New blog.

This blog sucks.

New one: http://fundamentalfrequency.wordpress.com

I believe in America. I believe that it EXISTS.

I think I’m going to try blogging stuff about my life and stuff more often, and stuff.

I was invited to a surprise 21st birthday party on Facebook, so I joined the group and quickly realized I could not go. Although the party has been over for quite some time, the group still exists, so I occasionally upload a picture of a pseudorandomly chosen fruit sliced open.

—

I don’t really think I’m going to do all that well in my classes this semester (I don’t really know how I’m doing now, because it’s impossible to tell what your grade at any given point in most of my classes). I could be doing poorly because I took a semester off, or perhaps because the classes I’m in are, for lack of a better word, retarded. I do enjoy my Design I class, although it’s not particularly challenging, and my Random Processes class is okay, but the teacher is terrible and I think I got between a 20 and 30 percent on the last test. Oh, and my Anthropology class is pretty cool, but it feels awkward, reading PowerPoints and taking multiple-choice tests (ROFL HIGH SCHOOL).

The plan is to graduate in Spring 2010 despite my semester off, unless I “fuck up”, in which case I’ll be graduating the following Fall.

—

I like the cello a lot. I’ve finished the first movement of the Haydn Concerto in C, and am starting to work on the Saint-Saens Concerto in A minor; I’ll probably get to the other movements of the Haydn later. Yeah.

—

A lot of people have been complaining about Lost lately. Common complaints are “It raises more questions than it answers”, “WTF Time Travel?”, and “Hurley was in this Hardees commercial“, the last of which only improves the Lost experience.

Those of you who have taken a University-level Physics class may know that time travel isn’t that implausible; wormholes, which arise as solutions to Einstein’s field equations, would allow someone to travel “through” the fabric of spacetime, and thus travel through time. Lost loosely makes use of this wormhole theory (One end on the island, the other end in Tunisia), though the wormhole has to be “held open” by some sort of “exotic matter” to be traversable by a human being. I think I vaguely remember this being mentioned in an episode. At any rate, it’s less far-fetched than other Sci-Fi I’ve seen.

I will admit that there are many unanswered questions in Lost, but that bugs me considerably less than the unanswered questions in the real universe. I at least, to some extent, expect closure from Lost. The reason I watch Lost is very simple: It grabs my attention, and keeps me interested. I stop watching a show when it begins to bore me, and Lost has not done this yet.

THANK U 4 READING

Whoa.

I totally forgot I had this blog.

Music, Robots, and Robotic Music

So I’ve been in Fargo since the 21st or so of December.

Nothing has really changed too much; it is still an aging, frozen shithole. The 19th Ave Taco Bell burned down. I think everything else is pretty much the same.

–

So most of my time has been consumed by music. For the most part all I’ve been listening to is Orchestral Music and Jazz, namely Classical Minnesota Radio, Cello Sonatas, and Freddie Hubbard (who by the way, passed away this 29th of December ). He was one of my favorite trumpet players to listen to. If you want to hear a spectacular Jazz album, listen to Red Clay.

Been trying to get up to speed with the cello (took a break for a month or so), which has been going pretty well. As for finding a good private lessons instructor, I’m basically screwed, because I think I have to take from the instructor from Concordia to play in the orchestra, and the amazing professor who used to teach here retired. Some idiot who apparently has no idea what he’s doing is teaching cello there now, despite other inarguably better candidates not getting the job. Hooray for the idiots and conspiracy.

I also just finished an experimental electronic album called Nectar, which can be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?yyghlgq52j5

But way, way, way cooler is the collaborative project I am working on with Paul Wiesenborn, who is a musical genius. His jazz-like piano parts as well as just a natural talent for arranging things is pretty awe-inspiring. The project is called Polychaete, which I would describe as kind of an experimental progressive effort. Some tracks can be listened to here: http://www.myspace.com/polychaete

Newer tracks will probably feature more guitar, cello, and vocal parts as far as my contributions, as I am pretty digitized out, what with Nectar.

–

I’ve seen a few movies this break, but the one that probably stands out the most was Wall-E. It was pretty amazing, although it kind of makes you lose faith in humanity from the start, and without Wall-E’s help, the humans in the movie wouldn’t have realized how “trashy” their lives got.

