Last.fm - I love you. But why are you so wildly inaccurate?

If you scroll down the right side of this blog you'll see that I added my Last.fm weekly artists chart. Last.fm (link) is a website / program that watches your favorite music player in Windows, Linux, or OSX and sends the tracks you play to a website. On this website all of the information is compiled and you get a nice chart that shows you your listening trends and it will even recommend you other stuff to listen to based on what your tastes seem to be. There are other features too...but to me this is the most important. I only wish that it was more accurate. As it stands, it makes no fucking sense most of the time and it tells me all this wrong information. Apparently from Dec. 25 to Jan 1 I only listened to 89 different tracks. I find that hard to believe. It could be possible that I'm not listening to as much music as I think I am. In any case, I recommend this free service highly. Maybe you'll get better results than I have. I've been using this for quite a while. It's been a year and a few months. I had it back when it was called audioscrobbler. Have fun.

Quick Question For Those Bashing Google About google.cn

Do you guys think that somehow Google will be able to have a localized server for China without complying to the country's regulations and laws? Google is not above the law. This doesn't make them criminals, they are not "red on the inside" (lol at that comment), they're just trying to provide a more stable service to the vast potential Chinese userbase. Most of the results that Google has filtered out of its Chinese domain would have been blocked by the powers that be over there, anyway. So why all the fuss?

Excerpt From A Novel.

I'm reading Stephen King's The Stand (1978) right now and it's pretty good. It's been a relatively long time since I've read a King novel (about 10 months I think). Here is a part that I just read that I found interesting. A character is explaining the possible re-emergence of society in the aftermath of a "superflu" which has, apparently, wiped out most of the human race.

Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I'll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alove and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent that charming thing we call "society." Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll re-invent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll re-invent warface. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Wow, This is like the morlocks or something. Kind of.

Story taken from Boing Boing.

"According to Standart daily newspaper under the Bulgarian capital Sofia there's a thousands of kilometres of tunnels built between Roman times and Communist regime. They shelter about 20,000 people - most of them are criminals and bums."

Link

I need to read more work by Burroughs...

Copied and pasted this from a forum post I was reading. Opiates are interesting and scary at the same time. Imagine not caring about life; being a wraith. Wraiths exist in this world, and they are junkies.

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... Most survivors do not remember the deiirium in detail. I apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium...

The Sickness is drug addiction and I was an addict for fifteen years. When I say addict I mean addict to junk (generic term for opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics from demerol to palfium). I have used junk in many forms: morphine, heroin, dilaudid, eukodal, pantopon, diocodid, diosane, opium, demerol, dolophine, palfium. I have smoked junk, eaten it, sniffed it, injected it in vein-skin-muscle, inserted it in rectal suppositories. The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Bannistria caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drug of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence. The action of these drugs is physiologically opposite to the action of junk. A lamentable confusion between the two classes of drugs has arisen owing to the zeal of the U.S. and other narcotic departments.

I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the street is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly:

* 1--Never give anything away for nothing.
* 2--Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait.
* 3--Always take everything back if you possibly can.

The Pusher always gets it all back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form...buy off the Monkey.

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately measurable. The more junk you use the less you have and more you have the more you use. All the hallucingen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them--there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults--"the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God"--but no one ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money. I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India. It was called soma and is pictured as a beautiful blue tide. If soma ever existed the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old time JUNK.

Junk is the ideal product...the ultimate merchandize. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

Junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk is a big industry. I recall talking to an American who worked for the Aftosa Commission in Mexico. Six hundred a month plus expense account:

"How long will the epidemic last?" I enquired.

"As long as we can keep it going... And yes...maybe the aftosa will break out in South America," he said dreamily.

If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street. And stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups," so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no more junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.

Addicts can be cured or quarantined--that is, allowed a morphine ration under minimal supervision like typhoid carriers. When this is done, junk pyramids of the world will collapse. So far as I know, England is the only country to apply this method to the junk problem. They have about five hundred quarantined addicts in the U.K. In another generation when the quaratined addicts often die off and pain killers operating on a non-junk principle are discovered, the junk virus will be like smallpox, a closed chapter--a medical curiosity.

