This year, MetalSucks is sponsoring a Protest The Hero tour, and arranged to give away a pair of tickets to each show. I won the Philly tickets. This is fucking awesome.

Below the video for “Sequoia Throne” by Protest The Hero. Revel in the insanity.

First lines of the song:

Did you come here to kill, or did you come here to die?
And did you really think that spaceships would descend from the sky?

\m/

Unfortunately, I, cameraless, was unable to snap photos all day long of fun things that we did. So I had to wait until I got home and I could snap them with my laptop’s camera.

Behold.

That’s right, I bought a cowboy hat. In Manhattan.

Now, I understand that it’s not a real cowboy, and actually looks exactly like a cowboy hat that one would buy in Manhattan, but still, I’m really freaking pleased with it. Everyone tells me it’s extremely “me,” whatever the hell that means. And it was $20. So whatever.

Alright, I went kind of crazy with the pictures. You can tell I miss having a camera, no?

One final note: I know y’all are teetering on the brink of sanity right now, so maddened are you by the furious jealousy pounding in your skulls (which are most certainly not housed under cowboy hats, I think it’s safe to say), but I hope that this cowboy hat does not come between us.

No, seriously. Alright, I slept pretty late on Saturday, then made it to a cafe for “breakfast” around 2pm. After that, some friends and I took a stroll through the park beside which the cafe resides, and we encountered… just look at the pictures.

Charge!

It was the greatest day.

I talked to the leader of the ragtag lot and he directed me to their ragtag website. Turns out it’s some summer camp for kids who are smart bargainers: “OK Mom, I’ll go get some fresh air, but on one condition!”

It looked like an absolutely awesome time, and the leader was kind enough to 1) welcome our profuse picture taking and 2) invite us to play along. We accepted. Duh.

Now, I know it looks like I spent the afternoon kicking the crap out of little kids and girls, but this was a much more complex scenario than that. There were like two other dudes my age, one of whom wouldn’t stop reading a Terry Pratchett book, even while swordfighting. I liked him.

The best part is that my friends and I lingered in the park long after they’d all gone home. It looked like someone had left their gear (one blood-tipped foam spear and one shield) there, so I scooped it up and took it home. So it wouldn’t get stolen.

Now I guess I’ll have to go back to Clark Park next Saturday from 1-4pm in order to return it. Damn.

Special thanks to Leigh for letting me use her exquisite pictures.

By the way, before anyone pipes up that this doesn’t look like real LARPing, go to hell. You’re weird for knowing that.

I have the day entirely off, and there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about that.

With this wonderful font of free time, I’m going to listen to the new Arsis CD, as well as a lot of old Arsis, and make a post about my thoughts.

Then I’ll probably have a beer and watch a movie.

Then more Arsis.

I repeat: There’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

But I do.

I miss my guitars very, very dearly. I do have an acoustic on loan from a friend here, but that’s only making me miss my sweethearts back in the States all the more. Recently I went digging through my video directory to try to see if there was any concert footage I could upload to YouTube and show some friends online. (Another story entirely, but I still haven’t been able to get the full version of “Treacherous Gods” at Paganfest up on YouTube. Worst 2.0 site ever.)

Anyway, while scaling the heights of the furthermost branches of that directory tree, I found some old videos of me playing guitar. This one I made two years ago, or almost. It was definitely August 2006, although I am not sure when in that month.

I absolutely love the riffs in this song. Heavy as hell, and no dicking around whatsoever. This CD was utter devastation. Make sure to check out the lyrics, too, as the whole CD was a concept album on the Iraq War, and has some real gem lines.

Try not to headbang yourself down to a lower IQ during the bridge. (“See who gives a FUCK!”)

And man, I have to say it: my guitar tone in this recording is fucking killer. I mean, it’s so heavy, it has its own goddamn event horizon. I am a Line6 fan for life.

One last thing to note: I remember so clearly that this was August 2006 because that’s the last time I cut my hair. You can’t really see my head in the video, but you also don’t see any long curly locks. I had a buzz cut.

Never again.

There’s nothing I have to do today. Tons of things I should, of course, but screw them.

There’s even a medieval festival in Munich this week, and I might not even attend it tonight. I’m that interested in doing absolutely nothing.

So, we’ll see how the evening plays out. Good luck enjoying life as much as I am.

Update:

A friend uploaded this picture of me today. Life is good, no?

When I find a higher resolution version, I’ll replace it with that.

Apparently at $40,000 a year, they can’t afford to make their own teaching aides. Then again, it doesn’t seem like they need to. I feel like I just earned a degree, watching this thing.

