From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 29, 2004
This morning, upon awakening I was greeted with the
cheeriest news: the
first DVD master of ARISE had successfully prepped,
compressed and
burned itself into a DVD that worked perfectly. INCREDIBLE!
Normally it
doesn't come out so well on the first try, and this
one has a trickier
interface than I've tried to make before.
One trick about it is that when you first insert the
DVD and the menu
comes up, you see a lovely morphing-Dobbshead mandala,
but there's no
music or anything. It just sits there silently morphing,
trippily. I
should probably bill the front menu page itself as a
"Bonus: Meditation
Video!". You can put on some Ravi Shankar or Hawkwind
or something and
stare at it while doing Whip-Its, I don't know. BUT...
it's not really
silent! After 18 seconds, a voice suddenly says, "Bob?"
Every 18
seconds thereafter, that "Bob?" repeats. It's
the classic "logo guy
saying "Bob" clip" that's been abused
on Hour of Slack since God was
born.
Now, originally I was not going to have the loop be
SILENCE for 18
seconds and then a "Bob" - originally I had
made a loop that was a
FUNNY WHIRRING-CLICKING NOISE for 18 seconds and then
the guy saying
"Bob?". So that when you first put in the
DVD, IT WOULD SOUND LIKE YOUR
DVD PLAYER WAS FUCKING UP! (And eventually saying "Bob"
now and then.)
But I decided to change the "DVD PLAYER FUCKING
UP" sound loop to
silence after I made the loop. For one thing, it clashed
with the
pretty morphing Dobbshead mandala and wouldn't sound
good with the
Hawkwind or whatnot. But mainly, I didn't want to deal
with the HASSLE
of IDIOTS who wouldn't GET THE SUBGENIUS JOKE and would
think their DVD
player really WAS fucked up, and would bitch like hell
about it and
maybe even worse, IF their DVD player happened to ACTUALLY
GO BAD BY
COINCIDENCE any time shortly after playing our funny
conceptual prank
DVD.
I have done little techno-pranks like this before, and
the laughs have
never been worth the fuckwads who thought they'd been
victimized. Like
the "virus installation" page on SubSITE.
In the Day, we had that NOT
reveal that it was a gag, and our server hosts got HELL
about it from
the numbskulls and dipshits.
So I decided not to make that loop that made it sound
like the DVD was
fucking up your player. Made the one with the silence
leading to the
"Bob."
Decided to make a second safety master DVD while I still
had that
program up. Did so. Took it to the DVD player to check
it, make sure it
was good. Put it in.
The lovely morphing Dobbshead mandala front menu screen
came up, and IT
SOUNDED LIKE THE DVD WAS FUCKING UP THE MACHINE. For
half a second I
thought I had accidentally somehow put my prank-loop
back in the
soundtrack. But this was WAY more loud and VIOLENT-sounding,
AND THE
DVD PLAYER WAS VIBRATING SO HARD IT WAS ALMOST JUMPING
AROUND. (It's a
very lightweight Apex.) It sounded like the DVD was
somehow tilted or
grossly off balance or had like a NICK in its edge or
something,
because it was REPEATEDLY AT VERY HIGH SPEED scraping
and knocking
against something in there, real real bad.
It sounded just like two skeletons fucking on a tin roof.
YET THE MOVIE WAS PLAYING JUST GREAT!! Over on the TV.
The DVD player
sounded SO bad though that I figured it might well be
breaking the deck
and when I hit STOP, it DIDN'T, and when I hit EJECT,
the knocking
slowed down to a drunken crawl and then the whole thing
went dead.
Then it ejected.
I tried a commercial DVD and the previous ARISE master
and determined
that there was nothing wrong with the deck. I looked
real close at the
Ridata DVD that I had burned the bad movie onto. IN
THE SILVER CIRCLE
JUST PAST THE CENTER HOLE, the outer edges were....
