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Thursday, September 30th, 2004
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2:29 am - Packing Sucks
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So my mom got me a buch of boxes to start packing up my room for the move. I leave on Sunday. A lot of parts of my room have just so much crap that they've actually developed sedimentary layers.I was going through my junk drawer and was literally peeling layers of my life off of one another (and throwing them out). I felt pretty nostalgic. My bracelet from Mexico, pictures from Grad, my work pass from Convergys, the reciepts from l33t.ca, a bunch of grade 10 bus passes, birthday cards from my grade 9 B-day, pics from summer cottage trips. I wasn't sad, but it was definitly a weird feeling to be throwing it all away.
Basically 7 years worth of "stuff" are sitting in a garbage bag in my garage. I honestly don't see myself ever pulling that shit out again though. I never look at photos, yet I can't bear to part with anything that has a memory attached to it. It was hard tonight, but god damn does my room look clean. I've got my journal from tree planting sitting on my bookshelf. I told myself I'd read it as soon as I got back to Ottawa, but 3 months later and it's still collecting dust. The reason I'm throwing it all out is that I'm never going to need any of it in Vancouver.
So it's the last couple days before I ship off for good. I feel weird now, I know it's the last couple days and that at some point in the future I'm going to regret not having done something, but honestly, I'm just waiting to go. I've got some parties and events planned for the next couple days which I'm really excited about, but I'm most excited to just head to the airport, check into the hotel, sleep, get my ass to work, and find out what the hell I'm going to be doing!
It hit me though last night when I was bar hoppin' with JG that there's so much that's engrained in my head about Ottawa. I've got such a comfortable and tight group of friends, I know my way around the city, I know where the hot spots are and what night their hot on, I've got a history with a lot of different spots in Ottawa, I know which nights people are available to hang, I have peoples phone numbers in my head that I can just call to kick it, and these are all things I'm gonna have to redo once I get to Vancouver. I'm gonna miss this city and moreso, the people in it. The first volume of my life is coming to a close. I'm done school (did I ever start school? :)), done being young, and now I start working a serious job and get my career on track. I guess I'll always remember Ottawa as the city of my youth.
That's seriously how it feels though. Like I'm done being young, and that really scares me. I'm sure everyone who's reading this will feel this way sometime in the next two years (or whenever the hell you finish school). Once your out of University, you really can't call yourself a kid anymore, so does that make you a grownup? You gotta stop slackin', get a job, pay them bills, start working on your life and decide what the hell you're going to do with yourself between now and when you die! Hell! That sounds like the responsibilities of a grownup to me!
I'm not worried though. I'm 21 and will have my dream job in the most gorgeous city in Canada in the next few days. To complain and act like I've got problems now would make me a certifiable drama queen, emo fag, douche.
Later ya'll!
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004
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2:06 am - Hugo Chavez
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Just finished watching "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and I have to say it's one of the most amazing films I've ever seen. It's the story of how democratically elected president Hugo Chavez was thrown out of power and dramatically reinstated by the people of Venezuela. It is simply an amazing story which surprisingly (or not) wasn't even noticed by North American media. Kazaa/Suprnova.org should have it if you can't find it in video stores. The quality of the copy I found on the net was pretty crappy, but it's definitely worth the watch.
Went over to Chan's house today to help him pressure wash his fence. He rented a gas powered 1500 psi pressure washer and it was hella fun to blast shit with it, like firing a gun. This got us into trouble though. We get it running and put on the 'laser blaster' tip and just randomly start spraying it at the fence. A good 2 or 3 millimeters of old stain/wood came off, and Chan and I drew our names and a huge wang into the fence, thinking it wouldn't matter since the bleach would take off all the rest.
Nope.
Now Chan has a huge "JUSTIN" "CHRIS" and "8=====D" on his backyard fence.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, September 21st, 2004
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4:04 am - Been a YEAAAAR!!
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Yup, it's been just over a year since I've updated this beast. So, lets briefly sum up what's happened to me in the last year.
Got back from Kingston with very little money after squeezing into my second year of college. Worked pretty hard on Serpent, which was a game engine that Dan and I were developing over the summer. Ran out of money, and had no choice but to take a job as a telemarketer at Ipsos-Reid for a little under 2 months. Finally got a better job and worked at Best Buy in the home theater department for November, December and a bit of January. During the fall, Serpent hit a brick wall as the code base was starting to bloat and Dan didn't want to refactor it. I had started on the scripting module for it, and decided to fork that off into it's own project, which became CaLua. I worked on CaLua for about 3 or 4 months until about February.
By February I had completely fucked myself out of school. Work on CaLua and my part time job left very little time or energy for school; this, added to the fact that I didn't really care much for school to begin with, led to me getting spectacularly failing grades, and going back part time for the second semester. Having finished work, saved up enough cash to not need to work for the second semester, and only doing a fraction of the courses, I told myself that if I fucked this semester up, I would simply not return to college. Looking back, I could almost hear myself say "do you promise?!?".
