Waldorf Blofeld Vs Waldorf Largo

Waldorf Largo is a soft synth that is similar to the Blofeld, but Waldorf insists it is not a soft synth version of the Blofeld. They are very similar, the only differences are that the 3 Largo oscillators each have a sub-osc, the Blofeld oscillators have a Brilliance parameter, and the Blofeld has a PPG Low Pass filter setting. Pretty much everything else, in my experience, is the same.

I am of the mind that you would either have one or the other, there is no reason to have both. Some would disagree - I think those people have too much money.

I've been thinking about selling my Blofeld and picking up Largo instead. I like the Blofeld, it definitely has its place in the mix, it's by far my brightest synth and I wouldn't want to do without it completely. However, it is a pain in the ass to program. I do not like the layout, and one of my four programming knobs is buggy - if you twist it, say, clockwise, it goes up by about 10, then down by about five, then up another 10, then down another five. It's very annoying. Even without the buggy knob, it takes forever for me to program and tweak a patch, whereas with the Largo demo, I'm throwing shit together in five minutes.

Waldorf has a very generous demo thingy for the Largo where you get to try out the full version for 30 days. You can even bounce it and record it - so say I'm working on a song, I can throw in some Largo stuff, bounce it, and I'll still have it in the mix as an audio file when the 30 days expires. I think that alone would make someone more inclined to buy it.

***

Today I put together some Blofeld vs. Largo comparisons. The idea is to throw something together in Largo, then recreate it exactly in the Blofeld. At first I thought it'd be hard, but it was actually really easy. It's almost like the Largo would be a great sketch pad or visual reference for programming the Blofeld.

The first track is a pad with lots of delay.
Blofeld vs Largo 1 by mikeoday
The Blofeld is first, then Largo right after 2:03. The biggest difference is the delay, the Blofeld delay turns to flat mush, but the Largo delay maintains separation, giving it an animated, rhythmic quality. Largo definitely wins this one, I kind of hate the Blofeld half of this, but I think the Largo half is very nice. There's no compression on either recording.

The second track is an old school EBM percussive bass sound.
Largo vs Blofeld 2 by mikeoday
First half is Largo, second half is Blofeld. For this patch, Blofeld has a bit darker, thicker sound, whereas Largo is brighter and less chunky. This one is a toss up as to which is better, I'd be inclined to go with the Blofeld one, but I have a feeling I'd be rolling off those lows when it came time to mix this down in a track with a kick drum and stuff.

I'm still a bit up in the air at this point. If I did not own a Blofeld, I'd definitely go with the Largo. But if I'm going to go with Largo, I'd definitely want to sell the Blofeld, which would be a huge pain in the ass without the buggy knob, let alone with it.

Because... ZOMBIES!!!

Plants vs. Zombies from popcap!!!


WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOO!!!

...

I'm retarded.

PS. Popcap sells it for $19.95, but you can get it on Steam for $9.95

DAMN YOU, google maps!!!!

Thanks to that, we missed the start of the Angelspit concert, plus running around in the cold and the rain made my wife's cold worse.

I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!!!**

**Dear google, please don't delete my free gmail account or my free blogger account. K, thnx, bye.

What comes next?

Republicans accused liberals of being crooks and thugs. Then they gave us Watergate.

Republicans accused liberals of media bias. Then they gave us the Fox News Channel.

Republicans accused liberals of election fraud. Then they gave us Florida in 2000.

Republicans are now accusing liberals of plotting to create re-education camps and death panels.

What comes next?

Butterflies on Shit

Say something profound.

"Something profound."

ohGr - Devils in my Details

This CD actually came out last October, but I never picked it up because none of the music "previews" or whatever really grabbed me. If you listen to the two tracks posted on the ohGr myspace page, you have two songs that both start with weird spoken word things, and when the song starts, the first one "Timebomb" is kind of a samba style thing, and the second one, "Feelin' Chicken" is like circus music with random chicken noises in it. Based on those two songs, it comes off as an album by one of the leaders of the industrial music genre, whose solo work has had kind of an electro/synth-pop flavor to it, apparently doing every other random style of music that is not industrial.

This album was released right after Repo: The Genetic Opera was in limited release in theaters, which niveK Ogre aka ohGr had a role in. Based on these two tracks, it isn't entirely unreasonable to deduce this album is somehow influenced by - well - musical theater or some shit. I also listened to the 30 second samples on Amazon.com, but nothing there really changed my mind. It seemed like, for whatever reason, ohGr decided to do an album of industrial tinged show tunes. That's great, I'll pass.

As time passed, I noticed a lot of industrial reviewers gave the album high marks. Regen Magazine even went to so far as to call it the number one album of 2008. (Angelspit's Blood Death Ivory should be way higher on that list, possibly even number one.) I wanted to check the whole album out, but I didn't feel like spending $10 or whatever in case I hated it. (And I don't fuck around with piracy, no bit torrent, none of that shit). So I put it on the back burner until recently when Gemma and I happened to get an amazon gift certificate from an extended family member of hers.

It's really fucking good.

