A sad week for mankind

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Means and ends (on the unconspicuous usage of violence)

I get very pissed off whenever I read that some idiot went postal in town X, country Y (no, it's not always the USA) because of the evident lack of foresight of those chimps (everybody knowing that it was them the ones shooting people at the school/supermarket/post office, thus having no way out of the mess they got themselves into except death or imprisonment, usually followed by death). It's obvious that noone bothered briefing these scrapes from the bottom of the gene pool on the dos and don'ts of violence.

Shooting and killing sprees when your life is not in imminent danger are pretty much like using PowerPoint in a lecture (I don't think I have to explain this one, but just in case, stick it up your ass): cruel and counterproductive. Cruel because you're screwing a lot of people in the process and not making a profit. Counterproductive because in the Powerpoint side of the problem as well as the violent one, you're not getting your point across and you are looking like a fucking lunatic and an idiot and I'm falling asleep - permanently.

Also, for weeks after you have sprayed the pavements and walls of our beloved town (I'll just pretend I'm from town X in this example) with your brains I'll have to put up with idiots everywhere speaking about how violence is just wrong and not quite the right way to do things.

Of course violence is not the answer for everything! Almost everyone prefers to reason over arguments, but there are some brickheads you can only reason (or get them to act in a way that doesn't bother you) by inflicting pain. Vast amounts of it. And you should do it in a way that won't allow for charges to be pressed against you (I believe the bullshit term for this is "cost/result analysis"). Personally, I'd suggest a kick in the back of the knee. It can be done without drawing attention, and judging by the expression of the recipients and the time they stay on their knees it hurts a lot which should suffice to make yourself clear. Experience has shown me that while violence is not the solution for everything, it solves the most persistent ones (where words won't work) and it gives the gratification of a work well done.

OTOH, sadly, tossing a projector connected to a laptop off a window is very expensive, which detracts from the gratification it provides.

Remember kids, when it comes to violence, think before acting and don't do it a day late and way over budget!

Test Drive: the Führermobile (day 1)

Today I took the Führermobile for a drive. I hadn't driven for four years, and it was kind of confusing for the first few minutes, but I guess it's kind of like coding HTML: you can't forget how to do it.

Parking was the hardest bit, but surprisingly I got it right on the first try (mind you, I was checking which pedal was the clutch just five minutes before that). The car's small on the outside, but big inside (not "big as an SUV", but big as "I can fit inside it without having to practice ninjutsu for two years", which given my size and the car's size is quite an achievement. You can never go wrong with German cars...), it's quite responsive, offers a great view of the road (it's got a short snout) and you can notice by the sound and vibrations if you're revving up too much or you are getting on the curb/off the road without it being noisy or bothersome inside. Yes, it's a bit old (about 18 years now), but it isn't gasoline-thirsty, I can get it for free and it comes with a tape deck, which is awesome for my metal tapes which I can't listen to anymore in my computer but I still keep around, just in case.

Tomorrow I'll take the Führermobile for another drive.

Forging the furnace for the final grand slam! (Ta-dadada, ta-dadaaaa!)

It was the end of the fucking line...

Sunday about 6 am. We were at the end of the fucking line.

The place was, in a metaphorical way, where old, rusty, battered cars with oil leaks go to die. In a non metaphorical way, too, if you substitute cars with people and oil with... er... oil, piss or "I don't want to know" -yep, time doesn't treat people kindly, I suppose- and wrinkled instead of battered; it's not a cheap whorehouse, it's just some sort of human junkyard where people who were in their youth or middle age in the 70s go to drink and dance, or mess with their prosthetic hips, or whatever.

So, there we were. It was a lot like the bar in the hotel in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", but instead of peanuts there were popcorn bowls and those little salted cookies. The reptiles, I mean, people inside were the same, though, but worn out. All this show of light and colour, carried to our brains with EnhancedVision(tm), i.e.: a visual enhancement obtained after drinking beer, vodka and mezcal and watching Bollywood and cheap-ass ninja movies before going out.