Anyways, about two months in and Dan finally gets off his ass and decides to start working on something again. He says, he's going to build an isometric tile editor for use on a 2.5D RPG game for cell phones. Me him and Chris all start talking about it and getting more and more ideas and doing more and more research into the field and getting really excited by it. Chris had no job, Dan had no job, I had lots of money and little school. Needless to say, we were excited to start working on this.
One day, after simply talking about it for too long, we just decided to setup the office in the basement. We moved all the computers downstairs, setup tables, built a new computer from scratch, got chairs, put a dorky poster on the wall, and called ourselves Orbis Studios. We just started working day and night, both of which had also lost their meaning. Sleep schedules went way out of wack, I found myself sleeping on the office couch more than my own bed, and we would only know what time of the day it was from looking out the window or when Chan and I would go for smokes.
We worked through the cold winter and into the spring, during which my grades went to total shit. Chan and I had signed up to go tree planting up north that spring, and it was up to Dan to keep working on the game and e-mailing us his progress while we were away.
Well, Chan and I went tree planting, which was an adventure of it's own (perhaps one day I'll write out my planting journal, which I wrote in every day, on here), came back to find that Dan had basically played Ninja Gaiden the entire time we were gone, and hadn't done a god damn thing the entire time, save for maybe a week after we left.
So we get back, bum around for a bit, try to get Dan to hop back on the game, but basically not much is being done.
One day Dan gets an e-mail from a lady at EA Canada and wants to do a phone interview with him. They do the interview and she sends him a technical test. Dan simply doesn't do the technical test, which results in a big fight between him and I, but is quickly patched up when EA moves Dan along in the interview process without having done the test. Dan had several more interviews, and one day after a long night of gaming at a LAN party, he called an HR person and got the dream job of his life. He would be flying out to Vancouver in 2 weeks to work on games for the biggest game company in the world.
We made our time with Dan, worked on one last goofy project together as Orbis Studios, and that was it. Chan and I saw him to the airport and he was gone for good. Me Chan and Dan had been best friends for as long as I can remember, and it was weird driving home knowing that I couldn't just pop over to his house to hang out, and that from here on in it was JUST me and Chan.
So knowing that I didn't want to go back to school, I decided to put my resume in to EA and try my luck as well. We were going out to visit Dan in a few weeks, and I was determined to have at least one interview setup for when I was out there.
EA called, I had the phone interview, setup an in person interview for when I was out there (which was a series of interviews which took about 6 hours of the day and was quite exhausting but exciting), and had a great awesome time in Vancouver. Headed back to Ottawa and was extremely excited by how it went. I basically bummed around, spent my money, chilled in Kingston for a week during their frosh week, and started to get really nervous. They hadn't called me back at all, and when I called them up, they didn't sound like they had any openings. By this point, I was running a bit low on money to go back to school, and it was getting to the point where I couldn't just be waiting for EA to call me back anymore.. I didn't know what to do....
I fretted for a while. The bank was calling my house, asking about my student line of credit when I wasn't enrolled in school, and I didn't want to find a shitty job and work it, and I basically couldn't go back to school without MUCH begging and humiliation (someone had told everyone in my class that I had already gotten the job, but this was very much not the case)...
Anyways, they finally called back and I got the job, and now I head off to Vancouver in a week and a half. I'm fucking nervous as shit, and I hate leaving all my friends and my whole world behind. I'm basically starting a new life, and I've never been so scared and excited before in my life... I was feeling this way on a much smaller scale before tree planting, but, even with that I knew I'd be back in 2 months... This is me leaving Ottawa basically forever...
I'm sure I'll make a post about how life is now in the next few days. Just bringing my journal up to date.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, August 5th, 2003
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3:05 am - None
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Everything is fine.
It's recently occured to me that this Livejournal is more embarasing than it is useful. I've taken out all my self-serving, childish posts from the past, and left only the one's that I think people will actually enjoy reading.
I think that livejournals wouldn't have such a negative stigma attached to them, if people actually tried to entertain their audience, but, I suppose the draw of these things is the idea of reading someone's actual journal. Livejournals are like video phones, Beta cassete tapes, Segway's, electric cars, and vacuum hair cutters; Great ideas that just didn't turn out.
Neil Miron sent me an e-mail a while back curtly asking me to take the slanderous comments I made about stigaimports.com out of my journal. I didn't know this was such a hot spot for E/N, but, hopefully with me taking out the.... mmm... childish posts, I've removed whichever tidbit of annoyance I expressed about his company.
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It's winding down to my last few weeks here in Kingston, and it's been, easily, the best summer of my life. Met tons of interesting people, learned a thing or two about women, met a girl, gained some independance, made some cash, and got an idea of what life is like outside of a comfortable suburb. I really wish I had kept a journal while down here. Everyday, so much happens that I know I'll want to remember in the future. I figure that the amount of interesting/significant events that happen down here, compare the number back in Ottawa, is about 5:1. That means that the last 4 months living down here have yeilded about 2 years worth of stories from back home. This is sounds about correct to me.
