Sonorous hum

Nothing quite as sad as a blog neglected. There it mopes and whines in the rain of electrons, thick rivulets running down its sides, hair matted and plagued with digital fleas too stubborn to drown. Searching desperately for sustenance, it's been known from time to time to even engage in cannibalism, and the shame of those acts reflects in the tears it tries to dam behind its brave but ragged shell, poor thing.

I've been mentally gearing up for the release of Wrath of the Lich King. The standing joke is that on thursday life ends - but as my sister put it, with my two epic flight mounts I've already turned the whole apartment complex to no-life, so maybe there's little sense in worrying about that. The comforting thing is that I probably won't have enough time to both finish leveling my hunter and acquire one for it too, so the rest of the residential area gets to stay living - whatever it means for them. (They probably won't even realize the peril they've been in, much less understand to be grateful.)

Life, though... Most of the time when thinking of writing about it I feel at loss for words. Days seem to roll by on their own weight with very little input from me. I think I'm still prey to the delusion of heroism: That to be a protagonist worthy of my story I should go out of my way to accomplish something extraordinary every minute of my waking hours. Hell, even my dreams should be way out there instead of just semi-freudian sci-fantasy action flicks. I think the fundamental problem for me is the inability to set a goal worth pursuing. Whenever I start thinking about possible courses of action, I feel that no matter what I achieved, I'd still feel dissatisfied with it. Somehow the train of thought that begins there always ends up circling back to the start and I end up just asking myself "why". Is it too depressing if the only answer I can come up with is "why not"? I don't know, really, but it's what I've been trying to learn to content myself with. Just hanging there, taking it one day at a time, working when there's work to be done and generally being lazy otherwise.

Next weekend I'll get to go jamming with the boys again. That should provide a nice distraction too.

Sitting here, in the comforting glow of my newly acquired lcd to rival movie theaters, drowning in the jet engine roar of my dust-clogged laptop and sipping the last of my hot chocolate before heading off to work, I find a certain calm that has been missing for a long time. Even though once again I'm only certain of todays employment, the reality of it doesn't so much bother me as it just passes through me. It's a thing, but I need not be concerned with it. I can pay next months rent and still have something left to buy food with. Looking back to how my mornings were last winter - late, hateful and dreary - the change is nothing short of amazing.

It's not like there aren't viable subjects aplenty. In the last few weeks events and states have ranged from cozy to surreal, but I'm just too tired to put it all into words. After work the only thing I can really think of is getting rid of my sweat-soaked clothes, taking a shower and crawling into bed to die. Maybe eat something and watch some Hikaru no go first, if I'm lucky. WoW keeps tempting me as does Spore, but there just doesn't seem to be enough time in a day. It feels like I've just gotten myself going when it's already time to go to sleep to recharge for the next day.

Haven't had a real free day for over four weeks now. At least I don't have newspaper deliveries this week before saturday. (The bicycle route I got a while back is almost a post by itself.)

Saturday shambled by in a hung over daze. The other half of last nights pizza, half a bowl of popcorn and some cold meatballs kept me going, but after going to sauna in the evening, I was at zero stamina. On sunday I got up late and spent the whole day productively in the lands of Azeroth. More than that, I spent the following night there too - after all, it was my free week before the back-to-back early mornings, delivering newspapers for the whole september. After the sun had already risen I finally gave in and went to bed, only to be awoken by my cell phone chiming its happy song. Turns out I did get the position I had been asking for and got "promoted" to delivering real mail. And work began at ten am. So much for free time. What really makes things interesting for next month at least is that I had already promised to work at the newspaper side of the operation, so I'll be doing one and a half mans worth for the month. After that I'll probably need a breather (or more likely a respirator).

Ah, the gray, dank, lightning-blistered beauty of the finnish monsoon season. While smoking on the balcony, the fine spray from the rain on the railing misting my face, I noticed that I had used the adjective torrential to describe the weather twice in back-to-back posts. And both in the opening paragraphs too. What an embarrassing slip. I really need a better synonymicon.

