Neurothustra

this is an elaboration of my Twitter and other such micro-blogs.

In regard to the title, I think it’s bullshit. I love Halloween. I love Autumn and I love carving Jack-O-Lanterns. In fact, I even love that other people dress up. And I’m not really even all that aggro about the assertion that Halloween lets everyone express their inner-whatever. I will say, though, that the default choices for women are either Sexy/Slutty [occupation] or princess is pretty lame. Ultimately it isn’t even about what other people are doing that compels me to retire from the concept of getting into a costume.

Rather, I just don’t like it. that really sums it up. And if I can use Halloween as an excuse to get people to do something once a year that they normally would prefer not to do, it’s watch an obscene number of horror movies. Or maybe tell ghost stories and do shots of silly Halloween themed drinks. If people want to get dressed up, shit, float your boat, man. Seeing as how Halloween is Christmas for me I should be able to participate in the holiday any way I choose. Hell, it doesn’t matter what Halloween means to me, I’m going to celebrate the season of the witch how I want, regardless.

To me, the spirit of the season isn’t about makeup. It’s about taking advantage of the beautiful weather and stunning color palette to really get into the “spooky” mood like no other time of year can offer.

Not as much of a hot-button issue like abortion or politics, everyone has an opinion about suicide. My thoughts on this don’t really justify a full sized blog, but it’s too big to Twitter. If someone you know is contemplating suicide, they’re essentially going to fall into two camps: they really want to die or they really want a hug.

If they really want to die, you probably won’t ever know until they’re dead and you have to read the note, if they left one, to find out why they ended their own life. They aren’t just depressed, they’re actually suicidal.

If you know they want to commit suicide, they probably don’t really want to commit suicide. I know, none of this is news to anybody.

I think anyone has a right to take their own life, and I think it’s sad that they don’t choose to weather the storm and see it through to better days. Having said that, if someone has no intention of killing themselves, perhaps they feel like they want to die but they really know that they could never do it (taking a greater-than-recommended amount of sleeping pills to off yourself isn’t a suicide attempt either), is disgusting and weak. I’m fairly callous on this issue. I have no pity for people who claim to want to kill themselves to get their friends to rally around them and make them feel wanted.

Digital Rights Management simply does not make life easier for the consumer. Let me add my DRM horror story to the rising din of discontent with this virtual gatekeeper of intellectual property.

Compared to most of my friends, my (digital) music collection is rather anemic. I’m still engaged in the process of ripping all of my CDs and I’m not even really halfway done with it. It’s so much easier to just buy new music digitally. I use the Zune marketplace and it is surprisingly accommodating to my somewhat esoteric tastes. I was just over two thousand songs or so. Note: I said “was.” Now I have slightly more than 800 songs. One morning about a month ago I woke up and an error message was centered on my monitor warning me that my Zune Pass had expired (Zune offers unlimited music for a monthly subscription fee). I do not have a pass, I do not want one. So I dismissed the warning and checked to make sure my music collection wasn’t effected in any way regarding this unexpected event. No problems until the aforementioned update, in which case the Zune desktop software would fail upon launch, post-update. Irritating. There was an error message with a long url of cryptic alphanumerics that I really did not feel like typing manually into my browser (conveniently, the string of text was not selectable). I relented to the long url and discovered that my DRM must have been corrupt. I was instructed to rename the directory (a Zune specific dir) and allow the Zune to create a new directory, which I did. A new version of that directory was automatically created by the Zune software as it did not crash. Good stuff. Where’s my music? I check the music folder – all the artists’ directories are still there, album art where it should be – no fucking music! What music remains has screwed up ID3 tags.

It’s important to this little entry to note the following: I have spent a ridiculous number of hours correcting ID3 tags, tracking down the correct album art for EVERY album should the Zune not provide it (I’ve even double checked the album art at Discogs.com, a great site for music discographies). I’m more organized with my music collection than I am with my house, my bank account and my own life.

Some of my music is so old that I don’t even remember where it comes from, whereas some of it is old stuff ripped from CDs that friends would let me borrow for 10 minutes. In other words, not all of it is replaceable, despite the nature of the electronic format (that is to say, “easily” copied or distributed). Additionally, all of that work I did ripping and tagging CDs must now be duplicated, all for DRM that was applied to all my music, including music that wasn’t purchased from the marketplace. Even worse, some of the music I purchased from the marketplace isn’t showing that I bought it – which means that I am now expected to buy it again. Well, I’m not going to. I supported artists that I liked and I shelled out real money for property I cannot now prove I really owned. Yes, I am going to torrent as much of my collection as I can retrieve, but I know some stuff I will have to break down and repurchase because they are too obscure and were not purchased in mainstream music stores (like, where the fuck did I get the Phantom Dust soundtrack from?).

My friend told me a story about a week ago about his Viva Piñata garden that was wiped out by malicious, um, piñatas. He described the amount of work that went into his garden and lamented its destruction after so much investment. The next day he called to tell me that it was a blessing in disguise, and that he applied what he had learned the first time to optimize his garden v2.0. The upshot was that he was able to start clean with much more knowledge to manage and grow a new garden from the ground up. I’m looking at my music collection the same way: it’s much easier to reorganize things by starting over with a more optimized system than it is to try and restructure the old foundation (changing the wheels on a moving car, so to speak).

So, now, with a drastically reduced library, I am forced to rebuild my music library. It absolutely sucks that I have to do this, and while starting over will, hopefully, yield a more organized collection, although I still wouldn’t choose to do things this way (I mean, really, with music, you just remove a song you don’t like and that’s that.) In either case, I will find DRM-removal tools and in the future I will kill all signs of DRM, I suggest you do the same.

Quote

McCain-Palin Rally Attendees: "Obama Is A Terrorist"

This is embarassing and aggrivating. It doesn't matter whether or not you are a Democrat, and Republican or any other affiliation; to be this ignorant, uninformed and mean-spirited is simply the most disgusting thing I can think of.

I bought a PSP recently, having changed my mind on two things, buying Sony hardware and portable gaming. I had entertained the idea of getting a PSP for around a year, mainly because I just wanted to play the GTA Vice City game. What finally sold me was the integrated internet radio which is awesome (and hopefully won’t go away). Initially, I didn’t think that there were more than a few fun games to play on the thing.

Turns out I am wrong. I’m buying more and more games for this thing, and while the quality is PS2-era (not bad, in my opinion, since I can remember when the Gameboy had no color, black pixels on a green background) the upshot is that, unlike the so-called next-gen/current-gen consoles, games are cheap to develop and cheap to buy. I’m not going to sell this thing, but a crappy game seems less crappy when you only spent nine bucks on it.