So Many Madness

8 Reasons to Be a Lousy Musician

lamehats asked: Can I just express my love to you? kthnx. :P

Thank you! That is quite flattering. Thanks for following me also. :)

How to “Install” Texture Packs and Skins for Minecraft - Mac OS X only

I’m posting this because of this video, which can basically be summed up like this: dead air, a little information, um… Dead air. I’m going to improve on his video without losing the original content.

Basically, this is how you change texture packs or skins in Minecraft on the Mac OS X operating system.

SKINS:

1. Find the skin you want. You can download one from the skindex, or make your own. Download/create it, and you should end up with a weird looking .png file with what you want your skin to be.

2. Go to www.minecraft.net, and log in to Minecraft (top right of opening webpage). After logging in, click on “Profile” at the top of the screen. On that page there will be an option to upload a picture for a new skin. Upload the picture, then click on the button to the right of it. Basically nothing will happen and your skin will be changed.

3. Run Minecraft and log in. 

TEXTURE PACKS:

1. Find the texture pack you want. Download it. You should have a .zip file. DO NOT extract the contents. You need them zipped. 

2. Navigate to “/Users/(yournamehere)/Library/Application Support/minecraft/texturepacks” using Finder. “yournamehere” should be the name your user is (typically your name).

3. Drag and drop or by some other file transfer method, place the .zip files you just downloaded into this texturepack folder.

4. Run Minecraft. On the main menu there is an option to change texture packs. Select it, and then select the texture pack you downloaded.

The Guide to Life

My Official Opinion on Lady Gaga

Recently on Facebook, a few of my friends were arguing about Lady Gaga. They went back and forth about she does or does not suck, how creative or uncreative she really is, etcetera. I linked to this article, thinking it would lighten the mood a little bit. Instead, one of my friends lashed out at me. To be honest, at the time I thought it was rather comical for her to react so harshly to a joke. And then it started getting me thinking about what Lady Gaga is to people today.

I’m going to very straightforward about this. I don’t have a big problem with Lady Gaga. I don’t find her music particularly interesting or pleasing, and I find her sense of style to be quite strange, but I don’t hate her. But I DO NOT think she is really all that innovative or creative, or all that important. And this is why.

A capitalist society is designed to give the consumer exactly what he/she wants. If you don’t want what a company is selling, you don’t buy it, they don’t make money, and their idea/product dies away. That’s how we get what we want here in America. We buy it because people sell it. People sell it because they know that other people will buy it.

Today, we don’t just want food or clothes. Music, like in many civilizations before ours, is considered one of the basic necessities of life. For some reason, all over the world, people love and enjoy music. If you ask me, having a taste in or enjoyment of music is part of what makes you human. And that’s no different today. People are selling their music for you to enjoy. And if you like it, you will typically buy it.

How does this relate to Lady Gaga then? First, let’s talk about Mozart. Mozart was an incredible composer, and his music is loved by many people. His music is a central focus in the study of Art Music, and is held as an excellent example of musical form. A master of the craft, Mozart has stunned audiences in his time, and continues to today. Why was he so successful? He knew exactly what his audience wanted, and gave it to them.

Now, not to compare one of the masters of composition to a pop artist, but Lady Gaga is doing just that. She knows exactly what people like, and she’s selling it. In the words of the scholar and professor at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Alex Lubet, “Mozart was as sensitive to his audience as Lady Gaga.” And that can be taken vice versa. Lady Gaga is as sensitive to her audience as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was. In other words, they are both excellent business people.

This brings us to the next argument many people have in support of Lady Gaga: she is an original. Is she really? Let’s look at a brief history of popular music.

Before Lady Gaga has become the popular thing, we have had a variety of other pop singers who sing about stuff that gets people’s attention. Need a list? Lady Gaga has sung about sex, partying, being crazy about you, and dancing. She has even sung about a very controversial and important issue, and has even taken a side with this song. Sounds to me she is 1) pandering to people’s tastes and opinions, and 2) doing something that has already been done before.

You might recognize this character. She is another popular singer who is singing about all the same things as Lady Gaga: sex, partying, and dancing. In fact, the video that I linked to back there is about a large orgy. Those tend to turn a lot of heads. And she is making a crap load doing so too. But to be fair, she is part of this generation’s popular music, so maybe she doesn’t really count.

How about this person? She was really big in the late 90’s. She sung about everything up there too, and was often criticized for her sense of style and stuff. And she got a lot of attention. And a lot of money too.

Do you recognize Madonna? She sung about sex, had weird style and people went nuts over her. And that was the eighties. She made a ton of money back then too.

The popular, sexy, glamorous female singer archetype has simply been around for a while. And it all runs on one thing: attention. Madonna, Britney Spears, Ke$ha, and in today’s world Lady Gaga, all make loads of money because they get a lot of attention for being totally nuts. It has just gotten less subtle over the years. Instead of wearing something like this, Lady Gaga has just taken it one step further.

