Local school is forced to allow a Straight-Gay Student's Alliance

Yulee is a small town in the Jacksonville, FL area. I am not surprised by the school board's attempt to shut it down for the silliest of reasons; I am heartened by the positive reaction on the part of the students.

The old bigots are becoming outnumbered, a minority, and scared because they know how they treat minorities. I am happy to not live to their expectations, but I can enjoy the schadenfreude in the meantime, can't I?

Alright, time I used this journal a bit. Some folks whinge about their personal lives, others pimp their careers or make political screeds, I'm gonna act like I work for Rolling Stone and tell you what you should be listening to. :)

Supercommuter's self-titled disc isn't quite out officially yet, but they're allowing people who preorder from their site a digital download in the meantime to tide them over. More can be found  at  http://supercommuter.net/.

To fully explain this album, I'll have to dive into a little history. Given I'm only friends with a few people and thus hardly anyone is likely to read this journal, you probably know I'm a fan of nerdcore music. See, when I was a kid, I often mentioned I liked everything but country and rap. Now I am adult, and I've found country I don't mind too much... and found that there was so much more to hip-hop than the obnoxious shit they played on the radio. There's a lot of very cool underground stuff out there, and stuff not quite underground but not exactly played on the "twelve songs in twelve hours" ClearChannel radio stations, and I have found that I genuinely enjoy the form of hip-hop. It distills popular music to the purest form of a person, poetry, and a beat. Being a fan of the use of English and the sort of person who likes prog-rock and the fancy lyrical masturbation prog often engages in... I really like smart hip-hop.

While the first blush makes nerdcore look like some silly parody, as the humorous nature of MC Frontalot, MC Lars, and so on might make it seem, there's some very serious artists out there who rap about real lives. It's just their lives involve computers, video games, and... well.. geekery. And hey, so does mine, so we connect there! Primary among the nerdcore elite was a little funk-rap band of Seattle origin named Optimus Rhyme, whose gimmick was pretending to be robots, the "Autobeats", fighting against the inferior rhymes of the "Wackacons". Yeah, goofy-sounding... but incredibly tight music.

Optimus broke up last year, but their frontman (who goes by the stage name of Wheelie Cyberman) teamed up with Stenobot and Tron Juan to make Supercommuter. Wheelie is in as fine form as always and this time he's backed by chiptune beats, making the first hip-hop act I can think of where a Gameboy is a major part of the instrumentation. So, how's the album?

Much like OR, Wheelie raps in a robotic persona, but these songs go beyond dropping the occasional Transformers reference to using robots as a metaphor to look at modern life, in the tradition of good science fiction, though it's not quite a concept album.  "10th Generation" has our fictional outer-space robots saving humanity for itself, only to be hated for it. For the flipside, "Robotopia" has the last robot on Earth running away as genetically engineered humans put robots out of work and destined for the scrapyard. "Life is Grand" is the grey-goo nanotech scenario visited in a rap. For all of the high-sounding subject, the music itself is guaranteed to get your head nodding, toes tapping.

If you're looking for a new favorite musical act, Supercommuter is a pretty damned good choice.

Song playlist meme! (stolen from missvolstead)

Rules are:
Pick ten or more songs, keep the playlist under 80 minutes.
Not a pick-your-favorites thing, but rather, pick "songs that describe, represent, or resonate with you personally."
Pick your favorite of the bunch, then shuffle the rest after.

1. Dream Theater - "As I Am". To those who understand, I extend my hand. To the doubtful I demand, take me as I am.

2. Cake - "No Phone". To this day, I STILL refuse to carry a cell phone if I can help it. I don't LIKE being bothered at every hour, I think people walking down the street texting look stupid. By no means am I a technophobe... just don't like it.

3. Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies - "Country Roads". I originally hail from West Virginia. The punkish rendition fits me.

4. Cheap Trick - "Surrender". Momma's all right, Daddy's all right, they just seem a little weird. Describes my folks perfectly.

5. Jello Biafra - "Plastic Jesus". My dad used to have just the thing on the dashboard of his truck.

6. Monty Python - "The Philosopher's Song". :)

7. Electric Funstuff - "Has Anybody Here Seen My Corpse?". Everquest was my first MMO, with things that would never be accepted in a online game these days... yet a big success as they were reckoned then.

8. Foolish Frost - "Avatar". My current "MMO", still. Foolish was a good friend of mine, but we've fallen out of touch lately; he's been a busy guy.

9. Torley Wong - "The Games We Played". A big chunk of my identity is as a player of games of all kinds. This is all computer and video games, but it's also a very pretty piano song!

10. The Grammar Club - "Post-Collegiate Shuffle". No comment needed, eh?

One of those ever-popular memes that spread across the Internet, where someone gives you five words then you explain what those words mean to you. Words here provided by http://eggshellhammer.livejournal.com:

Raksha
I play a roleplaying game called Exalted. You've probably heard of it if you're reading this. The Raksha are the game-world's version of the Fair Folk/faeries, but without all the nice-nice fairy-tale associations. They're soulless abominations who don't exactly exist, but are reflections of things found within the world.

They also happen to be one of my favorite character types, although I tend to play the ones who have 'gone native' as opposed to trying to destroy the world (which they view as something like a bunch of toxic waste dumped on their lawn, where lawn = 'infinite chaos'). Doesn't mean the characters are nice, or even good, but they don't actually want to unmake everything.

Roleplaying games
Okay, it's two words, but we'll let the poor guy slide. RPGs - of the paper sort, primarily - have been a lifelong passion of mine. Stuck somewhere in the nexus of boardgaming, improv theatre, and storytelling, there's nothing quite like a satisfyingly run roleplaying game. It's a sad fact that it's been so misunderstood in America, what with the mid-80s-ish Satanism scares and so on, and today it gets muddled with massively-multiplayer games, japanese "RPGs" in the Final Fantasy mold, and roleplaying of an entirely different, kinkier nature. While all of these things are good and have their place, they ain't the same thing!

Tall, muscled ladies
Again, a bit long, but we'll pretend the poor fellow just wanted to avoid the associations of, say, "Amazon", or prevent me from saying something cheeky about everyone's favorite online bookstore. Yeah, I like them. Something in me bitterly resents how the ideal woman in modern western society is supposed to have all the body development of a twelve-year-old, except maybe in the chest and ass. Keep 'em short and managable and unthreatening.

Sarcasm aside, I'm fine with people in all their many forms, really... but durn it, it's a segment that needs a little love. I have a separate interest in big things; I like monster movies, anything of impressive stature and scale. It's not that surprising the two intersect. I've played a lot of characters of a lot of types in RPGs, written many in stories, but your basic female brick/tank sort is a comfortable go-to. (I won't deny I find the type attractive, but it's not JUST that, honest!)

Eschaton
Eschaton: The bringing of heaven to earth, to establish paradise on Earth. Also the title of a game I am writing for an established RPG publisher and more I will not speak of, yet.

Hometown
I'm not much for spreading personal information on here, but I'm not wanting to lock this to friends-only... still, it's probably not too revealing to say I'm from West Virginia. Yes, we have computers there, even though deer outnumber the humans living in the state. I don't live there any more, and I don't quite miss it.

Home safely, for those who care. :)

For the handful that even read this: I shall be heading to FWA. If you'll be there, let me know!

I'm not a blogging, livejournal kind of person.

But, on occasion - especially in connection with Puzzlebox MUCK - I figure it may be useful to post things. Or I might just want to spout my opinion in the mistaken belief someone cares! Consider this fair warning.