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You are viewing the most recent 20 entries March 31st, 200903:11 pm: ZOMG LAST POST.
Okay, so, this is it... the LAST time I'll be posting in this LiveJournal. From now on, I'll be over at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) terminalhipster for further LJ-type activites. If you've already added my new LJ to your friends list, thanks! If you haven't, get on the ball already! When I've got a bit more time I'm going to go through the F-list I've got here and add folks to the new account, but if you want to be ahead of the game, go ahead and add me. I'm not going to delete this journal just yet, though. I do want to go through the archived posts and save some old photos and bits and pieces here and there. Again... when I've got some more free time. And now... on with the last post (cross-posted, of course)... At eight years old, I was still pretty young when Star Trek: The Next Generation first took to the air in 1987. By the time I was in junior high, though, it was one of my favorite shows, and I'd race home to catch the syndicated reruns beaming in from Spokane's KXLY TV every afternoon. Over time, I caught up on the years of the show I had missed, while keeping pace with the new weekly episodes. By the time the series wrapped in 1994, I think I had seen every episode, and I knew more about the Star Trek universe than I did about just about anything else since Transformers G1 had ended. Not having cable for the past few years, I haven't seen the show in quite a while. So, on a trip to the mall several weeks ago, my girl and I picked up the DVD set of the first season of TNG. I'm lucky enough to have hooked up with someone who's an admitted but not addicted Trek nerd like myself, and this past weekend we finished off the season. Sure, the writing in some of those first season episodes is pretty clunky. There's a fair bit of "As you know, Bob..." type dialog going on sometimes, and the Ferengi are probably the biggest failure in TV science fiction history in terms of a threatening nemesis. Thankfully the producers noticed that early on and brought back the Romulans at the end of the season, and later introduced the Borg and Cardassian races. Anyway, I could rant and rave about Star Trek until the tribbles come home, but I'm short on time, so I'll just get to the meat of the matter. As a kid, I always wondered why the Enterprise was always wooshing around in random directions during the opening sequence...
I've finally figured it out. Must be they're letting Geordi drive...  PS: if you want to comment on this post, you'll have to do so over at terminalhipster... I don't even want to have to log into this account again if I can avoid it...
March 27th, 200909:43 am: new comic... sorta.
 So, it's not a proper comic as such, but I posted up a new comic thing at the Terminal Hipster site this morning. It made me laugh, at least. I'll get back on story when regular TH comics resume next week. Also, a quick reminder to add my terminalhipster account to your friends list in the next few days; next Tuesday is the day I'll be shutting this LJ down and migrating over there full-time. Tags: blog news, terminal hipster, things i drew
March 19th, 200909:59 am: shut 'em down! shut 'em, shut 'em down...
So, I've been thinking this over for a while, and I'm going to go ahead and shut this LJ account down in a few weeks. I'll be migrating over to my terminalhipster account full-time at the end of this month. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. The clearest, obviously, is for better "branding" between my LJ and the main Terminal Hipster comic site. As well, there's a lot of old baggage here I don't care to keep around. Things and people in my life that seemed vitally important at the time that I couldn't care less about now. I don't associate with the 'parasyte' ID much anymore... that's a holdover from the Comatose Rose/Dead Air/Warehouse days. When I get a bit more of a chance to spend some time on here, I'll add the friends from here who are still somewhat LJ-active to the friends list on my terminalhipster account. I know a damn lot of folks on my current list have more or less abandoned LiveJournal in favor of Facebook these days, so it's a good chance to clean up the old friends list. If you want to keep up with me until I get a chance to spend some time adding friends to my other account, go ahead and add terminalhipster and I'll return the favour. For now, I think I'll cross-post most entries between the two LJ accounts, but as of the 31st, the whole game is going to be over there. See you on the other side. Tags: blog news, terminal hipster
March 11th, 200903:15 pm: i was in woodstock on the day rick danko died...