That was a lame pun. Goodnight.

Laundry time

here we gooo

Characters and Cashback

So just recently I bought and viewed Blood Simple, a film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. I’ve always enjoyed movies by the Coen brothers, but as time has passed I’ve only liked their work more. Blood Simple is their directorial debut, a dark neo-noir which like many of the Coen brothers’ movies is about a seemingly insignificant crime snowballing into absolute chaos and confusion. It’s one of their more dramatic films, with the occasional bit of dark humor here and there. I highly recommend it. (I’d say it was one of my favorites, but pretty much everything I’ve seen by them is my favorite, so it wouldn’t be establishing much.)

The coolest thing about the Super Coen Bros. films, in my opinion, is that they aren’t movies as much as character studies. People who primarily enjoy plot-driven movies might not like their films, because the plots in their films for the most part feel like they are from a strange dream, with coincidences and misunderstandings often diverting a character from his objective. One of these coincidences and misunderstandings, by the way, forms the entire basis for The Big Lebowski. The detail put into the vast array of personalities in their movies is amazing, from the curiously believable (The Chief of Police Marge Gunderson in Fargo likes buffets a lot, I sometimes look for her when I’m at one), to the symbolic (Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men seems to represent pure evil with no motive).

I also have to give credit to their casting; I have yet to see a performance that isn’t completely solid in one of their movies. All the characters are perfectly sure (or purposely unsure) of their motivations, and they remain faithful as the plot crumbles beneath their feet. Their most recent film, Burn After Reading, has the least closure of any Coen film I’ve seen to date (purposefully so), and while I can’t pretend this didn’t bother me a bit, the characters in the movie are hilarious. John Malkovich is the perfect Osbourne Cox, a very bitter former CIA analyst with a drinking problem, and Brad Pitt plays the funniest character I’ve ever seen him do; it was hard not to laugh at the sight of him.

Speaking of Brad Pitt, Microsoft once again brought back their Live Cashback deal, which allows you to get 30% off any eBay item as long as you Buy it Now via PayPal and it meets the Terms and Conditions. So with these refunds up to $200 per person, and with a limit of 6 purchases per person, is Microsoft making a profit with merely advertising for eBay? Or maybe they have projected they will…?

It’s kind of an interesting scenario, because Microsoft lists on their Live Search engine “Hey, get this PS3 from eBay, and we’ll give you 30% off”, which is advertising for eBay somewhat, and then when the link adds a cookie to your browser which enables this Cashback deal, once you’re on eBay a message “Hey, Microsoft is giving you this 30% off” appears.

All I really know is that I’m going to take advantage of this deal and that Jerry Seinfeld should stop appearing in pointless commercials with Bill Gates.

Heroines and Heroin

So, I started watching the sci-fi television series Heroes recently. It’s dark. It never really lets up; I find myself making a lot of comparisons between Heroes and Lost, and one major difference is that the latter tends to have more heartwarming and optimistic moments (though it seems like this has decreased as the show has progressed). One similarity between the two, which makes both of them more enjoyable, is the broad spectrum of personalities in the shows and how we are supposed to (and how we do) feel about them. The thing I noticed about Heroes, is that when being introduced to a character for the first time, they sometimes ostensibly seem like “the bad guy,” but over time, after getting to know this character, I find a place for the character in my heart (see Brain). The only character that Heroes marks as actually completely, objectively, and entirely evil is Sylar. Characters like Nathan Petrelli and The Man with the Horn-Rimmed Glasses I found to be complete jerks at the start, but now I feel sympathy for them, cognizant of their suffering. This is also true for me in regard to Lost‘s Sawyer and… just him, I think. Sawyer seems less like a douche than he was in Season 1. But as I just have realized, there are more set-in-stone evildoers in Lost I think; Charles Widmore and Ben will never get too much sympathy. There were maybe a couple episodes that by revealing Ben’s background made me feel sorry for him, but it just wasn’t enough to warrant perpetual sympathy.

Perpetual emotion machines.

