Waiting for the Big One

Been housesitting for my mom until she returns from Japan tomorrow night. Also my home PC is having drama, so there probably won't be much from me for the next couple weeks. So here's some links:

Jason Scott's TextFiles.com is a neat web-museum compiling relics from the pre-Internet BBS era, with collections of old .txt files (including ASCII art), vintage computer graphics and chiptune music, and old shareware CD-ROMs.

At last, there's finally a website dedicated to the imminent revival of Euro bubblegum dance pop, the genre that gave us Aqua and Toy-Box and all those virtually indistinguishable bands that look like assholes from the cover of Jock Jams until they start singing awesome songs about mermaids and Barbie dolls and cowboys and shit. With an index of music videos on YouTube. Ah, the Millennium. For those too young or drug-addled to remember, the turn of the century was a time of innocence, of Windows Me, Sega Dreamcast and irrepressibly positive fly-by-night pop stars with Kool Aid hair and well-toned abs. Before the dark times. Before the Empire. We can only hope that 2008 brings back some of this lost magic. Aqua is getting back together, so that's a start. Yes, I have what Bill Cosby called "the brain damage."

"The Story of SREBRENICA" is a mind-altering computer animated fable (split into three parts for YouTube) by someone named Nanny Lynn. It's sort of like an episode of Dora the Explorer written by Henry Darger. It's part of this DVD, which will probably be the first of many I'll buy from 5MTL.com.

I heart pixel art.

Happy Goddamn New Year from me, ABBA, Peter Gabriel and the year 1993.

eat rich chocolates and sleep too close to a space heater on Christmas Eve

I live in a Santa Fe style adobe apartment sometime in the not-too-distant future. A couple of guys I play music with on occasion invite themselves over to drink beer and listen to the radio. They arrive and it starts to turn into a party. Some bitchy girls I know from back in high school are there, taunting me and telling me that I won't have any time for drawing when I go back to school for the spring semester.

Annoyed, I walk into the bathroom, stepping over torn scraps of paper and shards of shattered plastic that were left on the floor by a baby or a misbehaving dog. I look into the mirror and discover that I have giant purple welts all over my face, not unlike the scar makeup that I wore with my Halloween costume.

I mindtravel to a sparsely decorated comic book store. A girl I used to date and her obnoxious, unfamiliar tall male friend are there. The friend harasses me for money, taunting me like those girls at the apartment did and repeatedly asking me to give him $42 in cash. I do my best to ignore him. The girl tells him to stop. I turn away from them and when I turn back they have walked out of the store together.

Back at home I'm reading the Something Awful forums. There's a new thread where some guy is describing a bizarre infection he has. His face is covered in lesions -- "space barnacles" -- that resemble brightly colored 7mm rectangular plastic tiles. Each tile has a raised circular ridge on it, like a condom in its wrapper. The guy sounds smug despite his grotesque affliction. He says he also built a kickass computer and got a new girlfriend over the weekend.

Reading that post gave me a weird feeling. I walk back into the bathroom. Oh. Turns out that the forum post contained a computer virus and now I have space barnacles all over my face and chest. I look like the Elephant Man covered with Legos. Looking closely at the tiles I can see veiny red and blue lines running underneath them. It's a highway map, complete with numbers and city names.

Northern Boulevard

Driving in Rio Rancho. Don't know whose car, but it's not mine. It's mid morning or mid afternoon in early springtime. The sun is out but the shadows are long. I pass my mother's car somewhere on Southern Boulevard. Mom calls my cell phone and we chat briefly. We say goodbye; we'll meet at her house later.

