No Escaping the Scene

I actually went to a show last night, for the first time in quite a while. There’s either been a dearth of good shows and venues in the area lately, or I’ve just been completely out of the loop. Probably a little bit of both. But I saw a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while.

The show was at Michele’s, in Santa Rosa. I’m gonna have to pay more attention to what’s going on there, if there are good shows like this more often. Ashtray was up first, a boy/girl fronted punk rock band, really energetic with a lot of trade-off vocals and stage presence. Not really my sort of thing, but they’re pretty good at what they do. Next up was old favorites The Rum Diary, who I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and who were still rocking as always. Then came The New Trust, Josh Staples’ newer project. They’re a harder-edged sort of indie rock, very melodic, with lots of short songs and some really cool rhythmic interplay. I’m glad I finally got around to checking them out. But during their set, they took a two-song break and loaned their instruments to The Polar Bears, who tore shit up and left Josh’s bass bloodied and seriously detuned.

I need to find more local shows again. And get working on a band project of some sort. I’ve been neglecting the rock and roll for too long, it seems. I’ll have to do something about that.

Anyways, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 earlier in the day, with Joey, but I think I’ll write more about that later on. I’ve gotta head out to Reed and Nicole’s slide show in a little while here, and I haven’t even showered yet. Bleh….

The Terminal

Saw the Terminal yesterday with Reed, Nicole, and Joey. I really enjoyed it, and it was nice to see Kumar Pallana in something that wasn’t directed by Wes Anderson. The movie starts off like the Monty Python “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch, becomes more like Kafka’s “the Trial” for a time, and then becomes straight-up heart-warming Spielberg for the remainder. Not a bad time, all in all.

Nothing Nice!

the Nothing Nice to Say archives are back! This is truly a glorious day!

A Slow Death

So, my laptop appears to be grinding it’s way to a slow and painful death. And this only two months after my two-year “no questions asked total replacement” service plan from CompUSA failed to get my soundcard problems fixed, or even properly diagnosed. So you could say I’m a little upset about this. Anyways, the hard drive is making happy little “click-click” noises every now and then, especially during things like, oh, virus scans, when the drive is in a state of more or less constant spin. It has also failed to boot or recognize the hard drive after booting on at least three separate occasions now. So I did the whole frantic back-up routine last night, making sure I could save all of my e-mail, site design work, pictures, music, etc. But now it looks like it’s only a matter of time until total breakdown.

I could get a new hardrive, but that still leaves me with a laptop with a broken-ass soundcard that I can’t stand to listen to any sound on. Plus there’s other nagging problems, like a dead pixel in the screen (not that big a deal…hardly noticeable for the most part), a loose usb port (not too problematic, since there’s a total of 3 on 2 separate buses), one of the trackpad mouse-buttons is getting less and less responsive….Arrrgh. I think I’m just going to have to spring for a new one. And not at CompUSA, because their service department is completely unreliable and unresponsive.

So I guess I’ll be laptop shopping again soon. At least I have my back-up laptop set up still, the one with the broken screen that is essentially a small desktop now. But this is going to be a huge pain.

More later…

Eugene

Well, Eugene has been somewhat fun. Lindsay’s ceremony was yesterday afternoon. The graduation ceremonies here are divided up by department, so we didn’t have to sit through the campus-wide graduation ceremony and speakers, we just got a small ceremony for about 150 anthropology and geography students, which made the whole affair much more pleasant.

I’ve spent a lot of time walking around downtown Eugene the last two days, so I have a pretty good idea of the layout of the campus area of the city. Eugene reminds me a lot of Santa Rosa, only less urbanized, and with a much healthier downtown. There aren’t vacant retail spaces every dotting the main roads like in Santa Rosa, and there are lots of eclectic little shops, like Stylus Grooves Records, a tiny little DJ-oriented records store built in a little house, followed te next block by House of Records, which is more of a general record/CD store built in a residence. I alos managed to find myself some black licorice ice cream in the local mall, which is something that most Californians have probably never even considered the existence of, by all appearances. I however, grew up on Tiger Tail ice cream (orange and black licorice swirled together), so that took me right back.

I managed to get a couple pairs of shoes while here, thanks to my mom’s disgust with my aging Dr. Martens. I also picked up a copy of the Love and Rockets comic that Clark’s apparently didn’t order for me.

