BrainWyrms

Over the past few years I have been tracking down some of the lost music of my life. Most of it has been from a year or two when I was listening to a local college radio station in Chattanooga, TN. They almost never said who they were playing and I wasn’t really thinking about how ephemeral life can be.

The last song that I tracked down was The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove by Dead Can Dance. The funny thing about that one was that my brother, elegiac, actually owns a bunch of DCD CDs (and probably cassettes, at that.)

On the last WanderRadio podcast, WNDRWolf (who I keep typing Worf) played a song that sounded really familiar. Almost, but not quite one of the songs I was looking for.

I didn’t help anything that I thought the lyrics had something to do with dwarves and I thought that it was Scottish.

Instead, it was “Rocky Road to Dublin“. He had played a version of this traditional Irish slip-jig by the Connemarra Stone Company.  Woot!

I ran over to Amazon and started listening to the little previews of all the different versions of “Rocky Road to Dublin” that are available for purchase as DRM-FREE downloads.  And I found it!  Dropkick Murphys!

I’ve been meaning to check them out for at least ten years.  I could have found this awesome track years ago.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I have to thank Mr. Wolf for bringing it back to me.

Now I just have to find that big band song with the overly emphasized drums and the overly repeated lyric of “INFECTED!!!”  That one is a doozy.

For some reason, after reading this article from the NY Times about an all girl band in Saudi Arabia my attitude changed. Initially, I was thinking that this was great. I was happy for the burgeoning freedoms coming to a long repressed culture. You know, the normal thoughts for an elitist bastard from the Elitist States of America.

By the time I had finished reading through the first page, my attitude was switching. I can’t quote any one thing that Dina or Dareen said, but instead of being about fighting against the man or any other boring but understandable rebellions, it felt to me that these were the same spoiled rich kids who feel entitled to whatever they want and throw a temper tantrum as soon as it is denied to them.

In other words, instead of seeing punk rock… I was seeing Paris Hilton.

Quoting some lyrics from Tilt’s Molly Coddled:

Now you’ve chosen poverty
You did it for the sake of being hip
Begging for a dollar
Never doubting for a moment
Your bohemian indigence
And you wonder why the folks
In your run down neighborhood
Don’t recognize you as a kindred soul
‘Cause they know you gotta a bed
In a sunny sub-division
Anytime you wanna run home

… returns!

This morning Amazon sent me a friendly email, asking if I wanted to pre-order The Dark Knight.

I really loved The Dark Knight, so I decided to check it out and see what Amazon had to tempt me today.

Apparently, a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

To quote Readernaut’s description of themselves:

Readernaut aims to be the best book sharing site on the internet.

Our website is made with which is built with . We’re running while keeps track of our dataz. is proxying to where Mod_WSGI does its magic on our server at . is our source for book information and rocks!

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Come one, come all… to see the spectacule of my movie review!  Now live! At Epinions.com!  For an unlimited time only!

The Happening: It’s Not!

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Muxtape was this weird little online analog (digital analog?) of the old mix tapes that we used to make with the dual decks.  But it is gone now.  At least for now.  The mafia side of the music industry is working on making them die now.  ”Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

But from the ashes, something must rise… right?  This time, it is a new opensource software program that enables practically anyone to -be- Muxtape.  It is called Opentape and pretty much all it takes to get running is a web host with PHP5 and an FTP client.  

So instead of everyone hosting their analogous mixtapes at one central location, now anyone so inclined can host their mixtape on their own site.  To see it in action, check out my BrainWyrms mix… Right at this moment, I’ve got Nine Inch Nails from Ghosts I.  I’ll probably add some other “open-source” music as I find it.

• Back Seat Producers
  • Double Trouble Mini 1: 8 1/2
  • Double Trouble Mini 2: Eight Legged Freaks
  • Double Trouble Mini 3: Butterfield 8
  • Double Trouble Mini 4: Hard Eight
  • Double Trouble Mini 5: Eight Days A Week
  • Double Trouble Mini 6: 8 Mile
  • Double Trouble Mini 7: 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
  • Double Trouble Mini 8: Eight Men Out
  • Special Episode 6: A Chat with Tee and Pip
  • 73: Taxi Driver
• Critical Myth 21
• Geek Radio Daily August 25th 2008
• Geek Radio Daily August 26th 2008
• Buzz Out Loud 796: Is that an HTC Dream in your pocket?

Today is Mur Lafferty’s “Playing for Keeps” run on Amazon.  Basically, there is a technique for ramping your sales rank on Amazon up real high by having a large group of purchases in a short period of time.  And “The Tribe” has been running through our podcast authors as they get publishing deals and basically doing our best to get some noise going.  So I have purchased a copy of “Playing for Keeps.”

