Well, we've had some inquiries about the most righteous doom group Witchsorrow since posting the doom metal primer. For those too lazy and / or stoned to go to Youtube themselves, here's the lead "single" from the self-titled disc of dementia, "The Agony." If you don't think that this is some of the best leaden music of the year, you are a plone.
After the below video, be dead sure to go the the next link, where you can stream the entire new Krallice LP, "Diotima," for @#$%ing free. NYC ambient black metallers Krallice are the new cause celebre of the hipster fixed-gear cappuccino-metal set, but they're also one of the most creative bands in underground music. It's a must.
Click below to stream the new Krallice LP. From NPR. C'mon just take a sip of your fair-trade chai, don't let your greasy metal friends see what URL you're on, and click :
The icy October wind lashed at Sue’s cheeks as she made her way across the parking lot to her car. An unseasonably cold evening in which was planted the spore of an unseasonably hot romance. She had caught a glimpse of him from the coffee shop and tried to go out to him, but by the time she’d reached the threshold, he was already gone – evaporated into the gloaming.
In the brief magnetic instant that she’d seen him, he appeared loping purposefully down the sidewalk, his head turning slightly from side to side as he observed everything. His eyes were concealed behind a big black pair of sunglasses, but she imagined them to be green and intense. The collar was turned up on his leather bomber. The swing of his arms was a counterrhythm to his long stride. She could see even from a distance that he had a tattoo on his right hand.
She felt her heart crumple as she stepped out into the crisp afternoon air and craned her neck in vain to catch a glimpse of this man. She’d been harpooned with the most powerful of feelings, like this man would write the next chapter in her life, could shape her sadness into something towering and worthwhile. He was gone, though – slipped away like the lifesaving rope from a doomed mountaineer.
--
Ch. 2
All the heartbreak of years past came galloping, trampling back all of a sudden. Sue’s mouth turned down like a baby’s does when it’s about to wail. She could not prevent the single hard sob that escaped her throat. A terrible wave of loss settled through her body like poison.
She bumbled heavily back to her chair and gripped the paper cappuccino cup for support. That man in the sunglasses was receding ever further from the possibility of togetherness, and dragging, unravelling along behind him a feeble thread of her hope. She could feel it pulling out of her, like the stringy guts of a bee after it’s stung you.
Sue sat in the chair for another half-hour, bruised. Then she forced herself to get up and leave the coffee shop, moping on down the street in her car, back to her apartment. She flopped onto her huge couch and stared at her blank computer screen on the coffee table. She didn’t move for two hours. Then, the leaden blanket of sleep slipped over her. It was a fitful slumber. (33,060)
VirtualBox is an open source x86 virtualization program. To put it simply what that is:
I've been running into more and more reasons to boot into Windows lately, so today I decided to stop rebooting all the time and get a virtual machine program. I've been burned before when I purchased Parallels, so I decided to find a cheaper and better way.
Parallels charges for every version, and each version EXPIRES when used with a newer version of OS X. The upgrade costs nearly as much as the program itself, so it's quite the motherfucker.
So I googled, found VirtualBox, started downloading the 70mb file, and decided to read a review to see if those precious few seconds of waiting were worth my time (the internet has left me with crippling A.D.D.). After reading the Macworld review, I nearly stopped downloading the file, which says a lot, because in chrome, that button is ALL THE WAYYYY DOWN TTHEEERRREEE. Fortunately, my laziness won out and since VirtualBox is FREE, I decided to give it a few minutes of my time before dropping another benjamin just to run Internet Explorer.
After starting VirtualBox up and getting it up and running with a few clicks and in under 45 minutes (44 minutes waiting for Windows to install/configure), I've decided to make a few humble corrections to the Macworld review:
An while we're at it, let's alter a another of their fuck-tarded reviews:
Here's the problem with reggae : its primary adherents in North America are hippies. Upper-class white kids with belabored dreadlocks. You know, morons. We don't much cotton to hippies here at Latewire, so therefore we don't really listen to reggae. Calypso, ska, rocksteady, dub, dancehall, jungle, yes. Reggae no. In case you hadn't noticed, it's not standard procedure here to 'lively up oneself.'