Sometime later I turn onto Northern Boulevard, which is developed on the south side (boxy industrial parks) and mostly undeveloped on the north side, save for a couple of plain churches and custom-built homes. I pull off the road, park the car and pick up a library book sitting next to me. It's a cheaply-printed, laminated paperback with an ugly gray cover, no graphics or illustrations, and a title written in a generic Times Roman-like font. Some kind of sci-fi novel self published by a crank author who lived in Rio Rancho until his death a couple years back. I'm studying this book for my own personal research, taking notes about it in a spiral notebook. I start to copy the title, but then I realize that the spine of the book, the front cover and the title page all give slightly different titles.

The Arrival at Isthmorn[? or some other nonsense science fictiony proper noun]
The Ithmorn Arrival
The Ithmorn Arrival: A [something something]

Something like that. Even stranger, the edition of the book that I have is an omnibus collection of three different versions of the novel-- the original, a revised version, and a version re-written by a friend of the author. Confusingly, the different versions are jumbled together, with one chapter of each respective version in printed in succession. Many of the chapters are only half a page long, while others go on for twenty or fifty pages.

Because of the rampant inconsistencies in the text, I give up on my notes for the time being and just begin skimming through the book. The prose is impenetrable, like a Scientology book translated into Japanese and back into English. I have no idea what any of it means.

I look down the road in front of me. Rio Rancho used to be known as a haven for crank science fiction writers. Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when this area was empty desert, the author of the book I'm holding was allowed to build a line of small monuments along this street, then a dirt road, immortalizing his insane philosophies. The first one is at the very spot where I've parked. The monuments are squat little structures, maybe 4 feet high by six or seven feet wide, made of beige cinder blocks, like the signs you see in front of call centers and suburban housing subdivisions. Quotes from the book are stenciled on them in white paint. They are small and nondescript enough that you could completely ignore them if you don't know to look for them as you drive by.

The signs continue for the next couple of miles down the road, one every hundred yards or so. I stop at each one, cross-checking them with the corresponding passages in my book and still utterly failing to understand they're supposed to mean. Then I get to a place where the soil on both sides of the road is being churned and flattened by bulldozers, preparing for the construction of a new housing development or a box factory or something. The signs beyond this point have been destroyed. Soon they will all be gone, and no one will notice.

I take Northern the rest of the way down to Highway 528, make an awkward left turn and then drive north toward my mother's house. I pass hesitantly through a flashing yellow stoplight. Then I hear sirens approaching from somewhere behind me. Helicopters pass overhead. Fire engines go by as I pull over to the far right side of the road. The radio tells me that there's a massive forest fire somewhere up north, started by an electrical mishap. The implant in my brain begins playing a TV newscast about the fire. A pretty, airheaded anchorwoman says that the fire is the fault of some collectivist farmers. Somehow I know that this is false propaganda.

happy xmas 2007

my first foray into 'pixel art'....i'll do better next time

srsly STFU

Last.fm chart in crisis

My Last.fm Top Tracks Overall chart has just updated, and there are a bunch of weird songs on here that have just been flung into the tops spots after I downloaded them and listened to them a few times. They don't really reflect my tastes at all, and some of them seem to have sexist or racist overtones in the titles...My but this is embarrassing.

hombre sin pantalones

Cadwallader does not remember those pyramids being there

America's cookie crisis/Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Director's Cut

For years the U.S. government has propped up the domestic cookie industry with large subsidies. Now Congress has taken away those subsidies and the cookie market is collapsing. Cookies are expensive and hard to obtain. While discussing the issue with my mother and sister, I joke that we should join the evil corporate ConAgra/Globo-Chem cookie collective so that we may continue to receive cookies. The very suggestion makes my sister angry.

* * * *

I'm watching tonight's FEATURE PRESENTATION on the local TV station: Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In a scene early in the film Eddie Valiant is standing on a street corner in 1930s Los Angeles. He witnesses a murder and calls the police, using the designated police code for murder. I'm incredulous that Valiant would actually know this code, until I remember that it was previously established that the Valiant brothers used to be police officers before they became private detectives.

