random

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The Police: I thought I was a middling fan of The Police. I remember a friend letting me borrow a greatest hits cd when I was a kid. But I got the box set recently and was initially disappointed. Thinking I only liked their hits.

Cut to today and I'm enjoying most of the songs. I really just had to sit with it, which is something I've always been concerned about for my consumption habits. A lot of times, I will only listen to a song for ten seconds before giving up on it. But this made thigns pretty clear how that's not always applicable.

One criticism I have so far is that Stewart Copeland should not sing. Sting is too good and he is horrible in comparison. (only by comparison) Another thing that's really odd is that I know his name. I'm not a huge fan of The Police. I know Sting's name because he's Sting. But the fact that I know who that guy is pretty remarkable for me, but I do know they had a contentious relationship, so maybe that's what I'm remembering.

sampling: I do a lot of music sampling. In the style of hip hop, and it's so crazy how the most benign things can inspire you. I was listening to OLD ass music (almost a hundred years old) and some spam call rung up. In that brief moment that my mind got distracted by the call from wahtever I was doing, I heard this interesting disonant bass sound in the music that I might not have heard if I wasn't distracted. I was immediately inspired and was able to create something that I thought was pretty decent. (In the unlikely event, that anyone cares and wants to ask me, it's 2024-10-03-b. Though, it might change by the time it gets to you.)

One thing I really love about sampling - there's this like guitar in Protect Ya Neck so I went to WhoSampled to find out what it was. It comes back to LL Cool J - Rock The Bells, but it's a guitar, so clearly it's a sample. WhoSample Rock The Bells and it's from an AC/DC song, which I absolutely love because AC/DC has been very publicly against sampling and the fact that the sample is credited for Rock The Bells instead of whatever AC/DC song is absolutely great.

file system organization: So, I recently had an idea for organizing my files. There are three main categories that I think are important. (in order of importance): Documents (written files created by myself or that are germaine to myself), self-produced media (meaning all audio, pics and video that I have personally created), and consumptive media (media from other people - I know that's not what consumptive means but I like the entendre)

There's some ambiguity though. Scans of documents. Technically, those are pictures but their functionality can be like a document. (as in to document something - though, picture albums are just pictures) If it's something that's not personally created by me, but personally important on the same level, isn't that the same? I have some pictures from my uncle's phone and while they're not that interesting, they're still the last thing I have from him.

parkour: I became interested in parkour just from watching videos on the Internet. I have no idea how I would have found these videos though. (Digg???) And if you would have asked me, I'd put the timeline at 07-09, but apparently, I'm way off because that was when The Office episode aired lampooning it. (2009) I just found some old videos I had downloaded and apparently, I first became interested in it around 2004, which I don't even know where I would have downloaded a parkour video from, because in my mind, that predates most social media. Though, I think MySpace had just become a thing by then.

janis ian: "At Seventeen" is a classic song but as I was listening to, I was like, "Man I wonder what she looks like to think she's so ugly." BRUH, gtfoh.

Boba Fett: Why was Boba Fett so revered as a character considering he's hardly even in the original trilogy? Like, what's the big deal? Is this something that was retconned in the later releases? I don't get it. There's almost nothing remarkable about him. Like, that one character from the prequel that fought Obi Wan and the other guy was WAY COOLER LOOKING but when he died, that was it.

reddit answers subreddit: It's really annoying that people don't read the content of the post and just scan the title of a question asked on answers subreddit. Because I just posted about a thing, gave some context where I said I ruled out the most obvious answer and half the replies are people replying with the obvious answer, which if they had read beyond the title of my post, they would know that I already tried that and it didn't work. This has happened previously in other reddit subreddits and it's just annoying af.

Die Hard With A Vengeance: I'm watching this movie again for the umpteenth time. What's so weird is there's this scene of clear police overreach and brutality of a cop pointing a gun at Samuel L Jackson for no other reason than he yells at someone and jumps a turnstile. When I originally watched this, maybe I was aware of a racial undertone but now, in this era, it's impossible not to. It's weird how much things change.

I watch Three's Company, a classic American sitcom from the late 70s and 80s and I still enjoy it for what it is, but a part of is grossed out by the constant homophobic jobs in almost every episode.