The vaccine that can regelate the junk virus to a land-locked past is in existrence. This vaccine is the Apomorphine Treatment discovered by an English doctor whose name I must withhold pending his permission to use it and to quote from his book covering thirty years of apomorphine treatment of addicts and alcoholics. The compound apomorphine is is formed by boiling morphine with hydrochloric aicd. It was discovered years before it was used to treat addicts. For many years the only use for apomorphine which has no narcotic or pain-killing properties was as an emetic to induce vomiting center in the back brain.

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in One room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removedthem except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminalk addiction . I never cleaned or dusted my room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit--and rarely did since who or what was left to visit--I sat there not caring that he hads entered my field of vision-- a grey screen always blanker and fainter--and not caring when he walked out of it. If he died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you? Because I never had enough junk--no one ever does. Thirty grains of morphine a day it still was not enough. And long waits in front of the drugstore.Delay is a rule in the junk business. The Man is never on time. This is no accident. There are no accidents in the junk world. The addictis taught again and again exactly what will happen if he does not score for his junk ration. Get up that money or else. And suddenly my habit began to jump and jump. Forty, sixty grains a day. And it still was not enough. And I could not pay.

I stood there with my last check in my hand and realiuzed that it was my last check. I took the next plane for London.

The doctor explained to me that apomorphine acts on the back brain to regulate the metabolism and normalize the blood stream in such a way that the enzyme system of addiction is destroyed over a period of four to five days. Once in the back brain is regulated apomorhine can be discontinued and only used in case of relapse. (No one would take apomorphine for kicks. Not one case of addiction to apomorphine has ever been recorded.) I agreed to unergoe treatment and entered a nursing home. For the first twenty-four hours I was literally insane and paranoid as many addicts are in severe withdrawal. This delirium was dispersed by twenty four hours of intensive apomorphine treatment. The doctor showed me the chart. I had received minute amounts of morphine that could not possibly account for my lack of the more severe withdrawal symptoms such as leg and stomach cramps, fever and my own special symptom, The Cold Burn, like a vast hives covering the body and rubbed with menthol. Every addict has his own special symptom that cracks all control. There was a missing factor in the withdrawal equation--that factor could only be apomorphine.

I saw the apomorphine treatment really work. Eight days later I left the nursing home eating and sleeping normally. I remained completety off junk for two full years--a twelve year record. I did relapse for some months as a result of pain and illness. Another apomorphine cure has kept me off junk through this writing.

The apomorphine cure is qualitatively different from other methods of cure. I have tried them all. Short reduction, slow reduction, cortisone, antihistamines, tanquilizers sleeping cures, tolserol, reserpine. None of these cures lasted beyond the first opportunity to relapse. I can say definitely that I was never metabolically cured until I took the apomorphine cure. The overwhelming relapse statistics from the Lexington Narcotic Hospital have led many doctors to say that addiction is not curable. They used a dolophine reduction cure at Lexington and have never tried apomorphine so far as I know. In fact, this method of treatment has been largerly neglected. No research has been done with variations of the apomorphine formula or with synthetics. No doubt substances fifty times stronger than apomorphine *could be developed and the side effect of vomiting eliminated.

--William S. Burroughs 1955

RIP - The Black Table

I just learned that The Black Table (link), one of my favorite online publications, will cease updating on January 27th, which is just a few days from today. I'm really sorry to see it go. Some of the articles were awesome. Actually most of them were awesome. Everything I read there was awesome.

Gaim 2.0.0 Beta 2 is out!

Tell your AOL Instant Messenger client to go fuck itself!

Gaim website: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

Link to download Gaim 2.0.0 beta 2 program (Windows): http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gaim/gaim-2.0.0beta2.exe?download

Holy shit! How did they do this with such old hardware?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5885351342753379583&q=8088

I think I had a dream about:

Being harrassed by some strange pedophile. This is funny because I am no longer a child.

I got into a show of aggression match with a duck today.

The duck hissed at me a few times and I had never seen a duck hiss before. It was BONKERS.

