I would like to preface this article by saying this is purely and exercise in creative writing. The opinions and views expressed in this fake article are not the ones I personally hold. It’s probably the polar opposite to my belief system. I though it was kind of an interesting concept though. What if all those crazy accusations made by the far-right came true? What would the future be like. So, I wrote a diary entry from the not-so-distant future outlining what America is like. It’s absurd and I doubt a single person outside of Rush Limbaugh actually believes that this is what will happen, but I have been surprised before. Anyway, enjoy.

June 27, 2010

I am writing this letter not for present, but future generations. The world as we once knew is simply a crinkled page in a history book. If they only had listened! I am getting ahead of myself, let me explain the whole terrible tale from the beginning.

The 2008 Presidential Election is what I would call the turning point. The liberal, left-wingers shot down every warning we sent. We tried to inform the American people that Obama has a streak of terrorist associations; that he was in fact a secret Muslim. We even uncovered the fact that he was not even an American citizen. Why people didn’t listen is beyond me. They are paying for it now, paying with their freedom and with their lives.

After winning the election, Obama tried to play coy, like he was just a normal guy. The veil of that came off around September of last year. He held a national press conference to inform America that we were pulling every last troop of ours out of Iraq. What a mistake that was, or perhaps from his perspective, the ideal move. Most of the country applauded his effort, but us skeptics knew this didn’t feel right. Without proper infrastructure in Iraq it was only a matter of time. The country soon feel to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist, terrorist groups. With anit-American sentiment growing in the Middle-East by magnitudes in only few short weeks another terrorist attack on US soil was immanent.

Remember Swine Flu, or H1N1 as we all refer to it now? Well, just as some suspected it was indeed an act of bio-terrorism. The first outbreak was just too small to work. Only a month after Iraq fell people began dropping like flies. The terrorist group responsible for the production of H1N1 have come forth and admitted the delivery method for the virus were indeed the Mexican immigrants coming over the border, illegally. Lou Dobbs saw this and tried to warn everyone to no avail. Half the US population is now dead thanks to H1N1, it has been likened to the black plague if the black plague had super powers.

The economy is almost non-existent here in America; the repercussions are far worse than any photograph you can find of the great depression. Socialism is the grandfather of all these horrible conditions. The nationalization of the free-market has been a horrible mistake that we can’t come back from. The banks were the first to fall thanks to sneaky wording in agreements with TARP funds. Then the car manufactures fell prey to the golden apple that was TARP as well. The government was becoming more socialist by the second and we were powerless to stop it. With the new taxes on big business and the rich the wealth was being spread around. Without large corporations to combat the growing government it soon took control over our lives.

Deviating slightly, I would like to say thanks to the current administration I can no longer marry out of love. We tried to protect the sanctity of marriage; man and woman, just like the Bible says. With Prop 8, changing one of the most liberal states over to outlawing same-sex marriages, I though we put the who mess to bed. I was wrong. Once Iowa voted to allow same-sex marriages many other states followed suit. Soon all fifty states allowed same-sex marriages with Texas being the last to give in. Now that the United States had become same-sex friendly, opposite-sex marriages were becoming frowned upon, especially since the divorce rate was so high. Soon states started outlawing true marriage in favor of a same-sex only system! With out last stand being yet again Texas we now stare at a bleak and same-sex only future.

Another dicey subject that was recently settled was the abortion issue. As we all know life begins at conception, but not to the newly elected government. In a strange turn, (even for the government) the newly appointed chief justice, Keith Olbermann, convinced all his peers to add an amendment allowing all forms of abortion. It’s maddening how crazy it’s become. This story informs the next.

Roughly three months ago Obama came out and openly admitted that he has been a practicing Muslim for years and everything he said about being a Christian was solely to become elected. On top of that “startling news” he admitted to not being born American, but moved here as a baby. The congress having a Democratic majority voted to allow him to continue in his current position. As the days past you saw the White House become more and more sympathetic to the Muslim plight and eventually almost every Democratic senator or congressman was praising the glory of Allah. Staring to piece things together we saw what the government had truly become. Islamic nationalists now held the highest seat in American Government. With the amendment declaring all forms of abortion legal they soon instated “random” mandatory abortions. They were targeted at pregnant Christian women, but with the whole government now Muslim controlled, opposition was stamped out almost immediately.

