Moved!

Kicking Reality is now located at www.kickingreality.com.

Moving!

I've decided to take a chance here despite the fact that no reads - Kicking Reality will be moving. Bigger and better things are coming. Stay tuned.

Remember Toonami? Nostalgia and drum n' bass make sweet, sweet love.

I don't think many people seem to know this about me, but I have myself some incredibly odd nostalgic spurts. Sometimes I'll reminisce about my childhood. You know, the good old days, when things were a lot simpler and you didn't have to worry about GPA's or paying the car note or finding another job or any of that shit. Sometimes it's Power Rangers. Sometimes it's old toys. These trips down memory lane can range from mentioning how cool something used to be in passing, to looking up an old childhood obsession on YouTube (which is a fucking treasure trove for the nostalgic, by the way) to, well...something like this.

I doubt anyone even remembers like I do how cool it was to watch Dragonball Z in the afternoons on Cartoon Network's Toonami block, where a little blue robot named Tom would stride into the bridge of his kick-ass spaceship and introduce the next show with cool electronica playing in the background. I do have a point here, and that is the afforementioned electronica. Seriously - that shit was cool. I was thinking about it again a few years ago and went and did some internet searching - turns out, there's a whole CD (in fact, several whole CDs, if you know where to look) worth of this shit by a guy named Joe Boyd Vigil. I'm not going to delve into the whole of the stuff that I found in my internet travels, but I'll share with you the one published CD that came out of this stuff.

Thanks to KHInsider for hosting this, which means that I don't have to MediaFire the shit. Enjoy!

»Download: Toonami: Deep Space Bass

Wonderful!

Well, I'm finally fucking finished with school, and I had roughly 16 hours of freedom before...I got sick. Now I've got something (the flu?) that comes with fevers and headaches. Surprisingly (and thankfully) no cold or cough stuff, which is good because I have a show in less than a week and I need to be on the ball. Oh boy.

Whatever. I'm just looking forward to being done with all this shit so that it can fully hit me that it's summer.

So close.

I'm stressing the hell out these days because the last few days of the school year are upon me. This past week I had two tests and three presentations in four days. I was up till goddamn six in the morning working on a stupid, stupid video for film class that was only for extra credit (okay, it kicked ass, but still - 6AM.) I'm so ready to just get the fuck out of school and throw myself into two things: working my ass off to finally make some more money, and music. I'm playing as many gigs as I possibly can this summer; I already have two lined up and one of those is at Borders, which is a big thing for me. Yikes. I'm gonna be doing a lot of recording once I get my two nifty condenser mics as well and hopefully have an EP done and on iTunes by September or October-ish. I can't keep being this fucking exhausted all the time. It's nuts.

That's all.

Trent Reznor is officially God.

Ladies and gentlemen, he's done it again.

I totally forgot to post a blog ranting and raving about this a few months ago, but as you may be aware (but probably aren't, because you're probably dumb), on March 2, Trent Reznor released a brand-new, two-hour, 36-track instrumental Nine Inch Nails album via nin.com called Ghosts I-IV, with absolutely no prior announcement, beyond cryptic hints, that a new record was coming out. Free of his record label, Trent sold the album at various tiers - $5 for the digital download, $10 for the download and a physical two-disc CD copy with mighty fine artwork, $75 for a deluxe edition with a hardcover book, the multi-tracks for remixing and the album on a Blu-Ray in hi-def, and $300 version with all that shit, plus a 4-LP vinyl set, signed by Trent himself.

Long story short, the guy made a million dollars in a week - more in one week than he saw from his last album, Year Zero, to date (it was released about a year ago.) That's pretty fucking incredible.

So it looked like all Trent was going to do was tour. Nope - the other day, again out of nowhere, Reznor releases a new single called "Discipline" (this time with vocals) to radio, having finished mastering the song the previous day. A note in the ID3 tags says "Go to nin.com on May 5," leading me to believe that there is yet another new album on the way from Nine Inch Nails.

I absolutely bow to Trent Reznor at this point, even more so than I used to. For not only is a musical genius, but now he's completely changing the way shit gets done in the music industry. Free of his label, he can pretty much drop a record whenever he wants. And being sober and apparently thinking more clearly and having more creative spurts, the guy's pretty much shitting out music right now. Once again I have to lament that Flo Rida is on hour rotation at every shitty radio station in America and this, because it's by NIN, will never get played - despite the fact that the song is perfectly radio-friendly, and a lot cleaner than most of what's on the air these days anyways to boot.