That's just more evidence that makes me believe that birds really are descended from dinosaurs.

Slept for about 2 hours

I can no longer sleep


(I'll probably fall asleep really hard in about 20 minutes)

Life is like what?

I can now see life as a game. In this game, people play in many different ways. Some, like Dave Chappelle once said, are "always trying to get points." That's not the way I play. I myself find myself like the player who wants to get the most out of life. That is to say, I see myself as the player who wants to experience as much of the game's content as possible before it's game over. There are many perks to this. I feel that this kind of gameplay has the most benefits, and offers the richest experience I could have in the game. The other player types include: the casual-good player, the cheater, the spaz (button mashers are like people who flail their arms lol), the one who doesn't want to put in the time necessary to get good (losers lol), and the game genius-who can figure out exactly how the thing works behind the scenes and therefore can use/exploit all of it's richness and knowing exactly why things happen as they do. In other words, the person who is able to figure out the secrets. This guy though, he may not exist in real life, at least not as powerful as he is in the world of games. It is only since modern times that man has had the tools necessary to even come close to doing this. Never before have we come so close to touching the very fabric of our world. A game. That's all this is. When you think about it that way, it's far easier to take it easy and try to enjoy what you do. Life is not just a game. It's also a dance and a metaphor for the seasons, among other things. But for me, right now, when I can, I like to think of this as a game. I'll play it may way, you play it yours, and maybe I'll see you one day in a dragon's lair.

Hey; Energetic, Bitter, and Optimistic: These things go great together

I'm feeling this stuff lately and really, fuck a customized template; fuck spending a lot of time trying to make something look good; it just has to be readable. This pre-made template is readable. I am glad it is readable.

I'll be back and I won't make any promises I can't keep.

Shitty Dreams

Slept hard dreamt of an airplane amusement park it was a fucking drag by the end of the dream I had gone on like 5 different planes looking for family members all over the world what a drag

First Day of Class, Winter Session 2006.

I started my day today by brushing my teeth and then going back to my room and putting on Necro's song "Burn The Groove To Death (Nail 'Em To The Cross)."

The song goes like this:

Yo, insult the coat you'll fit this casket, imma break a cassette tape and stab you with the plastic, so bleed beautifully, roll up your shirt strap on a belt, start shootin’ me but draw no blood, peep like a water bug, cursing out the mugs, roll with a hord of thugs, necrthe lord of drugs, pay me for death till you got no brains cells left, no fit, rippin' a prison up in your crib, yo you dead kid, no brass or tassel left, i’ll leave my beef bloody, i cook it red, your future is as good as dead, i’ll shove my blade in, so you could fade out, your trapped in a time that’s played out, so check the date out, you’re a pussy that no one ate out, while my brains on fast foward, you’re a victim and you don’t even know it, the evil poet, you got no hands, you can’t catch it when i throw it, depression makes you cut dimes until your brain crashes like the streets without traffic signals and stop-signs, cause everyday, is judgment day for me, cause humans that don’t know me get scared and run away from me, it’s trife hate, let no one control the life, channel your energy cut thru your clothes like a soldier’s knife, while the average front, i’m on a never-ending scavenger hunt, i’d rather be blunt so violate the fact you wanna die is great, watch me annihilate i got insanity inside a jar and i’m dropping it off the empire state, cause you talk like your in justice, so muskets we trust kid, so bust clip, the verbal open, my philosophy is molten, cause my pupils can only see a world unwholesome, insulting, repulsive, revolting, let’s risk it for piles of green, with, sadistic violent schemes, twisted like silent screams, i have a determination and, seeing your termination to extermination, cold like a frozen igloo, your rubber room is closing in on you, the chosen is you, death, is, fucking you insane, you’ll get nothing from my pockets, the only thing you got sewn up is your eye sockets, so play dead as i color you blood red, give up the bread or i’ll put a hole in your fuckin skull large like a huge alien head, incinerate the beat till’ it’s six feet deep, then do a jesus on em, like the crucifix, repeat, now watch me

Better give it up kid, burn the groove to death say yeah yeah
Better give it up kid, burn the groove to death say yeah yeah