I think I’ll like it.  It’ll be weird to actually read her voice instead of hearing it piped in the way I usually do.  Then again, I’m not real familiar with her fiction.  I love her tone, but usually that is form her podcasts “I Should Be Writing” and “Geek Fu Action Grip.”

Anyhow, “Playing for Keeps” is a super hero novel about the other guys.  The ones with somewhat less useful abilities, like our heroine Keepsie.  her power is that no one can take her stuff away.  That’s all.  No flying or throwing cars or seeing through steel.  I like odd stories and I like comic book style hero stories.  But I really did not like the “Wild Card” series, so I am excited and a mite nervous to see how I feel about “Playing for Keeps” once I’ve actually read it.

I’m pretty confident that I am going to enjoy this tale, but if you want to taste before you buy Mur has made “Playing for Keeps” into an audio book as well as a PDF, both of which are currently available for free.  So check it out, and then go do your part by purchasing a copy today!

I am a pathetic fan of the Farscape series.  I’ve been a huge fan since the first episode I saw, somewhere in the first half of season one.  Unfortunately, I moved in the middle of season two and never managed to catch up with the stories.  I would log onto SciFi.com and read the epidsode synopses, but that was never going to be good enough.

Eventually ADV began publishing the seasons of Farscape in a “two episodes per tape/DVD” format.  And I picked up the Pilot on VHS, and eventually the rest of season one, as it came out, on DVD.  I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was around twenty five dollars per release, and something like ten releases just for the first season.  I ran out of money and couldn’t keep up anymore.

And eventually ADV began releasing the whole thing all over again, this time in a “StarBurst Edition” with about seven episodes and lots and lots of extras.  Each season took three releases.  So season one was 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and season two was 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.  I began collecting these, partially because they were cheaper, but also because I love the extras commentaries.  Of course, I was only able to get one here and another one many months later and sometimes I would forget about Farscape when something else had my attention.

Then last week, while checking on the order status of a gift to myself (Farscape Starburst 2.3), I noticed that Amazon had changed the message in my wish list.  It now said that the manufacturer had discontinued seasons three and four.  Oh dear.  See, the problem is that they had discontinued season one a while ago and I couldn’t afford to buy them… they sell used for a low price of sixty to ninety dollars.  I immediately starting filling my shopping cart with Farscape.

As it is, I ended up spending a hundred dollars on new and used Farscape Starburst Editions.  I was able to get 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 in new and used copies for between sixteen and twenty-two dollars each.  Unfurtunately, 3.1 was already sold out with no used copies available on Amazon.  When I went home I was agonizing to Jade that I had just wasted money but I vainly tried to self-justify by saying how much I was saving by buying now instead of waiting till each one was extremely expensive.  But I really didn’t buy into my own argument.

Until yesterday.  Farscape Starburst Edition 3.1 is now selling used for ninety dollars.

Now I am KICKING myself for not thinking clearly and pickup up a few extra copies to re-sell.  I knew that the price was going to get jacked up.  I could have made a return of 450%!  I almost never think to sell something, but this time… I really should have.

Oh well, at least I’m going to finally be able to catch up on Farscape, find out what happens in the Uncharted Territories, and maybe see what happens to Crichton and Aeryn… but I still need to pick up the PeaceKeeper Wars for that.

My initial impression of The Dark Knight last night was that I was not disappointed. In fact, I was really happy with it. Which is rather amazing considering just how excited and just how high my expectations were going into The Dark Knight.

Batman Begins is, off hand, my favorite film of the last few years. I haven’t recommended and pushed and watched and re-watched anything else like this since it came out. I’ve really enjoyed a few other movies,  strangely enough including The Prestige, but none to the extent of Batman Begins. So when I say my expectations were really high, I mean they were ridiculously high.

The last time I was half as excited for a new movie was for Jumper. I ended up hearing a review of it on the Totally Rad Show and realized that I was going to be horribly disappointed. So I watched it on video just a few weeks ago and it was so-so okay. Before that was The Bourne Supremacy, where I left the theater almost shaking in rage at the travesty done to The Bourne Identity as a movie and the Bourne series of books. And then there was Riddick. But let’s not go there.

Basically, my point is this; I had, despite my own best intentions to damp down my enthusiasm, reached a disturbing and unfamiliar level of excitation such that I had difficulty stemming my vibrations in order to sleep the morning before. I was literally like a child the night before Christmas. And I was NOT disappointed.

Unlike Iron Man, which apparently was a really awesome movie that I simply did not connect with emotionally on any level, I loved The Dark Knight. (I just have a hard time admitting it.)

<— There may be mild spoilers after the break —>

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