Regdar and the Fighters

Greatest Album Title Evar

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Ok. Something like my last 3 posts have been grumpy and politically. So let’s mix it up with some hilarity!
Last year I went into a record store in Madison and shuffled through the $1 bin. Inside I found this brilliantly-titled albumThis is quite possibly my favorite album of all time. It raises so many interesting questions.
Obviously, there was a Killing All the Posers #1, right? So what happened?
Did they miss some? Do posers occur spontaneously so you have to keep going back and weeding out the new ones? Where are these new posers coming from, and what can we do to prevent future infestations?I feel that if we can solve this problem, we can probably handle anything!

Double Secret Cross Post

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Hey look! A blog post that isn't me waxing sophistic!I wrote a guest blog post for my buddies over at Loop Community. They sell Ableton loops for live musicians. They've started selling sample libraries, so I gave them a big collection of Regdar drum patterns.Their primary audience is Praise & Worship/CCM, but with sample libraries there's appeal for a much broader audience. Even if you're not interested in the music, they've got some pretty cool videos and information about looping technology. There's some pretty neat stuff.

Nerd Rawk Speaks

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Ok. Let’s see if we can offend and annoy everyone with this one! Autism! It’s a thing. A lot of people consider it a very unpleasant thing. I know very little about it. Good jumping-off point!Being as autism is an often unpleasant thing (is it considered a disease? A mental illness? I should probably at least read the Wikipedia page before I keep writing about it.) Anyway, being as a lot of folks don’t like autism, some clever researchers are trying to develop a cure for it.From what I gather, this prospect scares the crap out of a lot of folks who have autism. No matter how much they may dislike the disorder, it’s a core, ingrained part of who they are. If they woke up one morning and were magically no longer autistic, they would no longer be the same people. Essentially, some people fear that a cure for their autism would on some philosophical level be killing them and replacing them with a more “socially acceptable” doppelganger. This is a frightening prospect! That’s the sort of thing they make sci-fi movies about.So why am I talking about this? Clearly, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m just gesticulating wildly at half-remembered, half-read blogs.*I’m kind of afraid of the concept of Heaven for the same reasons. Heaven, as I understand it, is a place where there is no sin and our bodies and minds will be perfect. Unfortunately, I can’t picture me being in that situation. I fear that if you magically excised my sin nature and made me perfect, I would no longer be me. I would have been killed and replaced with a more socially-acceptable doppelganger. That is a frightening thought to me. Yes, I hate my own human weakness, and I desire to be more perfect. However, I still like me and don’t want to see my annihilated for my own sake.So these pronouns are getting pretty hard to follow, but you get what I’m saying right?* Ok. So I did do some actual research here. Basically, I read “Don’t Mourn for Us” and that’s it.**
** Cheezy Petes! You’d think an autistic dude would be able to create a better-looking website! Even his HTML is ugly.***
*** I told you I was trying to offend and annoy everyone, right?

REGDAR SMASH PUNY OCTOGENERIAN

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The building I work in has a lot of art hanging on the walls. Some of it’s good; some of it isn’t. Some of it fills me with seething, uncontrollable anger. Specifically, some of the paintings by minimalist pioneer Ellsworth Kelly. Specifically... Never mind, I can’t find them, and Googling them is just showing me more of his terrible, terrible art.Now this is a problem for me. I have this gut reaction of hatred for his art, but intellectually, I dislike the idea of dismissing someone’s artistic expression. Rather than admit myself to be a hypocrite, I’ve decided to come up with some kind of metrics that allow me to intellectually dismiss Kelly’s work as the tripe I know it in my heart to be.This requires me to define art. Rather than just resort to the old “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it” standby, I’ve come up with two qualities to define whether any artistic expression (music, painting, whatever) is actually “art.”1. Difficulty of creation. How hard is this work to make? The Sistine Chapel ceiling was hours upon days upon weeks of painstaking labor to create realistic drawings in a hard-to-reach place. Obviously, that is art. Jackson Pollock (another oft-reviled modern artist) created paintings that, while seemingly random and stupid, were actually mathematically-difficult to produce. Apparently, he splattered paint in such a way that it formed fractal patterns, and apparently, very few adults can do that. So, that’s difficult. Elephants can be trained to paint crude line drawings. That’s difficult for them to do. If you do something that is challenging to create (for yourself or for others), I’ll call it art. Kelly paints two squares on a canvas. I drew more impressive doodles in the margins of my middle school notebooks.2. Uniqueness of expression. Are you saying something new and creative? The Beatles used brand new technology to create unique sounds with which to fashion pop music. Nobody had done it before; obviously, it’s art. John Cage said with 4’33” (an oft-reviled song), “hey, maybe the important part of a music performance isn’t the music itsself? Let’s bring everything that we normally ignore to the foreground and make it the focus!” It was strange, and it was an interesting, unique perspective. Kelly has been painting two squares on a canvas for over 60 years. I’d be willing to grant that he was creating art in the 1940s. He said, “hey, why does there have to be so much stuff in our paintings? Let’s get rid of most of it!” But that’s not a new message any more. That’s just churning out the same schlock to get a paycheck. That’s autographing photos of yourself at a convention. That’s going on a reunion tour in support of your Greatest Hits album. That’s selling Andre the Giant “Obey” stickers in bulk on Amazon. That’s... that’s...Really ticking me off, and I need to stop writing now!Anyway, don’t forget to come to our show next week, where we’ll play a bunch of songs that we’ve played before... oh...