The hour glass is filled with blow, sniff your time away, sink into the snow and suffocate your face, the mind decays, string the brains the spine will pay, there’s no burden vermin vaccination, i’m doing your life’s bid and imagination, bitch i don’t gotta answer you, how bout’ i cancel you? bury you with satan, smoke up and do a dance for you, morbid shit, keep me poppin’ on your guts g, watch your step of sinkin’ breed be bloody, i’m bleeding sin, there’s cancer in the air, you’ll breathe it in, my whole scheme is to achieve a win, slice you leave you with un-even skin, it’s apparent your transparent you can’t conceal your lies, your synthetic like women that are really guys you got jeff heely’s eyes, fuck you in your cunt group, i’ll bring murder right to your front stoop, talking like you comatose your correct, i’ll propose a toast to your death, i hope you’ll decompose with one breath, i suppose i’ll infest, i doubt your mine, peep the poison here’s enough for an amount to die , and the holes in your body you ain’t got enough fingers to count that high, after you lose, swallow my chief of rings you’ll be crying, so much your putrid smelling body will be washed clean, rippin the mics allowed to do with pride it’s necessary to bury involuntary like mandatory suicide, government style, there’s nothing more fresh than a skull covered with flesh i’m dressed not to impress i’m cold laughing g, i’m so fly the swat team’s after me cause everywhere i go i bring a blood bath with me, peep the creak creak, yo hemaglobin's cheap, just look for it it’s skin deep, the person next to you got eight accessible pints you can keep, peep the black market, your girl and there ain’t nothin' but a target, i’ll gin start you up fuck you with an exclamation, jig you the jug and i don’t need no explanation, i’m fo exploitation my slang has no expiration, bloodied up you’re a sight for sore eyes, you’ll be screaming for me when your cuts get basted in sodium chloride, i’m pulling your cards kid, i see the ace of spades, death is in your future watch it parade to your face with blades, the reels reviled your face in the jiffy bag is sealed, would it kiss up to disease, i’m on a h.g louis blood feast, i run with the insane type your life is like water floating down the drain pipe, a scream or cries cracked feind demise, open up your eyes and breathe between the lies, a flick, imagine light up a kid a whole drum kit, till there’s no life and no and theres a spike infested with 2 pieces of crooked wood now beat me.
Burn the groove to death kid, gonna burn the groove say yeah yeah
Burn the groove to death kid, gonna burn the groove say yeah yeah

Have a wonderful day. I know I will after listening to this song.

Interesting article on wealth. Read this.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA

I'm not sure if most of you know what this is. It is a copyright law that was passed in 1998 here in the United States of America. Uh, let me just copy the first paragraph from the wikipedia entry, to give you a feel for it:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. The act criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself, and heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on May 14, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended title 17 of the US Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of Online Providers from copyright infringement by their users.

Yeah, so that's about it. It is a huge "fuck you" to those of us who want the freedom necessary to make informed choices in the software-based marketplace. I firmly believe that if something is good enough, I'll buy it, but I'd rather try it first, because there's a lot of shit out there that's being boxed up, wrapped real pretty, and advertised on television as the second coming of whatever-god-you-believe-in. Also, the freedom to do as we please with products we've already purchased would be pretty nice, and I don't know, maybe even something they shouldn't be allowed to arrest us for.

Twenty die as historic seaplane crashes into water

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2436252005

For some reason, I really liked the title of this story. It's Something about the release of twenty souls as a historic seaplane crashes into water, I guess.

When I clicked on the link, it became even more awesome because there was a public service announcement on the page done in flash that showed animated balloons made to look like a penis and a pair of testicles, and the penis balloon deflated. The ad then said not to use cocaine because it damages your sex drive.

A Boring Dream

I had a dream that I got three bags of groceries for less than five dollars. Good groceries, too. Actually maybe it was less than six dollars. Either way it was pretty cheap I'll tell you what. Finals are a good time.

Extremely intense French music video

http://www.icidailleurs.com/nonstop/devantmanuque.mov
Very intense indeed.