The friday before last saw us packed in a station wagon borrowed from our parents, heading south for what would be just about the last possibility of a festival experience this summer. Three of us journeyed through first sun, then drizzle and finally a torrential downpour that had me thinking about building an ark to salvage what was left of decent humanity and animalkind. At the festival grounds the rain continued as fierce as it had ever been, the inhuman tears of some long-forgotten god lamenting its creations loss of faith.

Punk was had and as the vocalist barked out stark condemnation of the church and state, little girls danced barefoot in the mud in a prelude for the madness to come. Somehow that image stayed with me, ringing of innocence and earlier times when music was still completely a shared experience - before the onset of industrialization of creativity and hypercalculated marketing schemes. There was the wordless connection, the sound and feeling reaching deep inside a being and caressing the heart, the frantically splashing feet and the swaying bodies a contented kitten purr answering to the touch. Although my supposedly water-proof coat had proven not so and my impermeable trekking shoes had not lived up to their promise, my drenched and shivering being was held up by my undampened spirit.

Later on, great finnish metal names proved their worth. Diablo had the whole crowd roaring out the choruses, the people at times almost drowning out the band itself. Moshpits broke out and yours truly chose that moment to step back from the fray lest he get trampled underfoot. The more frantic pushed, shoved, headbanged and slid along the muck, getting helped up and yanked right back in. The rain that had ceased made a triumphant return just as the band got into a slower, more melodious piece dedicated to the members of the fairer sex present and absent.

Stam1na was also met with overwhelming enthusiasm. Although their vocalist at times took some leave from his duties at the mike, the throng made certain that no word of the lyrics was left unscreamed. During their gig the pits grew even more furious and the band only fueled the mayhem, urging the seemingly demon-possessed moshers into a frenzy. At the beginning of the last piece before the inevitable encore, I got to witness a wall of death. In a custom before unknown to me, people lined up on two sides of a clear divide and smashed head-on into each other as the music began. Scrum comes to mind.

By that band she had also materialized on the scene, transported by an almost pauseless hitchhike straight from her job. Tired by an early wake-up and work as we both were, we still found ourselves smiling at the teenagers in front of us screaming at each other and the stage. Their carefree wildness made me feel old in a way both unsettling and comforting at the same time.

The final act of the evening was what we had come to see; Meshuggah gave a show as bleak and grinding as their music. Nary a smile touched their lips as they wrought their jagged-edged dystopia upon the onlookers, a meticulously controlled chaos of asphalt, saw blades, fields of ruined towers and nightmarishly twisted insane organic machines feasting upon the enslaved human wreckage. She rocked in my arms, eyes closed, absorbing the rhythmworks as I raised my fist in concert with the others and yelled out my acceptance and adoration of their way.

Of the first leg of our trek back, before my first jug of black caffeine salvation, I have only a vague recollection that consists of just rain on the windscreen, refracting the headlights of our vehicle as I drove along the winding forest road. There was a comfortable loneliness in staying awake while the others slept, keeping hands on the reins of the fire-bellied metal beast propelling us forward, a feeling of having grown up. I remembered dozing off in the shotgun seat on family vacations, while my father was driving. In the hum of the engine and the soft sound of the radio I felt completely safe. For me to have the same kind of trust from others is humbling and at the same time uplifting.

As the sun began to climb back to the sky, she awoke to keep me company. We talked about the kinds of things people on a long drive talk about. Honey - huge vats of it. Somehow that turned into a discussion of the fate of our bodies when time passes us. I contemplated having a feast prepared in my honour - me being the main course - but the thought is perhaps too macabre to even be voiced. (As you can now imagine.) A more enticing and wicked option would be to plasticize my body like they do to those of whom the whole-body slice-scans are taken, encase that in a cube of clear plastic and then saw the whole thing into two-inch cubes, creating a 3D puzzle in my likeness. I think such an afterlife would, in all its wickedness, be a suitable tribute to my sense of humour.

