I'll Just Ram My Ovipostrator Down Your Throat And Lay My Eggs In Your Chest, But I'm Not An Alien

TEKNO!!!!

I like music.

A lot.

Music is like one of those things that keeps me driving. I wrote a rather cool essay in Grade 11 that I've since forgotten that was entittled "Celebration of Youth". It was kind of a breather from all the darkness and dreariness that was the Brentwood Grade 11 English Programme (which includes such light uplifting tales as MacBeth, Lord of the Flies, 1984, and The Bible). I wrote it after spending a week in Richmond for a rather interesting look at the inner workings of United Church Politics (one of the events that actually led to my deciding that Christianity was not right for me), and it was one of those events that you really decide are one of the better moments of your life (It was).

So I wrote an essay in a rather hippie-esque manner about the Dance Of Life. A bastardized Shakespeare quote or two, keep it within the structured design they pummel into your soul in academia, and huzzah! An A essay. Anyways, I read it for the class, they seemed to like it.

Am I gonna post it? Fuck no. I was 17 and naive, having never seen much in the world outside my parents' basement and a mild exposure to raves and rave culture.... that was about it... Not to mention I have no clue where I'd find the essay as I believe it was lost in a hard drive crash a whiles ago. At any rate, I prefer what I'm writing these days to those days of lax grammar and undeveloped concepts, anyways.

The point of all this? Glad you'd ask.

Music's always been a rather central part of my life, which is why I own a Rio Karma. So as such, me being a freelance Disinformation Agent, I'd like to reproduce for any of my readers a chance to enjoy such music. So I'm going to recommend some things you may not have heard of. Starting now.

Mux is a Techno producer from Vancouver, BC, who makes really REALLY good dance music. All contact and booking information is on his website, so I don't need to do much other than say BOOK THIS MAN!

That is all.

Don't Panic

Go download. Like now

In honour of it:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of
towels.

A towel, it says, about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini-raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. Futhermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence the phrase which has passed into hitch-hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Attn: Disinformation Agents

Are you like me? Are you willing to fight the illuminati by beating them at their own game? Of course you are! Well, first thing you need to do is start tracking people! Thankfully, the Retailler sect of the Pentaveret had the brilliant idea of Tagging customers and releasing them in the wild.

I remember doing this in first year Psychology. The prof distributed tags to all members of the class so he may observe us in our natural habitat or something like that. He told us it was a great way to meet girls. I shit you not. That was a great class.

At any rate, in my daily /. browsing, I discovered this article and this link in discussion about being able to hack your RFID tags.

Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens here. If the retaillers start taking people like this to court, then we get to see if the government is really here to serve our needs or not. Or if we even have a semblance of capitalism left in American culture. I don't see this becoming a big problem in Canada... heck, we've already told the RIAA to fuck off back in March... Besides, stuff like this tends to be started in the States, because they're the ones who seem to get their panties in a knot anytime something of a Religious Matter happens (like, say, a nipple on television... OMG HOW HORRID! A HUMAN BODY! DISGUSTING!). And I'm certain if something like this _were_ to get to litigation that PJ and crew will have a few things to say and do about it.

This internet stuff is interesting. At any rate. I highly encourage all those reading this to start learning about RFID hacking and keep trying stuff... Only way we can fight the things that we dislike is to be better than them.

edit: I like the fact that this is runnable on an iPaq. Given that I most recently learnt of a cell phone I'd actually want and the fact that it's an iPaq, this makes me relatively happy. Wanna scan/hack RFID tags from inside the store? Ooooo, the possibilities.

From the Underground Electronic scene: Venetian Snares.

As I'm mostly using this blog to distribute information amongst any who come across this, I'm going to send you towards some of the most fucked up music you've heard.

Venetian Snares is a Noize/Glitch/IDM producer from Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). He's gathered popularity, by my observation, in a few different scenes: The Vancouver Hardcore Scene (if such a thing exists anymore. I dunno. I've been out of town for a year and out of the loop for another), The online pretentious raver scene and, most recently, around Duncan's music scene.