One thing I do put in favor of Die Hard is that it's the closest thing to an American 007 we will ever have. Where James Bond is all charm and British whatever, John McClain is the American equivalent of that: pure bruteforce, unwavering self confidence, and phenomenal luck.

One weird trope that has no basis in reality is the "I'm a cop and I'm commandeering this vehicle!" Like, that's not a real thing.

One weird bit that's kinda jarring in any circumstance is that McClain chooses to drive his car through a divider off of an overpass. Why would that be necessary? And how would he be able to succesfully do that without just crashing his car? I get it. It's a movie but that's an extremely dangerous manuever that's treated without note.

I think my criticism was unwarranted. I forgot about the scene where he escapes from a flooded tunnel by being shot out of a sewer hole 50-100 ft in the air and coming out unscathed. Then a few scenes later, they rappell down onto a container ship and fall 50 ft, relatively unscathed.

heechee saga: I liked Gateway. I don't know where I got the idea to read it from. I wish I kept better track of that but it was an overall good read. I read the sequel and as I'm reading the pages, I'm like, "is this main character talking about being attracted to a teenager? a 14 year old?" and then it became equivocally obvious and I just stopped. That's too weird for me. No thanks.

programming: I just did this really weird programmer thing where I created a script that would rename all these files in a directory but it took me WAY longer to program it than it did to just manually do it. Manually, it would have taken 5 minutes. Tops. It took me an hour and a half because I was having an issue with how Bash interprets mv

The Ink Spots: Most famously known for their asssociation with The Fallout franchise, out of all of the musical artists I've heard, you hear a lot of criticism that 'all their songs sound the same'. At least in regards to The Ink Spots, they genuinely do have the same guitar backing for a decemnt amount of their songs. Like, if you just played the guitar without them singing, you would not know what song it is.

aladdin 2 / return of jaffar: This is not that great of a movie. I thought maybe the reviews I read on its wikipedia. I know Dan Castelleta (sp?) voiced The Genie and I'm pretty sure he was on The Simpsons. You can tell because he sounds just like Homer in certain parts of voicing The Genie.

cliffhanger: The accent that John Lithgow (I think that's his name...) is so weird and jarring. It keeps tkaing me out of the movie every time I hear him talk.

linux: I've used linux since at least 2000. (maybe even 1999) Not consistently of course because tbh, linux was dogshit back then. It really didn't become viable until Ubuntu.

It used to be worse. You had to manually configure it to use a cd drive or dvd drive. Just weird shit that tech people thought people wouldn't mind doing. Anyways, I'm a little disappointed at its current state. Audacity (which for me, is one of the premier audio editing tools around - maybe I'm wrong?) should not require full usage of the audio card to start up properly with sound. It just shouldn't. I don't know what configuration is required for that but its bullshit.

I keep an external hard drive as my main hard drive for everything. A while back, an entire directory on there was just deleted. I assumed it had something to do with linux but I wasn't sure. (I think the power went off in the middle of a file transfor or something.) THEN a month or two later, the entire drive just conked out in a way that seemed pretty clearly connected to linux at the time. I was able to salvage the data later with some kind of software format thing. Recently though, the power went out when I wasn't home and linux was giving some kind of error, format such and such bad. boot sector yada yada. I hoped it was just a one off. Unplugged, replugged. Nothing.

I thought I lost all my data. (AGAIN) But then when I went on my Windows machine. Everything was fine. No issues at all. Not even an error message. This sent me on a spiral to an already bad day. (I've ordered a new hard drive for my machine so that my primary storage will be on the computer and I can start doing proper secondary and tertirary backs up like a data hoarder is supposed to.) I had just upgraded recently to 24 and I had some weird issues installing it on this same machine with a different hard drive. But when I installed Ubuntu 22. It worked fine AND there's no error messages on the external hard drive. Suddenly, this implacably bad thing that was going on with my external hard drive that RUINED MY DAY was no longer an issue. WTF?!

As much as I love linux for it's open ecosystem, these are the shitty things I can't stand about it.

gangs of london: This will be a pretty big spoiler alert. I'm watching s2e6 and, damn, I'm not nearly as invested in this particular character because it's not 4-5 seasons with her. I barely started watching season 2 today but I haven't felt that bad for a character since Adrianna La Cerva of The Sopranos. But I think this is worse because it's more direct of a betrayal. I think the impact was kind of lessened though because I never expected anything else of Sean.

