wintermute.

"measure twice, cut once."

--zion base founder

(neuromancer, william gibson)

for time first time in a long time, if ever, i'm in a spot where i need to organize on a level far past my experience. this is in no small part due to the fact that much of my planning is reliant on computers.

i've an able enough hand at hum-drum activities on a computer, but utilizing them for planning and record keeping (activities i typically reserve for paper and pen) is a matter foreign to me. so... what to do? it's strange that one of the greatest challenges of my near future is becoming more familiar with computers where for the past three years, i've been more than competent. 

for better or worse, me and my lappie will be getting to know each other even better. we'll see what happens.

l'blog pour l'blog.

"l'art pour l'art."

("art for art's sake.")

--french slogan (source debated)

i recently was reading my friend laura's blog where she discussed the purposes behind her blogging. it was a good read, and had me start thinking the my own blog's roots. my first blog post was four sentences long.

quote: 

disaster has struck, and i'm now a "blogger." or, you could take the immature route and think that i'm a "booger." i personally think that's the funnier option.

and on that note, my first blog post is complete.

this was the beginning of something that has now been in progress for two years,one month, and fifteen days as of the time of this post. while this description may make it sound like some sort of noble quest, you, my two readers, surely know otherwise. what it is, in fact, is a little nook of lund on the net. a place for me to ramble and for you to wish i didn't. 

this blog has roots in things since passed and addressed in posts previous in a variety of, at times absurd or stupid, ways. at these times i mainly wanted an outlet besides punching a wall. nowadays, however, i find myself punching fewer walls and needing less frequent bizarre allegories.

so why do i keep this up, my dear two readers?

l'blog pour l'blog.

flourescent gore.

poetry is a habit of mine that fluctuates in its frequency. typically it comes when i've a few minutes to spare or my mind is wandering. because of this, bedside scraps of paper and math notebooks tend to attract a lot of it. 

i think i'm going to start posting some of it from time to time (starting with this post) to help keep them somewhere that isn't as readily lost or thrown away. also, it may help flesh out the blog with some more regular posts. or perhaps just flood it with garbage. but if i was afraid of posting garbage, i wouldn't both posting anymore. 




1:07

in less than a minute you will change--
color soon will rearrange
from the red shapes on black i saw before
and again you'll adjust in a minute more. 
electric black and florescent gore,
the devil's cattle on on a midnight range.
    yes, you've no hands to tell of time.
    you need them not, small clock of mine. 




bean of light


kidney bean on my wall,
what's your point in being?
have you a goal you're chasing?
have you a fear you're fleeing?
or is fate with you agreeing
and softening you with good intentions?
or do i label you with my own fears and contentions?
you're likely just another false projection i am seeing.
     i confess, the latter smacks more true,
     but i feel less concern for me than you.


p.s.--a quick note: though i love poetry, i've never been able to take it very seriously. feel free to read anything you like into this stuff, but know that what i put into it is of consistently shallow substance.

lie detectors.

i'm writing this post from my phone as a test, so if formatting seems wacky, accept my apologies.

i recently realized that i would fail any lie detector test. this is not because i'm a poor liar (though i am), but because although i respond well to pressure when it comes to schedules, assignments, etc., i am absolutely terrified of interrogative situations. for whatever reasons, i can't handle it. whether or not i know something, did something, or anything else my nerves loudly rattle when someone interviews/interrogates me as if i do.

i can handle interviews for work or the like, but if i were wrongfully accused of even a petty crime and given a lie detector test, my physiological responses would betray me and i'd likely be found guilty. at least based on the test.

i hate that.

on a side note, i've once again grown the christmas chops.

the tragedy of 'skip track.'

i think the feeling that i have towards cassette tapes is reminiscent of the feeling those in generations prior to my own have toward vinyl. there's a certain romantic quality to a cassette tape.

in my mind, an album is (or can be) as much a piece of work as the tracks themselves. a song can be made or broken by the songs surrounding it, and it's no small credit to cassette tapes for making me feel this way. because it was quite a pain (though possible) to fast forward through tracks and hit the next one at its beginning, i never bothered. as a result, there were several songs that i wouldn't have enjoyed that become favorites.

