Your Greatest Fear

Instead of reviewing something or sharing my thoughts on something today, I'd like to ask you all a question.

What is your greatest fear and how do you react to it? Other than my curiosity, I don't really have a reason as to why I'd like to know.

To be fair, I'll share my fears and why! I am primarily afraid of two things, and they're both fairly irrational fears. I can't stand mold, and I don't like high edges. The high edges seems a bit less irrational simply because falling off the edge could kill me. The mold is definitely irrational, though.

Why am I afraid of mold? I think it stems from a traumatic (if you could call it that) childhood experience. I had somehow managed to take two pieces of bread out of a bread bag and begin eating half of them before realizing they were mostly dark green. Just the thought of it makes my hands begin to sweat.

So yeah! What is your greatest fear, and what is your reaction when you encounter it?

Really cool Lego Sandcrawler!

Just felt like sharing this really cool picture of a Jawa sandcrawler made from over 10,000 lego blocks. Must have taken the guy quite some time! You can find the rest of the pictures and a video over at this DVICE article.

Haunted Collector SyFy Series: My First Look

So the SyFy channel has this new series called Haunted Collector. They run in blocks of an hour on TV, but I opted to watch it on Hulu, so I only ended up with a few commercials expense in order to give this show a trial run. Now I'm not a huge believer of the whole ghost hunting scene, but I still watch these types of shows from time to time just because.

I'll just leave a summary of the show so as to not spoil anything. I've only seen the first episode at this point, so I can't speak for the series as a whole, but I can throw a guess that it'll be very similar with each of the episodes because that's just how reality series work. The show follows a dad, his two kids, and a few crew members as they go around the country trying to help haunted houses by determining what item in the house is causing the haunting. So what do they do? They run around a house with various "high-tech" ghost hunting equipment and complete their "investigation" within a few days time as suspenseful music and clever editing try to keep you interested.

Overall, it was no more entertaining to watch than some of the already successful ghost hunting shows (Paranormal State, Ghost Hunters, etc.). Some of the parts seem heavily scripted, but then what reality TV show doesn't feel this way?

I'd watch it again, but I kind of favor the cast of Paranormal State over this show's team of people. None of these shows really contribute to furthering my belief in ghosts though!

Thanks for reading!

Custom Non-SONOIO Physical Release

So today I thought I'd talk a little bit about a lesser known "band" called SONOIO. (If you can call it that, being that it's pretty much a one man show.) He was previously a keyboardist for Nine Inch Nails while they were touring, but now that he's away from those shows, he's able to freely work on his own music.

He's put out two albums thus far, one called Blue, and one called Non-Sonoio. Blue is his first set of songs put out in CD/digital form. He was also cool enough to put out a limited run of signed physical copies for it. I was fortunate enough to get one of those. As for Non-Sonoio, it's a bit different. He hasn't put out a physical version of it, as it's comprised of remixes from the Blue album. Both albums are awesome in their own way.

So that may seem a bit random and such, but the point I was trying to reach was that I received a gift from a friend today. Being that there is no physical copy of the remix album, a friend of mine took the time to make us both custom unofficial physical releases, complete with a cool little booklet and a printed CD to match the Blue album.

Official Blue (Top) Unofficial Non-Sonoio (Bottom)

Can hardly even tell the difference between the two, yeah? I thought it was really well done

Anyway, that's enough rambling for today.

If you'd like to check out SONOIO, head over to www.sonoio.org 

There are quite a few songs available for free. Go listen!

Private Trackers Mean Work!

I just recently received an invite to an unnamed private tracker site. I'm not new to the world of private trackers by any means, but this one runs so efficiently that seeding is quite difficult to manage. Today I've put quite a bit of effort into coming up with a way to get established on the site.

Like any decent tracker, your seeding ratio is important to keep yourself as a good member. Some strict ratios coupled with inactivity restrictions leave any member that is new to the site to work hard in order to stay a member. My solution? I found an old CD which, at first glance, didn't appear to be in the list of available torrents and proceeded to rip it, abiding by the vast catalogs of rules the tracker wishes you to use to name and rip your files. With FLAC ripping taking quite some time as is, I very quickly invested a few hours time into this project, but completed it nonetheless. Yay!...right?...not quite.

Ripping in progress.

After pouring my time into learning the proper use of the rules and completing my torrent, ready to upload, I discovered that the CD had already been uploaded a long time ago. Guess I just searched for the wrong keywords or skipped over the existing torrent when looking to see if it already existed. Argh!

All-in-all, I don't feel as though my time was entirely wasted. While I'd have loved to have had that extra boost to my ratio as I'm starting out with this tracker, even without it, I've learned the rules and process. This will make all of my future rip/uploads for this tracker go by much quicker!

Thanks for reading!

Remembrance!

How could I forget with my first post that it was Memorial Day?! My thoughts go out to those that have been doing such a fantastic job at keeping us all free! Thank you for making life possible in this country!

Happy Memorial Day!

Windows restarting.

Doesn't it bother you that windows restarts on its own? It sure bothers me. Makes me want to use linux more often.