The Cult of Ika


An intro thrown together for The Cult of Ika. Only had two hours to make it and post everything (this included). Will very likely remake it without any slow buildup at all, but time is a factor and this is what I came up with as fast as I could. Best wishes to members, even retard.

Keyboard-Vs-LFO Percussion Battle

For E Subversives


>reposted after further tweaking


Put a huge amount of effort into an extended jam set of this: tons of keyboard composition changes, handmade echo effects, crossfading from scratch. The first one was rushed because of promises.

Botanical Extended Jam


Gonna put another couple days into this and release it a third time. It could be really excellent instead of just very good.

Falling Piles of Wubs

hijacked



Psy has already been seen by more than 100 million people in a very short period of time, making his global rise meteoric.

Clouded Up




Soundclouds:

http://www.soundcloud.com/whitnall
http://www.soundcloud.com/whitnall1
http://www.soundcloud.com/whitnall2

Only posted one of the many tracks with lyrics done over the years, so the third account is not full. I may fill that one up and another, though, in the not so distant future.



Gadget Duress [Complete]

3. Track removed
4. Robotic Vocallette
5. Ridiculously Enlightened
6. Splintered Pi Storm
7. Sweat and Castigation
8. Streamed Imagination
9. Forced Inspiration 3
10. Sexy Bamanation Instrumental
11. Opined Instrumental
12. Glossy Degradation Instrumental
13. Promiscuous Multivars
14. Moral Disintegration 2
15. Laughtermath - Fected















Joi de Vivre: A Notice and a Disclaimer

Oh for the simple era of political commentary and 4-500 tweets a day, when my time and money were longer than the days...

*

7:00 A.M. January 1, 2010:

Day: We're gonna need more guns, bombs.
5link33: I thought we were completely non-violent now.
Day: Oh, we're not going to use them.
5link33: Are you drunk again?
Day: They're for the Minutemen. If we can funnel them enough armaments --
5link33: I don't like that.
Day: -- they'll start a war with Mexico.
5link33: I thought we agreed you wouldn't try to talk to me when you're drunk.
Day: Once the price of weed goes up, we reap converts from among the people who have to quit.
5link33: This is why we broke up.
Day: I'm not drunk. I'm more sober than I've ever been.
5link33: Oh, God, why did I give you my new number?
Day: I want you so bad.
5link33: Don't call me until you're not crazy anymore.



- Names and places here are not necessarily based on real life. Some of the written material is fiction. Some proper place names reflect futuristic and fantasy views of those places. -


=::=


Instead of deleting comments, old material is moved to an entry called "Comments," nearly at the beginning of the site (the date of that entry is 2008-08-01). That's also instead of having comments from the random factor of the general public. This is not a campaign to be the next person who gives you hope until taking office. This is not an attempt to get your money. These are just excerpts from the mind of a writer and a musician.

Soundfonts

"Onward thru the Fog"

When, at the age of ten, I first experienced Austin's Oat Willie's it struck me as the neatest store in Texas. Their stock fascinated me exponentially more strongly than items at "regular" stores, with the exception of Herget's Books in New Orleans. The pipes, scales and other paraphernalia failed to even register on my radar, and the five pound bags of ephedrine were a total mystery. The underground comics and head posters made me never want to leave. It is not surprising that the old store is still thriving decades later, although some things have changed. Wholesale manufacturers of old school methamphetamines can no longer turn to the store for the base ingredient, and that's a good thing. Now an adult of advanced years, looking back I can iterate how my outlook on life changed because of Oat Willie's. A great deal, it must be said, for the underground subculture forever after appealed to me to the nth degree.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor continues to hold my highest respect and admiration, and I consider them to be greater than any other band. Cult movies and esoteric literature and art impress far more than mainstream entertainment, and surely always will. Obscure become popular can be particularly delightful, but enjoying creative greatness as a member of a small refined audience always outshines brushes with the herd mentality. The Austin subculture eternally stands out as the source of my initial divergence from conformity, but it would be in poor taste to slight the heads from the LSU area. I found Insect Fear and Slow Death by the campus in Baton Rouge, not in the sometimes elitist capitol of Texas.

Nowadays my personal original music occupies most available free hours of the week. I hold loops and kits in the highest contempt, because that is someone else's work. Sometimes, every now and then, my own sound impresses me. In those moments all the busy work, editing and tweaking seems very worthwhile. However, there's a pain from creating only solo music and only by non-traditional methods that never goes away. Reaching a state of mind in which the beat permeates the atmosphere and every fiber of the human essence helps to soothe the ache of perceived minimized accomplishment, but pondering what staunch musical conservatives perceive makes it impossible to dispel. At least, though, at least, there's nothing mainstream about the work, and the herd mentality could only retch from some of it (hoorah).

Due to music production very little else has been advanced here as of late; that is not a great tragedy. As long as life goes on there's always time to remedy the shortage of literature and commentary, and so there's this, a few words written down because being able to do such a thing with grace and skill is a gift handed down by the divine. For that, and all of the rest of life's fleeting joys, I never fail to be grateful.

Cheers, and happy summering.

From Guest Writer Abigail Mason

* Content, including links, belongs exclusively to the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Symbols.

Are Internet Users Being Pushed Underground?

Governments all over the world, as usual, are a bit behind the population when it comes to technology and its uses. During the London riots of 2011 politicians were mystified by this curious communication technique called BBM. This of course was just Blackberry Messenger. The use of this made it incredibly difficult for police to monitor those taking part and thus the entire situation was very difficult to control. In comparison, people who posted Facebook updates supposedly encouraging the riots were swiftly arrested. The internet is no longer a safe place to voice your opinions without the government, or anyone else for that matter, knowing about it. Everything you do online can be traced easily directly to you. Plenty of legislations has been suggested by governments such as ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which are the most well known. All have been introduced in an attempt to stifle online piracy of films, music and other media. This legislation also had a more sinister side to it which directly infringed on the civil liberties of internet users. The whole point of the internet is that it is meant to be a free place for all to share whatever opinions and ideas they have without fear of retribution. As governments begin to realise the potential of the internet they also realise it is potential they don't want solely in the hands of their citizens and not them. So how can you protect yourself?


First and foremost is the obvious. The less personal data online the less there is to be stolen. Withdrawing yourself from social networks is a great step. If you want a little bit of a scare to push you in this direction then make use of a feature Facebook now offers. You can now easily request every bit of data that Facebook has on you. This is essentially every status update, photo and whatever else you have shared through your account. Apart from the embarrassment of reading the kind of things you posted 4 years ago, it is a great shock to see how much information can be gleaned just from your account on Facebook. It might hard at first to unplug yourself as people rely on it so much for staying connected these days, but it is the first step to not only protecting your personal data but towards controlling it.

One of the most powerful tools to look after yourself online is the use of Tor. Tor is a way to access the dark side of the web. Essentially this is where websites are that you cannot access through a normal browser or bring up in search engines. Without Tor, you can't get to them. Tor as well completely hides you online. Anything you do cannot be traced by anyone in the slightest, not even the government. Everything you post or look at is completely secret to you and this is where the internet is headed. As governments become more oppressive, users will be pushed underground and to get there they will use Tor. As more and more people head into the dark depths governments will suddenly be faced with what looks like an increasingly empty internet, despite bandwidth use suggesting otherwise. What is in this hidden web though?

