mrshl | blog

Emusic now has Nick Drake in the form of the recent Tsunami release Family Tree. As an Emusic subscriber and rabid Nick Drake fan my big question was how this new release of early recordings compared with the compilations I already had, the out-of-print Time of No Reply and the bootleg Tanworth-in-Arden. Naturally, the internet comes to the rescue:

Two of the best songs on Family Tree, “Been Smokin’ Too Long” and “Strange Meeting II,” were already included on the now out-of-print official release, Time of No Reply. The latter is presented here in a different and inferior version to the earlier version, but it is still an example of how truly original Nick Drake was as a songwriter. He almost always played his guitar with strange tunings, which makes his material extremely difficult to play or mimic. In addition, he is one of those folk guitarists, like Bert Jansch, whose obscenely agile playing makes the guitar sound like it is one of the easiest instruments to play. Just listen to these two tracks for clarification.

Some of the cover material is particularly strong on this release. Nick was influenced by the likes of folk icons Bert Jansch and Bob Dylan. His recording of the former’s “Strolling Down the Highway” is straightforward, but his playing is dead on and his rendition of Dylan’s “Tomorrow is a Long Time” is just about as strong as the original version. There are also a few demo versions of songs that would later make it onto his first and best album, Five Leaves Left. The beautiful “Way to Blue” is featured here in the form of just Nick and a piano, stripped of the lush string arrangement that was recorded for the album version. There is also a rather nice version of “Day is Done” as a working version.

…

There are also a few songs missing that were on the Tanworth-in-Arden record. Namely, a cover of Bert Jansch’s “Courting Blues” and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” His version of the Gershwin standard, “Summertime,” was also quite strong, but that too has been left off Family Tree. If you are a rabid Nick Drake fan, you will want to get yourself a copy of this release, but it is probably only reserved for fanatics who have to have everything. I actually prefer Tanworth-in-Arden to Family Tree, even though the sound quality is not as good. It has a better running order and does not feel disjointed with the addition of Molly Drake songs. If you are interested in that one though, you will have to dig around on Ebay or some other dealer of rarities to track it down.

There you have it. Of course, there’s not a lot of overlap with No Reply and it might be somewhat difficult to track down the Tanworth recordings, so picking up Family Tree might be pretty worthwhile. My brief preview listen to the tracks available on Emusic indicate the sound quality is WAY better than Tanworth, which was scratchy and poorly mastered.

In my old age, I’ve noticed I hardly ever curse or swear anymore. I don’t even say asshole all that much, but I don’t think there’s a better word for what these assholes did on a public forum for epilepsy sufferers.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

Yes, a group of technically savvy people actually conspired to flood a message board with flashing lights and images that were specifically calculated to produce seizures and migraine headaches in their intended victims. I can’t even think of a way to rationalize that sort of attack, although understanding griefer mentality might yield a few clues.

Before today, I’d never heard the term. According to Wikipedia the word has its genesis in online gaming:

Griefers differ from typical players in that they do not play the game in order to achieve objectives defined by the game world. Instead, they seek to harass other players, causing grief. In particular, they may use tools such as stalking, hurling insults, and exploiting unintended game mechanics. Griefing as a gaming play style is not simply any action that may be considered morally incorrect. Though the staff of each online game defines griefing in a manner that best fits their game, certain criteria must be met for an action to be considered griefing. An act of griefing involves the following three types of actions to be considered grief play:^[1]

• The unfair use or abuse of a game mechanic that was not intended by the game’s developers.
• The inability of the victim to exact some means of retribution beyond utilizing similar unintended game mechanics.
• The intended purpose of an act of griefing must be to negatively impact the game play of another person.

An act of griefing usually meets all these types of criteria as well as any game specific criteria set by the developers of the game.

See? They’re assholes. But if you found the dudes who vandalized the Epilepsy board, they’d probably laugh off any insults or criticism. Another, seminal article on griefing in Wired does a fine job summing up the rationale offered by griefers for their obnoxious behavior.

