Audio Technology Minidisc

On forced migration and format changes.

Sony is finally phasing out the DAT medium (Babelfish translation and community reaction). To be honest, I thought this happened years ago. There are no plans to cease production on the blank tapes themselves, but recording/playback equipment will no longer be made.

Why is this important? Well, it goes a long way towards showing that “obsolete” formats still have some life left as long as a) there’s a dedicated user-base, and b) blank media are still available. Take Minidisc, for example: the format was written off as a failure outside of Japan back around 1998, but Sharp and Sony still make recorders for it, and you can still get media at the local Megalomart.

Minidisc still has a fervent following as a reliable and worthy medium for portable recording. It “failed” because Sony hyped it (along with Phillips’ lamented DCC) as a “replacement” for pre-recorded commercial CDs. This was 1994-1995, when the cassette was being (thank God) phased out of production.

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Music

Resonant Hum

New mix up at AOTM. As always, if you’re interested in a copy, let me know. And, no, don’t ask how I got the Boards of Canada this early.

1) Broken Social Scene: KC Accidental

2) Menomena: The Late Great Libido

3) Architecture in Helsinki: Maybe You Can Owe Me

4) Sufjan Stevens: All Good Naysayers, Speak Up!

5) Butterfly Child: Young Virgins Cry for Mutiny

6) Books: There Is No There

7) Bark Psychosis: 400 Winters

8) Prefuse 73/The Books: Pagina Ocho

9) Boards of Canada: Dayvan Cowboy

10) Explosions in the Sky: Your Hand in Mine

11) Tarentel: For Carl Sagan

12) Yo La Tengo: The Sea Horse

Music

Polygon_Cities by Monolake

If I had to pick an act that serves as the apotheosis of Basic Channel records, it would be Monolake. Like the rest of the roster, Robert Henke (and a revolving crew of collaborators) specialize in German minimalist techno. Sure, there’s a ton of that stuff out there, and most of it is downright embarrasing, but the guys on Basic Channel tend to push it into more interesting directions, if only in subtle ways.

Previous albums had ranged from Musique Concrete or dub experiments, but over the last few records, he’s been pushing in a more rhythmic direction, culminating in 2003’s excellent Momentum. The general mood is dark and metallic, and very sterile. This is music for airport runways at night or dark subway tunnels. There’s very little melody, and samples are used sparingly if at all, and are often so obfuscated as to be unrecognizable.

Polygon_Cities doesn’t push the envelope so much as strain at the edges a bit.

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Audio Technology

Rockbox: new life for the iRiver ihp-120

I’ve talked about my experiences with the ihp-120 previously. It’s a great piece of hardware, but iRiver really fumbled the software, and though they promised updates to rectify some of the more glaring omissions, nothing was ever released, and the product line has since been eclipsed by newer models. This left many users (myself included) feeling burned.

I ended up returning mine for a Rio Karma, which is a wonderful player, but Rio’s closed up shop, and their promised next-generation players have gone from vaporware to ghostware.

A few months ago, a friend of mine decided to ditch his ihp-120 for one of the new Iaudio players, so I bought it off him for $40. At the very least, it comes in handy as a 20GB portable drive. I never expected to use it as a music player.

Enter Rockbox, the folks who wrote a wonderful open-source firmware for the old Archos series.

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Civil Rights

More on the forced evacuations in New Orleans

Yet another video feed of citizens being forcibly evicted from their homes in New Orleans. Notice that these houses are not flooded or significantly damaged. Notice also the heavy ordnance that the police are carrying. I guess the 4th amendment is on hold in Louisiana until further notice.

Direct quote: “(…)the police power of the state trumps an individual’s right when there is a public health emergency.”

Welcome to Ted Kennedy’s America.

Humor

Why the internet is evil and sick.

Recent IRC quotes:

<Staberinde> The worst of the bunch was this

* Staberinde points at his crotch

<Staberinde> “Ya know this thing isn’t going to blow itself!”

