Diagnosed With Robotulism
Raptured by Gobots
Two-dimensional descriptions fail to capture the true awesomeness of Friday's Robochrist show, and I can only assign mere words to the concepts that you, dear reader, must flesh out in your own mind. Maybe I'm being a bit exaggerative here - and it is certainly possible that the element of surprise played a role in heightening the entertainment level of the event to an inane plateau. Anyhow, here's what happened:
The first performance was given by a band named "Captured! by Robots", which consists of one live performer, whose guts are hanging out, backed by a band of robots who are triggered to perform on various instruments.
Just as the picture shows, "DRMBOT 0110" plays kick, snare, ride and hi-hat, while "AUTOMATOM" takes care of the rest of the kit. The programming is alarmingly precise; you could be mesmerised by the single kick drum playing rapid triplets during one of the band's many Black Metal tangents, if it weren't for the equally distracting absurdities of every other -bot playing in perfect unison.
"GTRBOT 666", likely named after the unfortunate number of the emptied-out briefcase he stands in, is prone to vicious anti-semitic outbursts. Although, in GTRBOT's defense, his anti-semitism is more anti-human beingism than anything else.
"The Ape Which Hath No Name", and "Son of Ape Which Hath No Name" are slow-talking stuffed apes who learn valuable lessons about life, love, and the importance of exercise during their soul-searching onstage moments. As a matter of fact, the whole reason they are performing music is "to get strong muscles".
The website refers to the band's brass section as "The Headless Hornsmen" but, at the show we attended, the bodies were furnished with cardboard cutouts of the heads of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. I'm glad a splatter-core robo-Black Metal band can muster the civic virtue to include satire of modern American political figures in its performance.
"JBOT", the lone sentient being on stage, performs the tasks of triggering the robotic cacophany, playing along on his axe/microkorg, and providing modulated voices for the robots during the between-song breaks. He also happens to be sloppily eviscerated, and makes the audience painfully aware of that fact during his exercise song, which involves quite a bit of gyrating and lunging of the entrails.
Captured! by Robots covers a whole spectrum of music ripe for parody, including insanely fast grindcore, early Chili Peppers/Mr. Bungle-style porn slap, and 70s prog-rock wankfoolery. Lots of rapping about Moses, lots of high-impact aerobics, lots of referring to the "Speed Food Pyramid" for suggested dietary intake, lots of dancing "like a stuffed animal". During one of the funkier songs, some drug-addled girl started running through the audience, randomly crashing into people and laughing hysterically, and nearly knocked Jackie and I over. For some reason, this was much more entertaining than the cow-steroid injected jock punks at the AKAs/TSOL show indiscriminately ramming into people in an attempt to get us pussies to start a goddamned mosh pit, already.
Stigmetabots
Then came Stigmeta, a "Christian metal" band which Jos--I mean "zzzalgern00n", my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend's brother - and owner of the famous Eukanuba show Pomeranian "Caligula" - plays bass in. Their performance really served as the musical backdrop for the wave of robotic destruction that was going on just feet away from the stage. Cordoned off was a large section of the parking lot, populated with various mutant crane-looking mechanisms outfitted with flame throwers and chainsaw arms, calibrated to annihilate every non-robotic entity in their paths. In the middle of the arena was a giant aluminum pipe crucifix with a television mounted in the center, which played repetitive snippets from a certain televangelist (maybe of "farting preacher" fame?) over the funniest robotic techno wah-wah song you've ever heard. "Wake up!!"
Quite climactically, during the course of the show, the crucifix was lifted up and crushed, and a watery red substance spilled out into the crowd's path. In the meantime, Stigmeta was blasting along with their thrash-metal approximations of Stryper in the Bush era, with lyrics like "You fuck with the U.S.A., you're fucking with Jesus Christ" (or something like that). It was the perfect mood music, but I'd probably want to see them play without the natural disasters of fake blood pouring out of crucifi(xes), fire shooting out of robotic appendages, and the senseless crushing of playskool trucks distracting me.
