Don't trust Ancient Greeks!

Or your parents. Also no SotW today, I have some kind of cold-type thing.

No questions asked...

...Just read the description here. Honestly, there's just so much awesome there, it's like, I don't even know, man.

Things I don't Like

Usually I like to write about stuff I like. Not today.

Justified Text: So it's bad enough I have to read these boring-ass textbooks. Why do they use the worst possible format? Justified text a) Wastes paper and b) is hard to read, for three reasons: b1) the identical-length lines are indistinguishable from each other, making it easy to confuse them, meaning it's easy to lose your place; b2) the words are different spaces apart, which is visually distracting and can cause headaches and eye strain (probably. I have no proof of either); b3) so-called "rivers" of white space, which are also distracting. So you get distracted, and then it's harder to find your place when you go back to reading. And you have a headache. This is serious issue. Hours of my life, and probably other people's as well, have been lost because of justified text. And...why?


ABC.com: not enough episodes, loud, annoying (and automatic) video ads, proprietary install, confusing interface, and low video quality. And you have to restart it after commercials. Imagine if you had to get up and press a button on your TV after every commercial so you could keep watching your show. No would watch TV, we'd all still listen to the radio. ABC, just give up and jump on the Hulu boat with everyone else. Or at least fix that commercial thing.


And on a related note, Firefox on Macs. Make me lose my twenty some-odd open tabs because I didn't notice a popup ad? Or because some website (cough*ABC.com*cough) needed to install some update?


Oh, and I just found this out, ABC.com doesn't let you pause if you're watching fullscreened. It's like they want this to fail. And it auto re-sizes your browser window, wich is a cardinal sin of internet-anything.


Canker Sores. I have two. Not fun.


Those TLC shows about the families with too many kids. At what point does television stop being entertainment? If you have ever enjoyed any of these shows (I think there are two of them, and they just added a third one), congratulations, you are officially old.


OK, one of the ABC commercials was for the show I was watching. Listen, ABC: The whole point of putting shows on the Internet is promotional: the show itself is the commercial. If all you can get to advertise during your shows is yourself, your business model is flawed f'd up the a'.

The Phillips-head Screw(driver): better screw(driver)s exist. It's an old idea we just can't get rid of, like the QWERTY keyboard or the system that's not the metric system. Or justified text.

Negative Internet Articles and Blog Posts. Find something nicer to say, douchebag.

And one thing I like: Lists. Excellent way to organize information. I was just going to write about justified text and then I thought, no, no one will read that. So I made a list and now its like I don't have to remember to hate those things anymore. It's very therapeutic, those of you with blogs should try it.

Double Song this Week...

[Song of the Week is a "weekly" feature which is supposed to update every Thursday Friday, but almost never does. In it, Drew records a song, or attempts to record a song, or gives up and writes another movie review.]

...But don't get your hopes up. No, just kidding, go ahead. Wait, don't. I don't know.
"One":


"One" gets it's name because it is played entirely with the right hand. This is a revolution. finally are we free from the tyranny of two-handed guitar-playing! Just think of all the things you can do with your left hand now! Now stop thinking such things, pervert. There's still a whole post to read.

Actually, I wrote a whole song this way. Ironically, it was my singing that was was the problem, and the whole thing was scrapped. Probably. Maybe. If that song ever happens, I never said any of this. Also if you want to hear part of it, it's buried far back in the mix here (named as track 6, 7, 8).

Also, the other thing here is, of course, the fuzz. There is no way to avoid the fuzz. I tried recording in a different place, I tried mixing it out, but the problem remains: my guitar isn't loud enough on its own and to record it at all I have to overcrank the mikes. Microphones and I have a long history of animosity.

"Testify (Acoustic)":

As promised. I actually had something much more ambitious planned, but if I had started it this morning, I'd probably still be working on it. Which wouldn't work, since I was asleep this morning. Plus I heard the original on the radio yesterday and it sort of reëntered* my brainstream.

This song is worth hearing for the first thirty seconds alone, but I'm worried maybe it goes on too long. There's a lot of noodling, which I would have cut, but on the other hand, I like to have things kind of loose and extemporized. I'm a big fan & supporter of improvisation, but I don't know, maybe I went too far here.

