Lunar Eclipse, 4/15/2014.

^Taken with my Sony Cyber-shot just now, right outside my apartment on campus.

I would have completely forgotten about the lunar eclipse, except that I needed to dash to my car to get some tax information (yes, I waited until the last minute). On my way back in, I noticed the moon was red. So I woke up Draya, who has to work at 5:30 AM, to come see it. She agreed it was worth it.

Anyway, I have a friend in Scottsbluff who can't see it through the clouds, and friends in Scotland who can't see it period because it's morning there. So here's the best of the pics I took.

How I Mine For Craft: The al-Ramadi Mosque and Mokattam Gardens

Welcome back! Last time, we saw the start of an Egyptian city, with ancient and medieval Egyptian characteristics.

Well, there's more.

Starting at the entrance to the bazaar and port under Mokattam Mountain, we will explore the al-Ramadi Mosque and Mokattam Gardens.

How I Mine For Craft?

I've taken up Minecraft.

I actually took up Minecraft a while back, but getting it on my laptop on Thursday night has guaranteed that my academic career is going to be sufficiently imperilled. So I might as well show you guys what's destroying my free time now!

Back when I was living with Caveman, I tried create this huge underground version of ancient Babylon, complete with artificial sunrise and everything. Making the cavern was really time-consuming, though, so I decided to not start there. Instead, I started in a desert area near a river, so I decided I was gonna rock ancient and medieval Egypt. (I say medieval because I wanna make bazaars and the Hanging Church and such.) It's not gonna be a literal copy; I'm not going to recreate the world map and such because that would be a bitch. But I'm going to make civilizations appropriate to each biome I come across, and I'm starting in Egypt.

Anyway, pics!

We're starting on the Wannabe Nile, looking at large statues of nondescript pharaohs carved into the side of a mountain. They each bear the crook and staff, symbols of royal Egyptian power, and they both have those pharaoh goatees going on.

LA face with a Chadron booty.

Nate and I were hanging out last night, rocking beyond reality, and this song came on the radio. I'm a fan of the Dandy Warhols, but I didn't recognize this song. The jangly guitars at the beginning are supes trippy, and were the perfect end to a very odd night.

Yeah, might as well talk about that night. The Sigma Tau Delta (OMG THAT SPELLS STD!!!) open mics at the Broker have been ongoing since I was an undergrad, but they've been wrecked lately by a particular group of teenagers. We can't actually forbid them from coming, or playing, but we've tried to figure out controls to filter out the worst. Everyone can only do two works now, no sign-ups are allowed after 9:00 PM, and as of last night that seems to have worked. There's a couple people that get up and sing a cappella rather badly, people that read truly shitty stories (," stated James), but it's not as bad as it was two weeks ago.

This is important, because two weeks ago it was bad. Like, if 75% of all the performers were Creepy Dave bad. It was so bad that Nate, Shanda and I had running MST3K-style commentary on Facebook about how bad it was. We also resolved that at the next one, we were all going to deliberately suck. Nate was going to read the lyrics from Rebecca Black's "Friday" in the style of William Shatner, and Shanda was going to read the lyrics from "Ice, Ice Baby." And I? I was going to perform "Baby Got Back," a la the Jonathan Coulton version:

Ancient Levantine ancestor worship, African masks, and the origins of drama and modern Judaism.

It's nothing like you'd imagine.

Of course, whoever made these masks were not Jews; "Jews" didn't exist yet, and wouldn't for thousands of years. But it's probably appropriate to consider that the religious society that made these masks were a part of the greater religious climate of the Middle East at that time.

In those days, the Middle East was the center of the world. Civilization started there; the package of crops and domesticated animals that would conquer the world was freshly put together there at that time and place, as wheat had just been deliberately cultivated a few thousand years ago and people started living in villages, towns and then cities. It was also not a desert: most of the Middle East was forested at that time, at least the parts near sources of water, and it hadn't succumbed to the human-led processes of deforestation and desertification yet.

Open mics.

A lady got up at an open mic and said she was going to read a poem she had written a long time ago. It sounded suspiciously like an email forward, especially when I heard her claim that certain folds stood for shit in the Bible, because you're forbidden by law from hitting the "forward" button on an email unless you mistakenly believe that America was founded as a Christian nation. So I Googled it, and sure enough it was an email forward debunked on Snopes.

See for yourself.

She even read the "Share this with your friends" crap. So she not only was full of shit about why an American flag is folded, but she was full of shit about it being something she wrote, and she wasn't even clever about hiding it.

And then Fish gets up and talks about period sex. I love this place.

HIstory Harvest Ad Final Take And This Time I Mean It.

After three different recording sessions, this is what we've finally got to broadcast. You'll hear it on the Alleycat and maybe some other stations if we get lucky.

Project 86 is looking for funding support for a new album.

It looks sweet as hell too.

