I’m not annoyed by any individual dubstep song.  Even that such a word exists hardly bothers me.  The premise of a singular sound that an artist pigeonholes himself into does irritate me to no end, but that runs in every genre from the very real Flanders Recorder Quartet on up to Dimmu Borgir.

I’m also amused.  I was old enough in the 1980s to remember that brand of heavy metal.  I always knew the sound had roots in my parent’s generation yet was somehow made dumber.  I listened anyway.

Hair metal was almost manufactured to be extremely accessible.  The drum beats were spaced out from each other but played hard (ie, Twisted Sister, RATT, Quiet Riot).  Basslines could frequently consist of very few notes so long as the rhythm was intact (Falling to Pieces by Faith No more).   Everything else was played aggressively, and the quality of lyrics was a joke.  Those bands followed paths blazed by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick and Jimi Hendrix.

Hair metal looked like sheer stupidity to our parents, who had seen masters of the craft also step forward to pioneer the sound.  As all popular music should, to be honest.

Dubstep does all of these same things.  Sure, there aren’t five guys in leather chaps parading around a stage any more.  A lot of these guys look like nerds when you can even see them from behind their gadgets and/or masks.

Yet, dubstep comes on the heels of acts like Moby, the Crystal Method and the Prodigy, who in turn followed the likes of Thomas Dolby and Gary Numan.  Older fans of electronica listen to this stuff with the same disbelief that our Hendrix-loving parents felt listening to Cinderella.

Dubstep has also set aside the work of electronica’s forefathers in favor of producing electronic cock rock.  There are long passages between the drums, overly simplified bass rhythms and distorted melodies.  The tools are different but the method remains the same.

Do you think this is false?  Imagine, then, the rhythm section of a 1980s heavy metal band has been asked to cover a Skrillex song.  Are the drums going to be that difficult for the heavy metal star?  Does the bass player need to do much more than bend a string rhythmically?   Can’t you even imagine the keyboard player frantically looking for the “Atari Dropped in Bourbon” patch on his instrument?

Close your eyes.  Picture that scene and imagine what happens after the drummer counts out the rhythm.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  It’s not hard to imagine at all.

Dubstep has also achieved the honor of angering this generation’s parents.  We’re wondering why we waited for Fatboy Slim to fall off the map if you were just going to replace him with this crap.

My congratulations to the new generation of music fans.  They actually remade hair metal in their own image without blatantly aping this long-dead trend.  You’re even pissing off your parents in interesting ways.

You did such a great job that you even fooled yourselves.  Keep up the good work.

The guy is great at what he does.

If anyone in Austin is looking to hire a local magician or even just see a video of one in action then please check out Black Bert’s site.

““I don’t think we gained anything from Durbin,” said Robert Donovan, U.S. assistant treasurer for McDonald’s, at the ATM, Debit and Prepaid Forum.”

There are a lot more details in the article, which I urge you to read from its proper source.

So, the banks are legally not allowed to set their own prices on debit card transactions.  Instead, two businesses – possibly more – have been counting on Durbin (D) to boost their own profit margins at another business’s expenses.  Our leaders in Washington agreed, presumably stating it was for everyone’s good.

Is it?  The businesses want the service at the price they named regardless of what it costs the bank to process.  Out of curiosity, which of you is able to set their own price at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart?

Worse – is it really in our own interest to cheer our leaders for demonizing and injuring some giant businesses for the benefit of other giant businesses?  You know the guy is just going to stand on his record of being “anti-corporate” after pulling this slimy con game.

And what of the banks?

• Hated by the population they provide services to for daring to charge for those services.
• Demonized and hobbled by the government.
• Openly abused by the businesses their services support.

I’m sure that will work great right now, but what happens in six months?  No one thinks this can end well.  The problem is that no one is thinking beyond their own hate and fashionable anti-corporate sentiment.   The banks aren’t saints, but I’m having a harder time finding any moral party in this event.

I left school dreading the last bell of the day so that other people would not need to reach up or speak out. The teachers got in on the act when I turned 10. It couldn’t be helped then, either. They were having feminine problems. Please contact McKinley Elementary in Wyandotte, Michigan if you have any more questions about these events.

It kept happening, for the record, well into my twenties.  No one could help committing violence.  They could not help the knives or the broken bones or the beatings or whatever else they inflicted on me.  They were just not as lucky as me.