Gabrielle Anwar / Burn Notice: I was a huge fan of Burn Notice when it came out. I thoought that it was one of those really smart shows that surely would be cancelled after one season. (It got seven seasons.) I'm watching Three Musketeers (1993) right now and she's in it. She looks mostly the same though so I wondered how old she was so I read her Wikipedia page. She was only 23 at the time of filming that movie. That's not the most interesting thing and I guess her surname should have made it more obvious to me. But her father was Indian. She just seemed like a white lady to me. But maybe it's because her father's mother was Austrian.

Black Sabbath: I was reading this article that ranks the Black Sabbath songs. (On a side note about my ADHD, I had sat down intending to program, but I wanted some music: Children of the Grave, my favorite Black Sabbath song. And I figured I'd look at the wikipedia article about it just to see if they mentioned anything about the production. Well, they mention it's 'one of their greatest songs' and mentioned a list that ranks it at #5. ) But number 2 was a song I wasn't familiar with. "Heaven & Hell"

I just recently went through their discography and the name sounded familiar but nothing else. So I listen to it, and yeah, it's good. The singing is exceptional. The bass line on there is really interesting. But it's not a timeless song like their early work is. Children of the Grave, to me, still sounds as fresh as the first time I heard it. Heaven & Hell just sounds like a good 80s song.

Democracy / elections: This is kind of grandstanding, so feel free to pass on if not your wheelhouse. When people get their ballots, I imagine that for the most part, for the local elections, they're picking only the names they're already familiar with, they're picking randomly or they're ignoring it. Maybe they read the summary literature that comes in that packet with the ballots. Me? I literally sit there googling each candidate name for each position and compare all of them. I think that's the only way you can make an informed decision on who you're voting but I guarantee you that almost no one is doing that. And I think -that- is a real problem for Democracy. People shouldn't have to spend an hour and a half researching each individual candidate for every position in order to make an informed decision.

rite aid: so I'm sitting, reading a book, perusing the Internet as well and all of a sudden I hear a click like someone starting a phone call and I'm like, 'wth?'. I had been on hold for so long that I forgot that I was still on the phone. 23 minutes. No hold music. Thank God I wasn't doing anything embarassing when they came back on the line.

raspberry pi zero: why the fuck does the USB port act as power when a power source is attached to it? Shouldn't it NOT power on so people will intuitively know that's not the right port? It doesn't make any sense. I thought it was a faulty adapter or some weird software glitch.

Get Back / Genius lyric interpretation: I was listening to Billy Preston's cover of Get Back and I heard a lyric "Loretta Martin thought she was a woman but she was another man", which is kind of an odd lyric. So I went to Genius and found this interpretation:

Loretta Martin could possibly be a transgender character, a girl who thought they were a woman but found themselves as a man, with all their friends saying that they already knew.

The 1960s and 70s were a time of sexual revolution and transgenderness and gender bending were more common and mainstream.

This seems very much like a retcon. I'll grant the sexual revolution allowed more experimentation back then, but I don't think transgenderism was more common and mainstream by any metric. Maybe drag shows weren't villainized like they are now, but that's about it. Maybe it's because I was a kid for most of that time, but transgender people were basically just 'weirdos' up until very recently. And the idea that they used to be more common and more mainstream seems to be pushing an agenda of some kind. Despite the interpretation of this lyric, the literal lyric is literally denying that person's gender identity, so this just confirms the idea that it was -not- more common and more mainstream.

idk, the way I interpretted the lyric, especially in the context of the next lyric which is about other women resenting her is that she enjoys sex. Like, she's on that player player shit and just goes through dick like condoms at a gangbang. And other women resent her for that. Maybe I'm wrong. But while I do see a possible transgender interpretation, I just really bristled at the idea that it was more common and mainstream, considering it's just now barely even remotely acceptable to be transgender.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles (the movie): Casey Jones was always cool af. And for some reason, I've always thought the character was played by Christopher Meloni, the guy from Law & Order: SVU. This was kinda weird because his character in Oz was a little disturbing so it was hard to reconcile the two for me. But apparently, it's not played by that guy. It's played by Elias Koteas and Casey Jones may have been his biggest role if you don't consider he's been on Chicago PD. A little weird I confused the two actors considering they don't look that much alike. Though, I think they both have New York guy vibes if you know what I mean, even though neither are from NYC.