Crackpot Christian Cosmos Colonies

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I was thinking to myself, why aren’t we colonizing space yet? I mean, seriously! Is the idea of colonizing other planets not awesome enough for people or what? Then it occurred to me, the same people who have political clout and hate space programs are the same sort of people who have historically enjoyed misinterpreting Scripture for their own jingoistic purposes. Maybe there’s a connection there?So here’s my ridiculous strawman reason for why all good, patriotic Christians should oppose extra-terrestrial colonization projects: How is the Rapture gonna happen? I’ve seen Left Behind. I know how it’s going to go down, and moon colonies don’t fit into that picture. If it’s raining ash and fire on earth, what’s happening to the colonies? Sure, a third of the ice on Mars could turn into blood, but who cares. God’s not going to impress anyone with that!And, because I enjoy winning arguments against stupid (and fake) people, here’s my rebuttal. Really? Is God so weak that he can’t wipe out humanity and usher in a new Heaven and Earth in more than one location? I figure that being omnipotent He can probably blow up both Earth and a few moons of Jupiter simultaneously. Heck, there’s probably dozens of types of cosmic phenomena which could wipe out our whole solar system in one go. Maybe even our whole arm of the galaxy.Heck! We’re almost obligated to spread throughout the universe, just so that it’s more impressive when the end of humanity does occur! Do you think Carl Sagan is going to stand before the Throne of Judgement and be impressed by God wiping out one measly little planet? Heck no! He sees bigger catastrophes than that before he’s had his breakfast.So there you go. Sci-fi nerds, we need to colonize space because it’s awesome. Conservative, pre-trib Christians, we need to colonize space because that way we’ll get to see more of what’s happening in Revelation as it goes down, and that will be way cooler!--------Special double crackpot theory! Logistics!How do we get our first space colonies launched? Convince somebody that they want to do it. Here's how we solve two problems at once. Take one of those people groups who's always fighting in the middle east and convince them that their holy land is actually on the moon!I'd recommend the Jewish people because I think they've probably got the most resources for it. (Although the Palestinians already have a pretty good rocketry program, I hear. (I am going to Hell for that joke.)) But really, I'm open to suggestions if somebody else would do a better job. That way, once they get the program launched, we have one fewer group of people squabbling over that land, and humanity has made our first baby steps into space! Rawk! (it)

Happy 13337 Day!

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Happy 13337 day, everyone!
Ok. I’m the better part of a day early, but I’ll be busy tomorrow.“Fighter 1,” you ask, suddenly calling me by my canonical band nickname despite there being no precedent to do so, “what the frickin’ flippin’ A are you talking about?”Why, I’m talking about UNIX timestamps of course!BORING EXPLANATION: A lot of computer systems use UNIX timestamps to keep track of what time it is. This is a nice system in that it’s consistent around the entire world! A timestamp is simply how many seconds it has been since midnight on January 1st 1970 GMT. So your computer just stores the time as a nice big number; then, whenever it needs to display it for one of us meaty, weak humans, it converts it into something that makes sense to us.
END BORING EXPLANATION.So what is 13337 day then? Well, this Friday at around 3 AM (Central USA time), the timestamp will be 1333700000! It will stay 13337somthing all the way through Saturday morning around 7 (again local time). Nice, round numbers for dates are always fun, especially when they’re particularly nerdy or mathematically interesting.So how does one celebrate 13337 day? I’m not sure. Perhaps you should go to an anime convention? That’s a pretty good idea!“But Steve!” You say, reverting to my real name like some kind of inconsistent jerk. Why are you such a jerk, hypothetical reader? “Don’t interrupt my leading questions with more questions, Fighter 1. It just confuses the issue!” I’ll interrupt what I want! I’m the one writing the blog, I retort testilly. “ ‘I am sorry,’ you say, ‘it was rude of me to interrupt.’ “ You say putting words in my mouth. Cut that out! That's my thing! Just ask your stupid question, so we can finish up this blog post and go eat some pie or do whatever it was we were doing before.“Fine,” you sulk, “Why are we celebrating 13337 day instead of just waiting for 1337 day on May 14th when the timestamp will be 1337000000?”
To which I respond. Shut up!(Besides, 1337000000 to 1337999999 is actually about 12 days.)

