Shouting Grounds

amirite?

LONDON, England (CNN) — The world’s oldest known Christian Bale goes online Monday — but the 1,600-year-old thespian doesn’t match the one you’ll find in theaters today.

Discovered in a playhouse in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the self-trained Christianas Balaticus includes two characters that are not part of the official New Christian Bale and at least seven characters that are not in the Old Christian Bale.

The New Bale traits were learned in a different order, and include numerous technical acting corrections — some made as much as 800 years after the skills were learned, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bale online. The changes range from the alteration of a single vocal trait to the insertion of whole method-acted personas.

And some familiar — very important — skills are missing, including the ability to ‘snap out’ of the trademark raspy Batman voice and persona, they said.

Juan Garlic, the British Cinematic project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient thespian is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bale has developed and changed over the years.

“The Bale as an inspirational thespian has a history,” he told CNN.

“There are certainly thematic questions linked to this,” he said. “Everybody should be encouraged to investigate for themselves.”

That is part of the reason for putting the Bale online, said Garlic, who is both a Julliard scholar and a computer scientist.

Genius. I almost passed out from laughing at this. I particularly enjoyed his attention to detail. The “judemental teddybears” are fucking hilarious.

Michael Jackson died of a heart attack last night, losing a miraculous battle for life after his face died over ten years ago. Our Generation will always remember how the man went from being one of the coolest guys in music to the bankrupt, faceless, pederast he was when he expired. I loved Michael back in the day…but shit, man…that’s just sad.

Paramedics report that before their last attempt to resuscitate Jacko, his brother Jermaine whispered through weeping, “…just…just beat it…”

hai giuyzzzzz!! LOLZ

artist’s rendition of the actual scene:

From The London Telegraph by way of ThinkProgress.org:

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency. [...]

Among the graphic statements…is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: “I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid’s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures.” [...]

Three detainees, including the alleged victim, refer to the use of a phosphorescent tube in the sexual abuse and another to the use of wire, while the victim also refers to part of a policeman’s “stick” all of which were apparently photographed.

Now the “kid” in the above example was male, as was the translator who was allegedly busting up his bowels.

Also from The Daily Beast:

A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. … Some show U.S. personnel engaged in sexual acts with prisoners and each other. In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position. [...]

Still other withheld photographs have been circulating among U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq. One soldier showed them to me, including a photograph in which a male in a U.S. military uniform receives oral sex from a female prisoner.

So the decision that Barack made to block the release of these photos is a little more justified. No matter how many “My Bad”‘s you issue after revealing that your government condoned and permitted sexual assault on male and female (sometimes underage) detainees in your charge, you are going to have a tough time “focusing on the future” without answering calls to prosecute military and CIA personnel and also civilian contractors. I really don’t think that there’s any way around prosecutions and further investigations, because I think that there isn’t way to ignore this any further. I read a story yesterday that said essentially Maliki was briefed on these photos and stated, “Bagdad will burn” if the world were to see these images. Releasing the photos without any actions taken to apprehend or answer to the crimes these images depict would probably rush the United States out of the region much sooner than planned, for good or for ill. The longer Obama hesitates to sort out these crimes and bring perpetrators/planners/instigators to justice the more he is complicit in the coverup.

I LOL’d

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

I love how these bastards parse the phrase “pain and suffering” and choose to view both terms as a joint concept with which waterboarding was conveniently not compatible. I’m sure we would all enjoy to have our “pain and suffering” discounted in such a detached and calculated manner. As we all know, suffering = prolonged event. As long as you break one’s suffering into several “seasons” of “episodes” then something like watching “the hills” could not be considering “suffering”, I’m happy to say, by John Yoo’s definition.

Seriously, all these guys need a good stiff jab in the balls.

Enjoy!

by: Jerry Fletcher
April 9, 2009 – Chicago, Ill

The US Navy hopes that a peaceful resolution is at hand hundreds of miles off of the Somali Coast.

Early Wednesday the U.S.-flagged cargo ship, Maersk Alabama, was approached by a small watercraft containing several Somalian nationals who had become stranded over 350 nautical miles east of the Horn of Africa. The 20-person All American crew of the Alabama tied up the small boat and brought the Somalians on board the super-cargo ship.

A witness on the Alabama said that the stranded peoples were showing signs of malnourishment and dehydration, and also that they “seemed more primitive” than he would have expected for people that had found themselves in such a situation.

In accordance with United States Maritime Law, the crew of the Alabama tended to the Somalians and immediately began their exposure to the “American Dream”. Luckily, Maersk Line Ltd. out of Norfolk, Va., requires that all of their cargo ships sail equipped with proper training materials for such situations. The witness, who prefers not to be named, said that while the Somalians happily sat through the first two presentations, “Capitalism Today” and “Tale of a Good Consumer”, then showing signs of the Fear once they had eaten through their provisions and the crew began showing “The American Way: Jesus Christ our Savior”.

“They were surely grateful to have been rescued, but didn’t seem willing to accept the American Dream as they should have,” the witness stated.

