Temporary Ghost Town

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:21:45 GMT

Hahahaha

I was looking at the musicians available/wanted section of the Phoenix craigslist and came upon this...

"Am looking for a Guitarist who has black hair, brown eyes,and who is under 5 feet tall. She must be very cute, has to play a les paul and must use a fender twin reverb. She also must live near Lookout Mountain. Someone who took communication in collage and who has the ability to teach is a plus. Age is not a factor. My intent is collaberate writing songs and to start dating."

Is there anyone in the world who fits this insanely specific set of requirements? I love how despite the restrictions on hair color, eye color, height, appearance, the kind of guitar you play, the kind of amp you use, where you live, and what you did in college, he doesn't care how old you are. Also I love how this was posted in the musician section, but you end up having to date the guy too. And why is using a Twin Reverb so important? What does communications and the ability to teach have to do with anything?

http://phoenix.craigslist.org/muc/556075428.html

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:50:05 GMT

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:37:08 GMT

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:52:50 GMT

http://youtube.com/watch?v=M8gJ3igY2Lk

Man, I just heard this song today for the first time in probably 10 years. It epitomizes everything that's awesome and silly about grunge.

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 23:33:52 GMT

Check out this new band :D

Wallpaper Werewolves

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:46:37 GMT

Yesterday I heard the weirdest case of radio censorship I've ever encountered. The local "alternative" station was playing Live's All Over You which has a line that goes "our love is like water / pinned down and abused for being strange". They silenced the word "strange"! What's going on there?

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 05:53:17 GMT

Confused about chronology

I always thought the movie Detroit Rock City was made in the 70s. Turns out it was from 1999.

I always thought Blister In The Sun was an early 90s song, no earlier than 1990. Turns out it's from 1982.

Weird!

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:42:26 GMT

Going to San Jose tomorrow.

Want to hear some awesome music? In my opinion, the four most awesome commercially successful (I was gonna say mainstream but it sounded kind of snobbish) pop songs, 1990-2000:

Basket Case, Green Day I've probably talked about this song enough so I'll spare you

Semi-Charmed Life, Third Eye Blind It's set to a Gilmore Girls montage, but it's the first unedited version I could find. The actual music video on Youtube is the radio edit, which cuts out a very important 30-second section.

Slide, Goo Goo Dolls Once in high school I saw some girl playing this song on a guitar outside by the auditorium. I should listen to more Goo Goo Dolls - I actually think I've liked every song I've heard by them: "Slide", "Name", and "Dizzy" are all awesome, and "Broadway" and "Iris" are pretty good. Are they one of those bands that gives every song a one-word title? For some reason that irritates me. Probably because the titles end up sounding generic unless you pick some good words. I associate it with Disturbed: every fucking song has a one-word title

Got You Where I Want You, The Flys Katie Holmes! This one wasn't as big of a hit, and so I've always kind of felt like this song was my secret, even though it was still pretty damn popular. Who the hell are the Flys? Who knows? This song is the 90s for me.

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:17:48 GMT

I added the best facebook application of all time

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:12:02 GMT

I've owned Green Day's Dookie since about the time it was released, in 1994 or 95. It's one of my favorite albums of all time and I've listened to it over and over and over. But somehow it wasn't until last night that I noticed this wordplay in the lyrics to Longview:

I sit around and watch the phone but no one's calling
Call me pathetic, call me what you will

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:41:44 GMT

Anyone who enjoys lolcats must view these right now

laugh out loud cats

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:52:45 GMT

Something really similar to Andrew's ordeal happened to me today. Basically here's how it went down:

Things have been kind of strange here at work today. I was walking across the lot to do some maintanance at the other office we have, and I noticed a lot of commotion around the entrance, which is right near by. All of the construction workers had stopped to look, and I couldn't really tell what was happening aside from someone (I think one of the security people) was calling for an ambulance.

Later we found out that some homeless person had tried to get into the lot. When the security tried to stop them they apparently kept going. One of the construction workers was on break and he got into a fight with the guy who must have cut him or something. What we didn't realize is that the homeless guy had a few hobo friends hanging around in the parking lot. During my lunch hour I walked outside to get some fresh air and before I knew it I was surrounded by three very angry looking men. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said "you're moving with your auntie and your uncle in Bel-Air."