With the government owning many large corporations many of it’s profits have been secretly embezzled and funneled to help extremist nations in the Middle-East. It would appear that America’s glory days are behind her and America as we know it is gone. Our cries have gone ignored and now with millions dead and thousands more being killed every day we are finally given an ear. I’m afraid it might be too little too late though. There is one hope on the horizon though. A small militia is forming in the backwoods of Alaska. They are gaining numbers and manpower with every growing day; headed by our once rising star Sarah Palin. With her expertise with assault rifles, skills with hunting, and collection of snow machines she was able to outrun Obama’s “Muslim Missionary” forces. If you are reading this please join us and help us take our country back. We need to go back to the way things were, when we were the ones doing the oppressing.

Most of the blogs I am reading these days are making a big stink about the Game Boy turning 20, as they should be. I thought I would write a lil’ something, something as well because it did have an impact on my life when I was growing up. For the first couple of systems I owned I was about a generation behind by the time I got it. My NES was a hand-me-down from my cousins and I didn’t get a SNES until quite a bit after it’s release. At the time I was quite oblivious to any real gaming news. My cousins who lived in New York were my source for all things video games. As far as I knew they were the best players around and had the inside info on all the latest games. One of their trips when they came to visit they brought along their Game Boy with Mario Land 2 and Tetris and let me have a go with it. I was blow the hell away. My tiny adolescent mind could not comprehend what I was doing. I was playing NES quality games (sans color) without being tied to grid or a TV. It was a spiritual moment for me. From that moment on I think the only things that came out of my mouth were, “Hey Mom, could I get a Game Boy?” That following birthday my consistent nagging finally awarded me with a shiny new Game Boy and a copy of Super Mario Land 2. That was the first new game system I had every received. That system got me through so many hard car trips and waiting rooms. If we were going anywhere that even sounded remotely boring, the Game Boy came too. After I became more hardcore into Video Games the Game Boy and I had a little falling out. I flipped in on every once in a while, but it mainly sat there collecting dust, and by collecting dust I mean sealed away in a container to protect it from the elements. I am very careful with my stuff.

In comes this new craze called Pokemon. Holy crap, Pokemon. That dominated about three years of my youth and made my Game Boy the number one attention hog for a while. I am glad it was not only me. All my friends caught on to. Recess meant link-cables would be flying all around. This is the first time I felt the magnitude of Game Boy. I don’t want this entry to shift towards Pokemon, but I can’t see how it didn’t lift sales across the board. Everyone had one. Even girls! That began my lifelong obsession with finding a girl who actually liked Video Games. Just for those out there wondering. They still elude me.

Anyway, the Game Boy is forever cemented in my mind as the system that brought Video Games into everyday life. It was possible to go somewhere and game without boundaries, provided you had 4 AA batteries. As a testament to it’s quality, my original Game Boy still works without fail almost 17 years later. Thanks Nintendo, and thanks Game Boy!

The Dismemberment Plan – Crush

I am excited about this week’s Track of the Week because The Dismemberment Plan is one of my favorite bands ever. Following in the tracks of last week (pun fully intended) this is another cover, and again of a pop song. This one has had so much radio play I doubt anyone has not heard it. If you do take a listen to the original you may not even listen to the lyrics but may be shaking your behind to the beat. Upon listening to The Plan’s cover you uncover a deeper meaning to the lyrics with their slowed down tempo, minimalist backing, and often creepy vibe. The track is off a joint album between The Dismemberment Plan and Juno aptly named The Dismemberment Plan/Juno. It’s a pretty awesome and very curt album coming in at only 4 tracks. There is an awesome cover of High Noon by DJ Shadow done with real instruments. Pretty cool indeed. As always, download is on the right sidebar.

First off, we get it. Tea bagging. It’s a double entendre. It doesn’t need to be pointed out any longer. Second, I have a little beef with the people who are doing such bagging of tea. Your symbol is a bag of tea and you are assumed to be perpetrators of a “Modern day Boston Tea Party.” I am not impressed by your lack of historical knowledge. It’s either that or a stand skewing of history to fit your specific situation. Honestly, I am not sure which is it. Let me provide you with a refresher. The date is December 16, 1773, and the colonists are pissed. They want to know why they should have to pay taxes on tea to their British overload without even so much as a say in Parliament. The colonists get together and decide, “You know what? We are tired of this, let’s do something about it, k?” They assembled on a boat and dumped three shipments of tea headed for the motherland right into the Boston Harbor. History is made.

