Zappa on Dick Cavett, part 1 -- pardon the rather abrupt cutoff; I'll get to part 2 tomorrow. Uploaded by buruglen. I didn't catch an exact year but it's clearly late '70's or early '80's.
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Happy birthday today to my little brother, and also to my bachelor's degree in computer science.
Tonight I wanted to print something.
For some fucking reason, this required me to download a 140MB "driver file" that appears to be composed primarily of videos, one of which tells me how to use my printer and the other is just a fucking animated HP logo.
In my personal and professional opinion, shit like that is completely inexcusable. There is no fucking reason why I should have to download 138MB of crap just so I can get at the 2MB driver file.
At least there was a feedback form at the bottom of the page. I filled it out! It was a lot like this post but with less cursing. (Although I did tell them that I am offended "as a programmer, as a customer, and as a guy with SHIT TO DO.")
Increased processing power and widespread high-speed Internet has made programmers lazy. (Though in the programmers' defense, this particular little call has "marketing department" written all over it.) On the plus side, the increasing prevalence of smartphones is forcing developers to think about smaller footprints, both in system requirements and bandwidth consumption. But unfortunately that's probably not going to convince anybody to make Windows device drivers smaller.
By a jazz trio called organissimo. I'll admit I miss the horns, but it's a pretty cool rendition.
Uploaded by Jim Alfredson, who says this is at the Founders Brewing Co. He doesn't say what year the performance is, but he uploaded it in November of 2008 and I'm willing to guess it was a recent video then.
My dad told me he and my brother just named their new cat Big Swifty.
This is an audience recording from Passaic, '73, courtesy of YourArf.
A week and a half ago I mentioned the bit in The Real Frank Zappa Book where he talked about how he first discovered Edgard Varèse.
Well, it's been about a decade since I read the book, but I just ran across an article called Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth from the June 1971 issue of Stereo Review, and I'm pretty confident it's the same piece. (If it's not, it's a different telling of the same story.)
Another Zappa interview courtesy of afka.net.
I really do love Red Dead Redemption. But for all that it's a big open-world sandbox game, the actual story events have very little room for player choice.
See that guy running away from the creepy, slavering weirdo in the middle of the desert? Better lasso him and take him back! Otherwise you fail the mission.
Or what about the guy beating up that woman? If you attack him, you fail the mission. Instead you have to buy her freedom and then take her away, so she can go back to him and get murdered and you end up killing him anyway.
Or how about the guy who told you where to find Javier Escuella, only to lead you into an ambush and try to kill you? Looks like you've got him in your grasp, and he's telling you where Javier Escuella is, really for real this time! So before you ride off, you have the choice of either (1) killing him or (2) letting some other guys kill him. There is no option (3) consider the possibility that the guy who already lied to you and lured you into a deathtrap may be lying to you and luring you into a deathtrap. (Spoiler alert: he is lying to you and luring you into a deathtrap.)
I mean, John Marston is depicted as a pretty simple guy -- a self-described "half-literate farmer and hired gun" --, but he's not a blithering goddamn moron. He's just, you know, a character in a video game who is occasionally forced to behave like one in order to move the narrative forward to the next event.
Bill Boggs interviews Zappa about New York City, disco, drugs, and showmanship. Yet another fine upload by tomtiddler1.
I just got a bill for 25 cents in the mail from my insurance company.
Stamps cost how much, again?
BTW, anyone using ROM Collection Browser who's just upgraded to the latest XBMC beta and found that the list of ROMs is completely blank:
Open up C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\script.games.rom.collection.browser\resources\lib\gui.py and find the following line, which appears twice:
self.addItem(item, False)
In both occurrences, change it to simply
self.addItem(item)
You don't need to restart XBMC, but if you've got ROM Collection Browser open, right-click out of it and then reopen it. That will get the list to reappear.
If you find that it throws an "Unimplemented method" error for executehttpapi when you try to launch a game, open up launcher.py in the same directory and replace all instances of "executehttpapi" with "executeJSONRPC". (Same as above: you don't need to restart XBMC, but you do need to restart ROM Collection Browser for the changes to take.)
Thanks to versus for posting the gui.py fix and fmonaca for posting the launcher.py fix on the XBMC forums.
(And yes, I am posting this at 12:30 in the damn morning. You know how sometimes you have a thought on how to fix a vexing computer problem and know it'll be gone by morning?)