Recently I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, another chapter in the Dulouz Legend. It was amazing, and definitely more depressing than the other Kerouac I’ve read. He lives on a mountain in Canada as a fire watchman for two months at the start of the book, and while he’s on ground-level for the remainder of the book, it feels like he left something behind. Kerouac both questions and embraces Buddhism, Christianity, and religion throughout the book, while he travels with the Beats & Co., through America, Mexico, Tangiers, France, Dictionopolis, etc. There are a ton of Beats and writers in this book compared to his other work that I’ve read, and you really get to know each one pretty well (they hang out with Salvador Dali, too, it’s sweet).

One such writer you get to know pretty well is William S. Burroughs, famous for his obscene novels, heroin abuse, and the bullet he put through Joan Vollmer’s face. I have already started re-reading Naked Lunch, a terrifying journey through Burroughs junk-infested, political, depraved vision of the world. Terrifying is no exaggeration. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac talks about having nightmares from reading it (called Nude Supper in the book, due to some lame publishing issue which made him change the names of people, poems, etc. in his books).

So ya.

My favorite crayon as a child was Vivid Tangerine.

Materialism and Song

Materialism

Today my Swiss+Tech Utili-key 6-in-1 came in the mail:

Swiss+Tech Utili-key 6-in-1

Product Features:

- Flat Screwdriver
- Phillips Screwdriver
- Micro Eyeglass Screwdriver
- Straight Blade Knife
- Serrated Blade Knife
- Bottle Opener

At first, I was skeptical at the utility of the contraption (despite its name) when I took it out of the fine gift box it came in. It seemed to be a hassle to slide it onto my keyring… until I realized that loop on the key actually unhooks so you can easily snap it onto any keyring.

It seems to be fairly well-designed, despite how minimally all the features were added to the key. I intend to do a series of tests over the next few days to test all the functions of the machine. I will blog the results.

In other news, my roommate’s dvd player is now region-free, thanks to how easy it is to hack it. All I had to do to hack the LG DN191H was burn a text file with gibberish (“jalksdj” or something) named LG36868.IMG to a CD and put it in the dvd player. When I booted up the player, the player allowed me to select any region code I wanted. I selected “0″ for region-free, and then proceed to watch Dylan Moran’s stand-up routine, Monster on a region 2 DVD.

Song

Radiohead’s “Cuttooth” has to be one of the most moving songs I have ever heard. The lyrics are great too ->

I will leave the wallpaper life and run away to the foreign legion…

And as the tanks roll into town… as the tanks roll into town…

A little bit of knowledge will destroy you… a little bit of knowledge will destroy you.

And as the tanks roll into town… as the tanks roll into town…

A little bit of knowledge will destroy you… a little bit of knowledge will destroy you.

I don’t know why I feel so tounge-tied,
I don’t know why I feel so skinned alive.

Moan until your lungs are sore, until you cannot feel it anymore…
Moan until your lungs are sore, until you find an open door.

I’ll build you up to pull you down, tie you to your feet and watch you drown,
A little bit of knowledge will destroy you… a little bit of knowledge will destroy you.
I’ll build you up to pull you down, tie you to the stake and watch you burn in hell…
In hell…
I don’t know why I feel so tounge-tied,
I don’t know why I feel so skinned alive.

I’ll find another skin to wear.

It shares the same chorus as “Myxomatosis” from Hail to the Thief.

Well, I have to go hail to some thieves; later.

- The Soup Nazi

Dr.Pepper and Annelids

I desperately tried to think of something worthwhile to write about for a first entry, but this is all I came up with.

Yesterday at work I realized for the very first time that the encircled 23 found on a Dr.Pepper can is because the taste of Dr.Pepper is apparently made of 23 unique flavors. (This is explained in the words along the circumference of the “circle.”) I’m not sure what actually constitutes as a flavor to satisfy this claim, but I say with confidence that Dr.Pepper is probably the most flavorful soda out there.

23 is considered either lucky, unlucky, sacred to the goddess Eris, sinister, sacred to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, or strange.

After a quick glance at the “Origins” section of the Wikipedia entry, I turn to William S. Burroughs, heroin junkie of the Beat Generation, for the answer to the 23 flavors. (This means I need to give Naked Lunch a reread and read Junkie.)

-Yash

P.S. The Pizza Hut in north Fargo never has Dr.Pepper.