Then a thin, wrinkly woman who might be in her late 30s or in her early 60s (the kind of woman that ages worse than a can of tuna left open in the jungle) comes towards me and asks me something. The horror... the horror! I answer with some faux-Kazakh nonce words from Borat (from the naked fight scene, more specifically) and my pal comes up with something good: "My friend is Serb!". I play along, and he claims that my axe-shaped and celtic cross shaped pendants are Serbian decorations for bravery or something like that. She freaks out, walks away and we laugh our asses off.

Which goes to show that in a dump where young, idiotic people go to fuck with elderly people because of -you all probably can guess- their money, good things can happen too if you are willing to make up surreal stuff!

NORSK ARYSK BLACK METAL et al.

So, I've been to a couple of concerts lately. One was last weekend, the other was some months ago.

On 19th April this year there was a Black Metal concert. Dark Embrace (a local band) and Watain. Dark Embrace has improved vastly over these years, and it showed in the concert. Watain were awesome, also. No, they didn't splash any blood on stage (both the stage and the concert room's floor were wooden and it would have been a hell of a bloody mess to clean up), neither did they display goats' heads or anything like that, there were some inverted crosses, black candles, incense and all that stuff, and the music was great, mostly songs from their latest album, "Sworn to the Dark" (which was sold out, unfortunately). The concert was at the Dublin Irish Pub, in Carballo. Great, comfortable place, with cheap but good booze and food!

Last week (21st June) there was a grindcore concert with Extreme Noise Terror, Nashgul and Machetazo (these last two ones are local bands). Great concert, lots of fun, my ears ringed a couple of days afterwards. There were lots of people dressed up as zombies, with some spare limbs to throw around (much to the Extreme Noise Terror folks' mirth). It was at the Capitol concert hall in Santiago, it used to be a cinema and therefore is a great place with lots of space and good accoustics: something you won't find in my hometown. Here it's the Opera House, the Colisseum or a small, crummy place.

Speaking about Santiago, I don't know what's wrong with that town, it's as if noone there fucked and had kids, because it looked that the concert-goers were the only young people in town. There was only one metal pub, with a Lord of the Rings theme, which isn't an intrinsically bad trait if it wasn't coupled with: the place being a very small one (I'm rather large and I hate being in cramped spaces), full of people and most of these folks being that kind self-appointed nerds. You know, the ones who can talk about MMORPGs, heroic fantasy or Final Fantasy. The ones who prostitute what was once a badge of honour, that is, having arcane AND useful knowledge (mostly about computers), which is what a proper nerd is, not someone who has read Death Note seven times in a row. That is a masochist with no life and no balls to get into real SM. Fucking bastards.

Now, how did I get here?

The recently departed and the undead

Gary Gygax died two days ago, at the relatively ripe age of 69. Taking into account what kind of people read this blog, I think he doesn't need an introduction... but I'll say he's the guy who made Dungeons and Dragons, just in case.

I know I should have written something about it yesterday, having enjoyed D&D for more than a decade, but it was a rather busy day at work, and I'm not too keen on composing panegyrics. Dead people are just dead people, anyway. I'll remember the D&D basic (red box) set fondly because "Dwarf" was a class, not a race, which, to the best of my knowledge, is a fact in real life. Especially in porn. Just like the little people involved in it, midget porn is a class of its own.

On a completely unrelated topic, the infamous Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) came back from the fucking dead last month (IIRC). Bloody hell, can't these fuckers stay dead? They went broke last year and some SOB had to give them $100 million to get them up and running. Now, if they had gone bankrupt in Europe they'd be royally screwed, but since this happened in the US, they filed Chapter 11, which grants them court protection, allowing them to stay in business. So much for "free market".

Humppa!

Today I feel several orders of magnitude lazier than usual, so I'll just do what I once vowed never to do: I'll make a post made mainly out of Youtube videos. So much for oaths...

But they are good videos, I swear.




And for those who don't like metal, there will be acid house.



And of course, there will be sport.



And now, for something completely different.