It's not a collection of songs, it is an album. You listen to it from beginning to end. Each song blends into the next. Unfortunately, the Amazon.com 30 second samples tend to fall on the in-between portions of songs, so you get a lot of Bill Moseley saying weird shit. And "Feelin' Chicken" is probably the last song that should be used to promote this album. It's not bad when it's played in its place on the album, but out of context it's just WTF.

Another thing I love about this album: it opts out of the Loudness War. It's beautifully mixed and mastered. The first track, "Shhh," intentionally lacks the highest frequencies (aka "sparklies") - why? So that when the second track, "Eyecandy," comes in, it has those upper-upper frequencies and it creates DYNAMIC CONTRAST and therefore MAKES AN IMPACT. Y'know, like music is supposed to. Music needs to be quiet sometimes so that the LOUDNESS means something - everyone who mixes and masters knows this and yet we all feel pressured to accommodate record execs (and consumers) and mix for maximum loudness all the time.

Musical "volume," aka dynamics, are not meant to be static, however record execs, radio programmers and consumers are increasingly demanding the music be LOUD all the time. Some Amazon reviewer called this album "poorly mixed." Wrong, bucko, all music should be mixed/mastered like this. The industry standard for movies is an overall dynamic range of 24 dB - meaning that the quietest part of a movie can be 24 dB less than the loudest part of a movie. In music, the standard is inching from 8 dB to 6 dB.

That's bullshit.

Decibels are not a linear measurement, it's logarithmic. That means a dynamic range of 12 dB is NOT twice the range of 6 dB, it's actually exponentially more. So 24 dB of dynamic range is actually far more than even four times that of 6 dB.

What does this mean? It means we're losing a lot of quality and fidelity in music. Why? Well it all started with the idea that, on the radio, the louder track grabbed people's attention and therefore sold more singles/records.

But does that even fucking matter anymore? Who listens to radio for music nowadays? No one I know. And what station is playing ohGr? Probably not a single one, probably not even college radio anymore. So why play the LOUDNESS game? Why not opt out? (I guess in the industrial genre, there's being played at clubs, but I digress...)

So yeah, this album is awesome. The music is great, the mixing/mastering is bold and refreshing, and if you're on the fence about it, my best suggestion is just to listen to the first two tracks, "Shhh," and "Eyecandy" back-to-back.

Logic Pro Pedal Board and Amp Designer demo

This is the same ~45 second recording I made of my guitar going straight into my MOTU 828mk2, ran through four different Pedal Board/Amp Designer combinations. I'm blown away by how good it sounds, but then I never had a really good, quality amplifier.

GuitarTest by mikeoday

Logic 9: Pedal Board and Amp Designer

Pretty much awesome.

Anyone want to buy a Fender Roc Pro 1000 Head and Cabinet?


(Not actually mine, just a random image of one I pulled from Google. My actual amp head has a hole cut in the front of it by a previous owner. A very stupid previous owner.)

Apple Logic Pro 9, OS 10.6

Yesterday I had one of my manic days and ended up running to the Apple store to pick up OS X "Snow Leopard" and Logic Pro 9. I had just paid off some car repairs and felt like "celebrating" by putting some shit on my credit card. I'm such a dick.

OS 10.6 installed flawlessly on Gemma's MacBook. No problems there whatsoever. However, on my iMac, it would not install. The instructions suggested first unplugging all peripheral devices, and I have a lot: Virus, MOTU 828mkII, USB hub, two FireWire external hard drives. I did all that, still no luck. Next suggestion was to run Repair on the hd. It found no problems. Finally, the last suggestion was to erase the hard drive. Fuuuuuuuck.

Even though I put all files that I have created on the external drives (song files, sampler instruments, etc. etc. etc.), that's still a huge pain in the ass. I did it, and once the hard drive was erased, Snow Leopard installed, but then I had to reload everything once again - Firefox, iPhoto, Waldorf Attack, Virus Control... I was working on this shit from 2pm to about 7pm (a lot of that time is failed SL installs.) Then once that was done I had to install Logic Pro 9, which took forever because all the Logic 8 shit was gone. (I also install all the jam pack bullshit, I'm big on sample fuckery/destruction and it's nice to have lying around.)

Anyways, everything's finally working now. I played with Amp Designer - it's actually pretty neat. Not $200 worth of neat, but neat. I haven't done shit with flex time yet, haven't converted an audio region to a sampler instrument. I tried Bounce to track on the Virus, but there's no "real time" option, so it didn't work. That's alright, it is easy enough to just route Virus output to a bus and then use that bus as an input on an audio track. I'm sure bounce to track will be great for other things.

The only bug I've noticed so far is that every time I bounce a project that has a Virus plug-in, even if I bypass the Virus plug-in during the bounce, when I close the project and open a new one the audio is garbage (out of sync or some shit I guess). I have to quit Logic, then relaunch it. Then everything works. It's a minor annoyance and not a show stopper, so I can live, I just hope we get a 9.0.1 update soon.

Since I'm plugging books, I may as well plug some music

I'm always looking for Industrial (aka Electro, aka EBM, aka etc.) music that doesn't suck. A few weeks ago, I decided to check out some Wumpscut. I'd heard a few Wumpscut tracks, it's hard not to when you're a fan of these genres, but it never really made an impression. I downloaded Wreath of Barbs and Fuckit from Amazon.

