Tonight I had the chance to see them live. Trent and company did not dissappoint. If you are a NIN fan, you owe it to yourself to see them live. The set ranged from PHM tracks to new stuff and everything in between, including a few tracks from Ghosts (which included several complete instrument changes during the show, the unique multipanel display setup meant those could happen in realtime without stopping the show.)

While a concert is a shared experience, it affects everyone differently, and especially in this case since I’m so connected to the music I don’t feel I can really effectively give voice to my feelings about it. I will leave you with two thoughts:

Watching a whole floor turn into a mosh pit instantly with three words (if you were wondering, they were “STEP RIGHT UP!”) was incredible.

Experiencing “And you could have it all, my empire of dirt, I will let you down, I will make you hurt” live - even decades after the fact was one of the most powerful things I have ever had the fortune to witness.

This video is particularly striking.

source
The person doing the reporting, Marta Costello, flat-out panicks at one point during the video, but snaps quickly back into news mode, describing a particularly chilling scene: you’re at a protest, without warning cops start gassing your group, and as you’re running through the streets trying to get away from them, at every turn there are more cops who continue to gas you.

Hey, you’re free to say whatever you want, just so long as it’s not something somebody else doesn’t like.

Fuck this shit, I’m going to Nine Inch Nails.

I hate leaving home because there’s always so much shit that I haven’t gotten done yet, and I really need to get it all done. Considering the massive self-image problems (thank you Beta) I have, getting one little thing wrong makes me feel worthless, so it is inevitable that at some point this week I will feel worthless. I just got done finishing up my car stuff, so now I have powered GPS and mirror-mounted radar detection. It’s pretty damn slick. It’s like something you’d see in Galactica or The Matrix, shit bolted to other shit that all works, assuming you know how to work all of it. But I still need to do laundry, and get some cash, and get the schedule squared away, and… *brain explodes*

This will be my fourth Defcon and if I have learned nothing else it is these things:

1. There will always be gear you didn’t bring.
2. There will always be things you didn’t do.
3. There will always be stuff you should have thought of months ago.
4. Major Malfunction will always be cool.
5. Priest will always be scary.
6. Winn will always be funny. Also drunk.

There’s no point worrying about the stuff I can’t change because it’s not changeable. I’m just jumping at something to think about for a change. Lately I can’t seem to get interested in anything, no matter how mundane. I seem to spend all my time avoiding thinking about anything, which really bothers me quite a bit. In the last two years, I’ve gotten more antisocial and more ignorant than I have ever been. It’s all by choice, too - people just bug the fuck out of me, and I can’t seem to bring myself to do anything useful, and it’s getting worse.

For fuck’s sake, I’ve become a consumer. That is not cool.

I really don’t know what to do. Defcon usually inspires me in some way, but this year I’m hoping for inspiration more than usual. My uselessness is becoming a fucking epidemic.

I got a Blackberry Curve, and I really like the device itself. Blackberry reminds me of the days of Unix, pre-open source. Everything is kinda pricey and kinda proprietary. There’s not very much free software out there. Even themes cost money. The software’s kinda ugly. It takes a while to learn. But it’s insanely fucking powerful, runs really fast and never crashes. And that’s a very compelling thing.

I got it last Thursday and took it out to Beta’s this weekend for our 4th of july celebration (which turned into a whole ‘nother story by itself - I’ll want to tell that one in person) but the really depressing part is that I couldn’t roam onto Edge/ATT out there so no signal. I could have used UMA but they didn’t have Internet. Plus there’s the minor little detail that my grand scheme pretty much depended on the ability to roam onto AT&T in the areas where T-Mo coverage sucks (read: anywhere that’s not inside TF.) Anytime I was in Beta’s basement or tried to choose the Edge Wireless network manually

I decided on a whim tonight to take a drive south and see what happened signal-wise. I was curious what happened when I simply ran out of T-Mo signal area entirely. And a curious thing happened. Outside of T-Mo coverage area, I was able to roam onto Edge without any effort whatsoever. South of Hollister the damn thing worked great, all the way into Jackpot and back. But as soon as I got back into T-Mo signal range, if I manually selected Edge, no go, SOS mode only. So that’s not going to fucking work.

I called support but their answer was there must be something wrong with signal coverage in Filer. I disagree - it says on the coverage map it might be a little sketchy, I just figured with the free roaming thing that I’d be able to roam onto AT&T at least to get texts and phone calls, if not BIS. They said they would look into it and should have an answer for me in 2-3 days, but I’m working against the clock here, and this seems to be some sort of systemic problem, not just Filer. I can’t roam into Edge towers in significant portions of the coverage area, and it seems likely to me that this problem could be encountered anywhere without rhyme or reason.

So as much as I hated to do it I called and canceled. I hate making decisions a lot and I hate going back on them even worse. I always feel like I should have tried harder, worked with them more, whatever. I really hate whatever’s miswired in my brain that makes me dwell on thoughts like this. I want so badly to get rid of it. In the end though, I got it done.

I’m probably going to get a phone through AT&T. They’re the 2nd fastest carrier I tested in TF (when you’re in a good strong signal area, like work, T-Mobile was by far the fastest carrier I tested.) I’m not real happy about this but I’m sick to fucking death of Sprint. Their network is so goddamn slow and horrible I might as well be sending transmissions to Mars.