Last night after graduation, Lindsay went to bed early, and I got tired of playing Zelda on her roommate’s Gamecube, so I decided to go out in search of a drink. Unfortunately, the two bars in the main downtown area were full to overflowing with recent graduates, lined up for half a block at each one, so I had to settle for people watching instead, which was still pretty interesting in it’s own right.

Both mornings that we’ve been here, we went to breakfast around the corner from my sister’s apartment, at the Glenwood. We visited the Glenwood last time I was here, with Emily, on our way up to Canada, and the thing that I like most about it (aside from the excellent Willamette burger) is the incredibly high ratio of cute waitresses. I swear I walk out of there heartbroken every morning.

Ah well. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing today. Heading down to Face the Music to music shop (again) after I’m done here in the U of O library, but other than that, it’s pretty up in the air. More Zelda is on the agenda, I would imagine.

More later….

Comics, Books, Oregon, Features, and More!

Lots of good comics out today, although I’m a little pissed that a copy of Love and Rockets Vol. 2 #10 didn’t show up in my subscription box. I thought I added that to my list? Hmm….Anyways….I did get Demo #7, 100 Bullets #50, Bone #55 (the big finale!), Y: the Last Man #23, Love Fights #10, and PVP #7. I’ll write a little bit about some of that, along with Blankets, which I recently finished.

I’m off to Oregon on Friday for Lindsay’s graduation. It’ll be nice to hang out in Eugene for a couple of days, and miss out on a couple of days of work. Especially nice since work has been super-busy lately. Always a perfect time to take a couple days off, although I feel a bit bad about leaving my co-workers to fend for themselves!

This week’s Bohemian has a really interesting article about Santa Rosa author Robert Heinberg’s new book, The Party’s Over, which is about an idea called “peak oil theory” that’s gaining some attention since it was formed in the 70s (if I’m not mistaken). Sounds like a really interesting book, and I was thinking about picking it up at Border’s tonight (went there with Michelle for a few this evening). I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but that may be a good thing. I’d probably end up reading it ont he way to Oregon and getting even less reading of Love in the Time of Cholera done. I’m slacking on that book. I took about a week off reading it to read my huge stacks of comics from Mile High from last week. But I will probably end up picking up either that book or The End of Oil, a similar book I saw at Borders that was a bit too expensive for an impulse purchase.

I’m thinking about adding a new feture or two to this website: one would be a monthly mixtape, a downloadable playlist of 8-12 or so MP3s that would rotate every month. Sometimes it would be a themed mix, sometimes, just what I happen to be listening to at the time. The other feature would be a weekly wallpaper graphic. I’ve got a serious backlog of fun desktops I’ve made, and I’m always looking for a good graphic to use to make a new one, so maybe I should give myself a public outlet for that. That way all 3 of my readers could download them. Har Har….

More later….

Life Under Glass

I just posted the debut Superficial Hero full length album, Life Under Glass, to the Music page here. All files are 192kbps stereo Mp3′s, except for the last bonus track, which is only available at 128kbps for now. I’ll try to fix that at some point. More music coming along at some point…

R-Type Final!

R-Type Final is such an awesome game. It’s been a long time since I’ve played a classic side-scrolling shooter, and while the idea of revisiting that genre appealed to me already, I don’t think I was quite prepared for just how far it could be taken with today’s technology. The additions are somewhat simple, and mostly affect the visual experience rather than the gameplay. However, the visual experience of this game is pretty amazing, and the gameplay is good enough to stand on it’s own. It’s somehow surpassed the “Twitch and Kill” style of most side-scrollers, and actually involves some planning and strategy to be successful. Highly recommended.

Got a couple things fixed up here, but there’s still some odds and ends to tidy up. Soon enough….

More later….

The Moment Finally Arrives!

Welcome to Successless.org, version 3.0! Finally free of Blogger (which I have nothing against), and into the liberating arms of Movable Type! Everything should be running pretty smoothly here, but if you notice broken links, images that don’t load, or other weirdness, e-mail me, post a comment, or IM me (see the Contact page for details). Have fun. More features to come. Make yourselves at home.

New Music – Panties

New song up at EM411.com. Check it out, yo.

More later…