Meghan bought me the then just-released Gold Box complete series for my birthday this past year, and we just recently got around to watching it. That series is, in short, completely amazing; we were both completely hooked right from the start, and now that we’re done, I find myself wishing there was more. It’s just too bad that ABC killed it before they could do a third season, because so much was left unresolved. That, in and of itself is fairly typical David Lynch, but still. It’s disappointing. And there’s virtually no chance in hell that it will ever be resolved. Some of the actors are now dead, others are not interested in returning, and they’re all too old now anyway. It was 17 years ago, after all.

The only hope that the world will ever see any “new” material resides with Mr. Lynch himself; there remains a lot of unused Fire Walk With Me footage (whole story arcs were cut out) that he has supposedly been re-editing to put in a special edition release of FWWM on DVD. The last word (in 2006) was that is was supposed to release sometime in 2007. We’re well into Q2 2008 and there’s been no word, so I’m not holding my breath. On the plus side, FWWM is becoming hard to find on DVD, which may mean that existing stock is being sold out or recalled in anticipation of a new version about to release.

So I’m stuck turning it over in my mind, how things turn out. Left with the surreal and haunting imagery of the series every time I close my eyes. In particular, the sequences in the Red Room with the Man From Another Place, are etched into my mind. At this point, my only hope for any kind of closure, is that Lynch and his co-conspirator Mark Frost will put their heads together and write a novelization of what the third season should have been. That also seems unlikely.

It’s amazing to see though, just how profoundly the show impacted and influenced pretty much everything that came after it. The X-files and the Silent Hill games are the most obvious examples, but I see many many elements of the show in other things, too. I had no idea just how influential it was. Ironic that they were shunned by their peers in the industry at the awards shows, despite 14 nominations. Unsurprising that the industry doesn’t bother to reward innovation and creativity. I guess that’s why I don’t have cable, and why I think 90% of the stuff on TV is garbage.

Fast forward several years, sometime after I discovered the Minibosses. At one point, they had a live cover of a song called “Golden” available for download from their website. I grabbed it because I was grabbing everything  they had up on the site, and there were few details available on the individual tracks. It was a neat song, but I had no idea who was responsible for the original. I tried searching for individual lyrics (I’ve had good success with that in the past), but came up empty. For all I knew, it was a Minibosses original in a more conventional alt-rock style. It’s live, and the ‘bosses were drunk, so the vocals are bad, the guitars are sloppy, and it’s a piss-poor recording. For some reason though, my wife really liked it. It’s unusual enough that she likes anything in that style, let alone a grainy live recording, so I tried to discover exactly what it was for her benefit. Whenever she does like something like that, I try to be as diligent as possible in accommodating her.

To that end, I emailed the Minibosses, asking them about it. To my pleasant surprise, they got back to me, letting me know that it was a cover of a Failure song. Now that I knew the band I thought I’d have better luck finding it. That was not at all the case; searching for Failure was pretty futile. It was almost as though they didn’t exist. In fact, what I did discover was that they did exist, but were now defunct, with almost no trace of them on the internet (at the time). I did find a few sites that mentioned them, and some bad samples of Golden that sounded just as bad as the Minibosses cover version (possibly thanks to the inferior WMA CODEC). So again, I’d given up.

Then one day, I got a mailer from Grant Henry, a.k.a. Stemage, the fellow responsible for the MetroidMetal project (of which I am a fan and sponsor). This mailer had information pertaining to a tribute project that he was working on to none other than Failure. Looking it up this time revealed a lot more information. It seems that the internet caught wind of them, and word-of-mouth had increased their fanbase a lot. They now had a detailed Wiki page, and a huge underground following. I found that a collection of their b-sides, demos, and rarities was even available for free download. Paydirt!