IDM, or "Intelligent Dance Music", is somewhere between Drum & Bass and Noize. Very spastic drum machines, lots of fucked up sounds using high-speed snares and whatnot. Crazy glitchy sounds made through weird effects on sinewave audio patterns. Some stuff is what I'd call more "experimental" than others, But V-snares is notoriously great for just tripping your mind out with music. Not always for dancing, but can be danced to. I think it depends on how good of a drug user you are or something like that.

At any rate. I have high opinion of this man as a musician. If you enjoy it, I'll further recommend Hella, Boards of Canada and a number of the people hosted on the Gabber.org website.

They seem to have it pretty good, and relatively impartial.

I'm liking Wikipedia so much more every day. Not only does it give you a nice little Hit List of every person that needs to be assassinated in order to make it so that the United States has NO government, but it probably gives one of the more accurate and impartial reviews on Electronic Music and its surrounding culture (rave and whatnot) based more on history....

I like this a lot. It's like someone's writing the history books as its happening and keeping it well maintained online for all to see.

If you ever need something to do to kill time, I highly recommend hopping onto Wiki and just clicking things and seeing what you learn.

Goodbye Ladies, Goodbye Ladies, Goodbye Ladies, I'll throw out your lawsuit now.....

Groklaw has now offered us with a nice summary of what's happened most recently in the SCO vs. IBM court case. There are a bunch of other stuff around that site if you've never looked at it involving legal practices pertaining to tech law (usually software patent and copyright stuff). It's proven to be an excessively useful resource amongst the blogosphere as a collaborative work for people trying to understand the legal system and wondering how they can actually make a difference or two to what's going on.

The best thing about Groklaw is how it's been pointing out in rather clear english exactly why SCO is full of shit lately, with their desire to sue just about every single company they've ever worked with. A lot of the conspiracy nuts (by "Conspiracy nuts" of course I mean "common sensical people paying attention to the facts") have been saying our favourite villain Microsoft has been pulling the strings. I'd feel kinda sorry for SCO but they seem to have gone about it in the worst way. It's like the Illuminati with George Bush: Yeah, he did what they wanted, but nobody's buying it, and he's made for a horrible figurehead.

Need a summary of what happened?

SCO says to IBM about a year and a half ago that they misappropriated UNIX System V code they licensed from SCO into Linux. Then the countersuits came up, and it was a lawsuit fest. IBM countersuing, Red Hat sues, SCO sues Novell, SCO sues Damier-Chrysler [sic], Microsoft sits back, funds anti-Linux propoganda (thus screwing over not only SCO in this whole debacle, but also the Alex de Tocqville institute, a think tank that now is known to merely publish what they're told. Fuck I hate think tanks.), keeps investing their money in SCO, pats them on the head and says "Good job" despite the fact that both their stock and their profits have killed themselves.

At any rate, I recommend the article, it handles both the legal side and the tech side rather well. Makes things clear for everybody. Damn PJ is good at what she does.

I figured I needed to put some link to that here, as Groklaw is one of those reasons I'm really happy the internet exists, as it seems to be pushing the public opinion agenda rather well. We're getting there. The Illuminati must be shaking in their boots with this one. Oh well. All Hail Eris.

Boxing a Waterfall

MSNBC reports about how the TV industry (in the form of Hollywood and the NFL) has decided to go the way of the MPAA and the RIAA (TVAA? Methinks Ted Turner will drool over that idea) and has started to "crack down" on TiVo and ability for digital distribution of that which it captures.

Here's my question: Does it matter? Anybody with a capture card and a scheduling program (go cr0ntab!!!) has their very own open-everything TiVo they can use anyways. Hook up your TV to your computer, and huzzah! Instant Entertainment Center! You can even script it to automatically edit out commercials!

Oh well. I guess they're gonna start suing people next for sharing TV shows. On the most part I've found, though, TiVo means squat for the piracy community (I like how Television is an industry and piracy is a community. Makes you kinda wonder which one is more capitalist...) as a lot of the communities who are trading tv shows (Digital Archive Project being my personal favourite) do so with full intent of merely providing people with what they want: High-quality distribution of TV shows, similar to tape trading, based on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 model. What that means is that if the TV show is commercially available, don't trade it. So I don't think that this supposed TVAA would care about that type of stuff.

