Mah Blog

As you may remember from reading the last entry regarding the Beale Street Music Festival, this is the second year in a row that my friend Jason and I have gone to BSMF. I think we plan on continuing the tradition, because it’s just so damn fun.

However, this year’s BSMF almost wasn’t, for us. We procrastinated even more than we did last year (which is sad), and we almost didn’t go. In return for our laziness, we were able to find an even cheaper Hotel this year than last year, and we reserved it approximately a week before the show. Pretty nice. Another thing was that this year we had a different guest in tow. This year, our friend from college, Erin Poerschke, joined us for the awesomeness. Finally, this year wasn’t so much about there being a ton of artists that we just had to see like last year (I’m pretty sure it’s going to be hard to beat the 2007 BSMF in terms of lineup, at least for me and Jason[unless it's fucking Voodoo Fest '07 which was superbly epic, but expensive and I couldn't go]). This year was more about seeing some “fun” shows and just enjoying ourselves for the last weekend together (school, like last year, gets out the week right before BSMF, which is really nice for us).

If you’re familiar with last year’s entry about BSMF, you’re not going to have to worry about length as much this year (I don’t think) but it should still be a considerable length. So, without further ado:

Day One!

Concert One - Lord T & Eloise

Wow. These guys were just so ridiculous. I would try to explain them via text, but you wouldn’t get the full effect. So instead, I present you with a picture of the two, courtesy of last.fm:

Just super-ridiculous. It wasn’t a bad show, I have to say. Interesting, at the least.

Concert Two- Flyleaf

During this concert, I met up with some friends we knew from the Memphis area, that was pretty cool. We talked for a while, and there were serenaded by the weird Lacey Mosley. It was a pretty good show, though I’ll be the first to admit the reason I even knew of them is because of Rock Band (and that one of my roommates from the last year sung that song as incredibly screamo as he could). I will say that the bassist for that band is incredibly crazy — I’m pretty sure he took every opportunity he could to jump off the monitors in the front.

Concert Three - Hellogoodbye

It was at this point that Jason, Erin and I parted ways for the night. They wanted to go see Ben Folds (which would have been pretty cool, but I don’t really know much of him) and The Roots (a band I know absolutely nothing of), so I decided to stay with our Memphis friends for Hellogoodbye and My Chemical Romance (don’t judge me >_>). That turned out to be the better decision, for one reason: rain. See, it’s inevitable that it rains during BSMF. This year, it was on Friday. And it was a torrential rain. Really bad. Because of the rain, it turns out, the stage that Ben and the Roots were performing on (it’s the only one facing in the opposite direction of the other stages, which turned out to be its downfall) was basically shut down — the rain was able to get on the entire stage at their end, while the others were partly protected from the back. So unfortunately, Jason and Erin didn’t get to see their concerts, and I got to freeze my ass off in the rain and wind in return.

But the concert: I really enjoyed this one. I think if you didn’t get at least some entertainment from this concert (whether it was from the music or just being able to make fun of the singer for his weird mannerisms), then you’re probably not human. I’ll admit, I like HGB even though it’s kinda “girly” (>_>), and I really enjoyed the concert. I couldn’t see because the rain got on my glasses, and I don’t have contacts (that’s on the list to get before next year’s BSMF), but it didn’t really detract.

Concert Four - My Chemical Romance

I see you laughing there. STFU. This concert was actually really fun. The singer wasn’t drunk (at least not too bad), so he actually performed well, and it was a pretty cool atmosphere. I did laugh a bit on the inside when they didn’t play the first guitar solo from “Dead!”, but that’s OK, I guess. >_>

MCR was the last show of the day, so after that, I headed off to the car to learn that Jason and Erin had been sitting in it for a while due to show cancellations and rain. We went back to the hotel and died for the night.

Day Two

We started out the day by going to Jim Neeley’s Interstate Barbeque. Oh my God. If you’re in Memphis, EAT HERE if you want real, awesome BBQ. It was so super-amazing good.

Afterwards, it was back to the “daily grind”. ;P

Concert One - Al Kapone

First of all, a disclaimer: I don’t like rap. I would go as far as saying that I hate the genre.

With that said, I really loved this concert. Yes, it was rap, but it was really good. However, I may be a biased because he actually used real people playing real instruments to play his set. I was really surprised at that, and I applaud him greatly for the showing.

Concert Two - Tegan and Sara

Next concert was Tegan and Sara. Not a band I knew personally, but Erin really liked them, and since we were almost on the fence, we stayed for them. They were pretty good. Mostly singer-songwriter-style music, but they did have a lot of anecdotes (basically Sara saying that she’s a weak Canadian who doesn’t like the hear [her words, not mine] and other stuff), which were pretty good. Also, Tegan flipped Sara off once during the set, that was exciting. Strange, though, as they were supremely nice. After every song, they would say “Thank you very much” after the crowd clapped for them. Overall, it was pretty good. We did see some weird looking people in the crowd, but that’s not a story for now.