On to lighter things. I've been thinking about the subtext of this cover and it's twin (linked to above). When I first did "Sleep Now In the Fire", I wrote it off as a joke, a parody of the slow, "serious" acoustic covers we've all heard before. But while I was doing it, and after I finished, I got sort of soured on Rage Against the Machine for a while. It was almost like, without really meaning to**, I had sent out my attacked in both directions. For a while, I couldn't help but think of the whole thing as a bunch of posturing-- a lot of words but no meaning.

Eventually I stopped caring. Bad lyrics never killed any bands before, and "Testify" is a great song even if its actual politics are murky at best. Tom Morello*** is still pretty good at that whole guitar thing, and those guys no one can name in the rhythm section do what they do pretty good. And even if he can't write lyrics (and his side project sucked, you know it and I know it), Zach Hardtospelllastname can shout (it's not really rapping-- you know it and I know it) with the best of them. So no hard feelings.

So with all that on my mind****, I can't decide if this cover is more serious or less serious than that one. I wasn't thinking as hard about that one as this one, but I was trying not to overthink it as I did it, and just concentrate on the music and the emotion and all that other gay shit.

*Alt+137
**Maybe a little, but not all the way.
***And on a completely unrelated note, did anyone else know that Tom Morello is black? I just found that out a couple weeks ago.
****Kids, feel free to use that transition in your little homework papers about George Washington and mathematics and To Kill A Mockingbird.

[Man is this post long.]

DOWNLOADABLE VERSION:
Rerelease Notes: "One" is remixed for hopefully better quality. "Testify" is unchanged.

Another video post

I have a rule to where I can't embed videos if they're just a photo-montage or words on the screen (you've all seen, especially you*). So I'm just going to link to this.

*The person to whom that is adressed knows who he or she or it is.

In Space!

I just finished watching this episode (because of circumstances too complicated to explain), and I thought, might as well embed it.



(Click here for a bigger version)

My Six Word Reviews...

...Of the very, very disturbing Who Killed the Electric Car?

Wanna know why Detroit is dying?

...

Hey, it's Ralph Nader! (Of course).

...

If it wasn't true, it'd be hilarious.

...

California Air Resources Board makes C.A.R.(B.)

...

P.S. the title of this is not "My Six-Word Reviews". Read closely.

...

OK seriously how come I never heard about this before? It's like a documentary of an alternate universe.

...

This is what's wrong with us 'Mrkans. The smartest people in the country are making great shit, and then the dumbest ones somehow get it blown up. And then go home to their beautiful houses. Where's my beautiful house? Where's my beautiful wife? Where's my large automobile? My favorite part is at the end, when the GM guy says, "We know what people want". Obviously, you don't, you tard.

See, now I'm all angry from writing these Word Reviews. I'ma take my angry nap.

Spoiler alert: You want to know who did it? It's watch the movie already to find out, you big cheater.

How is it...

...that Aerosmith and ZZ Top are touring together, and no one realized they should call it the A to Z tour? Honestly, I came up with that before the commercial was over. The portmanteau tour headliner is a dying art.

I did it!

I finally beat Eversion! And now so can you. Hint: you can evert in the maze at the end of level six. For some reason that's not in the walkthroughs.

Ready?

[Song of the Week is a "weekly" feature which is supposed to update every Thursday Friday, but almost never does. In it, Drew records a song, or attempts to record a song, or gives up and writes another movie review.]

"Sad Today":


First and foremost, I'm not actually sad at all. I just liked the way it sounded.

Second, this week's song probably went through more changes of mind than any I've done. First I was going to do a cover, then I was going to do two covers. (These two sentences are good examples of the difference between "than" and "then".) Then I had a great idea for an original song, this sort of kickass hard rocker. I practiced it so much I got a blister on one of my fingers. So then I wasn't going to do a song at all. Then my finger got better. Then I decided that my hard rock song* didn't really work without some kind of drums. So we were back to nothing. I kind of thought about taking a break anyway, so I can figure out how to make these songs downloadable, and also to remix and play with some of the older songs so they could be worth downloading. But I didn't want to just do nothing, so I thought I'd just do some kind of piano piece, since I thought I'd been doing too much guitar-focused stuff. But as I was practicing my piano playing I kept thinking about something I had read, about blah blah E minor chord (my memory of the rest is kind of funny, but that part was sticking with me). A guitar, as if by magic, flew into my hands, and I started playing with an E minor chord, and very quickly this song came out.

