Yet another nail in the Dork Coffin

Amon Tobin (of 4-Ton MANtis fame) has written a soundtrack for the up and coming Splinter Cell game for Xbox. Gamespot.com interviewed him. Full Text

I was losing my shit when I read this:

Gamespot: "... Were there Ninja Tune fans at Ubisoft who were familiar with your work and lobbying on your behalf?"

Amon Tobin: Oh, sure. Definitely. There were a surprising amount of people. I guess. Computer programmers and nerds in general is my demographic right now.

NERDS!! [points at self...and waan...and mikey...and john]

Stunted Blog Growth

Ok, so you're going to have to bear with me. Chaos has besmirched the past 4 fortnights, but I have been able to maintain a list of drafts detailing all of the events. Unfortunately, I'm still not out of the thick of things, and my "Saved As Draft" list is getting larger and larger.

My main motivation in holding back, even the stories that HAVE been completed is that I wanted to publish them in chronological order and keep the dates straight for when I show this to my kids and say, "This is why Daddy drinks, not because you cry." But seriously, for me, whenever I come upon someone's blog, I'm always like "What's the newest headline?" and if it is old, then I move on to the next internet pit-stop. You, the reader, are justifying my existence by reading this tripe bullshit, and the thought of publishing something about myself that you haven't read, frankly, keeps me up at night.

So this is The Official NEW STUFF BELOW THIS LINE, I SWEAR post. Anything between this and "The New Car Search" is ripe for the taking/judging. My count shows 16 drafts.

Sincerely,
Governor Fuck-Head

Published Jan. 26, 2005. First Drafted Jan. 10, 2005. Hooray Turn-over.

Trust No One.

You know, if it's not one thing, it's another. What is today? January 15th. What does this mean to you? Probably nothing, but to me? It's application deadline time baby.

AND WHERE....are the letters of recommendations from my professors?

THEY'RE AT HOME....WASHING THEIR TIGHTS!

No seriously. Last years application process came to a screeching halt because I didn't have a second academic recommender. This year, that was one of the first things I secured. This year, I talked with both of them extensively about my interests including why certain programs interested me. I talked with them about how to maximize my potential of getting in. And here we are, game time, and they haven't mustered up to their promise, even after several reminders.

My sister says I may not be too fucked, but that I'm still kinda fucked. I can kind of understand why the professors were late. One is starting up a robotics research lab and the other is starting up a small company to supply the navy with active sound insulating ear plugs. But still. I'm fucked.

My old boss, Chris, came through in spades though. Not only did he come through by the deadline, he also wrote an amazing letter of recommendation. Such amounts of high praise coming from him meant a lot. My work at (INSERT CELL PHONE MANUFACTURER HERE) was one of the two most shaping experiences of my life, and I have Chris and Tom (my mentor) to thank for it. But that's an entirely different 3-4 page blog post.

Fuck you ID3 Tags...

you're sucktitude knows no bounds.

If you have ever discussed music with me you would know about my extensive collection of albums. I started backing them up for a few reasons. The first? Since the birth of CDs in the early 80s, the CD manufacturing industry has done nothing to increase a CD's durability despite advancements in material sciences. See those things they are selling now to put over your CDs to protect them from scratching? You should be asking why this material isn't already on the disc? The second, unfortunately, was seeing Mike's entire collection get ganked from under our noses thanks to the wonderful invention, the CD binder; an invention we all must use when the majority of your listening experience is in your car.

In order to keep my music regardless of these two possibilities of destruction, I decided to move my collection to a more durable media: the MP3. And of course, this transition had to be done in a completely anal and quality oriented way as per the jamie norm.

I started this transition back in 1999, and what I soon found out was how completely suck ass the CDDB was at the time. People would enter in things like '[[MetallicA]] - Ride_The_Lightning' or 'L337 |-|@XX0|2 - I pwned the cddb'. I set my naming standard as - - .mp3. So the process was scan -- CDDB -- rip -- de-l337 file names and put into standard form -- place in genre folder. But the l33tness remained in the ID3 tags, the meta-data standard for MP3s and what would show in winamp's playlist. So instead of cleaning the tags, I just deleted them.

Fate is rarely on my side on small endevours such as this. It turns out, most portable players, in-dash head-units, etc. all rely on these tags. I discovered this after getting a Creative ZenTouch 40GB for Christmas. Not only does it dump all of your MP3s into a single folder on its tiny hard drive, it also only reads files by id3 tag. So not only was my naming standard moot, so was my by-genre directory structure.

My only wish was to have my entire music collection at my fingertips while driving my car. It seems that won't be happening until I write a program to populate the id3 tags for each of my kabillion songs.

