30.9.08

--o--o--d

Days be crazy.

I have two essay revisions, a test, a reading, and an algorithms assignment due tomorrow. All of it takes more time than I have, or have had. I'm just really busy, you know?

If I did a weekly music spot, when would people like to see it? I was thinking either Wednesday or Saturday, so either mid-week or on the weekend. The weekend is a bit harder for me to stick to, just because I'm usually working and homeworking then, but I don't want to cram all my updates into the weekdays either, you know?

29.9.08

The no-place of an ache dangles body all around it

It's interesting how we just let stuff go by sometimes, pieces of our lives. We'll get to it later, right? That's the intention, but will it ever happen? I'd really like to play banjo, or buy that mandolin on goingToday, but I don't have time, and I won't buy it, because I have other things in my life that I need the money for: coffee, food, and most importantly seeing Angie.

It's interesting how we live with situations that we don't enjoy, just because we think we have to. It's something that's so ingrained in us, it's no wonder that Evie has to almost die before she's free. What is freedom? It doesn't have a face, or a concrete image: is that because you can't define it so basely, or because we don't have a real example to give to it? What is freedom, but a lack of shackles?

And what of it? Is choice not its own prison?

B--L--

Happy Monday everyone! That means it's Artsy Fartsy Monday! Let's see the new piece this week:



This was an attempt, if you could call it that, to recreate the feeling of the really blocky, cubist portraits of musicians, if you've ever seen one of those; it's a man and a cello if you didn't quite see it. I like the mix of shape and free lines in this piece, it sits well with me for some reason.

28.9.08

The ground always falls to pieces

This was quite the weekend. I'm exhausted. On Friday night I went to the Building Better Bombs show with Tessa. They played at the Triple Rock, and the whole thing was intense. It was a weird bill for them to be on, the other bands were mostly "heavy metal", that is, Mastodon w/o testicles, so we didn't stay long. Martin also came, and he and I hung out afterwards for a while. It was good to see both of them, but as usual it was a little strange.

Then I worked for two days straight, basically: 2-10:30 yesterday and 1-9:30 today. I'm a little tired. I almost fell asleep on break today while listening to A Love Supreme, so yeah, that's about where I'm at.

I'm really lucky my homework wasn't that bad this weekend. I had an essay to write and an essay to revise for Chinese, a short reading (the page count of which wasn't clear anyways) for Romanticism and some stuff to work on for Wednesday. I'm tired, but still got enough done to feel successful. I'm also always amazed by how I manage to walk in on Open Mic at Dunn's at the wrong time/wrong day, as I wanted to read heavy German philosophical shit, and the OM dude was up on stage fingerpicking.

Also, very sad about the wine.woot sale for this weekend - it's exactly something I'd get my dad for Christmas: two award-winning Cabernet Sauvignons, which is his favorite kind of wine. However, the new item goes up at midnight, and I don't have time to talk to my mother about ordering it. *sigh* I'll just have to wait a bit longer, I guess.

Artsy-Fartsy Monday returns for another episode tomorrow, and I'm thinking of a doing a music spot to the tune of "What I've Been Listening to Too Much This Week".

Bis spaeter.

26.9.08

The LP is a lie.

Sorry about not actually getting this up on Thursday, I had a busy day that started about 12 hours ago. It's now Friday, so yeah... anyways, I present to you a poem:

Weather permitting, the train wreck begins
With a soggy early-morning invitation to sin:
Your mother says goodbye to her last living kin
Over the phone her voice echoes of tin, and D7 → D7? → I don't think that's right, man...
→ Alright, alright. Uno mas, eh?

Weather permitting, the train wreck begins
With a soggy early-morning invitation to sin:
The rattle-tattle tale procession of rin tin tin
And Jimmy, they're getting Richard back his courage again.
I think I'm confused, but the words cover it up
Like the mist over this island, let's color it up
→ pssh, pssh, pssh Why can't we all be purple?
Instead some of us is wheels and some others is gerbils

You know it too, it ain't quite right
You feel yourself left but the nation goes right
The nation goes, “fight, fight fight!”
Man, you gotta be like Mike and bite.
You bumpin this beat, you nod your head to its truth
You swerve down the street, wish you was asleep could be loose
But your mother said her last goodbye to you, her kin,
And over the phone her voice echoed of tin and → crash!

You think you're in heaven
Smell those cookies mom made when you were eleven
Right before dad walked out, shaken and pissed
Wait, is that him walking right there through the mist?
Dad?

24.9.08

A break in the wooting.

Tasty-looking wine that I can't buy because I'm not yet 21 makes my feet sad.

I got Malcolm X the movie for my birthday from my friend Vinny, which is really cool; I'm currently reading the Autobiography, and I'm really appalled by how far black people in America at that time went to fit the white status quo, and it makes me think about now, and if things have really changed. There's been a strong integrationist/anti-integrationist conflict for a long time, and it makes me hope that there's something in the middle: a point people can reach where everyone accepts everyone else on their own terms, not on terms of whiteness or how alike they are to majority. The whole thing makes me wonder about Obama: what message does electing him send to the nation?