Two of my housemates went back to Ottawa yesterday and offered to take me. I seriously have no desire to go back. The only things I miss from Ottawa are my friends and family. I don't miss any social scene, any bar, any parties, any job or any girl, because basically there are none of these things in Ottawa that I haven't found a better substitute for in Kingston. I miss my homies and my bitches, my Ma and Pa, and my sis and bro, but nothing else. It would have been nice if I could divide my time equally between Ottawa and Kingston. Come up and visit and chill with friends more often who I usually see during the summer, but, I'm really sick of the bus, and we're still waiting for that money tree to start growing in our back yard.
I miss just talking to a lot of my friends. ICQ is a pretty poor substitute, and I rarely use it these days. I'm really looking forward to seeing my friends when I get back. So many stoires that I wish I had the ability to tell them the day they happened down here. They must have a lot to tell me about as well when I get back home. It'll be a good night out, I'm sure.
Perhaps for this last month, I'll try to keep a journal of what happens each day.
- Couldn't sleep last night, so I stayed up 'till 8am watching movies that are shared on the network.
- Woke up at 5pm.
- Blaire came over, and we went to this fucking AWESOME rock climbing gym. They have this 100 foot smoke stack that you can climb the inside of. Blaire did the hard course up, and I took the pussy course, and had to climb the ladder for the last few feet.. Fuck, I suck... At the top is this awesome view of kingston though. I'm supprised I didn't drop a log out my harness; No rope and pulley system can completely take the fear out of clinging to a wall THAT high up. I did fall and dropped about 5 or 6 feet, which put the fear of God in me. Anyone coming to Kingston HAS to see this thing, Blaire says it's one of the best climbing gyms in Ontario. Hannan, Blaire, this chick he knows, and myself will hit it again on Wednesday if my Mom and sis don't come down.
- Hannan was getting back from Ottawa when I got home from the gym. She brought back all this crazy Leb food, we ate it, then went and rented High Fidelity.
- Dave, Salty, Ashley, Nathan, and Daniel made there way to the house throughout the movie, started watching the movie with us, and sparked a couple joints. I didn't smoke (you know I never do), but maybe I should've. Movie was fucking LONG, and incredibly preachy.
- We all chilled on the porch, smoked cigarettes and played guitar after the movie.
- Hot waitress from the Brass walked by our house. She is really fucking cute, 20, has a great body, and is sort of timid, but, after seeing that movie, I dunno.. I just had less inhibitions about saying something to her. No one knows her or anything.. anything more than 'that hot waitress from The Brass'.... So she walks by and I say "Hey, you're that waitress from The Brass'. The porch went silent, thinking I had made an ass out of myself, and the whole house, but she turned to me and sort of muttered "Ohh.. ummm...". I said "Am I wrong?". And she just said "No no.. Yeah, I work there.. Yeah you look familliar", and she stuck around and just started chatting it up, it was awesome!! My Niggaz was flashing maaaad snaps for that one. She DOES live right behind us, so, who knows, maybe I'll invite her to come chill with us when she's off work next night I talk to her at The Brass....
- Ashley dropped her keys in the crack between our porch stairs, and the porch.
- Ryan got them out with a coat hanger... This actually isn't as impressive a story if you don't know what our porch looks like.. it's a huge, very deep crevase, and anything that falls down there is lost forever usually.... well, moving on....
- Went out to get McDicks with Ashley, Ryan, and Dave.
- Ordered our food in a pirates voice ("A Large Fry, For I.." etc. etc.).
- Ryan spilled a large ice tea in Ashleys car. Ashley didn't really care.
- Came back, chilled some more, then went to bed. Ohh, and did this livejournal shit..
Hmm... reading this over, some of those stories are a bit trivial, but, climbing a 100 foot smoke stack and aquianting myself with a hot waitress I yelled a rediculously stupid opening line at, are things that would be note worthy, if they happened in Ottawa. It would be a pretty awesome day for me back home, but, down here, it's just another day.
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There aren't really any good T.V's down here, so I haven't been watching NEARLY as much T.V as I would back home. On Sunday, I did watch a bit of T.V before I went to bed, and I saw these ads for the most fucking retarted reality T.V shows, movies, CDs, and other form of media (some REALLY freaky web-site, whos ad hinted that it might be some forum for hooking up 3-ways and partner swaps between couples). Another thing I really don't miss from back home, is constantly being exposed to the SHIT that pop culture has to offer. Each bar from Ottawa plays the exact same, new 15 fucking songs. The new Sean Paul, new Beyonce, new J-Lo, new 50 cent, new whatever-the-fuck-is-being-overplayed. Some of the new video's I saw were just sad. No namers in low-budget, poorly choreographed videos, singing formula driven, repetative, lyrically neutral songs they didn't write. They're employees, not artists. There aren't really any T.V's down here, and I'm not at bars that play Top 40 shit, so, it'll be quite the experience leaving the pop culture deprevation chamber at the end of the month.