But I digress, and now you will listen to my instructions and you will follow them flawlessly:

Step One: Go to discipline.nin.com and download your free copy of "Discipline," and check back on May 5 because there will probably be an EP or possibly a full-length album awaiting you when you do. For the record, it's a great song - fun and dancy, albeit slightly more in the spirit of the With Teeth album. If you liked "Only," you'll like this.
Step Two: If you haven't already, also go to ghosts.nin.com, or go to Target, and check out Ghosts I-IV. It's completely instrumental, but it's a great record too - as Reznor describes it, "A soundtrack for daydreams." For those familiar with NIN, there are little bits and pieces of this record that each remind me of different albums. It's very The Fragile-y, but there's also some very The Downward Spiral and Year Zero elements to it. If you have a hard time actively sitting down and listening to instrumental music, it also makes for great study/work/drawing/other music.

I'll know if you don't do these things, and I won't be happy about it.

If we don't elect Obama, we deserve whatever's coming to us.

It's a good thing no one actually reads this blog, because if they did, my official Kicking Reality endorsement of Barack Obama for president may just hurt the guy. So just this one time, thanks for NOT telling your friends about Kicking Reality. I've been thinking a lot lately about this election. I'm almost 20 years old, so this will be the first one I get to vote in. I live in North Carolina, so our primary is May 6. I am biting my nails hoping that maybe Hillary will be out of it by then, but she probably won't be because the bitch doesn't know when to quit.

To the exact same degree that I love Barack Obama, I loathe Hillary Clinton.

I think she's evil, conniving, back-stabbing, ice-cold bitch and I don't trust her as far as I can throw her. She's flip-floppy, she's too polarizing, and not to mention, she's about the least likable candidate I could fathom. I know what I'm gonna get here - I don't like Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. Wrong. My dislike for Clinton has nothing to do with her politics (which I'm perfectly alright with, since even I can admit that they're close enough to Obama's) or the fact that she's a woman. As a matter of fact, she's such an evil hag that I don't really consider her much of a woman at all. But speaking in the technical, if she didn't have a vagina, I'd still hate her just as much.

I hate all the bullshit that goes around about her "experience." Dave Matthews said something that I'm gonna totally rip off here - I don't want someone with her kind of experience, because all she's experienced in is the same kind of political manipulation that she practices now. I don't want someone like that running my country and I can't believe anyone does. The only reason this woman is still in the race is because she's been riding on the coat tails of her husband. I need someone I can trust not to fuck us into oblivion and I can trust Obama not to do that. I know a lot of people argue that he just speaks big empty words, but I don't want to hear that because empty or not, those words unite people a lot more than any of Hillary's, and that's exactly what this country needs right now - unity. Besides, whatever experience Obama MAY lack, I'm sure he can make up for in the cabinet, and I'd venture to say that he's going to be a lot better at foreign relations - if only because he's fucking LIKEABLE - than Hillary or McCain ever would be.

Oh, McCain - how could I forget you, you wrinkly, twisted old son of a bitch? I don't understand why this guy is the frontrunner for the Republican party, either. Even most of the Republicans (finally) no longer support the war in Iraq and are beginning to become disillusioned with Bush, but now they want to put a guy in office who would keep us there indefinitely? A guy who sang "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran"?

Fuck that. I'm 20 years old. We've exhausted our troops as it is, and if we go into Iran, as we most certainly will if McCain gets his hands on the Oval Office, they're going to have to start a draft again. Who do you think is gonna go first? When I look at John McCain I can't help but think that he's so excited about getting into office and thus Iran that he's practically sweating napalm with excitement. Fuck John McCain.