<CrashCat> it will if you wire it with explosives

<Staberinde> Well yes, but that’s only when the zombies are near

* Ouroboros does a robot dance in FLB’s pants.

<FLB> …

<Ouroboros> Well.

<Ouroboros> I mean.

<Ouroboros> You have spare pants, right?

<FLB> Yeah! Of course!

<FLB> That’s what you meant

<Ouroboros> Yes.

<Ouroboros> It is.

<FLB> Umm.

<FLB> You can keep that pair.

<FLB> They’re on the house.

<Ouroboros> KTHX

Audio Technology

Rio is dead. Long live Rio.

I absolutely love my Rio Karma. It’s the best portable audio unit I’ve ever owned. Rio chose to make a pure audio (as opposed to a half-baked PDA or video player or personal storage or whatever…) player and to do it right. I have music pretty much everywhere I go, and the Karma’s pretty much the perfect gadget for me.

About a year back, Rio announced that they were doing R&D on the Karma’s successor, tenatively called the Chroma. Details were sketchy, but the few things that had been left out of the Karma, like Audible support and MSC compliance, would be part of the Chroma, as well as a larger hard-drive and a color interface. Basically, it was to be the Holy Grail for audiophiles, and the community waited with bated breath for details.

Well, it turns out that’s not gonna happen, pilgrims. Rio has closed their doors and sold assets off to Sigmatel.

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Ordnance

Weapon or furniture?

Just thought I’d post a couple of shots of my new Nill Grips. If you don’t have any experience with their work, you’re missing out. They make their grips from quality walnut, then finish them in an oil they call Rhomlas. Finish is gorgeous, and the checkering is aggressive but not grating. Here they are on my P7 and P225:

They’re precision-fitted to the frame, and they match the dimensions of the factory grips almost exactly, except for the ones on the P7, which have just enough of a swell in the palm to make them far more ergonomic than the factory H&K grips.

There’s not much you can do towards “tricking out” old West German service pistols, but the Nills go a long way towards changing them from grim-looking but utilitarian devices to true showpieces.

Music

Swelter

New mix up at AOTM. Let me know if you’re interested in a copy.

Swelter

  1. Tim Hecker: Song of the Highwire Shrimper
  2. Twerk: From Green to Brown
  3. Aphex Twin: Jynweythek
  4. Tortoise: Tjed (John McEntire Remix)
  5. Mouse on Mars: Flim
  6. Bola: Sirasancerre
  7. Epoq: For the Ears of the Stars
  8. Sybarite: Ashs
  9. Alog: The Youth of Mysterious Conversations
  10. Keith Whitman: Stereo Music for Disklavier, Electric Guitar and Computer
  11. Thomas Fehlmann: Luftikuss
  12. Lusine Icl: Drip
  13. Yasume: Slowly, Clearly and Calmly
  14. Shuttle358: Scrapbook

Civil Rights

If you can’t trust the government…

…who can you trust, right?

A friend pointed the FBI Crime Clock to me. For those into statistics, give it a look. Some of the data:

Every 22.1 seconds One Violent Crime in America.Every 35.3 seconds One Aggravated Assault.

Every 1.2 minutes One Robbery.

Every 5.5 minutes One Forcible Rape.

Every 32.4 minutes One Murder.

Every 3.0 seconds One Property Crime.

Pretty scary, huh? Just like those “every 3 seconds, a cop-killing assault rifle kills twenty innocent preschoolers” slogans the left likes the throw around. (It’s a lovely testament to the liberal mindset in this country that supposedly “educated” people never fact-check or question the “statistics” they’re fed) The only difference is that these numbers are real, verifiable, and hey, they’re from the government, right?

Now let’s take the Lott/Kleck average of 2.5 million civilian defensive uses of a firearm per year and break it down:

Every day, 6849.3 uses.Every

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Humor

Aleatory inbox poetry

One thing I love about Thunderbird is the built-in junk filtering system. After a little bit of training, it wipes out 95% of the crap I’d rather not wade through to get to my email. Thing is, with any such filters, you’re bound to get the occasional false-positive, so it never hurts to double check.

