BrapBlog

Mysterious E-Mail, Lists of Politicians' Home Addresses and "The Government That We Deserve"

Reblogged from ThereAreNoSunglasses:

A Few Days Ago, I received an anonymous email, which consisted of a list of Washington politicians, including their home numbers and addresses. 

I flushed it away, since it seemed very suspicious at the time.  It felt like a set-up, made to order for those police state functionaries, who like to look through our private emails and listen to our private phone calls. 

Read more… 848 more words

February 2011 Update

Okay, so yeah I have been absent here for awhile, as my buddy Whelp was just pointing out.  Note the sequence of events, though: I got a new computer and the best studio ever available to me in my life so far, I proclaimed this excitedly, I disappeared.    Makes perfect sense to me.  Hell, I dedicated all of 2011 to getting a better grasp on my technology (and then added more and more, and more on that below) and it’s only freaking February.

Learning takes time and effort to become experience.  I know this very well and put it to my advantage by arranging new habits and learning to do them by rote through conscious repetition.  I am very much a handmade, homemade, experimentalist poking-about sort of musician.  There’s just a lot new to poke about in.  When something strikes me the right way, I run with it and a song is born.  This process is far from fixedly simple for me, though.  Again, this is part of what 2011 is to be spent on/in. 

I also now have some video stuff going on at YouTube.  I added a reasonably sufficient video card to this happy computer and got some video software of a level that is perfect for me to jump right in and start learning.  This is also much of what will be doing in 2011 (I am writing this while waiting on my first longish video to test render, even).  Why am I not blogging the videos?!?!?  Because I am mostly doing near daily weather reports for my area, from my limited aspect here in this house I almost never leave.  And cat videos.  And some casual vlogging mixed in.  If you want to get to know me better as a person, the videos are probably a good way…but I don’t wish to fill this blog with that stuff.

I will reserve this area for the stuff that really stands out for me, and mostly that means music.   I mean, if you don’t know this, I have this other page that is updated at least a couple of times a week with links to things I have absorbed lately…Links for Whelp, as above on this blog, but moved to my own website for easier updates and no reliance on WordPress to not crash a post that took weeks to write.  :/  Links for Whelp is where I will post ALL the video links I make, as Whelp will watch them in his long boring night job.     Then he will say encouraging things, as he always does.  He’s a useful friend that way, for sure.  This page is for him, not spam or anything nefarious.  See for yourself how freaking simple I keep the code.

What else?  There’s more?  Yes.  I have also been very busy with making new jewelry.  I just packed the beads up for awhile, but I have to go another couple weeks of beading sometime here before Spring kicks in for real– the weather here has been pooie for days after 2 or more teaser weeks of springtime.  Wah, huh.  I am already missing the sun.

I also reopened our Etsy store.  I only have 10 items in there so far, but there’s some crazy stuff coming soon enough.  I have a lot of different bugs vying for the right to fly up my ass each day, WHICH IS JUST HOW I LIKE IT!  Trust me, I need the distractions and the more occupied I remain, the better my mood, the easier it is to deal with my day-to-day health issues that are not going to go away.  :/  Not a pity plea, just a fact, jack.

I also also made us a Facebook page for Braplets.  I don’t use FB much, but Manda does.  I just like the easy ability to post pictures of every single piece of jewelry that I make from now on and have an archive, as they are each individually imagined and designed works of wearable art.    I think of the thousands upon thousands of bracelets that I have made and not photoed…and then am just glad that technology finally gave me the ability to capture, archive and share so easily.  Regret won’t help…but I have been doing this for ten years and barely started taking pics in any earnest last Fall….  Look to the future, live in the Now.  Huzzah.

Now I will go back up this page and add all the appropriate links.  It is 4:36 in the AM here and I have not been to bed since my nap from 8-10 in the PM.  I very much need to and the video is at 87%…woot.  Peace.  (Update: it beat me in rendering.  I hope I didn’t miss any links.  Much love.)

[Announcement] I will be interviewed…er…was interviewed…

Where? Ghosts of the Republic (on BlogTalkRadio)
When? Wednesday, August 4th at 11pm EST, 8pm PST
Why? For my music. 
How? Telephone/Skype

This will be my first interview in more than 20 years.  The last time I was interviewed on the radio, it was to introduce people to me as I took the show over from a friend.    I did a public radio show called ‘The Industrial Revolution’ in the late 80′s.  It was a fun experience for several months to a year….