After what seemed to me like years of torrential rain and damp, dready clouds hanging down level with my shoulders, the sun emerged from its hiding. I spent most of the morning with string instruments and studio software, sketching up and fleshing out an idea I'd had the night before. Still a work in progress, though. Some two minutes of track length in, the multitudinous avenues opening before me provided a good place to put the fledgling thing on hold for later revision. I laid down my electric axe, relieved myself of my garments - save for shorts - put on my sunglasses and sat down on my balcony to jam with my acoustic under the scorching gaze of Gods radiant eye. Thus came to be the first part of my burning.

While doing groceries it hit me that it was a perfect day to go outside so I rung her up and proposed a picnic-ish outing on a certain forlorn bridge she had remarked would be perfect for such an occasion. So I donned my clothen armor, packed my knapsack and charged towards our rendezvous on the saddle of my triple-butted steel framed horse. I found her with her friend deep in discussion on the various merits of different makes of cast-iron frying pans. They both ended up buying one and though I managed to avoid getting one myself - and understand, the items in question were very compelling arguments in and of themselves - I was teetering so precariously on the edge that a hummingbird thinking of a nice, succulent steak in Tierra del Fuego could've toppled me the other way. She promised to let me use hers if I'm nice and that's enough incentive for me to comply. Indeed, perhaps even to strive.

We coursed lazily through the other departments in the store, remarking on whatever suited our fancy. I saw a few potential candidates for future dining and coffee tables, but was quickly put off by the three-plus digit price tags. The sofas were mostly cozy and impressive too, but of those adjectives only the latter could be applied to their cost, and definitely not in the flattering sense of the word.

I waited outside the grocery store while they went to pick up a couple of beers and some pistachios. That's what they said they'd do anyway. I had already progressed in my boredom to the state of walking aimlessly around, taking great care to align my foot perfectly with the paving tiles on every step, when they finally returned from their hunt. Apparently things had gotten a little out of hand, one impulse purchase leading on to a slew of others as she egged her hungry friend on to more and more outlandish culinary ventures. Toast and processed cheese I understand, lemon and cinnamon spiced chocolate-dipped cookies I can still dig, but blueberry soup? Outdoors? At four o'clock in the afternoon? You be trippin', sir.

The bridge over the railyard was both too busy and smelly for the gentler two thirds of our party, leaving us with bounty but no lot to enjoy it. Instead of the numerous well-cultivated parks in our city, we ended up on a short strip of gravel road leading from a resting area by some truck terminals straight to the sea. There, between the reeds and bushes, under the ever-watchful oculus blazing high above, pandemonium ensued.

My recollections are mercifully hazy, but photographical evidence stirs up in my mind images both vivid and frightening. While we gorged ourselves we found the number of chocolate puddings to be indivisible by the strength of our crew. A competition was called for and won by being the first to toss three pistachio shells into a foil cup a few meters away. After the winner had had his second helping, things quickly degraded and I bore witness to events that make me question if cameras can lie after all. Truth or some manipulation performed by darker magick, the pictures hint that it would be wise to shy away from frying pans as the weapon of choice, should you ever be called to duel either of my two companions. (I cannot be taken into account here, as I was only borrowing the pan for the picture. As everyone knows, the second you buy a cast-iron pan, you enter a blood bond becoming one with the pan and the pan with you. Using a pan not your own is akin to trying to punch someone with the fist of a third person, while holding said person by the legs.) My last ragged shred of reminiscence is of a horse. In the sea. A sea horse? I suspect the heat of the day star had taken its toll at that point and I had given in to delirium. Thus came to be the second part of my burning.

I never really got classical music before I listened to Rachmaninovs third piano concerto.

I slept way too little the night before last and way too much after work yesterday morning. As the end result I spent the rest of the day in a really queer mood; The kind of anxiety you get from wanting to create something - anything - but failing to start and resorting to secondary activities that pass the time and nothing more. At least some of it had to do with putting off blogging for far too long and developing a morbidly obese backlog of issues to cover. (Thus leading naturally to the solution of ignoring said backlog and writing about something completely different. Almost the first thing that came to mind, actually.)