The last few times I’ve perused my “Junk” folder, I’ve noticed a preponerance of advertising messages with subject lines like, “Virginia said hi” or “Has Carla left Steve yet.” I guess they’re supposed to be mistaken for personal correspondence, but for the most part, internal patterns in the messages are enough for Thunderbird to pick them out.

What I don’t understand (and if you know, drop me a line) is the smattering of nonsense that’s attached to the bottom of each of these messages. Stuff like “proud poetic seething sidereal decreeing presidential brash hut sham.” What the heck?

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Visual Media

After the prequels, or “where are they now?”

The following contains spoilers for the new Star Wars movie. If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want it utterly wrecked for you, skip this post. And go see it. It’s much better than the first two episodes.

So, at the end of Episode III, all the nails are pretty much in the coffin. Everyone you don’t see in the original trilogy dies over the course of the movie.

Plo Koon, Aayla Secura, Kit Fisto, Agen Kolar and the rest of the Jedi Council: cut down by their own troops in the field after Order 66 is activated.

Mace Windu: partially dismembered by Anakin, then killed by Palpatine by being shocked and thrown out a high window.

Bail Organa: to be killed on Alderaan when the Death Star destroys it.

Qui Gon Jinn: killed in Episode I, finds a way to become immortal through the Force after death, passes this secret on to Yoda, who passes it on to Obi-Wan at the end of Episode III

Nute Gunray, Rune Haako, Wat Tambor and the rest of the Trade Federation cronies: killed by Anakin Skywalker on Mustafar.

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Visual Media

Star Wars: Episode III, Part 2

Okay, there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, skip the rest of this review. All I’ll give away is the obvious: everyone you don’t see in the original trilogy dies here. Horribly. This isn’t a fun movie, but yes, it’s worth seeing if you have any interest in Star Wars.

You’ve been warned.

Of course, it opens with a huge space-battle. Like so many other things in the prequels, it looks great, but in context, it doesn’t serve any real purpose, and there’s no sense of urgency or risk. Seriously, cut out the whole battle/rescue sequence, and the plot doesn’t falter a bit. It’s just there as a huge, loud and confusing overture. Count Dooku shows up, and promptly gets cut down by Anakin. Again, no emotional investment whatsoever. No,”you cut off my hand, now it’s payback,” no witty banter from the Count, just a flashy lightsaber battle and off with his head.

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Visual Media

Star Wars: Episode III, Part 1

Well, it’s all wrapped up, and at least it went out with a bang instead of a wheeze this time.

After Attack of the Clones, it occured to me that I’d gone to see it out of reflex more than anything else. After Fun Time with Jar Jar and Pals (also known as Phantom Menace, if memory serves), I had really lost faith in George Lucas. His “enhancements” to the original trilogy didn’t help matters, either. It felt like all my childhood memories had somehow been tainted, I wasn’t looking forward to the second installment. After the fever-pitch of hype and dissapointment that surrounded Episode I, most of the folks attending AOTC seemed just a bit wary. There were more than a few folks holding out hope, but even that had a certain guarded quality to it.

Episode II wasn’t nearly as horrendous as the first one, but it certainly wasn’t very good, either.

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Music

Chessa by Shuttle358

12k is one of those rare labels that manages to stay in business despite the fact that they fly completely under commercial radar and that they’ve been quietly hosting some of the best electronic music out there for a couple of years now. I stumbled across their roster purely by accident, and come to think of it, I’ve never heard a whisper about them from the mainstream press. Many of their artists cross-pollinate with German minimalist label Mille Plateaux, and there’s a shared style between the two labels, but where Mille Plateaux tends to trade in dry academics, 12k works from a more organic and emotional template.