Reality shows are really really really starting to lack though. Tonight I saw an ad for Big Brother 4, which seemed to be lowering it's guard against exposing the conflict creating devices it employes to make the show interesting. Extremely awkward, stressful situations, fueled by alcohol, designed with psychological consultants to maximize the hostility, in a setting that would wear the mind in uncommon and unpredictable ways, seem to be the main coefficients in the design of a reality show.
Shows like Big Brother, Survivor, The Restaurant (which I, sadly, actually watched on Sunday), and whatever shit there about to push over our cable lines, all are designed aroung breaking people's minds.
Survivor and Big Brother break you with captivity.
The Restaurant and The Great Race break you with stress.
Fear Factor and Scare Tactics break you with fear.
It's such a perverted idea. You're watching people at the most embarrasing points in their life. People shitting their pants from fear, or fighting like children, or strained our of their skulls from stress, are experiencing very personal, very embarrasing emotions. You wouldn't like seeing yourself in that situation, and that's what makes it good T.V. To me, watching this stuff, is like pulling up a lawn chair, and a 6 pack of beer, infront of a fatal car crash. It's perverse, and I feel embarrased watching it, but it's really hard to look away :)
In 5 years time, there'll be a show that is based around humans dying on camera. That's the upper limit of the type of boundary that these shows try to push.
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When a relationship ends, it's always the person who initiated it who gets the least hurt, if at all. Even if the other person knows that it's the best thing, and was days from initiating the break themselves, it's always the first person to press the button who comes out ahead. You could be reaching for the phone to call them to tell them that it's over, but if that phone rings in your hand before you dial, and it's them, and they spit it all out at you before you get a chance to speak, you lose.
When it's over, it's not about the good times you had, it's about who wins.
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It's pretty late now. This LJ can be pretty fun if you don't write about how much life sucks.
current mood: nerdy
current music: Yo Yo Ma - Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 9th, 2003
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12:25 am - Sail To The Moon
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I think that modern day science and industry has passed over a HUGE potential market. It's a market that we've all had to suffer through as erroneously named bullshit class in elementary school. A market with vast applications in today’s world.
Social Science.
The science of humans as social creatures.
Now, I know that you're probably already thinking "Well, what about psychiatry?", and you're correct, that is a form of this science, but it’s far to broad for the applications that I’m thinking of, and seriously, what the hell has it given us recently, besides a small army of over paid egotists who waste your time trying to coax you into blaming something for your failings.
Electronics has brought us the wonders of the internet, the ability to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world with the press of a few digits while we're walking down the street, the television, fantastic new medicines, and countless other inventions that you probably use from day to day without ever thinking about what an incredible thing it is that they actually exist.
Engineering has brought us the wonders of the automobile, sub-marines, the washing machine, the escalator, bridges, mines, beer taps, and the means to bottle 1000 cans of pickles in an hour.
Chemistry has opened up the worlds of DNA, medicine, nuclear power, gasoline, stink bombs, purple-haired marijuana, and better condoms.
True, all of these advances in human knowledge were the results of years of research in a variety of different fields, but there was one field that didn't play a role in any of them - Social Science, and its various sects.
Think about what the purpose is for any invention; it’s to rectify something that someone thinks can be done better. And I’m VERY sure that there are a TON of social inventions that people would be DYING to get their hands on.
I’ve been thinking about getting older quite a bit over the last few months… I have no idea why, but it’s been pretty depressing and eye opening, all at the same time. One of the things that struck me, was that as you get older, you’re venues for meeting new people (women were main focus of though) quickly diminish, until basically you’re only options are taking your chances at a bar, trying to meet a total stranger in a public place, hitting on one of your co-workers, or trying to meet someone through a mutual friend of some sort. All of the above options have considerable hurdles, whose solutions are not always immediately obvious to everyone.
Seriously though, for all that schools have to offer, don’t you think that they should offer at least ONE of the following courses:
- Interesting Conversation 101.
- Asshole prevention and awareness techniques.
- Introduction to meeting women.
- Dynamics of Bars and Clubs.
- Principles of Humor.
- Advanced Womanizing Techniques.
- Methods of Persuasion.
I guarantee you there is a MASSIVE sub-culture of loneliness in the Ottawa area. Tons of small companies with not many employees and long work hours spent in front of a computer screen. Not exactly the recipe for a vibrant social life. Techies and people with very demanding jobs would LOVE to take a program that offered the courses listed above.
I love computers. I love working with them. I love holing myself up in my basement, creating a huge play-list, and coding for hours on end. It’s what I love to do, and I would consider myself lucky if I got to do it for the rest of my life. But I wouldn’t consider myself lucky if I ONLY did that for the rest of my life.
