So I Was Thinking About Playing WoW Again...

Fine. Fine, you fuckers don't have anything to say?
I can be prolific by my own self.
It's cool. I can entertain myself.

You know what happens when you stay silent?

Griffin Weston talks about WoW.

I don't even play WoW anymore.
Look at what you've done.

Have I spouted about Cataclysm yet? Cataclysm is the next expansion pack that's on the horizon. It'll probably be another year before it's implemented, but it (again) promises to breath life into an an already 6 year old game.

Aion? Don't talk to me about Aion. Warhammer didn't work out. Eve is still going, I guess, if you're some weird Swede who has nothing better to play.
WoW has claimed me as it's devoted follower, and no MMO is coming along to woo me.
Star Wars: The Old Republic doesn't count. Shhhh. We'll see.

The point is, eventually, we're going to run out of content. Oh, they've strung out as long as they POSSIBLY could so far - in fact, if you look at it, original WoW (pre-TBC) didn't actually deal with much WCII or III lore. It was all Elemental Fire Lords and Dragonkin and Old Gods. And they spun out the Qiraji out of fuckin' nowhere. These guys weren't in the older games - but just about everyone is dead.

We've defeated everyone except A. The Lich King, who we WILL probably I guess vanquish at the end of WotLK, and B. The actual GODS THEMSELVES, or equivalent powers that be.

We're all out of people, really. So what, I hear you cry out, what could possibly await us in Cataclysm? What does such an ominous single-word name like that even signify? Who is left for us to fight?

Time for a history lesson
God, I love writing these. Give me a campfire and a big beard. I will tell these stories to my children.
Let's have some setting.



So Cataclysm. Let me run you through the basics.

Have I told you about the dragons? There were 5 Dragonflights, ruled each by an Aspect dragon. Chosen - in fact, created by the Titans, benevolent and omnipotent world-makers from Beyond.
Alexstrasza, Nozdormu, Ysera, Malygos, and Neltharion.
Red, Bronze, Green, Blue, Black.
Life, Time, Nature, Magic, Earth.

These were the Guardians of Azeroth.

Neltharion, the Earth-Warder, charged by the titans to safeguard all the land and deep places of Azeroth, warden over the very earth itself.

Turns out Neltharion went crazy, guarding the earth for so long. I could go into the details, but the phrase "insidious incessant whispers of the Old Ones" really sums it up. There were things so corrupted they spread to even the most stalwart and powerful. Just look at Sargeras.

In fact, look at Sargeras! Pause Neltharion for a minute.

Because see, 10,000 years before the warlocks of the Orcs of Draenor opened up the first portals to Azeroth, before the petty squabble of Orcs and Humankind had even thought about existing, the Kaldorei (proto-Night Elves) lived in relative peace, artistry, and immortality along the shores of the massive Well of Eternity (the largest arcane remnant of the Titan's ontological touch upon Azeroth since they created the damn thing).
They were a curious and innocent race. They marveled and wondered at the reasons, the mechanisms, the how and why of their existence, and the "waking world" they inhabited.
The Queen of these people (like all true queens) was the most beautiful and clever among them: Queen Azshara. She became interested in the Well - and rightly, for it was the progenitor of all power. The Quel'dorei (priest-royalty-researcher-law entities of the Night Elves) began to investigate and explore and, eventually, channel and wield this arcane energy for themselves.

So the first magic was born.

Reckless and raw and dangerous, this incredible prolific use of magic had dire consequences. Not only were the Kaldorei slowly being influenced by the constant exposure to the Arcane, such wild usage of the energy that links all things does not go unnoticed.

There are other worlds besides Azeroth, other places created by the Titans or perhaps by other beings. The Orcs, the Eredar, the Naztherim, all (in a sense) "alien" to Azeroth. All found their way there by other means.

So the Kaldorei, in their infancy, unwittingly turned Azeroth into a blazing beacon for all magically attuned beings.

This was, as I think you can see, where things started to go downhill.

But nevermind.

We were looking at Sargeras.

You have go back a lot farther than 10,000 years for his story, so we'll leave that for another day.

Suffice it to say that he is known as The Great Enemy of All Life, The Lord of the Burning Legion, the Chaos God, who desires all of everything to return to a chaotic primordial pure state with the power to do it, too.

Suffice it to say that he and his hordes of nether demons (again, a different story) felt the recklessness of the Kaldorei's magic and thought "....delicious".

The Kaldorei weren't doing so hot themselves. A constant exposure to the lightning-surge level of ecstasy and power that raw magic creates had transformed the once innocent race into hedonistic and capricious demigods.
Queen Azshara and her Quel'dorei began to covet and keep the Wells energies for themselves, looking down at the common people as unenlightened.