Wumpscut doesn't tour or play live shows, it's one guy churning out a studio album a year, plus singles, remixes, etc. Both albums have some good songs, but a lot of the material is just kind of blah - perhaps even underdeveloped. Fuckit is also mastered super loud; I'm willing to bet that if I plugged it into Logic and measured it with the multimeter plug in, the RMS would be -6dbs. I could try to explain why that's bad, but just google "Loudness Wars," and you'll find articles with nice graphs and charts demonstrating why -6dbs is ridiculous.

***

Saturday night I was drinking, surfing the internet and listening to music when I decided that I felt like checking out some music I haven't heard before. I've had pretty good luck discovering new bands via the various remix albums I own. I think I only really buy remix albums of Haujobb and Seabound, but so far, so good - so whatever. I was listening to tracks from Seabound's When Black Meets Blue and decided to check out Die Form. I'd heard the name of the band before, but couldn't place the music. Turns out they've been around since 1979 and have been very active and releasing an album every year or two for more than a decade.

It's kind of weird - which is saying a lot for this genre! Very electronic, with pleasantly abrasive squelches and squeaks, and repeating sequenced EBM bass synth sounds (reminds me of old D.A.F. tracks), with a female soprano singing in a very Classical/operatic style. I would have hated it for that last point when I was 18. It took me a long time to get used to operatic singing in college. Once you listen to enough opera, however, it doesn't come off as obnoxious as it does when you are uninitiated (your mileage my vary).

I decided to go with their Best of XXX and Noir Magnetique albums. Both CDs are super expensive (the "Best of" is over $90!!!), but the mp3 albums are the same price as anything else. I have to wonder, are downloads more profitable than CDs at this point? No cost of plastic, I figure that might help - maybe not. All I know is that I'm much more likely to impulsively download albums than mail order the actual CDs; cost is a factor, but so is instant gratification. On the other hand, I'm also the 1% of the population that actually pays for what I download instead of using torrents and shit like that. I love music, and I love albums instead of just single tracks. In fact, it doesn't matter if someone wrote the best single song in the world ever, if the rest of the songs suck and the album overall sucks, then the band sucks.

Besides, I already have hundreds of CDs and their cases cluttering up my living space. I actually like not having physical trinkets for every fucking thing.

Anyways - overall I like both Die Form albums a lot, but I fully understand if the operatic soprano turns people off. Definitely worth listening to the free samples on their myspace page; start with "Bite of God" if you're not sure you'll like the soprano singing, then expand from there.

Reading is FUN-da-MENTAL

From 2003 to July 2009, I believe I read a total of 4 novels: Catcher in the Rye, Nightwatch, Daywatch and Twilightwatch. Those aren't the only *books* I read during that time necessarily, just the only works of fiction. Instead, I read a fair amount of textbooks, technical manuals and books about making electronic music. I also read Sun Tzu's The Art of War in June 2009, for whatever that is worth. (Nothing.)

I have two "songs" written, except for lyrics and vocals. For some reason, I'm just at a total loss. I don't really pay attention to lyrics anymore; to me they're just another texture to a track. Words are meaningless. On the other hand, the last thing I want to do is write bad lyrics. I'm not trying to be profound, but I also don't want to be retarded. It probably doesn't help that my favorite genre of music is dominated by Germans for whom English is a second language. (Example lyric from Destroid: "Life is too short for mourn.")

I've had a copy of On Writing by Stephen King sitting around since 2000 or 2001. My mother bought it as a gift for me because she always wanted me to be a writer for some reason. (Writing is probably a far less expensive endeavor than electronic music - and equally unprofitable!) I never bothered with it; I used to read a lot of Stephen King and Clive Barker from the 4th grade up until I was in 9th grade. The last Stephen King book I read was Insomnia, and I didn't even read all of it. I don't think I got halfway through it before putting it down out of boredom. (I guess old people with insomnia and hippie-ass aura shit put me to sleep!)

Sometime after August 1st (I know this because it was after Gemma and I got home from a vacation to Door County, WI with her folks), I read through On Writing for inspiration about lyric writing. (Reading a book about writing prose for inspiration on writing lyrics is pretty assbackwards - but that's just how I roll). I don't know if it helped, but it did get me interested in reading Stephen King again. Sometimes reading about someone's creative process can spark an interest in their output; it happens all the time in music, especially when I was in college studying Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Philip Glass. Along the same lines, reading Tom Shear's blog, Waveformless, has gotten me more interested in listening to Assemblage23 than I had ever been before.

Gemma and I each brought a shitload of books to this marriage. She had a couple of Stephen King books I had not read before. After reading On Writing, I started off with Bag of Bones. I finished it in a few days. I was then going to read The Drawing of the Three, but it turned out that was the second book in King's "Dark Tower Series." Being totally anal, I wanted to read the first book in the series, The Gunslinger, before I read the second book. I had the same neurosis for the X-Men movies. I never really wanted to see them, but I won a DVD of X-Men 3 when I worked for the pork plant. I didn't want to watch the third movie without having seen the first two, so it sat on my shelf for 3 years before I watched it. I still haven't seen X-Men 2, but that's okay because I think X-Men 1 and 3 are ass.