So, I have been watching the Occupy movement with dread. I do not want the people working for their share to live in fear due to the unaccountable “unlucky” just outside their doors.  Too many people in the Occupy movement seem to stand for the following line of thought: If I can not have the money then no one can.  Too many others seem to feel that we are are all entitled, and I fear for that more.

Entitlement does not stop with money.  It never has.  It never does.  It never will.

Entitlement will always extend to a second mindset.  The society that is born entitled to money will spread that entitlement to other aspects of life.  Feeling a lack of self-esteem?  Earn respect in a gang.  Feeling lonely?  A six pack bought with scrounged dollars is all the consent the entitled man needs.  This isn’t theory or any repeated talking point, but a way of life I consider myself lucky to have survived.  I hope never to live in that kind of filth again.

“But that’s not happening!” could rightfully be the words any critical thinker should rightfully be thinking right now.  Except, that Human Events has been keeping tabs on the various rapes – especially the willfully unreported ones - occurring on various Occupy sites  (source).   Please bear in mind that Human Events is horribly partisan.  Try not to read the comments, either.  The contempt for other humans there is on par with the juvenile trash to be found on Yahoo News or the Daily Kos.

Back to the point.  No one deserves to be attacked like that.  Every individual, even the cradle-to-grave entitled, makes his or her own choices.   This puts the responsibility of the rapists to answer for their actions.  However, if the Occupiers insist on collective rights then I must insist on viewing them as a collective.  These attacks are only the start of their entitlement collective.  They are also to be expected under the entitlement mentality, as is the protection of the rapist at the cost of his victims.

The third mindset is what you see in the European riots.  The entitled will destroy a thing simply because they can not have it.   When, and I do mean when, America reaches this state, I will hold the Occupiers and every human being who willfully supported them responsible.

Count me out of this collective.  Do whatever it takes to revise that 99% figure.  Most assuredly, the committees and masses of underemployed college students can handle this one math problem:

Please solve this problem then send word to whatever necessary committees will revise the 99% slogan to something more accurate.

The Occupy movement is neither entitled nor allowed to count my presence among the people they claim to speak for.

I have been pushing myself to remember things.  These things were lost to the day-to-day life of being a grown-up.  They were lost to my regrets of having not acted in favor of what I believed was a more patient, long-term commitment to myself.  So I have been trying to remember.

I remember one year, the thing I wanted more than anything else for Christmas a copy of Borland’s C+ Compiler.  I lost many Friday nights to a beat up, cigarette-stained computer and learned to chip away pieces of code, one function at a time.  I remember the pile of books from outlet stores, or from the computer show (on opposing weekends to the gun and knife show) at the Gibraltar Trade Center.  The books were outdated but not yet obsolete.  I remember coding by the light of a CRT monitor, augmented sometimes by a scented candle or a dim fluorescent light from around the corner.

Was that what I loved?  I loved doing it very dearly.  It was still a means to a bigger end.

I loved building worlds and telling stories.  I loved telling the machine what to do so that the machine might some day immerse an audience in a work of fiction that I had built.  This was a passion started in 1984 that began to find its maturity in 1993.  This was another tool, such as my drums and my paintbrushes and the scraps of fiction that filled my bedroom.  They were all tools for something wonderful with a unified theory that I only believe I only recently learned to name.

This all stayed with me all the way up until the day I became a full-time wage slave.  ”I have made it,” I thought on that day.   Then, I had two jobs.  One was working on almost all levels of web design and the other writing creatively for a video game.  ”Hell, yes.” I shouted to myself.  It was a literal shout.  It was a cry of joy.  I was creating.  I was blazing forward in life.  Then, it stopped.

It atrophed.  The details aren’t important.  It atrophed and I bear the full responsibility for it.

I wrote a horror podcast for a while, and will probably start it up again soon if only for Halloween.  I even made contact with some heroes of mine in ghastly arts.  I used to admire them for their work, and still do.  They have put a second layer of being really awesome people on top of that admiration.

I’m trying to remember the punk I was at 20.  Not just the one with technicolor hair who, one night, would see Lords of Acid play a concert and the next cruise around a parking lot blasting Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos to irritate the neighbors.  The lonely, angry, bitter punk who saw his future in a blank IDE.  It’s not difficult to remember that sense of bitter hope.  Atrophe torments a soul in ways that stagnation could never touch.

So, here I go again.  Pumpkin scented incense, bad lighting, and two not-stained CRT monitors.  My five years as a smoker are eight years in the past.  I am learning to take fuller advantage of HTML5, stuff we used to call DHTML, and databases.  I am coding a tool that will help me tell fantastic stories.  It will help other people tell their wild tales.