“The Internet is serious business.”

Look it up in the Encyclopedia Dramatica (a wikified lexicon of all things /b/) and you’ll find it defined as: “a phrase used to remind [the reader] that being mocked on the Internets is, in fact, the end of the world.” In short, “the Internet is serious business” means exactly the opposite of what it says. It encodes two truths held as self-evident by Goons and /b/tards alike — that nothing on the Internet is so serious it can’t be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise.

To see the philosophy in action, skim the pages of Something Awful or Encyclopedia Dramatica, where it seems every pocket of the Web harbors objects of ridicule. Vampire goths with MySpace pages, white supremacist bloggers, self-diagnosed Asperger’s sufferers coming out to share their struggles with the online world — all these and many others have been found guilty of taking themselves seriously and condemned to crude but hilarious derision.

Basically, messageboards and online gaming worlds have spawned a group of “seriousness” police who see themselves as enemies of those who would impose real-world value systems and mores on a virtual world. What’s liberating about the Internet is its lawlessness; its ability to raise anonymous irreverence into an art form. And for sure, I’ve laughed at this sort of thing before. Take for example the World of Warcraft virtual funeral following the real world death of a player: players in the Serenity Now guild massacred the avatars who had queued up to pay their respects. The following video does a fine job telling the story.

And yet, with the epilepsy stunt, the griefers crossed a line into committing a potentially criminal act; their virtual world prank provoked a very real physical response. In fact, it was designed to provoke a physical reaction in the victims. That was the whole point:

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users’ browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

Take a look at Section 211.1 of the Model Penal Code (upon which many states, including Texas, base their criminal codes):

Simple assault. A person in guilty of assault if he:

(1) Attempts to cause or purposely, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another; or

(2) Negligently causes bodily injury to another with a deadly weapon; or

(3) Attempts by physical menace to put another in fear of imminent serious bodily harm.

Seems like (1) above pretty fairly includes what these griefers did to the epilepsy sufferers visiting the forum.

Criminals and assholes.

• Just installed Wordpress 2.5 on mrshl.net. Seems to be working beautifully. #
• Really thinking we should have ordered our wedding invitation instead of doing the homemade thing. #

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Recently I started taking a closer look at the comments section of Achewood. If you didn’t know Achewood even had a comments section, don’t feel bad. There’s only a small, uninviting "discuss" button on the front page to clue you in. But if you click "discuss" (or directly on on the strip), you enter into Acheworld: a social network of sorts for Achewood fans built mostly around the opportunity to rate each strip and editorialize upon its various merits or meanings.

Once you start reading, it becomes clear that some people love Achewood a whole lot more than you do. Is it entertaining? It can be, but it’s mostly annoying. Because I’m 33, it’s been tempting to assume that all Achewood readers are polite, soft-headed lawyers each of whom has attained my years.

In fact, it looks like most Achewooders are college and high-school aged dorks trying to show off. There’s a built-in merit system that tends to encourage the kids to expand every Achewood strip into a zany meta-exercise written in faux-Onstadian deadpan style. The more calibrated and "hilarious" your comment, the more "chubbies" you are likely to get. If you say something to offend the herd, you get "lamed" and your comment ends up like this:

Lord of the Flies style, a leader has naturally appeared among them. Dude’s screen-name is SpinyNorman, and I’m not sure if he’s the best or the worst. However, the community provides an objective measure. He’s made 1221 comments, and received 4073 chubbies against 242 lames. Those are Tom Brady-like numbers. Here’s a sampling of his chubby-ness in response to this strip:

To contribute, about ten years ago they made a program that analyzed all of Mozart’s symphonies and much of his other written music and "fabricated" another symphony of his, the 42nd. They played it for two groups of people - those who knew it was made by a machine and those who thought it was straight up Mozart. Those who thought it was Mozart thought it sounded wonderful. Those who thought it was a machine thought it was pure shit.