Shuttle358 is the alter-ego of Dan Abrams, who had a track under his own name on the second Clicks & Cuts compilation. Like his labelmates, he makes very quiet, minimalistic stuff. If you’ve heard Sogar, Vladislav Delay or Pan Sonic, it’s in that vein.

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Code

Linux Myth #483: It’s no good for games

Wine’s been around for awhile, but when I first tried it a couple of years back, I couldn’t get it to work, so I abandoned it as an idea whose reach exceeded its grasp. Wine isn’t an MS Windows emulator so much as a Linux program that imitates Windows’ system-calls and attempts to run them natively in Linux. The idea was that eventually, it’d be possible to use those pesky Windows-only apps without having to reboot into a Windows partition.

When I tried it, it was a pain to install and a nightmare to configure. In the end, it just didn’t work. I hadn’t given it much thought since, until I heard from a friend who was using a Wine-based program called Cedega. He had World of Warcraft as well as several other Windows programs running seamlessly on a Suse box, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The folks at TransGaming distribute a program called Cedega, as well as a graphical frontend called Point2Play that handles everything from the installation to the actual program functions.

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Music

Great records of 2004

Last year was an odd one for music. Politics reared its ugly head during an election year, and musicians, who we all know are the real experts on foreign policy, seemed to come out of the woodwork to denounce “the war,” falling back on rehearsed soundbites and incoherent vitriol. The whole thing was made all the more disappointing by the fact that there simply wasn’t anything very good coming out from the major labels. U2 did an okay record with a ponderous title, but it traded mostly on nostalgia, and it appears that R.E.M. is just a hollow shell of its former self without Bill Berry.

As usual, there was some truly great work done this year, but it flew under the commercial radar. Thankfully, Emo appears to be dead, and we’ve finally seen the end of “Post-Rock” as the new Prog. Acts like Tortoise treaded water, while others redefined themselves and came out all the better for it.

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Visual Media

The Episode III Trailer

The third and final Star Wars prequel comes out next may, but Lucasfilm has released the trailer. I managed to snag a copy, and it looks interesting so far. What’s odd is that the first half is comprised of footage from earlier movies, including a voiceover of Obi-Wan’s original description of Vader’s origin to Luke in A New Hope. I suppose it’s to bring audiences up to speed, and to make the connection.

If the horrible travesty of Phantom Menace hadn’t rattled my faith in Lucas, I might be looking forward to this movie with a bit more anticipation, but now I’m only mildly interested. I wasn’t too impressed with Attack of the Clones, either, but I went to watch it because, well, it was Star Wars, dammit, and I was supposed to at least give it a chance.

If nothing else, the first two prequels were visually astonishing, and this looks no different.

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Visual Media

Why Joss Whedon is a genius, and I am but a humble mortal


(Click to see entire page. Copyright Marvel, 2004)

Those words are “Fastball Special.” The following two pages are a single-panel spread of Peter launching Logan into the upper atmosphere in the time-honored Claremont fashion. It suddenly doesn’t really matter how exactly Peter’s back from the dead, or what Chuck Austen and the rest have done to the series since the early ’90s. In just a couple of pages and a few well-placed lines of dialogue. Whedon’s erased all concerns, and suddenly, you’re back in the halcyon days of 1986 like nothing’s changed at all.

Given what readers have endured in the hands of writers since Claremeont, it feels like coming home, and I got a lump in my throat reading this issue. It’s been a long time since the X-Men books have had an emotional stake for me, but Whedon’s found the heart of the title, and this is only halfway through Astonishing #6.

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Code

Election-day Propaganda

Well, it’s election time here in the States. In case you didn’t notice, it’s a ridiculously close race. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian, but for the first time in my adult life, I’m voting Republican. Just to be safe.

My finger hovered over the “Badnarik” button until it shook, but I took the plunge and made the moral compromise in the name of pragmatism. I still feel a bit odd about it, but hey, them’s the breaks, and the thought of John Kerry running this country gives me the night sweats. I suppose I can’t always be the fashionable outsider.