A commercial break or two later, the film has flashed forward ten years, to 1947, when Eddie is talking to Roger in his office. Roger uses some coarse language in reference to women. There is no mention of his wife Jessica.

a new kind of creature for the new fiscal year

don't make me 'splain myself

I hate my new job so much that I keep calling in sick and going for walks in the park instead of working. I wouldn't even care if I got fired, except that I was referred for this job by my old bosses Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz, and I don't want my poor performance to reflect badly on them.

Happy December

• IT IS A TIME OF LINKS THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE
• Don West videos
  
• TIM BURTON MADE A 3-D ALICE MOVIE AND THE WORLD REJOICED
• Mutts 2007.11.04
• Paper Rad
• Wham City
• Mario level plays by itself
  
• Here's a selection of last year's posts I did related to the XMAS event that is just around the corner. You have not heard the last from me on this issue.
• T-9's Liquid Diner #003: Xmastacular
  
• desert lights
• RPG
• dire reindeer
• ice skater
• A Christmas Adventure?
• what i got for christmas '06

• 2005's free MP3 album Auld Lang Syne (which I totally did art for) is still totally available for download from the no-longer-updated Comfort Stand Recordings website. Totally.
• Rock-and-rolling group Yoda's House are going to "do" Albuquerque's Launchpad on 12/26. See flyer at right. Genitals will be melted. Beer glasses will be thrown.
  
• Bunch of stuff added to Flickr, mostly old stuff but perhaps new to you.

Bank Error in My Favor

I get an unexpected refund check for $46.XX from someone. I check my bank account and find that it's twice as big as I remembered it being. This is great.

a missed opportunity for questionable toys

The Penny Arcade guys put out a podcast a couple weeks back discussing cool after-Thanksgiving Day sales. As I'm listening to it I'm sorry I hadn't heard it before the holiday, because someone had a pretty good 1/2-off deal on Watchmen action figures that I might have taken advantage of. I'm not familiar with some of the characters that Mike and Jerry are talking about, though. "Cherry Soda"? "Ax Battler"? Alan Moore must be spinning in his grave.

the argument.

More Muir

Sketch of Krista Muir (cribbed from one of her MySpace photos) done while making this flyer for tomorrow night's show.

The NYYAAAARRRest Story Ever Told

I'm standing in a holodeck with my dungeon master, discussing the hypothetical powers of a Big Bird kaiju. He calls one up that is enormous and terrifying, charcoal gray with glittering gold veins and pterosaur wings. Big Bird's familiar face is locked in a pupil-less grimace, like some ancient stone god, and he screams like Godzilla as he glides over a simulation of a 1960's Japanese port town.

The rest of the players show up for tonight's game session. We're role playing a anime-style adventure. The DM has programmed the holodeck to transform us into a group of futuristic bounty hunters, à la Cowboy Bebop. I'm a bushy-haired film noir type in a shabby suit, and there's a burly cyborg, an annoying boy genius, a treacherous femme fatale and a goth-y android girl. The corrupt corporate kleptocrat rulers of the solar system call us a "terrorist cell," and we do what we can to bring them down, one by one.

Tonight's mission is a raid on a massive space station casino that's controlled by the mob. Our group has split up into three teams, leaving the android girl and me alone in an elevator. She seems depressed about something, so I make some kind of lame joke. She laughs weakly, then tells me that she has just initiated a sequence that will erase her own mind. She promptly drops to the floor, eyes vacant.

"She killed herself!" I yell, grief-stricken and pissed off.

The tragedy of the goth-droid's suicide causes the already fragile bonds of trust and camaraderie between our group's members to disintegrate, and so after a bit of infighting we agree to disband forever. I solemnly slip the girl's cracked anime goggles in my pocket as a memento, but I could care less if I ever see that irritating computer hacker kid or the rest of them again. Thus concludes our RPG campaign.

After the other players have left, the DM shows me a second version of the Big Bird kaiju he cooked up at some point during the game session. This one is kind of disappointingly small compared to the first one.