Before I close, I'd like to remind you that Hillary supporters are fucking retarded. Even if you like Hillary more than Obama, obviously one candidate needs to be picked. Now, if you look at the politics, they're similar enough to be reconciled. But let's say Hillary does get the nomination - she won't stand a chance against McCain because she's too polarizing. Almost all Republicans hate Hillary, and indeed a large percentage of Democrats hate her too. But Obama, on the other hand, has the support of many more Democrats, and is even pulling a lot of Republicans and independents. Thus, he'd probably ruin McCain's pruny shit come November. If the bottom line is the politics of the person you're putting in office, and Obama's politics are similar enough to Hillary's, why would you not just rally behind the guy more likely to get elected? What it comes down to is this: What's more important to you - Hillary winning, or a Democrat winning. What's worse to you - Obama getting the White House instead of Hillary, or McCain getting it and keeping us at war?

The bottom line is, we desperately need someone like Obama in office, and if we elect anyone else but him, we probably deserve whatever shitstorm comes our way.

Album Download: Black On Both Sides

So as you can already surmise from my previous blog entries (especially this one) my outlook on hip hop is rather bleak. At least, hip hop these days. I want to again make clear that I love all kinds of music, including hip hop. I just only like it when there's some actual artistry involved, when there's some thought that goes into it. It doesn't all need to be art, but for the love of God, I can't stand that kind of shit that you can tell was churned out for the money.

In my continuing effort to push good hip hop on people, here's my album download of the whenever I feel like posting one: I present to you the mighty Mos Def's debut album, Black On Both Sides. Mos is a musical genius. His lyrics are thoughtful and have some actual substance to them. His beats are anything but the generic bullshit that's out these days, and he's got some pretty good one-liners to boot. And on top of that, he can sing too, which not a lot of rappers can do well.

Kids, this is some of the best of the best. It's so much better than the generic Soulja Boy or Timbaland bullshit. This is real hip hop. You owe it to yourself to listen to this album; I would be willing to say it's my favorite hip hop album ever. He's got some other great shit, including the next album after this one called The New Danger but nothing compares to this. You'll love it.

»Download: Mos Def - Black On Both Sides

Shopping on eBay? Steer clear of "mathony."

I just wanted to let anyone who reads this to know that if they're ever out and about buying things on eBay, to never, ever buy anything from a user named mathony. Why? Because mathony is a stupid, thieving, irresponsible son of a bitch.

Let me tell you a little bit about my experience with this "mathony." For all intents and purposes, let's say "mathony" is a he (this is counterintuitive to me, because my experience leads me to believe that mathony has no balls.)

A few months ago, my laptop's power cord began to quit working on me. It was a fairly new one. The wire had become frayed and was poking out, and this culminated with me walking into my room to find the power cord to my laptop sparking. Thankfully I grabbed it and disposed of it before it caught my sheets on fire. I sure don't need that to happen again.

You can't find a power cord for my laptop, mostly because it's a cheap piece of shit, unless you either a) look on eBay or b) shell out $120 for what's called a "universal adapter." This adapter can be adjusted to fit many kinds of laptops, but as I said, damn thing's a hundred and twenty bucks, so fuck that. Left with only option B, I hopped on eBay and within minutes found a replacement for $30, including shipping. Fast forward a week when my plug gets here. Anxious to finally have a working laptop again, I go to plug it in only to discover that the plug is too small for the socket. Barely - a little larger, in fact, and it would have fit just right.

So I e-mail this mathony, and say that he must have sent me the wrong plug. He shoots one back with a half-ass apology for the inconvenience and asking for the item number. I send it to him, and he says if I ship back the plug he sent me he'll send the "right" one. Fast forward about two weeks. I finally get this new plug, and it still isn't the right one. I look on the auction again, to quintuple check that the title still says the name of my laptop (which is embarassingly cheap, so I'll omit that) as one of the compatible computers. It does. I look closer in the auction, and it says it is an 18V plug. My laptop requires a 19V plug. So now we have a problem on our hands - he's sending me the wrong plug because the bastard advertised the wrong plug.

I send him a few e-mails about this and he fails to respond with anything at all, let alone an apology. Long story short, I'm settling this via negative feedback and a PayPal dispute, but this person is a coward. He won't even refund me the $20 it's cost me to ship back now two plugs that are the wrong ones, so I'm really only getting about $10 back from this motherfucker.

Don't buy anything from mathony. (S)he's a dick.

Lost is back. Watch it.