Hopefully, I’ll get to keep my guns for another four years.

On a lighter note, here’s another theme from the archives, dusted off and polished a bit. It’s based on a Propaganda background of the same name.

Magic Milk Dispenser

Code

Sleep

Another reworked artifact. This one was a loose port of Lindsay T’s “Sleep” theme for Enlightenment. The wonderful background is from Tommy Tubbiolo.

: Sleep

Audio Technology Minidisc

Sony MZ-EH1

Here’s the 2005 flagship playback unit. The NH1 is the recorder, and the NH3D (which is very rare) is the downloader. Still waiting for word on the next-gen units, which should have full mp3 compatibility as well as uploading capacity.

The new Hi-MD units do support uncompressed PCM, as well as the new 256 and 352kb/s bitrates. The Hi-MD amp sounds clean and clear, though I can’t distinguish any difference between the Class D amps they were using in the last series.

With Sony’s newer EX90 headphones. These are getting warmer as they break in, and I’m enjoying them greatly. Far more emphatic and less “shrouded” in terms of sound quality than the Shure E3’s, which I’ve always thought of as expensive and over-rated.

With my old fallbacks, the Grado SR60. If you don’t have a set, you don’t know what you’re missing. Some criticize them for being a bit “shouty,” but they’re fun and vibrant, and very faithful to source material.

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Music

Listen with Xela

Well, this came out of nowhere. It’s a mix cobbled together by John Xela for Boomkat, and apparently it’s an exclusive because I’ve heard absolutely nothing about it elsewhere. I went ahead and got it on a lark, and it’s pretty darn good.

For music geeks, the mix-tape (which I shall call it, regardless of medium) takes on a certain aura of history and reverence. Chances are, most of us have had a life-defining moment based on something somebody’s cooler older brother or sister put on a tape for us…something that we’d never have been exposed to otherwise. For me, it was the first time I heard “Debaser” on a tape that a high-school friend’s sister’s boyfriend had given her. I was a freshman in a redneck Georgia school, where all the local radio stations played a constant litany of country and “Classic Rock,” so the dichotomy between Francis’ hideous wailing and the sheer catchiness of the chorus was something altogether alien and liberating.

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Visual Media

In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Colossus.

Just felt like I’d get that out of the way for the last three people on earth who haven’t been reading Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-men. Not like I’m spoiling anything, since Marvel chose to run with a variant cover that splashes it right out there for everyone to see.

I grew up on the X-men, specifically Claremont’s run in the mid-to-late ’80s. The book was unlike anything out there, with a strong, well-developed cast of believable characters who just happened to live in the most unlikely of circumstances. They fit somewhere between the bland superhero comics that DC were churning out and the more grim “adult” segment market. The X-men were outlaws in the eyes of the public, but by their own standards, they were protectors of a world that despised them even as it depended on their help. They were freaks who bonded together not just out of a need for survival, but as a family of sorts.

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Civil Rights

Go north. Invest in hydrogen cells.

The subject of John Titor came up in conversation today. In case you never heard, he showed up in early 2001 claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036.

Sadly, many people believed him, and many still do.

Apparently, the world in 2036 is recovering from a global war in which American civil liberties eroded to the point that, in 2004-2005, there were “Waco-type events” on a weekly basis, and the country finally fell into civil war, the opposing factions being centralized urban areas and organized rural militias. Then the militias allied themselves with the Russians, who subsequently nuked the urban areas, leaving the United States a semi-nuclear wasteland.

Yep. It gets better.

This war escalates and draws in China and the EU, and by Titor’s time, a shaky and traumatized US is split into five regions, each governed by a separate president but united under a central Constitution. The economy is largely agrarian, and technology is scarce.

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Music

Codename: Dustsucker by Bark Psychosis

Man, it’s been awhile. Hex came out in, what, 1993 or so? What gives? Graham Sutton gets some friends together, records a modest record which receives almost no promotion but invents the whole “Post-Rock” genre, then he just disappears for eleven years? Hm.