At this point, I left for the bathroom and random wandering around the park, because I didn’t want to say for Colbie Caillat. So basically, I didn’t really see any shows for a while, though I did get a few snippets — mostly bad. Like The Whigs and Cat Power. At Cat Power, we all rejoined with our Mephisian Friends and decided that she really sucked, and decided that Simple Plan would be a better choice.

Concert Three - Simple Plan

This concert was really good. I wasn’t all that familiar with them (I know a few songs), but I still enjoyed it.

After Simple Plan, we stayed a bit for Seether, but when the crowd started compacting (á là Godsmack last year), we decided that that was not the band for us. ;) We moved on to Lou Reed.

Concert Four - Lou Reed

This concert really sucked. I’m not even going to lie. It could have been partly due to the contact high I got from the little bit we were in Seether’s crowd that gave me a massive headache, but mostly it was that the guy just really wasn’t very good. The format was jamband-style, which I usually just enjoy, but this guy couldn’t pull it off. Nothing was particularly amazing (something that should happen with jambands) and the guy’s voice was really annoying and chanted the same lines over 2309745987 in the course of a song. This was not a concert I enjoyed.

Concert Five - Santana

How can you not like Santana? Seriously, though, this concert was super amazing. THIS is a jamband you need to see. Plus, it’s fukken Santana. I’m happy to say that I’ve marked off one of my “dream” concerts off the list (now I just need to figure out a way to see Muse live >_>).

Day the Final

For our final day, our Memphis friends decided to give us a short impromptu tour of downtown Memphis. Before they got there, though, we went down Beale Street a bit and watched some random Blues Band play in a corner. It was pretty sweet. The friends were met, tours were give, and good food was had at a place called Rum Boogies. It was epic.

Concert One - Carney

This may be the surprise concert of the festival. They were so good. They had a very blues / western rock (kind of like a Bon Jovi) feel. They also did a cover of the Beatles and it was sooo good. Awesome band. Go pick up their EP.

Concert Two - Rue Melo

This concert was decent. It would have been way better if the three instrumentalists just dropped the girl and became like a funk band. Her voice was so annoying.

Finger Eleven - Finger Eleven

This concert was superb. The songs they played were awesome and the band really got into. They were just super-crazy. Especially the rhythm guitarist. He would hold the guitar by the neck (whilst fretting the chords), and he would change the chords by tossing the guitar up and catching it in the correct position. That’s crazy. The drummer and lead guitarist were insane, too, but what they did were indescribable. I was really disappointed at the bassist, though. He didn’t really do… anything. The best part of the concert was when they did Covers of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out“. They were incredible, but I was a bit disappointed when they didn’t play Floyd’s solo ;).

Concert the Last - Fergie

Yes, I went to both an MCR and a Fergie concert. So sue me. I didn’t enjoy this one at all, though. It was basically just her being a whore (imagine that) and ruining classic rock. Suffice it to say, we left early for home.

So, after leaving Fergie early, we drove home with a stop for snax and a switchover so that Jason wouldn’t fall asleep during his driving and kill us. ;) Pretty uneventful ending to an awesome weekend.

Hey guys! As the title would indicate, I’m not yet dead. The past few days have been simultaneously very exciting and very boring for me — starting with last weekend, the Beale Street Music Fest. I’ve watched two movies and been over to one of my friend’s houses everyday over the past four days. I’ve been job hunting (oh, the Joys of Summer), reformatting my laptop and re-installing Windows XP, and all sorts of other goodies.

So, you may be wondering, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?” How can he be bored after doing all of that? Well, besides those things, my life has been incredibly boring at home — internets = dialup, no Xbox 360 [It caught the RRoD bug =( ], and parents being mildly annoying. Just a day in the life, I guess.

But that also means I have quite a bit to write about, so be on the lookout for at least three more articles from me over the next day or so, and possibly even a guest blogger on the horizon. So, keep an eye peeled. ;)

So, over the weekend, I helped my dad install roofing shingles on my Grandmother’s house (I’ll continue tomorrow afternoon after classes, too =/).

If that shit doesn’t make you want to ensure that you get a college education, I don’t what will.

Saturday (I would say yesterday, but because of a silly Philosophy paper, it’s Monday now =P), I took a little trip to Starkville, Mississippi with three of my friends. You may be wondering at this point, “Why?”, and I’ll tell you, friend: a Quiz Bowl tournament. Yes, my good fellows, due to the hard work of certain individuals, the University of Central Arkansas now has a team of people gathered together for the purpose of academic competition.