I'm not going to get into another rant on why I'm so smart and you're so stupid, because frankly I don't feel like it, but seriously - Lost, one of the most brilliant shows ever to grace television, is back on, and it's my civic duty to tell you to FUCKING WATCH. If you've never seen it, start taping/Tivoing them every Thursday night at 9 and in the meanwhile, start watching from the beginning. Do not be a dumb fuck and try to come in in the middle of this series because you won't have any idea what's going on. Do not be a dumb fuck and think that watching a recap will help you either, 'cause it won't. It really won't. Plus you'll be robbing yourself of the great experience that is actually watching the show.

If you don't comply with my demands, you're probably retarded. In all seriousness, I don't mean to imply that by watching some TV show, you're smart, I'm just saying this: I only know a few people that watch Lost, and all of them are really smart. I also know a lot of really dumb people. None of them hardly know what Lost even is. It's just that it's a show that takes a lot of brains both to put on and to watch and follow, so have your wits about you.

Return of the Overblown, Overhyped Karaoke Show

It's that time of year again. It's the start of a several-month long stretch in which families everywhere will burn their eyeballs out in front of the television for at least four hours a week watching what I can only think they believe is the most brilliant phenomenon ever to grace television.

That's right. You know what I'm talking about. The Overblown, Overhyped Karaoke Show is back in full force, complete with a new cast of completely untalented, spoiled fuckheads vying to become the next entirely unsatisfying industry stooge. I'd like to derail for just a minute and say that I was flipping through channels the other day and I caught Sanjaya Indian Guy on the TV Guide channel. He was asked by another alum of the show what he thought about the tour that plagues the nation during the summer after the Karaoke Show. His response, which I can only paraphrase because I have to minimize my exposure to that adorably flamboyant little boy, made me first shit myself with laughter and then cry actual, genuine tears of dispair: "The best part of being on tour was being able to perform with all these talented musicians."

WHAT THE FUCK?!

Before my afforementioned laughter and tears, I literally staggered backwards a few steps. That's how baffled and blown away by the lunacy of that statement I was. "Musicians"? Fuck me in the face! In all honesty, I shouldn't react so harshly; this is good news for the world. I've been playing guitar, singing, writing, and more recently, playing shows, a little of the keyboard and recording music for the last few years of my life now, and all of those things were done in vain when I could have instead walked into a run-down karaoke bar, hopped in front of a microphone to wail a chopped-up 90-second version of an already shitty song and been able to legitimately call myself a musician. Woe is me; I have wasted the five years of my life. Thank you, Sanjaya, for showing me the folly of my ways.

Anyways, I think the appeal to that travesty of a reality show, which shall not be mentioned here, was "Oh my God, here's the catch - you can vote who you want to win!" You know what else you can vote for? The fucking president. Try voting for that and maybe we wouldn't have been stuck with an idiot cowboy for eight years. Fact: more people voted for American Music Industry's Bitch than voted in the presidential elections. (Do I need citation for that? Is it really that hard to believe?) It's just incredibly sad to me that people have a bigger commitment to a pop star who will do absolutely nothing for the world but make it an even more irritating place to live in* to the point where you spend every Wednesday night from January to May repeatedly dialing a phone number, but you can't be bothered to drag your ass to the polls once every four years to help make a decision that matters.

Look, I'm not saying that watching this show automatically makes you dumb (well...yes, I am.) All kidding aside, I'm a sensible guy. There's a place for good, clean family television and at least it serves as a way for families to come together. But two to three nights a week, for an hour each, coupled with a nearly zombie-like dedication to retarded pop stars? Fuck me, that is so sad.

*That, and make one horrible record that doesn't even sell the way it was expected to before mysteriously dropping off the planet never to be seen outside of shitty talk shows.

Cloverfield was awesome.

Thank God.

I just robbed the internet.

So I've had a pretty wonderful day on the internet today, and I feel like a thief. Despite being completely flat broke, I have had the fortune of procuring these items this weekend online.

1. Samsung Sync phone. My contract with AT&T (boo) needs to be renewed, meaning I'm due for an upgrade. A word to the wise: Always upgrade through Amazon.com. In the store, this would cost me $120, and with rebates, maybe down to $50. Online, this phone cost me precisely one penny because I was renewing my contract or some shit. Free two-day shipping too. Before anyone asks (which they won't, as a matter of fact) I do know a lot about this phone beforehand. A buddy of mine has it, and I've seen videos of its functionality. It features video (including streaming TV), an MP3 player that I will almost certainly use not even once, and a camera that takes such crystal clear pictures that it would make a baby cry and say, "Waaa, too crystal-clear." I feel like I just screwed AT&T out of a little money, and we all know them fuckers deserve it.
   