One of the most infamous websites is one called Silk Road. This is an online market place where anything is for sale. By that I mean you can buy drugs, weapons and fake passports. The currency used is called “bitcoins”, which is an online currency which is also untraceable without a hefty and time-consuming investigation by various bodies. Here is an example of what you could get on there. You could purchase an old vehicle you've always wanted on there for a great price without anyone being able to trace the transaction. What about protecting a classic car, such as the one you just bought? Well, with your purchase you could also get some surveillance or tracing equipment to help you with that problem as well. It would be a simple matter of picking up you vehicle and the only people who will know about it will be you, the seller and anyone you decide to tell.

As time goes on it is increasingly likely that more people will move to this part of the internet. As it's use grows, so does the services offered. It is a haven for criminality so its increase in popularity is not always going to be a good thing. For the moment though, it is a great way to hide yourself away from prying eyes.

Laughtermath

NOTE: Filming of lesserdevil videos begins today, June 25, 2012.


Album Gadget Duress nearing completion. Only extras and versions remain.
- Laughtermath Fected

[Yet Another Note: Work is crazy right now. This would all be done right now if my time were free; it will still be, eventually. Suffice it to say Sexy Bamanation is a cynical socio-political statement.]

Promiscuous Multivars


Gadgets in Duress

*the sample "rock the beat" was overly repetitious so this is the second version of the song

Conclusion of Gadget Duress


14. Promiscuous Multivars
15. Moral Disintegration
16. Laughtermath

Gadget Duress did not end after the second part, Sexy Bamanation, although it was not made clear that there was to be a third part. The conclusion of the album is a short collection called Gadgets in Duress. Recording is in progress. The completed works will be posted along with the rest of the album, as a complete collection, along with a good deal of extra material. This is just an announcement. The songs will not be, as so often in the past, simply linked to the announcement post. {that is a blatant fucking lie; expect them}


* added 10 new soundfonts for production, and counting. If anyone wants a torrent of my 40+ original soundfonts, then drop me a line.

Gadget Duress Part Two


Second part of Gadget Duress, complete:
Sexy Bamanation.

1. Sweat and Castigation
3. Forced Inspiration 3
4. Sexy Bamanation Instrumental
5. Opined Instrumental
6. Glossy Degradation Instrumental
  • production notes are in the ancient post titled "Comments"
  • abomi- ... abomi- ... oh never mind

CISPA - They Never Quit

The Internet privacy crushing Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act -- it's just like every other chilling piece of legislation destroying civil liberties and rights as citizens. The War on Privacy has picked up the support of 800 major corporations: They want to know everything about you, for sales! The votes is coming with lightning speed as well. Tasks for the activists are not getting any easier.

CISPA contact list. Inundate, rinse, repeat.

Saturday XIV

Beware of gift phones. They may be set up to spy on you, and not just a little. Anybody can do it, and every part of the phone's use becomes available for inspection through the procedures. (.pdf)

Facebook officially changed some of their "1337sp34k" settings so that females are no longer "54ndw1ch m4k3r5."

In case you missed the news, Coachella is on live on YouTube.com/Coachella. Three stages.

Harden you Android phone like a rock- secure, encrypt, anonymize

If Aereo can win this court case it will revolutionize device broadcasting. They may win on fair use because of the hardware they employ, or may even simply be exempt from interference. Futuristic tape dubbing via remote.

Neon Indian delivers a super-hyped, comfortable stage presence, but they still sound like shoegaze to some of us. They played Coachella today. They were even better at Spanish Moon in Baton Rouge in 2010. The amplifiers negated the pop sound almost entirely

The Next Projects


Friday, April 13: Recording vocals. Roommate's latest album is retail errywherr; that deal is open, so I'll be working on the new abum wih it in mind that it will be sold on a "Pay If You Like It" basis and on iTunes...

-note on the timeline: swamped IRL right now, seriously, so next release is gonna be a minute.
-video production in progress with kdenlive (stalled because of rain)
-more soundfonts. I burned up the last 20 (wait, so not true, just needed to look at them more closely [listen to them])
-next album a slower tempo acoustic track will divide all hi-BPM songs, so like starting in a few minutes...

- The United States Postal Service has vast digital spying data. The data could be used to violate rights, or it could be considered an extremely high value corporate asset. The people: target or price tag?

Learn things.

[So tired of people asking if I use Fruity Loops. No I do not use Fruity Loops. Windows: Kill it with fire. What about this site suggests anything related to Windows? Fruity Loops... candy ass, lame-o, entry level BS, pfft.]

Album Release

The album Barefoot on the Burning Street in its entirety.
Decided against public Bit Torrent. Bandwidth is limited. Non-members will just have to get it from Archive.

Contents:
Barefoot_on_the_Burning_Street.rar

Files in Archive:
I. Cover Art

1.

2.

3.
II. The Album
18. Co-Meet Diversion Vocal Mix (reworking vocals - thought the song was only 3 minutes so they are less than a minute long)

Video for Beating River Road Down not complete and so not included.

Gintama Tear Jerker


Gintama turned out to be awesome entertainment. The animated series easily occupies the top tier of genuinely humorous things to watch. There are few contenders with the sheer cleverness to challenge the show when it comes to being funny: Zetsubou Sensei and Nichijou do make a fine showing. However, with the Kintaro arc, Gintama proved that the production staff and actors can manipulate the entire range of human emotions. It's no wonder the show is still going strong after five seasons. If only Bleach could always feel so fresh...

Note: The still is not from the Kintaro arc, it's from the Yoshiwara is Burning arc, which was one of the few disappointments of the series (you heard it here).

The "Monsegur" Five

Who cares? Who the fuck cares? Oh, StratFor owners, employees and clients, most likely. Yeah, them. The stroy:

The FBI and the U. S. Attorney's Office brought charges against five people loosely aligned with Sec and Anon groups. The defendants are called The Monsegur Five because Hector Xavier "Sabu" Monsegur, a.k.a Fuckhead, snitched on everyone. At least one party responsible for the StratFor Christmas fun is included in the bunch. One PayPal-Wikileaks revenge DDoS coordinator is included, but that was seen coming weeks and weeks ago. LulzSec is mentioned repeatedly, perhaps with the intent of tainting the jury pool in some unknown future action. LulzSec warned of this way back on February 29th, as you can see below.

HBGary execs will finally be able to sleep peacefully now that the faceless baddie will be brought to justice. Says everyone, "Yep. It was him. It was all Monsegur." His Guy Fawkes mask usage has been revoked. I, uh, don't know how that ED link got here...

Still Free - The Square [Update]

A Fine Piece of Work-- Absolutely SICK:

Another arrest comment:
I just got hold of the Higio Ochoa PasteBin link. This letter makes me feel better. I never participate in any attacks. I just listen while people type. They are slowly being outed from Anonymous, aren't they?

Only 1/900th of the samples prepared in the past week were used. Gotta try harder to prevent effort from being wasted-- make more tracks, use more sound. Urg. Hit cave wall with stick. Meurzik!

Oh, the update:
Later in this post it's mentioned that the people arrested by the FBI and named as LulzSec do not match some info from the past. Here's the main point, which was not elaborated on earlier. After the 4Chan DDoS there was a revenge hack against LulzSec. One steroidal hacker claimed to have penetrated a LulzSec computer, and had the payload to prove it. It was not a Mac. LulzSec was running FreeBSD. It stuck out fairly prominently as an event. Maybe Monsegur or Hammond changed computers or operating systems, but LulzSec was dead-bang in the crosshairs and it was a FreeBSD system that got nailed. Some of the facts don't jibe with what has happened over the years. The info is old, because your author stopped spending time in IRC with these guys...