Horror movies, Zombina and the Skeletones, ghouls made of fabric hanging from the walls, a five cup coffee maker, <canvas>, javascript and MySQL queries.  Perhaps, even, an expression of the unified theory I couldn’t name in high school.

Screaming in code.  Hopefully, again, in triumph.

I had a nightmare around two years ago.  In this dream, I beaten and arrested over something trivial.  Nothing this depraved has ever actually happened to me.  Situations close enough to it have occurred.  The police did not join in the festivities, but they did nothing to stop them.

Two years ago, that nightmare inspired my first vision of this Apocalypse.  That bad dream would not only inspire a lot of notes for a story that never took off but would be a crucial element of this adventurer’s journey.  The only problem was that it was an aimless journey.  I knew what I wanted to say but had no reason to say it through this character or the world built around him.

The time between that first attempt and now has been wonderful in that I have made a lot of great friends.  I have been finding strengths I thought were lost to the worst of times.  In other parts of life, I have been fighting against slow, painful atrophy.  It was in one of those moments of near desolation that I thought it might be clever to translate my worst feelings into a post-apocalyptic tale.

If I’m going to wallow in it then I still want something in return for the effort.

I remembered this character and the world built around him.  Flashes of trials, enemies, friends, pain and triumph have been coming to me.  The events leading up to the story were suddenly re-imaged with a stronger purpose than to get the story going.

I bought a small, hardbound notebook to serve as an honest bible for this tale.   New characters, motives, organizations and events are coming to mind almost faster than I can find to make notes of them.

Knowing me, this may well fizzle out.  Odds are great if my past is any indication.  I still need to finish project:whiteworm — something only a handful of friends have seen detailed.  Some other shiny project may capture the energy that is going into this.

Also, I’m supposed to be on a break from writing to work on all the parts of life that hit terminal atrophy.  Oops.

Its presence in his record collection – and please remember these were the days of big vinyl disks – kept my hands and curiosity at bay.   That album cover is burned into my mind like a smoldering scar.

Those who know me can understand why it’s much less frightening to see Fred Kreuger in a nearly perfect mirror image of the same album cover.  ”Freddy’s Greatest Hits” recently came to my attention by way of a blog devoted to the foolhardy days of vinyl.   Here are the covers, side by side.

Okay, so right now it only looks a prom photo with two people who settled on desperate, last-minute dates.  I’ll put a different perspective on this.

That smirk on Freddy’s face is as good as a bloody fingerprint.  He knows he’s up to something.  I’ll bet it’s this.

That is, except for “lite” browsers on mobile devices, gaming consoles, or anything else that lacks the inherent capacity to store a respectable mp3 collection.  These browsers can play YouTube videos.  They can play the flash/mp3 players found on many podcast sites.  There has to be some way to play mp3s off the cloud services.

My collection is at 35 gigabytes of all legal mp3s.  I predict it would top 60 gigabytes if I were to rip my entire cd library and pull the remaining audiobooks from my old laptop.   My desktop computer has a half a terabyte sitting in it right now, along with a removable half-terabyte hard drive to go between all of the family’s devices.  My working laptop has more than enough space for what I want to hear.

My cell phone and my Wii have much more limited space.  One “cloud” music service requires Android 2.2 — not unreasonable for people with reasonable smart phones.  Regrettably, I got stuck with HTC’s bait-and-switch, unloved Eris.  Thankfully, Amazon’s cloud service only requires version 1.6. My Eris is rocking the Amazon player.

Through Amazon, I will at least be able to plug my Eris into both a power outlet and an external speaker.   This isn’t terrible.  They are offering a free upgrade to a 20 Gigabyte cloud account.  I wanted the new OhGr album “Undeveloped.”  A deal was made and we are all happy.  The cloud service they offer is, for the most part, very nice so far.

The currently free cloud service is currently useless to me.  Amazon’s service offers less space but actually supports enough of what I use to work.  Amazon has my business.

Other services might look for new ways to play mp3 files.  Really.  It can’t be THAT difficult.  Support the family video game console, at least.

This would also be a great time to extend my middle finger to eMusic, who put such a leash on their offerings as to become thoroughly unusable.  I’m saving a lot of money only buying albums I want, and getting much better support for my paid downloads.

This is also a great chance to wonder aloud what in the hell Google and Verizon are doing letting HTC do this to their brands.  Likewise, it’s doubtful I’ll be buying another HTC phone.  Ever.