and he's gonna cause trouble

ok, so in case you haven't noticed yet, the puffin is back, doing the 'blog thing again, and out of the gate, he's got a nice huge review of the new Sonic Youth album. it was only a matter of time, with the consistent badgering we (and others) were giving him to return, that he would do so. he's back now, so give him some linky-love, folks.

in other news, i'm still working on a design for my new musiced thing, and actually reaching a point that i'm fairly happy with. i've been rather frustrated by graphic design for years, always feeling that i was falling short of the type of stuff i'd like to be able to do. hopefully, i'm finally getting the hang of it. next design tasks–a new theme for bipolar, a redesign of coffeemonk.com (which hasn't been updated in… well, years. it'd be nice to come up with a new design for x:13 design proper, as well.

anyway, once the design for musiced is done, i'll start posting my reviews. in the meantime, anyone who wants to contribute to my musical education can of their most highly recommended albums. i can't guarantee that i'll buy & review everything (especially if the list ends up crazy long), money is, unfortunately, a factor. if you really want to get crazy and send me (legal) copies of your favorite albums, hell, i always accept bribes. ( for a mailing address.)

oh, and i'm fully moved into the new digs at work, bathing in natural light all day for the first time in a long time. i'm going to get the webcam set up again, so, once that's done you'll be able to catch some glimpses of me at work. (yeah, don't jump for joy all at once, folks.)

that's it for now. go visit puffin-a-go-go.

so, yes, this past week has been anti-social matt week. beginning with last Friday and the weekend i was lamenting in the last post.

as it turns out (i think i can finally write a little something about this), two *more* of my co-workers were laid off last Friday. this seriously threw me for a loop, considering that a month ago, when my boss (and two others) were laid off, we were told "well, that's the last of them for a while. don't worry about your jobs, we won't need to take such drastic measures again."

obviously, that wasn't quite right. so Friday was at least partly a result of that little tailspin i was in. and this week, the one guy in my "department" (such as it is) is on vacation. so, in a little cube world that once was home to five people, it's now been just me all week. sitting at my little desk, doing the work of 1.5 men (since i couldn't possibly pick up Geoff's full workload in addition to my own). it's been lonely. i've gone out to eat more than usual, just to have an excuse for some human interaction. unfortunately, i'm not the world's most entertaining conversationalist. i function, but only just.

next week, me and my remaining buddy move our stuff into an honest-to-god office, with windows (which our present space doesn't have). this is assuming he shows up on monday. i have no reason to think he won't, but i won't be surprised.

anyway enough of that depressing shit.

at some point this week, i was discussing music with nate, and he was, once again, trying to sell me on the whole ska thing. called it his "number two" favorite musical genre… after big band jazz. somewhere in there, we hit upon the idea that he should write up a list of albums he thinks i should check out, new artists i haven't given a fair shake to, or who i may have heard but don't own.

i have always freely admitted that my musical knowledge is not what i'd like it to be. there is so much out there, that i've pretty much just stuck with what i know. everyonce in a while, someone would introduce me to a new band, or i'd hear them listening to it enough that i'd get hooked. so now, i've got this list, and i've decided to make it a project. yet another of my infamous projects.

my plan, such as it is, is to buy an album from each of nate's recommended artists, live with it for a few days, then write up a review. i'm also planning to document this somewhere here on bipolar, and i'll probably use the reviews to up my monthly posting stats.

I managed to get out to Ear-X tuesday and picked up Al Greens' "Let's Stay Together," and Big Black's "The Hammer Party." i thought they were appropriately dissimilar selections.

I'm going to work on the master list page tonight, after (AFTER, damnit) i finally get off my ass and finish my passport paperwork. if i don't get my passport soon, i won't be able to make it to my sis's wedding in September. those of you who know about passports are probably already laughing. yeah, yeah. keep it up.

so, i got home from work on friday, a bit unbalanced by the days events. paul and his new gal head out for dinner. brax and his … uh… amanda (status varies with barometric pressure, i think) also head out for dinner. despite the fact that i'm actually hungry for once on a friday evening, i decide that it's a good time to go upstairs, grab a copy of the book of poems i wrote for the ex on Valentines day many many moons ago, and sit down and relive days gone by. (this should give some indication of my state of mind) this is around 7:30-ish.

a few hours later, i'm waking up in the chair, completely dazed, drained of all energy, wanting only a cigarette & more sleep. and… that's exactly what i get.

i plop down ("throw myself upon" would be more accurate) on my bed, and proceed to sleep for the next 12 or so hours.

of course, i woke up around midnight, then again around 4:30am, but since i couldn't think of any reason to actually get up, i just went back to sleep.