When LulzXmas came out the first association that sprang to mind was not LulzSec. Lulz is not a trademark. It's a figure of speech. It's not a gang. It means "huge bummer." The StratFor hack did indeed seem like a huge bummer, but LulzSec made a big name for targeting pedophiles, not high profile credit card number theft. Previous actions do not match that exploit. It seemed like somebody attaching lulz to their hack as a descriptor, not as an affiliation indicator.

Anyone with a shred of intelligence would, of course, defer to the Federal Bureau of Investigations when it comes to intel. They know more about everything than mere mortals could hope to. I certainly don't pretend to know more. However, if LulzSec actual was not the person responsible for StratFor, wouldn't they be laughing their ass off right now? It would mean LulzSec just got a "get out of jail free card" because of these arrests. They could let the name LulzSec die and start fresh, de facto exonerated by a law enforcement media success.

moving on

ETA on Muzik: Friday morning? Nope. Still setting up the 3000 drums and cymbals. Really. It's almost too much to work with. Almost.

The Math: Did the math on lifetime audio sample creation. It's not very high. Less than 90,000, more than 65,000. Ever since Genesis lost the TG and PsychicTV samples collection in the Hearst Mansion there's been a simplistic running tally here. Lost close to 40,000 from hardware failure, more than once come to think of it. Lately it seems good to sort of keep a lid on details, because caution doesn't hurt anything. This talk comes out of having prepped 3000 samples today for placement into fonts. [was so wrong about how much there is, maybe it'll be finished before spring ends]

The Dumbening: At least once in the past month "VST" was used when "DAW" was meant to be used. Something didn't seem right about that. The old memory never did kick in until "DAW" slapped me in the face on a forum. Derr-urr-urr-erp.

Gotta love the Seven Samurai musician shoop (moved to "comments"). It fits well with the current trend of the site [am up to 10 soundfonts as of 3/20]. The pic is from the new 4scrape, as is so often the case.

Sure would be nice to acquire a new profile picture, maybe one with a bandanna instead of a cap. That'd be so very different. Also, with funny nose glasses.

LulzSec posted. The threat of loss of freedom was quite obviously taken very seriously. Although the removal of the Kony post already indicated everybody's fave 1337 haxxor wasn't in shackles, it's good to see verbosity back to normal levels. Someone said the square shows up differently on some proprietary browsers. Who cares? Linux-FreeBSD forever - FTW. Note:
As for lulzsec coming back, we would like to remind the world that the known 6 people from lulzsec have been arrested and facing charges as well as the claimed leader becoming a FBI informant.
That is news to me. That was not my understanding at all. How many groups are those six guys supposed to have been in at the same time? Sabu's big mouth only hit the scene fairly recently. The events surrounding the Lulzsec DDoS against 4Chan predates Sabu, the Herp Derp Six, sgnificantly, but whatever...

-A few other things will go nicely here. -

Still building soundfonts. Up to five complete, with six more file sets prepped and ready for conversion to sf2. It's the most boring thing in the world or it would be finished. Should write a macro to do it. Seriously... (twiddles thumbs)

Holding off on new songs until at least a dozen sf2's are sitting open in LMMS. Did complete the entire background/atmo for one earlier today, or at least one layer of it. Stopped converting samples from stereo to mono and began harvesting voice licks from random audio for the second third of the LP; love that stuff. About to go back to that.

Tore a rotator cuff tendon on St. Patty's or severely sprained it. It hurts like hell to use a computer, but that's nothing new. Application for a new human body is taking an eternity to go through.

-- expect more non-news as time goes on --
the triviality is deafening, so how about some REAL music?
Bubble Pop - an instant classic. There's a flame war in the comments there. Who knew hot Asian chicks singing and dancing could cause controversy?


Aw, she so horny. Aw, aw, she so horny. She love you long time.

A Pound of Sick Sinse: Post-Glitch Neo-Industrial Hypno

Victory! I forgot all about Wine while I was trying to install a SoundFont editor. So freaking simple... and now I has my very own (new) SoundFonts!

Something else: I hadn't opened the song outside of the production environment before this morning. It's, uh, 2 minutes longer than the program said. Well, huh. Meh, moving on...

leak - finally - A Side, no vocals, pre-fx (B Side, single batch file with versions, album art and cue sheet later this weekend) - this genre is real as a muh. I'll put the bigger release in a new post. When the whole album is done, weeks from now, I'll release the entire audio library used.

Thursday Night: I have to stop composing. I've still been making the first song denser and denser. I sure as hell don't want to quit right now, but sleep is not really optional at this point. My job is impossible without down time. My big plan is to make the B Side song a really long one. This one, despite being heavily layered, is still very minimal. I'd like the second song to be as jammed out as possible. All that must wait though. [sigh]

A few words about licensing before I step out: I've recently been going through other people's licensing violations, just to hear the current state of audio engineering, and it hit me, like a sledgehammer in the chest, that what I was listening to was very nearly identical to percussion samples I released in 2009 and 2010. I went through hundreds of sounds that may very well been sounds I created; the resemblance of some is so uncanny I have a deep suspicion about it. These sounds have been on sale for over a year, for budding music producers. My releases weren't on the restrictive Non-Commercial Creative Commons license back then, so I have no legal claim, but a claim against me would be laughable, except that I can imagine a corporate attorney suing a legitimate creator on behalf of the thieves. No names mentioned.

Thursday Morning: Since daybreak have been putting sample banks into kits for the B Side song. Am very anxious to get the first single released. I'll have a name for the album when that happens. Before leaving for work I'm actually going to back up my data (crazy talk) so there's no way it can be lost.

Wednesday Late Afternoon: Rather than waste another minute trying to get a Vienna substitute to work (I already spent several hours to no avail) I'm moving on with what I have. It's a pain in the ass that I have no way to go inside SoundFonts, but going off on that tangent could waste huge amounts of time. I'm going to finish Side A tonight and start on Side B.

out of time, and as suspected, compiling the editor triggered a domino effect in missing dependencies. Fffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Wednesday Morning: Passed out after only being home a couple of hours last night. Working on this before daybreak, I can get a feel for why people get their heads bitten off sometimes. Anyway, editing is taking way too long the way it's set up in my VST. If you don't keep something in it's original state things get complicated. To bypass the current aggravation, caused by the closed nature of the instrument banks once they are loaded at song stage, I'm compiling an editor this morning...

This the reason I used a placeholder. I knew I'd have a lot of comments, and creating a new post every time is conceited and selfish. It just works so much better to do this.

Note: The download counter on Archive audio can be manipulated. The top download numbers there were manipulated by an sql injection. I manipulated mine like that one time, and I don't think that went over well with the staff. All my audio said zero for like two years after that. lol - that's what I get for inflating numbers for no reason. It's not like there's any money involved. [stupid stupid stupid - also not entirely true, but didn't feel like going into the method, which was just a script kiddie thing and not a system intrusion]

Tuesday Evening: Title is evolving. Sixth Sinse doesn't make much sense, so I changed it to Sick Sinse. That feel when you have a pound of sick sinse... that's what I was thinking about while I started working on the song. Track evolving as well. Loading down samples now. Inserting negative space. Creating a third drum kit to flush out the depth, as if it weren't deep enough yet. Not changing major flow, however.

Tuesday Late Afternoon: Can, almost, finally, start working on the project again now that it's almost evening and nightfall. Having four to six hours a day to work on a music project is way better than nothing (could be more if I cut way back on sleep, but that isn't a good plan). At least I have a situation where I can do such a thing, unlike hundreds of millions of other people in the world.