This is how Sargeras works upon a planet.
Given a hairline crack, he works into the minds of those in places of power and exudes his influence upon them.
He appeared, radiant and beautiful, to Azshara and her Highborne. Their corruption hardly had to be worked upon further, they were so readily converted.

Long story short, the Quel'dorei all but withdrew from society and began work to use the power of the Well to bring Sargeras's true form from the Nether to Azeroth (under pretenses,I believe, of untold power and utopian cleansing of the unworthy Kaldorei).

This, as you have probably worked out, was a bad idea.

It worked.

The Burning Legion swarmed into Azeroth and basically set it all on fire, as the Quel'dorei mindlessly expanded the portal to strengthen it for Sargeras himself.

Now, some Kaldorei fought back. Three, specifically: Malfurion and Illidan (YES ILLIDAN) Stormrage and Tyrande Whisperwind. Aided by just about every sentient being left alive on Azeroth, as well as the Dragonflights, they started fighting back.

This is known now as the War of the Ancients.

But, you clamor, I thought you said we were talking about......Actually, I hear you clamor, you have no idea what we were talking about.

That's because we haven't gotten there yet.

This was all setting the stage for the War of the Ancients, a war of earthshattering proportions. Literally.

The Kaldorei Resistance and the Burning Crusade raged, while the Dragon Aspects sought to counteract the Quel'dorei's drawing power from the Well.

Ahh, you say. The Dragon Aspects. I know about those!
I know about Neltharion, the Eldest, the most powerful and resourceful, the permanently connected to the earth itself and all the other ones too
So you do! Well done.

Now imagine Neltharion, fighting for his planet, seeing it burn, against the ever present soul-corroding might of Sargeras while simultaneously being turned by dark voices from further below (again, Old Gods, different story).

He became bothered.

So, half-insane and all-desperate, he came up with the typical desperate plan.
After enough fighting, all leaders turn to a similar strategy.
It goes along these lines: "....What if....we build a _____...BIG ENOUGH....to WIN."

The ____ in this case would be a magical weapon, a concentration of all five dragonflight's power. Which was substantial.
The Dragon Soul.
So they made it. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So Neltharion, armed with the very essence of the other dragons, led a massive charge to the palace of Azshara (while the Kaldorei Resistance kept the Legion at bay)

The dragons spread out and linked all their magic, and turned to Neltharion, awaiting his signal to unleash a focused charge.

This is, as you have probably figured out, where shit does not go as planned.

Neltharion, at the brink of his sanity, poised to deliver the biggest level of destruction ever seen on his own land, with the power of five dragonflights behind him

breaks.

He freezes the other dragons in their place, lifts the Dragon Soul and releases all his agony and despair and hatred and molten anger and vaporizes every god-damned thing you can imagine being capable of vaporization.
Demons, dragons, night elves, plants.
A level of destruction, an unleashing of energy so powerful that Neltharion is changed instantly and forever, altered, a reflection of his corruption and disgust.

Neltharion ceased to exist, and in his place was born Deathwing the Destroyer, who fled to the hidden depths that were once his domain and became one of the greatest evils Azeroth has ever seen.


The War of the Ancients continued and was, yes, eventually won by the current Night Elves. But that's (again) a story for another day.

All you need to know is.

This is who we're fighting next, in Cataclysm.

This is who comes back.




Edit: Oh, and by the way, the reason my interest in WoW just got piqued is that they enabled Faction Transfer and lifted the PvP ban on double factions.
And you get a switch to whatever race your class can be on the opposite side.

So....since I'm going to switch to Alliance anyway for Cataclysm (read: WOOOOOORGENNNNN), I was thinking of making Harticus into a (female?) Dranei Paladin.

Can you imagine? It's one way of refreshing the amount of available content. Just play the OTHER SIDE.

I was an alliance paladin once....

WAT

WHAT
Guess what dropped today.

Allow me to explain.

I'm half disgusted. Offended, much more so than when Guitar Hero dropped and kids started caring about famous guitarists again.
This is far worse, this is....dangerous. It's much closer to home.

I'm half intrigued. I have no desire to play Guitar Hero, but if I squint my brain I can understand why it's such a popular game.
I have an extreme and pressing desire to try out DJ Hero.
There is more at stake than some Pat Benatar song here.

Remember that Konami game at Fun Factory? Beatmasters? The thing, basically, DDR with turntables, and it sucked because all there was were DDR-style tracks?
I hope it isn't that.

I hope it isn't Guitar Hero for the Turntable.

I don't actually like turntablism that much. Scratching, crabbing, transforming, all the intricate and quick movements blend together in my ears too much. I respect it but I don't enjoy it. I recognize DJ Qbert, but I don't listen him for fun. .