I got a chance to listen to this collection (a while ago) and I can confirm many of the things I’d read about them. I didn’t think that anyone made music like that anymore; they continued the evolution of great underground acts from the late 80’s and early 90’s (minus the mainstreaming). The best way I can think of to describe it, is that they sound like a “retro” indie-garage-rock act, the likes of which could have come from the Pacific Northwest scene circa 199x, and yet, at the same time, sounding like they come from 1,000 years in the future. The sound is very atmospheric, concentrating on creating texture and mood rather than on technical displays (though it’s evident in some tracks that they’re still capable of excellent musicianship). Long story short, they blew me away.

Sadly, at some point, the battered blue spiral-bound over-sized notepad which contained this list became lost in time and space, possibly as the result of cleaning my room, or perhaps when I moved back upstairs from my windowless room in the basement. I don’t know exactly when it was lost, just that the next time I went to look for it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was pretty distraught over it, as it took me a long time to compile and at the time, could not easily be re-researched and compiled. I wrote the stuff down precisely for that reason.

It was probably just as well. I vividly recall crying myself to sleep one night after having made the realisation that I would probably never have the resources in time and money to follow through with my research. After all, at $20 per CD, just to sample the most acclaimed album from each band would have cost in excess of $40,000. Even if I were hunting through pawn shops, that still represented more money than I could ever commit to such a project. That list didn’t include movies either, and when you factor in that many of the groups on the list probably had more than one release worth buying, the cost grows rather quickly. The list was still growing at that time as well. The conclusion I was left with was that I would be constantly playing catch-up.

Then the internet happened. Napster. It was a dream come true. I downloaded a lot of stuff. I started keeping track again (though mostly just on scraps of paper). It was like a second shot at the dream, until the service was shut down by the lawsuits of a few wealthy artists whining about how they were missing out on revenue desperately needed to fund drug habits, psychiatrists, and whores.

Still, the genie was released from the bottle, and has to date proven impossible to put back. Things aren’t as easy as they were then, but looking this stuff up is still fairly trivial, as is keeping a list on my computer. It doesn’t have 2,000 entries or whatever, but factoring in all the bookmarks and everything, might be getting there. Wikipedia helps a lot too.

And that’s one of the many things I’ve been using to occupy my time whilst I’ve been  away from work. I’ve also taken the time to rip many of my old CDs to MP3. I hadn’t realised how many of them were not on my computer until recently. I think that was a result of being storage-limited before. Now I have more space than I know what to do with.

Work has been picking up a little, and as such I have been helping out a little when and where I am needed. Today though, I stayed home from work; I wasn’t feeling well. I’m also not so sure that I want to go back full time. I guess this is less about what I don’t know and more about what I do know. I know now that this trade is not for me. I love learning, and I love doing the work, but I don’t think that it’s what I really want. I think the change of heart comes from my reflections on the past couple days experiences.  I had two less than stellar days, yesterday being particularly bad. I know it isn’t always like that, everyone has both good days and bad, but I now know that I need to alter course again.

I wish I could be one of those people who just knows what they want and can therefore go after it, or at very least one who has enough success with something that they can tolerate that they can focus on other areas of their life. Both would be better still. I seem to have neither.

I spent all day yesterday trying to discern why that might be, but unfortunately, drew no meaningful conclusions.

I’d like to think that RPGs have had a positive influence on me over the years. For one thing, I met my wife through D&D, and made many lasting friendships as well. I’ve been playing since I was 8 years old, and have spent probably thousands of hours playing and writing game material, and hope to spend many more; the stuff is fuel for my imagination. It’s like a great book that never needs to end. Maybe I’ll even get my own stuff published one day, who knows. If I do, I should dedicate my first book to Gary.

Over the years, the man made some enemies, even if most didn’t even bother to find out who he was. The genre he helped create, and D&D in particular had its critics, and to those who would denounce it as unhealthy, I have this little story to relate.

I don’t remember how old I was at the time, but if I had to guess, I would say maybe 12-14. Young, in any case. I lived in Blind River at the time, I remember that, and my friends and I were always looking for places to game. Many of my friends’ parents were not fond of the game, for whatever reason. Most just wouldn’t allow us to play at their house, though they didn’t actually try to stop their children from playing, save for one, however, that is a story for another day.