Tuesday Morning: Slept. Sounds great although incomplete. Instead of what I said below, plans changed. Going to put "Pound of Sixth (Sick) Sinse" with another song, burn it as a single, create cover art, rip it with EAC and release cue sheet, music and art together. If I didn't have the track I wouldn't be able to say that with utmost confidence, but it is sitting here waiting only for vocal audio.

Monday Night:
This whole post is going to be taken down and moved when the song is posted. It's nothing but production side notes, really. Time filler.

Monday afternoon
Song is called "A Pound of Sick Sinse" (now) - Song is done except for vocal track. There's literally no way to finish it tonight. It turned out really fucking good. Hopefully the computer won't melt or something before it's done. It would be finished but I had to sleep and go to work last night and this morning, sort of like now. I must have forgotten how long it takes for me to completely master a song. There will be no blown mind, before it's time...

Monday morning:
I have like no freaking extra time during the week. Here's a discarded take. I restarted the song about five times. This is just proof of advanced aspies. The final version isn't even in the same ballpark as whatever this was. There's sort of a haze surrounding my recollection of uploading this...

Sunday afternoon:

Check out the Melodic trumpet soundfont at the top of the page. That was a long time ago, and I had nothing to do with ripping off any circulating synth collections for that soundfont, that year, and especially not using Napster. In case anybody is interested I may post the 4000 new ogg samples, but that's not music production. Gonna get all the heavy work done after it gets dark...

Sunday morning
Further Procrastination: Got a digital Nikon. Took a picture. First ever real life picture of me on the site.

Note: I realize that using a placeholder is a piss poor way to market something, even if there is no money involved. That really didn't cross my mind. I just wanted to write about something, and this is what I've been doing.

Progress and Incidents Report (Sunday): As anybody who has sat around with me during production knows, I am all about the glitch. I'm having a problem incorporating glitch into the overall harmony without making the whole thing glitch though [trying to make the genre true here]. Considering just downsampling the wide array of noise transitions, but it feels like a cop-out to do that. Meanhwile, the VST set-up is the best ever, and in addition to my own 4,000 original samples and 1,500 loops, there's a gajillion royalty free samples and loops lying around in the audio folder, as well as the obligatory licensing violations which I will not identify. All of it just waiting for the creative process to do something with it. Just sitting there. Just waiting. Yeah, this is wasting time...

Saturday night:

-Was a placeholder for the first of the week. If you're familiar with this place then you know that when a placeholder appears content will follow. This rule has never been broken, and only death or dismemberment will break it now. Of course it's increasingly unlikely that there are many people familiar with this place since it has been idle for long periods of time. Stop inciting hatred and discontent, lose readers. Stop creating beauty and start appreciating it in other places, lose readers. Another vicious reality... sometimes discovering those becomes bothersome. Regardless, it may be a long time before I can boast 24,000 hits a week on Twitter again, and the spillover here that came along with it; that took too much work and returned too little reward, on the scale of social change with which I measured reward.

Friday night:
Post-Glitch Neo-Industrial Hypno: Impossible, you may think, considering glitch has yet to lead a full life. "True story," I respond. I'm glossing in glitch components with melody while at the same time paying tribute to it, restoring the hard hitting roots of organic electronic mimicry and packaging the work in heady relay sequences.

The last time I started on a new EP the whole world fell apart, but a few tracks made it out anyway. Hopefully such a thing will not happen this time, but tracks will be making it out no matter what happens, beginning here. Unfortunately I'm not in Louisiana, so I'm not using the piano or the garage warehouse back at home, or my bass, or my guitar, or the condenser mic, or the, aww f**k it (lol - you may be getting a feel for why this is Neo-Industrial).

That's enough talk about the music until it actually occupies the placeholder, erm, early Sunday morning...NOPE, Monday more likely. No title until completion this time; that may be a jinx. Moving on.

The "Blood Red Mist" novella will be out by Christmas. It needs the air of the deep south to be revived. Still boycotting poetry [fuck love, fuck poetry, nuff said]. Any lyrics will reflect that. Lest I become too positive I must remember that I do not actually exist, and nobody will ever witness any of this. There is no tree, it does not fall, and sound is an illusion, even that loud crashing shit, which, could it be music? Likely.

February 8, 2012:

"Blood Red Mist of Gouache" will be laid to rest with a novella to tie up loose ends. My entire life changed not long after beginning work on the novel. I've lived in three states and four towns in the past year, and continuing writing on the work was literally impossible for a variety of reasons. My life outlook changed significantly as my surroundings shifted, and I no longer feel the plot outline can serve as a vehicle for the statements I'd like to make. One thing that can be said about it: I wrote the entirety of it as it now exists in crowded public areas.

Best Anime List Part 2

Forgotten during first listing:

1. Malice Doll
2. O Ren Ishii Sequence, Kill Bill
3. Neo Tokyo
4. Strait Jacket
5. Blue Gender (camp)
6. Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
7. Tales from Earthsea
8. Return of the King
9. Vampire Princess Miyu
10. Parasite Dolls
11. Blame
12. Sky Blue
13. Bubblegum Crisis
14. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
15. Samurai X (Rurouni Kenshin)
16. Armitage
17. Osama Tezuka Experimental Short Films
18. Iria - Zeiram the Animation
19. Robotech The Shadow Chronicles (American anime)
20. Tokyo Revelation


This could be added to, but I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel...

Best Anime List

Similar* to the books lists here in the past, the title of the anime applies not just to one series, OVA or movie, but exists as a category, where applicable.

1. Cowboy Bebop
2. FLCL
3. Ghost in the Shell
3. Samurai Champloo
4. Akira
5. Spirited Away
6. Tekhnolyze
7. Bleach
8. Vampire Hunter D
9. Hellsing
10. Witch Hunter Robin
11. Elfen Lied
12. Soul Eater
13. Kamichu
14. Death Note
15. Darker than Black
16. Appleseed
17. Princess Mononoke
18. Ah! My Goddess
19. Durarara
20. High School of the Dead
21. Ninja Scroll
22. Black Lagoon
23. Rurouni Kenshin
24. Clannad
25. Canaan
26. Frozen
27. Level E
28. Howl's Moving Castle
29. Escaflowne
30. Gosick
31. Ergo Proxy
32. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
33. Mononoke (Ayakashi)
34. Nichijou
35. Steins;Gate
36. Pale Coccoon
37. Genius Party
38. Usagi Drop
39. Battleship Yamamoto
40. Haruhi Suzumiya
41. Steamboy
42. Honey and Clover
43. Potemayo
44. School Days
45. Gintama
46. Dead Man Wonderland
47. Evangelion
48. Love Hina
49. Togainu no Chi
50. Full Metal Alchemist
51. Monster
52. Wizards
53. Wolf's Rain
54. Tekkon Kincrete
55. Rainbow
56. Perfect Blue
57. Godfathers of Tokyo
58. Black Butler
59. Trinity Blood
60. Wicked City
61. Dirty Pair
62. Panty and Stocking
63. Berserk
64. .hack//
65. Read or Die
66. Mind Game
67. Golgo 13
68. Scryed
69. Strike Witches
70. Detective Conan
71. Lupin III
72. Xam'd
73. Planetes
74. Gallery Fake
75. Galaxy Express
76. Final Fantasy
77. The Animatrix
78. Summer Storm! Open for Business
79. Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge
80. When the Seagulls Cry
81. Bakuman
82. Michiko and Hatchin
83. Natsume's Book of Friends
84. Yondemasuyo, Azazel-san
85. Moshidora
86. We Still Don't Know the Name of the Flower We Saw That Day
87. Freedom (really this is like #1, and #86 is like #2, etc.)
88. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
89. Paprika
90. Kobato
91. Memories
92. 5 Centimeters Per Second
93. Spriggan
94. Laputa
95. Metropolis
96. My Neighbor Totoro
97. Only Yesterday
98. Cromarty High School
99. Paranoia Agent (almost does not make this list)
100. Blue Exorcist

I keep thinking that some of the really great stuff is late on the list. This is just personal opinion. I refuse to list a very large number of anime because THEY SUCKED [Intentionally left off: One Piece, Naruto, Dragonball, Samurai Seven, Basilisk, Gunslinger Girl, Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Inuyasha, Trigun, Gundam, Fate/Stay Night, and many others. I'd be willing to take these apart episode by episode to prove that my intense dislike was not from a failure to let a series develop] but just because it isn't here doesn't mean it's not good. I may not remember it right now. I may even have not seen it, although I try to remedy that when good things circulate...