I also wanted to tell a story about how much Ninja Turtles meant to me. I assume it was like this for all kids around that age. I don't know if that was the first movie or the second, but I'm assuming it was the first movie because of how much it meant to me. But we went to go see the movie with another kid and his mom, and when we finally got to the ticket booth, they told us they only had two left and they weren't together. I was so heartbroken. I wanted to know if me and my mom could just go instead. She refused. I'm pretty sure I cried. To be able to see LIVE ACTION ninja turtles meant a lot to me.

Video Game Movies: So Just out of curiousity, I was wondering what is the shortest time period from the time the original video game was released and it was turned into a movie. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games) And, apparently, the early 90s was a golden age with the two movies of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat because they were released just 3 years after their source material. Most other games are released significantly after that time period. And unless a game is released with that intention, I'm not sure that could be much better considering how long it takes to get movies into production. These are theatrical releases though. And given the state of theatrical releases in general, I don't think that will ever be topped. Just giving a brief once over of the direct to video releases, I did find one with an even shorter release period which was Sin at tywo years. (Though, that was animated so also not the same.)

I assume the inverse of this, where movies will actually be released even further and further from their source material as the film industry runs out of ideas, because it's kinda crazy that they made Rampage (2018) 32 years (!!!!) after the original game. And that was a great game in its time but I don't think anyone liked that game enough to be like, "OH MY GOD!! A RAMPAGE FILM!!!" 30 years later. Like, Sonic The Hedgehog, while nowhere near its cultural relevance in the early 90s, still can get people excited because it was just that game at that time. (It had two TV shows with basically the same name released in the same year! And they were both voiced by Jalell White!) What's crazy is I remember when Doom got released in theaters, I thought it was just an extraordinary long time for a game to be released after a game's release (14 years) but I was still there when it got released. Because Doom was -that- game for me. It'd be like if they made a game for Ultima Online now. I'd be there, COVID be damned.

Super Mario Bros (1993): Why did the henchman get evolved smarter but then still be dumb? Saw what you want about the 'quality' of this film but I watched like five different movies yesterday and I don't think I finished any of them. This one I'm almost done with and it was a pretty great experience. This is like the third or fourth time I've watched it too.

I'm watching a promo video that was distributed to Japan. The only thing I don't particular like about this movie is that the directors or producers thought 'the characters don't have a story' and that the games themselves didn't have a story, which just isn't true.

Kamala Harris: So there's this band that I've been a fan of from the late 80s early 90s, connected with grunge. I remember a decade or so, going to one of their social media pages and they were complaining about 'liberals'. I was kinda apprehensive about checking their social media page again for fear of their same kind of vitrol, but I saw they were endorsing Kamala for this election, which was kind of odd and it made me wonder if Trump has -completely- lost his base. Or whatever complaint of liberalism I read previously was from that kind of knee-jerk, die hard centrism (unconservative/unliberal) that can be so prevalent in certain circles.

Internet Archive / porn: So because I aspire to follow The Discipline and only consume halal media, porn is kind of the only thing that brings me out of that. Porn from before 1995 isn't exactly a hot commodity and I know there's vintage porn here and there, but I just haven't bothered yet. So I've been trying to find porn on Internet Archive, but it's not nearly as common as I thought. I even looked up the classic porn movie Deep Throat on there and it looked like all the pornographic elements had been removed. So I kinda gave up but today, I found, what I assume, is a regular film but had some pretty hardcore elements. It was Japanese though and those guys are straight weird when it comes to consent and age of consent so I didn't download it. (Though, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.) Then just a short while later, I found another porn video, this time it was American. (I think. I didn't actually look at it.) But both were gay. Which I thought was so interesting. But I guess back then, it was less acceptable so for some people, that would have been the only outlet. (Actually, in that first movie, that was entirely the premise of the movie. A closeted gay man seeks outlets.)