In accordance with Maritime Law, the executive officer of the Maersk Alabama distributed handguns and automatic rifles to their crew to help in convincing their guests that the only right way was American way. The ship’s Captain, Richard “Trick Dick” Phillips, reportedly didn’t agree with his XO’s representation of Maritime Law, and took issue with the escalation of the situation. The executive officer swiftly diffused the situation by removing Captain Phillips from command and subjecting him to the same treatment afforded, as the witness referred to them as, the “skinnies”.

The witness couldn’t recall how but the Somalians were able to overpower the crew, steal their weapons and lock them in the ship’s steering maintenance compartment, along with one of their own people…the only one who appeared willing to understand the American videos.

“One of the savages subdued me with an alarmingly large tube of real Wisconsin Summer Sausage…when I regained consciousness my mates and I were locked in the [steering bay],” the witness struggled to recall.

Luckily, a member of the crew was able to signal the nearest U.S. Navy ship before being sequestered to the maintenance compartment. The USS Bainbridge, a Navy Morale and Resupply cruiser, was quickly able to track down the Alabama and intercede.

Wanting nothing to do with the ship itself or her payload, described by the witness as “convenience toiletries, nondescript plastic junk, and supplies for the U.S. Christian charities of WorldVision and Catholic Relief Services”, the Somalians were able to coerce Captain Phillips into helping them flee using one of the Alabama’s lifeboats. The escaping boat wasn’t able to get far before being intercepted by the Bainbridge. U.S. Naval personnel were able to quickly free the crew of the Alabama, restore their command of the cargo ship and allow them to continue on toward their middle eastern destination with their cargo.

Captain Phillips has been in communications with the Bainbridge, claiming that he “really doesn’t care for the three C’s anymore,” alarmingly referring to Consumerism, Catholosism and Conquest…the cornerstones of modern America. Captain O’Rly of the Bainbridge has attempted to diffuse the situation in the “only way he knows how”

“Luckily we were the closest vessel, being a [Morale and Resupply] ship. I reckon we had the most convincing weapon at our disposal…the blinding righteousness of American-made consumer products,” Captain O’Rly said.

The Bainbridge started by lobbing plastic bottles of Mountain Dew Code Red soda, King Size Snickers candy bars and bags of Xtreme Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in the vicinity of the lifeboat while projecting reruns of American Idol through its windows. With no obvious effect, Captain O’Rly has been reluctant to use escalated force since the arrival of the Marine Nationale (France) “intelligence” ship, the Dupuy de Lôme. The U.S. Navy hopes to avoid what could be construed by the French as an overtly-hostile act in the name of the American Dream.

The U.S. Navy is now considering this as a hostage situation, and the Bainbridge awaits the arrival of negotiators from the F.B.I., who can hopefully return peace and American prosperity to the Middle East.

I was driving to a LAN party the other day with a friend and for some reason (no pun intended) we got on the subject of music and why we don’t make it anymore. I felt compelled to express a frustration that I’ve had with music software that essentially prevents me from creating anything these days. Every time I get the desire to open one of these programs I hesitate because of all the bullshit hoops you have to leap through in order to set your canvas and get something accomplished.

One has the power, through software, to accomplish insanely complex tasks that were impossible with prior technologies, but with this power comes an immensity of technical hang-ups that don’t exist when you have a 4-track and a guitar, for instance.

In my mind, workflow is largest barrier between me and my creating. Some people (including me, when I was a student and had time to burn) have no problem with a few set backs or technical glitches. They accept this as par for the course, or use these limitations to their benefit by finding creative workarounds. I really have no time for this kind of “dicking around” anymore. Through the years I’ve come to expect a certain amount of functionality to the applications that I use, and I’ve distilled these findings to the following list.

1. Drum Synthesis
2. Audio Recording
3. Self-reliance (doesn’t require additional software to be used to fullest extent)
4. Plug-in Support
5. Flexible audio routing
6. Backwards compatibility
7. Standardized file formats

I’ve learned that no program is perfect in respect to its workflow/features because not every program is created with the same musician in mind. That brings me to Reason 4 (or 3).

Reason 4 is built from the mindset of someone with an affinity for hardware. All software instruments and virtual “devices” within Reason are modeled from existing or imagined hardware devices. Inputs, outputs, signal flow, patch cables, bypasses, and even drawn-on power cables are featured, and perform as imagined. While this is “cute” and certainly helps those not familiar with abstract computer-based music software get their heads around the concept, it’s impossibly limiting! Wiring up a patch is just as arduous a task in Reason as in real life, but with the added “bonus” (see, handicap) of having to use a mouse to patch everything together. Everything about Reason screams “waste of time”!

For example, I’m a musician who, on occasion, likes to add vocals or a live bass/guitar part to a song. I also tend not to record my parts perfectly on the first try, nor do I set “live” parts in stone for a whole project. I tend to revert back to these recordings and either re-record them or cut them up. Ok fine, now, Reason costs about $400 for the latest version. It’s a bit more if you want all of the bonus content. You’d think that this amount of money will allow you to accomplish the above tasks without spending additional money. You would, of course, be wrong.