Now can you spot the fundamental difference between these two events? The “revolutionaries” of today are quite represented by their….representatives in congress. They are pissed because they don’t like what Obama is doing. I am afraid to say it, but that’s Democracy. Democracy doesn’t work on a system of everyone gets what they want. It’s based upon a majority vote. Now, it sucks that you don’t like it, and all I can say to that is keep trying to get your message out and protesting and perhaps people will listen and elect officials that will vote in your favor, but DO NOT go around comparing yourself to the revolutionaries of olde. You are represented, find another symbolic gesture.

Please don’t misinterpret this. I think protesting and questioning things is fantastic. People should be involved in their government and if something is fishy to them; they should get involved and try to fix it. That I believe is the true American way. STARS AND BARS! EMERICA! THESE COLORS DON’T RUN! *cough* excuse me.

I decided to accompany the track of the week (which by this time should be called the Tack of the whenever I get around to it) with a little bit about the song chosen. This weeks track is a cover by the talented Mr. Ted Leo. It’s actually a cover of a Kelly Clarkson song which was pretty popular when it was released, and I am sure you have all heard it. He does such a fantastic job with the song. He managed to incorporate Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps into it at the end, and the transition is fairly seamless. This track surfaced somewhere around my junior or senior year of high school and I remember humming the tune around the hallways and being asked, “Are you humming Kelly Clarkson?” To which instead of going through my long spiel on how it was covered and all, I simply bowed my head and said, “Yes.” Anyway, great tack, download!

This entry is going up a little later than I would have liked to to go up, but I guess late is better than never, right? This past spring break I made some projects for myself to try to hone some skills that I plan on utilizing for my career later in life. Not only that, but some of them were fairly practical. One such project was modifying my American NES to play audio from enhanced Japanese Famicom carts. I had a previous post explaining the whole thing. Here’s a Cliffs Notes of the whole thing. In Japan, on the Famicom (NES, but Japanese), there was an extra pin that allowed developers to make their own enhancement chips to mix into the audio. This was not put into the NES when it came to America because there were much stricter policies for publishing games and it only allowed for the use of a handful of chips to be used.

Step one for the whole thing to work is to acquire a Famicom to NES converter, and a game that used a sound enhancement chip. Luckily, I had both of these already so now I just had to figured out how the whole thing worked. To my unsurprised I found that this modification was already done many times and pretty detailed information was already given on it.

The process included taking the audio out pin from the adapter and passing it through a 100k ohm resistor and a 4.7 μF capacitor then to the R9 resistor on the NES main board. The resistor and capacitor help with the volume in the mixing because without them the extra audio channels added in would be too loud and we wouldn’t hear any of the default audio channels.

Here is a basic schematic of the process

All set up and ready to go

Top of the NES Board

Bottom of the NES Board

Wire soldered to R9 (labeled on the top of the board)

Wire Soldered to pin 16 of the adapter cart

I wanted to make sure it worked before I soldered it on a board

You can see the finished board by the power button

While I was in there I was wondering if there were any other mods I could do. I found out by just knocking out pin 4 of the infamous “lock-out chip” I could disable it. Technically you are supposed to connect pin 4 to ground, but almost everything I read said that leaving it floating is fine. This chip was supposed to keep any old company from making games without going through Nintendo (greedy bastards!). Of course many companies found a workaround for the chip, most famously Tengen. Tengen actually finagled the information from the US Copyright Office and reverse engineered a solution. They were sued outright. Why would I care about disabling the lock-out chip? Well, if you are an NES gamer and remember back to when the thing used to reset constantly and you would have to take the cart out and blow on it and stick it back in. That is the lock-out chips doing. If the pin that loaded the data to tell the lockout chip, “Hey, I’m legit, let me play.” didn’t connect the game wouldn’t load. If you were a kid who grew up on this, you absolutely know what I am talking about.

Here is the death of the lock-out chip.

The finished product.

Here is a video of the proof. VRCVII audio coming out of the NES. Success!

I want to modify it to use a 3.5mm plug and input, but I will save that for another time.
I have a couple more projects I have been working on and will post them shortly.

I heard about this film called The Great Happiness Space from a blog I follow and was intrigued by the concept. It was a documentary on the “host clubs” that litter parts of Japan. The concept of these are that women come in an pay for time with a host of their choice. The ultimate goal of these places is not to provide sex, but to provide companionship. For reference the female reverse exists as well. It might seem a little strange here, on the other side of the planet, to pay just to hang out with someone. That’s not to say that nothing more ever happens, it’s just not the service that is advertised. Anyway a history lesson on host clubs is not the focus of this post, nor the documentary; a little background was needed though.