I went to a bookstore to pick up The Gunslinger, as well as The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White (the latter wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little of all things). King mentioned this book in On Writing as an essential tool for writing; his description of its rules of grammar and style caught my attention. One of the "lessons" that made an impression on me is to avoid using adverbs. This intrigued me. In all my years of schooling, from kindergarten up through grad school, I had never heard that piece of advice - yet, once revealed to me, it made a lot of sense. I tried counting the number of adverbs King used in 600 pages while reading Bag of Bones, and I counted four (not saying that's all there is, but he really does avoid them!). The Elements of Style is a great book for anyone who writes or for those who just find the English language interesting; it also has some amusing examples of how we mangle our language.

I found the two books I was looking for at the bookstore and also picked up Gerald's Game on a whim; call me a perv (because I am) but for some reason a horror novel about a woman handcuffed to a bed sounded interesting. In a matter of days, I had read Gerald's Game, The Gunslinger and The Elements of Style. It probably helped that I was sick and ended up taking two days off from work.

Next, I read a copy of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend that I've had lying around for a couple of years. Right before the movie with Will Smith came out, I had asked Gemma to give it to me as a gift, either for our anniversary or for Christmas - I don't remember which. I had just watched The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which was the first movie made that was based on I Am Legend. I finally got around to reading it about a week and a half ago. Then, satisfied that I had read The Gunslinger, I plunged into The Drawing of the Three without fear of missing some crucial plot point from the first book of the Dark Tower Series.

Last Saturday, I caught Hellraiser on TV. This inspired me to reread Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, the novella that Hellraiser is based on. I've had it lying around since I had last read it back when I was in middle school. It's short, under 200 pages, so I finished that in a night. Clive Barker uses a lot more adverbs in his writing than Stephen King does. I hadn't realized it until last weekend, but I had read everything Clive Barker published before 1994 back when I was in middle school. No wonder my mind is so fucked up. (For reference I was in middle school from 1993 to 1995).

Recently, I have taken another trip to the bookstore and picked up the third book in the Dark Tower Series, The Waste Lands, as well as Salem's Lot. I'm reading The Waste Lands right now, but I don't seem all that interested in it and may put it down for Salem's Lot instead. Gemma also has a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I intend to read while I'm on this roll. However, I tried reading it earlier this week and I just wasn't feeling it. It may the language, I don't know.

It's strange, having done so much reading after not really being interested in fiction for such a long time. I had not realized how much I used to read when I was a kid until now. I remember it used to take me weeks to get through a 600 page book, now I can do it in a couple of days. I'm sure college and grad school sharpened my reading skills, but it just feels so weird. It's like being thirsty for years and not realizing it, and then all of sudden drinking a shitload of water; or not running for years and then all of a sudden breaking into a sprint.

As for lyric writing - I still have not written shit.

Logic 9 - Thoughts on the new features

I'm looking over the "What's New" page for Apple's Logic 9 and decided to post my random thoughts. For science.

"Flex Time" - This is essentially Apple keeping up with the Ableton's and the Digidesign's - it was going to happen eventually. I must admit I am curious about Ableton Live just from word of mouth, but I actually have a demo CD for it lying around from when I bought a UC-33 Evolution MIDI controller and never bothered to install it so - not that curious. The idea of being able to use the "Flex Tool" to click and drag to change the timing of audio without making cuts might be interesting. On the other hand, the ability to "quantize audio" and use "Varispeed" to slow down a track while recording and then speed it up again for playback just seems stupid and evil to me. I'm no virtuoso, but I hate this shit. However, I understand Logic has to put it in there to keep up with ProTools, so there it is. Under this category, "Speed Fades," seem pretty cool - I mean, I've often found inspiration by using the Scissor tool to scrub a track or thought to myself "Oh man, if only there was an easy way to record this!!!" I think this category is what makes the update Logic 9 and not Logic 8.5, but it's not really stuff that I'm interested in. I give it 5/10.

"Production Tools" - I never even used quick comping in Logic 8, but that's likely to change whenever I actually start laying down vocal tracks so I can't really evaluate the the new editing stuff they show off. However, I've never thought to myself - "Oh man, if only I could import entire tracks and settings from this other song!!!" so that whole "Selective Track Import" seems like a waste of time to me. Selective drum replacing, however, I could see as useful. But the big dick daddy in this category is the "Convert to Sampler," I've wish for that before so I'm actually pretty excited to see it. It's not going to get me to be an early adopter of Logic 9 - shit, money is so tight nothing short of a bag of it falling in my lap from the sky would change that - but maybe after 6 months to a year I'll actually upgrade mainly for this. Bounce in place could be useful, but I tend to just use buses for this kind of thing... a trick I learned from SFLogicNinja. For example, the Virus TI can only be bounced in real time, but what I do once I am happy with my Virus tracks is I'll route the Virus output to Bus 1, then create an audio track whose input is Bus 1 and then just record it. This way I can do one instrument at a time and then apply effects (compression/EQ) independently. Whether I bounce or whether I record it to an audio track, it's real time, and with my current computer (iMac from last year) I've really never had any slow downs or anything like that, whereas with my G4 powerbook and my old Windows98 PC, I would constantly need to bounce tracks down to save processing power in a project. Enough rambling, I'm giving this category 9/10.