2. USB data cable for the phone. Usually these are about $15-$20, but I found one for $0.02 on eBay with $4 shipping. (Man, I'm good.) It also comes with a CD with 10,000 graphics on it and some ringtones, as well as the software to actually manage the phone.
   
3. Three Cowboy Bebop CD's, which only cost me $5 each. Those shits are impossible to find for reasonable prices (or so I thought) but I guess I lucked out. They're in brand-new condition too. Ah, I love the Seatbelts.
4. A new power plug for my laptop. Alright, I cheated a bit; my dad bought that for me. Hopefully this one won't catch fire, which is kind of important to me in buying appliances.

So yeah, with all the bargains I lucked into this weekend I feel like I just robbed the internet. I'm a happy panda today.

Stop wearing bullet-proof vests, before someone actually shoots you.

So I'm in the library at school and I have to stifle a laugh. Someone in here is wearing something that looks suspiciously like a bullet-proof vest.

Ah, what a statement! Now keep in mind, I don't know shit about fashion (then again, neither do most brilliant people) but even I know how fucking ridiculous this is. But I'm not ragging on this in terms of a fashion statement; I'm ragging on it because the very concept is fucking stupid. Why the fuck would anyone wear this? It's as if to say, "I'm such a bad-ass motherfucker that I have enemies everywhere who want to shoot me on a community college campus in a place that doesn't even crack the top 25 most dangerous cities in America, but that is ten minutes outside #14 on the list of the safest ones." There are two things that I feel it's my civic duty to bring to this asshole's attention (and indeed, any asshole that thinks this trend is cool.) Pay attention, because I'll only say it once.

1. Everyone knows you're ripping off 50 Cent. And the irony of it is, you're ripping off something that wasn't even cool to begin with it. It was stupid when he did and it's even stupider when you do it, especially since, once again, you live ten minutes outside a suburban city so safe that the only time a cop has drawn a gun in 50 years is to put down a suffering deer. Which directly ties into my next point:
   
2. No one wants to shoot you.* No one even knows who you are. You're not significant enough to get shot. You're not actually dangerous; you just think you are. You have no enemies; if you do, they are figments of your imagination and everyone knows that despite basic second amendment rights, there is a loophole that prohibits figments of the imagination from obtaining gun licenses and, subsequently, guns themselves.

Update: I also feel the need to let you know that five minutes after I wrote this I heard this retard answer the phone. Now, I don't like to eavesdrop, but God save me I just couldn't help myself. Oddly enough he spoke with the same drunken drawl as 50, and even had a (incredibly fake) grill. I had to run to bathroom so I could laugh. Everyone probably thought I was about to shit myself but I don't even care.

*or at least they didn't before you started wearing retarded bullet-proof vests. Good job, dipshit; now people will actually want to test it out. Joke's on you when it doesn't work.

Lunacy!

Well, I can't say I've kicked off '08 quite the way I've wanted to, but everything seems to be peachy at the moment. So a few nights ago, the night before I left to go out of town to Hilton Head (I don't even want to get started on Hilton Head, so I won't) I reunited with a good friend of mine, one Nick Dowden. Nick and I used to jam together and were in the process of forming a band when the fat fuck had to move out of town. Fortunately, he's only a few hours away and thus has the opportunity to come into town on occasion, though not as often as I'd like.

Anyways, I was showing Fats around my (very meager) music recording shit and we started playing around with the MIDI keyboard. Before long I had accidentally come up with something mildly cool; really just a phrase. I told him to start playing shit on the keyboard with me and about three hours later we had about finished a 1:15-long track (I wish it were longer; I might have to make that happen) that is very odd and features: a Koto run through various flanges and shit, a completely unrhythmic timpani that sounds like it features two two-year-olds (one trying to tune it and one banging on it randomly), some computer noises, and (my personal favorite) Nick making weird whispers and gutteral noises into the microphone.

I present it to you here. But be forewarned, it's fucking STRANGE.

»Download: Lunacy (Dowden Was Here)