But what keeps me coming back to this is the list of search engine terms leading to this blog. As if I didn’t know already, I write about weird stuff, and that brings weird people to this blog. Thank god they keep their mouth shut, too, because I wouldn’t want to talk to any one of these freaks. (Although, to be fair, it does look like we have a lot in common.)

I think it’s official: I have the greatest blog in existence.

Subject:	0708 additional funding
Topic:	Scholarships and Financial Aid General
Submitted:	12/21/2007 09:57 AM
Last Updated:	12/27/2007 02:06 PM
Status:	Solved
Discussion Thread:	Conor: Please be advised that we were able to provide you with additional funding for the 2007-2008 academic year. A Drexel Award for $5,469 was posted to your account and your financial hold has been lifted. If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact the financial aid office.
Account Balance:	Your current account balance, including recent account activity, is $-0.48.

This is the first year I didn’t borrow anything. Not a dime. All scholarships, all the way. Maybe this is why:

	Attempted	Earned	GPA Hours	Quality Points	GPA
Overall:	161.000	158.000	155.000	607.01	3.91

I think this is cause for celebration. I know no better way to do this than play C&C3 with Cihan until the sun rises.

How cool is that? The list is already making the rounds through the dorm, I should think, but screw everybody else, because I’m connected now, and there’s no going back. Of course, it appears that each room in the building is assigned a static IP address, which I find uncomfortably Big Brother, but whatever. It’s fast and I’ve already set up a Tor server to give back to the world for what it’s given me.

With this bandwidth I’m blazing through picture uploads. Expect a new post soon.

He fought Grendel naked. It in all honesty does not get cooler than that, ever. And so what if it’s a little gay to hang with your bros while naked? They are Vikings. Everything they do instantly becomes the paragon of masculinity.

When we left the theater and came outside, around 1:30am, there was snow everywhere, about two inches of it. It was the kind that packed beautifully into snowballs. Since pretty much the whole movie was shot in a snowy landscape (occasionally a scene was inside, meaning snow was briefly not visible), it was a bit much for me to come out and be reminded once again of that Viking lifestyle.

So I stripped naked and began brawling with strangers on their way home from the bar. I picked the ugly ones, so it was just like fighting Grendel.

Snowball fights the whole way home, with choruses of “ICH… BIN… BEOWULF!” ringing through the streets of Munich.

I want a dragon for a pet just so I can raise it to adulthood and then battle it.

I wish I could say my CIRN 2007 conference was this rocking.

J’s on vocals, for those of you who don’t know him.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “It even will superimpose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below – like something out of Terminator.”

I assume the feature creep on the development of the F-35 will lead to allowing the planes to fly with laser guns permanently switched on. Because that’s awesome.

Thanks, J.

Jesse was along for the trip, as I’d let him know that I’d found word of a 60€ router for sale somewhere downtown. It’s indeed fairly cheap for a router, especially in this city, it seems, but the real clincher was that it was Linksys and so therefore it was entirely open source. This is a very good thing.

Its being open source meant that I was able to take the thing home and flash the firmware on it with an open source alternative, enabling quite sophisticated functionality for a user-grade router. Specifically, I was able to plunk the thing down next to my window and tell it to act as a bridge between my computer and the signal broadcast from the university building 50 meters across the courtyard over which my balcony looks.

This stuff is really, really freaking badass. Check out this article for a brief rundown of neat stuff you can do with it.

So, in short, I have internet now. I’ve dropped once so far from the connection, but that’s in about an hour of use. I usually get disconnected around once every five to ten minutes, so things are looking awesome so far. And by tinkering with the position of the router, I should be able to find a spot with a decent signal. It’s made easy by the dynamically updating “signal strength” graph on the client bridge setup page in the router software. Thumbs up!

Today is the last day of the conference, and at that, it’s also at the last session. There’s a brief coffee break before everyone reconvenes in the large hall for one final panel discussion, which is supposed to be a culmination of all the different themes touched upon over the past three days.

I’m pretty exhausted, and also a little pressed for time, so this post won’t go into details. I’ll just mention that by attending this conference, as fantastic as I’ve found it, I’ve definitely learned that there’s a difference between community informatics, which this conference focuses on, and social informatics, which is what I’m more used to, and in fact that which I still largely prefer.

In brief, community informatics seems to assume the appropriateness of implementing ICTs (information communication technologies) in developing and underprivileged societies, and tries to posit the most cost-effective and longest-lasting ways of installing and maintaining them. In my experience, social informatics goes about the ICTing process in a much more critical manner, trying not to assume that the implementation of ICT is some kind of saving grace that’s going to solve social justice problems across the board in all cultures and contexts.