I hope it isn't mashups.
I like them but I don't respect them. I understand that they're easy to make and hard to master, but I don't think it takes the same amount of skill as sampling and beatmatching does. (Note: They still take a considerable amount of skill - at least the good ones do) I like this, but I still don't listen to it for fun.


What do I hope it is?
I hope it's an adequate simulation of playing multiple tracks simultaneously, of crossfading between them, of flipping them back and forth and making them intertwine, of laying down a massive beat, of creating something that makes you want to move.

That's why I want to play it. Maybe it's training wheels, maybe it's daydreams. Why do people want to play Guitar Hero? Same reasons.

But it isn't going to be what I want. It isn't what I think of when I see the iconic image of a turntable.

It'll be DJing. That's fine. It's called DJ Hero.
I don't want that.

I want Producer Hero.

This game has spun my brain about. Got me questioning, thinking of hip hop in general, of djing, of why I talk about this so goddamn much, of why I have so much and yet so little of this kind of music.

The answer is annoying.

I like it.

That's it.

I like some of it and I don't like some of it and I hate some of it, and I tend to focus on one side more than any other, and I have my favorites and my prejudices and my background but it boils down to, in the end, I like it.

I like Producers. I follow the behind-the-curtain information behind tracks, I research beats, I wonder how they made those goddamn noises and where they came up with these samples. I like them more than DJ's and Scratchers and Rappers because they above all manage to inject a bit of flavor into already flavored things.

It's very easy to make something taste strongly of a single thing.

Mixing is the hardest thing to do. Mixing well, that is, mixing two delicate or two strong and maintaining balance, making something new, making something delicious.
I guess I have my drink prejudices too. Sour, painful, alcoholic, sardonic, achingly sweet. In that order, maybe not.

If I made a list of "Top Hip-Hop Producers", it would differ greatly from my own personal choices. I'd have to speak for decades of artists, I'd have to obligatorily include pioneers who otherwise pale in comparison, I'd have to do research and bulk up my meager knowledge so I could sound more official.

It's something I might have done, not too long ago.

I think it's time for a different kind of list.

You have to understand that producers are, by nature, creating something to be used by another artist - out of something produced by a different artist.
Beatmakers just pump out clever tricks and rappers mosey on and search through them and go "this one, I can rhyme over this one. tune it up".
The technicalities, the specifics, these are fascinating and ornate aspects of the music business that can gum up an entire blog.
There are a lot of producers. There are substantially more than five, anyway.

This list ignores a lot in order to say a lot in not very many words.

The following links contain over an hour of music, so...take your time.

Griffin Weston's Top 5 Hip-Hop Producers

1. J Dilla - There are two things everyone knows about J Dilla. He was influential, and he was prolific. Neither of these reasons contribute to why I like him. I like him because his beats are the greatest I've ever heard, with or without somebody on top of them. They're complex, they're rich and voluminous, they rock back and forth. They're funky and slow and they're the absolute best for walking along the street and bobbing your head. It's impossible to not move listening to Dilla. It's simple as that. He's "your favorite producer's favorite producer".

2. K-Murdock - Having just gone on a bender about Panacea, it's no surprise I consider Murdock a damn fine producer of beats. He's half the group - literally, he provides 50% of all content. And what content it is. One of the most dedicated, intricate, and concentrated. There are melodies at work here, strung with strange twangs and thumps, woven around fat beats or no beats at all. One of the most diverse out there, Murdock also throws in samples from so far out there you never heard of them. Also, his first instrumental album was entirely anime-flavored. Amazing.

3. The Neptunes - I think even the dumbest among you know how hard I slaver over Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo - and why. Talk about original. Talk about creative. Talk about primordial thoomps mixed with spaceship whirps. Talk about stripped-down essence of music. Mixing ethereal with striking. Dont' even take into account their incredible range of production, from Britney Spears to Snoop. If you've danced to it in the last ten years, it's a 33% chance the Neptunes produced it. And it was good.

4. RJD2 - I have incredible respect for RJD2 because he, in turn, has incredible respect for the art. The man is a machine. A brilliant, fastidious, mindbreaking machine. SO funky. So cool. So ranged and clever, such an amazing library of rare funk samples, so many changeups, so many perfect matchings. He has the skill only years of diligent crate-digging and study awards, and it shows over and over again no matter what direction he takes it (and he's taken it in a lot of directions).

5. I spent a lot of time debating number five. It's low enough a slot to be available to a lot of different producers - all of which I like, but none enough to elevate among his peers. There are quite a lot. There are the influential, the legendary - Prince Paul (De La Soul, Handsome Boy Modeling School) and DJ Premier (every East Coast rapper for the past 20 years), the new and skilled yet immature popular champions - Kanye West (to quote Justin Timberlake, "It might sound cocky, but is it really cocky if you know that it's true?") and Timbaland (responsible, no matter how you cut it, for a shitload of gargantuan beats), to the underground and innovative - Danger Mouse (Grey Album, Gnarls Barkley), MF Doom (you've heard him and you didn't even know it), Q-Tip (ATCQ, The Renaissance)

And a million others.