My parents were always willing to let us play at our house, but we lived a short distance outside of town, about 8 km or so, and this created logistics problems. So we thought we’d hit pay dirt when the town built a new arena, and sold the old one to a company that turned it into an amusement hall, complete with arcade games, miniputt, and pool tables. We thought we had found the perfect solution; it was fairly centrally located, they were open late, and sold all kinds of refreshments.

We were wrong. They threw us out for “playing the devil’s game” and told us in no uncertain terms that we were not even permitted to bring the books with us into the building. Something to the effect of, “don’t let me catch you with that shit in here! It’s the devil’s game!”

While we had no choice but to respect their wishes, I did ask them why this was so. All I could get out of them were pseudo-religious proclamations of inherent devilry in the game. So we were forced to continue playing when we could, at my parents’ home, infrequent as it was for my liking. My parents were very tolerant, but even they needed a break from us sometimes too.

I should get to the point. The point is, what did we do on all those nights that we otherwise would have been playing D&D? We got up to no good, that’s what. Mischief. Vandalism. Drinking. Smoking. Perhaps even Fornication for some.

I’d like to close with a quote from Steve Jackson’s eulogy for Gary, “For the last few years, roleplayers have celebrated March 4 as “GM’s Day.” (March Forth, get it? -ed.) And now it’s the day when the best-known GM of all time put down his dice. Going forward, this should also be a particular date on which we recall Gary and his contributions.”

Basically, the situation is this: I have barely ever shoveled the driveway this year, and we’ve had a ton of snow. My wife and I both drive AWD Subarus, so getting in and out of the driveway hasn’t really been a problem. Even sitting low like they do, the ol’ girls still have traction like a proverbial mountain goat. The rally-winning reputation is well-earned. I’m sure driving talent like Petter Solberg helped a lot, too, but us everyday folks don’t need to drive like Solberg (even if some of us would like to imagine that we can) to appreciate The Beauty of All Wheel Drive™. Now, combine that with my near-legendary laziness, working full-time, along with a few other issues (that I won’t get into here), and you have a recipe for driveway disaster.

I let it pile up and pile up, all the while just continuing to drive over the snow, packing it down nice and hard along two narrow humps, leaving everything else a mess of slush, snow and ice. My wife was starting to get a little annoyed by the situation, but in typical fashion, I continued to not give a rat’s ass. I went out and did only the bare minimum that my conscience would allow, and usually only if my wife went out to start shoveling, or if we really got whomped with wintry precipitation. I know; I’m a bastard, but I didn’t feel like one until the other night when my parents came over. My dad didn’t say anything, but I did ask if he had difficulty getting in the driveway, and it was then he admitted to getting stuck.

He got stuck. In my driveway. In a front wheel drive minivan with top-rated snow tires on. That’s when it hit me, that I was, in fact a jackass for not shoveling more. I mean, my mother-in-law had already started refusing to pull in the driveway for fear of being mired in the icy bog, but somehow, I didn’t let that bother me. I think I rationalised it as her just being a bit timid about her driving skills, or her car, or whatever. That part probably makes me more of an arsehat, really, than the fact that I was negligent about it in the first place.

So there you have it, I was motivated by guilt to go out and do something about the problem. Now that I’m on a little vacation of sorts, I have all kinds of time to do things, and more reason than ever to need to get out and exercise a bit. Zero excuses. Time to get it done.

I started two days ago, around 3:15 in the afternoon, thinking that I’d have it done before my wife came home from work that day. I guess I didn’t realise just how bad it was out there. She was late coming home, and I’d only barely managed to scratch the surface. It was that bad. Granted, the graders and snowbank-removal equipment had been by the night before, mangling the end of the drive with hard packed ice chunk soup, but I still had no idea how long it would actually take. I’m not trying to bring it down to bare asphalt or anything either, I just wanted people to not be afraid they’d need to call a tow truck if they came to visit. Not that we get many visitors, but that’s not really the point here, now is it.

