By
anders pearson
11 Jun 2002
dhs.org appears to be having some trouble. they’re a free service that provides simple domain name functionality. for the last couple years, i’ve been using them to point thraxil.dhs.org at this site. my main rationale for using dhs.org instead of going the ‘proper’ route and registering thraxil.(com|net|org) has been simplicity. i’ve never really bought into the whole mindset that you need a good domain to be cool. the system is a beaurocratic nightmare with the main players abusing their customers every chance they get. stories about squatters selling domains for millions of dollars just made me laugh. i’ve never had any great desire to subject myself to that kind of abuse.
<p>dhs.org seems to be having problems lately though. you may have noticed that this site was inaccessible for the last couple days. it should be fixed now and thraxil.dhs.org should exist for at least the near future. however, the future is not looking so good for dhs.org. at the very least, it’s unstable enough to have me worried.</p>
<p>so i bit the bullet and registered thraxil.com, thraxil.net, and thraxil.org. i grabbed all three because i couldn’t make up my mind at it was pretty cheap. it could take a day or two for <span class="caps">DNS</span> to propagate fully and for any/all of them to work.</p>
<p>once they stabilize, you’ll want to change your bookmarks and links to point to one of the new domains (for the time being, all of them will point to the same place. in the future, i might decide to different things with different ones though).</p>
<p>in other words, in the next couple days, thraxil.dhs.org will be deprecated.</p>
By
tuck
11 Jun 2002
today was a great day. i now own the following four My Dying Bride albums:
<p>34.788%</p>
<p>The Dreadful Hours</p>
<p>The Light at the End of the World</p>
<p>Turn Loose the Swans</p>
<p>i freakin love this band.</p>
By
tuck
09 Jun 2002
i found a great cd store today and grabbed a bunch of shit, all for around $2.00 each. the highlights are:
<p>Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Murder Ballads</p>
<p><span class="caps">NIN</span>: All that Could Have Been</p>
<p>Napalm Death (double): Harmony Corruption and Leaders Not Followers</p>
<p>Dizzy Gallespie: Coolworld (1965)</p>
<p>Bud Powell: Hot House (1964, France)(cool because he was pretty brain damaged at this point and since its a live, small venue recording, you can hear these grotesque, inhuman grunts and squeaks coming from him on all his solos… all of which are entirely distracting). hes a pianist, btw. </p>
<p>Type O Negative: After Dark (<span class="caps">VCD</span> with home video footage, plus videos for Black Number 1, Christian Woman, My Girlfriends Girlfriend, Love You to Death, Cinnamon Girl, Everything Dies, and fucking cool backstage stuff reminiscent of Panteras home video Watch It Go. </p>
<p>because i was so impressed with the diversity of the music selection of this tiny shop, i also picked a bunch of random death metal which i wasnt familiar with. my criteria for selection was: coolness of cover art, coolness of band name, and coolness of track names. one of the picks was called Lacrimosa- and this ended up surprising me, pleasantly. its actually opera music, mostly sung in german. its playing now.</p>
<p>hmm.</p>
<p>its entirely listenable. theres a full classical orchestra, occasionally classical guitar, all behind some calm and collected vocals by some german dude, or his totally hot dudette. </p>
<p>basically, this seems to be sort of a sedated Theater of Tragedy. the two occasionally seem to be singing in response to each other, sometimes together in harmony. and oooh, as im writing now, it just started to get a little faster with some borderline metal guitar. this has potential to be great if the dude starts getting angry or something. </p>
<p>err. its staying slowish.</p>
<p>losing me now.</p>
<p>hmpf. </p>
<p>whoa, kick ass! its Dich Zu Toten Mir Schwer (track 6) and the dudette just got totally pissed off at something and yelled over some heavy metal riffs before a while.</p>
<p>dammit. the dude came back and is pissing me off now. he killed the metal. neat bubbly septic tank sounds though…</p>
<p>yeehaw! picked up again! (please, pah-lease let the chick come back!)</p>
<p>gaaa. shes gone.</p>
<p>but wait… wait, wait, wait…. this is pretty cool. an angel chorus is now chanting Sanctus… Sanctus….. Sanctus… Dominus…. over and over. </p>
<p>and now other stuff i cant make out. </p>
<p>yeah man, Sanctus! Sanctus! hehe. </p>
<p>two mood-dependent thumbs up for Lacrimosa.</p>
By
Mark Boudreau
07 Jun 2002
I noticed that most of what I’ve posted lately has been harsh, political, drivel. I’m sorry. I pull the diamond from my ass that was formally a lump of coal (awkward Ferris Bueller reference for the unedjumacated).
By
Mark Boudreau
07 Jun 2002
The drug war has failed. It is not winnable and it is the largest source of attrocities of the American government on both American and foreign citizens.