today, i favor a mix cd over a tape. for one, my car doesn't have a tape player. for two, i can make a mix cd in about fifteen minutes, as opposed to the hour or two that mix tapes take. here's the rub. when i make a cd of new music for listening, i find myself skipping tracks. tracks that i apparently thought good enough to put on the cd in the first place, but in the moment impatience all too often wins and a morrissey track gets skipped because i'm never giving it a chance to soak in. therein lies the tragedy. with the convenient ability to freely roam the field of any given cd comes the loss of the obligation to listen to it all. and really, i miss that obligation.

freshman year.

hey friends and others.
so, about four years ago now, i was a freshman in college living in helaman halls on byu campus and living the dream. part of said dream was to make beautiful music. what instead was realized was the creation of noise loosely described as music. that being said, over time it's been fun to share my wastes of time, and am finally putting forth the effort to do so. these tracks were done with the blessed hammerhead rhythm station and windows sound recorder along with film quotes as you'll hear. at any rate, it was a monster pain editing all of them, so it makes me all the more proud of them.

also worth noting before we get started are two things of practical application. one, i'm still unaware of a way to simply post these tracks as wav or mp3 files, so they're still being posted as movies(yes, the visuals are boring, but i can't be bothered to actually do anything visually for stuff i made four years ago). if you want to be able to download any of them, just get a hold of me or leave a comment and i'll just e-mail them to you. and second, while some i'm quite proud of, others were more me just playing around and trying to figure out how to work. for this reason, i'll only be posting the worthwhile ones, which are few, but there just the same.

so, here are the tracks, loosely in the order of which i favor them. i wrote these under the name "coat hat and cutlass" in case any of you burn these on mix cds and distribute them among friends. then when they ask who they're by, you can express that it's by coat hat and cutlass but they stopped putting out tracks a few years ago and sound very hip and knowledgeable.

as you mixed.

super micro fun.

frankly reanimixed.



your one unheard message.

try to enjoy.

irish washerwoman.

so, it's been over a month since the last post. you know what that means, if you're a regular here. time for me to give a brief recap of anything interesting that's happened over the last little while. a bit of content and not a lot of depth. i'm sure you don't mind. 

first of all, i've started learning the mandolin. i came into contact with it jamming with my pal jordan who had a mandolin by way of one friend winning it in a raffle, trading it with another friend for credit toward a bass guitar, and that friend giving it to jordan. and for now, jordan is borrowing my acoustic guitar and i'm borrowing his mandy. good stuff. i'm really enjoying how much character the thing has. jigs were never such fun to play.

the next big time investment has been trace's nerdy  game. basically a card game designed for a player to be able to play and customize in infinite directions. i'd bother trying to explain it, but really i should be writing the rules if i'm doing anything with it since i think i still have people waiting for me to get some on paper. so there. if you'd like to see some of the card designs that i've done, here you go. i'll probably do a proper post about that sometime soon. i'm sure you don't mind not seeing it now.

other than that, work and school, work and school. always a good time. besides the fact that i hate calculus and it hates me. i'm quite looking forward to winter semester. i'm taking a sabbatical from science courses and taking strictly psychology to see how i feel about the med school track. my biggest concern is the fact that i was taking biology earlier this semester, but i dropped it because it worked like a four credit hour class when it was only two hours. but on top of that, i just did not at all enjoy the material. and i'm thinking to myself, "man, this phage and cellular respiration garbage isn't very cool. and... this is a big part of medicine. interesting..." so we'll see. i've definitely made no solid plans, but i may be running back to psychology as a career path and opting for graduate school over med school. we'll see. you know i'll be posting on that later anyway.

and i'm sure your curious why there are no pictures in this post.

simply put, my parents bought a mac recently, and macs and i don't get along so well, and i can't be bothered. i'd rather just deal with no pictures in this one. and if scott happens to read this, no. i'm still not swayed. if anything, my time with my parent's mac makes me love windows even more. so there.

see you later with a post that probably won't come for another little while. 'til then, enjoy the season. i'm off to sword fight with jimmy.