I love computers, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also love the softer things in life. People, ideas, outings, bars, friends, are a few of the things that I love just as much as computers, but unfortunately you can’t make much of a career out of any of them. But that’s ok, for now. Right now I like going to school and hanging out with buddies from class and shit, then going home and having the option to either go out for the night, or work on whatever coding project I have cooking. That’s fine for now, but, what about the future? I want to run my own company when I get older, do it all myself, no boss, no managers, no company functions, just me in total control of my destiny, responsible for all my success and all my failure. There will be no Algonquin College in my future, and if observing my parents has taught me anything, a very narrowed spectrum of friends, so where the hell will my social life come from, Work? Probably not!!
So let’s get back to my original idea. People with PhD’s in Social Engineering (S.E) will, to sum up briefly, be able to mind-fuck anyone they wish. People with degrees in S.E will be able to get long with anyone, meet anyone they wish, pickup any girl they desire, and get people to do whatever they want using just their silver tongue. They will be the zoo keepers of human beings.
Think of what someone like that would be able to do! Design better bars and clubs that will cultivate more social interactions with people. Be able to council marketing people to be able to make that all important sell to the big client their meeting with in a few days. Help the lonely and shy meet new people. Weed out all the assholes at a large company, for a better working environment. Write books and create methods for picking up women, but from a scientific, procedural point of view. Tell you how to break-up with someone properly. Tell you how to let that asshole roommate know that you want him out by the end of the month. Council you on how to let that creepy guy in your English class know that you’re just friends, if that. This man would be able to fix any sort of social dilemma you could possibly have.
In a world with some many people pursuing completely useless careers that don’t do a god damn thing for humanity, I think that a friendly neighborhood social engineer would be a VERY respectable occupation. Mechanics fix your cars, geeks fix your computer, the garbage man takes out your trash, and prostitutes let you act out your most twisted, sexual, violent fantasy without many people missing them and little police attention. The S.E would help you deal with people when you get in over your head.
So where the hell was I going with all of this? Ohh yeah… Where the hell do you meet new people once you’re out of school? Where the hell do you meet women when you’re IN school (but stuck in a sausage fest, such as Photonics Engineering)?
I’m gonna go check the yellow pages for Social Engineers.
Peace Out!
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 5th, 2003
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5:01 am - Response to thread
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Bellow is my response to Jordan's 'religion sucks' post made a few days ago.. Thank fucking God I saved it to a text file before I hit 'submit' because LJ complained it was too long, then cleared everything when I hit the back button...
Original thread can be found here
I've been personally anti-religion for a long while now, simply because physics and science seem to have better answers than religion ever has for any question you can ask it... let's try some now....
What happens when you die?
Religion : If you follow all the rules in this book, you'll ascend to a magical world of unbridled pleasures.
Science : You are dead. The processes in your body stop to function, and all synaptic activity ceases to exist. You will stop thinking is what happens when you are dead.
To me, I agree more with physics, and it has a nice philosophical second order effect about it. When you die, you are dead. Whatever you want to do now, DO NOW, because there will be no after life. For everything you didn't do today, there is an infinite amount of time where doing the same is impossible. Religion implies that not living your life to it's fullest is ok, since you'll have an infinite amount of time in heaven to REALLY live it up. Look at the amount of fun in your average atheists life compared to the amount of fun in your average "Religious Nuts" life.. I'd rather have 50 atheist years, than an eternity as the nut.
next question....
Who created the universe?
Religion : God created the universe in 7 days, then made two people who got kicked out of a magical garden then had two sons who.... somehow.... had kids themselves...... somehow......... yup.... two sons BTW.....
Science : The universe, by definition, had no beginning or end, and therefore, never had a creator, and will never have a destructor. We picture things moving linearly along the path of time, but the truth is, time is just one of many dimensions, and to truly understand the nature of the universe, you must observe it's behavior in a number of dimensions higher than time.
A friend of mine once painted me a picture about how the universe is a lot like the surface of a balloon, and we're small, 2 dimensional ants crawling along the surface of the balloon.. There is much more to the universe than we could ever possibly observe, but mathematics allows us to explain the higher dimensions that govern us. I wish I could remember what he said, it was really really good...
Next one...
Do I have free will?
Religion : All of God's creatures are free to act on their own behalf.
Science : No. The chemicals in your brain that make you love, laugh, hate and cry all follow a basic set of rules. Knowing these exact rules, and the exact state of every molecule in your brain at any given time, would allow an observer to predict your actions. If I know that a ball is dropped 40m above the ground, I can predict when it will hit the ground, because I know the rules that govern this ball. Not all the rules are known yet, but it's only a matter of time.... With enough computing power, and enough understanding of these rules, you and your brain and your thoughts and yourself are just a falling ball.
Once again, science gives us the cold harsh truth. If every particle in the universe obeys a set of laws, and your brain is a collection of these particles, and your brain reacts to stimuli from these particles.. well.. hmm... it seems a lot of things that were once mysterious, are all consequences of these particles... understanding 'these particles' seems to be the key to explaining a lot of higher level things built from these particles.... it's technologically not possible now, but so was predicting the arc of a cannon ball a few hundred years ago.....
Is there a God?
