Your rock station sucks.
Posted on Sunday, May 28, 2006 at 8:35 pm
So, as far as I can tell, there’s only one real rock station in Dallas. Which kinda sucks, cuz it really limits my choices as to what radio station I’m going to listen to. Part of the problem is the myriad Spanish stations wasting frequency space, as well as Top 40 and Country. It’s hard to find room for good music when 90% of the available airwaves are eaten up by shit. 
Tres mal.
Anyhoo, most of the time this doesn’t present much of a problem, because the station plays some pretty decent music. It’s mostly sell-out rock, mind you, so not a lot of any of the really good music that exists for the art of itself. But still, it’s not half bad. Hell, anything’s better than fucking Nelly.
But sometimes… sometimes the music is just awful. And I can’t escape it. I mean, I’ve got an iPod with an FM tuner, so, I could escape it. I just don’t. With that being said, I still feel the need to complain. So here is my list of all the songs that 102.1 plays… that I don’t think should be played. Not all… because that would probably be a long list… but several, at any rate.
1. Buck Cherry – Crazy Bitch. Much like the Meredith Brooks one-hit-wonder of similar nomenclature from the 90s, this song is a worthless, gimmicky way to say “bitch” a lot on the radio. Seriously. There’s no point to the song other than to have a lot of swearing. And coming from me, that’s saying a lot, since I generally like to swear quite a bit. But swearing in music should enhance the song, not be the song. What makes it worse is that every time this song is about the be played, the DJs practically cum all over themselves with praise for it. The song is just awful, so the only possible reason for this reaction to it is that the record company is paying them a shit-load of money to pretend like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. And that’s just not right. I demand integrity with my DJs, not corporate dick-sucking.
2. Anything by Rage Against the Machine. Zach de la Rocha is a douche, and should be treated as such. The music sucks, so stop fucking playing it!
3. Korn – ADIDAS, Got the Life, Falling Away From Me, Freak on a Leash, et al. Now, just to be clear, I forgive this station for playing Korn’s two new songs. But all these other ones, from Issues and Follow the Leader… really now, you should know better. Korn was great when I was 16 and wanted a way to piss off my grandparents. But I’m not 16 anymore. I’ve grown up, and Korn has lost all its redeeming qualities to me. The station even has a show during the lunch hour called “Flashback Cafe” that is explicitly reserved for music from the 90s… and yet they continue to play this old Korn crap all day. 3 days out of 5 I hear one of the above-mentioned songs on my way home from work… and lemme tell ya… when I’ve had a rough day at the office, the last thing I wanna hear is Jonathan Davis dreaming about sex.
4. Staind – Its Been Awhile. The song sucked from the moment it came out… there’s absolutely no reason it should still be wasting valuable air time.
Alright, that’s all I can think of at the moment. I guess I can at least be glad that they don’t play any ICP… that would probably make me tear out my radio and shove it down the DJ’s throat.
4 Comments
Varia.
Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 6:56 pm
Been a couple weeks, hasn’t it? I’ve been kicking around a few ideas for new posts, but none of them ever really made it out of ‘idea’ status. I’d start writing them, then not remember all of what I was going to write about, and you know how it goes. Anyhoo, here are a few of the remainders of those ideas, all rolled up into one cynical little package.
First, Bush’s speech last week regarding immigration. It’s quite possibly the first thing I’ve ever agreed with him on ever since he started taking a gigantic shit all over the Constitution about 3 months after 9/11. (To be fair, it started about 24 hours after 9/11, but it took 3 months for us all to realize what he was doing.) I live in Texas, so I fully realize that the wholesale deportation of illegals (as some have suggested) would pretty much ruin the economy of any state south of the Mason Dixon line when toilets all of a sudden stopped getting cleaned. And granting immunity to all the illegals en masse would indeed completely destroy the purpose of having laws against immigration in the first place. Not to mention it’d make America look like a gigantic pussy. Of course, the problem with his so-called comprehensive plan is that it won’t work. The borders have remained essentially open for too long, so no amount of new rules and laws will ever stem the influx of people who can’t be assed to do things the right way – even when there is a right way so readily available. But his plan is probably a step in the right direction, if nothing else.
Second, the Senate voting to make English the national language of America. Or, more precisely, some peoples’ response to said vote. I heard rumblings that it amounted to state-sponsored racism, and lord knows what else. Those people need to get one thing straight: we live in America. Not Mexico. If you want to speak Spanish, go back to Mexico. If you think that’s out of the question, learn English. It’s quite simple, really. Deal with it.
Third, still waiting on the new upgrade for Threads. I’ve got the new WordPress skin pretty much finished, save a few minor little tweaks that I’ll probably find between now and the time I release it. But it’s really good to go, for the most part. I wish the Threads upgrade would get here faster.
Fourth, as those who follow this have probably figured out, I’ve been taking a break from Scourge development for the last month or so. Work’s been killin’ me, and I can’t really bring myself to do any in-depth PHP coding lately, even on the weekends, when I’m not being expressly compensated for doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back into it here in the next couple weeks, but lately I’ve just been too tired to mess with it. Sorry.
And finally, American Idol is over tonight. Thank Christ! I hate that show with the passion of a thousand dying suns. Seriously.
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Angry Liberal Man to the rescue!
