Well, I saw the film Repo: The Genetic Opera

Well, I saw the film Repo: The Genetic Opera

I was with a group of friends at one of their's house and they were like, Hey, have you seen this? Just in general, not to me specifically.
I confided in Claire that I had reservations, but everyone else, seen it or not, seemed keen on watching it.

So, I took my typical spot in the corner and just played along nicely.

It's a musical. Hey, that is cool.

It has Anthony Stewart Head. That is cool too. His brother Murry plays the American in the performance of Chess that I have.

Sarah Brightman too. Hey, she is an incredible singer. How did she get stuck with this? Did she loose a bet?

There is Alexa Vega playing the role of me. No, I mean Shilo. I did not realize she could sing - or is it overdubbed. I will have to look into that.

And Bill Moseley, no less, of House of 1000 Corps franchise fame. I mean, grindhouse/gore flicks are not exactly my thing, but hey.

Okay, so the film. The music is pretty good, the singing is (mostly) good.

The plot was as thin as the stage blood, but, I mean, operas are not exactly known for complex plots. Yeah, there are some back stories worked out for the characters. It is not completely see through - there are some twists, but again, the point is the music which is what really makes this all work.

It is the Faustian counter plot to the Ishiguro Kazuo, Philip K Dick, et al dystopia fictions that started coming out post-WWII. If you saw the film The Island? Imagine if that... insurance... was financed - And you could not pay your bill after having put the policy into effect.

Best songs (In my opinion, and in no particular order that I will admit):
Things You See in a Graveyard
Come Back
Chase the Morning / Everyone's a Composer
Seventeen / What Chance Has a 17 Year Old Girl? (Oh-Kay... this is probably because I am me)
At the Opera Tonight
Zydrate Anatomy
Infected (Again, because I am me)
Let the Monster Rise
Genetic Emancipation
Chromaggia
Depraved Heart Murder at Sanitarium Square
I Didn't Know I'd Love You So Much
21st Century Cure

Notable mentions:
Can't Get it Up if the Girl's Breathing (Mostly for the music. Okay, and for the title.)
Genetic Repo Man

And, there are plenty more good/amusing songs

Well, that is about all I am going to blog about this thing... publicly.
Take Care
LQ

Change of the Window Manager

It has been a while since I posted anything on LINUX.
For roughly a month, I have been enjoying the Linux Mint Debian Edition 64Bit. As I am not really interested in discussing the 32bit release, I am just going to refer to it as LMDE and be done with it - you can trust that I am talking about the 64bit release.

So. As mentioned in other blogs, I have mentioned that I have never been all that fond of GNOME and KDE can be fairly heavy weight on its own. I have used the Linux Mint Fluxbox, and XFCE and whatnot, but I have stuck it out with the LMDE GNOME standard to give it its full whatnot. Vague much? Well, sorry about that. If you have been following along this month, you may note that I have not been spending a great deal of system testing, just working through the "How I Use My Computer" aspect of testing.

As for the difference in the Debian over the normal Ubuntu based distro? It seems to not even be a factor on the day to day. My system is stable, releases are easy, things update nicely... Meaning, in short, I have rebooted much less, stayed more current, and my system has not been getting in the way of my doing-things.

As for the apps - well, the software manager gives me (almost) everything I need to be happy without much fuss. This is important to me. I mean, sure, any halfway descent distro is going to have some kind of package manager and it is not that big a to go, Oh, Hey, Where is VIM? apt-get install vim and you are done. So, the package thing - what I am saying here, is that it does not get in the way. Now, remember that "almost" up there? What is the deal with chromium-browser vs. google-chrome? I mean, really? Can someone please explain to me (or rather don't and I will go look it up) why I have to go and manually get the deb package from google and install it? Why is it not just an option in the repository? Why do I care at all? For the apps. Specifically Muro. But nevermind that.

My desktop was easily configured, and reconfigured as I worked through the options. I wrote a php script to take a directory, find the images, and make a wallpaper list xml thing so I have my rotating wallpaper, etc. It has been good. CPU speed and RAM have kept me content.

And complacent.

So - I installed XFCE this morning/last night (don't know, I just couldn't sleep). Wow. I forgot how fast a desktop manager can be. I am wondering to myself why I was content.