The documentary is kind of a taxi cab confessions of one of the clubs in Osaka called Rakkyo . The spotlight is usually shined upon the clubs owner Issei. The sheer dichotomy of this man’s personality is beyond mind boggling. The rest of the time is split between many of the club’s frequenters. They try the best they can to explain their justifications for spending almost all their free time within the establishment.

I really had no idea what I was stepping into when I started watching. I didn’t read a whole lot about it and hadn’t heard of it until about a week ago. The synopsis was fairly vague, just a general outline really. What was supposed to be a documentary on host clubs turned out to be more focused upon human frailty and the constant need for validation. It’s really a sobering film.

I found myself at many junctures with my jaw open at the absurdity of some of the amounts of money that were thrown around. Some hosts would make upwards of $50,000 per month! When interviewing some girls about how much they would spend there it averaged about $1000 per night with some girls going up to $5000 in one evening! The most amazing thing is that no one throwing these numbers around did so with any thought or even shame for wasting all that money.

The documentary starts to pull away from the pack when the girls and the hosts start talking about what they are actually selling/buying. The hosts openly admit that they are selling dreams, fake love. They lie to these girls faces and tell them exactly what they want to hear. Many of them say they have so many clients that people become easy to read and they can shape and mold their personality to fit the person’s needs. They often times get girls who fall in love with them, even propose at times. That’s what keeps them coming back. They fall helplessly in love and try ensnare the hosts as their own. The hosts go on to explain some strategies for getting out of talks like that and to give them hope so they come back. That all sounds pretty terrible, extremely terrible really. The hosts should be run out of town for what they are peddling! But wait, what do the girls think?

The clients, when interviewed, seemed to be pretty aware of the situation. They are in love with guys who are paid to take them to an imaginary world. They still fool themselves into thinking that something may happen down the line. The real kicker comes when you find out how they finance their extravagant expenditures. I won’t tell you that, but I am sure you can guess. It really turns into a vicious cycle.

As sorry as I felt for these people watching it, the theory of the whole thing is extremely easy to relate to. People are not made to be completely independent, we are social creatures and require interaction. We all need to be validated now and again. The problem is that the host clubs only provide a temporary relief from that feeling; it’s only a band-aid on the underlying problem. Watching it you could tell that everyone at the clubs were wearing masks; alone in the crowd.

As depressing as it was, it was enlightening and at the very least entertaining. Go pick it up!

Potential names for my unborn child:

• Chainsaw
• Dirtbike
• Carburetor
• Tarantula
• Sawdust
• Excalibur
• Bear
• Dallas
• Obi-Wan
• Rambo
• Terminator

If you are wondering, they also apply to a daughter. I believe in equality. Can you think of any other names?

This post is filled to the metaphorical brim with photos. I want to start documenting more of my life in photos. I really enjoy taking pictures and the fact that some people might enjoy them makes the whole process that much better. Let’s get into my week in photos.

Art Projects!

I decided the space above my desk was feeling a little bare and decided to spruce it up with a little homemade art. I have always liked the look of power lines for some reason, I can’t really explain it to you. So, I found some pictures of power lines and did a little GIMP magic to them to make them more rasturbatable (that is such an imaginary word). Anyway here are some photos chronicling the event.

It looks like it fits.

The foam board makes it look so much better.

Goodbye loyal sabers. You have served me well.

Tacky putty seemed the obvious choice.

One panel up, only eight to go.

All finished up! I think it turned out pretty well.

Baby’s first papaya

I was just strolling through Wal-Mart, buying up some food stuffs, when I happened upon a strange fruit. I decided to give this foreign fruit the old college try.

I actually had to look up how to eat a papaya…

There is that beautiful piece of fruit.

The inside looks pretty cool.

This looks like…something…perverted ^^;

Unfortunately, I did not like the fruit. Maybe, it was because it was from Wal-Mart, but it was pretty gross. I am not going to write if off completely, but it was not good. It smelled kind of funky too…yuck.

Back into action figures

My desk was looking mighty plain, and especially in contrast to the new wall art. I decided to dress it up with some new toys! TOYS! Yeah, I am 21, but who cares? I am a dork, might as well embrace it.

Shiny and boxed.

Plo Koon is the ugliest badass ever.

Such a cool figurine.

The noblest of Jedi stands proud.

I have more pictures, but I will save them for another post. I hope you enjoy the more photo filled blog. Also, TRACK OF THE WEEK!