"Guitar Gear" - From my first impression of Logic 9, this is the category that Apple's marketing seems to be emphasizing the most and I can't understand why. Guitar amp simulation is such a fucking hornet's nest, and as a guitarist who owns a tube amp head, a 4x12 speaker cabinet and a collection of Boss pedals, it just is not for me. Unless the simulations end up being, like, godlike and not just a shitty compromise like every other attempt at amp simulation I just think this is a big waste of time. Now I may be proven wrong on this, it may end up being that these amp simulations and the pedal board effects become the next big thing for electronic music and everyone's going to route their synths and samples through them. Conversely, this combined, with mainstage might usher in a whole new era of guitar bands not using amps. I just think it's highly unlikely. I give this a 3/10.

My over all impression? 5/10 + 9/10 + 3/10 divided by 3 = 5.6/10, so I guess I'm quantitatively more excited about than I initially thought. Mainly that's the Convert Audio Track to Sampler feature, I think. I just look at this like, take out the amp simulations, take out the Flex Time, and give me the new Production Tools category as 8.5. But that's just wishful thinking, that's never been how this whole music software thing works. I've been spoiled by the Access Virus upgrades over the past few years, I think.

Full circle (jerk)

My first blog post ever was me agonizing over the upgrade to Logic 8 and counting up all the money I've spent on Logic software since I started with Logic 4 back in the day. Now Apple has announced Logic 9. I'm not linking to it. Seriously, fuck off Apple.

Logic 8 came out 2 years ago. It was a huge update, added a bunch of nice shit to Logic and redesigned the interface. It was $200. Now Logic 9 is here and it adds a bunch of guitar amp and pedal simulations. Yay? It is also $200.

Right now, I have everything in my studio working together and playing nicely. Plus I'm broke as hell and work one of the worst jobs in the world. I think it is best if I opt out of this upgrade.

Inevitably I'm going to end up upgrading - it's the nature of the beast. There'll be an update to the Virus software or some shit, and I'll "fucking NEEEEEEEED" Logic 9.

Until then - Fuck off and die, Apple. Just fuck right the fuck off.

Yikes!!!

Just saw this post on matrixsynth.

Some dude decided to open up his Blofeld and remove one of the knobs to see what decoder was used.

Somehow I don't think that's a good idea.

Blofeld Gripe #1

The "Play" button should play a note.


The Blofeld is so small it would be awesome just to plug it into an electrical outlet, put on some headphones and make some patches. However, you need some kind of MIDI input to play a note to hear whatever patch you're working on. That means I have to hook up my wife's Micron, connect a MIDI cable, blah blah blah... pretty soon the entire coffee table is taken up by gear.

How awesome would it be if I could just press that button that says "Play" and it actually, y'know, played a freaking note. Just C4 - I'm not asking for anything fancy.

Even something like the Korg Nanokey wouldn't alleviate this; it's USB powered, so then I'd need to hook it up to a laptop, blah blah blah... Once again, the coffee table is full of gear.

I just want to watch bad movies while creating and editing Blofeld sounds. Is that so much to ask?!

Sometimes I make music

CableTVdemo061609 by mikeoday

Song structure and mixing pretty much set, gonna have to write some lyrics and record some vocals... bounced everything to a single track, then applied Multi-presser and Adaptive Limiter to maximize loudness for showing friends and shit.

Thought Crime Pt. 2 - Electric Bugaloo

I am accused of the crime of negative thinking. But my thinking isn't really traditional negative thinking as an actual psychologist would define it - it's rational thinking.

***

I often wonder about the opportunity costs of giant corporations. How many more small, independently owned businesses would there be if they were not crowded out by impossibly titanic competitors. It was once assumed that global-mega corps provided more jobs. But when we consider our job market today, doesn't it seem like all they do is consolidate everything so that overall they have less jobs, but they are all concentrated in one area? When I worked at the Pork Plant in Hoosierville-A, we had our own accountants, our own collections guy, our own telesales manager, and a few other things. When the wiener factory moved in, they eliminated those jobs entirely, because they had accountants, collections guys and telesales managers in Indianapolis. Not moved - eliminated. The people they already had in Indy were simply saddled with more work. 84,000 customers worth of more work, I guess.

So now we have less businesses. Never mind the less competition aspect of it, we have a relatively few number of companies, and they're dominant all over the country, if not the world, and they have consolidated their workforce and put a giant-mega office in this community or that community, and they outsource a large percentage of their work to India and China and sometimes Mexico - but could it be that overall they are generating less money for the economy?