BUMPY. It was not a
perfect circle of silver. There were extra little FUCKBIT-WADS
of
silver, TINY blobs, extending too far out, and in a
couple of places
the ring of silver was THIN.
I examined previous burned DVDs from the same batch,
other things
besides ARISE. They all played fine except for one and
IT TOO had the
little bumpy FUCKWAD-BITS in the silver ring. The others
all played and
had perfectly circular silver rings.
I examined my stack of what had been 100 Ridata 4x DVD
blanks.
Respectable blanks. Not shitty cheap stuff. SUPPOSEDLY.
But the next
FOUR disks in the stack have the MARRED SILVER INNER
RING - marking
them as POTENTIAL SKELETON-FUCKERS.
In fact I made a container labeled "USED AND BLANK SKELETON-FUCKERS."
I made one skeleton-fucker into a DATA DVD - just holding
safety copies
of sound files, only to be used on a computer - and
it sounded FINE
while burning but when I put it back into the computer
as if to use it,
IT MADE A HORRIBLE NOISE in my computer DVD player.
Not a knocking but
an awful and sickening THRUMMING noise.
The rest of the DVD blanks appear to be fine. But of
course this means
I have to eye-check each one before burning... FOREVER.
Because you can't
trust ANYBODY. RiData stole my heart and then FUCKED
me. Left me high
and dry. I'll never be able to trust RiData blanks again.
RiData
cheated on me.
But it is ironic that just when I decided to be "GOOD"
and NOT prank
all my DVD customers, that's when I GOT THE IRONIC IMMEDIATE-RETURN
BAD
KARMA ANYWAY! Just for even THINKING about making a
DVD that would make
you think it had broken your player.
But the thing to remember is that I now have a couple
of DVDs, one of
them the new ARISE, WHICH WILL possibly BREAK SOMEBODY'S
DECK when
played!!
Should I use it to "bury the hatchet" and
"let bygones be bygones" by
giving this copy of ARISE as a GIFT to some enemy asshole
from the
past?
--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath
of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected (Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
PRABOB
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "iDRMRSR" <idrmrsr@subgenius.com>
Stang:
>>Should I use it to "bury the hatchet"
and "let bygones be bygones" by
giving this copy of ARISE as a GIFT to some enemy asshole
from the
past?
Yes, that's the ticket. Just like I occasionally send
you the mysterious
copies of movies that sent the Apex into lalaland right
at crucial moments.
Let's face it Stang, you and I have both gotten burned
in the recordable
media department. Somewhere over there, some slant
eyed guy that looks like
the ringmaster in the Russian Roulette contest in Deerhunter
is laffing his
puffy little chink ass off and fanning a roll of dollar
bills he earned off
us crazy yanks.
Your experience matches mine, except you got dud blanks
that chew up the
whole DVD player while mine record the first 47 minutes
of each movie and
then skip or stop the damn player. Of course, no problem
detected burning
the damn things. And I use SHOP4TECH blanks! These
are supposed to be
Ritek equivalent. Ha ha.
If you look on my spindle, you can see BUBBLES on the
shiny side (not the
recording side). Like when the master thingy was poured,
they didn't
vaccuum suck the bubbles out of the plastic before it
set. They burn
without error, too. Just that they don't play back
worth a hot damn.
I think this whole computer DVD thing is just another
case of imperfect
technology released to a hungry and gullible public
TOO SOON. The very idea
that you can record 4.7 gigabytes to a little damn plastic
shiny thing seems
impossible. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE! Dammit, unless you buy
the $5 blanks.
Well, don't get me started.
Uhhh...wait a minute, I already have.
[*]
-----
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
iDRMRSR <idrmrsr@subgenius.com> wrote:
> Let's face it Stang, you and I have both gotten
burned in the recordable
> media department. Somewhere over there, some slant
eyed guy that looks like
> the ringmaster in the Russian Roulette contest
in Deerhunter is laffing his
> puffy little chink ass off and fanning a roll of
dollar bills he earned off
> us crazy yanks.