The most punk band in the world right now

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Theoretically, I like punk music. But here’s the problem with that: I missed punk’s heydey. I was born in the mid 80s and grew up in small-town Wisconsin. By the time I heard any punk besides Green Day or Blink 182*, it was 2003, and I was in college. The people who invented the genre and came up with all the cool staples were OLD! All the bands have either burned out and scattered or come off as old guys trying to cash in on art they did when they were young and hip. I see The Refused or Rage Against the Machine getting back together, and I don’t think, “wow! This highly-influential group is going to shake up the music world again!” I think, “wow, those sellouts didn’t have the integrity to stay broken up.” And I'm pretty sure a Sex Pistols reunion tour would be the most depressing thing ever.And younger bands can’t recapture that magic. Sure there are younger bands doing the same type of music, but to me that sounds the same as young bands trying to sound like Journey or Styx. It’s not new or original; it’s old and tired. Plus, the genre is mainstream enough that a band that sounds like The Ramones because they think it’ll make them money sounds just like the band that sounds like The Ramones because it’s what they enjoy playing.There’s music that build on what punk did and tries to take it in new, exciting directions, incorporating new instruments and themes into the old genre. But that always opens up the debate as to whether or not that music is really punk?** If you want old-school punk raw anger, you can’t have sequencers and 7/4 time.So where can I go to find music that captures that raw crappiness and state-smashiness of old punk without just retreading what other people have already done?Then it hit me, Guns ‘n’ Roses is the most punk band around! They’re doing the exact same “let’s retread our glory days” crap that all the other bands from that era are doing, but they’re doing it badly! Everything Axl Rose does these days is a giant “f*** you!” to everyone else! He won’t work with the musicians that made his band worth listening to. He’s a jerk to the other musicians he tours with. He spends 10 years longer than could possibly be considered reasonable recording a mediocre album and then has the gall to try to sell it to his loyal fans.He is sticking it to everyone! And that, my friends, is punk. Smash the system!* I’m not going to debate whether or not those count as punk. That’s not the point here.
** Yes. If I’m going to keep calling RatF “nerd punk,” I really can’t take any other stance.Update 4.11.12: Axl Rose just turned down an induction to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, saying essentially "Sure, you can induct the rest of GnR Classic if you want, but I hate those guys so much that I don't want you to include me with them. I would rather exclude myself from the company of rock and roll greats than to be in the same room as Slash." He's so punk!

Grading Scale of Pseudo-intellectual Cosmology

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

An interesting correlation I’ve noticed over the years is that people who like to think they’re smart also tend to like to think they’re incredulous. It doesn’t really matter what they’re incredulous about. Just the smarter they think they are, the more they want to second guess things. (Especially things they disagreed with in the first place.)Now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of schooling, it’s that correlation always means causation, and that leaping to conclusions is probably the best way to go about things. I also learned that I like to see the letter A a lot and that I like to see the letter F less often. I clearly did not learn to count to 1. Which is weird, being as I study computer science, and that’s one of two numbers that we’re really expected to know.Anyway, here’s a thing I’m proposing! The grading scale of pseudo intellectual cosmology! Grade your own level of belief in things that are difficult to prove! Clearly, if you’re a smart person, you’ll grade yourself way up there! And if you’re dumb, please admit it and give yourself the appropriate low grade. Thank you for your participation.Aist - Refuse to believe anything. See, this one’s funny because the “a” prefix is Latin (Greek?) for not. So by not believing anything... Yeah, they’re getting dumber from here.
Bist - Acknowledge your own existence, just like Descartes would have wanted! (“I think; therefore, I B”
Cist - Believe what you see. Bwa ha ha!
Dist - Believe in some kind of god. It’s funny ‘cause it sounds like “deist.” This is also probably the high point of the word play here.
Fist - f it I'll believe whatever. It looks like “fist” but really I’m just out of amusing things to say.Maybe I should just stick to writing songs. Does someone have a rhyming dictionary I could borrow? I can’t think of anything that rhymes with f-ist.