* [On the books lists only one book was listed by each author, although every book by that author was usually fantastic]

ACTA and TPP

The same people and corporate entities that backed SOPA, that horrible piece of legislation that would trample on Internet freedoms and innovations based on falsehoods and misdirection, also strongly support ACTA and TPP. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) are secretive, backdoor trade agreements that would criminalize Internet behavior, globally. The wording of the agreements continues in the same vein as SOPA and PIPA, that is: vague, ill defined and designed to effectively trample on the rights of average, everyday citizens.

The law as it now stands is well thought out and efficient at combating threats to the interests of copyright holders. No new laws were required to arrest and jail the people involved with Megaupload. That case clearly shows no new initiatives are needed to counter online copyright violations. The FBI has all the tools it needs to perform its duties with the utmost diligence.

A lucid and conservative approach to law easily shows ACTA and TPP for what they really are, a radical and dangerous power grab on the part of giant media and multimedia conglomerates, the MPAA and the RIAA. The sane, commerce friendly course on these matters is to trust in the well functioning system as it now stands, and refuse to allow dangerous changes to the way the Internet works. Conservatives should be just as outraged by these shady maneuvers as liberals and progressives, or more so, as ACTA and TPP would radically alter a major facet of our lifestyle, in direct conflict with conservative values.

Please do everything in your power to spread the word about these secretive trade agreements, and help stop them. We don't need government mandates encouraging our ISP's to spy on everyday citizens. We don't need our sons and daughters running the risk of being branded as criminals, if they ever make the mistake of file sharing without full knowledge of the consequences of their actions. ACTA and TPP would create legal pitfalls for an entire generation of youth that simply do not need to exist. There's nothing positive about these agreements, and we, as thoughtful, competent citizens of the world, should not stand for this sort of shenanigans on the part of politicians in the back pocket of big money.

Thank you for your time, and please, please consider speaking out and contacting your representatives. They do listen. You can make a difference. Your voice does matter.

☮☯♡⚮♡☯☮ ⚖ ☮☯♡⚮♡☯☮

Tonight's Playlist
  1. Venetian Snares - Mutant Cunt Sniffer
  2. Biosphere - The Things I tell You
  3. edIT - More Lazers
  4. Coldcut - Everything Is Under Control
  5. Kid 606 - She's=Defective
  6. Xanopticon -Constant
  7. Zazen Boys - Himitsu Girl's Top Secret
  8. Stendeck - Run Amok
  9. Goddess in the Morning - Flower Crown
  10. Kashiwa Daisuke - Requiem
  11. Ryoji Ikeda - Dissonanz
  12. Cycheouts Ghost - Kingdom of Dreams
  13. Gocoo - Celebration
  14. Middle 9 - Island Pull Out
  15. Worriedaboutsatan - You're in My Thoughts
  16. Dalek - Asylum
  17. Teeth of the Sea - Red Soil
  18. Royksopp - Eple
  19. Hauschka - No Sleep
  20. Tunturia - Silence Is Consent
  21. The Ascent of Everest - As the City Burned
☯☮ ⚖ ☮☯

Aaron Funk created Venetian Snares in 1997 and released six significant recordings between then and the turn of the millenium, four albums and two major singles. He produced music for multiple labels in quick succession in those early years, an EP with the company History of the Future, an album with label CLFST, but his self-released creations greatly outweighed that commercial work. In 2000 Funk inked a deal with Planet Mu, a label that has continued to unite the public with Venetian Snares albums throughout the years since then.

Although Venetian Snares comes out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, that has not hindered the success of the music or international recognition, and indeed VSnares has gained a respect and admiration from music lovers the world over. Funk's skill with the electronic medium spans a wide range of elements. It can be both audacious and introspective at the same time, hard hitting and thoughtful. The song included on this playlist comes from the album Invasion from xXx Dimension and provides a fine introduction to the edgier side of Funk's Venetian Snares.

---

The electronic ambient genre encompasses a wide array of styles and talent, a field so incredibly vast that more than a dozen sub-genres easily spring to mind. At times categorizing music can create limitations on listener interpretations and create false preconceptions. Such a thing is absolutely impossible when it comes to Biosphere's album Substrata. The music engulfs the audience and snatches words away, sending them back to the setting where they work the best, silence.

The depth and richness of this modern classic thickens to a point that almost feels like solidified emotions, like liquid sensations, but at the same time roils and bubbles away concerns. Ocean waves and oxygen floating up from the depths far out at sea fit well as a natural comparison to this digital experience. The ears that perceive it bob and sway upon the audio swells.

Geir Jenssen explores the peaks and depths of synaptic experience in this work, outdoing his past artistic incarnations in the process. Not every listener will feel blown away or consider Substrata to be a masterpiece, but none could possibly deny that Jennssen shaped and molded the music to the intense intricacies of his own spirit. Substrata was one of the best offerings to reach the public in 1997, and continues to feel ultra-relevant yet timeless to this day.

---

Edward Ma, member of The Glitch Mob, member of The Variations, created edIT back in 2003. Ma then introduced the world to that appellation in 2004 when he released Crying Over Pros for No Reason. The glitch style of regulated syncopation and arrythmic simultaneity captures the listener's attention and causes every regular beat to come across like treasure scattered just below the surface of the earth, waiting to thrill and enthrall those who bring them to light. The discovery of each new twist and turn in the maze of a single composition brings a sense of freshness and delight. At the same time hard hitting beats and masterfully looped melodies and riffs direct the speakers to grab the audience by the mind and squeeze until every fiber of their being is awake to the experience.

The startling vibrancy of edIT can not easily be forgotten or dismissed; it's difficult to understand why anyone would try. It's possible that some folk could be intimidated by a style of music they do not understand, or that they are frightened by the social and technological advances that made Edward Ma's music possible. Regardless of what detractors might think, and in addition to what fans and admirers feel abut the genre, this music is a sublime taste of pure creative genius.

---

Matt Black and Jonathan More banded together to form Coldcut way back in 1989, when the concept of a DAW was still in its infancy and creating electronica required hardware and instruments on a grand scale. Black brought his expertise in computer programming to the table, More creative intellect and a desire to enlighten the world, that drive so ever present among educators. For almost a quarter of a century the two men have entertained fans and newcomers alike with music heavily influenced by the underground scene, a scene they expanded and fed in turn.

While Londoners have known and enjoyed Coldcut for decades, the success of the duet has been limited in the United States. They played many international venues after the release of their fifth studio album album and have earned respect the world over. Unfortunately many average Americans may never have heard of them due to the restrictions placed on commercial radio by corporate entities such as Clearwater, in partnership with the profit mongering RIAA. It's a shame, because while the music of Coldcut may not be astounding in its influence and engenuity, it happens to be a pleasure.

