log

As the morn­ing grinds on my music gets more angsty.

One of my favourite bands of late is 30 Sec­onds to Mars. I loved a lot of the tracks from their first CD. When the sec­ond album came out I bought it from Ama­zon as soon as it came out. It’s a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent CD from the first, in scope and style.

I’m a great fan of Tool and A Per­fect Cir­cle, some Tori Amos stuff, most of Garbage’s work (Bleed Like Me was ter­ri­ble), and pret­ty much every­thing Evanes­cence has put out. To be hon­est, a lot of the music I lis­ten to is clos­er to main­stream than woah-out-there music, but then even the term main­stream depends on your loca­tion and the kind of demo­graph­ic you asso­ciate with. I avoid most tech­no, hate jazz, can­not stand any homie rap shit and R&B makes me want to hurt pup­pies. The dying strains of boy bands just make me shake my head in dis­gust (well, with the sin­gle excep­tion of Maroon 5’s Hard­er to Breathe, which I’m not very proud of). Friends of mine lis­ten to ambi­ent trance, euro pop, The Bea­t­les, ABBA and Korn. We’re an ecclec­tic bunch.

The first 30 Sec­onds to Mars album had a sci­ence-fic­tion bent that influ­enced the lyrics and the emo­tion­al feel of the music. I’m not sure of the gen­e­sis of the whole theme, but it made the band unique and gave a strange ‘remote­ness’ to some songs. Some­times it felt as thought the singer was com­plete­ly out­side the song, look­ing in from the per­spec­tive of the lis­ten­er. I still don’t pre­tend to know what Bud­dha For Mary is all about, ignor­ing the obvi­ous reli­gious ref­er­ence. A very pol­ished rock/electronic album with great vocal tal­ent, but a few songs a lit­tle hollow.

The sec­ond album lost the sci-fi theme and became much more emo­tion­al­ly con­nect­ing, with a wider vari­ety of mate­r­i­al and more qui­et vocal moments. Of course, the lead song from the album is the loud­est and most emo of the lot, but once Attack fin­ish­es the two star songs of the album come out: A Beau­ti­ful Lie (also the album’s name) and The Kill. I heard the first on the band’s web­site before I bought the album, and kept going back to hear it again.

It’s a con­sis­tent album, with the excep­tion of Was it a dream, which is an imme­di­ate let­down after the first three tracks. I’ll admit that it took a while to warm to the whole thing, unlike the first CD, but then I’m pret­ty finicky and music has to have some­thing spe­cial to get a thumbs up from me. I gen­er­al­ly need more than a beat and words to be inter­est­ed, and I don’t pre­tend to under­stand peo­ple who say things like “I love all music!”, because that’s entire­ly alien to me. I have to feel empa­thy in the tonal struc­ture or the lyric’s mes­sage to enjoy it.

I start­ed this post just to talk about music, and it’s some­how turned into a review, or even worse an adver­tise­ment. Not inten­tion­al. It kin­da shaped itself.

—- 

so I run and hide
and tear myself up
start again
with a brand new name
and eyes that see
into infinity

—- 

lie awake in bed at night
and think about your life
do you want to be dif­fer­ent
try to let go of the truth
the bat­tles of your youth
cause this is just a game
it’s a beau­ti­ful lie

—-

Well, it’s 9:47am. Time to go fin­ish Foot­fall. :P

How embar­rass­ing. I’m sit­ting here at 2:30am, lis­ten­ing to the Thun­der­puss remix of Mary J. Blige’s No More Dra­ma on head­phones. Next is Madon­na’s Easy Ride.

• mood: funky
• bev­er­age: Solo
• head­bops per sec­ond (aver­age): 1.3

Did a bit more work on the log site — not vis­i­ble work, but CSS fix­ing the Old Blog page. I still have to turn a few hours into the gallery design.

Got my first com­ment (!). Thanks Brad. I’ll fol­low your advice and turn the text bright­ness up a lit­tle with the next CSS revi­sion. Oh, and I’ll call you tomor­row night.

Michael’s cur­rent job has him get­ting up at 7am two days a week, so he hits the sack pret­ty ear­ly: at 12:30am. Heh. No mat­ter how many times I see him off and home again, I can’t help think­ing he could do with more sleep before an hour’s dri­ve to Penrith.

Because of those two days a week, I have only my own com­pa­ny dur­ing most nights. His web-dev con­tract is for anoth­er two and half months, but then we’ll back to all-night World of War­craft ses­sions and I might have a chance at watch­ing an ani­me with him. Iron­i­cal­ly, the work he’s doing is bet­ter done at home; half of it requires remote­ly using the code envi­ron­ment on our local serv­er. His con­trac­tor is pay­ing him to trav­el, then work slow­er than nec­es­sary over an unre­li­able con­nec­tion. Some­where, some­one has to jus­ti­fy this deci­sion. Maybe it’s the same peo­ple who gave Kim Bea­z­ley this great idea about manda­to­ry net cen­sor­ship.

Keep­ing true to my off-on-a-wild-tan­gent writ­ing style, I think Labor’s moron­ic elec­tion promise deserves a bit of froth. I read that sto­ry, and, for the first time in my life, wrote an email to a politi­cian. It was­n’t nasty, it did­n’t involve dirty lan­guage, and it did­n’t get replied to.

I was­n’t sur­prised when a few days passed with­out com­ment — I mean, he must be get­ting an email like this every ten min­utes, even con­cern­ing just this top­ic, since the pro­pos­al is so moron­ic in the first place.

I focused on the polit­i­cal aspects of the deci­sion because he should recog­nise these first. The tech­ni­cal prob­lems are only there to be over­come, and some­where down the track they will. But the pri­va­cy impli­ca­tions can’t be ignored.