Recently, I've begin to reexamine this prejudice. In a car I rented recently, there was the newfangled satellite radio, so I tuned to the reggae station (called, of course, "the Joint" BAAAARF). I heard, in rapid succession, gritty, forboding tunes by Max Romeo, Culture, and Peter Tosh that I realized were not only non-hippie, but also objectively good. I began to think : why do I readily accept reggae as a part of a rap tune (cf. KRS-One, Ice Cube, Run-DMC) or neopsychedelia (Massive Attack, Tricky), but refuse to countenance it on its own? It's because hippies stink. But I realized that it's not th' fault of th' reggae artists themselves that their Stateside champions are these kinds of RABS poser slime :
So after coming to grips with this simple PR disaster, I gave a bunch of reggae tunes a listen and liked many of them. Toots, Max Romeo ("Lucifer!"), Dennis Brown, and th' standard output of Horace Andy all met with my approval. I've been a fan of Damian Marley since his breakout hit "Welcome to Jamrock," and I guess that while I've considered him dancehall because of his toasting style, th' music has more to do with traditional reggae than I was willing to admit to myself. One thing about Jamaican music (best typified in dub, which is always great) is that it nearly always includes crushingly heavy bass, which is something we could all use more of in our lives.
So, take some Thorazine, stay in yr house, and give some real dire Jamaican reggae a listen. Not any kind of bullcrap California pansy stoner rubbish, either. You might find as I did that reggae isn't just for $%&holes any more.
As a special treat, here's the original (rocksteady) version of one of everybody's favorite Massive Attack cover tune, "Man Next Door." This gem written by John Holt (also of "The Tide Is High" fame) is here performed by his group the Paragons. Nice wailing stuff.
For crying out loud though -- can anybody give me a reasonably sane explanation of what in blazes "Tu Sheng Peng" is?
BONUS! Here's the hard-to-find uncensored version of "Welcome to Jamrock." Funnyman a get dropped like a bad habit, apparently.
They say we're done for Because of what's coming on the wind They're handing out death for free To anyone who asks for it
They say that their way Is rational and best And that we'd better hurry And eagerly fall to rest
But no matter if they're right or wrong, That's a deal I won't accept
Maybe the Lord will save us But probably not There's too much poison in the air
But even a last moment in anguish Is a moment that belongs to me And I won't let them put me down
We may hear our children Cry out in pain Yours may be the last remaining Human name
But that doesn't mean That I'll let them take the reins I'll stay here and and present with you While we wait for the final rain
Even all these aching thoughts They're thoughts that belong to me And I won't let them put me down
We always, always, always fought And I'll fight to the end I won't surrender my last hours On the advice of these wretches
Even at the end of hope for this life I still hold on to hope for pride And I won't let them put me down
I'm not saying that I'm OK with this being the total end I was one of those who dreamed of art's survival long after the Sun's death Now there's slight time left, and you're my ultimate friend
But that's the way of things - There are stones you can't roll back An even now I feel that weight So heavy on my neck
I won't trade time for comfort I won't give up this last thing I'm keeping every feeling that's Been allotted to me
When I feel the terrible change, That sensation belongs to me And I won't let them put me down (56,580)
With Snow Leopard, I've actually enjoyed starting up and shutting down the computer, as well as logging in and out. -MacfixitThrough a series of brain farts, 10.6 managed to be downloaded and installed onto my Mac this week. With other fanboys writing articles that include inane quips like the one to on the left, I thought I'd post my impressions.
First off: What the hell is the point of this? There is almost no difference between this and the previous OS. I know, all the fanboys are ranting about how it's got more 64bit code. Most of them don't realize that for most programs, 64bit does nothing to enhance performance. There's no reason for iCal, Addressbook, Mail, etc. to have 64 bit support. By the way, fanboys: the 64 bit kernel is turned off by default (apart from in OS X 10.6 server). I'm trying to see the advantage here.
Sure, it's got the ability to offload tasks to the GPU (a feature called OpenCL). Which tasks are we talking about? They didn't upgrade any of the video, audio, or photo software to use this feature, so where's the fuckin beef, man? Do I really give a shit that my file manager (Finder) can list the contents of a directory 5% faster from an already incomprehensibly quick display time?
Well Hell, why don't we just go through the top features from the Snow Leopard Site. Keep in mind, this was created by Apple to spin Snow Leopard into something people want to buy:
Apple Claim:
Translation:
"We ran out of ideas, so we decided to fix our code"
After years of piling on the bloat, Apple decides to actually make the existing programs work the way they're supposed to.
"We realize that the OS X Finder should've been written in cocoa in the first place, but carbon was so retro and cool at the time we just couldn't help ourselves. Better late than never, right? Think different."