We have these gigantic corporations, headed by executives who magically profit personally, even when the businesses they run fail. They are beyond overpaid, and the justification for their pay scale and their golden parachutes is that they need to feel free to take risks and "think outside the box" in order to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Somehow the need to take risks is so great that the last thing we want to do is financially ruin some executive who ran the business into the ground via a shortsighted and failed attempt at innovation. Instead we must all line up and say "yes!" and engage in "positive" thinking (as narrowly defined by corporate needs), so that no one can declare a non-viable solution or business plan as a "bad idea." So they execute it and it fails. Miserably. All of a sudden an entire workforce is held hostage to layoffs because rational thinking and long-term thinking have been narrowly redefined as "negative thinking."

Would it not be better to have more small companies hiring more people overall, with more offices and factories across the country and a higher standard of living for more Americans? Would it not be better to have owners, instead of executives, whose personal finances failed just as much as their comapany's finances failed, who would also be in the same boat as their laid off employees? Would it also not be better to allow one business to fail amongst a myriad of companies so that there is no giant that's "too big to fail?"

If the argument for capitalism is that it is "natural," there is nothing "natural" about the current state of affairs. We do not have capitalism, we do not have socialism, we instead have "corporatism." Corporatism is not capitalism, but it is totalitarian. And like all totalitarianism, it too must die.

Following up on previous two posts

1) Finished Silent Hill: Homecoming. The sewer crawl, and the rest of the game, became a bit more bearable once I discovered that when you're in your "combat stance," no matter how many enemies are surrounding you, only one will attack you. However, if you are not in your combat stance, like if you're trying to run away, they will all attack you at once. How sporting!

2) Finished a "positive thinking" training module at work. Here's a direct quote - on the subject of responding to criticism it advises saying:

""There may be some areas that could improve." This is a good way of acknowledging that improvement is possible while avoiding committing to changes."

Well, fuck! That sure explains a lot!!!

Silent Hill: Homecoming

I'm in the middle of this game and it's seriously pissing me off. I loved playing every other game in the Silent Hill series, even less popular efforts like The Room and Origins, but the way this game is going I can see myself abandoning it before I'm even done and that's really saying something.

It's the combat, stupid. Or the stupid combat.

Previous Silent Hill games are known for their unintuitive combat, but there's a relative straight forwardness about it, in my opinion. You whack a monster, you run away, you run back up to it, you whack the monster again, rinse and repeat. Sure, I'm oversimplifying, but what I'm getting at is that it just made sense. The Silent Hill series isn't about the combat, it's about the atmosphere. That's probably why I've beaten every Silent Hill game before this one and I've never finished a Resident Evil game. But in Homecoming, it feels as though every fucking encounter is a round in a fighting game.

The biggest problem is the dodging mechanic. In previous Silent Hill games, there was no "dodge," - not getting hit simply meant moving away out of the monster's reach before you got your ass slapped, thwacked or eviscerated. In Homecoming, you press a button at the right moment to dodge. The problem is, as the game goes on, you can't get a hit in on some of the later monsters without first successfully dodging one of their hits, reducing combat in this game to "Dodge-attack-attack." It gets fucking mind numbing after a while. Plus, you've REALLY got to pay attention to the enemy animations to dodge correctly. Timing your dodges is everything in this game, if you hit the dodge button too early, you won't have enough time to get off a second dodge. This of course means that your first encounter with any new monster is simply getting your ass handed to you while you learn the timing of the animations so you can react correctly.

This is not Silent Hill style game play. This is fucking Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Virtua Fight, etc... I mean, fighting games are great for people who like that shit. There's a whole genre dedicated to dodge-block-parry based on the slightest enemy animation. But who the fuck was asking for that in a Silent Hill game?

Another important aspect to any "survival horror" style game is the option to run away. There's really no running away in Homecoming, every fucking monster you come across needs to be taken out if you want to get past, and it seems like they're all faster than you. If you try to run, you just end up running into more and more monsters and it becomes the closing credits of Benny Hill, with every monster in the level chasing after you in a line. Then you're REALLY fucked, because the only effective way to deal with multiple enemies at once is using firearms, but the one thing they held over from the other Silent Hill games is the scarcity of ammo!

Maybe I'm just frustrated because I'm in the "sewer crawl" level of the game. Sewers are always the worst levels. Silent Hill 1 had a sewer, it sucked. Vampire: Bloodlines would've been a near flawless game if not for the sewer maze. Fallout 3's weakest moments were all the sewers you had to go through. Seriously, sewers suck. Why do game developers love sewers so much? Are they really that much easier to put together than empty streets, dilapidated buildings and metal cage and barbed wire hellscapes?

Dear developers; if you're putting in a sewer level just for the sake of having "variety" over the other levels in your game - just fucking don't! The sewer is a cliche across so many genres and so many games, there's really no variety to be had there. Video games need to take a decade or two off from sewer levels before they become fresh again. The best thing you can do with a sewer level in a video game at this point would be to make it a single, straight corridor with no enemies and have it be over after only 30 seconds walking straight forwards!

