Prince of the Mods

But not like the Scooter-riding, Italian suit-wearing Mods. You see, in spirit of my previous post post, I thought I might divulge my aforementioned compulsion. A spirit of change, the winds of non-conformity!

I have this fluid theory on life. "Nothing is truly yours until you modify it." Modification! Change in order to make something more to your liking. This can be as complex as a total overhaul of your car, as ho-hum as adding a part to your bike, or as simple as changing the settings on your cell phone. So long as you make it better to your liking, it's your thing. Your object, your mirror reflecting who you are to you, and to the rest of the world. It's a conversion to conversation piece from stock NIB item. It's materialistic, but it doesn't have to be.

It can mean modifying one’s self too. Taking effort to change for better or for worse. A workout regimen, a tattoo, or a drug addiction. Whatever moves you forward. I feel like I owe it to myself to undertake the task that makes my life better to my liking. Fluidity, Improvement, Personalization, and Movement. It's like Kung-Fu zen. Or just plain metal. I don't care. No! It's metal. There, that's my stink on the idea.

This philosophy came forth during a period where I was starting to get into bikes and computers. I got my close friends to subscribe to the idea as well. It's come to the point where the only ones who know what's going on with our stuff, is us. Awesome times, to be sure. I make it a point to modify my computer at least every six months (it helps to keep it closer to the cutting-edge, if you will.) My bikes get tweaked monthly. My sax? I tune its springs as they fall out of tune. I do this to pretty much everything.

It seems like a good way to go through life. You'll always be able to find something to do. You'll always be richer for some experience, and if nothing else, well, at least you tried to do something new. It's a lifestyle. Change to your liking. Change to you. Essentially, it's like being yourself, but with an effort-filled, yet subdued way. Comment with questions if you're confused.

-The0

P.S. (reference) The title is only Prince, because Vince Noir is King of the Mods. (/reference)

Black and Red

Just before I went to college, I needed a way to transport myself. As I did not yet have a driver's license, and never really had access to a car anyway, it came down to a simple choice: Walk, or Bike. I had a high-quality Schwinn that my parents had actually bought for my little brother. He was already driving himself to and from school, so I claimed it as my own. This was my first foray into cycling, which was one of the costliest and most beneficial decisions I have made in my life.

During my sophomore year I began to ride with my best friend, who was a pretty aggressive extreme sports enthusiast. Through riding with him, I learn how to launch myself off of tall objects and then, while remaining mounted on the bike, land with the rubber side down. Everything was was progressing swimmingly, from skill to stunt complexity, until we started breaking our rides. We needed to find a machine that would keep up with our riding ability.

Since I already had a Schwinn, I had the old catalogue, in whihc I circled a couple of wish bikes. During a random trip to a bike shop about a half hour away, my friend pointed out a dual suspension bike just sitting in the store. About a week later, I was owner of one of my wish bikes, a 2001 Schwinn Rocket 88 Stage 4. Due to a compulsion which I will explain in a later post, it wound out being phenomenally upgraded, tweaked, decorated, broken, repaired and customized over the course of our riding careers.

We both had our bikes of choice, and this one was mine. When you ass spends that much time in a certain saddle, hunched over in a guaranteed position, you start to form a bond. I freaking love the Rocket. One evening, after a strenuous free day of simple stunt practice, my friend and I leaned our respective bikes outside of our fraternity house. I came back out to a horrible truth: My lovely Rocket had been stolen. A quick review of the surrounding area, plus a driving-mad-through-town excursion (I had gotten my license by this point) turned up neither hide nor hair of it. I was crushed. After hundreds spent and hours burned making it my masterpiece, it was simply gone. I couldn't quit sobbing. That was September of 2005. I still have a copy of the police report.

Let's fast forward to July, 2007. I was awoken one morning to a call from my old bike mechanic in my college town. Through his own efforts, he had distributed a description of the bike to all the bike shops within an hour of the town. Because of the insane amount of modification I had made to the Rocket, it was a total bastardization and amalgamation of cycling genres. A light trailbike with downhill racing brakes, XC drivetrain components, and stunt tires. It had shown up at a store a half hour away, having been brought in for service, presumably by a relation or friend of the fucker who stole it. The shop owner recognized it, called my mechanic, who then called me. I was speechless, and flustered out a thank you after collecting the number to the other store. I paid them to bring the bike just out of limbo, and then took it home a week later.

Later on in the following year, I dropped a massive amount of money to get it past its former glory, right into semi-pro condition again. I of course did all this through my man in my college town. Doing all my business through him for the rest of my life seems like a fair way to express gratitude. After all, I might never had seen my black and red abomination again if not for his effort and work on it in the first place. Some significant food for thought. What if I had done every bit of the modding myself? What if my friend and I never chanced upon his local shop? What if...

The moral of the story is multi-faceted. Keep loyal to your merchants. Write down your serial numbers. Lock your shit up. And after all of that, don't lose hope. Things that are taken from you are only things, and if they are truly meant to be yours, they'll come back.

Materialistically Yours,

-The0

Edit: 06/12/2010

I think it proper to add a picture, in order to really express the feel and love in this bipedal locomotion device.

Coincidence by Design?