64bit: Was already halfway implemented in the previous version. They're just rubbing in the fact that they didn't deliver last time around Central Dispatch: Makes it easier to write multithreaded code… but wait, haven't they had multi-core processors in almost every product over the last 3 years? Shouldn't they sweep under the rug the fact that they'd been ignoring this feature? "Snappier": Are you fucking serious? Fuck. You.
"We changed one line of one piece of code and are overly pumped about it."
All they did was make time machine a higher system priority. Since it backs up every few minutes, having your computer not slow to a crawl due to lack of available hard drive throughput was actually a good thing. Apparently Apple forgot why they'd set it up like that, changed it to a system-halting annoyance, and now I can't seem to open any programs while a time machine backup is going on.
"When we cleaned up our shit that shouldn't have been there in the first place, your computer sped up slightly. Who wants to blow me?"
This is probably the biggest "feature" of Snow Leopard: a slight reduction in boot time. This may save the average user a whopping 10 seconds per day! Forgive me if I'm not super impressed.
"We don't install shit you don't need, therefore it installs faster. It's like fuckin magic n'shit."
Roughly half of the previous OS X installation was literally legacy code for PPC computers. Since Apple switched to Intel in 2006 (yes, 3 years ago), they've had no use for this code, but have included it anyway just so they could someday take it out and pat themselves on the back for removing it.
"Uhhh.. running out of features here, better list this one twice"
Like I said, they took out a bunch of legacy code, therefore the footprint is reduced too. Alakazam!
"We could've just released a free patch for this--our free, cross-platform browser--but we decided to force people to pay for an upgrade."
"We don't include 'Eject' buttons on our computers, so fixing this bug required an entire OS upgrade."
Wait, shouldn't this have been free? I mean seriously.
And while we're talking "Features", let me just introduce this little comparison chart of my own:
Vista SP1 Vs. OS X 10.6
Vista SP1:
Snow Leopard:
Faster?
Bug Fixes?
Free Upgrade?
Total:
WIN!
FAIL!
Normally, when Apple releases a new OS, it's good to wait a couple weeks for all the bugs to float out into the open and maybe even a patch to come out.
I figured that this rule didn't apply to 10.6 because… well it's basically a bunch of bug fixes anyway, why do I need to wait for the first patch full of bug fixes?. . . Famous last words. . .
Here's a list of fun problems I've encountered so far:
LOGOUT FREEZE
The first minute I had it installed and booted, I decided to create a new user account and log out. It froze, with the little progress meter thing hovering over a blank background. This required a hard restart.
TIME MACHINE
Since I did a fresh install, I was wondering about how Time Machine would react. Apparently, not well. At first, it had a permissions problem reading the previous backup. I fixed the permissions, hit "backup now" and IT DELETED THE WHOLE PREVIOUS 700GB BACKUP!!
Okay so that's a pain--maybe I should've seen that coming, right? But wait, there's more. A couple days after it finished backing up again, it came up with this message:
That meant it again refused to read the old backup--which it had created itself--and couldn't create a new one because the old one (still present, of course) was taking up too much space. I tried every fix I could find through google, and again it resulted in it deleting my entire backup AGAIN.
I ended up getting so pissed I just formatted my Time Machine drive. So now, as I write this, it is again backing up. If it fucks itself again, I'm going to resort to some sort of cron job.
SAFARI "SNAPPINESS"
A few minutes ago, I hit Command+T to open a new tab in Safari. The program froze for 2 whole minutes (as seen above).
SPOTLIGHT
Need I say more?
UPDATE 9/18:
I've had no kernel panics in a while, and for the most part, the problems have been resolved (some due to the 10.6.1 upgrade) including Time Machine's screw-ups... Though every few days, TM says it 'cannot create backup folder' and I have to restart, it's no longer deleting 700GB of its own data. It still freezes on logout roughly one out of every 10 times, but I'm usually restarting anyway when it occurs.
On the other hand, some of my longstanding issues with 10.5 have been resolved with 10.6. Plus, since I've been constantly rebooting these days to get in and out of Bootcamp (Windows XP), the quickened boot time is actually kind of useful... though I can't say, as MacFixit did, that 10.6 has in some way made rebooting 'enjoyable'. (59,214)
Share
That meant it again refused to read the old backup--which it had created itself--and couldn't create a new one because the old one (still present, of course) was taking up too much space. I tried every fix I could find through google, and again it resulted in it deleting my entire backup AGAIN.