I will say this: with one exception, everyone I talked to at T-Mobile was absolutely friendly, courteous and knowledgeable. I honestly expected to have some sort of crazy annoying retention person yammer in my ear about why I shouldn’t cancel while I was within my trial period, but the lady I spoke with seemed genuinely concerned about my problems and wanted to solve them. And if I’d had more time, I would have given them a try, but 21 days isn’t very much time and a $200 ETF is not something I want to risk. If they ever can straighten their roaming and signal issues out they would absolutely be a viable carrier here. Hell, if you very rarely stray outside of the TF city limits or the freeways, they’re absolutely a viable option now. And they have the best prepaid service I’ve found so far.

Why am I droning on about this? Because apparently fat people don’t like Wall-E. Google “wall-e fat” and you’ll find a few sources and a lot more sources reporting on those sources. Such is the Internet. These people are stupid. World-class stupid.

Why?

Because Wall-E is absolutely one of the best movies I have ever seen, and you would have to be a cruel, inhuman monster to not want to hug the fuck out of it. I take that back: you’d have to be something greater than a cruel inhuman monster, because Furb liked it. (Sorry, Furb.) Wall-E himself is one of the most endearing characters that Pixar has ever created, and considering the fact that he has no functional dialogue per se, that is a massive achievement.

Visually every Pixar movie has been better than the last. This one is no exception, but it transitions from being visually evolutionary to being visually ballistic - they’ll blow your socks right the fuck off. Most animated pictures don’t work very hard to create large panoramic visuals, but this one starts off with them right up front. Perhaps they’re making a statement. Either way, it’s an impressive way to start the film and the amazing visuals just keep up from there.

While their moments of sentiment may be a bit contrived, they are certainly not handled in a ham-handed way. There was one very specific moment when the theatre was entirely dead silent - adults, kids, everyone, hanging on a single word. Some people say that this movie left out the subtle brand of adult humor Pixar’s previous movies included, but I’d say that in this case they changed up the adult humor in favor of geek humor. There are some things in there that are obviously there because of their appeal to computer geeks or movie geeks, and they will make you grin a lot.

Go check out its RT or Metacritic score. I’ll wait. It’s obvious people are taken in by this film. Unless you’re the aforementioned heartless monster, you will be too. It’s wonderful, endearing, takes on large social issues and is simply massive in scope, but manages to at the same time be simple and emotional and absolutely fucking astounding. I want to see it again.

And because as a fat man I seem to feel the absurd need to justify the stupid claims made by my fat “peers” (please take that term as loosely as possible) it is made clear in the film that sloth, not fat, is the source of many of the problems created in the film. Fat is simply a side effect. I don’t see anything wrong with that whatsoever. In fact, if there is an absurdity to be had here, it’s that given a choice, people in the movie choose not to be lazy. That would never, ever fucking happen in real life.

I can prove it.

I’m publishing this fucking article.

The lawn looks somewhat bare without the rock gardens. The big garden looks rather brutal still but you can see where the small garden is how much better it’s going to look as only lawn. Lawn is damn easy to maintain.

Those of you who have been hanging around my house for a while may recall the shiny white rock at the very top of the giant rock pile that was the big rock garden. I decided I wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons - I wanted something to remember the rock gardens by - so we dug it out. And dug, and dug, and dug. Turns out it’s damn large.

Top view
You can see where the stone is very white, that was the part that was sticking out. It was large as is but it’s probably 2-3 times larger under the earth. Michael and I had to just push it into the bucket on the tractor to move it, it was too large for us to lift. On the topic of me being a total fucking weakling, I can barely move the damn thing on my own, so unless something dramatic happens it’s probably going to be staying where it is for a while.

Much love to the aforementioned friends, because looking back on it I could not have done it myself. Not only would it have taken days but there were several of those rocks that I could not have moved on my own.

Anybody remember that bright white rock at the top of the big rock garden? I wanted to keep that one as a reminder of sorts. I thought it might be moderately large, it looked like it was just sitting on a big pile of dirt. Turns out it WAS the big pile - the damn thing was really challenging to move around. I think I’ll be keeping it, which is good, because if I want to get rid of it, breaking it up by hand with a sledgehammer will probably be required. I can barely budge it enough to turn it around on my own - there’s simply no way I could move it.

I’ll post some pictures tomorrow when I’m not so fucking tired. The big white rock is a sight to see, and there was a metric shitload of rocks that composed that big rock garden. If you, anybody you know, anybody you think you know, or anybody whose existence you’ve simply pondered on occasion needs some rocks, please, please, please come take them. I don’t want or need them. I’ll even help you load them. As soon as I get some photos I’ll be putting them up on Freecycle TF and TF Craigslist too.

Fuck, folks, I will really, really miss this man. Here’s a couple bits. I’m gonna go cry now.

This one is probably my favorite Carlin clip of all time.

Turns out that much like the scary plant monster, if you look for a conspiracy, you’ll probably find one. Whether it is a bunch of propaganda or not, it doesn’t matter, because it’s still fucking terrible. Absolutely aweful. Recklessly bad.