I hate it.

"How's your day?" or "How are you?" or "What's up?" are questions that I loathe. When people ask me them, I have to spend a bunch of energy trying to come up with a succinct answer that actually sums up my day in about three words.

Now, I can tolerate them if they are simply the icebreaker to a real conversation. But they, in and of themselves, are not conversation. Do not IM me to say hi if you have nothing else to say, as having to deal with small talk from umpteen-billion people is a waste of time and energy.

It even bugs me when people do this at work, say passing by in the aisle-way between cubicles. "Hi" I can tolerate. "Hi, how's it going?" is slightly less tolerable, however. I generally ignore it and treat it as part of the greeting these days, though. Which usually ends up making my response either nothing, or "Good." I haven't the time (literally, we're talking about a quick pass-by in a hallway here) nor the energy to come up with a meaningful or accurate response, and honestly, you don't really care to hear what it is, I'm sure.

Every once in awhile is fine. But if you're repeat offender, be aware of the fact that I probably consider you to be really annoying and don't have it in me to tell you so directly.

I recently attended Penguicon 6.0 in Troy, Michigan. It was a convention where all kinds of geeks got together and celebrated whatever they wanted to celebrate, and partied all weekend long.

While there, there was a table filled with little advertising pamphlets and other cards. There were also a bunch of burned DVDs, simply labeled "WDET". WDET are the call-letters for my local NPR station, which, until last year, was the home of interesting, locally-produced content including several lovely music programs. At some point (I don't remember exactly when it happened), WDET killed off nearly all of its original programming and became a station full of nationally syndicated talk-radio, making it just like every other NPR station. Everybody that loved WDET for the things that made it great was soon in an uproar, but there was no turning back.

Well, these WDET discs that could be found contained something very special.

From the file Readme.txt found on the disc:

" What's this?

This is a piece of history. For decades, WDET was known as the home of locally produced "college" and alternative music programming in Detroit. From techno to bluegrass and everything in between, WDET dedicated lots of airtime to it. They carried some NPR news and talk, of course, but music was the bulk of their schedule.

In March 2007, changes were announced. Five of WDET's signature music programs would be canceled, and the schedule filled with more NPR during the day, and the BBC World Service overnight.

But nobody in southern lower Michigan was hurting for NPR programming during the day, or the BBC world service at night, because that's exactly what Michigan Radio (WUOM/WFUM-FM/WVGR) already provided! WDET was turning itself into a clone of Michigan Radio. Comparing the two stations' schedules for an entire week (168 hours), in 2005 their schedules only overlapped by 39 hours, mostly Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation.

By 2006, the weekly overlap had increased to 61 hours, and as of April 2007, the overlap is 103 hours. Well over half of WDET's schedule now mimics Michigan Radio's. WDET's coverage area is a subset of Michigan Radio's.

Five great music programs went off the air at the end of March, and this is a collection of their last days.

The files are in WMA format, exactly as they came off WDET's streaming server. Playlists for each show have been saved, as this data is no longer available on the site."

That's right. This disc I now am in posession of contains many hours of the last two months of original WDET programming, including a torrent file designed to help people who have a copy of the disc complete their collections and share them with others. If I can figure out how to work that thing (I rarely use BitTorrent), I will post more info on how to obtain and share these files.

IF YOU ARE THE PERSON WHO LEFT THESE DISCS ON THAT TABLE AT PENGUICON, I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU. I want to find you and give you a hug. You are a kindred soul. Please be in touch.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

I have discovered Maddox.

New Mexico? Spoiled dairy products? Come on guys. I thought that was a dead giveaway :)

In brighter (and not fake) news, I recorded a video of myself doing a track live, using ONLY my Electribe and Kaoss Pad.

Guys,

I think this is it for me. I've realized that I can't seem to accomplish any of my goals, so I'm done trying. I'm taking the site and forums down in a week, so collect everything you want to before I do. (Including the music FTP'ed up to the server).

There is some good news, however. I've gotten an offer to move out to New Mexico and help run one a convenience store that my uncle owns. He assures me that I'll get decent pay, and first dibs on 'expired' dairy products that we can't sell. (Little known secret - unopened milk can sometimes go a week or two after the date!).

Anyway, send me an email if you'd like my phone number.. I'm going to be getting away from the Internet entirely.

Tags: slashdotted, aprilfools

And I'm taking her clubbing next weekend.

It's really awesome having a sister who likes dance music.

Forget any disdain I've ever shown for Apple. If their product can allow this video to exist, I'm all for 'em.

