QuirkUniverse.com

This video has been making the rounds; an amazing Ukelel performance…. check it out.

Wow, caught this video tonight from Postcards from a Dying World. Man, this brought back a lot of memories; Earth Crisis, 90’s chugga-chugga hardcore, bandanas. Karl Earth Crisis looks so young when he’s being interviewed.?wonder how old this is?

Michael Jackson - Bad

1. Michael Jackson – Bad

I still remember Casey Casen’s Top 40 Countdown and hearing the song Bad for the first time. It must have been 1987. I was 7 years old. I was in my Dad’s car. And thus began a lifelong love affair with Michael Jackson’s music, not to be confused with a lifelong love affair between Michael and I.

To say I was really into Michael Jackson as a child is an understatement. I was all about some MJ. I had this huge cardboard cut out stand of him, nearly life size, in my room, acquired from a bookstore promoting his auto-biography, Moonwalker. (I had that, too, along with the video/movie he made of the same name.) Oh yea,?was also a member of the official Michael Jackson fanclub.

…

Public Enemy

2. Public Enemy – Apocalypse 91

Oh man, this album brings me back to 4th grade. 11 years, sporting a rat tail, and replicating the hip hop listening habits of my cooler older brothers. Insert Public Enemy! I still remember wearing my PE shirt with a cop in crossscopes on the back to my DARE graduation. That was a great moment. This is still an album that gets regular play at my house.

…

3. Marilyn Manson – Antichrist Superstar

Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar

Oh man, this is somewhat embaressing to include, but no doubt about it, I loved some Marilyn Manson in my early high school years. It fit nicely with my Rocky Horror Picture Show lifestyle I was living at the time. In 9th or 10th grade, practically every one of my friends and myself were mega-Manson fans, constantly sporting his shirts probably in an effort to appear rebellious.

P.S. These songs on Antichrist Superstar also really fun to play on guitar.
P.S.S. Mechanical Animals is also pretty awesome.

…

4. Bikini Kill

Bikini Kill - Pussywhipped

In 8th grade, my pen-pal Alice sent me a a tape (an actual cassette tape – remember those?) of Bikini Kill’s music. I remember the first time I heard it. I was at my grandma’s house. My Mom came with mail I had collected while I was away (my grandma lives in another state), and among this bundle was a letter from my penpal and this tape. I put it on my headphones and wow, it was really crazy – I had never heard anything like this. It was super raw, simple, angry, direct, in your face, unapologetic. I loved it! This paved the way to introducing me to good girl-positive, queer-positive punk music that I was really into back in high school.

…

5. + 6. Earth Crisis – Destroy the Machines and Vegan Reich – Discography (tie)
While I did become vegan as a teenager before I ever heard of these bands, whose music is mostly about animal rights and veganism (and let’s not forget, violent retribution in defense of animals rights), it was probably less than 6 months into things that I stumbled upon Destroy the Machines, and within a year of that point where I bought Vegan Reich’s CD used from this emo-dude at a show my friend had illegally organized at Bon Park. (The cops let the show go on.)

These bands represent an entire subculture (or if you want to daring, counterculture) based on veganism and a few other idealogical staples; militant stances against abortion and drug use, the use of violence to protect “innocent life”, the

promotion of religious and spiritual exploration predominately focused firstly on Christianity and then later Islam, and, also, I dread to mention, a sort of vague homophobia at times based on the idea of sexuality as presented in religious texts and eastern philosophy.

Either way, I was big into animal rights, veganism, straight edge, and Hardline as a teenager, and these bands and the enveloping culture of vegan straight edge were one of the biggest influences on my life growing up.

…

Cradle of Filth - Dusk and Her Embrace

7. Cradle of Filth – Dusk and her Embrace

I was completely obsessed with CoF for a few years back in the early 2000’s. I think I must have listened to them everyday for years. I saw them in Milano, Italy in 2001, it was awesome but also so loud I honestly couldn’t even make out just what the hell song they were playing for most of the set.

I really like reading the lyrics as poetry in their own right, independent of the music. Some of Dani’s writing is crafted beautifully, such as this stanza from a Gothic Romance:

From grace I fell in love with Her
Scent and feline lure
And jade woodland eyes that ushered in the impurest
‘Erotic, laden fantasies amid this warm Autumn night
She lulled me away from the rich masquerade
And together we clung in the bloodletting moonlight’
Pearled luna, what spell didst thou cast on me?
Her icy kiss fervoured my neck
Like whispering waves ‘pon Acheron’s beach
In a whirl of sweet voices and statues
That phantomed the dying trees
This debauched seductress in black, took me….

…

8. Aesop Rock – Labor Days

Aesop Rock - Labor Days

I heard Aesop Rock for the first time at my friends apt, when she put it on the computer with instructions for myself and her boyfriend to sit back and take this music in, and be ready to love it.

The rest is history – one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time. Aesop at his best. I am so happy I was able to see him perform much of this album when he went on tour to support his follow-up record, Bazooka Tooth. I also met him at the show and got my picture taken with him! He was super down to earth and just a nice guy. Hell yea Aesop, I heart you.

…

Sublime

9. Sublime – Comp from Elle

Sublime is one of those bands I always thought sucked until I really listened to them. My friend Elle made me a comp CD and I fell in love with them.