Religion : Yes, and he is a man and sent his son to earth to die for all our sins... Ohh, and his son turns water into wine, and he can walk on water.. <>.. either that, or he's a thing that looks like a chick with an elephant head and 10 arms.... well.. in any case, he's all powerful and all knowing, but he's still as emotionally stable as a drunk Italian. He's packin' omnipotent power and might and he'll drown your ass if you look at other God's.. He'll kill your ass if your homosexual... Or just sentence you to an eternity of damnation if you don't follow is text book of rules... in fact, he'll kill your parents in a car crash, just so he got more niggaz to party with in heaven...
Science : No. Everything happens as a result of an action, and in a system with millions of actions and re-actions happening all the time, slight patterns may arise, which could appear to be the works of a conscious being...
Again, religion plays out like a bad comic you'd find on a bus. Science gives the undeniably more accurate, but harsher truth. There is no God. Billy, your dog died because the chemical train inside it's body just got de-railed. Now he's dead, and he ain't going no where else. If we had the technology, we could piece him back together so his chemicals function properly, but not today. Some boy in the future will be that lucky, but not you. Today, and for every other day you're alive, your dog will be dead.
Is DMX the least talented asshole on the planet?
Religion : Yes.
Science : Yes.
Quite possibly the only case where both Science and Religion conclusively, and passionately agree on one answer to a question.
It's 5 in the morning now, and I'm going to sleep.. I hope this thread isn't dead, I'd love to see your responses..
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Saturday, January 18th, 2003
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3:02 am
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==Intro thingy (might sound better on a keyboard, with bassy chords)==
==Finger pick it==
E--0-2-3-0-2-3-0-2-3-0-2-3------------
B-------------------------------------
G-------------------------------------
A--2-----0----------------------------
D--------------3-----2----------------
E-------------------------------------
==Verses and shit==
==Slowly==
E-7--3--3---2------2------------------
B-8--5--3---3--OR--4------------------
G-9--5--4---4------4------------------
A-9--5--5---4------4------------------
D-7--3--5---2------2------------------
E-X--3--3---X------X------------------
Chorus is just A (Amin is the theoretically correct chord) and F in E Barre form.
Fills and stuff can be done using the cumulative scale (A B C D E F F# G)
That's all for tonight, no lyrics yet, I have no idea what to write about....
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| Tuesday, November 5th, 2002
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5:02 pm - I'm a reasonable man, get off my case.
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So what's up? It's been a damn long while since I've posted anything on this contraption, but I have an hour to kill before my next class and I don't feel like programming.....
A few things on my mind, which I'll just skim over (which I guess I'll go into deeper detail)...
- This change of season is really awesome. Ever since it started snowing, I haven't smoked, haven't drank. Just been doing work on l33t, work for school, and whatever the hell else I want. For my birthday, I want to give myself is the gift of self-control. I want to tell myself "Don't smoke for a week" and actually be able to do it. I want to be able to say "Go get some work done for l33t", and be able to do it. Get up in the morning. Stop wasting your time watching this T.V. Start learning some new shit on the guitar. Don't be the quiet guy. Go talk to her... Ohh!... there's the big one.... Self control in the sense that I won't be nervous going up to complete strangers and talking to them.. I think that a HUGE part of success in this world is being able to meet new people and create meaningful relationships with them (not stupid hey-buddy-small-talk relationships). Yup, definitly what I'm striving for in this new year. Not working on my left side of the brain, but focusing on my personal skills, and my right side of the brain. But primarily, my ability to control myself.
Next up. I saw Atmosphere and, more importantly, Sixtoo this past Friday. The only act I really really REALLY liked was Sixtoo. The opening act, Applied Science was pretty good, but had an AWESOME free-style section at the end of their show. Completely blew me away with how easy they made it seem. The other acts and Atmosphere were pretty much the same thing, pumping up the crowd, and one track of melody over one track of beat. Nothing much in terms of music, and I couldn't really hear what they were saying, so it wasn't that entertaining of a show. Slug looked high out of his mind, my back was hurting, and after a while I started to notice that there were maybe 2 black people in the place. If I was blind, I'd think I was in Harlem, but the truth is, it started to look more and more like a bunch of middle classed gangsters stealing black culture. James loved it though, and it was definitly an interesing experience for me. Worth it? Definitly! And here's why :
SIXTOO!
Hearing this guy spin fucking blew me on my ass. I LOVED his style of music. It was one of those serene moments of clarity where hundreds of questions get answered. His style was so simple, basically some textural piece of music (Any string instrument with a lot of reverb will do this effect. You can also super-impose a few tracks from a wave-generator to do the same thing (reverb + echo + phase is your friend here basically).), followed by some simple beat (I'm pretty sure if he had better tools he could've come up with some more complicated beats, but the one's he had were basically 2/4 and 4/4 style beats.) and his scratching, and maybe a few other tracks of some weird noises. It sounded incredible. It conveyed SO much to me. It definitly sounded like the future of music.