Slot 5 goes to whoever I've ever linked to on this blog, whoever you've listened to and gone "god damn" and felt movement, to whoever I haven't ever mentioned and just have to hear, to whoever you keep secret, to whoever you think you could dance to if you really tried.

The Rhythm You Breathe In To My Footsteps

A week or two spent without making any progress, wasting all the free time I have on videogames, spending all the unfree time on academia, not getting any new music.

I am not a music snob. I know this because my brother is a music snob and I can't hope to keep up against him.
But I've got a decent sized library and enough ear talent to hear what's important. I don't hardly ever listen to the radio, and I'm woefully deficient in what's hip. If a song comes on and people groan and go "oh man I'm so tired of this song" it's a good chance I haven't heard it before.
Most of the time it's advantageous.

Anyway. I'm not a music snob.
But it's fun to pretend, anyway. If it wasn't, so many people wouldn't be doing it.

What am I trying to say.

What I am trying to say is.

I found a record. Of my favorite band. That I hadn't heard yet. From two years earlier than the album I used to think was their first.
music snobs never say "cd". it's either a "record" or, if you must, an "album". individual songs are "tracks"
It's, I mean, when I say "favorite band" you have to understand that I don't have favorite anythings. I'm annoyingly well rounded. So when I say favorite, I mean "a group I like a lot. One of my favorites. If you held me down and forced me to claim them as my end all be all favorite, I wouldn't feel too bad to accept that." If you ask me to talk about hip-hop with you, I probably wont talk about them. They're probably not what you're looking for. They're mine.

Panacea. Have you heard them. I've talked about them before, provided samples of them before.
Two guys from D.C., an intellectual renaissance hip-hop group from Washington.

Here is what I mean. I don't possess the necessary vocabulary to express why I like them or why I think they're good. I like their brand of hip hop. I could listen to the voice or the music.
Their wikipedia page states "Panacea blends Native Tongues-inspired beats with warm major chords and soul samples and add smart, conscious rhymes about life, love, and of course, hip-hop."

I guess they do. I guess you're right, I do like the warm major chords layered over the soul samples. I like the smart rhymes about love. I can point them out on tracks now, now that I know how to look for those things I had already found.

It has to do with setting, really. My connection with this group is deeply personal and linked with my experiences for the past few years.

I found Panacea on the shared iTunes network of my UW dormitory halfway through my first miserable year.
The library belonged to some guy named Matt. Maybe Mike. I never found out, never contacted him, but he had a goldmine of a library that he chose to make available to the public.
He had the only two Panacea albums at the time - their debut, Ink Is My Drink(2005) and their follow up 2 years later - The Scenic Route.

These albums became my theme songs for the next half year of heavy shit. In their tracks is ingrained the entirety of my life at the time, and when I listen to them it's one of the most obvious examples of musical cues for memories.

The alternating slow-fast optimism and reflection of Ink Is My Drink, the really out there samples, the no-two-songs alike style, the brainlightning verses that you didn't notice until they had already happened and had to skip back and listen to again, these are the things that made me like them in the beginning.
Before I started liking them because I liked liking them.

By The Scenic Route I was a confidante. These guys knew music. They had "conscious rhymes about life and love" backed up by the truest of hip hop. The Scenic Route became music to live to, a soundtrack piped in through tinny wireless headphones I had bought in weak effort to cheer myself on.

Music to walk across busy Seattle streets to, through crowded hallways of academically superior Engineering and Business majors. Music to keep yourself busy, music to keep yourself sane.

Reflective, in their sophomore album. The Scenic Route is an actual story Every song had a "switch-up" moment when they yanked you out of the reverie they infallibly lulled you into and set you on a different path. You'd put the album on to stop yourself from thinking too much, and they'd oblige until they didn't. Until, tired of your blankness, they changed up the beat and you'd start listening because it made you think.

I still use Burning Bush as my test run song for any sound equipment I buy. If I can't make the speakers produce sheer brain fuzz, something is wrong.

I left Seattle, eventually. Took Panacea with me back to Maui, started riding the bus and walking through green fields and growing up. I didn't forget about Panacea, but they were absorbed fully into my rotation. They formed the basis for a whole pile of new stuff.

A Mind On A Ship Through Time came out late 2008, and I discovered it in January of the next year.

It never occurred to me that Panacea could continue, could make new music. I never actively searched out information about them. They just were. Until they were, new. It was strange and exciting and now, listening back, I realize I've formed new Maui memories of its tracks just as easily as before.