They've been one of my favorite bands since high school. The 503 is replete with Project 86 references, up to and including putting their frontman Andrew Schwab in the comic for Strip 300. The Project 86 froams (sic) were the second messageboards I ever posted at. They are, all around, a fantastic band whose brilliance hasn't diminished with time. Not only that, but they did it all with very little label support (back when that was a necessity) and in a scene with very little acts that could hold a candle to them. (One of the few that could, Anberlin, recently announced that they're breaking up after a farewell tour.)

Basically, their music kills, killed and will kill to come. Just about anyone who listens to harder stuff has dug them after I played a few songs of theirs. And their latest crowd-funding project is a fan's dream. For $25, I'm getting a signed limited-edition copy of the album, and a bunch of additional stuff. If you look on the list of perks on the Indiegogo site, it's nuts just how much they're willing to do for their fans.

I really really hope this thing works, which is why I'm spreading the word. It's got 38 days left to work, and they're over halfway there, but I wanna make sure they reach their goal. I'm currently reading a book for class called Who Owns The Future? by Jaron Lanier, and one of the points he makes is that the digital network economy has hollowed out the middle class, and one of the places it started was the music industry. It's harder than ever before to eke out a living playing music, but I think and hope that Project 86 will be one of the rare acts that manages to not only pull it off, but to do so on their own, without having to rely on a label. The future of the music industry is going to increasingly look like this, and as a multi-medium artist myself, I want to support other artists trying to make it work.

Human Sacrifice to the Gods.

(WARNING: the pictures and text below get fairly graphic.)

A few months ago, my friend Tom made a post comparing the modern neoliberal system to the Aztec system of ritual human sacrifice. I don't know why, but last night I had a dream about it. It was troubling, and I couldn't sleep past 7:00 AM on a weekend when normally I sleep in 'til noon. I've been up since then, writing and drawing what comes below.

1. I dreamed I was a Tlaxcalan warrior. We fought against the Aztec Empire, and were defeated.

We were marched to Tenochtitlan, where their priests did worship to the gods. Sweet-smelling smoke billowed from the altars atop the great temples.

We will be sacrificed, and our bodies fed to Huitzilopochtli in the spirit world so that the end of the earth will be delayed. The people cheer, for they will taste our bodies in this world, and they hunger for it - they need the meat we will provide. We are foreigners to them, and defeated in battle. It is right and just that this should happen to us.

A picture I saw on /b/...

At first blush, it's pretty disrespectful; making duckface at the Vietnam Memorial?

But look at it a bit longer, and it kinda sums up the differences between the generation before mine and the generation after it. Some of those names on that wall weren't much older than her. They were compelled by their government to fight and die half the world away. She's... well, not.

Which means, in a sense, that the world has become a better place, I think. An inevitable aspect of better circumstances is a lack of understanding of the worse circumstances that preceded it. This is why the older generation is always like "Well in my day, we didn't have X, Y and Z..." and the younger generation blows them off. The young don't understand (unless they're in a job like mine, or at least paid attention in history class) and the old are frustrated that their sacrifices have created spoiled brats that can't relate to them. It's mutual incomprehensibility... a generation gap.

It's always been thus, and always shall it ever be. The girl in the photo will probably grow up and have children, and they'll have children, and maybe one day her grandkids will do whatever childish fad is popular at the feet of the Afghan War Memorial, a war where she remembers some of her friends' friends died, and she'll be on the other side. But I can't hate her; what she does is probably out of blithe ignorance, not malice or unconcern.

On guitars, progressions, rock, and worship music.

My friend Vera is hanging out at my place right now and we're playing guitar together.

I've been playing guitar since I was... I wanna say 16? So about 13 years now, and now I feel old. But she just got her guitar this year. She's learned a lot more in this year than I did my first year; I wasted most of my first year or so trying to emulate power metal songs without learning chords or anything but she can play songs already. Granted, they're cheesy three-chord praise and worship songs, but that's still pretty awesome. (For the record, the first songs I learned were also in that genre... and the same goes for a surprising number of musicians. Churches have started musical careers since time immemorial.)

Anyway, I'm giving her some advice because I can. Specifically, I'm teaching her about how progressions work. She started playing this worship song:



I recognize it because I've played it countless times about a decade ago when I was in worship bands. Anyway, apparently my knowledge of music theory's come to a point where I noticed the chord progression and pointed it out to her. I started playing the song above in A instead of D, and then I, without changing the chords, started singing this song:



They have the same progression. The tempo you play changes a bit, but the underlying infrastructure of both songs is the same.

A present I made my friend Brad for Christmas.

There was only one rule: no money could be spent whatsoever. Brad is big into Star Wars, so I figured I'd make him a portrait made out of the opening crawls of all three Star Wars movies. (I refuse to acknowledge the existence of the prequels.)

Anyway, this is it to the left. My friend Vera was watching me draw this at the Bean Broker, and seemed to like it, so hopefully he will too.