I heard him, then I went home and downloaded Kid A and Amnesiac by Radiohead. Basically took what Sixtoo was trying to do (Not so much with the hip-hop, but with the textural, ambient sort of feel from his music) and brought it to another level. I've been listening to those songs, plus songs from OK Computer for the last few days, and I'm 100% convinced that it's what I want to do in music, if ever I should do something (L33t.ca is priority #1 with my free time these days). I even see myself leaning towards that direction more and more. I love just sitting down, looking up bizzare scales, noodling around with the scale for a bit, and then applying some weird effects to it, and just having fun with a few tracks of whatever I have. The way he sings too, he rarely sings notes being played, but rather, uses his voice to add more feeling to the song. I find myself doing this as well. Instead of singing one of the notes of the chord I'm holding down, sometimes I find myself saying "Ok, what's the minor second from the lowest note" and although it won't be in the scale, it still sounds really interesting when I sing it.
A friend of mine once told me that pentatonic scales will work for 99% of all music. The only exception he's found is Radiohead. That sums up what I want to do with music, PERFECTLY. No pentatonic bullshit. Exotic scales, and the singing should add something ot the music. I used to listen to songs and find one song really boring, and other songs really interesting to listen to, and not know why I felt that way. Now I have an idea. The idea is that the melody should be unique and interesting, and not something where the listener can pretty much guess the next note, OR, hear the next note, and not be suprised or interested in what it is. You ever hear music from the 80's? Fast guitar solo's where the player hits about 3 different notes a second? That stuff just doesn't sell records, and the reason is that it's basically formula driven guitar. It's Joe Axeman noodling away at some pentatonic, harmonic, major/minor scale, and popular music has been using those scales for the past 30 years, and I find that they've been worn into the ground, and trying to make music with them, is like trying to get rich by picking up quarters from an over-turned Brinks truck in downtown Toronto. Everyone's there, and there's no way to stake your claim.
Jazz has it right. Don't stick to scales, be creative and don't be afraid to be a semi-tone off, because that's how you get those unique sounds. The problem with Jazz though, is that it refuses to become textural, and confuses the listener with way to many sounds at once. Jazz players say that there can be any number of notes in a jazz scale, but I find that anything over 7 or 8 just starts to get muddy and irritating. Explore different intervals, but don't confuse the listener and try to fit a whole fucking octave into a bar.
Shit, only got 20 minutes left... Well.. that's what I think about modern day music, and why conventional music sucks, and the new wave of artists are really going to change musical theory and convention.
What else is up? Well, I'm getting pretty nervous about Neil not paying me for that site I did for him (www.stigaimports.com). He hasn't returned my call (I'll call him again tonight), and I'm DONE the site, so all that's left is for him to pay me, and for me to show him how to update the databasing system I made. He'd be a fool to think that the money he owes me is to much. The potential of this site is HUGE.
Hmmm.. only 15 minutes left.....
I've also started to dislike drinking for the sake of drinking. I have a group of friends who I ONLY see if drinking is involved. It's pretty sad actually. They're not exactly masters of conversation or free thought either, and alcohol is the perfect social lubricant that allows us to forget that we have basically nothing in common. I love hanging out with them when we've got a good conversation going, or we're doing something fun, but most of the times, what we talk about is completely un-interesting, and basically an attempt to fill up dead air. I now see alcohol as a condement, not a meal. Alcohol can enhance something, like wasabi sauce. But it can't be an entire meal, like a bowl of mustard. It only has the ability to enhance something, but not the ability to BE something. If the night is going to be shit if you're not drinking, it's not going to be that much better if you ARE drinking. If your nights going to be awesome anyways, drinking, to a certain extent, can make it that much better. Or so I find.
And this comes back to my idea of self control and working on my right brain functions. As many of you know, nights out with people who are interesting, outgoing, and good conversationalists, are always good nights, no matter what you do. I can't think of a night where I've been out with Ezay, James, Jordan, Giulia, Dave or any of my 'nerd boyz' that hasn't been a good night. Nights out with people who refuse to take risks, are introverted, and POOR conversationalists, always result in tiring evening which result in nothing. Drinking or not. Part of the benefits of having complete self-control, is the ability to create your own fun. People always govern the enjoyment in a night, and the ability to enjoy people, is basically the ability to make your own fun.
I'm VERY interested in hearing what niggaz who read this think.
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| Sunday, April 14th, 2002
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7:00 pm - Bored at work...
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Hello.
I've been reading over other people'e livejournals recently and it's nice to see that people are so ambitious now a days. Particularly Dan, Jordan and Evan. I've been wanting to hang with people who have more going for them than a crappy job that affords them enough money to go to packed dance clubs on the weekend to get drunk and oggle at girls. For you see, in my life, there are two distinct groups of people who I hang out with, and I find myself hopping ship between the two more and more often these days.