If you want to record vocal or other live instrument parts for use in Reason your only “real” choice (see my comments on Rewire below) is to record those tracks in an external audio editor and import them into one of Reason’s two sampler “devices” (three, if you count ReDrum, four if you count Dr. Rex and have deep pockets). Of course, by doing this you’ve “locked-in” that recording, so that if you had to re-record or make changes you’d have to go back into that external application and re-record, edit, export, then import all over again.

Like the Vocoder in Reason? Me too. Too bad you can’t reach the damn thing with a live input. What’s the point of a vocoder without a live input, you ask? Nothing, it’s just a stupid audio effect. Maybe there are tons of people out there that can imagine what their tracks will sound like with a vocoder without having to preview it ahead of time, but I don’t have time to record, export, import, map, then playback while playing another patched instrument as a carrier just to hear if I like a fucking vocoder added to my track!

Ok ok, let’s fucking forget the “live” features of Reason, as there are very few, and honestly it’s not meant to be a multi-track recorder or full-out DAW. Let’s move onto Reason’s bread and butter, namely electronic music production.

Synth drums?! Don’t get me wrong, people can do amazing things with samplers, amazing, but the days where you had to mixdown a software synth track to a sampler bank because you had seriously limited CPU power are quickly coming to an end. I mean, am I the only person that thinks sample-based drums are extremely limiting? What if you want to “create” your own drum sounds? Well, open an instance of Thor, Subtractor, Maelstrom, or what have you and start twisting, right? Well, none of these instruments are intended for drum sounds. Yeah, there are envelope options for it, but a whole device set aside for a single drum sound is pretty wasteful. Plus, if you wanted to add this drum sound from a Reason synth into one of the many sample devices (like ReDrum) there isn’t an easy way of bringing over your creations to these devices (despite the fact that you’re “locked” into a sample instead of being able to tweak a knob and pull a totally different sound into your mix). All I can think of is setting the sequencer to playback only a single note, mute the rest of the tracks, render to disk, then open in an external audio editor, clean up/trim the recording if necessary, then save this to disk and import it into Reason. What a fucking joke! Can it be done, yes. Will I do it, fuck no.

So you like to cut-up drum loops, eh? Well bend over, douche-neck. Reason 4 (as in Reason 3) features a phrase-sampler, Dr. Rex, that sounds great on paper. It allows you to playback cut up loops and re-sequence them at any tempo. Too bad the format that the “Rex Player” accepts (the .rex format) is only able to be exported from one particular application. If you guessed that this program is called Reason, then you owe me $200 bucks. Actually, you have to purchase ReCycle from propellerheads for $200 bucks to attain the capability of exporting Rex files from your own loop content. Kinda defeats the utility of such a “device” when you need to buy more software to use it properly, IMHO. And what is so special about ReCycle? Well not so goddamn much, at least not anymore, or not special to the degree that they couldn’t include the app’s functionality into Reason. The program is practically unchanged from when it was originally released in 1994. (we’re only on version 2.1, 15 years later, guys? …guys?) I’ve never wanted to buy the software because it seems so rarely supported or updated, that I figured that it would eventually be dropped due to lack of interest. I’d then have a dead-app that I couldn’t guarantee would function on any later OS X or Windows versions, so what’s the point?

I thought I could work around these plainly noted limitations but as I’ve tried to use the software I always, and I mean “always”, hit these walls one time or another in a project. Yes, I can add a lot of this functionality by tying Reason to a full DAW via Rewire, but if you’ve tried this out yourself you’d understand why this isn’t even a fucking option in my book. Using Rewire to connect Reason to Logic or another app is no different in my book than going back to using hardware instruments.

Using Rewire, you now have to make sure that your apps are opened and initialized in the right order (just like using a hardware synth where you have to load the correct bank before playback). You also have to worry about having two project files to save, manage, and backup, just like when you have to worry about saving a bank from a hardware synth to make sure you have a copy for future use, or for when you run out of internal memory. When I was using Reason in Rewire mode in Logic 7 there was a limitation where Reason would only play through as a single stereo track, not individual outputs. Which, even if this was a setup issue on my part, or a limitation that was resolved by the release of version 4 (I was using version 3 at the time) it’s still a pain in the ass to setup.

If they want to encourage the use of Rewire then they should build in a series of presets for outputting multi-channel to outside DAW’s, otherwise fuck off.

Would it be too much to ask to add your existing virtual instruments into Reason, like the modules from Rebirth? Why even have a software connection to Rebirth from Reason on OS X if ReBirth isn’t a OS X native application? That’s like a casket with a satellite dish. Foist your abortion-ware on someone else.

Like I said, I thought I could ignore these limitations, but in following the virtualization of hardware model they virtualized almost all of the limitations of hardware as well (minus the most important, instantiation). There is so much promise to an app like Reason, but I fear this promise will never be realized unless they dump some of the “hardware baggage” and think about the totality of service that’s expected by their customers. Make it easy for musicians to create music with this technology not in spite of it.