…Until I got into it with the station manager, who seemed to think that because HE was paid, the rest of us unpaid workers had to treat him like a Radio God.  He ordered me to go on two hours early one night just because I showed up 2 hours early (with food, fresh from work a block away) and he was covering for another DJ who was sick.  I told him I was early because I needed to prepare the show.  He said nobody is listening anyway and if I didn’t go on, he would just shut the station down for the night and lock up.  I said he could stuff it (SORT OF, heh), grabbed my crates of vinyl  and walked out.  ANYWAY….

Come listen or wait for me to post a link to the archived show.  Or don’t.  I’m easy like that. 

UPDATE! – That was fun.    Nice guys.  You can catch the archived show at the link up top of this post.

[Personal] Updates – Summer 2010

Hello, folks.  It has been awhile since I posted much in the way of anything in my actual blog posts, having been far more active in creating new sections and new pages within them instead.  I won’t bother linking, as they are right there up top of the blog.

‘Disclosures’ is just a space for me to ruminate and respond in long form to the internets, whether it be anti-troll in nature, a measured response to someone, or just for the fun of sharing and such.  I would say it is adult in nature, but I am trying to avoid my usual vernacular a la sailor, you know?    Adult, nonetheless.  I will be 42 in a couple of months and have no children (and no plans for any at all), so I leave them for others to deal with.

There’s also a new section for ‘Books’, which will grow slowly but surely.  I spend far more time in the bathroom than most, probably, and a book is always underway (brave the disclosure on ‘health’ if you need to know why).  Reading almost exclusively in that venue, I still manage a book a month or so…maybe 2 every 3.  Sometimes something grabs me enough that I plunk down in a more comfortable venue and plow through it.  Point is, reading is an ongoing exercise in my life and has been since I was about 4…so why not share some book reviews?  Why not indeed.  This section is still pretty sparse at time of writing, but it’ll grow.

‘Links for Whelp’.  When I started BrapBlog (the public version…at BlogSpot…I had two others that were private in years past), it was basically just a way to share links with my bestest buddy and spiritual brother Whelp.  He had a job that kept him working late into the night at a terminal, waiting for service calls to deal with.  T1 and long hours needs some links, ya know?  I would share things with him as posts and these added up into the old blog.  When that blog got tired, I started this one and imported the whole thing.

Two things here on this subject: 1) I will be going through (with no rush) and deleting many of the imported posts here, as they exist at the old blog just the same and I would rather focus this one better, as there are a lot more eyes than just Whelp reading it now, it seems.  2) all that old stuff you could find me posting (the non-made-by-me stuff, ya know?) is now found in the Links for Whelp section, which is the most updated portion of this blog and will likely remain so.  There’s more to say about it, but it’s said at the top of the section page.    Both Whelp and I think it is a much better way to go about it and I can share a lot more things than I wanted to actually make a blog post about. 

What else?  Music.  I actually entered ‘jewelry season’ and had to put the music aside for a time, in a way.  I have a couple of projects underway and am going about them very carefully.  I make no promises regarding what or when…but it’s on the burner set LOW, ya know?    I will say that one of those is the sequel to ‘The Solution’, for which I have the vocals completely laid out.  That alone took a few weeks of concentrated effort and now I am just playing around with different ideas to ‘score’ what I have created.  I am so home-made.    Bear with me…but don’t hold any breath or you WILL hurt yourself on this one. 

That’s about it!  Where beads and words have been occupying much of my creative self lately, Red Dead Redemption has occupied the rest.  HELLUVA game.  Having been playing them since I was a wee pup, I can say this is in my top 3, hands down, solidly struggling with the Fallout series for supreme position.    HELLUVA GAME, I repeat, FOR THE GAME LOVERS.  The rest of you can go watch teevee or whatever it is you do for fun and that is okay with me.

I am not so sure about doing this, but if you wanna cowboy up with me (and possibly even Whelp alongside me), my gamertag is BrapAllgood.  Send me a friend request and why I should add you (such as, “Truth prevails, brother!”) and I likely will, as I have only recently ventured into the online portion of XBOX and could use a bigger posse…at least until Fallout: New Vegas comes out. 

Peace, peoples.