My first group of friends are the kinda of people who you'll see at loud dance clubs downtown. They're fun people to hang out with if you just want to go get shitty drunk, not talk about anything particularly interesting, and really just mingle amongst them dabling in conversation. Don't get me wrong, that's cool! And there are some nights where I really do just want to go out and catch up quickly with a large group of people. But recently I've been finding myself wasting time with them. I really hate going out to big noisy places where you have to scream to talk, booze is expensive, and the only way to have fun is to pretend that you are! On those nights when you're with a close group of people, or not in a party atmosphere, that I'd much prefer to be at a quiet pub with them, just talking about things more meaningful than my shirt, or stories of times that we had in the past. What makes a night truly fun is not so much where you go, but who you're with and how the conversation is. If you think about it, what else is there to do at a bar? It's not like it's fucking Gym Jam, the only thing you have to keep yourself entertained is other people, and the primary way to gain enjoyment out of other people is to pick their brains through good conversation, and you just can't do that in a noisey dance hall. It'd be one thing if we just went there to dance and pick up, but I find myself spending most of my time weeding through crowds or just sitting, drinking, looking around, not saying much, and thinking "I wish I were coding". It's fun every now and then to go to places like that, but when you go with people who you see pretty much every day, and when you don't really do much there (for GOD knows what reason), then it's not much fun really. I find myself enjoying the pre-drinking, or car ride there, a lot more, only because we're actually talking and interacting. This is the group I will call "Group A". I like hanging out with them, and I enjoy the company of each and every one of them.
Group B is a totally different group. Chances are you're one of them if you're reading this. When I hang out with people from Group B, I don't think there's ever a moment when I'm not having fun. Simple as that. We usually do some pretty low-key things compared to what classicaly be considered large by group A, but it doesn't matter, because when you're actually chillin' with them whether it be in the car, in a club, in a bus shelter, in a crappy restaurant, it's ALL the same because they're a fun bunch of people who actually have INTERESTING things to say. They're more down to earth, and they all have different takes on things which makes mixing it up with them all the more interesting.
It's a simple description, obviously more complimentary that the description of group A, but that's the way I see it. Group A to me has basically turned into "Let's go to a club and follow the girls around", and when the guys are around it's only fun if you have old stories to tell as well. It just feels exclusive. It just feels like an environment where you can't be yourself at all, where you have to watch what you say and what you do, where individualism is almost frowned upon (to a certain degree).
You'll notice that I'm not naming names when describing both groups. It's less about particular names, and more about the feel of the night, although that is directly related to who's there, but that's not an exact science. Group B are the awsome nights where there's not much of a story to tell the next day, but you had a fucking kick ass fun night, and Group A is the kind of night were you can tell an accurate description of what happened, not a lot of funny or cool stuff happened, but it's a night you can put a label and a lid on, but it was largely just a waste of time. Group A is full of shallow, uninteresting people, and Group B is full of individuals with idea's and self confidence and a sense of dynamic.
I think the reason I found myself drawn to the Group A before. Now I find just the opposite, and I'm glad for that reason. I think that before, people from Group B kind of saw me as maybe a two face, or someone who wasn't real, or who wasn't really a friend, and that's find by me, 'cause I felt that way. They might have seen me as someone who has priorities that don't involve them. They have this detest for people who act phony in large groups and I think that I had that aire about me for a long while, but it truly is just the way I acted, nice or not is up to you to decide. I spent most of my time with group A, and the little time I spent with group B would make it almost seem proportionatly equal when it came to terms of quality. They might have seen me as someone who thought they were better than other people. Those are their opinions and for someone to say that someone else's opinion is wrong, is retarted.
This whole journal entry has basically been a way for me to verbalize what I've been thinking for the longest time. Group A is bullshit, Group B is where the fun is at, fuck what Group A says.
There are so many more bad things to say about the way group A acts, but I'll leave that for a time when I have less distractions, and I'am able to clearly think and write.
That's about it for this journal update. For those of you who are keeping up to date on www.l33t.ca there is some news to report.
- The AMD Thunderbird chip we've been using is crapping out on us every few days, despite having no side panel on the case and brand new heat sink. I've fucking hated that thing since I bought that Orb fan for it, which did nothing, and hating it EVEN more since it burned it up the Orb heat sink. Thunderbirds had a very bad rep for being heat/power whores, this is perfect evidence to back up that rep.
- New CPU will be a 1.6 Ghz Athlon XP, which I've heard run much cooler. It should also speed up the site which has been going a BIT slowly recently (still the fastest free host out there though!) due to a strained 800 Mhz piece of shit CPU.
- Pornbot is back up now for beta testing. You can head onto our new, face lifted, site and sign up for a new account a browse around, make some comments and rate our bitches!!
- When the l33t.ca server is back up (after the CPU upgrade), I'll be ripping out the guts of the pornbot user database. Each user is stored as a text file on the server now, and from my experience dealing with a similar user system on l33t.ca's hosting system, I know that it can fragment the shit out of a disk and cause the whole system to be larger than it needs to be (for fragmentation reasons, each file takes up a sector on the disk which is, I think, 32k, even though the file is only a few bytes big). I'll be changing the system to a shiny new mySQL database, and will be ripping the guts out of pb.cgi
That's about all for now. My brain is fried.
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