rabbit holes (radio version).

i'm in the middle of a weird phase right now.

life right now smacks a bit of when i wake up from sleeping in and can't quite make out what's really going on. even when i do, everything still feels just a little bit off. my daily schedule, hobbies, ability to do random things, none of them quite seem to fit the usual sound, smell, taste, feeling, or appearance of life. maybe it's from all the pizza.

i had a much bigger, much moodier post written up already. i wrote it over an hour's time whilst watching 'westworld.' (on a side note, that was a very good library find. i'm thoroughly enjoying it. it even stars yul brynner for all you 'king and i' types.) i was going to post it, but as i realized it was around three pages long, remarkably melodramatic, and really just annoying (as i would imagine to any reader), i decided to simply e-mail it to myself and forget posting it. maybe i would have thought otherwise if bothered reading it. it was too long and moody, though, so here you go instead. you should be glad i did so. all two of you that will read this.

basically, this post is just here so i can satisfy my need to post something after writing such a long post, and in turn not posting it. this is a sort of sad excuse for a post. like eating a cereal box because you threw away all of the cereal... yeah. just like that.

and now, since you bothered reading, here's part of the last post. it was the light hearted climax of an otherwise heavy handed piece of writing. it has an ironic history about it in context, but i'll leave it for now. if you're really that interested in it you can ask me, you two readers.

and i one day hope to smoke my awkwardness and everything else with it into extinction. figuratively, of course.

see you later. i promise the next post will be a bit more uppity and a little less johny raincloud.

count tranceula

hey there. so, it's been a while. i know. the fact of the matter is i actually have a bit to do these days, so posts aren't going up quite as readily as before.

but this little treat is really something especially good. something especially... spooky!
props to my brother skyler for this one. a good majority of this was written by him for guitar and simply translated to 8 bitness. i had some additions, but most original writing goes to his credit.

anyway, it may be a bit earlier than the usual season for this sort of thing, but i hope you all enjoy it just the same. and as always, watch your volume before you start.

now, may i present to you,

count tranceula.

hope you enjoyed. i was pleased as a peach when i found the photo for this video. not super thrilling, but i knew i was going to be lazy and have you staring at it for two minutes, and i couldn't have asked for a more entertaining still frame than the one i found.


so.
keep it real folks, really real.

as an elephant eats.

hey there. remember how i said i'd post more 8 bit stuff as i finished it? well, i finally finished another one.

i've realized that the fun of having multiple projects at once comes at the price of a slower development for each piece. simple, i know, but it's just started setting in. that means you may not be seeing these (or hearing them, rather) as often as i'd like. oh well.

here's my first of a few covers i'm working on. it's from a film which you'll probably have seen. i wish i'd had more to do for it, but i thought for now it would do as is since i really want to get to other projects. it may have more surgery later on... we'll see.

so here's the movie clip. as always, it's only a clip because blogger demands it be more than just a sound file. the visuals are strictly there to not make you stare at a plain black screen. if you want a copy, let me know. i'm sure i'll be able to get you one. also as always, you may want to be careful with your volume. you've been warned.

and thus, i give you, as an elephant eats.

i guess we'll see how long it is until the next one is up. could be a bit thanks to some tricky harmonies, but if you've waited this long for this one (as i know my severals of diehard fans have done) you'll be used to it.

so long, friends.

fenside

hello again, everybody.

i found myself with some time today, and decided to finally lay down a track i've had wandering around my skull for the last two and a half years.

for the unaware, i served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in various parts of england and wales. while there, i had my fair share of noteworthy experiences. quite a few of these experiences took place in boston, england (home of the stump and boston united). among these, many of the more exciting and or remarkably upsetting (only because disturbing is too strong of a word) experiences took place in fenside, a neighborhood in the northwest corner of boston town.

after working in the neighborhood and having such an interesting time, it seemed natural that this pulsing little number that i came up with on 24 key keyboard in my apartment should be named after it, if it wasn't at least partially inspired by it.