Onto lighter top­ics we float. Last week was a javascript-edit­ing fren­zy, get­ting drag and drop code for Michael’s project work­ing. The last prob­lem left is the dragable “clear:left” qua­si-ele­ment. I’ve yet to look at that, but basi­cal­ly all divs float left, and to get line­breaks we’re using clear:left, and we’ve made a fake ‘ele­ment’ that applies clear:left to nextSi­b­ling. There are issues here we haven’t invisti­gat­ed yet, like all the bloody divs sud­den­ly mov­ing when the clear:left is yanked around with the mouse. I don’t know whether that’ll make for a usable WYSIWYG interface.

This week I’ve been read­ing Lar­ry Niv­en and Jer­ry Pour­nelle’s Foot­fall. Since I read before bed on the Palm (using the green-screen back­light) my men­tal accu­ity isn’t what it should be, and it took me a few attempts at some para­graphs to recog­nise peo­ple’s names. The Mote in God’s Eye fea­tured a char­ac­ter list at the begin­ning, as does this book, but Motie did­n’t have four bil­lion char­ac­ters. As bad as it sounds, I’m read­ing this now for the sto­ry arc and explo­ration, aspects which drove me away from Arthur C. Clarke’s nov­els. In Clarke’s hands explo­ration con­sumes the nov­el to the point where the main char­ac­ter is sole­ly a cam­era for the events. In Foot­fall it isn’t as bad, but it’s still hard to keep focus.

Speak­ing of great books, those into raw, hilar­i­ous, intrigu­ing (and “queer”) nov­els are high­ly encour­aged to get Joey Comeau’s Lock­pick Pornog­ra­phy. I read the first few chap­ters online from a link on Dinosaur Comics, and clicked on buy with a speedy inten­si­ty I had­n’t felt in a while. The book arrived today, and as soon as I’m done with Foot­fall I’ll start Lock­pick. I’m real­ly intrigued to see where the book goes, since there’s so many con­texts just in reach of its the­mat­ic. I don’t think it’s a book with a con­crete polit­i­cal state­ment, and it’s cer­tain­ly not a com­ing-of-age dra­ma where char­ac­ters could be sav­aged with a lawn mow­er but still find time to smile beau­tif­i­cal­ly at each oth­er in the final twen­ty sec­onds of the trail­er (sor­ry, angst got away from me).

<side­note>

If you’re mar­ket­ing a gay film, don’t call it a com­ing-of-age sto­ry. What kind of pos­i­tive mes­sage are you aim­ing for if you can’t state direct­ly what it is? You’re dig­ging a hole you don’t need. Amer­i­can Psy­cho did­n’t achieve cul­tur­al mind­share by describ­ing itself as “one man’s jour­ney to find redemp­tion and self-for­give­ness”. You aren’t direct­ing a Bryce Court­ney nov­el. Use the word “gay” and stop pan­der­ing to some­one else’s under­ly­ing big­gotry, you idiots.

</sidenote>

So I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to Lock­pick.

It’s 4:40am and I should do some­thing else for a while. Bed calls, but I’m too men­tal­ly active.

Just a quick post to see ver­i­fy the XMLRPC fea­ture. This means I don’t have to use the Word­Press post edi­tor and can use the Fire­fox Per­for­manc­ing exten­sion instead, which feels a lot more solid.

The web log may not be fin­ished but it looks a hell of a lot bet­ter. Next I’ll revise the colour scheme and sync the sin­gle post page, but first I’m going to bed.

The obser­vant will notice I’ve changed the top left logo dra­mat­i­cal­ly. Truth is I was going crosseyed with the blur. It was also tak­ing up too much ver­ti­cal space.

Ok, sleep time.

I’ve been up all night play­ing around with code and themes.. and I’m not hap­py with either the log or the new Gallery 2 install I’ve got. Both are visu­al issues, and I’m just going to ignore the users page for now since there aren’t many users any­more and it’s next on the re-design board.
I sup­pose the quick and hacky relaunch was a bad idea, but at least I’m hap­py with the work page. Most­ly. I do need some­thing oth­er than the big red jpeg-arti­fact for a background.

I haven’t men­tioned that I’ve added my old blog­ging crap to the “oth­er stuff” link to the right. All my embarass­ing Blog­ger posts are there, albeit in one mono­lith­ic page I’ll have to re-order and slice up lat­er on. I had a very bad time try­ing to con­vert the posts since Blog­ger’s site would­n’t upload to the same FTP it was using hap­pi­ly for 2 years, and the HTML it has gen­er­at­ed was trag­ic. Twin br’s for para­graph breaks and then strange­ly lots of br’s fol­lowed by the XHTML clos­ing slash. I’m not respon­si­ble for that.

Over the next few days expect the site to be a lit­tle tem­pera­men­tal. I’ll be hack­ing the hell out of both the log and the gallery. Don’t be alarmed if sud­den­ly there’s bor­ders and out­lines every­where. I promise most of them will go away.

I’ve been slow­ly work­ing through get­ting the new web­site up, and trans­ferred the new pages into place. There’s a few things to fix yet, such as the gallery theme and a few more fix­es for the log. The work page is as done as it’s gun­na get for a week or so, since sift­ing through old CDs is both time con­sum­ing and distracting.

Redis­cov­ered Qwantz.com’s Dinosaur Comics tonight, and Alien Loves Preda­tor. One day I’ll do the same for Slug­gy Free­lance.

I’ve got the flu and I’m sit­ting at the com­put­er not feel­ing entire­ly sta­ble, not over­ly hun­gry, and like I’ve had enough 30 Sec­onds to Mars for a while. Help! I’m run­ning out of music, and that means I’ve got to lis­ten to some awful radio sta­tion to find some­thing else.