Remind me again; why do I even bother trying to do things the right way? So my girl and I are trying to take off for a weekend, looking at spending four days in Jasper at the end of April. About two and a half weeks ago I sent in a time off request for the 24th & 27th. Monday, not having heard one word in response either way, I brought it up with the assistant unit supervisor (aka: the guy in charge of approving vacation and time off requests). The problem, y'see, is that the 24th of April happens to be the last day of a ridiculous blackout window where vacation requests will not be approved. Supposedly, this is the busy time of year at the library, and all available staff need to be on hand at all times. Yes, we are naturally a bit busier towards the last few weeks of the school year, but the vacation blackout policy is based on stats from twenty years ago when our staff were shelving thousands of books and periodicals. But, as our manager constantly points out, those stats have dropped by massive percentages as online access to scholarly articles has widened. So after hemming and hawing for ten minutes, the only answer I left with was an "I'll get back to you." Thanks, chum! That really lets me know if I'm wasting my time/money booking a hotel for a trip NEXT MONTH. If they're not going to give me the time off, that's one thing, but keeping me waiting for weeks on end to find out if I'm going to be able to get two days off when I gave over two months notice in the request? Unacceptable. I guess that's what I get for trying to do things through the proper channels. Next time I need a day off, I'm calling in sick from my hotel room that morning. A new Terminal Hipster comic should be up tomorrow morning. The strip itself has been done for over a week at this point, I just haven't had a chance to finish up the Photoshop colours. The art for the following strip is 2/3 done at this point, and while I don't normally like to post in-progress work, I thought I'd toss up a quick B&W preview of a panel from that one that I'm particularly pleased with...  And, lastly, I guest hosted a show on CJSW last night. Here's what I played... Twilight Banter - 11.mar.09 screamin' lederhosen - dog pound hop black rebel motorcycle club - shuffle your feet stephen malkmus and the jicks - baltimore ac newman - submarines of stockholm the mooney suzuki - half my heart hot little rocket - let's play in traffic the flaming lips - she don't use jelly in-flight safety - crash/land 13 engines - beneath my hand the jesus and mary chain - april skies my bloody valentine - i only said the duke spirit - hello to the floor dan auerbach - i want some more nick cave and the bad seeds - abattoir blues handsome furs - evangeline the raconteurs - old enough corb lund - hair in my eyes like a highland steer luke doucet and the white falcon - the day rick danko died black lips - short fuse the national - so far around the bend sufjan stevens - casamir pulaski day andrew bird - masterswarm the brunettes - lovesong destroyer - this night Tags: cjsw, jasper, library, radio playlists, terminal hipster, things i drew, work rant
February 9th, 200912:17 pm: New comic!
I don't know if it was worth waiting almost two months for, but there's a new Terminal Hipster on the site today.  On a semi-related side note, I'm thinking of reitiring this Livejournal account and migrating over to the terminalhipster account. More on that as I think some things through, I guess. Tags: terminal hipster, things i drew
February 6th, 200912:08 pm: life is good, comics coming soon, more musical ranting...
Things be good lately, my friend! Things be good. I've got my first live show review assignment for BeatRoute coming up next week, and it's actually a show I'm quite looking forward to. The February issue is out, and my album review for Evil Nine's They Live! is in the paper (but not on the site). Went to a couple of great shows at The Palomino last month. The Women show on the 16th was killer, and packed to the tits with people. It was honestly a bit too busy in the bar to really get a groove on for the show itself, but it was an incredibly awesome night regardless. Hot Little Rocket last Friday was nowhere near as busy, likely thanks in large part to some customer appreciation night type thing at Broken City, but was every inch as great a show. It was nice to actually get a table and be able to hear the band, and Hot Little Rocket always play a great set. I'm still hanging in at HMV for the time being. This month marks three years with the company, which about two and a half years longer than I expected to stick it out. I think I'll be getting a $15 gift card from head office at the end of the month as a token of how very much they appreciate my dedicated service... which might buy me a CD or something. w00t. Kind of a backhanded gesture, in my opinion, but it's the least of my complaints with HMV right now (the bulk of which I'll blog about later, for real this time). Hmm... I wonder if Play is hiring...? Yeah. So, Terminal Hipster, right? I know. I've been tackling some pretty brutal writer/artist block lately. Couple that with my already-slow approach to getting comic strips done, and you end up where I'm at now: over a month and a half between "weekly" updates. I can't really make any excuses for it. But I do have a new comic almost ready to post, and some free time over the weekend, so I ought to be able to get it done for Monday. In continuing with looking back at the music of 2008, here's another musical oozing genital sore... Worst Crap Imaginable Girlicious - S/T Geffen First off, let me point out that I don't have cable and I try my best to avoid commercial radio, so for the most part I manage to remain blissfully ignorant of the pop mainstream. But, thanks to my job in a "music" store, I still know more than I care to about a wide range of horrendous shit. My other complaints about the company aside, I really hate HMV for even making me aware of the existence of this quartet of vapid succubi. Created for/by yet another banal reality show, Girlicious is basically the Pussycat Dolls' second line B-Team, and I feel the need to apologize if this is your introduction to them. Now, I have to admit that I'm shitpanning this album based on the strength of one song alone. The only track I've actually heard is the single, "Stupid Shit" (aka "Stupid Shhh"), and while I typically think it unfair to judge an album by one song, in this case I'm making a special exception. The producers behind Girlicious pretty much redefine the entire genre of brainless, push-button, shitty pop music with this asinine trash. The only possible purpose I can see for the existence of an entity such as Girlicious is as jackoff fodder for 13 year old boys who don't have internet access. Girlicious - Stupid ShitSide note: when exactly did pop music videos turn into softcore porn? I promise I'll post something good in my next music-related post. Something that won't make me look like such a snide hipster prick for a change. Tags: beatroute, girlicious, hmv, music 2008, terminal hipster, youtube