If you’ve never heard Hex, kick yourself now. When your posterior regains feeling, get a copy. You won’t be sorry. It was (and still is) one of the true masterpieces of the 1990’s, easily ranking along with records like Loveless and the first Low record in terms of sheer originality. It’s a slow, sparse and almost hopelessly melancholy record that exists in its own private universe, with nary a trace of any outside influence. One critic, not knowing how to pigeonhole it, coined the term “Post-Rock” to refer to it, and the name stuck, but after touring for a bit, Bark Psychosis just seemed to dissipate. Sutton went off to work on a drum-and-bass project called Boymerang, and that was seemingly it.

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Music

Faking the Books by Lali Puna

Lali Puna have always come across to me as more of a “concept” act than anything else. After hearing the rabid, foaming fanyboyish praise that got heaped on Scary World Theory, I was completely dumbfounded. The whole thing came off as a premeditated Stereolab-meets-Notwist experiment, with little of the latter’s subtle power and far too much of the former’s fey smugness. I wrote it off as by-the-numbers Post-Rock and forgot about them.

Needless to say, I had no expectations for this record, but on impulse, I decided to check it out. Glad I did. Faking the Books drops the coyness and Tinkertoy aesthetics in favor of something more straightforward and much more successful.

The opening track could have been lifted straight out of the Notwist catalog, even though it’s got a character all its own. Valerie Trebeljahr has a pensive, almost exhausted-sounding voice, and when she sings, “everybody knows/this ain’t heaven,” she evokes the type of elegaic feel that fills Notwist’s best work.

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Music

Lilies by Arovane

Uwe Zahn likes to take his time between records. It’s been five years since the release of his debut Atol Scrap, and two since its masterful followup Tides. Atol Scrap wasn’t the best or most distinctive record of its time, but it was pleasant enough, and although it was a bit lacking in character, the underlying craftsmanship of the arrangements was commendable. In the end, though, it was just another airless IDM record with angular structures. This isn’t to say it’s not worth a listen; it’s just that it didn’t have much to distinguish it from the rest of the pack.

For his second album, Zahn paired with Christian Kleine for Tides, which was something of a revelation. Kleine supplied several guitar figures, which Zahn arranged into a haunting and programmatic meditation on the French seashore. Tides was by turns beautiful and dramatic, all the while managing to neatly sidestep the New Age pitfalls of such a project.

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Music

Twerk: Living Vicariously through Burnt Bread

German electronic label Mille Plateaux has always been a hit-or-miss affair with me. They specialize in very minimal music, best exemplified through the archetypal Clicks & Cuts series, in which the barest of sounds and glitches serve as building blocks for their artists’ work. Sometimes, it works wonderfully and sometimes, it’s just too dry and insubstantial. The best artists (Kit Clayton, Vladislav Delay) take these simple elements and build something shimmering and immersive, but too many others just lack the imagination.

Twerk is the alias of Shawn Hatfield, who uses found sounds and field-recordings to build music that’s surprisingly tangible given its ephermal foundations. He’s also a programmer who writes much of the software he uses for composition, but the process itself is thankfully a means and not an end. There’s nothing about this record that suggests an agenda, and it’s easily enjoyed on purely musical merits.

This is a very vibrant and organic record, sounding at times like Microstoria with a bit of air let in.

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Civil Rights

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words…

I’ve heard alot about the lovely ’60’s “ideals” of peace and love, but this is just frightening. People with nothing better to do with their time take the coward’s way out and attack the issue of “gun violence,” pinning the blame on those of us who choose to own firearms.

Why the “coward’s way out?” Because the real cause of gun violence in this country has nothing to do with the fact that law-abiding citizens own guns, it has to do with deeper issues. Our violent crime-rate stems from many factors, most of which I’d expect the liberals to sympathize with. Poverty, drug abuse, racial inequality, the widening gap between rich and poor…I thought these were the real meat of the liberal agenda. So why not attack the root-causes? Because that takes real time and effort, and that’s just too hard for most of these people. It’s alot easier to shreik, “Guns cause violence!”

