Remi's Bloglet - Monday 15 March 2004

I thought my fingers were falling apart, but they were really covered in melty cheese. _
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06:50:07 PM, Monday 15 March 2004

I got a spam today that was appended with a 'Postmodern Story of the Day'. As security gets tighter, the world gets weirder. _
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11:05:55 AM, Sunday 14 March 2004

Been buying RPG rewrites recently. DnD 3.5 and Unknown Armies 2nd Edition. Where 3.5 is a minor update with some streamlining, and some . . . not streamlining, it still feels like a needless moneygrab. Why not a 36 page book detailing rules changes and corrections? Why a total relaunch of the 3, $35-each core books? Anyway, it was a lot of money for not a lot of new content or illumination, just a bunch of different rules. Same shit, different day. At least I didn't own the original 3rd Edition books.

Unknow Armies, though, that's how to do a Second Edition. Clean up the rules, clean up the world, make the good writing even sharper, and focus the game. Basically, make a game that was good into a game that is great. I read the book, and GMing ideas pop into my head, my hands tingle in anticipation of rolling dice. It's all just so damn good.

Just thought I'd share. _
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10:25:51 PM, Saturday 13 March 2004

Holy crap, this is just was looking for. I was wondering how I'd do font parodies for t-shirts quickly and easily (assuming I ever actually become an artist at the company). One step closer, baby. Thanks, Mike! _
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06:52:41 PM, Thursday 11 March 2004

I am sick. So I sit home, rub the cat (who is also recovering from a cold), eat chicken & stars (the only time I'm a huge soup fan), and watch movies. Well, in this case, movie. I watched About Scmidt, which, at the center of its black little heart, is a movie about a man totally removed from emotional reality. Funny, too. I really don't want to give away too much, but it's a good little movie, an interesting role for Nicholson, and hey, Mayor Wilkins from Buffy, or at the least the dude who plays him, shows up for one very weird scene in a camper. _
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05:41:59 PM, Monday 8 March 2004

I really don't understand this 'Will Farrell is a comic genius' meme. I mean . . . do I just demand too much from my comedians? That they be funny? That they have some sense of comic timing? That they have comic abilities beyond a dull-eyed stare and shrieking while very tall? I mean, I didn't feel like I was picky about that sort of thing, I love Rabelais, but maybe I'm just old fashioned. _
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09:29:47 AM, Sunday 7 March 2004

Y'know, the X-men really kind of suck. BUT. Joss Whedon and John Cassaday (who does the beautiful and detailed art for the excellent Warren Ellis-penned Planetary). I'm there. Totally there. _
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09:32:06 PM, Friday 27 February 2004

. . . Except for homos.
[via Daily Kos] _
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02:30:55 PM, Thursday 26 February 2004

Leo Strauss, one of the many minds behind the St. John's Program, is namechecked, and not in a good way, in this utterly terrifying article on former Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski and the role of the Office of Special Plans in the propaganda run-up to the war in Iraq. The article's good, too. _
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08:44:34 PM, Tuesday 24 February 2004

The 'Scratch Fury: Destroyer of Worlds' kitty comics on PvP are some of the best cat humor in recent memory (sometimes surpassing even Get Fuzzy). I'm sure these are the sorts of thoughts Luna, the cat we housesat, had all the time. _
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07:32:18 PM, Sunday 22 February 2004

Julia asked me to write a song for her friend Jenny's birthday. So I did. Now the song has been given, so I can share it with all of y'all.
[Update: Julia has a roundup of all the songs for Jenny's birthday] _
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04:05:38 PM, Sunday 22 February 2004

While walking around downtown Athens today, we saw one of these, a Scion xB. Strange little car/truck/thing, wonder if they'll catch on or if they're too weird to survive. _
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05:06:39 PM, Saturday 21 February 2004

If you don't know what Cerebus is, you won't care, but if you do . . . the 300th issue comes out in March. That's it. No more Cerebus. 300 issues, 6000 pages, all written and drawn by one crazy guy (Dave Sim) with help from background artist Gerhard from the mid-50's on. A staggering achievement. I'm not even going to make complaints. It's the end of an era. The last of the great self-published visions is fading out. Maybe it's finally time for me to start collecting the trades. _
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10:42:00 PM, Friday 20 February 2004

DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, a mix of Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles White Album has a legitimate claim as a grand artistic statement. Neither psychedelic rock nor harcore rap nor mashup techno, it takes elements of each and turns your headphones into the future. Naturally, EMI, the owner of the Beatles copyrights, has crushed the life out of any sort of distribution of the album with its uncompromising copyright stick. This is a shame. Luckily, the distribution channels of the intarweb are hard to crush. If you can't find it online right now, you'll be able to when Grey Tuesday rolls around. _
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10:07:20 PM, Friday 20 February 2004

I'm not much of a writer, but this conversation/lecture/messageboard class with sf writer James D Macdonald is pretty entertaining and might have some neat tips or ideas for folks of the writerly persuasion. _
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08:44:23 PM, Friday 20 February 2004

My keyboard is a little broken, the bottom 3 arrow keys don't work. I'm looking for a way to remap them to . . . somewhere (maybe the numberpad?). I'm running OS X (10.3), can anyone help? _
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07:31:15 PM, Friday 20 February 2004

Longish post ahead.

Work is going well. Not gonna say much more than that. I assume that people can find my blog if they want to (and I don't mind being trackable), so work-talk will mostly be indistinct, 'cause, well, I have no real reason to bitch at the moment, and if I did, I wouldn't say it on the internet, Where Everything Is Permanent. The lack of updates is me adjusting to the new schedule and the increased physical toll (aches and pains and weird rashes are AWESOME).

However, one nice thing about the job is that there are some tasks that don't require 100% of my attention, so I can do some thinking. Also the money is nice. These things bring you the following thoughts:

1)Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom is one of the best albums of the '90's. Really. It's perfect in its minimal, non-guitar-driven way. It has pop hooks, cool jazz, great beats, and no-one, no-one, has made an album that sounds anything like it. Ruby Vroom has very little tweakery, overdubs, weird musical effects (lots of sound effects), or anything like that. Or, at least, it feels that way. The sound is the upright bass and drums locked together in a way both electronic and organic, occasional guitar licks (usually more rhytmic inventions than melodic), geek soul poetry and voice, and a keyboardist bored with his presets creating music from seagull cries, closing doors, guys going 'Heeeey', mixing it up and creating more than experimental noise, willing it to be pop music and succeeding.

Soul Coughing spent the rest of their career trying to force the sounds they made on Vroom into a commercially successful formula. On Irresistible Bliss, they just got it wrong. Although it had a few good tracks (Super Bon-Bon, Soft Serve, Soundtrack to Mary), the overall sound is lethargic and a little too self-absorbed. El Oso was the Cough sound with a strange almost-metal inflection, forcing the band farther into the Trent Reznor corner they had started so far from, but travelled towards as Reznor's overwhelming vision of how electronics and pop music were supposed to play took over. As a result El Oso comes out looking a little overdriven, too eager to please, a little too quirky to share space with the Nu-metal becoming popular at the time, but not quirky enough to explore the space they had mapped out on their first album. Needless to say, this was enough to score Soul Coughing their only mainstream radio hit, 'Circles'. I sold a couple copies of El Oso to teenage girls who had heard it on HFS, I secretly hope they liked it well enough to buy Vroom.

If you asked me a year ago I would have ranked the albums in order of release, but El Oso really does outshine Bliss, both in songwriting, pop hooks, and musical invention. I think what I was reacting to was the fatigue the band was showing, surprised they would make an album so dark, so guitar-driven. Soul Coughing is no more, but Mike Doughty, the singer, has continued playing solo gigs. I saw him once when I still lived in Annapolis, and it was great. He completely escaped the groove of Soul Coughing and plunged into what he calls 'Small Rock', basically the Violent Femmes idea that music doesn't have to be loud and electric to rock a crowd. Doughty's a raconteur and great entertainer, if he's coming through your town, check him out. And if you're wondering what solo Doughty sounds like, listen to the 30 second clip of '27 Jessicas' on his site. If you're wondering what possessed me to buy Ruby Vroom for the third time, yeah, it was Doughty's imminent approach that fired my desire to listen to one of the great albums of the '90's.

2) Jon Bon Jovi may be kind've annoying, but he at least had two or three Rock Star Poses. Kid Rock stole his entire Rock Cowboy persona wholesale from 'Dead or Alive', and it's all the poor guy's got. _
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08:23:17 PM, Thursday 19 February 2004

Mirabai. The thing is where I said it would be. _
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10:43:00 PM, Tuesday 17 February 2004

The David Byrne track that played over the ending credits of Dirty Pretty Things entitled 'Glass and Concrete and Stone' will be the first track on his album Grown Backwards. I'm lukewarm on Byrne's solo career, but I think I may have to pick this album up if there are even a few more songs of that caliber. Or, if I don't feel like risking it, I can try to track down a copy of the magazine Uncut, which has the track on its sample disc.
[this news from Francey's Talking-Heads.net] _
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11:06:03 PM, Sunday 15 February 2004