>
> Your experience matches mine, except you got dud
blanks that chew up the
> whole DVD player
No, they just act like they're going to... I've stopped
them before the
centrifugal force got out of hand.
> while mine record the first 47 minutes of each
movie and
> then skip or stop the damn player. Of course,
no problem detected burning
> the damn things. And I use SHOP4TECH blanks!
These are supposed to be
> Ritek equivalent. Ha ha.
Yeah, I burned some data (not a video) onto one of these
fucked DVD
blanks and it burned fine... and "VERIFIED"
even. You can copy files
off it. IF YOU DON'T MIND THE HORRIBLE SOUND and possibly
wrecking your
deck...
> If you look on my spindle, you can see BUBBLES
on the shiny side (not the
> recording side). Like when the master thingy was
poured, they didn't
> vaccuum suck the bubbles out of the plastic before
it set. They burn
> without error, too. Just that they don't play
back worth a hot damn.
>
> I think this whole computer DVD thing is just another
case of imperfect
> technology released to a hungry and gullible public
TOO SOON. The very idea
> that you can record 4.7 gigabytes to a little damn
plastic shiny thing seems
> impossible. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE! Dammit, unless
you buy the $5 blanks.
It's nerve-wracking because there's no guarantee that
every DVD player
will play one's home-burned DVDs. Now, so far I have
gotten no DVD
returns from paying customers. But I gave one to Legume
and it wouldn't
play at all. For all I know I accidentally sent him
a blank. And the
copy of 5X-Day that I sent to Brushwood, Pater Nostril
said that the
SOUND would fade in and out! -- on BOTH Brushwood DVD
players -- but
NOT on the Brushwood COMPUTER DVD player, on which it
sounded JUST
FINE! (My guess is that it was a slightly-bad blank.)
If my processor upgrade goes well later today, I should
be able to
start using a much slicker DVD making program (DVD Studio
Pro) -- so
I'm sure I'll encounter a whole new set of problems
and limitations.
But don't you know it satisfies the hell out the TOOL-USING
APE INSIDE
every time I get one of these fucked-upperies back to
working again.
yesterday I had to CRANK OUT two Hours of Slack as fast
as possible.
(Must do ARISE box, ads!) While I was fiddling with
this ng I was
dubbing the 17 copies of the two shows. Onto some "Ridata"
CDs I got
from Office Max. Only after I had dubbed ALL of them
did I discover
that my CD player -- while it would indeed play them
all, all the way
through -- would crash if I tried to SKIP TO any track
past the first
two thirds of the 60 minutes. FUCKING HELL! So I had
to go into PROCESS
OF ELIMINATION MODE (for the second time that day, on
the second
medium). Definitely not my burner. Definitely the CDs.
Then I found
that the ones I made functioned normally on ALL THE
FOUR OTHER CD
PLAYERS in the house. Only on my NEW el cheapo one (which
plays MP3s
too) did this probably minor problem occur.
But, obviously I can't use that particular brand of
cheap blanks for
audio, just data. Live and learn.
Incidentally I can't see any difference whatsoever between
a "music"
blank and other blanks from the same manufacturers,
besides price. You
pay $10 more for the word "music" to be printed
on the label. Far as I
can tell.
For our commercial CDs I get very high quality silver
blqanks, in bulk
-- but you can't HAND WRITE LABELS on those, they're
for printed labels
only. So not good for limited run stuff like weekly
Hours of Slack
(which are hand-labeled by Wei usually!). If you ever
wondered why the
disks I give you with movies on them sometimes have
labeled SLEEVES but
not DISKS, it's 'cause I used those bulk ones.
Anyway I got a THIRD safety master of ARISE done, all
the shows dubbed
and mailed, now I just gotta do the boxes... AND REPLACE
MY COMPUTER'S
WHOLE BRAIN!!!! Then my OWN whole brain! Then the body
itself, with a
new IMPROVED one. Assuming the processor upgrade goes
well.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: phy <phy00x@yahoo.com>
"Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
wrote:
> I have done little techno-pranks like this before,
and the laughs have
> never been worth the fuckwads who thought they'd
been victimized. Like
> the "virus installation" page on SubSITE.