Posted on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 3:31 pm
I’m not usually big on quoting large blocks of text verbatim, especially on a blog that’s supposed to be about my own personal thoughts and ramblings. However, I came across this post on BoingBoing, which quotes verbatim a post made somewhere, on some blog, by some guy named C. B. Shapiro. I’ve never heard of this man, and BB doesn’t link to the original post [Edit: I believe what's on BB actually is the original post, this guy just sent it into them.], so I couldn’t tell you where to find anything else about him. Perhaps I should look this guy up, in light of how perfectly he has expressed my own thoughts. The post exemplifies to a T my thoughts on the current situation America finds itself in. As such, I shall quote the post verbatim.
Again, this is not my writing, however much I wish it was. Credit goes to whoever the hell C. B. Shapiro is.
There’s been some ink spilled lately denigrating so called ‘angry liberals,’ that is, people who have allegedly lost their right to be taken seriously because they are ‘angry.’ And they are ‘liberal.’
Well, I hereby declare myself a charter member in the ALC (Angry Liberal Club).
Sure, at first I felt guilty — what right do I have as a patriotic American to be angry? Or liberal? Oh, I tried to repress the ‘angry thing,’ I tried — if I was asked, I claimed I was a ‘peeved moderate.’ Or a ‘mildly upset centrist.’ But after much work through ‘BIT’ (Blog Immersion Therapy), I stopped feeling the shame. I’m coming out of the closet to announce I am an Angry Liberal Guy. And I am pissed.
You might be saying “Man, what are you so angry about, Angry Liberal Guy?”
I’ve compiled a short (and by no means complete) list just so I could see it all in one place:
I’m angry about the shredding of the constitution…illegal wiretaps…falsified intelligence…secret prisons… use of torture as an accepted means of interrogation…Terry Schiavo…the war on science…denial of Global Warming…the fascistic secrecy of our elected officials… presidential signings that declare the President above the law…the breakdown of the wall between church and state…the outing of a clandestine CIA agent for purely partisan political gain…the corrupting influence of K Street… the total sell-out of the legislative process to corporate interests… appointments of unqualified cronies at every level of government…Harriet Miers…Brownie…Abu Ghraib… Scooter …the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the lies about the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the grotesque budget deficits… the pathetic response to Katrina… a civil rights division dedicated to undermining civil rights…an environmental protection agency that refuses to protect the environment… (Take a breath, Angry Liberal Guy.)
And I’m angry about a smug, simple-minded, incompetent, unqualified President, and a press that denies the obvious fact that we have a smug, simple-minded, incompetent unqualified President.
If these things don’t make you angry, I have to ask — what the hell is the matter with you?
And what would it take to make you angry? — C.B. Shapiro
3 Comments
Tie goes to the runner.
Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Why do you like what you like, even in the face of logical and practical reasons to think otherwise?
Case in point. Me and AMD/ATI. Or, alternately, Me and DIE INTEL/NVIDIA DIE!
Intel is easily the most recognizable name in CPUs. Whether this comes from actual technological achievment, from their bigger advertising budget (anyone remember the “bunny people” commercials from the Pentium II days, or the Blue Man Group commercials from P3?), I don’t know. To me, it seems obvious that, in my own market segment at least, Intel lost the lead to AMD a long time ago. Their processors were more expensive and less efficient. Intel cared only about sheer clock cycles per second, while AMD concentrated not on speed but efficiency. Before it got fried because of a questionable heatsink, I had an AthlonXP 3000, which was clocked at, um, 1.8ghz I believe. The ‘3000′ in the name meant that its performance was roughly equivalent to a 3.0ghz processor from Intel. How’s that for effeciency, when a processor with a little over half the clock speed performs just as good? How do you like them apples, Intel?
And nVidia. Well, they done fucked up. I used to have a GeForce3 card, which was damn good in its day. A few refresh cycles later, they came out with their GeForce 5000 series cards, which were utterly terrible. They were loud, they were huge, they were slow, and they were annoying. At the time, it made sense to go with ATI’s offering, because NV’s were just so bad. So I bought my uber-top-of-the-line Radeon 9800 Pro, and it’s done me proud ever since.
Lately, too, NV seems to have forgotten the definition of “product launch.” They seem to think that sending myriad press releases about the specifications of their latest and greatest constitutes an actual product launch, even though it takes months before any of the cards are actually purchaseable for any sustained period of time. Sure, they sent 4 cards to Newegg, but those 4 cards were sold out in 2.5 seconds, and new ones aren’t coming in for another two months. Sorry, guys, that doesn’t work for me. They actually pulled the entire 512mb 7800GTX line because apparently they forgot to make any. Newegg had them listed for awhile, but I never once saw any in stock. All the press releases in the world aren’t worth shit if no one can actually have a card. It reminds me of the Xbox 360. Yeah, it’s been out for SIX FRIGGIN’ MONTHS, but how many people do you know who actually have one? Know of a store where you can, at a moment’s notice, walk in and purchase one off the shelf? Thought not.
Times change, though. Intel is fixing to release their new Conroe cores. If the speculation is correct, these will have the capability of outperforming AMD’s upcoming AM2 architecture by a comfortable margin – either directly at launch time, or as time goes by. NVidia’s dual graphics card platform, SLI, is arguably far superior to ATI’s Crossfire system because it’s simply more mature and more stable and more feature-laden. The cards themselves are roughly equal, depending on which game you want to play with them, but NVidia’s platform is better.
And yet, without hesitation, I pick AMD’s latest and greatest processor, and a couple of ATI’s latest and greatest GPUs, when I’m spec’ing out the new system I’m planning on building eventually. (Currently it’s a pipe dream, since I probably need to start saving for a down payment on a house, but hey, I can always wish, can’t I?) The other guys have caught up, will be catching up relatively soon, or will be surpassing pretty soon. But I still go with the guys I like, in the face of logical reasons not to.