9:30am i proceeded to Bobby E's (Bob Evans for those who aren't living in my skull) for some solitary breakfast and a review of my novel "in progress." (that last part is in quotes because i'm sure it's debatable that the small number of words added to my novel over the past two years could be called–even remotely–progress)

next, home, laundry, Star Trek:TNG DVD box set (disc 5–4 episodes), lunch/dinner with paul & j. brian "Jersey Boy" hall, email/quicken, more TNG DVD (disc 6–4 more episodes), and then now, this sentence, this word, this .

(i think someone's used that before, i'm not as clever as you think i'm not.)

anyway, oh, and there was some smoking of cigarettes and playing of galaga interspersed in the preceeding list as well. sprinkle liberally.

so now, i came up here to the computer for some purpose. oh yes! entering the rent-to-own information on the digital recorder and figuring out exactly how much i've (we've–the band) left to pay. and then maybe, if i can find the motivation, figuring out an easy way to get all those "recipe of the day" emails out of emails and into a file that can be easily imported into a recipe database program.

but upon arriving up here, at my computer, i glanced at my desktop (as i am wont to do when i'm trying to click on things to start programs) i noticed an image there that i'd forgotten. and that image prompted me to write this post. aren't you lucky.

i can't recall if i mentioned the minor quest i went on when attempting to create the LP show flyer i did, but nevertheless–i went on a minor quest. i was looking for book jacket scans from old 30's & 40's pulp detective/horror novels. in that search i found this little gem. all you heshers should enjoy this.

i think i may have to use that face for our next flyer.

in order to get in at least one more post this week, i'm resorting to some good old-fashioned link throwing.

first of all, there's my co-worker's site: http://www.ae4rv.com
he's been creating flash-based games for a while now, and has several fun ones. his latest venture, and a very addictive game, is StarMonger… essentially a game of Risk in space. It's still a "beta" product, but well worth the visit, if you're into that sort of thing.

I pointed this one out to Nate yesterday, and he was loving it.

In turn, he passed on some links to me, most of which i noticed were from this directory. turns out, whoever this guy is, he's been hoarding humorous bits of internet arcana for quite a while now, and has quite an impressive collection. There's some horrendously funny stuff in there (i haven't gone through it all yet, though i was up for a couple extra hours last night busting a gut when i should have been sleeping) like this little gem. (warning, "this little gem" could be considered very tasteless & offensive)

y'know there's a reason i don't do a lot of linking to esoteric internet hole-in-the-walls. i pretty much figure that if i've heard of it, that it's been on MemePool or something similar like 2 months ago, and has been bouncing around internet mailing lists, message boards, and email forwarding chains for at least that long. in other words, i figure if i've seen it, you probably have too. if there's one thing that I and my fellow blogging compatriots are, it's link whores. so be it.

nevertheless, a post was needed, and a post has been made.

(oh, and i was supposed to post about the Dell Computer guy–from the commercials–getting fined by the Screen Actor's Guild for filming commercials during an actor's strike 2 years ago. unfortunately, the only link i could find to this bit of news was this one, which pretty much just sucks since it's only like 3 sentences. blah. "Dude, you're gettin' a fine." hehe, that's clever. grrrr. )

ok. so i'm a liar. most of you should have me figured out by now though, if i say that i'll post again tomorrow, it almost always means you won't hear from me for a week. i thought that was accepted practice around here… guess i'll have to re-read the employee handbook.

so, anyway, let's step back in time to a week and four days ago. for most of the time leading up to our first show, i wasn't nervous at all. occasionally i'd have a bout, but generally i was butterfly-free. on friday, brax & i were just chilling about the house, me being on vacation and him being off of work, and it pretty much hit us both at the same time. we'd just got done watching some TNG season 3 episodes from my swanky DVD box set, and then all of a sudden about four hours before the show, we're both getting nervous. we made our now-standard jokes about how funny it would be if we all called in to the bar and told them we'd all come down with some stomach bug or something, calling in sick for our first show.

