on the back burner for the moment, as the end of classes is in sight (i only have to take ONE class next semester and teach one, and while i'll be doing diss stuff as well, i certainly won't be as busy as i've been for the last 1 1/2 years).

i'm getting some next effects pedals and such for my tube amp, so i'm hoping that'll inspire me to write some more songs, once i finally have time to sit down and think straight.

in geek-hobby land, it has in fact been a pretty awesome semester though, as i've gotten the chance to play a lot of games i hadn't previously played, like KoToR 1 and 2, all three prince of persia games (minus the new one, which i don't yet), and all three homeworld games. my new obsession is warcraft 3, which i somehow didn't play when it came out in 2002. i'm just now at the point of finishing up the expansion campaign, and am looking forward to playing the whole thing over again on the higher difficulty setting once i decompress from RTS land for a month or two. hanging high over my head also is the fact that i've still NEVER finished brood war, despite having played it for no doubt hundreds of hours in the last 10 years. but i think the next thing on the time-wasting, fun-having plate is a run through final fantasy 4-6, and 9-12. which will probably take the entirety of my whole life. i'm skipping 7 and 8 out of principle because, although i love both games, i hate replaying them because there are WAY too many "stop and level up here for 5-10 hours" sections in both of them. i've never played 10 or 12 before, so that should be a good time.

i'm teaching a (potentially) awesome class in the spring. but more about that in a minute.

old livejournal link

2009-10-19T02:01:00.000-07:00

in case you're ever bored and looking for something to make you feel better about yourself, you should check out the level of craziness on regular display here. it's my old livejournal blog (2004-2007), and it's fantastically old school.

ruminations on careerism

2009-10-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

so i've been mulling over this for a bit, as lindsey and i were talking about it on the way home...and by "it" i mean the whole question(s) of "why do you do what you do?" and "what should i do for the rest of my life?" and i've realized that my own attitude has changed pretty significantly since i last considered those questions seriously, but my justification for the new attitude hasn't really been thought through at length.

i want to argue that a lot of people do what they do for the wrong reasons. and i fully accept that this will potentially start a comment war amongst a few particular readers. if they still read this blog. but anyway, i have a pretty strong opinion on careers and professional motivation, so i'd be happy to belabor my points if anyone wants to discuss.

as i see it, the two main problems with the typical cultural answer to "what do you want to do with your life?" are these:

1. "i want to help people" is an unreasonable desire, based on a whole lot of assumptions that you can't reasonably make about other people and their situations.

for the first 25 years of my life, this was what i wanted to do. and from the time i entered college as a computer scientist, then changed to an english major (neither of which are very "people-helpy" professions), i felt guilty that i wasn't a doctor, or a vet, or an army sergeant. but at some point along the road, i realized that wanting to help people, while noble, is also silly.

we all want to help other people (unless we're sociopaths), at the very least just because if we're nice to them, or give the appearance of being nice to them, they'll be nice to us and we'll get stuff. however, i don't think you can honestly know when you're helping or not. people lie (to you and you to yourself, if expedient) all the time. now, if life were really black-and-white, like a lot of people like to think it is, then sure, "helping people" would be awesome. however, let's take a look at "doctor" for example to see where the "help" starts to fall apart...

okay, so you're a doctor. you keep people's hearts beating. you keep people from dying of infections. people tell you how happy they are that you saved their lives. that's pretty badass. however, you also probably occasionally don't help people. people you can't fix, who come to the hospital assuming that they're going to get fixed. people who come to the hospital and actually get worse. in the worst case, which hopefully happens very seldom to never, you kill someone. maybe someone who would have been okay otherwise. this is why doctors have huge insurance premiums. not because they help people, but because occasionally one of them (or the hospital) kills someone. of course, you can chalk this up to ben parker's mantra all you want, but the fact is that "helping people" is complicated and relies on a TON of assumptions on your part, assumptions that you often don't or can't share with the person you're supposedly helping. sure, you save a kid's life who has a broken leg that otherwise would have resulted in infection. that's nice (it really is). but, you could also look at the same act from this (extremely cynical) angle: the very health system and hospital your job and your "helping" is built on propagates a medical system that has widespread negative economic, environmental, cultural, etc. effects all across the globe. most likely, people in other, poorer countries died indirectly so that your medical machinery could be built to save the kid you saved. am i inferring that doctors should go to work everyday feeling guilty because they made some third world country a little poorer so we can keep americans alive? of course not. but at the same time, that's the reality of the situation...and from that you begin, maybe, to see how difficult it is to help someone with no strings attached. you simply can't trace the chain of causality far enough to know you're only helping. on some level, you're lying to yourself. which sort of leads into my other point...