Mind on a Ship is mature, older, with some new humor and callbacks. Mind is more confident now, able to speak up about personal things and experiment a little with some esoteric musical techniques that might not all work out.

Mind on a Ship is music to do a routine to, music to have memories to, not make memories to.
It's still Panacea though, it's got the warmth and the consciousness and the undefinable perfect essence, it's just different than what I had already so deeply ingrained Panacea to be in my brain.


The reason I'm telling this story is that I came across, almost accidentally, their real debut album - an EP called, ironically, Thinking Back, Looking Forward (2003).

Listening to it is one of the strangest musical experiences I've had in a long time. It's....new memories. Of things that haven't happened yet.
It's definitely Panacea, but an adolescent incarnation.
They're self conscious, rough, not sure if they're taking themselves seriously yet. They have no idea they're two years away from mastery.

The beat is younger, less specific. You can see the proto-groups that influenced them, the masters they learned from. You can see the true Panacea though, in between less original pieces. Raw expression of self.

It's like time traveling to a year before you met your best friend and seeing who they used to be before they moved to your town.

So I've been listening to it a lot, burrowing down into my music snob bunker, feeding off the pride I generate awarding myself points for arbitrary auditory accomplishments.
It's sparked a burst of musically oriented actions. I've started grabbing records off the ether again, swinging my needle over to the Arts side. Science has dominated for too many months.

So imagine how I might feel discovering that they've just released Corkscrew Gaps, an EP containing unreleased or remixed or collaboration tracks ranging from 2003 to Present.

Imagine, and listen to this. They had this in 2007. I just never got it till now.

Show me some love, strip off your clothes, and take off your socks

Edit: I don't know if I like The Dead Weather or not yet.
I do know I'm blown away by this video.
Get it. Because they're shooting each other.
With bullets. Like, from a gun.


All you need to know is, it's 2 in the morning and I'm prying apart Girl Talk again.


You know what? I Like Missy Elliott! She's in the, the same group as Timbaland (Literally. They were the driving producing force behind just about every hit you heard at school dances when you were in 4th to 8th grade. Then the Neptunes stepped into the spotlight.) musically, with really massive bass beats and weird ass noises.
She never takes herself too seriously, and her videos constantly amuse - and for the most part, she's tweaked her style each single enough that they're different.
That's the only downside, actually. Within each song, there are so many changes that I always find myself focusing/liking one couple dozen second long refrain or break.
If you a fly girl, get your nails done. Get a pedicure. Get your herr did.

That's what Girl Talk is, or rather, why it's wormed it's way into the generic college scene. It's just every couple-dozen-second-break that sticks in your head, stacked on top of one another until you can't....feel...the...pea underneath? I have no idea where I was going there.

Now, so, Missy is the driving element there. The only other two things you need to know are the beat at the very beginning (go, go listen again)

(How cool is this video. God. I love slow motion dancing. I love 1998. I love rollerskate disco. I'm okay with Faith Evans she's east coast, under P Diddy's label)

and the backing 80's synths for the verse (from like :30 to :56, go, go listen again)

(I fucking love the 80's. I love pulling fishes out of pots that turn into vector graphics for a turbine or something. I love shoulder pads. I can't stand this music.)

That's all I got. Unless you want to talk about Lycopodiophyta.

....go watch that rollerdisco video again. How fucking sweet is the guy in gold and black. I want him to follow me around and just dance all the goddamn time.

هزار و یک شب

This is an update this is an update this is an update that concerns.

Feces.

Well, not really. But it plays an integral, if unimportant role.

You know me. I'm decidedly wussy - certainly not one considered to be masculine.
In short, I don't laugh at most fart jokes.

This is not a fart joke.

It is, however, a story of how poop influenced my life at approximately 11:00 pm tonight.
We'll start there.
Let's get it out of the way, something embarrassing, something far too unpleasantly human and organic for my general tastes.

I pooped. Deal with it.

I tried to.

Deal with it, that is, not poop.
The poop (here, as a verb) was altogether successful in that it was executed to completion.
You may release your breaths held in by anxiety, oh Best Beloved. There is no part of the story where the poop exists in a non-designated poop area or state of being. The poop remained in the toilet the entire time.

This, in fact, is the root of the problem.

Know that I am most effortfully so attempting to recount this tale in as tactful and well-spun manner as I can.

Know, O Jewel of the West, that this is patently impossible.

I have never flooded a bathroom before.
It is, all things considered, a terrifying experience.

I understand now, a very tiny little bit, what it is like to have your religious beliefs crumble in an instant.

You pray, or wish, or whatever you want to call it, every time you flush. You might not do it consciously - in fact, it's almost entirely automatic - but it does happen and everyone does it whether or not they've had a prior "experience" or not.

