In lieu of any sort of update on me personally, here's some music I'm listening to heavily at the moment:

• Queensrÿche - Operation: Mindcrime II - Sequel to the 1988 Operation: Mindcrime. Pretty good album; story's not as good as the original's, but it still rocks. Queensrÿche did a good job bringing back to the old 80s sound. Best album since Empire. And hey, guest vocals for Dr. X by Ronnie James Dio.
• Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze - Good mood, very nice blend of musical styles, and a bunch of guests, including Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top on vocals and guitar in "Burn The Witch", which is an awesome track. Great album.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic - Straight Outta Lynwood - Hi-larious. "White & Nerdy" of course rules, "Trapped In The Drive-Thru" is great, and "Pancreas" is the dark horse candidate for best on the album. Really. Fair amount of rap parody, but still manages to fit in pretty obvious Green Day, Rage Against the Machine, and maybe even Cake styles.
• Vienna Teng - Dreaming Through The Noise - Beautiful album. Texture's a bit different compared to her prior two, the album almost has a bit of a defeated feel to it. Still has the "one" "happy song" though. I played the hell out of this last week and it skewed my last.fm stats.

Yeah. In something resembling news, I subscribed to last.fm for a couple months, in order to play around with the radio feeds. Pretty nice.

Huzzah! Back from Vienna Teng at the Majestic Theatre with Dan and Janell. Very nice concert, but whoever it was that opened for her was a yawn-fest. The opening act's set was very weak, either all of the artist's songs sound exactly alike (and all horribly ignore anything but one guitar), or the selection was poor, as the set dragged on and on.

Vienna, however, had a very nice performance, even despite the random noise that seemed to always be going on in the lobby. Pretty songs with some slight variations for that nice live concert touch, and of course some ancedote-telling between songs. Closed with a vocal solo of Green Island Serenade, very beautiful. Dan met with Vienna after the show for a minute, I said "hi" when they brought up La Crosse. Random irrelevant thought: she's taller than I would have expected.

In any event, now that I've plugged Vienna a bit, the next is last.fm, which some of you may know formerly as Audioscrobbler. The site is a social music "revolution", where the revolution is that you can optionally set your audio player to upload information regarding what music you're listening to and then receive other suggested artists and specialized radio streams generated for your listening pleasure.

There is some public statistic tracking that last.fm does; for example, on my user page you can see that (at time of writing) I last listened to Green Island Serenade and some various tracks from the Firefly/Serenity soundtracks, I listen to a lot of Joe Hisaishi and Yoko Kanno, and that track-wise, Hisaishi and Xenogears Light dominate my history.

These kinds of charts are generated for all users, and users can also join groups, such as the group I have set up for #lh. Users can declare who their friends are, and see their recent tracks in their front page. Almost all of my friends on last.fm are from #lh, so I encourage any faithful reader here to sign up. There are plugins for most of the popular Windows players, signing up is straightforward, and the only personal information collected is the opt-in track information sent to last.fm. If anyone signs up, contact me somehow, or just add me as a friend and I'll accept it.

last.fm manages to avoid most of my gripes with social sites in that the information bleed is low (although it is unfortunately a bit too public, but it's just track history), the networking still tangible, and most importantly, there is some interesting function to all the data being shared (I've already discovered a couple interesting bands through recommendations from the system and from other people). And all of that is cool, unlike the crazy obsessive one-way information sink that is Facebook.

Lastly, since I posted contact information that one day, I figured I'd point out that for those so technically-minded, I am most accessible as "bssteph" on the SlashNET IRC network (irc.slashnet.org), so if you're looking for a more reliable way to contact me, and would be interested in idling in a chat room or two, connect and give me a message.

Obsess over what I'm listening to. DO IT.

So, it's...

1. ...been a week and a half since I posted,


2. ...been a couple days since I checked my mail, and


3. ...been a week or so since I worked on my Sepulture stuff.

Instead, I've been accustoming myself to the school semester again, which is a bit strange since I don't have any lectures to go to, instead I can just wander around campus when I feel like it. Of course I have enough stuff to do, but that's not really a problem.

Anyway, the week's been sucked up with moving around various machines in the apartment, and changing what their services are. Sadly, in the process, I managed to obsolete one Mini-ITX box entirely, so simon (commonly known as the emulator box) has been powered-off and is now pretty much only for traveling. My desktop (now in the living room) runs MythTV, with its 670+ GB of storage. Other details are not terribly interesting, but in any event, things are more organized finally, and I no longer have a bedroom filled with noisy fans.

Other events involve getting progressively more annoyed at Facebook (and I'm not in a discussing mood over it, unless you want to hear me bitch about it), and much more interestingly, deciding if I'm going to go into Madison this weekend. Vienna Teng is around on Saturday, and there's gaming to be had, so I'm looking at going, but I haven't entirely decided yet.

Both Mansquito and SS Doomtrooper are on SciFi this Saturday...

Time for a tiny update to keep my blogging streak alive.

A template for my True20 game regarding residents of Sepulture (so in simpler terms, the dead) can be found at http://wiki.incorporeal.org/Sepulture:Sepulture#Deceased_.28template.29

More updates are still on their way.

Oh. And I have just been informed that Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray barb to the chest. :(

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1732439.htm

The naturalist and television star Steve Irwin has died in a diving accident in far north Queensland. He was 44.

Police say he was stung through the heart by a stingray while diving off Port Douglas.

He was filming a documentary when the accident occurred around midday AEST near the Low Isles.

A helicopter arrived with paramedics on board to try to resuscitate him, but it was too late.

Where the hell did this Saturday go? Oh yeah, terrible movies on SciFi...

• Deadly Swarm
• Locusts: The 8th Plague
• Larva
• Raptor Island (one of my favorites)
• Manticore

...and I'm working on the end of King of the Lost World at the moment. Very awful. That's followed by Sabretooth, Attack of the Sabretooth, and Not of This Earth. Today's average rating on IMDB? 3.2 3.35.

Alright, Stephan, stay on topic.

Updated the wiki for Sepulture stuff a bit last night, there's now information on Sepulture (the plane), the rest is still forthcoming.

Did a couple more roll variants.