Stylistically, this reminds me a little of my earlier song "Duel", which also featured a picture I'd made as the background (I drew this one in Fireworks and liked it so much it's been my desktop background forever). Something about the way the guitar sounds, though with this one it's a lot quieter, more subdued, and there's less focus on the guitar and bass parts. Oddly enough, the other song this remind's me of is Spike's song from the "Buffy" musical. I'm not quite sure why.

Lyrically I wanted to keep things simple-- this song almost had no words at all, but I thought they were funny so I kept them. They're just so inane and simplistic**. I'd always wanted to write a song that was just one verse, as few lyrics as possible, because I figured it'd be easier to remember the words that way. But just in case, they go like, "I'm sad today/ 'bout what, I can't say/ I'm sad today/ Tommorow, I'll be OK".

Musically, this one's pretty easy to explain. It just switches between E minor and A minor, or E and A on the bass. Mostly I like the tone of it, which I achieved by playing my guitar through a bass amp, which was probably completely unnecessary but worked out OK. The solo literally just goes up and down a major scale (do-re-mi...), and I can play the whole thing on the E string. The only digital productiony stuff I did with anything was I made the solo a little louder.

*It's called "Them" and I swear on a stack of Bibles, Korans, and whatever it is Buddhists use, that you will hear it some point.
**Originally, I wrote that they were meaningless. But the more I thought about, just because something 's a little simple and obvious doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning. Think about "Everybody Hurts".

Two-Part Hundredth Postacular, Part Two (of Four)

See, I had all these Grand Plans, and now I just want all this anniversary crap to be over so I can get back to talking about Pokémon.

Actually, you know what, all the serious reflection I was going to do here? I'm making that the 150th post. Problem solved.

I still have some other retrospective stuff I was gonna do though. Here's the post that was going to be part three of four, promoted to part two of three. Nobody remembers part three anyway. Think about the third verse of "Amazing Grace", or "White Christmas", or any other song with at least three verses. You can't, because no one ever remembers the third part. Anyway, here's the thing.

The Many Looks of The Infinite:

The Basic:

When I came up with the basic design of this blag, there were two concepts I wanted to focus on, both of which play off the reason I picked the name: I see the Internet as a big, unending, mostly empty place. So I what wanted to do was create the illusion that you were kind of trapped or lost in an endless space. So there are a lot of ways to do that, but I decided to focus on two elements of that, 3-D and sort of "larger-than-life" (in quotes because they're not really that big). Since most fonts are viewed straight-on--note to self, design font that's viewed in profile-- the best way to show 3-D is with blur. I tried a lot of fonts and the one I decided on, oddly enough, is called Erthqake (not to be confused with the similarly-named Earthquake). Normally, it looks like this. I know. Sometimes it's the last thing you'd suspect.

To reinforce the "fog" idea, I always use grayscale colors with this one. Regular colors "pop" too much and kind of destroy the illusion of blurriness. For the same reason, this (and-

To make the letters look bigger without actually making them bigger, I made them taller, and farther apart. My goal was to make them kind of monolithic, as if they're looking down on you, but without overdoing it and looking silly.

The Speaking of Silly:

Like a lot of the alternate logos, this one has only been used once, for a few weeks around Halloween, mainly because it doesn't make sense otherwise. This was the first alternate, so I was a bit conservative about it, sticking to grayscale (albeit reversed), blur, no edges and the same font. And honestly, it's probably my favorite out of all of them. I just like the skulls (if you do too, you can get a them here).

The Guess Which Presidential Election I Used This for:

First of all, I really do love 'mrka, in a not-ironic way. Seriously, have you been to other countries? Most of them suck, especially the food. Plus everything there is really old for some reason, it's like, build some new stuff other countries! Anyway, I'm not completely satisfied with this design, which is probably the shortest-lived one (running only from Halloween to Election Day). It's bacause it has edges. I prefer logos that blend into their background, and there was just no way for that to work here. I do like the red-white-and-blue color scheme that accompanied it though.