---

Venezuelan born musician Miguel Trost De Pedro, raised on the West Coast and now a denizen of San Francisco, is Kid606. His tracks most often feature the frantic percussive measures common to happy hardcore in combination with sampled lyrics, the style common to post-industrial dance taken to a higher level. De Pedro's carefully crafted album Don't Sweat the Technics brought innovations to the electronic genre that could not be confined to the designation "trance," innovations that easily defined breakcore and the early stirrings of glitch. Kid606 drops music to work to, music to workout to, sound that makes your body move involuntarily and stirs the urge to dance. Or you could just pop it into the car stereo and drive a couple hundred miles an hour down the interstate. Kid606 is also on the Planet Mu label.

---

Ryan Friedrich, a thirty-two year old from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is more well known as Xanopticon. While Xanopticon's web site summons a lot of dark imagery and sets its sites on a Gothic feel, the music is not industrial nor post-industrial, but just good old glitch from another planet. It's quite an experience, but one thing it also isn't is dance music. Luckily the music speaks for itself, because the web site really fails to do it justice.

---

On the heels of Friedrich's work, Zazen Boys sounds ordinary and simple, but even transitioning out of a brutal glitch-tech nightmare the group's sound hold's together to punch holes in any notion that math rock is an American thing. Mukai Shutoku, the front man for the band, early on in his career demonstrated a talent for a raw, experimental creative approach. Combined with Hinata Hidekazu on bass and Yoshikane Sou on guitar Shutoko and Zazen Boys enjoyed a warm reception from critics, a love affair with smart rock connoisseurs that never really ended. Everything the group releases meets with critical acclaim, and its easy to understand why. It only takes one listen to appreciate their technical brilliance.

---

At this point I have to confess that I haven't heard the rest of the playlist. That's going to put a damper on the review process. To be entirely honest I have heard neither Himitsu Girl's Top Secret nor Xanopticon's Liminal Space in their entirety, in case anyone was wondering why the reviews are so short. In addition to that minor detail about actually listening to the albums I'd like to review, something in RL came up, and depending on how my schedule looks it may be a couple of days before anything here gets updated.

Doxic Journeymanalism

While others slept restlessly or soundly, or full or empty, what point, what dread, someone wrote:
◊ saw the other approaching, ghostly light cascading down extended tendrils. ◊ signaled back assent, a complex pattern of blue and green flickering through ◊'s own extents. The two worked with the spiraling air currents, transferring processing to their aft sections to take advantage of convection.

In time they grew closer, and each flashed indications of intent, identification, internal structure. ◊ spread its tendrils on the side of the other, and observed the other doing the same. Currents and light propulsion brought them together, thin, luminous tendrils intertwining, Thought-light flickered, brightening on the overlapping tenders as they aligned, closed, and, at last, *connected*.

◊'s thoughts spread, traversing familiar but alien paths. Its mind stretched, widened, split and combined, moving across the other's mind-net and returning different, better. The other's mind passed through ◊'s, ideas, memories, and plans colliding and merging where they crossed the same mind-path.

For a brief moment, there was no ◊ or the other, but something else, grand and new. And then the currents carried them apart, the connection broke, and they drifted apart, forever changed, carrying a small part of the other.

:-:-:-:
Internet hacking savants under the name 'Anonymous (Anon)' disabled multiple government and corporate websites including the Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music and more Thursday...
That's from The Lantern. Those websites were disabled by Low Orbit Ion Cannon, or High Orbit Ion Cannon, simple tools which can be used by anyone with enough knowledge to load a web page. Thousands of people took part in the Distributed Denial of Service attacks that actually knocked those websites offline. It takes no skill to participate in such activities. James Garcia obviously has no real grasp of his subject matter. Those tools are available in numerous locations, to anyone.

***

As requested, what follows is a list of email addresses for every Teachta Dála in Ireland's Parliament, beginning with long time representative Gerry Adams, as per alphabetical:
gerry.adams@oireachtas.ie, james.bannon@oireachtas.ie, sean.barrett@oireachtas.ie, ceann.comhairle@oireachtas.ie, tom.barry@oireachtas.ie, richard.boydbarrett@oireachtas.ie, pat.breen@oireachtas.ie, my.broughan@oireachtas.ie, john.browne@oireachtas.ie, richard.bruton@oireachtas.ie, joan.burton@oireachtas.ie, ray.butler@oireachtas.ie, jerry.buttimer@oireachtas.ie, catherine.byrne@oireachtas.ie, eric.byrne@oireachtas.ie, dara.calleary@oireachtas.ie, ciaran.cannon@oireachtas.ie, joe.carey@oireachtas.ie, paudie.coffey@oireachtas.ie, aine.collins@oireachtas.ie, joan.collins@oireachtas.ie, niall.collins@oireachtas.ie, michael.colreavy@oireachtas.ie, michael.conaghan@oireachtas.ie, sean.conlan@oireachtas.ie, paulj.connaughton@oireachtas.ie, ciara.conway@oireachtas.ie, noel.coonan@oireachtas.ie, marcella.corcorankennedy@oireachtas.ie, joe.costello@oireachtas.ie, simon.coveney@oireachtas.ie,
barry.cowen@oireachtas.ie, michael.creed@oireachtas.ie, lucinda.creighton@oireachtas.ie, sean.crowe@oireachtas.ie, clare.daly@oireachtas.ie, jim.daly@oireachtas.ie, john.deasy@oireachtas.ie, jimmy.deenihan@oireachtas.ie, pat.deering@oireachtas.ie, pearse.doherty@oireachtas.ie, regina.doherty@oireachtas.ie, stephen.donnelly@oireachtas.ie, paschal.donohoe@oireachtas.ie, timmy.dooley@oireachtas.ie, robert.dowds@oireachtas.ie, andrew.doyle@oireachtas.ie, bernard.durkan@oireachtas.ie, dessie.ellis@oireachtas.ie, damien.english@oireachtas.ie, alan.farrell@oireachtas.ie, frank.feighan@oireachtas.ie, anne.ferris@oireachtas.ie, martin.ferris@oireachtas.ie, frances.fitzgerald@oireachtas.ie, peterm.fitzpatrick@oireachtas.ie, charles.flanagan@oireachtas.ie, lukeming.flanagan@oireachtas.ie, terence.flanagan@oireachtas.ie, sean.fleming@oireachtas.ie, tom.fleming@oireachtas.ie, eamon.gilmore@oireachtas.ie, noel.grealish@oireachtas.ie, brendan.griffin@oireachtas.ie, john.halligan@oireachtas.ie, dominic.hannigan@oireachtas.ie,
noel.harrington@oireachtas.ie, simon.harris@oireachtas.ie, brian.hayes@oireachtas.ie, tom.hayes@oireachtas.ie, seamus.healy@oireachtas.ie, michael.healy-rae@oireachtas.ie, martin.heyden@oireachtas.ie, joe.higgins@oireachtas.ie, phil.hogan@oireachtas.ie, brendan.howlin@oireachtas.ie, heather.humphreys@oireachtas.ie, kevin.humphreys@oireachtas.ie, derek.keating@oireachtas.ie, olm.keaveney@oireachtas.ie, paul.kehoe@oireachtas.ie, bily.kelleher@oireachtas.ie, alan.kelly@oireachtas.ie, enda.kenny@oireachtas.ie, taoiseach@taoiseach.gov.ie, sean.kenny@oireachtas.ie, seamus.kirk@oireachtas.ie, michael.kitt@oireachtas.ie, sean.kyne@oireachtas.ie, anthony.lawlor@oireachtas.ie, michael.lowry@oireachtas.ie, ciaran.lynch@oireachtas.ie, kathleen.lynch@oireachtas.ie, john.lyons@oireachtas.ie, padraig.maclochlainn@oireachtas.ie, eamonn.maloney@oireachtas.ie, micheal.martin@oireachtas.ie, peter.mathews@oireachtas.ie, michael.mccarthy@oireachtas.ie, charlie.mcconalogue@oireachtas.ie, marylou.mcdonald@oireachtas.ie, shane.mcentee@oireachtas.ie, nicky.mcfadden@oireachtas.ie, dinny.mcginley@oireachtas.ie, finian.mcgrath@oireachtas.ie, mattie.mcgrath@oireachtas.ie, michael.mcgrath@oireachtas.ie, john.mcguinness@oireachtas.ie, joe.mchugh@oireachtas.ie, sandra.mclellan@oireachtas.ie, tony.mcloughlin@oireachtas.ie, michael.mcnamara@oireachtas.ie, olivia.mitchell@oireachtas.ie, mary.mitchelloconnor@oireachtas.ie, michael.moynihan@oireachtas.ie, michelle.mulherin@oireachtas.ie, catherine.murphy@oireachtas.ie, dara.murphy@oireachtas.ie, eoghan.murphy@oireachtas.ie, gerald.nash@oireachtas.ie, denis.naughten@oireachtas.ie, dan.neville@oireachtas.ie, derek.nolan@oireachtas.ie, michael.noonan@oireachtas.ie, patrick.nulty@oireachtas.ie, caoimhghin.ocaolain@oireachtas.ie, eamon.ocuiv@oireachtas.ie, sean.ofearghail@oireachtas.ie, aodhan.oriordain@oireachtas.ie, aengus.osnodaigh@oireachtas.ie, jonathan.obrien@oireachtas.ie, willie.odea@oireachtas.ie, kieran.odonnell@oireachtas.ie, patrick.odonovan@oireachtas.ie, fergus.odowd@oireachtas.ie, john.omahony@oireachtas.ie, joe.oreilly@oireachtas.ie, jan.osullivan@oireachtas.ie, maureen.osullivan@oireachtas.ie, willie.penrose@oireachtas.ie, john.perry@oireachtas.ie, ann.phelan@oireachtas.ie, johnpaul.phelan@oireachtas.ie, thomas.pringle@oireachtas.ie, ruairi.quinn@oireachtas.ie, pat.rabbitte@oireachtas.ie, james.reilly@oireachtas.ie, michael.ring@oireachtas.ie, shane.ross@oireachtas.ie, brendan.ryan@oireachtas.ie, alan.shatter@oireachtas.ie, sean.sherlock@oireachtas.ie, roisin.shorthall@oireachtas.ie, brendan.smith@oireachtas.ie, arthur.spring@oireachtas.ie, emmet.stagg@oireachtas.ie, brian.stanley@oireachtas.ie, david.stanton@oireachtas.ie, billy.timmis@oireachtas.ie, peadar.toibin@oireachtas.ie, robert.troy@oireachtas.ie, joanna.tuffy@oireachtas.ie, liam.twomey@oireachtas.ie, leo.varadkar@oireachtas.ie, jack.wall@oireachtas.ie, mick.wallace@oireachtas.ie, brian.walsh@oireachtas.ie, alex.white@oireachtas.ie