Keep in mind though, that jailbroken iPhones are required for this to work so... eh, screw Apple again :)

...and millions rejoice!

http://www.anthrocon.org/node/1983

I didn't actually think I'd get to do two years in a row, but.. well.. the proof is in the pudding, my friends. Or something like that. Anyway, whatever, I get to DJ Anthrocon again! And people won't hate listening to what I have to play (I hope!) At anthrocon, if you don't like the music - come back in an hour :)

Lemme explain this one:

So you all know that I go by "Draconum", right? Well, a lot of people assume this means that I'm supposed to be some dragon-type thing. Which is, of course - not true. The confusion arises from the fact that my handle came from a game (Mage Knight), from a class of character called "Draconum" - which are dragons. Basically, I just started using the name as a handle in online games and messageboards, and soon enough, I was known as "Draconum"!

Then I got into furry, and decided that my furry persona was definitely a husky. But everybody knew me as Draconum, so I was not about to go and change my name. Heck, I even call myself that occasionally (and sometimes my friends - IRL - do too!). Heck, I GOOGLE OWN "draconum" (check it if you don't believe me).

So I was talking to a couple furry friends of mine, joking about being drawn as a "drusky" - of course, a dragon mixed with a husky. I've always liked dragons, sure, just never considered it to really align with me or represent me at all. But it sounded like an interesting idea. Apparently, it's already been done, as a fursuit even. That is Really, Really Cool.

I've been getting, occasionally, bounced emails from various servers/places saying that the message I sent was rejected by its spamfilter.

Why? It appears that some jackoff spammer is using my domain as his origin-address on his spam emails, so everybody that gets them sees 'draconum.net' as the sender of the email.

No spam email ever originates from Draconum.net, ever.

In fact, our DNS stuff is set up so that our email services are actually hosted by Google, so it would be impossible for my server to actually send out email in the first place.

If you recieve spam email appearing to originate from Draconum.net, it's not sent by me! It's sent by some spammer using my domain name as the return address. So, yeah. Hopefully anybody who thinks I'm a spammer reads this.

It's cool. Seriously. Said he figured that I did. (Why else would I drive for 3 hours a couple times a month to see someone?)

Hey, it's my life. Whatever makes me happy. (good to know)

I feel ALOT better now about stuff. That made me sick all afternoon... I knew I'd have to tell him sooner or later.

OK - lemme get this out there - why doesn't anybody seem to agree with me that at the end of the day, Microsoft, Apple, Sony - even Google and Mozilla - are essentially the same money-grubbing company?

I know an Apple fan and a Sony fan, neither of which believe these companies can do any wrong.

Bullshit!

Probably my favorite company is Sega, because Sega is, as far as I can possibly tell, pretty honest for a company, anyway. Nintendo has their moments, I guess. But Sega seemingly sacrifices itself for the gaming industry all the time, usually to the benefit of Sony (who has had no problem stabbing them repeatedly with unfair but probably legal practices).

Though actually, Apple is not nearly as bad as Sony, they just have more of an attitude problem. And Steve Jobs.... ugh. Steve Jobs is pretty much worthless. At least their products are pretty decent.

(note: I don't know anything about anything. I'm not trying to be definitive here. I just have some personal grudges :p)

It's 2008!

So don't write the wrong date on stuff like I will. (Seriously, that's one thing I DISLIKE about the new year).

That and the fact that it never quite feels like it's really the new year until like, oh, 2-3 months in.

As far as I'm concerned, it's still 2007 :)

But hey, hope you guys had a good year. I actually did, despite it all. 'Cept it would have been nice if my boyfriend wasn't in Pennsylvania all this weekend. =/

At least I've got lots of good (professional) prospects coming up in the future, and possibly a way out of the current muck I'm in these days. Lots of opportunities to be seized... just gotta go after 'em.

Anyway, have a great 2008 folks!

Love -drac.

http://draconum.net/index.php?cat=42 < If you remember, way back when (over two years ago, actually!), I did some stupid little posts called Google That Word, which, against my better judgement, involved picking words off the top of my head, and then giving each a random number. I would then GoogleThatWord (tm) and pick the image in the list corresponding to the number (i.e. 5 would mean I would pick the fifth image in the results). This made for some weird and random stuff.

I've decided it needs reviving for Christmas, though I'm going to make a slight modification. It's going to be based off of the Flickr image search, which may make for better (and less irrelevant) results. I'm sorting by interestingness, by the way. I'm also foregoing the number, because it'll probably be best if I just handpick the most interesting pics to post anyway.

So, here's the words:

Figgy Pudding
Santa Cat
Consumerism
Lots of Ham
Reindeer

Results after the jump.

=> Read more!

"Merry fucking Christmas. Tell my humans that I hate them, very, very much."