I finished The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. On saturday, having read the first half of the book - most of it a treatise on the sexual activities and peculiarities of our species from a zoological viewpoint - I was constantly self-conscious of my behaviour. Amidst the crush of bodies at the Iron Maiden concert at Ratina stadium I kept noticing how my gaze wandered toward certain female members of the throng. It was quite odd and amusing to realize just how much it is the primal instincts that keep me going and not the self-tacked-on veneer of civility and intellectualism.

The latter half of the book added to the gotchas of the first but with a twist. There, sitting innocently between the analysis of behavioral quirks, was a paragraph on population density that compared the current human head count of some 3000 million to the mere 500 million a couple of hundred years before. That was in 1967AD. It brought to mind one of the recurring motifs from Pain of Salvations Be album: the exponentially growing number of people read aloud against the background of continually intensifying music. At first the intervals are measured in hundreds of years and the changes are small, but towards the end a veritable explosion presents itself. There are about 6,8 billion people now. In Be the story takes a turn towards pessimism and the population count for 2050AD crashes down to just five million people as natural disasters triggered by the overtaxing of the environment take their toll. In the real world events of such magnitude have yet to present themselves, although some might say that in recent years we've already seen the first signs of natural occurrences turned disastrous by overly dense habitation.

The most troubling part for me, though, was that the sentiment concerning overpopulation was nothing new. I've been aware of the problem for years - as I believe any man with even an iota of mental capacity and civilization about them would be. There still exists that part of me that resents me for being alive - for callously prancing around as a bacterium in the collective plague that we are on this planet. I know that my way of life with its computers, cars and refridgerated malt beverages takes a toll on the environment (much more so than, say, an average african - even though I'm not the one chopping down and burning rainforests to make room for my next crop because I'm too (lazy|stupid|ignorant) to fertilize and reuse my old fields). Indeed the ones saying that saving the world should start by offing oneself are completely right. The only problem is that that'd still leave the other 6,8*10^9 minus one living; The third world farmers deforesting their part of the world, the former Eastern Bloc and far east polluting the hell out of theirs and the white folk strip-mining, sweat-shop producing, di- and investing and waging pointless wars to satisfy their incorporeal overlords. That this problem is unsolvable barring the extreme personal solution or some impossible collective moment of total enlightenment and exacerbated every time another denizen of the developing countries starts wanting a piece of the american dream, another desirable item of media is made or I upgrade my hardware annoys the hell out of me. (Thinking about it now, I should probably be out there on the street corner, singing about it instead of wasting electrons, but what can you do? I'm way too comfortable being comfortable.)

Goodness gracious, it seems I'm developing an environmental awareness. Best go see a doctor before it festers, methinks. (For some reason it also irks me that I can't seem to write about such issues without resorting to crankiness and sarcasm. You'd think that I could at least try and be mature about it. Perhaps I need to vent a bit more to cool myself down after keeping it all bottled up?)

Talking about those things - unrealized creative impulses and how our world is going to hell in a hand basket - with her, she was curiously sympathetic. This is me counting myself blessed to have found a woman with such a depth of understanding. At times it's almost frightening how much her thoughts mirror my own, but luckily we are not without our differences. Playing four-in-a-row turned into a slowly heating philosophical debate on the correct way of playing a completely deterministic game. I advocated calculating as far ahead as one can and through some twists and turns we arrived at the consensus that the game was too simplistic to serve as proper material for argument. Our discourse will resume over a go board some day in the future. Later on we segued into writing poetry by candlelight, the pencil scribbles satisfying my hunger for accomplishment and her fresh-baked bread with chevre-flavoured processed cheese, tomatoes and basil sating my belly. Even though I didn't get that much sleep (again), I woke up refreshed. Lines in the Sand was a better morning song but the best thing was her, sitting across the table, smiling at me.