It was over all too soon, and I felt slightly violated in the sense that I had experienced an evolved monster truck rally, but those qualms passed soon after I realized how entertaining the whole experience was. Such a pyrotechnics display probably took months of pre-planning and stressing over details, and I'm in awe of the technical prowess of everyone involved. We're going to try to make it out to Captured! by Robots' next show - which I think is going to be in December.
Cal Worthington wants to see you at the show!
Moogle's Girth
Google Earth is the most interesting application I've installed on my computer in the past couple of years. Everyone I've shown it to has been tempted to sit down and fool with it for hours on end and, although it seems like a civil libertarian's nightmare, its immediate utility is that it can be used in a similar way as Mapquest. So far, I've zoomed in on all of my old homes, found the small beach town in Italy that my family always visits, discovered the pixelation used to distort the White House, seen the Eiffel Tower in all of its flatness, and gawked at all of the strange looking buildings in Red Square, Moscow.
It's basically a composite rendition of the entire globe using hundreds of thousands of tiny satellite images of Earth, each of which you can zoom in to about a half mile's distance with minimal detail loss in some of the more populated areas. As for places like Antarctica, not much detail is provided, but Google Earth's capabilities are sufficient enough to compensate for the lack of to-the-millimeter precision of every penguin's gonoids. For instance, you could navigate to a dense urban area and check the box marked "Dining", and lo and behold: small "fork and knife" icons begin to populate the screen, complete with name and phone number for each establishment.
Click on the placemark you've set on your home address, click "Directions: from here", then click your desired destination's ": to here" option, and a purple line appears, connecting one location to the other - as well as the street-by-street rundown, in the left column of the window. The 3-D buildings feature is pretty nutters, too. You can change the angle of view, so you can have a sea-level perspective of a virtual city complete with grey block buildings at supposedly accurate heights. In addition to that, you can toggle the display options to allow the pinpointing of banks, motels, malls, bars, schools, road names, parks, ad infinitum. I'm still amazed by the fact that I can just scroll for a couple of minutes, using a couple of left clicks and my mouse wheel, to explore mountains which have haunted me since childhood with their anonymity and unpleasant jaggedness.
There's also an internal message board feature, where people can post their favorite placemarks. Among things people have managed to discover are a lake that looks like a giant circuit board, an enormous Ford logo in the bottom right hand portion of Michigan, and a massive irrigation system in China.
It's truly amazing that something like this is absolutely free for public use. Apparently, a version for use on macs is under development. I wonder what sinister machinations Google has in mind for all of this wonderful personal data they're collecting from me.
Once you're done with that, you can check out Google Moon!
M.T. Hammer
The Mary Timony show was pretty remarkable, as well. It consisted of just her and her drummer onstage, which invokes unnecessary images of the White Stripes, or of Mates of State - both of which, I think, Mary surpasses in the melodic department by far. Some of the more twinkly riffs reminded me of Helium, but her solo project is much more straightforward and much less orchestral. Her boyfriend/drummer is certainly no DRMBOT 0110/AUTOMATOM, but he's incredibly spry behind the kit, and manages to fill the sparser areas of each song very tastefully. He also happens to be the guitarist/vocalist for a jittery D.C. indie band named The Medications.
Congratulations, you made it through another one of my posts!
And, for those of you who don't care to wade through lj-cut'd text:
A beleaguered citizen of the future says, "We Need a Fourth Law Of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife!"
Patricia Heaton, Ray's wife on Everybody Loves Raymond, is very vocal in the anti-choice movement, with a defacto sympathy for the Republican party. Here's an interview with her, in which she provides a perfectly good excuse for being, like, the only Republican in Hollywood.
Here's an open letter to the Kansas City School Board. Apparently, the decision to counterbalance the "liberal bias" of Evolutionary theory - which is more of a commonly understood fact, at this point in human advancement - with theology masquerading as "Intelligent Design" theory, is kind of controversial. So much so, in fact, that people who believe the universe was created by all sorts of things - flying spaghetti monsters, for instance - want their equal time in the Biology classrooms of Kansas City.
I've been meaning to post a link to this "Crazy eBay mom" site for quite a while. I waited too long, I see, since the original site is down, and the browser is redirected to a new version of the site, complete with annoying stripe of text and insufferable Paris Hilton pop-up ad. Anyhow, here it is - I hope it's still entertaining.
