Hydras Nest & Fulcrum Cornice

New Versions

Ok, I'm approaching the 5 song threshold for giving a demo to a few venues. To get the demo ready, I re-recorded a couple of songs. Which version do you like better?

monsters1 | monsters2

monsters2 I think is recorded and mixed better, and slightly less noisy. It may lack a certain spontaneity that version 1 had, though. You tell me.

chrissy and jenny 1 | chrissy and jenny 2

Version 2 is a little bit shorter. I took out some measures in between the chorus and the verse that were slowing it down. I also tried a different mic, so the vox have a different sound from most of my other stuff. Again, which is better?

New Song! They Come Out At Night

Ok, instrumentally, I think this is my best song yet. Check out the clavinet solo after the second verse and let me know what you think.

They Come Out at Night

Gamecube: Done

Fuck me. Writing that last entry made me go out and buy a Gamcube. This thing is cool. The system itself is tiny. And it plays those tiny 3 inch cd's or dvd's or whatever they are. I love that. Go ahead, make it small. I'll see how it turns out. I may have a big-ass auction on ebay in a few weeks. I'll let you know.

Gamecube

beautiful 2d games: F Zero and Kirby's Dream Course



horrible muddy polygon-y 3d games: Goldeneye and Grand Theft Auto III



a middle ground? cel shaded games for the Gamecube: Ninja Turtles and Zelda: Windwalker

I almost bought a gamecube yesterday. This would be a big step, as my current gaming technology is a well-played Super Nintendo. One of my controllers just broke, and the whole system is getting to the point where you have to jiggle the games around and blow on the cartridges' circuit boards to get them to work. Kind of a pain in the ass. On the other hand, I like the games I have, and I am still working on Kirby's Dream Course, Mario RPG and Super Mario Kart (the original - yeah). There are still games I want to get, too, like Mega Man X2, Kirby All Stars, Super Metroid and Yoshi's Island. All classics. And I love the 2d animation. I still think that the best SNES games look better than the vast majority of 3d, pseudo-photo-realistic, horribly polygonned, pixelated games for the Xbox, PS2, or GC.

Holidays

I was thinking about the holiday Thanksgiving, and most of our other holidays. I think we are approaching them wrong. In the old days, when thanksgiving was invented, people were pretty much starving to death all year long. They would eat like one hardtack cracker a day if they were lucky and maybe some rancid salted pork or fish. A day. That's it. So on Thanksgiving, when they ate a GD turkey and corn on the cob and cranberries, it must have been the best day of the year times 1000. Seriously, they went all out on this one day, even though they were starving and dying the rest of the year.

What do we do? We probably have Thanksgiving-level dinners 3 times a week. Thanksgiving isn't even anyone's favorite food, let alone the best god-damned day of their year. (You may enjoy watching football with your friends or family, but come on, this is not mind-blowing once a year shit. You can do that any Sunday.) Purely in terms of expenditure, this holiday represents a miniscule fraction of our income relative to what the first guys shelled out.

The question is, what would you have to do in 2005 to make that one day as much better than a normal day as the original T-giving was to the old guys? You would have to spend a lot of cash; not on presents for anybody, but on pure consumption. You could keep the focus on food and just have the best, most ridiculously expensive dinner and wine that you've ever had. I think that would be misguided though. The old guys focused on food because they were starving. Now we are not starving, and we have a lot of other things to do that are fun. Rent a powerboat and take it on the lake. Go to a Formula 1 school and drive race cars. Call up some hookers and have a threesome. I don't know. I do think that this holiday is way out of tune with its original intention, and something has got to be done to get it back.

Time Life Phrase

Have you ever seen one of those Time Life music collection infomercials? They are for "60's music" or "classic soul" and are always hosted by a former artist (eg: Davey Jones from the Monkees) and some enthusiastic actress. They have 15 second clips of a bunch of songs. Anyway, they always talk about buying these collections of hits and what a good deal they are. They use the phrase "you could spend hours of time and hundreds of dollars assembling this collection yourself"

Hours of time and hundreds of dollars?

They obviously wanted some kind of parallel structure in that phrase. I guess "hours and hundreds of dollars" sounds a little weird, but "hours of time" is not parallel to "hundreds of dollars". A) It is super redundant to say "hours of time". Do hours ever measure anything else? "How much do you weigh?" "175 pounds and 5 hours". B) The parallel phrase to "hours of time" would be "dollars of money", not "hundreds of dollars". That would be great if they said "you could spend hours of time and dollars of money assembling this collection yourself". Assholes.

Hydras Site Updates

I made some changes to the hydras website. I did a new flyer/EP cover that's up in the artwork section, and there's a new Bio page. Holla back.

New Vino!

Yesterday I got a brand new Yamaha Vino. It is so cool. I am a big fan of this thing. It looks just like an old Vespa, which I have liked for a long time.

Anyway, it's not counted as a motorcycle, so I don't need a special licsense, and I can drive it on campus at the U and lock it up in bike racks. No paying for parking. Downtown and at work, it's the same deal. Parking in the city is a major hassle for cars, and it'll be sweet not having to deal with it.

I am just thinking, what exactly do you have to do to lock it up? I've seen them locked to bike racks and street signs, but do you have to? Or can you just lock the wheel to the frame so it can't move? Also, helmet? On a motorcycle, yes. But on a Vino?