She's in her kitchen, cooking. To be exact, she's spinning around, phone in hand, searching for her spices and holding a conversation at the same time, asking the other person where to find things. Not that the other one would know, really. Röyksopp is playing in the background. Not quite night club volume, but two notches above the threshold where sonic wallpaper takes on a life of its own, becoming a space within another. The sun inches toward the low altitudes, the gilding adorning the birch leaves outside her window slowly fading into the directionless light blue that passes for twilight this time of the year.

She moved in to her new abode yesterday with the help of yours truly and a couple of others. Undaunted by rain our brave four loaded her belongings into frighteningly rickety trailerfuls held together by gravity, tarps, way too few lines and hope. Miraculously nothing fell by the wayside and we got to haul every item up three flights of stairs. No elevators in a house this low, of course. Our third and final round trip culminated in pizza, beer and pig tossing, gathered around a tabletop perched between two mattresses. Later, after a quarter of our number had resigned to exhaustion, we moved on to communal tanka poetry. Good times were had, even if we were half asleep by then.

In retrospect, June went by in a flash. Moving into my new place, beginning work, getting to terms with early awakenings, early bedtimes and reacquainting myself with the concept of consequences to every action - even inaction - provided me with plenty to do. But all that was mostly just routine, things of diminuitive importance. Well, mostly anyway. The atonement for a slight and the humble beginning of a healing process was nothing insignificant, even if the forms it took were sometimes almost ridiculously macabre.

The most resonant, the most vivid thing, though, was her. A presence that suddenly filled my life with sights, sounds, thoughts, silly risks and excesses in gastronomy and sleep deprivation. It's amazing how easily the gray filter through which I had gotten used to sullenly glaring at existence was peeled off and put aside. (Though knowing my nature, it is still stored somewhere, should I ever need it again. Sort of like the old army boots with their soles broken in two that I stored away in case I ever got to sending them back to the factory for a refund or a new pair, which I didn't.) At times I wasn't quite sure whether I was awake or sleepwalking and not quite brave enough to pinch myself to find out. But it looks like I really didn't dream it all and that thought makes me so happy I could actually glow.

These have been interesting times. These have been good times. Here's to more of them.

For a full week of sunny days I wanted to write about how the sky up here looks so limitless and deep that I could fall in if I just let go of the balcony. I've missed seeing the clouds stretch far away to the horizon. I've wanted to write of much more, but first I couldn't find the words and next I couldn't quite even find the time to search for them. Life somehow got in the way. (Packing up and moving out, peppered popcorn and movies and music with her by my side, intense joy wrestling with guilt and despondence with a laissez-faire abandon trying to calm them down and have them just trust the future...)

Some times you have to do things that might seem silly, pointless, or even outright stupid. Just for the sake of doing them. Yesterday I had just completed my morning deliveries when she asked me to accompany her and her friend for a ride north with the intention of hitchhiking back. There was no preset destination and I had work this morning, but I still agreed after a single act of goading. (She says "jump" and I ask "how high?" But as they said in A Record of Lodoss War: "One should never pass a chance for experience", much to the amusement of the nerdy crowd watching it years ago.)

We drove, watching the scenery roll by and become more and more archaic. A gas station named "Teboil Love", tractors on the rooftops of farming equipment stores, old houses, a nature still in the tender stages of spring. Our driver remarked it was almost like a form of time travel; Going back to the sixties, going back to spring from the full summer of the south. At times it did feel we weren't constrained to moving only in space. I listened to them talk, commenting occasionally and towards the end, dozing off.

Somewhere between Kemi and Rovaniemi we spied a group of shaggy bovines grazing on a field. After a closer (though still from the other side of the electric fence) inspection that yielded some photographic evidence and a discussion on the nature of cow couture wrt. hair styles we parted with our driver and began the business of securing a ride back. Two hours - seemingly days - later we finally gave in to despair sufficiently enough for the last truck we stuck our thumbs out at to stop and pick us up. (I know that where you find a thing is always the last place you look, but at that point we had resigned ourselves to trudging yet another kilometer to the next bus stop to try again. It could have taken a considerably longer time, but luckily didn't.) What's more, its route passed by Oulu, so it was a real jackpot. The driver was an amiable fellow, apprenticed and now fully employed in the tiling business. Listening to his tales of massive income and flexible working hours had us both seriously pondering the merits of higher education. (I also got to smoke in a car for the first time in my life. At 90 kilometers per hour, the cracked window was an excellent ventilator and the air rushing by eliminated the need for flicking ash off the tip of the cigarette. Thoroughly enjoyable.)