I whistled for a cab, and when it came near, the license plate said "fresh" and it had dice in the mirror. If anything, I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought "nah forget it, yo homes to Bel Air." I pulled up to the house about seven or eight, and I yelled to the cabbie "yo homes, smell ya later." I looked at my kingdom, I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:08:18 GMT

I'm proud to own this book. I got it for free at an ASU "astronomy night" about 10 years ago. I've never even tried to read it, but I can't get over the title. It's probably the geekiest thing I own.

Tue, 08 May 2007 01:37:48 GMT

This is the cutest picture of all time

C&H

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:44:21 GMT

My semester, Calvin & Hobbes style:

Algebra

Applied Analysis

The Epic Tradition

Intro to Media Studies

Approaches to the Study of Religion

Math Forum

Archery

The semester as a whole

Speakers practice

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:06:21 GMT

Yesterday at 2:30 PM the Speakers came to Claremont as part of the "Practice in the Platt Basement" world tour. It was agreed by all in attendance that the show was amazing. Fortunately a fan happened to tape the entire show, and the band has allowed him to post some of the songs for everyone to enjoy.

The setlist:

Californication
What I Like About You
What I Like About You (alternate version)
Sunshine of Your Love
You Shook Me All Night Long
The Ocean (short version)
The Ocean (full version)
The Ocean (avant garde version)
Hard Day's Night/Here Comes Your Man medley
Day Tripper (extremely mindblowing, unbelievable, avant garde version)
Day Tripper (good version)
Where Is My Mind?
In Bloom
Happiness is a Warm Gun/California Sun medley
Back in Black (Let's Try That One Again version)
Back in Black (reprise)
What I Like About You (reprise)
What I Like About You (reprise of reprise)
What I Like About You (encore)
What I Like About You (Chemical Brothers mix)
What I Like About You (We Got The Ending Right version)

Enjoy! Other mp3s available upon request (or, if you're at Mudd, just grab the entire 700MB .wav file off Noel's computer)

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:05:35 GMT

Beatles

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 02:57:43 GMT

Check out this awesome drawing my brother did on an Etch-a-Sketch:

Under The Rainbow

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 08:05:13 GMT

New song...a new idea, I'm taking fragments of poetry posted to archive.org and putting them into an instrumental song I wrote. Check it out!

Under The Rainbow

Poems used:

"Untitled Poem" by (and read by) Matt Redman
"Poem to Take Back The Night" by June Jordan, read by "Hatshepsut"
"Spanish Dancer" by Ranier Maria Rilke, read by "Hatshepsut"
"Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, read by Neha Viswanathan
"Pearl" by the Pearl poet, read by "Hatshepsut"

Last-minute songs

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:12:20 GMT

Wow, only one week till school...today I'm leaving to visit a friend in Tucson for a few days, and I'll probably spend all of Friday packing, so here are some songs I was able to record at the last minute:

Angel Island This is really just a single guitar/bass/vocals demo, I've been trying to work on this song for a while now but have never been able to come up with a good drum part. Suggestions welcome. (The title and one of the lines come from a video game...can you guess which one?)

My Valuable Hunting Knife Cover of a song by (who else?) Guided by Voices. Silly and fun!

Stuff

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 06:11:53 GMT

A few weird, amusing things that have happened to my brother and me over the years:

Once we were at Waterworld (a water park place) with some friends. We were all going down some slide where you ride down in a tube. Eric was the last one to go, and we were all waiting for him, but he was taking forever to arrive at the bottom of the slide. It was because he got stuck inside.

We were visiting family in my dad's hometown in Illinois, and we were in some kind of old building that used to be a schoolhouse (I don't even remember why we were there). Eric and I went upstairs and found dozens of old black-and-white class photos from the 30s and 40s, I think. In one of them, one of the kids was moving his head when the picture was taken and had an eerie The Ring style blurry face.

And finally, something that I didn't actually witness, but my brother swears is true:

When Eric was in 8th grade, he was at the state fair for an orchestra trip. He was riding one of those things where you're strapped to a big circular thing and spun around/tilted at high speeds. He happened to look around at one point and saw something fly off the ride and hit the fence. Then they stopped the ride and he found out it was some kid's prosthetic leg.

Meanwhile progress is coming along slowly but surely on my followup "EP". Possible songs to appear:

Photography
Angel Island
Space Police
Wright Bros.
M-Tron
Ariel
Welcome to Tube City

Only Photography and Angel Island are completely new. Space Police and M-Tron are both from spring break last semester; I need to flesh them out and add lyrics (and find a new name for M-Tron). Wright Bros is an instrumental from last summer that's basically done. Ariel is from freshman year, although it's changed somewhat. Welcome to Tube City isn't even a song right now, just a title; hopefully I can come up with a song to match it.