I was driving back from a tap-house with a friend when a certain part of DJ Tiësto's live show at Dance Department in 2001 started playing over the vehicle's stereo system. It's hard to find a recording of this, and it's a trance track, so it's all one massive song. Still, I turned up the volume starting at 45:46, and showed my friend the melody that played.

Directly after that, I pulled out the CD and inserted Mutter, Rammstein's 3rd album. I advanced it to Ich Will, and had him listen to the bridge verse. Sure enough, a very similar melody played off of Flake's keyboard. We're talking 95% the same. Mutter was released before DJ Tiësto's live show by about 6 months. Did DJ Tiësto copy Rammstein, or was it simply a coincidence?

The idea I'm actually trying to bring up here is the point which came up seconds later in that very car ride. With the amount of musical groups out there, the finiteness of the musical spectrum, and the amount of popular material out there, it is nearly impossible to create original musical material. Everything will sound similar to something, be it Ich Will, Beethoven's 9th, Dethklok, or Vivaldi's Seasons. The very tune you may have idly whistled this morning could be strongly copyrighted by a very malevolent musical group. This can lead into a popular topic of what constitutes original content any longer, and does RIAA's authority apply. If so, where? Anyone who knows anything about this, please feel free to post in the comments.

My favorite bit of unoriginal content in Rammstein would be in their song Moskau. Those who have played Half-Life and Half-Life2 will remember the Gauss gun, a gun which would wind up with a very distinct sound. This sound can be heard throughout the song, but most noticeably at 3:10, end of the bridge. In my eyes, this shows that Rammstein, if they don't like us Americans, they at least like our video games.

Winding up for a busy day by listening to good music,

-The0

C2H6O

OK, so here it is. My first, long-planned-finally-conducted drunken post. I have been wondering what a drunken post would look like for a long while now, and I think the idea for which I've actually been shooting has been to simply stream what goes through my head during these very frequent and very horrifically private times of inebriation.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is blaring at me as I hunt down specific keys, Dana Snyder's clever interpretation of Master Shake believing again that somehow he is in the right, no matter how ridiculous the situation. Orgy's Vapor Transmission fighting for more of the sonic realm of awareness. It is winning, Eva winning over a magnificent part of attention from this current mood, feeling, and environment over to an earlier, more nostalgic part of my experience. I got this CD from a very then-close friend, right when I first moved into this apartment.

I've lived here for more than 3 years, longer than I've lived in any one place, including during college. Even back in Junior High and grade school, I switched rooms several times. This little overpriced hovel I keep now is my area, my home, my space. I'm going to miss the hell out of it. I know I have to move soon.

I think I am very glad for the fact that I kept a daily journal after the first 8 months that I lived here (14 month total of writing IN that journal, 8 months after I moved in, if that makes sense), and then, right after I gave up that, I started this blog. I think it might be a very good thing that I kept some form of chronicle. For you see, with as much as I drink lately, from job-related stresses and life-stresses in general, I may very well forget my golden years altogether. That is the reason I try to make it a point to get a regular number of posts out. To at least get a regular record of my experience out. This weblog isn't for all of you, you see, not to disregard my readership where it exists. This is for me to keep track of and categorize my memories for all time.

They say that once something is posted to the internet, it can never truly be erased. As long as electrons flow and hard drives continue to magnetically flip bits, I will remain immortal in my obscurity.

There seem to only be more questions at the bottom of this bottle, for the record.

-The0

The Dead Wings

It's finally dead. I killed it. I beat the fuck out of my dying, ancient-when-it-was-new phone. It had it coming. It was an HTC Atlas PDA phone, and I fell in love with the full keyboard and touchscreen. It was really fun, when it was new.

It was also poorly built from the start. One accidental drop will absolutely void the clips that hold on the back/battery door. This will allow your battery to disengage whenever the damn it so pleases. Massively annoying. And the touchscreen of such a phone then was ridiculously brittle. You bump a counter top with the thing in your pocket, you can kiss the screen goodbye, or at the least, the touchscreen. Say hello to operating your voice mail with the keyboard open. On the last iteration of this battery fumble, I rapped it, in simple frustration. This rapping, no more severe than I had given it AFTER the touchscreen broke, shattered the screen. I was fuming, and smashed the thing mostly into a hulk of itself. Somehow, it CAN still receive calls, the best plus I can give it this far into the game.

Not that I'm EVER going to want to place another call on a Windows phone ever again. Windows Mobile 6 is a fat, steaming pile of shit of an operating system, especially on a 200 mHz processor. There are absolutely NO fun or useful applications or features that can be downloaded for WinMo6. It had a rudimentary web browser which could make it all the way to YouTube AND download a video that would exceed its minuscule memory reserves, only to find that wasn't the ONE type of video media the little piss-wad would play.

3g service wasn't precisely fresh then, but it wasn't old-news. Still, fuck that feature. GPS, nil, reliable boot-up, null. Hard reset required once a month? You bet your fucking ass.

I'm sticking with my provider, but fuck Windows. I love you Microsoft, but you fucked me over just as much as HTC did then. I'm going HTC again, thinking that they've improved themselves, but the future of cellular communication is Android, I think. As others of my clique have said, it's good that there is a reliable competitor for iPhone. God bless you Google.

My phone of choice releases in 11 days. Here's hoping it doesn't sell out before I can get one.

-The0