Thought Crime

I used to think Americans' obsession with movie actors was a superficial thing. Now I'm not so sure. It seems more and more of us are demanded to be amateur thespians in our day-to-day low-paying dead-end jobs. In my job at the wiener factory here in Illinois (I was hoping to ditch the wiener factory once and for all when I left Hoosierville A, but the job market being what it is, I ended up transferring...), it seems as though I am somehow going above and beyond simply by being civil, competent and helpful. Now I'm being told that the first point is not enough and the last two don't matter. I must learn to act like every one's best friend. I must learn to act like I'm the pitch man in an infomercial. I must not use the same words or phrases twice with two different customers despite the fact that I have over one hundred interactions a day about the same three things. I must learn to be more casual in my speech, and the examples of how to do so that are given to me, I find impolite and unprofessional.

Simple politeness, competence and a willingness to help go a long way with my customers. I've been complimented so many times simply because the service at the wiener factory is so hideously sub par that it's like I'm doing a huge favor just by doing my job. I understand the need to get the rest of the employees to stop being dicks, but the way to do that is to stop tolerating bullshit, not by instituting lists of phrases to use and words to avoid. For example, I can't say the word "no," or any other "negative" word. That's great for a commercial or a piece of advertising, but all day long, I am supposed to ad-lib scripts in my head that would ordinarily take a troop of marketers, a gaggle of ad execs and a team of lawyers to write a 30-second spot for.

I haven't paid for my wiener deliveries in two months, can you guys just keep the wieners coming for a while longer?

"Nnnn....... uh, we can keep your wieners coming if you pay the outstanding wiener bill!"

That's not what I asked! Listen, you've stopped delivering my wieners today. How about I pay you next Friday and you keep those wiener deliveries coming?

"We canno... uh, we can resume delivery of your wieners if you make a payment right now!"

You are rude and unhelpful.

***

I'm currently experiencing the joy of training modules that are little more than an Orwellian attempt at thought control. Positive people are successful and they never use "negative" statements that involve words like "no" and "not." Negative people who do say things like, "no," "not," "can't," "shouldn't," "unethical" and "illegal," are psychopaths and should be treated like they have a contagious disease.

Since I'm just a cog in the wiener machine, I actually can't do a lot of things - like, for example, extend billing deadlines for customers, or force delivery trucks to go back the same day if the first delivery man threw the wiener delivery down a customer's septic tank. Instead of a simple, straightforward and, in my opinion - respectful and polite - statement saying I cannot do these things, instead I have to dance around the point with a statement of "I can..." do something else. To me, that seems not only rude, but also an insult to the receiving party's intelligence.

I have an appointment today and your wiener delivery driver says I wasn't here when he came by! I've been sitting in front of my house all damn day on a lawn chair drinking beer and pissing in a cup! He's the one who hasn't been here! Can you get someone out here soon, I've got a barbecue and no wieners!!!

"I can get a delivery driver out there next Thursday!"

That's bullshit! I was here! I've got the sheriff, a judge and the fucking mayor sitting here with me and they'll sign a sworn statement!

"These are not the droids you are looking for!"

***

It seems to me like the English language wasn't really meant to bend this way. The word "no" was specifically invented for one purpose, and it fulfills that purpose admirably. Replacing "no" with "I can" comes off as clumsy and long-winded at best, and downright belligerent at worst.

My guess is that this is coming down to us from on high, where middle managers and corporate executives get by every day by saying "yes," and by "playing ball" and "being a team player." It's an entire class of self-selected fakers who don't need to deal with the real world consequences of bad policies and how those policies effect the hundred or so customers I get stuck talking to on a day-to-day basis trying to justify the unjustifiable. Rationality goes out the window in favor of blind "positivity," and pretty soon you've got the same carbon copy personality types infecting the organization and spreading like a virus. They train their HR drones to only hire people who use "affirmative only" statements in the interview. Then they only promote people within the organization who never criticize the way things are currently being done and therefore, nothing is ever improved until the company literally loses millions of dollars over something stupid, and then they scramble to come up with a quick and easy band-aid that doesn't really solve anything.

I am really shocked at the way things go where I work. Our billing system is total garbage - the user interface is worthless. In Hoosierville A, when the pork plant turned into the wiener factory, they switched from one billing system to a second billing system. Now, here in Illinois it's yet another, third, billing system, and this one is the worst of all of them. I make suggestions, and my coworkers and supervisors go, "Is that even possible?"

YES!!!

Other billing systems can update a customer's current balance immediately after a change is made and not take 24 to 48 hours to show the change. They just don't here. And in other billing systems, you can take a payment and it will automatically be applied to that customer's account, you don't need to copy/paste their account number.* Just not here. And you can reverse payments and not tell customers they need to go contact their bank to dispute the payment. Just not here. And other billing systems have a customer's monthly rate, with promos and discounts already figured in, displayed prominently so you don't have to add it all up yourself on a calculator. Just not here. And in other billing systems, I can set up an automatic recurring monthly payment for a customer instead of telling them to do it themselves on the website. Just not here.

I can just imagine if someone like me were at a GM board meeting in the early 2000s.

Our business plan is to continue manufacturing more SUVs and Hummers like it's 19-fucking-99. We're going to eschew smaller cars and do nothing to increase research into fuel efficiency and hybrid technologies, but we'll have our PR people put together some shit that makes it look and sound like we're committing to those technologies even though nothing will ever come of it - at least not out of us!