And last but not least, our SNES works again so I was happily playing Mario 2 today:

Some things I used to think

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 06:08:37 GMT

Sometimes I realize that I used to have a bunch of notions about various things that turned out to be amusingly incorrect. For most of them, I have no idea where I came up with these beliefs. Since I find these pretty funny, here are the ones I could think of (unless otherwise noted, these are all things that I believed around elementary-school age):

I thought that people born on February 29th (in a leap year) were only legally as old as the number of "actual" birthdays they've had, i.e. they could only add a year to their age every four years. I thought that it was really unfair that they couldn't drive, for example, until they had lived 64 years.
I thought that any given city could only have 1 of any house number. I was really confused when I saw a house in our neighborhood that had the same house number as us.
There used to be a house by ours that had a mailbox that said "Barkley" (this was when Charles Barkley was playing for the Phoenix Suns). For some reason I assumed that Charles Barkley himself lived there.
For a long time I thought that Tommy Lee Jones (the actor) and Tommy Lee (the drummer from Motley Crue) were the same person. Specifically, I thought they were both Tommy Lee Jones, and I had no idea who Motley Crue was.
Up until a few years ago, I apparently had a case of very selective dyslexia: I thought the word "denizen" was spelled and pronounced "denzien". It wasn't a word that I ever really said or wrote, so nobody had a chance to correct me, and I don't remember anyone ever saying it to me (where I would have noticed the pronunciation), so I only encountered it in print, where I always read it as "denzien".
Until pretty recently, I thought that it was illegal to pass a car on the right while driving. This one I actually have an origin for. It's from a Dilbert comic strip I read a long time ago, in which Dogbert gets a traffic ticket. The cop tells him, "you passed an ambulance...on the right", implying that passing an ambulance is one thing, but passing one on the right is much worse. I figured that the only way that passing on the right would be worse than passing on the left was if passing on the right was itself illegal. This led to the conclusion that passing any vehicle on the right, at any time, was illegal. I didn't find out that this wasn't the case until I had been driving for a couple years.
And the best one, just because it's so dumb: my friend and I were eating in a Jack In The Box a long time ago (must have been 4th or 5th grade, because he moved to Texas before I was out of elementary school), and he told me that "Jack" was actually the founder of Jack In The Box, and that he had literally lost his head in some kind of accident, and had to get a (large, plastic, clownlike) replacement head. I believed him.

Feel free to add any if you have any amusing examples 8-)

"Album"

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 03:00:58 GMT

Edit: thanks to Noel for pointing out that track 5 linked to the wrong song...it's fixed now

Well, I guess it's more of an EP (5 songs). I figured, as long as I was writing stuff, why not make it feel a little more legitimate and make an "album"? So I recorded 5 songs and put them together in an EP that I decided to call Close But Not Forever (the title being a tribute to The Mice).

Tracklisting (also, click titles to download)
1. Dragonfly 1 (2:13)
2. Pathways of Power (1:46)
3. A.D. Adventures (1:36)
4. Nobody Knows How To Dance (1:50)
5. The Great Divide (1:48)

Since my only real songwriting rules-of-thumb are 1) Try to keep boring stuff to a minimum and 2) Don't repeat stuff too much, I had two choices: write long, complex songs with a lot of different sections, or write short songs. You can see from the running times that I chose the second option :)

Some notes on the songs, if you're interested:

I wrote most of track 1 about a week ago but just added the intro today. It's about an astronaut landing on a strange planet, "Dragonfly 1" being the name of the spaceship, I guess.

Track 2 is mostly new, but it's based on an idea I had at some point in high school, which I then discarded for basically being a rip-off of a Dinosaur Jr. song. I hopefully changed it enough so that it's less of a copy. It's about a megalomaniacal archaeologist (seriously).

Track 3 is based on Photopia, one of my favorite computer games. The title has two meanings, one where "A.D" is an adjective and "adventures" is a noun, and one where "A.D." are the initials of a person/character and "adventures" is a verb. I oringally tried to record this with my dad's acoustic but I found out that I suck at playing acoustic guitars. Sine waves courtesy of Audacity.

I wrote track 4 at some point sophomore year, except for the last part, which I just added. It's about trying to impress someone (well, it wasn't intended to be, I just came up with some random rhyming lyrics and that was the impression I got from them). The title comes from way before the song; it was something I said to a friend during prom season.

