Thursday, January 22, 2009

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is it something worse?

Oh, what could've been. Past midnight yesterday, Wakefield calls me up:

"Alex. Did Hoss tell you about tomorrow?"

"No. What's going on?"

"We're going down to San Diego tomorrow night. Are you in?"

And just like that, my next two days were set up. By the afternoon of the next day i made a call to Hoss to see what the plan was. I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but here's the gist of it: at night Wake would pick up me and Hoss. From there we would drive on down to UCSD. We'd then magically call Jin or Olivia or whomever, despite not having their numbers, and then hope that one of them would take Hoss and me in for a night while Wake sleeps 'til morning at his fling's place.

Problem with that, of course, is our reliance on something that, for one: was highly unlikely; and two: was completely impossible. Why the crap would Jin or Olivia let two guys they hardly talk to sleep over? And, of course, how the crap would we contact them without their contact information?

So the plan, as I rephrased it, went like this: Wake was gonna go to San Diego to sleep and along the way he'd drop me and Hoss somewhere on campus and we'd be left to fend for ourselves.The plan was awry. It was logically flawed. Moreso than our usual projects. Yet it did not deter for one second my intentions to go on this adventure - for it was truly an adventure like no other. For once in a long while I would be in a sticky situation where, depending on how compliant the A-men would be, we could've achieved outrageous success or vicious consequence. But no matter what, memories would've been made. That's priceless stuff. But tonight, it was not meant to be.

I call Wakefield when I return from class and I expressed my opinion on the sketchy plans of the night. Now that's something I probably shouldn't of done 'cause he took it the wrong way and got mad at me. I guess he figured he was doing me a favor by taking me on this trip. He also understood the ridiculousness of the idea so that turned him off the ordeal. In the end I let Hoss decide for me. I'm still in my seat in Irvine. Adventureless.

But of course nothing is as it seems when Wake's involved - a lesson I keep forgetting. Why, even stretching back to the San Francisco trip when he conspired to meet with a girl named Teddy, stringing me along with his devious plot, he always played a layered game. Only his games were full of trap cards.

And we're always helpless kuriboh.

Tonight is, again, one of those nights. Though I wish I could be there in the heat of battle, I've learned through years of friendship that Wake's affairs are best left for Wake to handle - for a Wakefield mess is a mess like no other. Built by a madman with hands made of tiny ants, his is a tangled affair of poisonous rope and creaky pulleys, each attached to cage of scorpions, where the slightest jolt and tug catapults the venomous critters straight to the groin.

Depending on how tonight plays out, Wake will walk away with his full groin, half his groin, or no groin at all. Regardless, I wish him the best of luck. He'll need it. To save his groin.

I will say that I am just a slight bit disappointed. Not so much my wasted time. Not so much my not being on an adventure. Rather, the reasoning we use to not participate in this adventure - reason itself. It did not stand to reason for Wake to drive over to Hoss' place, then my place, and then to SD, where me and Hoss would be abandoned for awhile, then in the afternoon leave early for Hoss to make it to his class. Unreasonable.

It is a shame, and a disappointment, to realize even we A-men are subject to the will of the world. Adventure died today (for me and Hoss) in the face of reason. I can only wait for the next opportunity a rare occasion like this will come along.

Wake, Wake, Wake....

Wakefield, although you are probably in the ICU or morgue, I will write this anyways.

You are a brave soul. Driving a hundred miles to get your ass kicked...that takes balls. If it is any consolation, at least you're going out a man. A dumb man, but a man nonetheless.

I'm just messing Wake, but seriously, you are going to get your butt kicked.

Godspeed Wakefield. Godspeed.

Smackdaddy V

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

http://restructure.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/white-american-culture-is-general-tsos-chicken-and-chop-suey/

Hello, everybody. So this is my first post, and I'm not sure what to post about, so after some time of brainstorming and inactivity, I figure I'd post about this video. As we all know, food is necessary for daily sustenance. This necessity alone has led to the creation of many types of food that we know and love, like hamburgers and stinky tofu. These are only two of the many foods available to us.

Life without choice of food would be sad. What would be even more sad is that if immigrants couldn't bring their foods to other country. Unfortunately, this thought can lead to good and bad. Regardless of the fact, different variations of the original recipe specific to the home country have come about. The video above gives some examples of foods, the origins of which we rarely question. Of course, eating is more important. I just stumbled upon the fact that it's nice to have so many different types of food, authentic or not, like the fortune cookie. As a collector of the fortunes, I like to think that I appreciate both the authentic and the not, broccoli beef and
say gwai dou" (some sort of beans). I think it's all great and I hoep you think so too.

Forget that Youtube man, I got a story to tell you:

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Youtube - What the hell?!

While I wait for youtube to process a 4 mb video I just uploaded (I've been waiting for about 3 hours, by the way), I'll go ahead and talk about youtube's new way to fight copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement in youtube has always been a problem, to copyright owners anyway. It's very easy to just post up a show, movie, or a song and gain at least ten thousand hits. Now, youtube has a new way to counter copyright infringement of music. They will analyze the audio in any video and if they find any audio that belongs to a copyrighted song, they will MUTE (yes, MUTE) the audio completely. I'm not really sure how they do this, but I think they check the audio against a huge database of copyrighted music, and if any audio from the video matches anything from the database, they will mute it. As you can imagine, this might take a lot of time, because there are terabytes of music out there, which why I'm guessing that they're taking so fucking long to upload and process my 4 megabyte, 50 second video!!! Muting audio on youtube might curb copyright infringement on music a bit. I don't know if they're doing this only for newly uploaded videos or if they will run audio checks against already existing videos. If they do mute the older videos, they will effectively be purging at least half of all youtube. Anything that has non-original music will be muted, and that includes short movies, video logs, anime music videos, and much more. Is this really a smart thing for youtube to do? The copyright holders might temporarily satisfied, but is it worth decimating the youtube community?

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