"That seems like a bad idea in the long term. Research shows that fuel costs are going to increase and consumers are going to want smaller, more fuel efficient cars."

You're never going to get anywhere in this company with language like that, mister!!! Take your NEGATIVITY and go work for some FOREIGN car company, you piece of shit!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!

Or how about AIG?

We are launching a new financial product called derivative assets. What we do is we take a shitload of crappy loans, divide them up, and package the pieces together. That way, even if one borrower defaults on their loan, the other loans are still getting paid.

"But if all the loans are risky, aren't they all at risk of defaulting? Packaging them together doesn't make them any less likely to fail. And you want to sell these to charities and non-profit groups? Is this even ethical?"

You are just not a TEAM PLAYER!!! I can tell by your word choice - and by the faggy foreign hybrid car that you drive - that you actually WANT this company to fail! Why don't you take your concern for long term profits and ethics and go work in academia or something!!!

***

For me, the issue is that there are *real* problems with this company in terms of how it does things. Part of my job requires me to say, "no," sometimes. People can make unreasonable requests about their meat. We honestly can't do certain things, regardless of whether we should be able to do them or not. And if the wiener factory wants me to be an actor 10 hours a day, the least they can do is provide me with a god damn script!

*Side note: This may seem nitpicky at first, but imagine if you called a company that you do business with every month, and you made a payment on your account, only on your next statement your payment was not reflected. You call in and it takes an additional 48 hours or more to straighten out. It all happened because the person you made the payment to pasted the account number of the person s/he was talking to before you in some field. Now repeat this a dozen or more times a day. Literally. Totally avoidable, yet it happens over and over again and probably costs the company millions of dollars a year in man hours spent tracking down these phantom payments and applying them to the correct accounts. Never mind the fact that it makes the company and its employees look totally incompetent, thus encouraging customers to purchase their pork products elsewhere.

Random Post

1) I'm now old and married and watching waaay too much Mythbusters. I had never seen an episode until I stopped at my in-laws on the way back from our honeymoon in November. Now I'm hooked and have probably seen almost all the episodes from reruns and marathons on the Discovery Channel.

2) Gemma got me an Xbox 360 for Valentine's Day. I'm such a spoiled little shit. I'll be writing up some posts about some of the games I've played like Braid, Fallout 3 and Dead Space. I've also been thinking about writing up some posts about all the Silent Hill games for a while now.

3) My job was horrible, and it's getting worse. It's normally a high turnover type of job, but since the job market's so tight, the wiener factory seems to be taking advantage by making things suck even more. If this company went out of business, I'd eat pancakes on its fucking grave. I can't believe I've been doing this shit for 2 and a half years now. Got a post about that in the works.

This blog is now a picture blog

I gots nothin' to say.


Rotwang did it.

Poppin' Caps!!!

This is my EVGA Geforce 7600 GT video card. If you click on the picture and look at the silver cylinders, those are capacitors. About half of them have popped open. Those fibers sticking out? I have no idea, but I did not pull them out. This is exactly how the card looked when I opened up my case after my monitor went black and my PC's POST beeps were BEEEEEEP-beep-beep-beep. (That's 1 long, 3 short = vga is fucked).

Luckily, I'm only about 15 minutes away from a Fry's, so I was able to replace it right away, otherwise I would have been waiting a few days because I'd rather order from NewEgg than go to Best Buy or something like that. Plus, my mail/package delivery here in ChiBurbs is a bit dodgy.

Now, I bought my 7600 GT w/ 256MB of onboard RAM in April of 2007 for $109. So I went to Fry's, and decided to pick up a GeForce 8400 GS w/ 512 MB of RAM for $60. Seems reasonable, right? I mean, 512 MB > 256MB, and 8400 > 7600, so my new card should perform better than my old card, right?

WRONG!!!

I pop that puppy in there, and I set up all the drivers and shit, and I launch AudioSurf and OH MY GOD IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT!!! I dick around, I dick around, I dick around... still shit city. So I start up GTA: San Andreas (still haven't gotten past learning to fly a plane, HA!) and sure enough I go from running all setting at max, to knocking everything down a whole bunch... fuck.

SO then I start doing my research - yeah, totally ass backwards on my part - and according to the charts at http://www.tomshardware.com, the 8400 does indeed perform about HALF as well as the 7600.

WHAT THE FUCK!!!

After dicking around on the net a whole bunch, I've pretty much determined that in Nvidia numbers, X800 > Y600 > Z400, etc, even if Z > Y > X. I don't get it but, whatever.

The big issue is that I'm using a 2 year old motherboard that's only PCI Express x16, and not PCI Express x16 2.0, so I have slimmer pickings of video cards, and an equivalent PCI Express x16 v. 1.0 video card to my 7600 is going to be about... $109!!!!!

DICKS IN A BASKET, FUCK!!!!

Toast fucking: Fucking or being fucked by toast

WTF is this shit?


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!

Goodbye Hoosierville, Hello Illinois!!!

Here's my first day in Illinois:






Oh well, at least I get to live with my wife now.