porn: When I was younger, I definitely defended porn as an outlet and could never comprehend that I would ever take the current viewpoint that I have, but I think being limited by The Discipline to media from before 1995 definitely puts it in a much more obvious perspective. Almost all of the stuff I'm finding is so soft-core and it's kinda crazy now that the outlet for sexual frustration back then was just plain ole nudity. Because that does absolutely nothing for me. Though, my body preferences are so far from that era's aesthetic, that might be a contributing factor, tbh.

streaming services / ads: I live in poverty. Because of that, I always go the cheapest route for everything. Even though, I have more than enough money. I aspire to take the bus to work despite it being a huge inconvenience time-wise because it saves me $6. But, for a lot of streaming services, (it really depends on the specific service) it's not worth it to do that because the ad experience is so annoying when binging. AMC Plus is genuinely annoying in this regard. Prime, not some bad, not horrible. But considering that I only sign up for most services for one month at a time, it's not worth my time to not spend the extra $5-10 to not be inundated with ads.

AMC+: Apparently, you can't unsubscribe from AMC Plus from the website. WTF! I cannot stand services that try to play this okey dokey type bullshit. The last service that did something similar was GameFly, where you get NO GRACE PERIOD at all in regards to checked out games and your service is immediately canceled at the point of cancellation, unable to be used past that point and any checked out games are considered past due. Bullshit. Would never do business with Gamefly based on that experience.

Oh, wait, LOL, never mind. I just didn't read far enough down the help page. LOL. They just designed the page weird and the tab isn't tabby. Just a heading that I glossed over.

Another criticism of their UI. When you go to the listing on that service, it automatically highlight 'play' with a light border, but on Fire TV, the default is this side menu for Info and what season you're selecting and the actual indicator what's being selected is when the button changed color entirely. The problem is I see the Play button highlighted and assume that's what about to happen when I click.

back to the future / saturday night fever: I'm watching Back To The Future and maybe, the scene where Biff kicks Marty out of the car and gets a little rapey with his Mom didn't happen in the original timeline, but I don't know. It just put things in a weird perspective from the beginning of the movie. Also, that weird rape scene in Saturday Night Fever was so incredibly offputting. It made me really appreciate the progress we've had in society that that scene it's kind of just glossed over, she's being gangraped in the back of a car with little to no moral outrage by the characters. Idk, maybe it was as bad for that generation of audience and this is just an overly weird post.

fantasia: I remember being really, really little and watching Fantasia. I was bored out of my mind. What I couldn't figure out though was why it was in theaters? I read through the Wikipedia and I remember being mystified as to when it could have been released. Though, I read it now and I realize the way it was written, I maybe just missed te part about it being released in 1990. Every other time period, I would have been too young, but 1990 was about right. Though, even then, 1990 seems a bit late, but in hindsight, it makes sense. Why though was it that I had to read in a Disney Adventures from 1990 about the release to finally realize that was when I saw it?

kawaiisu: The last male fluent speaker of this language died in 2022. I know he had a sister that possibly spoke the language but I don't know if she's still alive.

Good Will Hunting: If someone would have asked me, when did this movie come out? I'd have said 1994. Complete confidence. Bet a $100. The fact it was 1997 is crazy to me.

Deebo:Anyone that's watched Friday knows who Deebo is but I didn't know that character was in Next Friday. I cannot for the life of me remember him in that movie though. If I'm remembering correctly, I think it was something to do with the Mexicans next door.

Ohhhh. I read the Wikipedia entry and now I remember. I remember that scene where Deebo and that one guy have to sneak into that animal control car and he keeps yelling at the other guy.

Ultima 7: So I know I was playing Ultima Online in 1997. I must have gotten it for Christmas because I remembered that Catskills had just opened. But more importantly, I remember playing Ultima 7 -obsessively- It was one of the greatest games to have ever existed. It had systemic behavior that was unseen in so many games. And what's even crazier is it was released in 1992!!!! I was playing that game for YEARS so the idea that I was still playing a game released in 1992 as fresh as it was first released is crazy to me.

Highlander TV series: I tried rewatching the old show but I became slightly enraged (and this is kind of weirdo behavior on my part) about a particular scene. So it's a scene with Joe Pantoliano. (He's been in lots of stuff, but was in Sopranos & How To Make It In America) where he's a doctor or something like that and calling a nurse for some kind of update. And it's so clearly that both actors filmed their scenes separately without talking to each other, because he's doing it with personality and charm and the nurse is doing it very matter of factly. (not responding at all to his charm) Now there's the possibility that actress he was working with just didn't reply appropriately in the moment but occam's razor says they just filmed the scenes separately because the difference is just so jarring.

hip hop: I cannot tell you how much I hate conscious rap. Not so much the injection of positivity in contrast to negative street stuff. That's fine. That's cool. But, like, the moralizing, when it's all just a facade for some religious context that I do not agree with any context.