And Then the Third Futurama Movie Came Out:

The first of many logo parodies, undoubtedly. The hard thing here was getting the colors. The blue used for the real logo just looked wrong here, and I couldn't find quite the right shades of red and yellow to make it identical. In the end I just went with what looked good over strict accuracy. This one ran for about a week, I think, though it did lead to me coming up with the phrase "RSSMatron" (look to your right if you don't get it), which I guess is remains its legacy. Also the "flash" background directly led to the next one.

The Next One:

In case you hadn't noticed, this is also the current logo, though it originally went for about a week (November 2008: Month of the Four Logos. Actually five, I think I switched out the Halloween one a little late). But it's versatile enough to be reuseable. It also fits well with my aforementioned design elements, since the light helps place the words in space, and also has a somewhat alienating effect. Hopefully).

The Shiny:

Here I wanted to use the same design ideas, but approach them in different ways. Just as with the last one, the letters are illumnitated with a light, but this time it comes from a (heavily doctored) photo. I like the bombasticness of this one-- it's infinite in its own way-- but ultimately it didn't fit.

This was my Thanksgiving one, in case you didn't guess. Like I said, Novemeber had a lot of logos, especially if you include whatever I switched to after Thanksgiving (probably the Basic one, I can't remember. Huh, I guess that actually makes six).

"Oh, You Mean Xmas":

Pretty easy one to describe. Mostly I did this one because I liked this background picture. What I like here is that there's a moodiness and atmosphere to this that most of the other logos don't have-- it's very cold in the literal sense, but figuratively still warm and inviting. At least, that's what I see in it.

Tribute to Portal One:

See, originally I'd planned to review Portal after I finished it, instead of over a month later, and I designed this based on the game's credit sequence.

Again, this approaches the "infinite" idea from a different direction. Instead of being infinite in direction or size, this one is (not literally) infinite in how many pieces it has. Sort of I did it betteron my second go-round:

My Second Go-Round:

This one combines the "many, many things" idea with the "3d" and "blur" ideas. It'd be my very most favoritest, but it's a little too complicated.

Valentimes is Special Times:Here again we see the "many, many things" idea. This logo is actually a repurposing of something I had designed earlier, something I normally wouldn't do, but I thought it worked well.

I don't really celebrate Valentime's Day, religiously or socially, so I thought it would be funny to, in contrast to that, go all out with the blog design. The background was a maroon-red-purplish (I'd call it Dark Pink, but that's actually an oxymoron, and also a good name for a rock album*), the text actually had pink links, and this huge, intentionally garish logo dominated most of the screen. Luckily I got away with it because I don't think I had readers then. Actually, I have no idea if I have readers now. If you're a reader, please leave a comment so I can get a ballpark figure. Hell, leave two.

Here's what I did for St. Patrick's Day. My favorite thing about this: no green. I mean, green is a perfectly good color, but must we always go for the cliche? Instead I went with booze, clearly making a sign for "The Infinite Bar & Grill". At least I was kind of subtle.

Of course, my original idea was to do some kind of Celtic knot design, since those already symbolize infinity. But I couldn't figure out how.

OK, that's all of them so far. We can now resume our regularly scheduled blogtivities.

*Two other good names: Self-Titled Debut and ...A Good Name for a Rock Album, if only as meta-jokes.

UPDATE 4-3:
I built this animated one using gickr (not sure how that's pronounced). Consider it a bonus. Actually, my original plan was to do an animation, but I decided it would be too distracting. Plus I can't use this one, it's too small and jerky. And I'm not sure if it even works, literally. Seemed fine earlier.

Surfing the Infinite, Part II

"SURFING THE INFINITE, PART 2"

CUT TO BACKSTAGE. A HANDFUL OF AIDES AND ONLOOKERS STAND, WORRIED, JUST BECOMING AWARE OF THEIR SITUATION. LOOKING ONSTAGE FROM THE WINGS, WE CAN SEE OUR SPEAKER IN THE DISTANCE. HIS WORDS ARE REPEATED, ECHOING BACK TO US:

MAN (OFFSCREEN):
Where is everyone?

WE CAN SEE SAME THE QUESTION PASS ACROSS THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE BACKSTAGE.

FINALLY, ONE SPEAKS.

AIDE ONE:
Where is everyone?

A LONG PAUSE

AIDE TWO:
Why do I feel like I've heard that before?