Track 5 is by far the oldest of these songs; I wrote what appears here (essentially unchanged, except for some lyrics) in high school. I think I recorded a stripped-down version of this last summer. The title comes from a flavor of ice cream that my brother likes. The song isn't really about anything.

That's all for now. Coming up next, a cover of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go"...

Pro bowling

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 04:58:14 GMT

The fine art of bowling sabotage, this is from earlier this summer but I never got around to posting it

Sabotaged

Yeah, so I'm bored 8-)

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 03:27:47 GMT

I've never done one of these surveys before, but there's a first time for everything!

A - Available :: Yeah
A - Age :: 20
A - A random fact :: Coke bottles in Europe are smaller than coke bottles in the US (I think)

B - Best female friend :: Melissa, or any of my female friends at college, really
B - Beer :: Never tried it, maybe someday. From what I hear I'm not missing much
B - Best male friend :: Andrew F.

C - Crush :: Album by Bon Jovi whose cover rips off either Achtung Baby by U2 or No Code by Pearl Jam
C - Car :: Honda Accord 8-)
C - Candy :: I used to like candy more than chocolate ("candy" meaning Skittles, Starburst, that sort of thing), but now I like chocolate more

D - Day or night :: Definitely day
D - Death :: Doh
D - Dog or cat :: Cat

E - Easiest person to talk to :: Andrew F.
E - Eggs :: Over easy
E - Emotions :: Not bad

F - First Love :: n/a
F - Favorite colors :: Green, black, white
F - Favorite fastfood :: Taco Bell

G - Grand parents are from :: Japan, Illinois
G - Gangsta :: Once in high school I convinced my friend (the aforementioned Andrew F.) to wear a wall clock around his neck

H - Hair Color :: Black
H - Height: About 6'
H - Have you ever been on Welfare :: No

I - Ice Cream :: Awesome, my favorite is chocolate chip cookie dough or rocky road
I - Initials: KTF
I - Idol :: Thurston Moore

J - Job :: Library worker / Math tutor
J - Juice :: In decreasing order of favoritism: apple, cranberry, orange, grapefruit. The only kind I don't like is grape

K - Kids :: I doubt it
K - Killer :: I think this was the name of a dog somewhere
K - Kindergarten :: I didn't go to Kindergarten for some reason. It wasn't like I skipped a grade, I just didn't have kindergarten

L - Longest Car Ride :: AZ to IL
L - Last Phone Call :: Math tutoring guy

M - Milk flavor :: Chocolate (what other flavor is there, besides the regular kind?)
M - Money or Happiness :: Happiness

N - Number of Siblings :: One
N - Number of Tattoos :: None

O - One wish :: To always be in a sweet band of some kind (so far so good 8-)
O - One phobia :: Unintentionally offending people
O - One regret :: Being kind of a slacker in high school. It's not like a wasted 4 years but I probably could have been doing more interesting stuff

P - Part of your appearance you like best :: Hair
P - Part of your personality you like best :: Easy to get along with (I hope)
Q - Quick or Slow :: Quick I guess, I always start Tetris at the fastest speed
Q - Quote ::

"Do you want the ladder or the stool?"

"I want the latter."

-- A.F.

R - Reason to smile :: Playing drums loud
R - Reality TV Show :: n/a
R - Reasons to cry :: Can't think of any

S - Song Last Heard :: Kentucky Cocktail by Pavement if playing it on my guitar counts. Some random Pearl Jam song off their new album otherwise
S - Singer :: Anthony Kiedis right now, because the new RHCP song is stuck in my head
S - Shoe :: Black Converse All-Stars

T - Time you woke up :: 7:00
T - Time for shower :: Morning
T - Toilet paper :: Good invention

U - Unpredictable :: Sure

V - Vegetable you hate :: Mushrooms, if those are vegetables
V - Vegetable you love :: Potatoes
V - Vacation spot :: San Jose

W- Worst Habits :: Procrastination (popular one!)
W- Where are you going to travel next :: No plans before going back to Mudd
W- Weather right now :: At this moment, relatively cool. In general, HOT (going to be 111 tomorrow)

X - X-Rays :: I hope none of my dentists/doctors are cutting corners and filling the lead vests with sand or something
X - X-Rated :: X-actly

Y - Year you were born :: 1986
Y - Year you think the world would end :: If I understand Chrono Trigger correctly, 1999

Z - Zoo Animal :: Big cats
Z - Zodiac :: Aries