On this particular Saturday, Mississippi State University was hosting a tournament, and we were scheduled to compete. (Side note: the MSU campus is awesome. It’s big and seems like one of those places that’s just been there forever) Seven teams were in attendance, and a round-robin style bracket was had. In the end, we got fourth place, but we did really well. We averaged around 210 points a game. However, it was somewhat bittersweet, as we lost three (out of nine [not completely sure there]) games within 20 points (in the NAQT-style format that we were playing, each question is worth ten points, and if you answer correctly, you get “bonus” questions which are worth 30 points in total. You also get counted off five points if you buzz in before the question is finished with an incorrect answer). It was still really fun, though, and I think we did quite well considering that this is only our second tourney.

There’s one more thing I must mention. If you’re ever in Starkville, you have to eat at a restaurant called “Harvey’s” and hope that they have the Jamaican Jerk Tilapia Lunch Special going on that day. It is to die for. A mouthgasm, if you will.

Oh, one more thing. One of the people on the trip is a magician with music. He called up “Sweet Home Alabama” when someone said they wanted something classical rock, he found Rick Astley, Jewel, and Matisyahu on Sirius sattelite radio, among other things. ‘Twas epic.

Yes, very yes.

I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes or so importing all the old entries I made from various old blogs I kept (and by various, I mean my old Wordpress.com blog and my Xanga). It was really rather easy once I got everything working, and now I have all my internet writings compacted into one place.

If you wanna go back and see some of the entries I made in my long-forgotten past (actually, about two years ago), you can go here for the Wordpress stuff and here for the Xanga entries.

I’ll forewarn you, though, especially if you’re wanting to look at the Xanga stuff: that’s some of the longest content I’ve ever put finger to keyboard for. It also means that my XHTML compliancy on those pages are shitty (Xanga’s “editor” makes it look soooo bad).

Hey, hey, hey! Fat Albert here wi… wait. I’m not Fat Albert!

But I do have an important announcement to make. Some of my friends are making public a new PHP-based news manager called (somewhat blandly, I’ll admit >_>) PHP News System (or PHPns for short). It’s pretty sweet.

Of course, you can always get more info at the Project Homepage.

Check it out, d00d.

For the past hour or so, the weather here’s been pretty righteous. Lots (and I mean lots of rain), sicktacular lightning, and lovely tornadoes. It’s been pretty crazy. And somewhat scary.

One of my friends lives near an area where there was a lot more damage, and he’s going to try and get some pics. I’ll see if I can get those up tomorrow or sometime.

But yeah, it’s pretty insane here.

There have been some things lately that have made me think as to why I keep this thing around still. This thing being my blog.

First, I get no visitors. Really. I don’t. None. I can just take a look at my stats to see that I might get 5 visitors on a good day (that takes out of consideration articles that have been submitted to StumbleUpon and get a modest page-viewing). It shows up again when I look at my web host’s control panel and see that I barely use two gigabytes of transfer in a good month, and most of that is from one-shot things that I host on files.galador.org. I realize that not much of what I have to say is that interesting, but the stats are really disheartening.

I think that leads to point number two. I don’t make updates to this thing as much as I used to. Though it is up somewhat from Fall/Winter ‘07-ish, it’s still barely half of what it used to be. I don’t know. I just don’t have as much drive as I used to to update this thing. And another thing is that I haven’t really done much interesting stuff lately to write about. I haven’t had a reason to make a huge WoT (a Wall of Text, for those of you out of the know) like I used to. To quote Andrew McMahon, “My life has become a boring pop song, and everyone is singing along.”

Thirdly, as a recent comment made me realize, people are assholes on the Internet. They don’t give a fuck about your life. They’d rather sit on their ass and make fun of you. To the commenter: if you read this, then know that I actually enjoyed your comment (for various reasons) I could have easily said, “What an asshole.” and deleted the commend from the moderation queue, but I didn’t. I’ll be honest, I did give it a thought, but I decided to give a fair representation of whoever happens to read this thing. I also took the time to respond honestly, and hope you take the time to read the response.

Fourth, it makes you feel really shitty when one of your friends finds out you have a blog, and they say something like, “What, you actually write stuff on there? What do you put, ‘today I used my computer?’ in a condescending tone. Really shitty.

So yeah. This article almost sounds like it belongs more on Xanga/MySpace/et al than a self-hosted blog as it’s all self-pitying and shit, but here it is. I’m not ashamed to speak my mind and bitch. I should really learn to do it more often. I think my life would improve a lot if I weren’t so passive. But that’s a story for another place.

Yay! School is officially over… at least for a week or so. Yup, it’s Spring Break time around these parts.

Mine’s probably going to be relatively docile, consisting of sleep, and some fishing/boating down in Louisiana. That might not sound like much, but after the hell school’s been, lately, it’s going to be like Heaven.

In other news, I upgraded WordPress to 2.5 RC1, so if you notice some weirdness, drop me a line about it.