In the Day, we had that NOT
> reveal that it was a gag, and our server hosts
got HELL about it from
> the numbskulls and dipshits.
That scared the hell out of me for about 5 minutes.
-phy
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: saint bubba <abvhiael@auracom.com>
"Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
wrote:
>The lovely morphing Dobbshead mandala front menu
screen came up, and IT
>SOUNDED LIKE THE DVD WAS FUCKING UP THE MACHINE.
For half a second I
>thought I had accidentally somehow put my prank-loop
back in the
>soundtrack. But this was WAY more loud and VIOLENT-sounding,
AND THE
>DVD PLAYER WAS VIBRATING SO HARD IT WAS ALMOST JUMPING
AROUND. (It's a
>very lightweight Apex.) It sounded like the DVD
was somehow tilted or
>grossly off balance or had like a NICK in its edge
or something,
>because it was REPEATEDLY AT VERY HIGH SPEED scraping
and knocking
>against something in there, real real bad.
>
>It sounded just like two skeletons fucking on a
tin roof.
>
>YET THE MOVIE WAS PLAYING JUST GREAT!! Over on the
TV. The DVD player
>sounded SO bad though that I figured it might well
be breaking the deck
>and when I hit STOP, it DIDN'T, and when I hit EJECT,
the knocking
>slowed down to a drunken crawl and then the whole
thing went dead.
>
>Then it ejected.
my computer makes those sorta noises all the time, for
no reason
whatsoever...its an old ibm aptiva 386 who's original
hard drive is
likely just spinning dust bynow held together with hashish
smoke
resin, spilt coffee and just plain sheer ornerieness.
i bet you
introduced that dvd to my whirring, clunking, SNORTING
'puter, it'd
prolly FIX it. how much you want for it?
st bubba
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
I don't think I want to sell it, it's too valuable for
its
pranking/revenge potential. I'd gladly RENT it to you
though for
computer repair purposes for $7 plus $1 postage. Hell
it still could
probably be bootlegged and copied from and sold by the
humjillions in
China.
I have a nice stack of CDs and DVDs that are fucked
up in other ways,
like, they might play 2/3 through and then seize up
and stop. I usually
take the box of damaged but semi-playable media swag
to X-Day Drill
every year and auction it real cheap or give it to Good
SubGeniuses
that provide me with a hamburger when I suddenly need
one. Couple of
X-days ago, Rev. Lon got about $100 worth of SubJunk
for a hamburger...
the LAST hamburger, yet he gave it to me. FREELY! I
start to shrivel
and look really hangdog and pathetic between meals,
more than usual,
and this "Samaritan" took pity on the pore
old battered Cult Clerk and
shared of his meager repast. Later when I regained my
awesome powers I
bestowed upon him great gifts, a fantastic treasure
disguised in plain
white paper CD envelopes. Let that be a lesson to you.
When you see an
old wizened hungry man on the street, give him your
burger, for he
might really be Ivan Stang between feedings, and later
give you the key
to a great treasure. Actually I don't usually eat that
many hamburgers,
but chicken or those Boca fake sausage vegi-soylent
tubes, or gobs of
peanut butter and chocolate. And 'frop, lots and lots
of frop. Come to
think of it, save that shit, esp. the frop and chocolate,
for Rev.
Stang when you're SURE it's him. Don't just give it
to any old raggedy
assed hippie. In fact, just email me your credit card
# and expiration
date and I'll take care of your karma from there.
I'm putting off installing that new brain in my computer,
is why I'm
nattering on like this of a Sunday afternoon. Scares
the shit out of
me.
What if it WAKES UP DEAD!!
Original file name: Skeleton Fuckers.txt - converted on Saturday, 25 September 2004, 02:05
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