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

Zombie Walk!

So, a couple of weeks before Halloween last year, I heard of the concept of a Zombie Walk. It's like a flash mob, only instead of everyone just showing up, everyone shows up as zombies. They lurch about town, stopping traffic and generally making unaware citizens give weird looks.

Having no idea how to coordinate a flash mob, and given that the time frame was so small, I did nothing about my desire to actually participate in one. I perused the web and found that there were couple of really good ones that occurred in St. Louis and a couple of other cities. It sounded fun.

I think the idea of a flash mob is to simply show up with approximately NO warning, thus planning a flash mob is a little counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, I have decided that by the time Halloween rolls around this year, I will have organized and conducted a successful Zombie Walk.

There are a lot of fun variations off of which you can play. People running away, being caught up, horded by zombies and coming up as an infected. You could get zombie hunters, even dress up your dog. We could even try and play up some publicity, maybe litter flyers to a certain charity, or simply raise zombie awareness. There are so many options and things to plan, which is why I've started now.

The tentative date is October 23rd, and we're thinking somewhere in the University City Loop. More details are certain to follow. Here's the Facebook link.

And remember: BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINNSS!!!!!

-The0

Shark

Yet another Rammstein Video! Haifisch! Another ecstatic review! Commence!

Of course, you'll need to see it. Here is a link, but depending on the country in which you reside, you may not be able to see it. Partial world banning. Fun! (Side note: It is odd that they used Myspace. Maybe it's still big outside of the US.)

The song, which reminds me a bit of earlier The Clash, is itself based loosely on a verse of the song Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, known more commonly as Mack the Knife. Instead of having teeth, the shark has tears, which seems to imply that even monster-ish murder machines can have sensitive feelings. The actual verses to the song tell a story of solidarity and fellowship among the band mates. Keeping that in mind, we turn to the video.

This is another Rammstein video which tells a story, rather than an abstract collection of scenes or 0f them simply playing their respective instruments. In it, Till Lindemann, the vocalist, has apparently died. As the video progresses, we learn of opportunities each band member has had to murder him, or ways they actually did murder him. It's a little unclear. The average Rammstein fan will notice that these murder scenes are from previous Rammstein videos. Without Till, the band starts to fall apart and hate each other. It's actually quite arrogant and aggrandizing, but I love it all the same.

Of course, it's not Rammstein without something disturbing and/or wrong in the video. There's enough of that to garner attention, but what grabbed my eye a couple of times were Rammstein's winks at other popular metal acts. Marilyn Manson is in attendance at the funeral, and James Hetfield of Metallica sent a postcard or something.

Summarily, it's an engrossing video, and it takes a few views to try and get all of it. The hate that surfaces at the death of a friend is an actual reaction that has occurred at funerals, I understand. Watch the video, and then for fun, watch all the others, and see if you can figure out from which the reworked scenes came!

-The0

Through the Fire and the Flames

It's a little odd, the way some jobs can affect one's psyche and confidence. First off, I wish to call to mind a specific scene from the movie Go. In said scene, a father is stitching a bullet wound up on his son, talking about how there are no real promotions in life any longer. What simply occurs is the man ahead of another man fails at his job, and the other man moves up to replace the previous man's incompetence. This seems to be the way of his world, my question however, it what if something similar to the reverse happens?

What if a man can move up the ladder in skill and ability, but the replacement for his former position is not as enthusiastic or competent at the job as the man he is replacing? Does it speak poorly on the training abilities of the the ladder-climber? Does it reflect the difficulty of the job on new man? Should the person who moved up, move back down, and restart the whole process? Or should he maintain his new position, proud of the progress he's made, cast to naught the duties he once considered so important? Is it a prideful move, or one of quiet dignity?

I don't think I would make a very good boss. I would get bogged down thinking about this and the feelings of employees, instead of just bossing them around, which is what bosses are paid to do.

Well aware of the danger of his words,

-The0

Dendro-dander

I fucking hate pollen. Here I am, saving money by opening my window instead of turning on my damn air conditioner. Then here's some beautiful-ass tree outside of my window, spraying pollen all over my room and things. Yellow dust, everywhere.

Now, I realize that I could simply close my windows, turn on my air-conditioner, be happy and quit complaining, but this shit was EVERYWHERE!!! From my keyboard to my TV, a fine gold powder which wasn't gold powder.

It's not like I can get revenge either. I can't reverse the situation, go outside and spray my genetic material all over this tree. It'll be exhausting in the first place, secondly I'll get hurt (probably.) Lastly, well, I'll probably get one of those little blue squares put over my home on an online map.

Why can't we arrest trees for being sexual offenders?

-The0

April 1

OMG! I ws txting 2 my bff Walt dat i m goin to quit my bl0g cuz it takes 2 much tyme! Latez!

-The0

Placement Agencies are like job hunt butcher shops.

I have always been the kind to think about work while I'm at work, and that may be the reason I'm never the best at my job. Doing so, however, leaves me with revelations and realizations that I carry with me for quite a while, so I may just keep doing it.

One epiphany was that the job you perform is what you contribute to society. The harder you work, the more you produce, the more money you get. You then use this money to get things that you need or want that others have produced in the same society. It's like a standardized, long distance barter system. There was more to it, I'm just paraphrasing.

Another breakthrough that I had recently was that some jobs just don't fit some people. I remember back in college they had these tests which I would have been able to take which would magically be able to read my then-personality and tell me exactly what kind of job I should have been looking for. I think I ended up taking one of them, but never following through.

What I have begun recently is looking for a place where I can take these tests again. While I have been known to bitch about work before, it seems to be coming to a head in which I am losing a lot of my personal life to my job. I'm not very happy with my progress, and what I do was something that for a time, I loved doing. I dread every morning now.

If I had to start searching again, I'd start by finding out if there's a test to find a job I won't hate in 6 Months.

-The0