I’ve met so many amazing professors here. I was hoping for a substantially higher concentration of Europeans, given that I’m hunting for an internship in Germany next semester, and I’d love to do something in this field or something related to it, but no luck there. The conference is dominated by Australians (we’re at a sister campus of Monash University), Canadians (they’ve been at the forefront of this field since its rather recent inception), then some Latin Americans and Southeast Asians. I am the sole American present, and everyone seems mildly surprised to see someone from America interested in the intersection of culture and technology.

I should end this. There’s another session to attend, and I don’t want to miss saying goodbye to anyone. I have a ton of e-mails to write as follow-ups once I’m back in Munich, and I want all the material I can get to stuff in them, to make me seem more interesting than everybody already knows I am.

Till tomorrow sometime, after I’ve flown and slept and caught up on the ridiculous piles of e-mails I’ve been neglecting.

Like, there’s no other way to say it. Vikings are so freaking badass it makes me want to gut people with grossly oversized swords. I feel like the kid from Real Ultimate Power, but I’m actually serious. I fucking love Vikings with all of my being, and then even more. (I was gonna say that I love them more than I love breathing, but when you’re a Viking, you can’t always love breathing. So maybe I could have said that I loved them more than I love the prospect of drinking with Oden in Valhalla, but that’d be a lie.)

Seeing Amon Amarth live the other night (pics here) definitely made me consider running away to become a Viking. I would have a plundering ship and name it Flessskinnjoldrmangandrokthurkapjlodrojr. I’d have some Viking jawn pieces I’d roll around with and we’d point at people and call them Normans and then burn down their cities, wherever they may be.

What I don’t understand is why anyone ever opposed the Vikings. If anything that badass attacked me, I would take that as an obvious sign of my having failed at life, and I’d just flex my whole body and scream while waiting to be decapitated.

Now, just showing Amon Amarth lyrics without also showing the swords and tall dudes with long hair and insane drums and furious vocals is a bit half-assed, I realize. But bear with me, and check these out.

From “Cry Of The Black Birds”:

Charge your horses across the fields,
Together we ride into destiny!
Have no fear of death, when it’s your time:
Oden will bring us home when we die!

From “Runes To My Memory”:

When I am dead, lay me in a mound
Raise a stone for all to see: Runes carved to my memory!

From the timeless “Death In Fire”:

The wait is soon at end. Always charge, never bend!
Morning is here, make your stand
Live for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

Total war is here, face it without fear
Age of sword, age of spear
Fight for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

See the fire rise, flames are raging high
Soon all will burn and die
Burn for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

Storm of lethal flames, only death remains
Ragnarok is closing in
Die for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

The bridge from “The Pursuit Of Vikings” (see video below):

Oden! Guide our ships
Our axes, spears and swords
Guide us through storms that whip
And in brutal war!

From “Down The Slopes Of Death”:

Down the slopes of death he rides
The eight hooves pound like drums
Darkness reigns the crumbling sky:
Invasion has begun

From “Across The Rainbow Bridge”:

I dress myself in battle clothes
Alone I make the final ride
My sight is blurred by whipping snow
I seek to end my life.

I want to walk across the Rainbow Bridge,
And see my fathers in the golden hall!
They beckon me to join their feast
In my dreams I hear their call…

Hell, just read all their lyrics: Versus The World, Fate Of Norns, With Oden On Our Side.

At the show last night, I was fortunate enough to catch the first minute of “Death In Fire” on video. It’s pretty intense, because the crowd erupted in battle moshing when they announced the song, and so it took me a while to extract my camera from the depths of flesh below shoulder height. But that worked out well, because the camera bursts forth from the crowd right as the intro guitar riff comes in, like a a sword ripping out through a Norman’s back.

Check out the Death In Fire video. If this doesn’t make you bang your head, you need to see a doctor.

[qt:/blog/pics/video/aa-dif-intro-small.mp4 320 256]

And not as grand, as this was the closing song, and everyone was exhausted, here’s the bridge from The Pursuit Of Vikings.

[qt:/blog/pics/video/aa-tpov-bridge-small.mp4 320 256]

UNDERSTAND YE YET, OR WHAT?

He plans to get it before the big concert, which is a goal I wholeheartedly support. (Amon Amarth are one of the greatest Viking metal bands in existence.) Please keep in mind that this tatt is in addition to the sweet runes already gracing his forearms:

I choose friends wisely.