I thought this just some random underground rapper, but apparently, it was an -early- track from before the Fugees were The Fugees when they were still called The Translataz Crew or whatever. Their debut album was in 1994 but this track was on a radio program from the end of 1993 and Lauryn isn't even on it. The song is Living Like There Ain't No Tomorrow.

neurodivergence/'too quiet': I was just thinking back to an outting I had with a girl. It wasn't really a date. It was just me driving her (just her and I) to some place that a bunch of people were going to. Like a getting to know me type of thing. When we got there, I talked to my friend and he told me she said she wasn't interested because I was 'too quiet'. That was the weirdest criticism for me, because I was talking non-stop the entire drive there, asking her questions about herself and her giving these uninterested answers. And it made me wonder if being 'too quiet' is really just code for neurodivergence. I mean, obviously, she could have thought I was ugly or whatever and that was the nice way of putting it but it genuinely feels like it was code for something else. Like me not being aggressive enough or projecting some kind of persona like neurotypicals do.

I was thinking about secondhand from that same friend, the friend that told me what she said, was rejected by another girl on the same premise and I just think that's such a weird criteria. "Too quiet" idk, just seems weird to me.

The Watchers: I watched The Watchers yesterday and one anachronism really, really bothered me. Maybe it's a type of computer I am not familiar with but at one point during the computer, there's this really old looking computer from the 80s. It even has the prototypical Apple II load in screen but then: it plays video! And not some weird ass fucking cut-scene 1991-style video, regular ass video. That really, really bothered me. Ohhhhhh, and this was in 2008??? By 2008, unless my memory has completely failed me, we were mostly where we are at now in terms of desktops and their general feel and look. Having a 1980s desktop in 2008 just seems weird af. hmm, I wonder if they were doing some kind of desktop theme though. Like, the character they were depicting was an old guy so maybe he would feel more comfortable with a 1980s style interface, but even then that just seems weird af because those themes aren't that all encompassing. But -maybe-

The Room(2019): What kind of monster demands their wife have a baby when she's clearly traumatized by the past two stillbirths she had?

golden corral: I watch AMC Plus a lot lately because it's my streaming service for the month but there's a Golden Corral commercial on there. It's a family eating with two girls and this little girl, the first thing she says is, 'When I grow up...' and with how quickly she says and it being the first she says, I swear it sounds like 'negra' and it's always really jarring. I think it's just a weird effect after seeing it over and over again.

persepolis rising: I've just started reading. And I'm going to make a prediction that Clarissa will use her implants to sacrifice herself in the end. I hope I'm wrong though.

Another prediction: Miller is coming back. Maybe that's obvious given how central he was for a few books though. (p210)

Another prediction and I'm almost at the end, the Laution or whatever they are will be defeated like Marcus Inaro did. At least one of the ships anyways. (I'm also wondering if Naomi's son ever comes back into the story? And that's kinda sad if she doesn't.)

SPOILER: I'm said that I was right on one of the predictions and I think I know how the next one will work out. Last minute reveal before the story ends.

tisha campbell: I just read something on Twitter that compared Topanga from Boy Meets World (I think her real name Danielle Fischell?) and Tisha Campbell and how they look similar. And another person said that because Topanga is white, she's always been viewed as beautiful but because Tisha is black she's just seen as mid. WWWWWWHHHHHHHHAAATTTTTT!???!!? That's crazy. Like, out of your mind insane crazy. Anyone who thinks that either was never around in the 80s or didn't see her in House Party. She's always been and will always be THAT GIRL! And anything to the contrary is pure slander.

On a side note, I don't know who I am confusing her with but I totally thought her name was tischa campbell. Unless I'm thinking of her frequent collaborator Tichina Arnold?

stater bros: it's really dumb that if you go to the stater bros website to search for stuff, it searches the website without searching the prdoucts and you have to shop now to access the products.