2. ...which is "when did we decide that the only time you can make a difference in other people's lives is the 8 hours a day you're getting paid?". if you are the charitable type and you want to help people, why does it have to be during your job? can't you help just as much if not more in your day-to-day non-work life? i think a very significant part of this problem is that we're so obsessed with creating concrete identities for ourselves that we'll jump at the chance to be able to say "i'm a teacher" or "i'm a musician" or "i'm a sculptor" and the dark side to that is then we believe that that particular sub-identity is the only one of worth, simultaneously putting too much pressure on what we are at work and devaluing what we do with the rest of our lives.

so what do we do then? i believe the only thing that really makes sense is to find something that makes each of us happy, and do that for a job. you're the only one you can be completely sure that you're helping, and if you're happy and content with a significant portion of your life, that's going to bleed over into how you interact with other people. work on improving yourself and the rest will follow. at least that's the theory i've been trying to work under. and it seems to be working, mostly. at least as much as it can be expected to, considering how little i actually have control over. i mean, we have the ability in this country to be well-off enough in a global sense to have a measure of control over "what we want to be when we grow up". unfortunately, this creates a situation similar to the one that Pollan addresses in In Defense of Food; we have so many kinds of food and as a result so many layers of confusion about which foods do what, that we've literally forgotten how to feed ourselves as a culture. given simple, raw produce, or a plain old dead animal, the vast majority of our country wouldn't even know how to prepare it to save themselves from starving. similarly, we have so many choices in terms of careers that we're making it harder than it has to be, believing that if we choose "the one" that we'll be able to singlehandedly better humanity...when in reality the point of having a job should just be to find something you feel relatively satisfied doing each day in a personal sense, and which earns you enough money to keep food in your mouth and a roof over your head. i'm not saving the world being an english teacher, but i became a much better and happier person when i realized that i didn't actually have to.

note: i'm still a little sad that i'm not a doctor. doctors are awesome. i only ripped on them because they're the poster-children for the whole "get a job that helps someone" idea.

note 2: i was reading my old livejournal today. hilarious.

note 3: HOW AM I STILL HUNGRY?!

note 4: i will try to blog more soon. it really IS fun, just time-consuming and not as fun/meaningful/expedient as tweeting, playing with friends, doing homework, reading shit that's not homework just to learn about the world, writing poetry and/or music, watching good TV/movies, playing video games, eating, or sleeping.

been a long time...

2009-10-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

so i've obviously been pretty busy lately. this is my last semester taking classes, and i'm taking 3 while teaching 2 and trying to juggle a few conferences and the requisite paperwork, random school functions and social obligations. also, the small amount of free time that i do have is more and more often spent hanging around with friends and having weekend get-togethers, hikes, and those sorts of things. this weekend, for instance, it was a jam session on friday, conference all day saturday, wrapped up by a rico's night last night and then working on presentations for this week all night and day today. i find there is much less time and desire to blog when i'm increasingly out and about doing, you know, fun real-life stuff.

also, twitter is actually pretty badass and it's easy to get enmeshed in it. usually the things that have in the past flowered into 1000 word posts on here have started from a sudden idea or two that popped into my head while i was out walking around or grading papers or whatever. with twitter, i can just hammer out that idea in a sentence, hit send, and not only save time, but also get the idea out to a wider audience (which isn't really my primary goal, but still a draw for sure). i can easily post links to youtube videos, new music downloads, interesting news stories, etc. there (and in a much easier way that i can on blogger or even tumblr). and i hear back from 50+ others on a day-to-day basis, in a way that's easier and quicker to read than a whole blog post, and in a way that's easier to access than RSS (twhirl just sits in my sidebar). so i guess what i'm saying is that mini-blogging has really put how much "unnecessary" time i've spent blogging for years into perspective (i put "unnecessary" in quotes because i'm not entirely convinced it was unnecessary, but i digress) and it's really hard with my current schedule to say to myself "well, i'd really like to comment about how i feel about the current administration's handling of organic foods" and then follow it up with a context-heavy 1000 word post that takes me 30 minutes to write when i could just hammer "new administration's organic food policy problematic? [link]" instead and move on with my life while being reasonably sure that that tweet will get me some feedback and possibly more related links from my peers.

having said that, i could have probably also expressed this entire post as "long-form blogs dying off due to popularity/access/efficiency of twitter?"

but i didn't. and now there go 10 minutes i'll never get back.