On the short walk home from the E4 offramp we laughed at everything and nothing in particular, relief duking it out with exhilaration; A happy ending for a reckless adventure, which I'm in no hurry to repeat. (Still, there's this small part of me that's bouncing up and down, going "when can we go again, when can we go again?" Exp whoring is such a disease sometimes.)

"Emptiness struck as he realized
There's no answer to 'Who am I? What am I?'
He then saw why men must construct for themselves
A cloud of unknowing"

-Spiral Architect: Cloud Constructor

I wrote this last night, but as usual, OPOY was having unimaginable difficulties keeping their nameservers up.

Perhaps the only fault I found in Mushishi was that the finale didn't bring much in the way of closure. But some faery tales may be better off without the happily ever after.

Toward the Terra, on the other hand, slowly picked up its pace, until the final episodes brought the story to a climax wholly worthy of being called a space opera. It could be that it's the single shot of rum and two glasses of distilled caffeine speaking, but as the pieces fell into place one by one and the depth of the final conflict was revealed, I felt like applauding. With a conclusion like that, I think I can forgive the teenage space academy drama in the sixth episode.

Monday - being the kind of day it is - brought with it a minute disaster. My roommate had to reinstall XP. Normally it wouldn't be such a big deal, of course, as such occurrences are a perfectly normal part of windows box maintenance, but this time some sinister force prevented the OS from recognizing and taking advantage of the second NIC. Thus our three-man crew was stranded without a lifeline. Persistent reiteration of the driver installation measures provided no solution as the system stubbornly quoth: "Nevermore!" Today I tried to revive my linux box that had suffered a hard drive failure some months prior, driving us back at the mercy of Microsoft produce. My efforts proved futile. First the gentoo minimal installer did not find the pppoe setup script that it should have and then the ubuntu server edition installer couldn't quite grasp the possibility of someone using USB-only HIDs. (USB keyboards? The audacity!) Thus I had to grasp at straws and procure a shiny new router/hub/wlan hub/coffee roaster/ground assault mecha. Even then I had to turn half of my posters upside down, sprinkle around the blood of stillborn swine, and - gasp! - RTFM before our connection was restored to its former glory and we could stop holding our collective breaths.

It could still be the caffeine, but I find myself tapping at the desk at an alarming rate. The other explanation is nicotine withdrawal. In my quest for the perfect bad habit smoking was the next logical choice after coffee, tea, alcohol and WoW. Such an easy one to pick up too. It incorporated itself into daily life with such nonchalance that after a couple of packs it I felt like I had always done it. That's probably as good a reason as any to kick it. I wonder how long the process will take and if I'll ever be able to smoke casually again.

Looking back at what you've written and seeing only a long string of nonsense isn't one of the most pleasing sensations. Then again, there are things of which you'd like to write as little as possible and others which you'd want to formulate into writing only once in your lifetime. Even if limiting the words to a single time of usage wasn't an option with the latter, you'd still like to at least use them as little (or rather with as few persons) as possible lest they get worn and unrecognizable.

Like the colour printer remarked upon its ink situation: "It's springtime and I've still got the hues."

The first eight episodes of Mushi-shi were quite beautiful in their melancholy. I hope the series will stay that way. It's quite refreshing after watching so much shounen. (For instance people aren't repeating each others names every five seconds. Seriously, try a drinking game where your only cue to drink is any version of the name or nickname of the protagonist. I guarantee you won't last through the last two episodes of Busou Renkin.)