In other words, just because she is wearing meat or dancing around in a hula hoop doesn’t make her creative. Remember, she is doing this for attention. All she has really done is found new ways to get attention. And it has worked. So well, in fact, that my friend on Facebook had her feelings hurt over it (I apologize for that, by the way. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, and don’t mean to with this post). 

Let’s recap: Lady Gaga is not original, is a great businesswoman, and plays at people’s opinions. In other words, she is exploiting the secret to success in business: giving people what they want. To be fair, I did say Mozart did just that. In my and his defense, he still was a major part of the development of classical form and harmony, as found in his music. So he sold out, but changed the landscape of Art Music in the process.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate my opinion expressed at the beginning of this long-winded post. I don’t hate Lady Gaga. I don’t think her music is interesting or to be honest, aesthetically pleasing. I do not think she is all that original (as explained earlier), but I don’t frown upon people who do like Lady Gaga. To me, she is just another pop artist looking to find fickle fame and a lot of money. I commend her for her ability to please a lot of people. Lady Gaga, you are an excellent salesperson. 

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

I was maybe three or four. I had a fascination with this thing called a computer, which was basically a white box with a black screen, and a fascination with markers, neither of which I had vocabulary or even enough brain matter to describe. That white box people called a monitor was strange to me, and so was the sharpie that could make permanent marks on anything. I decided to combine the two, coloring all over the monitor with that sharpie. My mom walked in and told me “No, baby Andre.” I started crying.

I tend to wonder if life will always be like that. You push the boundaries of your current life, and discover you hurt someone or something in the process. I “damaged,” per se, my mother’s computer screen, but only out of curiosity of two different things. 

A little long winded, but I hope that’s what you wanted.

Trolls, the Sword and Pen, and Age Limits

Trolls. You either love them or hate them. If you love them, then you are probably a troll yourself. Don’t know what a troll is? Read this. Don’t want to read? Watch this video. You have probably had to deal with one when surfing the internet before.

First, philosophy. We have all heard “the pen is mightier than the sword.” But how true is that really? I mean, saying something vocally makes what is being communicated stronger, right? Then what about what you write, or in this case, type?

Let’s look at the case of Jessi Slaughter. You can read a pretty in depth and less biased story here, some little-bit-sensationalized stories here and here, but I will quickly give you an overview right now.

Jessi Slaughter frequents a site called Stickydrama. On there a rumor was started that she had sexual relations with one of the band members of Blood on the Dance Floor. She replied with this video, laced with profanity and other awful things. Surprised that this 11-year-old girl speaks that way, and typically looking to cause trouble, she got trolled pretty bad. It escalated to constant pestering and badgering of her family, and supposedly even death threats. This video basically sums all that part up. Finally Jessi was put under government protection for a little while, as the family received supposed death threats and pizza orders.

Long story short, she dun goof’d. And then got some serious flack for it.

The philosophy: the pen is mightier than the sword. If you don’t know what that means, read this article. It’s a simple truth about how life works. If you write it down, it is naturally more powerful. As Ramses expressed in the film The Ten Commandments, “So let it be written, so let it be done.” (Yul Brynner was the actor). 

But why is that the case? Why is the pen mightier than the sword? Here are the reasons I came up with.

1. It requires effort to write something down. In other words, work is equivalent to value. If you spend time working on something, you will value it more. That’s why you get all mad when you die in minecraft, or if you get a gift, you tend not to value it quite as much as if you worked for it yourself.

2. Writing, blogging, commenting online, etc, is something you have time with. That is, you have more time to think about what you are communicating, and then “publishing” that.

Do you have any other reasons? Comment and explain yourself, please.

Back to Jessi Slaughter, we need to put things in perspective. The person being harassed is 11 years old. What’s she doing swearing and speaking like that? More importantly, what is she doing being troll bait? This advice dog explains it all:

This brings up a more important point: is the internet a privilege? Should there be an age limit?

I am known to say that age is just a number. And I still believe that. But I don’t think an 11-year-old girl should be given a webcam and full internet without parental supervision. There are bound to be problems there, like this vlogger pointed out. And as this particular points out, there were problems.

I’m starting to think maybe there should be age restrictions on things. This would end internet anonymity, which I’m not sure I completely agree with, but by making people log in with a special ID number and attaching their internet selves with their real selves, these sort of crap simply wouldn’t fly (not that crap flies, but rather, flys or flies). 

This article makes some pretty good points. So should something like Korea be done? Users have to log in with their own names, not disconnecting their online actions to themselves.

Question is, is that okay? Should we restrict something that has become something so important for many of us? 

Go ahead and answer in the comments.

Superheroes and Humans