I hate all other musicians!

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

You know there are probably musicians who aren't a little crazy, people who don't have have an obsession with playing, who don't have a little voice in the back of their heads reciting lyrics at them all day, who could take or leave music. Screw those guys. Clear the field a bit!If you're doing it for the money or anything other than an obsessive desire to craft awesome music, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons and should probably become a manager or something, especially since a) that's where the money actually is, and 2) we could use a manager or at least a booking agent or something. Any volunteers?

Books and Covers

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600

I recently got into an argument with one of my friends about whether or not I should completely dismiss a band based on the fact that I hate their name. There’s an old adage that says, “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” There’s another old adage that says, “what you just said was dumb, and you should feel dumb for saying it.”Of course you can judge a book by its cover! That’s an important part of the book selection process. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read every book that crosses my path. Usually, I will use various clues given by its cover to decide if it’s something I want to read. Perhaps it’s by an author that I particularly like or dislike. If it says “Roger Zelazny” on the cover, I’ll probably read it because he was a consistently good author; if it says “Roger Zelazny,” “Amber,” and the name of some other author, I won’t read it because it’s just some jerk cashing in on his most successful series.I’ll also judge books based on their titles. A particularly catchy title might make me want to read it more; perhaps it’s a clever pun or contains the word “explosion.” That sounds worth my time. Alternatively, if it contains words like “mistress,” “vampire,” or “darkness,” I’ll probably pass on it unless something else convinces me otherwise. (e.g. I’d probably give Lampire: The Exploding Mistress of Darkness Who Was Also a Lamp a shot.)Then there are cover images. Most books these days have some kind of picture on the front to catch your attention and hint at what the book contains. Sometimes I’ll see what appear to be murder weapons and tools for solving crimes. I’ll usually skip those books because murder mysteries aren’t really my thing. Other times, I’ll see a shirtless man with pointy teeth and a deep purple or red filter over the whole image. Those I will definitely skip because Anne Rice should die in a fire! If I see robots, space ships, swords, or explosions, I’ll probably give the cover a more thorough perusal. Finally - and let me know if I’m going too fast here - most paperback books have words on the back. These words do the craziest of things! They describe what the book is about. I know! My mind was blown when I first heard about this. “You mean they just tell you what the book is about?” I sputtered. “I didn’t know you could do that! So I can read the back of the book, and it will just tell me if it’s about a topic that appeals to my interests?! That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard!”So yes, you can judge a book by its cover. Is it a complete and fair judgement? Probably not. I’ll bet there’s some really good vampire porn out there that I’m never going to read because Interview With the Vampire was so bad. Is it enough of a judgement to get by? Yes. I would rather miss out on that one amazing Charlene Harris book that I’ll never read because I don’t want to slog through the rest of her and her ilk’s garbage. It won’t keep me up at night. Partly because I don’t feel bad about it. Mostly because I’ll already be awake. I’ll be reading Discworld... with my buddy Vampire Roger Zelazny... still not listening to LMFAO

One last preview of HPaIMS (download)

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Well, February is almost over, which means it's almost time to be finished with our RPM Challenge album.Well, then this happened.Now I'm sad. :((Mixing this weekend.)

Further recording problems (new download)

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Ok. I'm going to get this stupid album done if it kills me!Last week, the guy who volunteered to do drums let me know that he wasn't going to have time to do it. Weak! I found another friend who is both a drummer and has recording equipment and asked him to do it on Thursday. Fortunately, it only took until Sunday before he backed out. Not as weak, but still an inauspicious event!I haven't heard from any of my other collaborators in a while, but we're keeping a positive attitude about it.So as it stands now, I've tracked all my normal instruments and voices, and I'm about to start frantically tracking some semblance of drums. This should prove to be an adventure!In the meantime, here's another demo! Wherein we cover both our obligatory shipping and ballad bases. A beautiful love song between Professor Snape and AM.