It's been hilarious researching ID3 tags and mp3 file structure. A little digging I found that an integer value represents the genre of the song. Genres ranging from "Fast Fusion" to "Porn Groove" but this is priceless: Genre code 108 represents the genre "Primus."

This just reaffirms that Les Cleypool is the lynchpin of our society.

(for mike: The company that identifies music by audio content instead of track length etc.)

SWM Seeks SWF.

Single White Male seeks Single Working Female to marry to exploit marriage law/Tax Code. Must meet with lawyers for pre-nuptial aggreement for no shared income. Appearance and personality are not disqualifiers. Can sleep with other men, be on "extended travel", and exit from agreement at anytime.

The debate rages on blurring lines between dogma and law, or what I what I like to call it: Lawgma. Or Dogamalaw.

Congrats.
Before starting this tirade, I'd like to extend a hearty congrats to the states that voted to ban gay marriage or unions, bigotry has now regained political legitimacy in America.

The sanctity of it all.
This is a joke right? Protect? The Sanctity? of Marriage? Can someone explain this to me? We want a constitutional amendment to "protect the sanctity of marriage," to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman?

Sanctity? I think we are overlooking a few abhorent problems in American Marriage.
1) Divorce Rate hovering around 50%. Of the half that do stay together, how many are couples who have legitimate reasons to divorce but can't because their religion prohibits it? And of the half that doesn't stay together, how many seperated couples rethink "yea, we probably could have worked through it"?
2) Highest amount of Annulments in the entire world. For those who aren't catholic, Annulments are essentially "recognized" divorces, allowing for the seperated person to legitimately remarry by the catholic church, because catholics aren't allowed to get divorces. Annulments can be granted on grounds of impotence, the refusal of a spouse to have children, and psychological immaturity when they tied the knot. Conveniently, annulments handed out by American dioceses make up 2/3's of the annulments granted in the entire world.
3) Let's not forget about Adultery. Once, a male dominated field of expertise, men and women cheat on each other in almost equal amounts. Adultery is the antithesis of marriage and to see that it is more prevalent today shows a greater disregard of the vows taken during marriage.

And this institution (regardless of issuing religion) is somehow STILL sanctimonious? "Fuck you Jamie, guess what, we've got problems yes, but we don't want to add even more problems to this shaky institution."

Ok, I'm always up for logical discussion, let's say we amend the U.S. Constitution to include these definitions...this "protection." Done. Oh but wait, since we have set precedence to protect this institution, and we have not, by any means, done as much as we can. Divorce is out of control and is eroding this institution. We should make a constitutional amendment to iradicate it. Husband beating you? Oh....sorry.

Oh but if we banned divorces, another dire consequence would be an elimination of an entire legal industry as well as mid-day TV entertainment. Let't change it to, say, slapping the 2 people with new (and huge) "failure in judgement" fines. On top of that, since infidelity is one of (if not the top) reason for divorce, let's fine (or even jail!) the people who sleep with married people and call them "homewrecker" fines / sentences.

And we could create and amendment putting a requirement on length of courtship. If you haven't dated for 2.5 years, you can't get married. The possibilities are limitless!

"Jamie, what you are suggesting would not be allowed to happen." Well of course not, because my suggestions, although tempting, are a bit outlandish. But my point with these examples is that an amendment to define or protect marriage sets a slippery legal precedence. Not only are you ignoring the most threatening problems to marriage today (divorce, et al), you are asking the government to do more of what so many in this country want less of: Regulating your life. "We don't want the government in our wallets, but I definitely want them dictating our social morals and virtues." "We're willing to bend our (and others) values as long as you leave more money in our pockets." That's fabulous.

But what we all are overlooking in this national (and I stress national) discussion is the main ingredient of marriage: Love. To claim that we, humanity, know exactly how love behaves is extremely egotistical. Writers from all different time periods and all different walks of life show just how unpredictable love is and how it affects us. And I figure that if more couples legitimately love each other, the better off we all will be.

Marriage is a religios entity just as much as it is a legal entity, and justice is supposed to be blind. 100 years ago, white's couldn't marry blacks; before then it was considered "unnatural"and "untraditional." The tradition arguement is an easy fall back. Tradition was to have kings and queens, surfs, and slaves. Tradition before 1776 was not to have freedom. Tradition was to get around by horse and carriage. Tradition was to interact with people face to face only. We are a society of revolutionists. This arguement is only used because we repress our urge to say "Let's write an amendment because fags wierd me out!" Once tradition is left out of the equation, the only thing left is religious law, which has no right in being involved in a "free from religious persecution" society. The fight for marriage is a religious battle, the fight for a societal and legal recognition of love is one of unbiased and universal reasoning.

God I sound like such a hippie.