Two-dimensional descriptions fail to capture the true awesomeness of Friday's Robochrist show, and I can only assign mere words to the concepts that you, dear reader, must flesh out in your own mind. Maybe I'm being a bit exaggerative here - and it is certainly possible that the element of surprise played a role in heightening the entertainment level of the event to an inane plateau. Anyhow, here's what happened:
The first performance was given by a band named "Captured! by Robots", which consists of one live performer, whose guts are hanging out, backed by a band of robots who are triggered to perform on various instruments.
Just as the picture shows, "DRMBOT 0110" plays kick, snare, ride and hi-hat, while "AUTOMATOM" takes care of the rest of the kit. The programming is alarmingly precise; you could be mesmerised by the single kick drum playing rapid triplets during one of the band's many Black Metal tangents, if it weren't for the equally distracting absurdities of every other -bot playing in perfect unison.
"GTRBOT 666", likely named after the unfortunate number of the emptied-out briefcase he stands in, is prone to vicious anti-semitic outbursts. Although, in GTRBOT's defense, his anti-semitism is more anti-human beingism than anything else.
"The Ape Which Hath No Name", and "Son of Ape Which Hath No Name" are slow-talking stuffed apes who learn valuable lessons about life, love, and the importance of exercise during their soul-searching onstage moments. As a matter of fact, the whole reason they are performing music is "to get strong muscles".
The website refers to the band's brass section as "The Headless Hornsmen" but, at the show we attended, the bodies were furnished with cardboard cutouts of the heads of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. I'm glad a splatter-core robo-Black Metal band can muster the civic virtue to include satire of modern American political figures in its performance.
"JBOT", the lone sentient being on stage, performs the tasks of triggering the robotic cacophany, playing along on his axe/microkorg, and providing modulated voices for the robots during the between-song breaks. He also happens to be sloppily eviscerated, and makes the audience painfully aware of that fact during his exercise song, which involves quite a bit of gyrating and lunging of the entrails.
Captured! by Robots covers a whole spectrum of music ripe for parody, including insanely fast grindcore, early Chili Peppers/Mr. Bungle-style porn slap, and 70s prog-rock wankfoolery. Lots of rapping about Moses, lots of high-impact aerobics, lots of referring to the "Speed Food Pyramid" for suggested dietary intake, lots of dancing "like a stuffed animal". During one of the funkier songs, some drug-addled girl started running through the audience, randomly crashing into people and laughing hysterically, and nearly knocked Jackie and I over. For some reason, this was much more entertaining than the cow-steroid injected jock punks at the AKAs/TSOL show indiscriminately ramming into people in an attempt to get us pussies to start a goddamned mosh pit, already.
Stigmetabots
Then came Stigmeta, a "Christian metal" band which Jos--I mean "zzzalgern00n", my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend's brother - and owner of the famous Eukanuba show Pomeranian "Caligula" - plays bass in. Their performance really served as the musical backdrop for the wave of robotic destruction that was going on just feet away from the stage. Cordoned off was a large section of the parking lot, populated with various mutant crane-looking mechanisms outfitted with flame throwers and chainsaw arms, calibrated to annihilate every non-robotic entity in their paths. In the middle of the arena was a giant aluminum pipe crucifix with a television mounted in the center, which played repetitive snippets from a certain televangelist (maybe of "farting preacher" fame?) over the funniest robotic techno wah-wah song you've ever heard. "Wake up!!"
Quite climactically, during the course of the show, the crucifix was lifted up and crushed, and a watery red substance spilled out into the crowd's path. In the meantime, Stigmeta was blasting along with their thrash-metal approximations of Stryper in the Bush era, with lyrics like "You fuck with the U.S.A., you're fucking with Jesus Christ" (or something like that). It was the perfect mood music, but I'd probably want to see them play without the natural disasters of fake blood pouring out of crucifi(xes), fire shooting out of robotic appendages, and the senseless crushing of playskool trucks distracting me.
It was over all too soon, and I felt slightly violated in the sense that I had experienced an evolved monster truck rally, but those qualms passed soon after I realized how entertaining the whole experience was. Such a pyrotechnics display probably took months of pre-planning and stressing over details, and I'm in awe of the technical prowess of everyone involved. We're going to try to make it out to Captured! by Robots' next show - which I think is going to be in December.