A dear friend from far away came in to visit. As is customary in his presence, amounts of beer were ingested and effects thereof were felt. He remarked upon my dusty gamecube and its controllers, at which point I could nought but concede that I was no true console gamer and that I'd had others in his absence. He relented and his fury was felt only when he was - somewhat controversially, perhaps - in control of Samus.

When the concept of our meeting was still a weak thing woven from the frail thread of question, probing and tentative promise, there was talk of "a band" that was, as was implied, magnificient in its presentation. Knowing nothing more of the matter I blindly agreed to to see the spectacle. What I witnessed was to my expectations like a shot of heroin is to a half an ounce of beer. Never in my life would I have thought that I'd live through an episode of time that would be the epitome of a medieval night at the tavern, but there it was. The folksy bunch responsible for the music quickly grabbed a hold and shook me, heart and soul. One of those times when I was glad for someone elses recommendations. I'll have to extort the name of the group from my friend, so that I'll be able to find out when they perform the next time.

--

Next: a few hours of sleep and after that some more MtG.

WoW has kept me ever so busy during the last few months. It began as an escape, but lately I've started to feel more anchored to reality by it - as twisted as that sounds. Back when M:tG was still my poison, I scoffed at the raiders wasting away their nocturnal hours in endless excercises of slaying towering monsters and the following loot acquisition. But now that I've had my first taste of the ritual and its rewards, I've come to question why I didn't enter the brotherhood earlier. Sure, it may be a sign of madness. But at least I'm not alone in it.

Tomorrow will be a welcome change of pace, though, as instead of the magnificient (and griefer-infested) vistas of Azeroth and Outland, I will join my friends in braving the formless horrors and dark, oozing madness of the streets of Arkham. The King in Yellow has arrived and we are to host his welcome. It will surely be an event of magnitude.

...he is malfunctioning.

Pak chooie unf indeed.

Since Twendy Sided Tale dredged up old memes I thought the flash version might be superior.

And as far as old memes go, repetition is funny. At least until it gets tedious. But after a few minutes it gets funny again. At least I hope it does. Maybe your brain is wired in a different way than mine.

This one I found oddly compelling and heartwarming even a couple of years ago. Perhaps because it isn't completely based on repetition?

...but I ated it.

Funky sailor.

Logging in to WoW after a months pause felt strangely like coming home. Should I be worried?

I've gone through every book in my haul except Atlas Shrugged, which I'm working on now. About a third of it done, I'm beginning to see why some people rave about it. The pace of the story is, in a word, glacial, but that leaves all the more time for philosophizing. There's plenty of that. At one point there was a nice little surprise too:

"He had no time for pain, no energy for anger. Within a few weeks, it was over; the blinding stabs of hatred ceased and did not return.

He was back in confident self-control--"

Let's compare that to the first verse of Learning to Live by Dream Theater:

"There was no time for pain
No energy for anger
The sightlessness of hatred slips away
Walking through winter streets alone
He stops and takes a breath
With confidence and self-control"

What a curious coincidence. I reckon it was either January or February in the book. Now I have to finish the rest of it fast so I can try to dig a little deeper on that connection. :3

Installing WoW from scratch is an arduous process. The five discs take something closer to two hours to process and then there's the added task of installing the expansion set and, of course, patching. On the third disc I got a read error and was forced to start over, rebooting to get my laptop to realize that, yes, it DID in fact have a DVD drive attached. On the second try, I hung on the edge of my seat as the installer struggled its way slowly through the third disc. Then the fourth, which apparently due to bad karma or me not having showered or some other arcane reason, caused the drive to continually spin up to full speed and then slow down. Spin up. Spin down. Spin up. Spin down. And with each fluctuation my nerves wound slowly tighter. Miraculously, the disc didn't produce any errors and so with an almost palpable relief mixed with dread I swapped in the fifth and final disc and closed the hatch. Spin up. Spin down. Silence. The prompt for the fifth disc sticking resolutely to the screen. A quick check to system properties confirmed my fear: The DVD drive had once again decided that one and a half hours into the installation was a good time to stop existing altogether.