10 years later, the love affair still hasn’t ended. Happy, feel good, chill music. So good. I can always listen to some Sublime.

Too bad he died before he could release many albums.

…

BTBAM - Silent Circus

10. Between the Buried and Me – The Silent Circus

BTBAM – damn, probably my favorite hardcore band of all time.

I’ve listened to them so much over the years.

When Silent Circus came out, I kid you not, it stayed in my car CD player for a year, and I listened to it every single day. Jesus Christ, I love BTBAM.

And like a lot of other bands, they keep releasing really effin’ awesome as opposed to getting worse and worse.

…

Honorary Mentions:
Guns N Roses – Use Your Illusions I and II
Nirvana – Unplugged

The answer, it would appear, is yes.

The latest issue of Wired magazine includes a tiny snippet about a University of Colorado at Boulder research professor, Garret Moddel,whose work is showing some interesting results on the power of thought to influence matter.

The experiment involves a beam of light aimed at a glass slide and then measuring its reflection. Subjects are to mentally project the idea to increase the amount of reflected light.

Without anyone “thinking” about it, the amount of reflection is 8%.

With the subjects intention to increase the amount of reflection, it goes up to 8.005%.

In reverse, the subjects were also able to decrease the amount of reflected ligh. (Percentage unavailable.)

On one hand, this does sound somewhat trivial. It’s only .005% of a difference.

Is it no more important than other really weird bits of knowledge -  for example, due to the complex nature of gravity and time, technically, time passes at a different rate for someone on the 5th floor of a building than someone on the 1st floor.

But stacking this example up next to this research doesn’t really mean anything to me as far as dismissing it. It just shows how weird reality is.

I wish I would see this type of research funded from  different angles. What would happen if the subjects were placed at a distance? What would happen if there were walls or other physical objects placed in between the subjects and object? Does it make a difference if more people are involved? Less people? 1 person? 10 million? Male? Female? And what else can be influenced by thought?Can this research and the same results be duplicated by other scientists?

This experiment reminds me of another wherein which subject were able to influence the outcome of random number generators. It was only by a tiny amount, but, nevertheless, there you have it:  thought alone influencing matter, right? Doesn’t that count as telekinesis? If not, why not? And now here’s a second study purporting to show the same thing – what am I missing?

Click here for the original Wired Article. (it will open in a new window)

On Thursday, Yahoo announced it will be shutting down Geocities this year, a free web hosting service it acquired for shitloads of cash a decade ago, reportedly 3-5 billion dollars. One can only assume it’s getting canned because it’s no longer profitable. (And no wonder, the ad placement is pitiful. No one clicks on ads when you line them up in a frame on the right side of a webpage.) And let’s not forget how with the whole “stock market tanking” in today’s stock market how that plays into such decisions!

Geocities was my very first home on the web. This is where I set up my personal pages on poetry and animal rights as a teenager, that were actually pretty popular and reached out to a lot of people. So weird that Geocities simply won’t exist anymore. There must have been hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of websites on their servers. Ironically, all of mine simply disappeared on their own accord after years of inactivity, so this is just pure mental nostalgia on my part.

And just to walk down that road, man, it reminds me of the old crew of free web hosts:

• Geocities
• Tripod
• Angelfire
• FortuneCity

God, who else?

And now it’s wordpress, blogger, today, and oh – about a million more.

On the plus side, I had wondered if it was worth it to set up a bunch of mini-blogs and mini-sites on Geocities in an effort to create backlinks to my niche sites. Good thing I didn’t start that yet!

RIP Geocities
1994-2009

Special RIP shoutout goes out to my neighbors @…/CapitolHill/Lobby.

PS Can you imagine the day when something like WordPress will go under just because it’s not relevant anymore?

Hmmm is this a good idea?

http://filesharer.org/criminal

I can’t wait to see this film on Ray Kurzweil and his ideas about the upcoming technological/social/cultural/everything upheaval, premiering today in select cities, but unfortunately not my city.

I hope it’s as good as it should be. The 4 or 5 books I’ve read by Kurzweil completely floored me a few years ago and have never left the back of my mind.

Found this creepy-esque song about tripping on Lady Salvia recently, with a good beat, decent rhyming…. someone added a video with trippy psychedelic visuals. Interesting stuff. I’ve tripped on Salvia before and yes, it’s patently weird, that’s for sure.

Stumbled onto this classic earlier today. Been awhile since I’ve seen it. I literally watched it three times trying to train my eye to see it “correctly.” Very strange stuff. What does it say about our brains ability to see what it’s trained to see and not what’s physically real?

Here’s a video of the illusion:

This has all resurfaced again due to research showing that schizophrenic individuals do not see the optical illusion because of differences in the brain as caused by the shizophrenic condition. You can read an article at Wired here.

WTF.

I’m loving this song by a guy named Mega Ran, or Random, who puts together rhymes based on the music from Mega Man. Pretty damn impressive. I know some of my friends would dig this. I’ve heard people rhyme over Mario Brothers but Mega Ran is waaaaay better.

To download an mp3 of this song, right click here and select save as.

Here’s some links on this dude:

MegaRan’sofficial site – offers free mp3 downloads
Random’s myspace page
Wikipedia entry for Random