There was probably a third group who thought they should be sitting around listening to Boy George instead of machine-made Mozart. That group was ignored. Until today.

Yeah, that’s pretty funny. But then you realize that the strip already made this identical joke, and you’re just laughing at what’s filtered through the prism. This crap both writes and reads itself. To really understand how annoying and exhilarating the comments can be, I suggest you check-out Onstad’s finest Rorschach test yet, this strip and this one from March 21 & 22, then delve into the comments of the second strip.

The best is unfun’s straightforward interpretation:

As far as I can tell: there was going to be a Roast Beef prostitute strip similar to the Ray one, but the Achewood machine malfunctioned, so Beef just looks around aimlessly and whatever small animal he was supposed to bang is horribly deformed. The person who operates the Achewood machine decides to blame the error on poor Indian manufacturing.

But SpinyNorman shows up too:

Man, what would Nice Pete’s look like.

I think it would just be him sitting on a wooden stool in a cinderblock room holding a stick over an oil can fire, dangling a spider over the greedy flames from the end of the branch and watching its legs collapse like broken fingers.

Then he hears a voice say, "Pete? Pete? I’m a prostitute."

He looks up and the moon’s out the window, crossing the old broken fence making its shattered segments look like the spine of some ancient decayed creature lying askew in the weedy fields. It comes and stands beneath the tree and says, "Womanflesh. Bitchflesh."

And Pete tosses the stick in the fire and walks to the door and he looks at the moon and he sees a face in it, swollen and dumb and luminescent, and Pete says, "I bet you smell like honey. I bet you smell like honey, sweet and fragrant."

And the moon says, "Waters deeps. Waterings it deepenings. Down to where tree-limbs dig down and eaterings things all dead inside."
And Pete says, "I’m going to water it. I got to water it. I’m gonna."

And then the gray rain starts.

See what I mean? If you’re a regular reader of Achewood, you’ll understand me when I say SpinyNorman wouldn’t know Nice Pete if Nice Pete killed and ate him. But the kids are having fun. And I guess that’s what matters.

As far as I know, I was one of the first participants in the Red Octane / Activision disc replacement program for the Wii version of Guitar Hero III. It seems the original game disc was mixed and mastered in mono rather than stereo. When they announced the replacement program and agreed to switch out the stereo for the mono discs, I signed up on the Web site immediately. They said the switch could take up to 2 months, but I got my replacement disc in about three weeks. Overall I was impressed.

But a couple of days I ago, I got something in the mail that impressed me even more. Red Octane / Activision sent us a free faceplate for our guitar and thanked us for putting up with the hassle. A nice touch.

Barack Obama is part of King Kaufman’s panel of NCAA tourney experts.

So is McCain. Sigh.

What you need is a deranged go-go dancer who is feverishly applying lipstick to the plastic wrap that is covering her mouth.

We are the state of fiscal responsibility and low taxes and job growth, right? We don’t want high taxes and wasteful spending (e.g., children’s health insurance) to drag down our statewide economy. Nope. But when it’s time to put our hand out and soak up those federal Tax dollars, we are second in line to get our remarkably unfair share.

Texas corralled $2.2 billion in special projects from the federal government this year, including $294,000 for a Houston zoo program and $22 million for an Army gymnasium near El Paso.

While presidential contenders and some Congress members debated whether the projects, called earmarks, bloat the budget, the Lone Star State was awarded 539 of them for the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

Only California was given more goodies, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis.

The Chronicle article does a good job analyzing the earmarks (and which of our reps supported each one). But there’s one thing that isn’t mentioned.

You might be wondering, "How much money are we paying into the federal government to get such rich rewards?" Turns out, we get almost $1 back for every dollar we send to Washington. We rank 35th out of 50 states in this regard. Who’s number 1?  Check out the list for 2005.