So there's this small network of people who always see each other at parties in certain geographic locations. The idea is that, if you've seen the same random subset of people over the course of a decade or more in the same sort of situation, they must have something in common with you at least. Occam's razor and shit.

Among those people is a dude playing records in Louisville tonight. Derek Plaslaiko. He goes on at the second 1:20 tonight.

The car didn't explode this time. It did hiss at me though, draining strange alien green blood. I think it's appropriate that it's green. My punishment for any offenses against the universe is to take the form of "car."

By the way, Derek rocked the place.

Do I still love my Volvo?

Let's just say that I am paying for my sins of engaging the Turbo. I should stick to playing Burnout and the like. Like a good squirrel, I have been socking away nuts for winter. I know that business will slow down (not a lot of call for T-Shirts in February, ya know...) and things will get lean. So, hence, squirrel-like activities.

A sequence of exploding, fizzing things starting with a radiator cap, then the heater core, then the radiator, and finally the head gasket has, well, impacted me in the general area of nut storage.

With hard work, I can get back up to zero in a few months.

Sigh.

Mark Farina. Nashville. Friday night October 14, 2005. Good stuff. I was surprised to see a whole floor full of people actually dancing. Farina took it down to 80-90 BMP funky stuff, acid jazz, hip house, broken funk.

I found myself thinking, "I should bring this guy up to Louisville and we could get that strange and secret venue in the West End, and..." *SLAP*

No more parties.

I'm like a junkie, I always come back to the bass and the excuse that anything which brings people together is a social Good. Of course, this ignores the friction which destroys the lives of those who don't get to the center of the Tootsie Roll, the actual junkies. My utopianism in terms of musical oriented social gatherings has been burned out.

Although this Technological Singularity thing looks interesting...

Two screenprinters sick and a 1400 horse catalog to lay out. Gotta finish a sign on the roof of the Fish House. Time to get back to work.

List of badass anime (the 2% that doesn't suck)

Samurai Champloo
Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex
Basilisk (kinda like Ninja Scroll)
The two Ghost in the Shell films (not seen Innocence yet? go check it)

the jury is still out on everything else.

Need a fix of excellent beats?

Check out Jerry Abstract (Seattle via Detroit) - his designs and mixes are both superb.
www.fixelplix.com

just some random links

Ceding your queen - hubris at it's finest. When I was a kid my dad taught me to play chess. I rarely beat him but later on could take most of the high school kids. I never played more than one or two moves ahead, just tried to feel it. Whenever I met anyone who knew patterns, or studied it, or knew what the hell a gambit was, they'd kick my ass. But I could destroy some novices. So when I was teaching someone else to play I'd just cede the queen and then punk them out.

Once I was at a party- like back more than a decade ago, and someone called me out. We drank, and I beat them. Then his buddy challenged me. It went in the sequence of- have a drink, play a game. The drunker I got the less I looked ahead and the easier it got. I got 5 wins and cleaned the house and got loud-asshole drunk. Then the last dude at the party sat down. He was ranked like 700-something in the world. I could tell in 4 moves that this dude knew the game on a level I would never grasp. I could see that I was fucked unrecoverably already, and I learned more dodging that guy and playing for a draw than in any other game before or since. I didn't get the draw, I lost.

So I have worked with vector graphics since the first layout programs in the world, but I never learned flash. I stopped writing programs when the projects got to complex to knock out in the last night before they were due. I grew up playing with lead type (it's fun to melt!) - and collect story ideas but never write. I started a small business in the most bloody simpleminded fashion possible - I just opened the doors and winged it.

For the past decade I haven't done much but survive and try to get my balance. When I look behind me I see a trail of unforced errors and laziness. But I also see a number of excellent internalized lessons.

I guess the point is: maybe at this point, a little more planning and foresight is required, not just trying to work with the moment and feel the flows.