we finally got our shit together and went over to jim's house, grabbed a little beer and whiskey (to calm the nerves) and waited for our of & underage transports to arrive. Paul was first to get there and we hung out for a few minutes before the girls showed up. two of the girls are brax's former co-workers, and they're both incredibly cute, barely underage, and unfortunately attached (not to each other). when they showed up–right on time–they'd also brought along another friend of theirs who also fit all of the above criteria (not sure about the attached part, since i couldn't work up the gumption to broach that particular question). everybody pitched in and loaded our stuff into the back of the truck, then we all left for the bar.

we arrived, met one of the guys from another band, and he pointed out where we needed to bring our stuff in. the sound guy showed up as we were preparing to unload, so we went ahead and started loading onto the stage. amazingly enough, at this point, i wasn't nervous at all. er, well, maybe a little. we got all our shit set up, the waitress brought us some drinks, we did our sound check, played portions of a couple songs, then went out into the "crowd" to talk to all our friends (the only people who were there other than the other bands). we tried to stall for a while, but at about 15 minutes after 10 (when we were supposed to start) we pretty much had to go on or get lynched. all told, i think we had 15 – 20 people there–mostly our friends, as i said–to watch us on our first outing. it was what i would consider a good turnout. amazingly enough, once we started the sound-check, pretty much all the nervousness went away, and we were down to "bidness."

now, we're all too well aware that most of our friends aren't into the kind of music that we play, so it really meant a lot to us for them to come. the support of friends is a powerful and very much appreciated thing.

we took the stage pretty much without saying a word, and started up our first song. of course, Jim was borrowing a bass amp from dave (red taled hawk), and when he played the first note (not having had a dedicated bass amp in any of our practices) it freaked him out to the point where he nearly lost the bassline. he did manage to get hold of himself, and we continued on. i'd have to say we did a pretty damn good job for our first time playing out like that, and considering the "PA system" such as it was, was crap. once we got to the louder parts in our later songs, we pretty much couldn't hear a damn thing from the monitors. i got totally off track in the first song, by a little more than a measure, but we just kept playing like it didn't matter. i think it happened in another song too, and again we just kept going.

one of the things i was the most afraid of was that we'd have a minor problem like that, and we'd just stop in the middle and have to restart the song. thankfully that didn't happen.

of course, now that we've had our first show, we've all been lazy bastards and haven't called around anywhere to set up another one. gotta work on that.
but this one went well, our friends were there, they enjoyed seeing us doing our thing, and we're anxious to get out again.

well now. i am officially back from Vacation (though i never technically went anywhere). sitting here at work, struggling to find things to keep me busy, and since i am currently not being very successful at that endeavor i figured i'd take my lack of success to other ventures–like this weblog.

i hesitate to say that my vacation was "shitty." it really wasn't. but it also wasn't "exciting" either. basically i took a week off from work, sat around the house, stayed up way too late at night (usually 'til dawn) and slept too late in the mornings (usually 'til 3 or 4). i had the grandiose plans for a week of relentless productivity wherin i'd finish several chapters of my novel, whip my 2nd poetry book into a publishable state, make more copies of the LP demos and send them out to all those labels that are just waiting for a band that sounds like us, and probably some other things as well–as i discovered them. what actually happened was that, a few days before i "went" on vacation, a co-worker "let me borrow a copy" of Grand Theft Auto III for the PC. needless to say, despite the fact that i'm not much of a gamer, i quickly became addicted to the game and proceeded to waste almost every second of my vacation playing it. stupid stupid stupid.

now, i did manage to get a few things done despite the new techno-crack. i created and made copies of some handbills for the LP site, took the remaining copies of the show flyer & handbills to different places around town, we had a 4th of July cookout complete with illegal Indiana fireworks and a near disaster that involved a largish bottle rocket (not a tiny firecracker sized bottle rocket) falling over on it's side and shooting directly into the garage where we were all "taking cover." of course, not everyone noticed the fallen rocket, and not everyone got out of the way. it hit my friend directly in the abdomen, caught her shirt on fire (or smolder, really) and singed her "favorite shorts" and her skin in the process. she was alright–no permanent damage done–but she was a little burned, bruised, and understandably shaken.

the band practiced several times over the course of the week, including at the cookout. then finally, Friday rolled around and it was time for the Prick's big 1st show. all i'm going to say right now, is that it went well, and we are grateful to all of our friends that showed up to give us support. i'm going to save the rest of the story for tomorrow. i've really got to find something to do, lest i begin to fear for my continued employment. also, hopefully, in a few days (as i think i've said before) we'll have some pictures from the show that i can hopefully include in a post.