Does it say, "Everything's ok now"? Because it's not. There are still problems, there is still inequity, there is still equality that needs to be had. My dad had a conversation a couple of weeks ago at his bi-weekly Minority Contractors meeting with two other local big-corp representatives, and he said that if McCain was elected, he'd probably give up on anything being done through politics. The two people he was talking with, one of them a Latino woman, the other a black woman, said,

"No. That is when we fight even harder."

23.9.08

Homework closed, due to AIDS

Sorry folks, it's a woot-off. That means all blogposts, work, homework, etc. will cease until further notice.

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we're all French now

That title is a line from a Time online editorial. The article is written from a very strong libertarian perspective (ie. anti-big governemnt, anti-regulation, etc.), and the person is obviously from a time when things like hating communists mattered, and he's horribly mean to the French, but it's still really funny.

I was wondering last night if it wold be possible to transform your laptop into a desktop. I mean, I know it's doable in terms of taking apart the plastic casing of the laptop and stuff. But is there a way to set up a base, a dock if you will (not unlike commercial docks that link into your ethernet/usb ports -- except better, because everything would go straight into the computer), relialbly, such that you can do it every time in the exact same way, without too much effort. Is it too much to ask that it could even *gasp* be the same for every computer? Or maybe just every brand, or line? I dunno, this could be cool. Meanwhile, I'm going to continue waiting for a 10k rpm harddrive to come to the Land of 2.5 Inches, where every hard drive fits into a fucking laptop.

Speaking of 10K, I wonder if it would be possible to actually prepare for something like 10k Day. 10k Day is where a group of people (it would be lonely just by yourself) strives to eat 10,000 Calories (big C) in one day, without throwing up. Standard recommended daily intake ranges 2k to 2.5k. That means you're eating about 5 times as much, in one day. The challenge is two-fold: how do you optimize your intake, and how do you avoid covering your house in puke. To my knowledge, there's only been one 10k Day, and people discovered that certain kinds of food were better than others, because they could be processed quickly, were cheap, etc. But my question is, is it possible to prepare for the day in a certain way that points towards easier victory. The options are:
-Starve yourself for a couple of days.
-Your stomach would shrink.
-Gorge yourself for a couple of days.
-You may have more challenge mentally to eating the food.
-Gorge yourself and then starve for 1 day or so.
-This seems like a good balance.
-Eat normally and hope for the best.
-This seems alright too.
-Nobody made it doing this though.

I feel like eating 54 hot dogs in an hour and eating 10,000 Calories in 24 hours are different tasks, so you couldn't really directly port eating championship techniques, but they could be adapted, I suppose.

22.9.08

Not that I really have time, but...

It's Monday! That means it's art time. Let's see the piece this week:


Please to be ignoring the doodles. This is pretty indicative of my general drawing style. I tend to use longer sweeping lines for form and curvature, and quite a bit more lead on the precise bits, here the eye and the curve of the beak.

21.9.08

I'm *in* the band.

So, my punk band, hello blacksmith, would like to play a venue this summer other than Martin's basement. I think it'd be pretty cool. I have no idea how these things work though. Maybe I'll talk to Daniel Balough. We've talked about also trying to get double-guitar acoustic sets at Buzz or Dunn's, because that would likewise be cool. I would be playing steel-string or banjo, Martin would be playing steel-string or gutstring. The acoustic sessions would probably be mostly covers, and to that end...any suggestions? Things on the list (I'll update this if people give suggestions):

*I Could Have Lied by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
*The Little Things Give You Away by Linkin Park

To help me (and help you....to help me help you?), I'm going to be organizing a regular update schedule, as well as an irregular update schedule: if I have something interesting to say, or w/e, I'll just post it as I want to, but I'll shoot for at least one regular update every couple of days. However, in addition to that, every Monday will be 'Artsy Fartsy Mondays', every Thursday will be 'Dichter des Donnerstags'. So come back tomorrow for the first Artsy Fartsy Monday!

That needs a new name. Suggestions?

Thank you, thank you, you're far too kind.

Hi everyone. This is going to be my new blog. I have had trouble updating my lj very often, mostly because I worry about how people react. I always felt like I never had anything of interest to say, and that if I did, it had to be really interesting, otherwise people wouldn't like it. I mostly ended up posting poetry, but nobody ever had anything to say about that. The colors got me down too.

And the interface. You gotta hate bad GUIs.

Anyways, for anybody who doesn't know, my name is Colin, and I'm a student at Macalester college in St. Paul, MN. I'm a computer science major, with mathematics and German studies minors. I enjoy playing music, writing poetry, drawing, typesetting, roleplaying and, of course, listening to music.