I had half a mind to crack the laptop in two right then and there.

Fifteen minutes, a beer and a cigarette later I tracked down a client download from the interwebs. Still an estimated ten hours for it to download. At times like this I wonder why do I even bother. All I wanted to do was grind for a bit and then proceed to more amusing things...

When we last gazed upon the life of our proud protagonist, he was standing atop a huge mound of cultural artifacts. Today we find him furiously burrowing through said mound, shreds of pages and shards of albums flying every which way like bullets on a regular texan shooting range outing. Suddenly he freezes in the middle of tearing through some unfortunate and doomed volume and turns to look at us, hunched like some wild beast caught in the midst of supping on its kill. His eyes are wide open and are...are those pages hanging from his mouth?

Righto...

So, there was some talk about analyzing the contents of my last weeks haul a little more in-depth. Let's tackle the music part first. Dream Theater, of course, is still Dream Theater and being the fan that I am, I find it difficult to find anything to criticize other than the pitifully flimsy cardboard 3-cd packaging of the Score cd version. The band is probably in the best live shape of their career - I've never heard LaBrie hit the high notes so confidently and seemingly easily on a live album before - and a live performance of the whole Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence epic with orchestral backing achieved almost mythical proportions. I almost squealed with delight.

Continuing with the theme of live albums, next in line was To Live Again by Tarot. I've been recommended the band on several occasions and I can see why. The music was good'ole no-nonsense metal and that's that. Screaming and roaring and blowing fire all over the place kind of stuff. A more bluesy approach to playing on stage was provided by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble with their eighties performances in Montreux. When someone is considered among the classics of their style, who am I to disagree. Certainly mr. Vaughans playing exhibits the soulful effortlessness of a hummingbird seeming to just hang in the air. If I could play the guitar like that, I'd probably do nothing but blues the days away. Oh, is that a Hendrix cover I hear? Wonderful!

On the bluesier side of the spectrum we also have Marcia Ball. So Many Rivers is the kind of music I've always unknowingly sought. At times soft and mellow and at times full of raunchy humour. A nice addition to my collection and something to listen to on a rainy day. The last female-led compilation of the haul was violinist Regina Carters album Paganini: After a Dream. The recording sprung from the idea of playing jazz on "Il Cannone" - the italian national treasure violin owned and played by Paganini himself. While the finer nuances of violin music still escape me, the album was intricate and full of dynamic interplay between the band members. Certainly good stuff and worth listening to more than once.

The Desperado soundtrack was a collection of laid-back spanish-influenced guitar music - quite fitting, considering the theme of the movie - interspersed with short clips of dialoque. While it didn't rock my world, it was still a nice distraction. The Dangermen Sessions (vol.1) by Madness was a nice collection of ska and reggae covers by a band that's been mostly an unknown to me thus far. Trying to extrapolate their own style from just the one song I had previous to getting this album would have been a bit silly, but after listening to their way of making covers, I think I'll have to look for some more of their original material.

The two Allan Holdsworth albums sounded like Allan Holdsworth again. Though perhaps a notch or two below Sixteen Men of Tain, they still were a good one-and-a-half hours of fusion guitar played like he had sold the devil not only the souls of himself and his family members, but also the family pets, the dentist, the stock-broker and the lady who puts the discount stickers on the fruit in the local grocery store. If I had his skills I would end world hunger. Or at least make half of the guitarists who listen to my playing quit their instruments in disgust and the other half to pick them up and practice 'till their fingers bled.

Then we get to the only real disappointment of the bunch. Zero Tolerance for Silence by Pat Metheny was an experience I wouldn't really recommend to anyone. Fourty-five minutes of guitar wankery on two channels with nary a trace of melody or any real attempt at song-building. Apparently the man is considered one of the jazz-guitar greats, but on this album it just doesn't show. (Or I'm just not civilized enough to see why...)

So all in all quite a nice haul. 9/10

Some more about the books a bit later.