January 23rd, 200912:27 pm: More Musical Musings: 2008
Right. So. Of course, after putting a bit more thought into things, I realized that there were quite a few things from 2008's musical offerings I enjoyed quite a bit. Rather than compile a long, boring list of titles and such, I figure what I'll do is break things up and post a couple of things at a time... Best Debut Album Foals - Antidotes Transgressive/Sub Pop Working in a music store - even a shabby, understocked chain store - you come across a lot of stuff you'd never otherwise really hear about. One of those for me in '08 was the first full-length album by UK band Foals. Antidotes caught my eye because of the cover art, and while plenty of CDs with great art on the outside turn out to be utter crap, this one didn't disappoint. Two guys in this band used to be in a math rock trio (The Edmund Fitzgerald, whom to my knowledge never covered the Gordon Lightfoot song), so a lot of critics were quick to lump Foals into the math rock scene. Never mind the fact that they started Foals to get away from the whole math rock thing and have some more fun with music. Anyway, Antidotes might still be a little inaccessible to a lot of people, as the band does play around a bit with song structures and time signatures that might sound jarring at first; the single ' Cassius' is a pretty good example of the kind of building, frenetic madness I'm talking about. Still, many of the tracks have a great deal of pop sensibility to them, fusing the complexity they've taken math rock genre with the more familiar sounds and musical themes indie rock enthusiasts are more used to. Repeated listening might be required to get a sense of what exactly this band is trying to do (I think they're still figuring that out themselves), but it's very much worth the effort. Foals: Olympic AirwaysBest Great Song on an Otherwise Painfully Bland Album The Airborne Toxic Event: Sometime Around Midnight This band have one of the absolute worst monikers in recent musical history, and I don't care what novel it references ( White Noise, by Don DeLillo, if anyone's keeping score). Before I heard a note from the album, I hated these guys based on the name alone. But when I heard "Sometime Around Midnight" I liked it enough to grant them a grudging chance to defy that first impression. The music on this LA band's self-titled debut is every bit as boring as the album cover art would have you believe. Totally unoriginal, insubstantial, overproduced corporate dreck trying to sell itself to both the rock radio and indie markets, and missing the target on both shots. Pitchfork gave this CD a 1.6/10 rating. I think, on the whole, that was rather generous of them. Still, they did record this absolute gem of a single. Sure, it's not exactly original or fresh, but it's solid and does a good job of being what it is. Apparently this was the top alternative rock track of the year downlaoded via iTunes, proving once and for all that the album is a dead concept in mainstream music. The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around MidnightTags: airborne toxic event, foals, music 2008
January 21st, 200912:06 pm: Right, then. Music.
So. No less than four new albums I've been waiting for were released yesterday, and... not a single one of them was received at my store. The new albums from Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, Bon Iver, and New Pornographers frontman A.C. Newman were all curiously absent from HMV Southy yesterday. Whether they're simply late in arriving, or sitting in unopened boxes waiting for our receiver to get around to entering them into our inventory, I couldn't say. Either way, it's the first week in bloody ages I can remember there being this many new releases I've been itching to pick up, and not a one of them was there for me last night. Fer fuck's sakes, as my friend Jimmy Stewart might say. More HMV-related bitching and moaning to come, my friends. In other music-related geekery I ought to have mentioned sooner, I've started writing for BeatRoute as of this month. I'm just starting out small, doing a couple of album reviews here and there, but hopefully it'll lead to something a bit more substantial. It's the first music writing I've done (outside of the occasional blog post) since the Comatose Rose days, and I have to say it's nice to be doing something like this again. My first BeatRoute review, for OHGR's Devils in my Details, is in the current issue (though not on the the website). I haven't done any sort of year-end listing this year, more for the sake laziness than anything else. I'm sure 2008 wasn't a terrible year for music, but sitting here right now I'm not sure I could name ten albums from the year that really wowed me. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks hit one out of the park with Real Emotional Trash, and Luke Doucet & the White Falcon delivered a very solid album with Blood's Too Rich (video under the cut at the end of the post), but other than those two there's nothing off the top of my head that was anything to really write home about. Of course, I'm sure I'll think of a bunch of great albums as soon as I walk away from the keys here, but I think I spent more time listening to stuff from the 90s than anything else in '08. Okay, so I'm a nostalgic wanker looking backwards to his glory days. Whatever. The first quarter of 2009 looks pretty promising, though. Aside from the four CDs I didn't buy this week, we should be getting new stuff from The Decemberists, William Elliott Whitmore, The Prodigy, The Handsome Furs, and Neko Case. Heck, there's even a new Marilyn Manson to look forward to... and there's no way it could be worse than 2007's abysmal Eat Me, Drink Me. I'll leave you with a video from one of my favourite CDs of 2008. Here's the title track from Blood's Too Rich by Luke Doucet & the White Falcon.
( click for video )Tags: beatroute, hmv, luke doucet, music 2008, music 2009, music january 2009, stephen malkmus, youtube
December 18th, 200810:16 am: new comic!
 New comic is up at the Terminal Hipster site. I'm hoping to get the next one up by Monday, but no promises. I'm trying to do some different stuff with the art in the newer strips, working towards a looser, less angular kind of style. I think it's looking better, but then again, I'm a little biased. In other news, Calgary's roads are a fucking disaster, while 30 ploughs are sitting there doing nothing. Great work, Dave.
December 9th, 200811:03 am: This just in...
Universe Classics Sideswipe is the bee's knees. More on this story as it develops.
December 3rd, 200802:35 pm: Politics.
I think, just for fun, my friends kocane and lysol_69 should probably read each other's most recent posts.
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