*Northern Ireland does not have any representation in the Oireachtas. This information was provided by CabinCr3w and #OpIreland. It would have been easier to just tell you that every TD uses @oireachtas.ie, but shortened names made a full list necessary (e.g. pat.rabbitte for Patrick Rabbitte). Good luck in your endeavors, and here's to hoping Ireland's parliamentarians have a higher opinion of their constituents than do some of our House members.
Old:
1/20/12
After the Blackout: LOIC


Anonymous is bombarding the DoJ, RIAA and Universal Music, and promises have been made that campaign raising abilities of SOPA supporting Democrats will be targeted in the near future. Anonymous has asked that opponents of SOPA not inclined to use LoIC follow #StopSOPA on Twitter and retweet all tweets. (see pic)


This comes on the heels of a unilateral takedown of Megaupload earlier.

Justice dot gov has been down for at least half an hour. Mike Masnick at TechDirt made a very good point earlier today: Democrats may think young people aren't paying attention to this issue, but they are WRONG. If they aren't careful they are going to alienate an entire generation of potential supporters with their asinine authoritarianism, an authoritarianism that is hugely invalid because of the very high level of ignorance among Congressmen concerning the technical aspects of these bills. [writer stops before rage causes temporary blindness again]

also: https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/160117673173323776

****

We won, for now, but only against SOPA/PIPA. OPEN is next and is very much alive. The fight is just beginning.

The following is another relic:

STOP PIPA (Senate 968) & SOPA (HR 3261)

Imagine a world without Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist, multi-channels [your favorite sites here]...

News Corp, RIAA, MPAA, Nike, Sony, Comcast, VISA & others want to make that world your reality.

80 Members of Congress are in their sway, 30 against, the rest undecided or undeclared.

Please take a minute to tell your Members of Congress you OPPOSE PIPA & SOPA

Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD

The time for action is now. The Symbols system needs jails(!) kFreeBSD has "jails." Stability demands ZFS(!) The Debian BSD kernel supports ZFS. The author craves both Linux and FreeBSD. Behold, such a thing exists(!) Not only that, but instances of lawsuits over patents and licenses become nil as the operating system leaves the Linux area and draws closer to the Berkeley Software Distribution model. There may be nothing to sue for at this end right now, but the future still exists when last I checked, a few seconds ago.

The sweetness deepens: Operating benchmarks for Debian kFreeBSD are phenomenally inviting. H264 video encoding is faster on AMD64 kFreeBSD than on any other kernel. Benchmark tests show the kernel chalks up almost a frame and a half per second more than in normal Debian 64 bit operations.

That's not as impressive as the 23% improvement in speed over straight Linux during 7zip compression. kFreeBSD wasn't the top performer in every test. It came in second on Gzip and LZMA compression, and in GnuPG encryption. All these tests were reported by Phoronix, and are slightly dated. It would be nice to see a bleeding edge redux of the study because this one was damned impressive and kernels generally improve over time.

There are other nice traits of kFreeBSD. Here's one: Further reading has shown that BSD-loyal developers tend to merge new features rather than create a distribution fork. Having to commit to development course deviations based on progress that could potentially move the system away from improvements in other areas has always been a troublesome aspect of Linux.

Further. A positive quality of FreeBSD which probably would not affect my systems anytime soon is the hardware support advantage FreeBSD has over Linux with a couple of companies. FreeBSD does include some proprietary binary in its hardware driver source code. Agreements have been made in the past to allow proprietary closed code into the FreeBSD kernel to enable a closer working relationship with some hardware manufacturers. That code has been excluded from the Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD release in order to keep it 100% compliant with FOSS standards, but the working relationship still exists. Some hardware may be functional under this kernel that may not be supported under Linux, or at least not supported as quickly. [It is irresponsible and disrespectful to say that Linux reverse engineering and driver hacking could ever entirely fail to support some form of hardware, considering how hard the developers work and the seemingly miraculous things they have pulled off in the past, hence the italics.]