So, if we've already eliminated all the non-commercially available stuff, that leaves us with Family Guy, Futurama, Simpsons, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City.... wait a minute... These are all available on DVD! And since the MPAA made absolutely sure that DeCSS would be made readily available to ANYBODY simply by trying to clamp down on it (What's your favourite? Mine's gotta be the DeCSS Haiku), all the stuff that's commercially available is going to be available to the pirates as well.

So what exactly is this mythical TVAA attempting to control? The P2P services have deemed it impossible to stop the distribution of these things. Let's face it, the technology community has found a cheaper means for distribution of art. Television, Movies, Music, Software and information have all become a part of the digital revolution, and it's moving faster than the companies' beaurocratic designs can keep up with. IMHO, this is a good thing. Beaurocracy is becoming obsolete and is being replaced by technology. About bloody well time. After a few revolutions in which the working class has been rendered obsolete, it's nice to see people designing stuff that can replace upper management.

People ask me why I rock climb.

This pretty much sums it up.

Now, I don't surf, but I do kayak. One of the really cool things about sports like kayaking, rock climbing and all the other more introverted sports out there (read: non-spectator) is that you get to see all kinds of really cool shit up close and in person that you normally would have zero chance to check out. You get cool moments where you get to commune with nature. I'm certain this makes me sound like a Dirteh Hippeh when I say this, but it's a thrill when you quietly dance with these animals and places.

I thought I'd drop that off here because it's one of those random little things I find every once in a while. I hope you thought it as cool as I did.

Style Sheets > Templates

Score. Well, it seems that a minor minor minor tweak (basically, changing a link) has prompted the blog to completely reverse all the template stuff I was working on. What a great idea.

Then I got to find out the reason for this was because of a rather complex style sheet that I had no clue even existed. Aw. What a nice little style sheet.

Course, that left me for about 10 minutes wondering "WHERE THE HELL DID MY TEXT FORMATTING GO? WHO THE HELL HAS BEEN FUCKING WITH MY BLOG? WHY DO THEY CALL IT AN ORANGE ANYWAYS???? IT'S JUST GOING TO CAUSE CONFUSION, THE SHITS!!!!!"

This computer stuff is so easy once you get the hang of it.

So anyways, now my blog is all prettylike. It looks like a standard Moveable Type blog with my own colour scheme decided upon. Now it needs pretty pictures to spice it up or something.

Oh, and if this is eyesoringly bad for the colour scheme, lemme know. I can change it to something else if there's enough public demand. As it sits I still like green-on-black. If you matter enough to me to coerce me to change my colour scheme, then you should already know how to get in touch with me. If not, well, POTH! You can eat me. My fucking site, my fucking rules. Unless Mike for some reason decides that he's gonna override me. The bastard. Always horning in on my plans. By Grapthar's Hammer, he shall not escape my deathly clutches!

Wait. I don't have deathly clutches.

New Blog, New Name, all kinds of shizniz

Welcome. If you're here that means I've told you I've started a blog, and you've reacted with "Jesus Christ Dave, not another one!" Either that or you've done some weird google search, like "cattle baby jesus pr0n" and come across this. If the latter, I'm sad to say that all my pictures of Jesus being raped by bovines was lost in a hard drive wipe a while ago.

So, a lot of people sit here wondering "What in the hell? It seems everybody and their dog (and in some cases their messiah-molesting cattle) has a blog today. Why the hell does this Ebb Omega character seem to feel the need to give us more useless crap on the internet?" Well, my answer is mainly that I finally decided that webforums weren't really the best place in the world to always vent what I have to say, and ICQ and MSN are severely lacking in ability to tell a whole bunch of people about cool things I find.

So where does this get us? Well, as this blog is still in its genesis (and is harshly borrowing the evil green-on-black colour scheme I used oh-so-long-ago when I designed My original website), I still don't know exactly what's going to go here. Thoughts, ideas, pieces of art I either come across or attempt to create, news clippings I find interesting/funny/important, all the other typical stuff one finds in the blogosphere.

So, it's not much to look at now. And knowing how lazy I am, it may not be for a while. But this is a second run, and I'm getting more in touch with my spiritual/artistic roots lately, so hopefully this can be a new era in which I don't completely neglect my web design skills or something like that. Maybe this will eventually look pretty. As for now, cope you chickenmonkeys.