Cal Worthington wants to see you at the show!
Moogle's Girth
Google Earth is the most interesting application I've installed on my computer in the past couple of years. Everyone I've shown it to has been tempted to sit down and fool with it for hours on end and, although it seems like a civil libertarian's nightmare, its immediate utility is that it can be used in a similar way as Mapquest. So far, I've zoomed in on all of my old homes, found the small beach town in Italy that my family always visits, discovered the pixelation used to distort the White House, seen the Eiffel Tower in all of its flatness, and gawked at all of the strange looking buildings in Red Square, Moscow.
It's basically a composite rendition of the entire globe using hundreds of thousands of tiny satellite images of Earth, each of which you can zoom in to about a half mile's distance with minimal detail loss in some of the more populated areas. As for places like Antarctica, not much detail is provided, but Google Earth's capabilities are sufficient enough to compensate for the lack of to-the-millimeter precision of every penguin's gonoids. For instance, you could navigate to a dense urban area and check the box marked "Dining", and lo and behold: small "fork and knife" icons begin to populate the screen, complete with name and phone number for each establishment.
Click on the placemark you've set on your home address, click "Directions: from here", then click your desired destination's ": to here" option, and a purple line appears, connecting one location to the other - as well as the street-by-street rundown, in the left column of the window. The 3-D buildings feature is pretty nutters, too. You can change the angle of view, so you can have a sea-level perspective of a virtual city complete with grey block buildings at supposedly accurate heights. In addition to that, you can toggle the display options to allow the pinpointing of banks, motels, malls, bars, schools, road names, parks, ad infinitum. I'm still amazed by the fact that I can just scroll for a couple of minutes, using a couple of left clicks and my mouse wheel, to explore mountains which have haunted me since childhood with their anonymity and unpleasant jaggedness.
There's also an internal message board feature, where people can post their favorite placemarks. Among things people have managed to discover are a lake that looks like a giant circuit board, an enormous Ford logo in the bottom right hand portion of Michigan, and a massive irrigation system in China.
It's truly amazing that something like this is absolutely free for public use. Apparently, a version for use on macs is under development. I wonder what sinister machinations Google has in mind for all of this wonderful personal data they're collecting from me.
Once you're done with that, you can check out Google Moon!
M.T. Hammer
The Mary Timony show was pretty remarkable, as well. It consisted of just her and her drummer onstage, which invokes unnecessary images of the White Stripes, or of Mates of State - both of which, I think, Mary surpasses in the melodic department by far. Some of the more twinkly riffs reminded me of Helium, but her solo project is much more straightforward and much less orchestral. Her boyfriend/drummer is certainly no DRMBOT 0110/AUTOMATOM, but he's incredibly spry behind the kit, and manages to fill the sparser areas of each song very tastefully. He also happens to be the guitarist/vocalist for a jittery D.C. indie band named The Medications.
Congratulations, you made it through another one of my posts!
And, for those of you who don't care to wade through lj-cut'd text:
A beleaguered citizen of the future says, "We Need a Fourth Law Of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife!"
Patricia Heaton, Ray's wife on Everybody Loves Raymond, is very vocal in the anti-choice movement, with a defacto sympathy for the Republican party. Here's an interview with her, in which she provides a perfectly good excuse for being, like, the only Republican in Hollywood.
Here's an open letter to the Kansas City School Board. Apparently, the decision to counterbalance the "liberal bias" of Evolutionary theory - which is more of a commonly understood fact, at this point in human advancement - with theology masquerading as "Intelligent Design" theory, is kind of controversial. So much so, in fact, that people who believe the universe was created by all sorts of things - flying spaghetti monsters, for instance - want their equal time in the Biology classrooms of Kansas City.
I've been meaning to post a link to this "Crazy eBay mom" site for quite a while. I waited too long, I see, since the original site is down, and the browser is redirected to a new version of the site, complete with annoying stripe of text and insufferable Paris Hilton pop-up ad. Anyhow, here it is - I hope it's still entertaining.