….
I found about a Nintendo DS game called Item Getter today.
What a stupid name!
I .. am almost speechless!
..
April 28, 2009
April 26, 2009
The end is near.. as the world crumbles into little piles of money.
Part 1 – Lawsuits
I have heard a lot about how people who do stupid things get to sue big companies when they really should have been added to The Darwin Award lists. Many of these cases end up being twisted by the public and made to look ridiculous, and while some of these do remain quite ridiculous, they are not as they seem. Here is an example of a case I hear regularly when somebody wants to bring up their negative opinion of the US court system.
The McDonald’s hot coffee incident – Known as Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants is really a case about how McDonald’s was serving their coffee 40 degrees too hot at 180 °F (82 °C), which can cause third degree burns in a matter of seconds. Even though Liebeck, 79 at the time, had the coffee between her legs when the lid came off and burned her, the court found her only 20% responsible. There were some 700 related cases from 1982 to 1992.
Some people I have talked to do not know much about this case and therefore some believe it to be an urban myth. This case is still quite controversial and many will argue that the burn could have been prevented if she had held the cup instead. In my opnion it would not matter if she held the cup or not, if the lid came off and if the coffee were a scalding 180 °F, you would get the same result. In the end McDonald’s decided to lower their brewing temperature and Liebeck was awarded $160,000 in damages as these related to most of the medical costs after had skin grafts and debridement treatments.
There are a few other interesting cases such as people getting injured, sometimes severely, after tripping on a faulty sidwalk. These I compare to potholes on major roads. Then there are far more ridiculous cases, usually related to companies protecting their trademarks and patents. A good example of this would be the Monster Cable vs Monster Mini Golf lawsuit in 2006, or the Monster Cable vs Blue Jeans Cable and dozens of others. Some companies are just giant assholes.
Some lawsuits are quite scary, and the deregulations made lately by the Bush Administration are going to throw some peoples lives into legal hell.
I could have written about thousands of lawsuits and instead focused on what seemed to be corrupted, and what is corrupted. These are simple examples, not huge class action legal hell holes or celebrity murders. Now it is time to ask, will lawsuits contribute to the end of the world? My opinion is no. The more lawsuits the better. This means that people are out there screaming to be heard, some trying to be honest, and a natural cycle in our capitalist world. When the lawsuits dwindle down to very few, this is when it is time to be afraid. When people cannot protect themselves from companies and vice versa, and when corporations do not have the right to sue each other, then you know there is something far more terrifying to worry about.
April 19, 2009
The Avation Project – Part 1
What is the Avation Project? It is the name of my 15 year music project. I will explain my influences and detail the song later but first here is the story on how I started it and how it got its name.
Part 1 – Sounds and song names.
When I was in elementary school, I noticed how I was able to memorize melodies and replay them in my head as if I had a huge speaker somewhere inside. There were a few instruments that I chose to focus on at first, mostly violin and piano, and I tried to recreate the sound in my head exactly. After this, I tried to create little tunes usually by repeating some notes over and over until it stuck, eventually writing sweeping instrumentals. I would be riding my bike to school and there would be this orchestra in my head which I created, and I was in heaven.
Mid grade 8 my family and I moved to another city and this is where I started imagining full songs with vocals. The first few of these were eventually forgotten or mishmashed into other songs later, but one that I will never forget is a song called ‘The Darkened House’ which was about someone having an epiphony late in life about how they wasted their whole life in misery and loneliness. Funny how depression affects you when you are young. Soon I had a few dozen songs memorized and I decided to divide them into groups related to the feeling of the song. There was no reason to name the project because I did not speak to anybody about it, but I eventually wrote it down as ‘Trilogy’. As the songs were forgotten one by one, I grouped the stronger songs into groups which eventually became something like album names for them. The first was Vaccine, which included the songs ‘Purple Cloud Sunrise’, ‘Reality’, and ‘Time’, which are very important songs to me. I wrote two more albums of material, one named Chemeleon which had a few strange songs on it, one being ‘I Win’, then there was the third album of material called Green, which was very atmospheric and had a song called ‘Lifeless’. These song titles do not mean much now, but I am hoping that you will eventually hear them.
Soon I was writing a forth group of songs and named it Ivory, and while I was originally content with the name, there were a lot of Ivory soap commercials on tv. Angry, I decided to scrap the groups and reinvent the project. After graduating from high school, I moved to Victoria BC and tried to get my head together on life, death, music, depression, etc.
Internet Relay Chat was a big thing at the time and I enjoyed using the service to chat with friends and sometimes family. Entering a chat environment forces you to invent a nickname for yourself, so I invented a few. First was Trez, which just sounded cool at the time. A few days later I was typing nonsense and came up with Ceilt|ei. When asked how to pronounce it, I changed the pipe to an S and thus created Ceiltsei’. Since IRC was a great place to cause trouble on the internet (similar to 4chan now), I had a lot of fun getting banned from religous channels and the such, and people knew me as a troublemaker. I changed my identity over night to Avate, which was a play on the name of a game I created back in 1996 (The Lost Rain, The tales of Avalorn). Somehow I named the project The Avation Project, which made me laugh since my father listened to The Alan Parsons Project.
While gathering up the songs I hit the ol’ song writing train and a concept piece called ‘The Trial’ was born. From this album on things got easier and if I had actually recorded these, I would have over 20 albums to my name. I have yet to forget a single one of these songs.
Recently turning 28, I decided it was time to record them.
The Anti-blog
Back when I was young, in the mid 90s, I used to have a geocities account where I would basically talk about daily shenanigans and random ideas usually related to programming. Awhile later the term ‘blog’ showed up and it just did not feel right. After reading a few blogs I grew tired of their idle talk about weather and their work day and I eventually started writing again, but I decided to talk about things in a sort of alternate reality or bastardization. I wrote about exploding toilets at work, made fun of my boss, and even wrote a hate section which was one of the biggest no-nos on geocities. My rebellious was overly negative and I got some very interesting feedback from people who discovered it.
So life goes on and here it is, a.. blog. Have I accepted the word? No. It still sounds stupid to me. Since I will be writing about many things including my music (which I am very serious about), and since I will have guest writers, I need to accept that it is a ‘blog’.
See? Blog is in the title. I have come a long way.
April 15, 2009
Guests and all the rest
Soon there will be some guest posts. I rounded up a few random people at a bus stop and told them to write stuff. Be prepared…
Bring a shovel.
Bring a shower curtain.
Bring a hole.
Bring some dynamite.
Take cover.