You are saying to yourself, to the poop god, to all toilets familiar and foreign, you are making a silent prayer that you never have to see this particular poop again.
You are achieving closure. This is the end of this relationship, every party involved knows it, and the feelings are mutual.

Sometimes, and I'm sure everyone has experienced this at some point or another, the gods test you.

The flow.

Doesn't.

The water goes up. Slowly. Menacingly. God himself shows up, eyebrow raised, silently waiting to see how you react to this new situation.

Have you studied your bible? Do you know the secret handshake? Has some kind uncle pulled you aside by your ear by now, to teach you about the miracle of the U-bend and how to properly operate a plunger?

Are you, in short, prepared to deal with your shit a second time?

And if you are, if you rise to the challenge, god smiles upon you and the waters recede. For now. And you fall to your knees and weep, thanking him. Thanking him for sparing you.

Tonight I was forsaken. I pray no more.

My god got angry, and He set upon me His most permanent and powerful of judgements.

The Flood.

You may, My Exquisite Desert Rose, release your baited breath once more.
It was only water. I survived to tell this tale to you, and in truth the real meat of the story lies in the buildup and the aftermath.

Let us avoid the unpleasant details. Suffice it to say that, like the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River (all set about with fever-trees) itself, my bathroom experienced monsoon season.

I am not a handy man. This is widely accepted as fact.
However, thanks once again to that benevolent uncle of mine, I have had the experience of replacing a toilet structure by myself. I feel fairly confident in my ability to, at the very least, prevent total armageddon.

That is now a past tense. I felt.

I mean, and here I must revert to base language, toilets shouldn't fucking do that.
I mean, they've got a catch mechanism that stops it when it's full, and a drain-off on the front in case of emergencies, you can go look at your bathroom sink, I bet it's got one too. Its a HOLE. Water goes IN IT. What the FUCK.


So. Flash forward to me standing in the bathtub, plunger and trashcan and rug and box and book all huddled at my feet like so many refugees, water literally waterfalling out of my ruined toilet.

Flash forward to me frantically leaning over and fiddling with chains, and bobs, and levery bits.
By now, any squeamish aversion to "toilet water" has been replaced by survival instinct.
This is my goddamn bathroom. More importantly, this is also my roommate Travis's bathroom.

I have flooded a shared bathroom.

I cannot call anyone in to help me. I would sooner ask a stranger to help me pick my nose, or de-lint my bellybutton, or any other such personal invasion.

Eventually, after a few deep breaths, I stem the initial flow of water. The toilet immediately returns to its resting state, becoming the only normal thing left in this new aquatic environment. Smug fucker.

I'm left with about a half inch of water spread out over 25 square feet of tile, and -horror upon horrors- wet socks.

There are junk towels under the kitchen sink.

They are the equivalent of...

They have no equivalent. They fit no metaphor. They are useless towels, they are sopping wet and there is still water on the floor.

It is time to man up.

"Hey......Travis.....we got a bucket?"

"Why."

"Water." That word is code. That word explains everything. No further explanation is needed.

"......We have some towels under the kitchen sink."

"You know, I thought you'd say that."

He walks over, takes one look at the room, and gets his keys.

There is still half an hour before he has to be halfway across town for drunk-as-a-skunk birthday celebrations.

We are going to buy a mop.

AC/DC yells at us the entire drive to the Pharmacy.

I buy a mop. Travis buys some candy. I buy some candy. Travis points out more candy. I buy more candy.

The entire event loses its magic, its allure, its meaning.
Not that I feel chastised, or particularly ashamed.
It was just a thing that got Dealt With.

But it makes for a shitty conclusion to a story of a bathroom visitation from the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River,all set about with fever-trees:

And so I mopped my bathroom with my new mop.

It's cleaner than it's ever been.

And so I wrung out four towels on my stoop, and bunged them in the washing machine to be dealt with in the morning.

And so I consoled myself with a two pound bag of swedish fish and an hour spent glorifying my own memories.

And so I recline, idle, spent, barely able to cram fistfuls of sweets into my languid face, spinning terrible yarns out of an otherwise dreary and unpleasant experience.

And so, Heart of my Heart, my Shining Radiant Moon, my Inspiration for the Fire of my Words, this tale draws to a close.

Maybe I'll kill you tomorrow night instead.



Edit: Oh you know how this goes by now.
It goes Thom Yorke, who has been fiddling about with his acoustic guitar for about long enough now, thanks, get back to work.

and then it goes Jay-Z doing something way outside his traditional style. Ignore the last minute of the song, it's the end track shoutout rideout for the Black Album.

To test Reality, we must see it on the tight rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.

I'm glad you asked.

My point, to reiterate, was that the attempted definition of/search for the "perfect girl" is ultimately unhealthy.