When I am writing, coding, reading, drawing, etc, I typically am full-screen. It is a descent enough size, but with my nice, small font (to make it harder for anyone to "accidentally" read over my shoulder, DAD) I prefer having what I'm doing fill my screen rather than what I may switch over to, or my background, or... whatever.

Sure, I would really like to make my wallpaper rotate again here, but then, that is one more thing out there, running, taking resources away from my fingertips.

But, before I go through all that, I am probably going to give FLUXBOX a spin.

Not that I have anything really against GNOME and KDE... just not for me, full time.

Oh, and I did install Thunar to use instead of Nautilus before going through all this. That was one of the things that was missing from the release that I really wanted to use instead.

Is it still Friday? No? Oh well

I have made a few posts here lately and had not realized that I had not made a Friday Blog Post this week. Hardly not the first week, but that is not at all the point of this.

So, I missed Friday by a couple of hours. Oh, GLOBALLY, I missed Friday by a great many hours, but that is neither here nor there. Or, I mean, that is there not here? Nevermind in any case.

But, I missed it and am not going to have one this week.

Maybe you will be able to read about my dream next week, hehehehe.

Okay, so, on with the point, already.

Where do these things some from? I have no idea, but another one just came out. I am may think it stupid after a few days, so read it before I delete it.
Again, on DeviantArt, of course, A Trusted Friend

The "Author's comment" is on that page, so do you really need me to repeat it here? Oh, for you, this would be first, and there would be the repeat. Well, nevermind that.

Take Care
LQ

J&J Series 009 released

Yes, I am concerned about this drawing attention away from the piece I did, Living in a Fishbowl, but while I like that one quite a bit, the series is more important to me.


So, yeah, I wrote it yesterday afternoon. It is only about 3K words, so a pretty quick read.

[J&J Series, No. 009: The Distaste of Revenge]

I will mention again for first time visitors, start with 001 or it will loose a lot of ... sense.

New Fiction Submitted

Okay, so, here it is on DeviantArt: Living in a Fishbowl


This is a standalone short story about Tamara, a punk, growing up in a small, backwoods town in Tennessee, although that is not specifically mentioned.
The characters herein are fictitious creations of my own.
This is getting a content warning for adult situations (sexual themes) but not for language or violence, etc. for whatever that may be worth.

A little long for a short story at about 11,000+ words, I am submitting this now as a trial run before letting it grow to a full fledged novella.

There is also a likelihood, like it or not, that I may round out some of the sections cut during re-writes and keeping the size down - both canonical, and non <-- I let them run a frolic a bit and it got a little out of hand, but kinda exciting too.

This was supposed to be just light and quick, but it kept taking deeper and darker directions that I had to keep pulling it back from.

I have been living with this story for the better part of a week, and was really unsure if I wanted to turn this "trim" version loose, so I left it over the weekend to think about its future.

IF I get positive feed back, questions about the story, etc, THEN I may let it out in full, so please leave feedback.

Thanks, enjoy.

11-1-11 and a Tuesdays

I have always kinda likes Tuesdays. And some Thursdays.
But nevermind that now.

So, today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day.

My chosen charity fighting this is LOVE146. I have a donation page to support them HERE but the most important thing right now is getting the message out there.

There is a lot of hubbub about it right now, especially with the Super Football thing.

I knew it existed. I have heard people going off about it and there was an episode of Castle, or NCIS, or something - I don't know, did not really see it and most of those kinda blur together.

Then I read Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, I was like, "Whoa" because as sick and disgusting as the issue is, I did not know it was that big globally. I mean, Yeah for the fight, but whoa.

Anywho, I did not intend for this to be a big post or anything, but there are lots of links floating around the web about things you can do, but here are the three I will point you to:

My support page for LOVE146
LOVE146.org
Stop Child Trafficking Now Org

Oh, and one more thing, with all the groups out there, why did I pick LOVE146? Do you really need to ask someone known as Lady Quindecim? But seriously, reading their story was... Well, it struck a chord with me.

Take Care. Spread the word.
LQ

Yeah, what he said.

...
It's getting harder
just keeping life and soul together
I'm sick of fighting
Even though I know I should
The cold is biting
Through each and every nerve and fibre
My broken spirit is frozen to the core
Don't wanna be here no more
...

- from Wouldn't It Be Good by Nik Kershaw.

But, I'm just smiling through it all. Some days are just that way, eh?