I took yesterday off from my travails because I was sore, over-tired, and just generally feeling like a sack of dung. Possibly the sum of the flabby interest I’ve earned on my lazy account, compounded daily. Today, I felt just as rotten, which I’m sure had nothing whatsoever to do with overeating at a greasy diner late last night, but my determination had returned at any rate, so I attacked it again. I must say, progress is being made. Last night, I got in the car a few times and noticed how it was listing at a pretty good pitch, the result of my efforts the day prior, to only one side of the drive. Today, I tried to even the slope off a bit on the other side, which was much more work. That side had more packed ice and snow, but it needed to go, so I worked relentlessly. I’m not even done yet, but it’s much better than it was. I will take another crack at it, maybe come back to it tomorrow or Saturday, after I’ve had another break.

Despite how rotten it sounds to do, I can’t say I minded doing it. It was a beautiful day out, and it gave me some time to appreciate the winter outdoors. It also gave me time to think. Whenever I do manual labour, I always set my mind free to wander. Sometimes I use the time creatively, or other times, just to work out issues in my head, have a conversation with myself, imaginary ones with others, stuff like that. In fact, while I was out there, I came up with an idea for another post. I think I’ll jot down the idea for draft, and flesh it out more tomorrow.

So it kind of parallels why it was that I quit blogging for so many months. I had a bunch of other shit going on, life outside teh intarweb. I didn’t want to shoot down one of my own, you know?

But that’s over now, for a bit anyway. I fought valiantly, but the damned X-wings took out all my TIE fighters, so back to the guns it is.

It’s kind of funny, the way I do that; using pop-culture-based metaphor and euphemism to communicate ideas. My sister does it too. In fact we can, and have, had entire conversations using quotes from films, songs, and other unrelated nonsense jargon. It confounds my wife; I can see how and why. I think it annoys her a bit, too. Sometimes, though, it works better than any conventional grammar at conveying just the right meaning, with the caveat that your ‘audience’ be already on the same cultural wavelength as yourself. That’s why it works with my sister, and not my wife; Jen and I grew up for 20-something years together (like it or not!), and have largely been exposed to the same things, culturally and environmentally, over time, so she has a pretty good idea where I’m coming from with my odd manner of expression.

On the other hand, my wife and I have completely different backgrounds, and have only the last 9 years or so to draw upon. Yes, we have a lot of things in common now, one of those things that help make us a beautiful team, but our childhoods are not really among them. That’s a strength all its own, though, and not entirely related to what I’m talking about.

The rest of October, and all of November was a pretty busy time, between everyone in Meghan’s family with birthdays (myself included), and sorting out issues with this new computer. December with the manic holiday buying (which, admittedly, I did very little of, so it’s a poor excuse - but that’s what this is about - excuses). At least during the holidays we got together with Luke, Chie, James and Jess. That was quite nice.

January was a little slow at work, so I finally got my car in the shop. I’m still rounding up parts to fix it, but it should be ready for spring. Unfortunately, January being slow has also led me to why I’m blogging at 9:24am on a weekday; I’m laid off. Not that it’s all bad. I get some unemployment enjoyment, and a little vacation, which I haven’t really taken in quite some time. Okay, it hasn’t been that long, but it feels like it has. Maybe I’m a wuss and need more off time than people with a real work ethic.

So I plan to take it easy for a few weeks, and hopefully my boss can score me a temporary position as a parts delivery dude, which would suit me just fine. We’ll see; the success or not, of that will determine if there are more forthcoming updates here, I think.

Still no house pics, Other Luke! :p

And now, in case anyone actually wants to know, the tech section

My car had been misbehaving for a while now, but I had no idea the extent of the issues. I suspect it’s like that for many people.

STi gearbox leaks horribly from the front axles. With the red gear lube I’ve been using, it looks like the car is bleeding all over the floor wherever it’s parked. Knew about that.

It misfires occasionally, more often when warmed up. Probably needs new spark plugs. Check. Got six NGK Iridium IX.

Leaks coolant out of the lower rad hose. Ordered a new one. Turns out it also pisses out the water pump, so I got a new one of those, and thermostat, too.