And impossible, but that's beside the point. I mean, jumping into the sun is equally impossible and equally unhealthy. In fact, that's a fine metaphor for reasons I'm going to ignore in order to maintain a somewhat directed level of discussion.

Already I've gotten derailed. That's the brilliant and annoying thing about this kind of writing, it always guarantees something, just never what you really plan for.

I was saying something about girls.

I remember previously saying a few things about girls. I'm sure there is more to say. That's really the fascinating thing about them.

People sometimes get on my ass about playing the same videogames for too long. And when I say people, I mean my Shadowhalf.

This metaphor has been discontinued due to the rational half of the author wrenching back control over the flow.

I always throw the music in at the end or the beginning.
Here. Have some Norah Jones collaborating with Wax Poetic. Unexpected? Correct!



I opened this to write about girls, and now I'm writing about Oscar Wilde.
I am madly in love with just about everything Oscar Wilde says, ever.
Especially The Picture of Dorian Gray - his sole published novel.
It's the perfect outlet for everything Wilde. Each character serves only as a mouthpiece for his own (to use his own words, in fact) "wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories". Theories about life, theories about love, theories about pleasure.

Indeed, he even describes it so himself: "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps"

Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy

Every line of dialogue in this book is the progenitor of bumper stickers, witty t-shirts, facebook status updates, and a million minutes of wishing you were half as clever as that.
It's fun to read. It's a confection, a wonderful conceit, sweet and tart and bad for you. It perks up your appetite and gets you addicted, it cuts your tongue and leaves you tasting granulated sugar in your next meal.

It's so perfect, it can be used to describe itself in a series of auto-quotations.

It's like a cigarette. "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit. "

It's a book written in code, like a poem written out of other, smaller poems.
It's fractal.

I could treat it like the Dao de Jing, and read a sentence of it every day until I die. Meditate on its meanings until I achieve enlightenment.

The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. they retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life.

Appropriate them for my own lowly means, sharing the quotes I like and impressing strangers with brutal and witty opines.

He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides.
It was an extraordinary improvisation

Fractal. Do you see?

How can I be bothered to talk about girls, caught up as I am in the heady sickly-citrus acidperfume of this brilliant, lofty, Irish bastard?

Nasa Prepares To Bomb The Moon

I had my first real hunger pang for WoW today, since I stopped playing three months ago.
I've been filling the void with HoN for the most part. I've written about that already, and what I said continues to hold true. Steady updates shoveling new content into my gaping maw have whetted my appetite to a bearable thrumming, while the maximum match time of 1.5 hours allows me to have a normal social life.
That is, I talk to other people and don't spend all my free time playing videogames. Those are the definitions I go by. They are pragmatic.

Today I had the strange experience of feeling the desire to visit an entirely fictitious place.
It was specific, I wanted to, in WoW, fly over to Zul'Drak - the snowy part - and go look at the roaming Harkoa kits.
See, each "race" of trolls - forest, jungle, ice - pray to their own set of animal-hybrid Loa spirits. Har'koa is the snow leopard goddess, the only one left after the ice trolls of Northrend brutally sacrificed their own gods in a desperate bid for power to defeat the advancing forces of the Lich King (P.S. it totally didn't work and now the Argent Dawn has to deal with, from one side, rabid ice trolls and, from the other side, with undead rabid ice trolls.
Luckily, as I may have mentioned before, this is pretty much what us paladins do in our goddamn leisure naptime.

So the Harkoa kits are these children of the snow leopard, but they've turned corrupted and bitter at the mistreatment of their mother.
They're basically massive, skulking mottled black snow leopards with flaming red eyes, prowling around a deserted altar.

And I, in my brain for a few seconds, went, "I'd like to go fly over there and muck about."

They don't even, like, they aren't in any way beneficial. They don't drop great items.
Anyway, it was fleeting but I thought it was significant enough because it's been a while since I talked about WoW on this blog and hey, I've got a quota to meet.


In other news, this.

won a grammy for best remix.
This makes me happy, in part because I love Justice, but mostly because the original song did not win a grammy.
I fucking hate MGMT. I hate the song.
Due to this, I love this remix on two different levels.
One, it's just damn good. Classic Justice, uses their signature sounds, takes it in a new better direction.
Two, it's grimy. It's thumping. It's dirty. It's a corruption of the real song, a darker and funkier shadow half. Maybe I've just got a thing for seeing things I dislike get ground in a little, beaten by French electrohouse.

Basically what I am saying is, MGMT tried to open the pickle jar and failed.
Justice came along and opened it for them and ,sneeringly, handed it back.