Semi-annual griping about other musicians' hair post! (new download)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Last November, as you may recall, I wrote a blog post complaining about a certain Canadian musician who may have stolen my haircut. Well, it's that time again.Skrillex, I see what you're doing there. You'd best watch yourself.I completely unrelated news, my computer is fixed, and we're continuing work on our Harry Potter/I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream crossover fanfic rock opera.Here's another demo for your tingling little ears! This song is the climactic awards ceremony at the end of the school year/book/album. Share and enjoy!

On Asteroids and Internets

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Meta political retoric rant post go!So here’s an interesting thing about political debates. Every time people start arguing about allocation of resources (health care, energy sources), philosophical sliding scales (freedom vs. safety, capitalism vs. socialism), etc., everyone seems to lose site of the endgame: Post scarcity. We’ve all seen Star Trek. We all know what we want the future to look like. Why is it that we always get so bogged down in the details of the here and now that we forget about what should be our long-term goals?Do we think that we truly can’t one day have readily available bacta tanks that allow us to quickly recover from any wound? Or cyborg hands indistinguishable from the original? Or vat-grown headless clones of ourselves so we can replace our decrepit bodies at will?Do we not plan on one day building dyson spheres to harness all the energy of Alpha Centaurie to power our holodecks?We’ve got Steven Hawking and Carl Sagan over here talking about how we should probably try to colonize other planes so that our whole species doesn’t get wiped out in a freak accident, but the only people paying attention are the sci-fi nerds!That’s what’s so weird about the free Internet debate recently. Information is one place where a post-scarcity economy is eminently achievable, not just within our lifetimes but within a matter of a few years! We could easily make it so that everybody has more information than they could possibly need. Yet here we are, fighting against post-scarcity like a bunch of jerks.On second thought, Sagan and Hawking are wrong. Bring on the asteroid! Melt this pale blue dot before we have a chance to infect the rest of the universe with more of our stupidity.

Rant: EULAs (nerding with the nerds in the nerdery!)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

You know what annoys me? End User License Agreements (EULAs sometimes also called Terms of Service). They’re these giant legal documents that corporate lawyers draw up as the agreement between them (the software creator) and you (the customer). The problem with most EULAs is that they’re really one-sided. There is a big list of things that they insist you can’t do with the software you bought, and there is almost no reciprocation. And your only options as a customer are to either accept the deal carte blanche or reject it and go through the hassle of trying to get a refund.They can get downright draconian too! Here is an excerpt from an EULA written by a popular game company (edited to protect their identity):You agree that COMPANY would be irreparably damaged if the terms of this License were not specifically enforced, and therefore you agree that COMPANY shall be entitled, without bond, other security, or proof of damages, to appropriate equitable remedies with respect to breaches of this License, in addition to such other remedies as COMPANY may otherwise have available to it under applicable laws.Did you catch that? The bit where you agreed that they can demand reparations from you if they think you violated the agreement, and they don’t even have to prove it! That’s ridiculous! Even when they’re not making ridiculous new demands, they insist that you agree to rights that are either a) already defended by law or 2) obvious. Things like “If your computer melts while visiting our website, it’s not our problem” or “don’t break copyright laws.”Here’s my proposition: We need a bill of end user rights. We need a set of rules that are automatically appended to every EULA to protect the customer. Here’s what I’m thinking to get it started:Security updates will be made available for free for the life cycle of the product - If your software breaks, you have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to protect your customers from your own mistakes.Security updates will not be contingent on escalating privileges - I get this one with my phone apps a lot. A new update comes out, and all of a sudden my tuner needs to be allowed to make purchases and charge them to me. No. That’s not cool.Privileges required by the software will be disclosed - This is one thing that smart phones do well. Every time I install or update an app, they tell me what permissions that app is going to need. I like that! All software should let me know what boundaries it has and make sure to stick to them!The software will not install automated services without first prompting the user; non-necessary services may be left off - Apple software is really bad about this. Every time I update Safari or iTunes on my Windows computer, I have to go through and disable Bonjour, iPod helper, and half a dozen other services that I don’t want or need.The software will not perform administrative functions without a prompt or previous permission from the user - Google software is really bad about this. You can’t turn automatic updates off for Chrome or Google maps. It updates silently in the background, often making administrative changes beyond the simple update function even. Chrome once messed around with the icons on my admin’s desktop during the update. Not cool!
So what else should go on this list? I’m sure there’s other important stuff that I’m forgetting. Leave a comment!
Oh, and also, since my page views tripled this week because of it: SOPA! SOPA! SOPA! (Why is everyone so excited about Spanish soup? Either way, come for the sopa, stay for the nerd rawk!)