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=all

An article by none other than David Byrne himself - both a musician and artistic/practical intellectual (among many things). This article is him talking about changing business models for music distribution, why joining up with a big label is often a BAD idea for nearly any artist, and he also details the 6 primary ways to do business with music these days (ranging from the 'label owns all' approach to 'self-everything', where the artist essentially does it all).

I'm mainly in the camp that thinks that labels aren't entirely obsolete yet, but they need to be much, much smaller. And composed of artists (with a dash of business sense and technological savvy), not guys in suits with executive payrolls.

For anyone who is aware of our current evil plans, you'll know that we're trying to set something up like this ourselves ('we' being myself and my co-conspirators). We're all artists, we all want to sell music, but it doesn't have to be alot, we don't want to spend a lot of money, and we want to do almost everything through the web (though sales of physical media are a must. CDs now and hopefully vinyl later - this is paramount for the electronic musician, whose clients/patrons could potentially include DJs. Fortunately such people are increasingly turning to web-based download stores for music and not relying quite so heavily on the pressed wax, much to the chagrin of purists.)

Dynamic Duo - Go Back

This is a song that's in the dancing video game Pump It Up (basically like a Korean Dance Dance Revolution with diagonal arrows instead of the traditional up, left, down, right, as well as a center-step in the middle). I don't really play PIU, but my boyfriend now does and I watched him play this song many times the other day. It's an awesome song to listen to and the video is cool too :)

...since I posted some husky love :3

Oh and, for something COMPLETELY different, watch this video. It's about uh.. unicorns?

http://xkcd.com

Babungus has made videos for several of his songs.

http://draconum.net/music/mixes/draconum_audition_fwa.mp3

This is a mix I did for an audition for a spot as DJ at Furry Weekend Atlanta 2008. It sounds like shit because I recorded it through the mic input on my laptop, which I think is Mono, and also really terrible anyways.

So it sounds pretty terrible, but it's a good mix anyway :p

Glenn Morrison - Hydrology
Retroid - Snowdrop
Tilt - New Day (Boom Jinx Dub)
Deadmau5 - Jaded
Draconum - Looking Glass
DJ Jeroenski - Back Once Again (Vandalism Remix)
Robot Needs Oil - Defected (Olivier Giacomotto Remix)

Holy crap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_(video_game)
http://orange.half-life2.com/portal.html

Get this game now.

I basically stayed up all last night, beating Portal in one sitting, but it was goddamn worth it. No, it wasn't the hardest or longest game ever, but good God it was well done. Think Zelda puzzles with a FPS engine, insane uses of fantasy physics, and a totally awesome antagonist (GLaDOS - Genetic Life Form and Disk Operating System - an apparently female computing watching your every move throughout the 'test facility'). GLaDOS begins the game sounding like an automated answering machine and ends sounding like a crazed computer bent on destroying you.

While the environments in Portal are relatively bland (since this is a puzzle game, there's a lot of sterile, grid-covered walls), but they soon become more and more elaborate, as you discover a warehouse-like setting BEHIND those sterile, white walls. You start to see the inner workings of this 'machine', as it were, even finding artifacts left behind by previous test subjects: "HELP!" written on the floor, photos taped to the wall, broken cups and silverware. Everything is designed in order to have the most possible psychological effect. Now, being a Valve game, it's equal parts humor and horror, and it's no Silent Hill. But trust me, if you were actually stuck in this facility, you'd probably go insane. :)

Speaking about humor, one of the best aspects of Portal is the female computer watching your every step. As the game goes on, she starts using different language, initially telling you that you're perfectly safe, and then later telling you that "after this point, we are required by testing procedure to stop lying to you in order to enhance the testing process" (or something to that effect). She contradicts herself and often slips in her speech (saying something about murdering you and then correcting herself, because "the testing procedure is entirely safe"..). I'd pay to read the script from this game, because it's absolutely brilliant (even though it's kind of a monologue; your character never speaks).

Buy it now, and play it all in one sitting. There are unlockable challenges (basically a remixed version of the regular game) and the capability for downloadable maps. No multiplayer (yet), but considerations are being made for a sequel...

SPOILER - end credits, after the jump. Awesome song.

=> Read more!

If you use Facebook or iLike.com, please 'Like' me! (< - iLike speak for 'adding as a favorite artist' :)

Wish I could use a tesla coil (yes, that's a real tesla coil and yes, it's being used as a synthesizer) in MY DJ sets.

(Disclaimer) I'm not advocating or endorsing illegal drugs, nor do I use them myself (end disclaimer)

http://www.fullmoonshop.nl/

No matter what your opinion is on hallucinogens, you have to admit that this website is pretty flippin' awesome. Interesting UI and music, though I'm not sure how you're supposed to buy anything (or how much of what you could even buy would be legal here, 'minus the CDs and T-shirts). :)