the song isn't exactly finished, at least in the sense that it has everything i wanted for it, but it won't for some time, i'd imagine. this being the case, i'll share it as is for the moment. let me know what you think if you have an opinion.

anyway, this is it. like last time, the video is just so it's not flat black screen to stare at, so don't bother complaining about it.

the thought of my mission reminds me of the people and places that met me there. to all of you, thanks. i love the places i stayed and the people that populated them. thanks for your kindness and patience with this and many other boisterous 19-year-old american boys.

and ones of other nationalities too.
ta.

heavy's big fists.

hellow.
for those of you who may not know me in real life, or haven't known me in real life for very long, i have a bit of an interest in creating music. however, the fact that i'm somewhat limited in my resources, making cheap digital music has had a certain flair for me.

well i've started playing with the stuff again. yes, again. if you'd like to get a hold of the stuff i made my freshman year, you can find it here. it's free to download if you'd really like to, though that may be unlikely.

anyway, i started playing with things some more, and have a new little number for everyone. i would have simply set it up as a sound file, but blogspot will only let me load it as a video. such being the case, i made some lame visualization for it with windows movie maker. don't bother complaining about how poor it is, i'm fully aware. it's just so it wasn't just black space. and by the way, if you'd like a copy of the track for whatever reason, just let me know in a comment or something. i'm sure i can get it to you somehow.

anyway, here it is.
you may need to turn up your speakers.

more than an attempt to make enjoyable music, this was an experiment. it turned out about as well as i could hope for considering the time and resources i had. hopefully more stuff will be posted as time moves on.

and that's about all this post was for. like i said, hopefully more in the future. for the time being, i'm sure "heavy's big fists" is more than enough digital blips to satisfy the most of you. and the rest of you, be patient.

and a big thanks to brad for the title.

level four shambling krenshar

from time to time, feel like i need to have some connection to nerd culture that i don't have by nature. not because i feel i need credibility or anything of that sort, more just because it seems to fill some void created by my not doing especially nerdy all that often.

there are of course many ways to go about filling this void, but i generally prefer more concentrated or potent sources. distilled nerdiness, if you will. i'll share a few i've found as of recent.

one that i've discovered since i hopped on the blogging train is called the "WoW fail blog" (the "WoW" is short for world of warcraft, for the unenlightened). before i go further, it should be known that i don't play world of warcraft. at one point i owned warcraft II for windows 98, but i didn't even enjoy that all that much. but anyway, suffice it to say that i don't play world of warcraft and plan on never doing so.

however.

what makes this blog useful to me is the fact that i get all the nerdiness of "WoW" condensed into jokes and stories that make me feel as if i know what's going on. therefore, even though i'll never actually be a level 68 undead mage, i can still have a laugh at an extremely nerdy joke about them on this site (even if i have to do some research to actually get it). and so, a bit of the void is filled.

it should be noted that this is animating a concept more than it is a specific thing that i love. sometimes simply talking about wizards and orcs and elves and whatever is, for whatever reason, very satisfying. i think this is why the lord of the rings films were so popular even outside of literature and warhammer types. sometimes we all like to have an excuse to talk about dwarves fighting goblins. it's simple as that.


another bit is filled with computer emulators and 8 bit music. once again, these are things that many people spend a great deal of time and effort creating and using, which is extremely nerdy. however, not being as cool or devoted as these people, i instead benefit from their labors and simply use their free programs and listen to their free music.

these activities i enjoy more than the last because i've actually toyed around with this stuff rather than simply reading about it occasionally and acting like i get it. it's really quite good. and thanks to the world of open-source software and cheap pc hardware, i too can act like i know what i'm doing and make lame digital music. that's what life's all about.

next on the list is talking about final fantasy. i've beaten two of them, vii and ix. although it did take a total of five years to do so, and that makes me less devoted than people who have beaten them twice in a few months. either way, talking about sephiroth with coworkers and peers undeniably adds weight to the nerd repertoire.
though to be fair, i'll need to beat the ones on nes before i can show my face in the presence of "devoted gamers." but this is enough for my brother to make fun of me, so it will do for now.