The guy sponsoring this ad on Atrios lives across the street from us. Local politics! Word. _
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11:58:48 AM, Saturday 14 February 2004

As always, Warren Ellis has the best grasp of American politics. _
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10:50:33 PM, Friday 13 February 2004

The Chocolate Apocalypse has struck again. _
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05:13:32 PM, Friday 13 February 2004

Mirabai wrote the lyrics, I wrote the song, then we wrote more lyrics, and I made more song! I present, Monkey Trough.
Neil complained the words were hard to understand. So there they are.

Also, I've been posting unfinished bits and ideas and early demos for songs yet-to-be-written here. So if you're interested in tracking the genesis of my music, go there, I suppose. GarageBand is really a wonderful tool, it makes this sort of recording easy and fun. _
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09:04:06 PM, Sunday 8 February 2004

My friend Sharon reviews the Diva Cup, a reusable menstruation hygiene product. Not a review, though, a thoughtful critique, in which Sharon tackles topics ranging from the environmental impact of tampons and pads to corporate responsibility to body image and, of course, the silliness of the 'ick' factor and the taboo around mestruation. Good stuff, certainly mind-expanding, even for a guy. _
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11:12:25 PM, Thursday 5 February 2004

The Decemberists! In March! Yay! _
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08:37:49 PM, Wednesday 4 February 2004

Someone (a person who will remain Liz) said that The Unicorns, whose excellent album I have picked up, sound like the baby of the Dismemberment Plan and They Might Be Giants. Not an entirely offbase description. Definitely have the whimsical lyrical TMBG element, and the rock musicality and brittle muscles of the Plan. A really fun band. I hope I'm able to see them on Wednesday. _
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06:25:42 PM, Saturday 31 January 2004

The story of my life (I'm Gabe). _
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09:11:07 PM, Wednesday 28 January 2004

I'd still vote for the guy, but why does Howard Dean have to look so damn much like that monstrous gnome, Joseph Heller, from Transmetropolitan? I mean, granted, their rhetoric, not the same at all (I don't believe Dean's made a speech about weak men shitting in the womb of humanity. Yet.) but the physical resemblance is a little creepy. Maybe it's just the iconic power of comics at work. Or maybe it's the rolled-up shirtsleeves.
Transmetropolitan is � Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, go read it. It's great._
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01:53:01 PM, Saturday 24 January 2004

I am now 'that person that updates his bloglet title graphic more than his blog'. I am good. I am working hard. It is difficult, but I'll get the hang of it. _
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08:23:00 PM, Wednesday 21 January 2004

Warren Ellis does the rant thing about Organic Farming. _
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05:23:20 PM, Sunday 18 January 2004

The 'Chubby Huggs' storyline in Get Fuzzy, starting here, is making me laugh quite a lot. "You're a very special human, Robert" _
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11:46:37 AM, Sunday 18 January 2004

Edward Burtysky does beautiful photographs of man-made natural disasters, including mining tailings, quarries, and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. _
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04:09:54 PM, Saturday 17 January 2004

Woo hoo! Harvey Pekar on Tuesday, then Margaret Cho the thursday after next! Truly a cornucopeia of entertainment deliciousness. _
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06:26:48 PM, Friday 16 January 2004

New bloglet.jpg! Refresh if you're getting the old 'fair and balanced' one. This one probably won't last long, but I figure I can continue in the 'Remi's Bloglet vs.' vein for a while. _
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11:18:42 AM, Thursday 15 January 2004

If you wanna celebrate my new employment with me, please listen to The Unicorns 'Tuff Ghost' and tell me what you think. I'm lovin' it. The somewhat twee sound is belied by morbid lyrics and an aversion to verse chorus verse song structure. The song is a great morphing pop soundscape. I hope I can see them when they swing through Athens in February.

The other track, Les Os, is good, as well. _
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10:37:18 AM, Thursday 15 January 2004

I AM EMPLOYED!!!!!!

I will be working in the printing building for Southland Graphics, which does mostly textile printing (t-shirts for the most part). I'll be learning a lot about the production end of design, and I'll be cleaning lots of used silk screens, but there seems to be many opportunities for advancement (including into the design and sales elements of Southland). The pay isn't the best, but will improve somewhat steadily as I go, and its got great health insurance. Hurray! _
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03:37:52 PM, Wednesday 14 January 2004

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