<p>But even when we’re not <a href="http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/papa/panamaus1989.htm">invading other countries</a>, <a href="http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/peru_americanplane_010422.html">shooting down planes of missionaries</a>, or <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-180es.html">bastardizing the bill of rights in this war</a>, and we actually try to help treat drug users, our country screws it up.</p>
<p>Read about the <a href="http://www.theagitator.com/straightfox.php">tough love treatments</a> some of the Drug War’s biggest supporters would advocate (Including our ambassador to Italy and the Bush family). Read about the <a href="http://www.sptimes.com/2002/06/07/Floridian/_In_the_middle_of_a_n.shtml">victims</a> and what they now have to live with. Why do we as a country put up with it? And why do we allow the people who advocate these attrocities to run the country?</p>
By
anders pearson
06 Jun 2002
a coworker of mine drove up to maine last weekend. as a favor, he brought me back a case and a half of shipyard export ale, which pretty much can’t be found outside new england but is one of my favorite beers in the world.
By
Mark Boudreau
06 Jun 2002
I know this isn’t cutting edge news, but I was wondering how people felt about the distribution of the Daniel Pearl murder video. Has anyone here watched it? Has it changed the way you feel about the US/UK/Western Nations war on terrorism? Or the India-Pakistan strife? Or the Israel-Palestine conflict? Or American foreign policy in general?
<p>Should the <a href="http://prohosters.com/pearl/">video</a> even be shown?</p>
<p>I’ve seen people all over the net debate this topic. I’m interested in what the folks at Thraxil have to say.</p>
By
anders pearson
05 Jun 2002
mozilla 1.0 has been released.
<p>rejoice.</p>
By
tuck
04 Jun 2002
i remember my parents explaining to me what happened on June 4th in Tiananmen Square after the american media began its typical frenzy of spitting emotional content directly onto our tv room carpets. students were murdered for protesting the same government which murdered them. some foreign reporters at the time said hundreds of people died. but of course, they were mostly running away from bullets, so couldnt really see. i remember my history teacher in high school, Ms. Vadebonceur (we got extra points on tests if we could spell her name correctly) a product of Colby College (a liberal arts school very similar to Bates, and also in Maine) spending an entire eerie class discussing Chinese lunacy. she had the Tiananmen Square death toll at a couple thousand at least. the following year when i was in India, my roommate, Lima, who was from a small northeastern state called Nagaland, was terrified of the chinese (for reasons which would take too long to explain here) and explained how in India, the Tiananmen Square body count was said to be as high as 10,000. i was also told in history class there (this was 1996, during the first real China-Taiwan showdown, so we were covering China pretty well) that pro-democracy advocates all over the country were killed that day, not just in Beijing. The official Chinese report on the matter was that there was only a small handful of casualties.
<p>its hard to know what to think, or, as the chinese government would prefer, whether to think about it at all. china has made so much progress since then; people can now wear shoulder-exposing shirts, they can joke about politicians without getting thrown in jail (usually, anyway). but a few months ago something happened that really bothered me: i was reminded that according to the chinese govt, Tiananmen never happened. a chinese highschool student friend of mine doesnt know anything about June 4, 1989. he asked: was there an accident or something? somethings wrong there; the unacknowledged massacre haunts my optimism. it was only 13 years ago, yet it seems completely forgotten. is the Party actually capable of erasing history? as i sit here typing, on this 13th anniversary of the murders, the entire country is watching their team play Costa Rica in the world cup of soccer. the only massacre on their minds is one of sports victory. maybe they have the right idea: just move on. maybe theyre now conditioned to feel like being heard is hopeless, and that no amount of speaking out and the resulting jailings will change the iron fist rule of this still corrupt and oppressive and usually ridiculous government. by thinking back to 6-4-89 im cursed with brain-numbing frustration. the fact that the government still lies about the reality of what happened, that it tried to kill off anyone who saw anything, including bystanders and people watching from high-rise windows, that it even had police guards at the graves of the victims each june 4th for years after to prevent anyone from mourning them, that it boarded up the Square on the 10 year anniversary of the murders claiming it was under construction (police guards quickly informed anders and i that taking pictures or even peeking at the merely under construction site was illegal, for some reason)… it all makes me remember that even though the country is seeing some money, looking a bit better, and filled with more smiles, i must never mistake this new atmosphere for political freedom. this country is still an iron-fisted authoritarian regime, and the authority of the Communist Party is not to be questioned in any way, ever. unless, of course, you want to spend 8 years in reform camp or be shot in the back of the head.</p>
<p>move on, or remember? moving on is easy when you see the progress which has been made, but hard when you remember that those killed were students like us, asking to be heard. theyre still dead of course, mostly unremembered, many with bullet holes in their backs from running away, terrified and shocked that the long trusted <span class="caps">PLA</span> would actually shoot them, their own people, for trying to initiate positive change.</p>
By
anders pearson
01 Jun 2002
my friend julintip left today. moved back to ohio to go to law school (well, first she plans on spending the summer lounging on the beach in thailand. envy.) one less person for me to hang out with.
<p>her boyfriend, adam, who’s a CS professor at columbia has a research position at los alamos and was driving out there for the summer today so they packed up her stuff, mailed a bunch of it home and packed as much as they could into a rental car and drove off into the sunset together.</p>
<p>[geeky conversation in the elevator:<br />
julintip:
adam:
anders:
adam:
anders:
(ain’t i witty?)
<p>as something of a consolation for my loss of a drinking buddy, i got to inherit the stuff she couldn’t fit in the car and would’ve gotten thrown out otherwise. did pretty good. got: an air conditioner (god knows i need it), a TV/VCR combo, a table, and a complete set of glassware.</p>