the last one i'll be discussing today, because we all know there are many things that could be discussed, is having a devotion to windows. i'm sure there will be at least a few mac users who read this (including my brother, who ironically knows windows much better than i do and still uses a mac), and will say that this is lame. well, fair enough. however, i still find it satisfying so i'll keep doing it.

my love for windows comes from learning it as i tried and tried to customize it. and although it was confusing at times, it was letting me do it. i enjoyed that. tinkering with settings (even if they are unimportant) makes me feel like i'm kind of like a h4xx0r, even though in reality there's no such connection at all.
i compare this to my experience with a mac. once again, i'm sure there are plenty of people who will disagree with me (and that's fine. you can even post about it if you like. go ahead. leave a scathing comment.), but i simply feel like macs assume i'm an idiot and that i'm too ignorant to be able to control anything important myself.
it should be noted that i've never actually owned a mac. however, i have used them, and i have used their software, and i've hated essentially all of it... with this being the case, the more i act like i could never so much as touch a mac, the more i feel like i have a nerd identity that defines me. and that goes a long way in filling the aforementioned void. also, it bothers me that you can only "click" and not right or left click. it's like having one pedal for both braking and accelerating.

and don't worry, my-computer-science-major friends, i'll be learning linux this summer.




and thus completes this post. chances are you disagree with the mac bit, think less of me for reading a world of warcraft blog, or are confused why i enjoy digital music as much as i do. or all of these. but either way, if you feel like a part of you is missing, maybe you'll find it in one of these locations. good luck.

keyboard cocktail.

last night i dissected a keyboard, and it was pretty awesome. and yes, that martini glass is full of keyboard keys. it's also worth noting that i wanted to call this post "you got servered", which was a hilarious quip from my roommate brad. i thought it stretched being related enough, however. but just you wait and see--life will find a way.

anyway, the di offered a few winning opportunities. the first being the fact that i found a killer ergonomic keyboard for three dollars that's fully functioning, fully awesome, and fully being used right now. the only disadvantage to the keyboard is that due to some short you can no longer use the numpad to type numbers. however, this is made up for in the fact that i figured out how to use the numpad as the mouse. sure, it takes some getting used to. but with some setting adjustments, it's starting to feel pretty natural. besides, this means i can sit at the couch with my laptop two feet ahead of me as a type on this keyboard rather than huddling over the laptop keyboard, desperately trying to type more quickly so i can stop the huddling. so, the ergonomic keyboard was a winning three dollar investment.

i bought another keyboard as well. this one was just a standard issue pc keyboard. it was a bit worn, but the keys worked like a dream and so on and so forth. when we left the di we had a few small breaks and then we were off to autumn's apartment to watch dune once again and experiment with the new typing equipment. the keyboard cocktail featured above was a reslut of this.

step one) remove the keyboard's screws with a butter knife compliments of the absence of a phillips head.

step two) realize too late that you undid the mounting screws for the connective hardware in the top write corner. oh well...

step three) borrow the laptop from autumn and try out the keyboard. at this point, the keyboard is simply a piece of plastic with inlay circuit work and little rubber domes over each key. because you already removed the mounting screws for the hardware, you'll simply have to press down on it with my thumb to keep it in place, but the keys will work... with a bit of tlc.

step four) lose the mounting screws and search for upwards of ten minutes in the crevice of a couch.

step five) lose the lost screw once again when you throw away all the gross stuff from the couch. spend approximately twenty minutes trying to find the screw, which you'll eventually find sitting underneath your knee after you've given up the search.

step six) take the keyboard's exoskeleton with all of the keys, and use the same butter knife to remove each key.

step seven) talk with your girlfriend about making pushpins with the keys, at which point she will trump that idea with the idea of earrings. be sure she mentions how much computer engineers will love them.

step eight)go crazy and simply remove all the domes so you have nothing left but a flat membrane.

step nine) keep the honor code and go home before you need to be kicked out.

step ten) play with the membrane until you get the two layers to line up properly and superglue the corners to prevent shifting.

step eleven) at home, further test the new membranous keyboard and draw a skull and crossbones on the underside of the keyboard's original metal bottom to mark the placement of the f key.

step twelve) test it out and find that it works (with some pressure applied to the circuit board). make plans to use twine to solve the problem the next morning.

step thirteen) give the keyboard a prototype name. you should probably use a reference from dune and a roman numeral. i named mine STILGAR I.

and you're done. at least in copying my process. it was great fun. hopefully i get the wiring better secured in order to make it so i don't have to hold down the top right corner to type. i'll be sure to let you know how i do. and now, i'm off to prepare for cleaning inspections.