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Visual Media

Serenity is a go!

Well, the Firefly movie is on schedule for a release date next spring. The original cast are all on board. As usual, Harry Knowles claims to have a leaked first-draft script, and he quotes a very apropos and encouraging bit of dialogue:

Wash: Yeah well if she doesn’t give us some extra flow from the engine room to offset the burnthrough the landing is gonna get pretty interesting.

Mal: Define “interesting.”

Wash (calm suggestion): “Oh god, oh god, we’re all gonna die?”

Nice to see Whedon’s still got it. Incidentally, rumor has it he’s also working on an X-Men script.

Visual Media

“We can’t die, because we are so very pretty.”

Well, the Firefly DVD’s out, and it was worth the wait. All the original episodes are here, as well as two others that weren’t shown. What’s nice is that they’re arranged in chronological order, rather than the shuffled mess that Fox chose to present them in.

In case you don’t know, Firefly was a great sci-fi/western show written by Joss Whedon (Buffy, etc). It received a lackluster push from Fox, and like the much-deserving-but-ultimately-slighted Futurama (which also received a great treatment on DVD), it ended up dying in relative obscurity. Despite this, the show had a fervent following, and fans were willing to wade through the pre-emptions and random schedulings to see it. When Firefly was cancelled, a large group even went so far as to take out a full-page ad in Variety to petition its reinstatement.

In the end, though, Fox just didn’t know what to do with it, and the show folded.

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Visual Media

Donnie Darko

After being bugged by my friends ad nauseam to watch this movie, I finally rented it the other night, and so far I’ve watched it twice, and I still haven’t unraveled the whole thing. It’s that good.

Basically, it’s an odd combination of American Beauty, Magnolia and 12 Monkeys. Yes, you read that right. It uses approaches from several different genres, but doesn’t neatly fit in any.

Donnie Darko is a troubled (possibly schizophrenic) teenager attending an upper-class Catholic school in upscale Fairfax. He comes from a nice Republican nuclear family. He’s in therapy. See where this is going? No, you don’t.

One night, Donnie is woken by the apparition of a shadowy character who resembles a death’s-head bunny rabbit. The rabbit informs him that the world will end in 28 days. While this is happening, a jet engine falls out of the sky and lands on Donnie’s house, falling directly into the bedroom where he should have been sleeping.

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Civil Rights

This is why I should watch more TV

There’s a new gun-control lobby in town called Georgians for Gun Safety, which ironically, gets its money from the Boston University’s School of Public Health.

They’ve been running a series of advertisements on local television calling viewers’ attention to the impending repeal of the Assault-Weapons Ban. The ads are narrated by a Hispanic baseball player and reference the DC sniper shootings, which is odd because the rifle used by Mohammed and Malvo was a Bushmaster semi-automatic, not a weapon even covered by the Brady Bill’s nebulous and vague definition of “assault weapon.” The ads rely on a hodgepodge of half-truths and emotional exaggerations to make their point.

What these folks hope to achieve is vague at best, but given that the fastest-growing segment of our population is Mexican, I can see where having a Hispanic narrator would be a shrewd (if not despicably manipulative) touch.

I checked out their page, and as usual, we’re fed a bunch of vague and unsupportable “factoids” to stir up the emotions.

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Code

WindowMaker CVS version

Well, the current CVS version of WindowMaker now compiles painlessly on Slackware, and I’ve heard it also runs fine on Fedora and Suse. Antialiasing and GTK2 compatibility are now a reality.

It’s nice to be back.

I’ve started a few new themes already. The first one is a backport of the Ultrafina site theme, which was originally an altered port of the old WindowMaker theme. Still with me? Good. Anyhow, here’s the package, and a screenshot.