I had no record of the timing belt ever being done, so I got one of those too, but it turns out that it needed 5 new pulleys for the belt as well, so more delays, more ordering.

I put in new swaybar bushings and endlinks. No more clunking!

New coilover springs & struts at all four corners. Handles like it’s on rails!

Inner tierods were whipped, so I ordered new ones.

Turns out the steering rack was also done, and leaking like a sieve. $1000 from the dealer, not available aftermarket. Still need to find a source for a good used one.

Hearing whining noises from the rear of the car; thought it was wheel bearings (common on these cars). NOPE! rear differential bearings. I figured, “fuck it, replace the whole thing” and splurged on a better diff assembly and axles, from an STi rally car. Now it matches my gearbox, or at least, it will when it arrives and is installed.

Front cam and crank seals. Fuel line leak. Exhaust leak. It goes on, but I won’t. Issues that still need to be diagnosed, like failing A/C, and some bodywork, will just have to wait.

I really like Alice, but sometimes she is a nightmare. Self-inflicted, but still a nightmare.

On to my other  nightmare. My new computer. Here is the basic setup:

AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 (high efficiency dual core, 2.1GHz)

2GB DDR2-800 RAM, dual channel

ASUS M2A VM HDMI version, microATX form factor

Onboard ATi X1250 graphics (good enough for me and my old games - still runs Enemy Territory ok)

Onboard High Definition Audio

Onboard gigabit LAN

(2) Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA2 hard drives, RAID-zero stripeset (almost as fast as my old WD Raptors, less noise, more space, better value)

Pioneer 212D DVD burner, SATA interface

Antec NSK2400 HTPC case w/ 430W PSU

Silverstone MP51 VFD & remote control (displays system info, now playing media info, graphic EQ, time, etc.)

all outputting to my Sharp 37″ LCD TV @ 1920×1080p

While it’s not exactly high-performance, the system looks good, is completely inaudible from the couch, and has a fairly gentle power footprint. It runs pretty much anything I want it to (I can easily slap in an add-on PCI Express graphics card if I get desperate enough). Problem is, I was an idiot and bought Vista for it (it was on sale cheaper than XP MCE, and I’m still too lazy to spend Eternity setting up Linux on it).

It started life completely unstable. Constantly crashing, BSOD, etc. I think we have most of that worked out, but it still gimps out occasionally when watching DVDs on the software that came with my remote (which I like much better than Media Player). Even more recently, after a flash player update, it even gimps out when watching YouTube or anything like that. There are newer video drivers available, but I had a hard time getting the display working properly in games, I had to use a particular driver version. I’m hesitant to switch. There are several new versions of Catalyst, and aftermarket drivers, even one on the WindowsUpdate site, but I’m hoping that this will all go away when SP1 comes out, just like what happened with XP for a lot of people so many years ago.

On the plus side, DOSBox works perfectly, and I’ve been playing X-Com Apocalypse again. Whee!

When we got up this morning, on the kitchen counter was an opened beer that nobody remembers drinking, and also, the jug of OJ tasted funny. Coincidence? I think not. It happened to be a very good beer, too, so it’s a shame that it was wasted like that. La Fin du Monde is not cheap, either.

I know, it’s been a while since I last posted. Shame on me. I have not posted camping photos, nor wedding pics, nor even the house pictures I promised in January. What can I say? I’m a lazy bum. Plus, my computer is in the bedroom, and has a very uncomfortable seating arrangement. Well, it was in the bedroom. I recently got a new system to play with. Built HTPC-style, it outputs to my new TV, so comfort and the computer are once again friends.

Unfortunately, this new box, while cool, quiet, ultra-efficient and good-looking, has some issues. I think it started with an issue between the keyboard and chair, around the time I thought it might be a good idea to order a copy of Vista to go on this box. Since then, nothing but problems. Issue by issue, things are slowly getting sorted out, but it has been less than ideal so far.

Once I get more of the bugs worked out, I will post more, both about that and maybe catching up on my backlog.