STILGAR I
the finished product

sorry about the quality, i had to use my phone.

password:**********

don't you love the unexpected? two days ago i booted my laptop and was greeted with a single error message. it locked the computer so i wound up having to manually cut the power and then reboot. this time, it didn't shut down, but boy oh boy did my anti-virus software have a few things to say to me. i was on my rather slow computer for about a minute and suddenly my desktop was a mosaic of virus alerts and messages stating that messages i had sent were not delivered because the respective recipient e-mail noted it as spam. which of course it was.

so, it seemed that somehow someone had attempted to use my computer as a spam server. i enlisted brad (my resident computer whiz roommate) and we began file hunting to try to destroy the virus. we were moderately successful. after the virus alert's ten minute cycle of alerting me that "my" e-mails were undelivered, we explored and found "s.exe", which was mysteriously installed earlier that day. i'm still not sure how exactly i downloaded this file without realizing it, but oh well. anyway, eventually we killed the file and anything touching it so we could actually operate the computer as with the file still up it insisted on keeping full demand of my processor. we cleaned the place out and were finally able to reboot in safe mode.

blessed be the computer engineer who was the cause of the "system restore" feature. he (or she, to be fair) has saved my digital heinie more times than i can count, so thanks.

anyway, it was eventually cleared off and the system was restored to 8:38 am of the same day and all was well. well, almost.

you see, because i was uncertain as to the nature of my viral friend, i was unware of it's intent. fearing it would either have ben a key stroke memory program or one that could download my firefox details, i borrowed brad's computer and flushed out all my old passwords with new ones. this all went fine except when i later tried to log back onto my gmail account.

this is my theory as to what happened: gmail was the first password i reset. i usually try to have four main passwords: an easy one for things i don't care about, a medium one for things that are important, a hard one for things that are very important or are normally especially easy to hack, and an impossible one for anything to do with money. well, gmail is the third one. very difficult. and... apparently in my haste to reset all my passwords, i forgot to write down what i changed it to, and thus i had now idea what pattern or what have you was my password, spent half an hour guessing and failing, and eventually had to wait a day and restore it with my security question. so it all turned out in the end, but what a train of events.

the final thought i had after all of this was simply that, if my computer is to be hacked, please make the hack cool enough that even though i'm mad, i'm still impressed. for example, zero cool from the film hackers. pull a stunt like his, and i'll be angry but still impressed.

the power of print screen.

i love how software that's every feature you can imagine to warp, color, invert or ruin an image always has self imposed restrictions on them so you need to keep using that program until the piece is finished.

well, i just had my new photo taken for my student id.
=========================================>
it had to be replaced because of byu's new id policy, and i wanted to be able to mess with the hue in order to make it a bit more interesting, suffice to say. however, the photoshop program available insisted it knew better than i did and yata yata yata, it wouldn't allow me to use certain functions because i had removed most of the color. and i was annoyed by this.

so, to strongarm the software (or outsmart it), i simply starting using the print screen key and then using microsoft paint. this sort of worked, but what really came out of it, was realizing i could save the file in paint and keep opening it back up in photoshop. i did so repeatedly, played with some sizing, and the result is the above photo, which is now my profile photo. it may change again soon, but i had to enjoy it for a bit.


the lesson of this story is simple. programs will often a)think they're smarter than you and not allow certain actions or b)want to limit your usage to get you to buy the full program or so on and so forth. however, you've the power to overcome such digital tyranny. there is always a way around if you're too lazy or too cheep to get it done at the mercy of software. this adventure's tactic was the print screen key, but there are so many others. use them.