Edit:
Legal proceedings

MGMT settled a legal dispute with the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy in May 2009, receiving a settlement payment that they plan to donate to a charity to help musicians with similar legal battles. The song "Kids" was used on several occasions without permission (in 2008), at a party conference and in two online videos. The party paid a standard fee of €53 to the French music licensing party, but this license did not cover all uses of the song. The UMP, Sarkozy's political party, admitted that the song had been used without permission and offered a symbolic compensation of €1. The band rejected the offer, claiming it was "insulting".[19] The band's lawyer commented that "we are dealing with acts of counterfeiting, with infringements of intellectual property."[20] Ironically, Nicolas Sarkozy is known as a vocal supporter of stricter intellectual property laws.[21]

MGMT can go take a flying fuck at a flaming dumpster.

A Catch In The Voice

Oh Carl Sagan.
You're a remnant.
There is no modern-day equivalent of you. Like Einstein and Feynman and others like them, you were equal parts brilliance and charisma - the link between the hard sciences and the general public.
Eloquent and charming enough to turn the dry data into perceivable wonders.
Grandiose but not overly so. Reverent but curious.

The relationship between Science and Most People has fallen into disrepair in, as Sagan put it in 1971, "this increasingly mad and dangerous world".

We need a spokesperson again, a Bill Nye for adults. Someone with enough unashamed enthusiasm to infect the public, with the credentials and stirring imagery to garner respect.

Everyone likes grand, sweeping summations of science. We all watched Planet Earth. We all watched March of the Penguins. We all watch Nova.
We love to see, to hear the wonders of the universe broken down into observable characteristics. Hopefully narrated by a trustworthy and educated guide. Morgan Freeman will do in a pinch.
We love to understand, or at least to nod our head slowly and feel, for just that 60 minute program, like we've learned something - collectively. That we, as Humans, are moving forward. Because that is our biological imperative. We need to be reassured by the intellectual elite, the Scientists, that we are Making Progress.
Because we're all busy with politics and parking meters and bake sales and True Blood, we're too bogged down with real life to do any Science ourselves, we're stuck in the dried up grass of This Side of the field.

We need a Carl Sagan to come and point out the things we should ooh and ahh at - without him, the translator, we're divided into two incompatible groups.
A small contingent of exhausted but grinning scientists holding a blurry photograph and speaking incomprehensibly among themselves, standing in front of a much larger group of busy, irritated and oh-so-slightly resentful regular people.

Without you, we cannot communicate farther than squinting at the photo and commenting on why, what with how much money it cost, we can't see a damn thing.
Which causes resentment on both sides.
Because Scientists need somebody to marvel at their work too. Everyone loves being verified, being praised.

Everyone loves Carl Sagan, aglow and professional, leading us in a sincere appreciation for both the fascinating frontiers and the secretly fascinating everyday aspects of life.
Everyone loves feeling like a little bit of both, like a contributing member of universal understanding.

Everyone loves feeling like a genius.

This is why I have a tendency to write, furiously and incomprehensibly, on my whiteboard - nay, on any available surface - when I'm absolutely boiled-as-an-owl drunk.
I want to feel that lightning sizzle of ideas making the jump from ethereal to substantial.
I'm more concerned with the feelings being produced than, say, the content, subject matter, or readability of the material at hand.

This is why it always starts off small, controlled, an actual effort by Drunk-me to jot something down for Sober-me to remember in the morning. But once I've got the pen in my hand and the blood rushing in my ears, I can't stop until I've produced something victorious. Triumphant. A work of brilliance.

A 100% illegible drunken scrawl. Usually about girls, or ice cream, or violins, or sex, or girls. Freed from the restraints of, well, comprehensible logic, I write! Pointlessly and exuberantly!
Exclamations of the night, admonishments for the future, remarks upon the past. Repetition of letters that are fun to make, pleasing to the eye. If I draw a perfect G, I'll use words with lots of g's.

It never fails to bring a smile to my face the next day, to get up and frown at something I have no recollection of writing, to try and interpret whether it's an H or a 3 or my attempt at a chinese pictogram I half made up. Or a small picture of a dragon in place of a word.

I can never understand them, and I don't copy them down before I erase them.
That isn't their function.

But everyone wants to feel like a creator, a savant, especially when they're drunk.
At least I'm keeping it private.
At least I'm not mouthing off to some dumb girl, or spouting ignorance just to boost myself up a little further that way.
Some people get this kick that way. You've seen it happen. It's awful.

It's also addictive.
It's also ultimately a letdown when you come off your drug of choice and find out you aren't the next Newton/Michelangelo hybrid.

Unless you're Carl Sagan.
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.


Also, and by now you should learn to seamlessly transition from my conclusions to music mode, here is some authentic West Coast hip hop.

(Note: I am still on a drum and bass tech-house breakbeat binge but I assume by now you are sick of it. I'm nothing if not amiable.)