I just had a conversation a few days ago about how much I missed Debian, brought on by the complications I encountered during the aborted migration to BSD. If I had known there was a Linux/BSD hybrid before this week I would have been running it already. There's only one other thing on the planet that gets me as excited as I am right now, and that's sex. An-tici ... pation!

Once Again BSD [Friday Night Update]

Friday Night PC-BSD Party Problems:

ZFS by itself will run with as little as 1 gb RAM, but performs optimally with 4 gb and upward. The way ZFS has been linked into PC-BSD makes 4 gb a requirement. 3.25 causes prefetch disable. Working around that problem hovers on the edge of the catastrophic. Booting into the system can only be accomplished by using BIOS to limit RAM to an OS install 256 mb setting, which isn't really enough to run KDE in PC-BSD. The system makes a valiant effort to work, so at least it dies gallantly as it chokes and collapses.

For me using ZFS was one of the selling points for making the switch to BSD. The idea of a file system that detects and self-corrects file integrity problems makes my mouth water. Having been through some insanely painful data loss debacles because of things like electrical current anomalies, learning about ZFS brought an actual tear to my eye. It sounds so beautiful, and, realistically, it is as wonderful as it sounds. Unfortunately my current system doesn't meet the criteria.

Anybody who does have the requirements should consider using ZFS. Keep in mind that I only decided on PC-BSD out of laziness. Partitioning into a ZFS format can be done with FreeBSD, with a certain amount of hassle. Webmasters and server guardians are migrating to it enthusiastically, heedless of the extra effort required to implement the file system using back door methods. I simply have not done so yet. And it's very simple to migrate during a new install of PC-BSD 9.

PC-BSD has a couple of other sweet points. The ease of file encryption is staggering to someone like me, who has gone through all the partition mounting and unmounting necessary to use file encryption with Linux. Encrypting user data is automated during install, and entering one's password at a prompt during boot completely takes care of enacting usability.

PC-BSD also sports a bubbling test tube background during login. Ahh, science. It may sound like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for positive characteristics of the operating system, but mad scientist lab nostalgia is its own brand of awesome. Yeah, though, unfortunately PC-BSD is about to get scrapped because without ZFS there aren't enough checks in the pros category for it to stay. Back to the drawing board!

One more thing should be mentioned. Booting into the system using the OS install RAM limiter caused the computer to sound like an airplane taking off. That's a huge red "x" in the cons column. It never sounded like it was going to explode before. It sounded bad, people, it sounded bad. That experience comes on the heels of reading this quote from a BSD developer: "Sometimes hardware damage is a good thing." Uh, no.

[I am not a computer expert, merely have a lot of experience and a good background. I am not absolutely sure as to the reason why PC-BSD exhibited such problems. I simply hazarded an educated guess.]

I-yie-yie kawaii - Image for tldr:


werds:

After a couple of days tinkering with FreeBSD's latest stable release I decided to chunk it and do an install from PC-BSD. That decision primarily resulted because using ZFS systemwide can be implemented in FreeBSD, but it's a pain in the ass to get it in place. PC-BSD 9.0 Isotope allows ZFS partitioning from the very beginning, as opposed to the default UFS. After much reading, passing up ZFS while switching to BSD seemed like buying a new Corvette body with an old engine. A lot of people hoped that FreeBSD 9.0 would enable ZFS at installation, but it didn't. In fact, it became more difficult to implement because the old method, using fixit, is no longer available.

Not only does PC-BSD support ZFS installation, it uses a graphical installation utility. Having brushed up on installing all packages and enabling a desktop manager from the command line, it became easy to remember just how time consuming the process really is. For me switching over to a new operating system means upwards of four installations, the tedium I would face became tangible. The brevity of the primary requisite command, pkg_add -r packagename, does not cover all of the other steps that are automated by a graphical installer. Bsdinstall made FreeBSD is definitely a lot simpler than the old sysinstall menu, but that's because it completely sidesteps package installation.

The downside to using PC-BSD is that the community is smaller, so any problems that might arise will have to be solved by a much smaller group of people. It's not that the support at pcbsd.ord lacks in any way, but fewer people means greater demands on those who are available. I personally hope to never need support, but in case anybody out there wants to try PC-BSD they should know what they are getting into.

The first step to installation is getting the medium. PC-BSD compact disc and DVD images are available here. Once you've downloaded the iso it needs to be burned to a blank disc. If you're using Windows that means you need Nero, or a program much like it. In Linux you'll need K3B or Brassero. Once it's burned you're ready to boot into install mode. Switching over to BSD means using a file system that's different from Windows and Linux, so any data you have on the target hard drive will be lost during formatting and partitioning.

It is highly recommended that you read up on installing and using BSD before jumping in. Not only does it use a different file system, but the organization is different. This operating system is extraordinarily stable and versatile for web servers and on machines used for data transmission and retrieval. You can still do everything on BSD that's done on Linux and Windows, it just takes a little tweaking. Conversely, BSD does things that would take a lot of work to do from Linux and Windows. BSD is well suited to the use of Nmap and remote shell operations. Another fine example is that virtual honeypots work best from BSD.

After I use PC-BSD for a couple of weeks I'll report back about it. It's based on FreeBSD to the extent that it's almost a clone. You'll hear anything out of the ordinary about it, positive or negative, and about ordinary excellence as well.

The original post follows. I figured it wouldn't hurt to illustrate the difference in my mindset between then and now. The cutesy, matter-of-fact sarcasm sort of makes me want to barf. "Too Easy!:"

Operating system switched from openSuSE 12.1 to FreeBSD 9.0. Essentially I was tired of having an operating system that no longer required any advanced open source system knowledge whatsoever, and by that I mean command line knowledge. I was not disappointed. FreeBSD immediately failed to install on first try, hung up on the ACPI driver, which evidently is sometimes shaky.

Slight headache began to form after disabling ACPI only to have install hang up again a mere two seconds farther down the line. Fixing the failure of the BIOS to assign an IRQ spot proved a lot more difficult. Backed up, regrouped. Still hadn't made it to the SysInstall screen. Turned off all but 256 mbs of RAM of 3 gb. Still failed. Turned ACPI back on, install kicked in, made it to first screen.

Installed hostname, minimal packages [doc, game, man, ports, src], boot daemons, configured IPv4, IPv6, DHCP, added user, added user to groups, set password, then exited base install to get to package installation. That was when having a CD instead of a DVD became a huge handicap. Everything has to be installed from the shell without the DVD. Wouldn't it have been funny if I had been installing to the only available computer in the house and the Internet wasn't available without it? No, it would not be funny, because that's what happened. It was not funny. It was not funny at all, but could have been so much worse.

Many long pages of hand written instructions tediously transcribed to make the installation process easy in the absence of Internet access became completely worthless due to the implementation of bsdinstall over sysinstall. Luckily I just had to switch wires to use Linux again. Detiled installation instructions can be found at Freebsd.org.

Back in the day every Linux distribution upgrade of my operating system required manually configuring KDM because of the fancy schmancy Nvidia graphics. In the case of FreeBSD, dbus and hald had to be added to rc.conf and started, and .xinitrc to start kde4 had to be added. Init 6 and startx enabled the graphical desktop environment people like me use. I would say "people like me" means those whose time is too valuable to waste on doing everything from the command line, but I'll be honest. I'm just lazy, so I like to use windows and widgets and buttons and a mouse.

Anyway, if you ever get bored with your operating system, install FreeBSD. If it doesn't install properly right away you're bound to get a minimum of 4 or 5 hours out of the experience. The installation could get nearly FUBAR, like mine did, in which case you could easily burn 6-7 hours on the install. Ask yourself, is using your computer too easy?
 
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