Sunday, December 24, 2000 03:20 a.m. EST
endless waltz was transcendent. unquestionably one of the best anime flicks i've seen since fist of the north star. the visuals were gorgeous, much better than in the regular gundam wing episodes. as a fairly huge fan of that series, the origin flashbacks in ew answered some burning questions never touched on previously. plus, the story of a child manipulated for political ends eerily presaged all that elian bullshit earlier this year. and of course, the action was house-rockin'. if you like anime and managed to miss it on cartoon network friday afternoon, i think i'm gonna let you break your foot off in your own ass.

other than that, accommodations are getting a mite crowded at the casa de freelon. thank god these people only come around once or 2x a year. some of 'em, anyway. but if we could pick our relatives, all mine would be musicians or in the music bizness. yeah.

only one shopping day left, sweetcheeks.

Friday, December 22, 2000 12:45 p.m. EST
wow, tuesday's foray into semi-relevance sure was fun, wasn't it? we'll have to do it again sometime. but today you'll get the same self-indulgent ramblings you've come to expect from ol' wolfie. wait, strike that last comment from the record. lately, i've had a thing about assiduously abstaining from uttering words and phrases that crappy institutions have appropriated. for instance, i berated dimitri last night for using the phrase "in sync" during band practice. also permanently banned are the terms "jackass," "real world," "lfo" (which used to stand for "low frequency oscillator"), and, um, "cash money," among others.

lurve, featuring yours truly, is playing a gig with my so-called band at kings in raleigh, nc on jan. 6. i expect all you triangle scenesters to come out and support your local indie rock webmaster.

last night i was supposed to get together with hollin and aden and verbally compete for dickhead supremacy with the former at a restaurant, but i got severely fatigued and fell asleep. aden came over to get his dreamcast, but i didn't find out till i woke up this morning. goddamn jetlag!

the relatives' arrival draws ever closer. here's hoping my aunt randy's addiction to tetris doesn't interrupt my blogging ssshedule.

Tuesday, December 19, 2000 11:49 p.m. EST
mp3. i remember it well. back when i first heard the term there were no legal battles over copyright issues, no power struggles over peer-to-peer networking technologies, and no asshole bands scapegoating a file format as satan incarnate. in late 1996, i was a high school junior. steeped in the depths of my own self-imposed misery and co-dependency, i turned to my computer to forget the agony of life amongst my fellow teens. this was long before wolf 359, but i had been using cool edit for about 6 months to play wav and aiff sound clips (two pre-mp3 file formats). one day i stumbled onto a web site called the house of the rising punk that provided several full-length old-school punk tunes for download. avid punk rock fan that i was, i rushed to rightclick and get to downloadin'. only problem was, the files were of type "mp3," heretofore unheard of by me. fine, i thought: cool edit can't play it, so i'll just download whatever player they have available, and i'll be on my merry way. winplay3, huh? allrightythen. thus i snagged it, and then i proceeded to download my very first mp3, bad religion's "fuck armageddon this is hell." it was about 2 ½ megs, so it took a bit longer than the 30-sec wavs i was used to, but what the hell, i was getting the whole song, right?

upon receiving the file, i opened winplay3 and tried to listen. everything sounded great for the first 30 seconds, but the program stopped exactly at the three-0. i'm thinking ok, this file is corrupted, i'll grab another. i settle on a social distortion song, which also halts right at 0:30. what the hell's going on? after five minutes of frantic hair-wringing, i spotted a long series of seemingly random letters and numbers on the program download page. a regcode? yeah baby, we're in bizness now! i proceeded to rock out for the next several hours.

after that incident, i forgot about mp3 for awhile. about three months later i discovered the wonderful world of software piracy, and i soon learned that the web's seedy underbelly trafficked in all sorts of illegal goods, including music. the first mp3 search engine i used was owned and operated by a student at rensselaer polytechnic institute, and it was damn good. now in those days mp3 pirates used easily stolen file-sharing software like serv-u and warftp to provide the public with free music archives. so you'd type the band or song you wanted into the search box, and you'd get a list of ftp addresses that matched the search string. you'd then login to the ftp site and grab the desired track. back then most site operators allowed unconditional access to the content they provided. these "leech" sites were common in the early days, but they were later supplanted by ratio sites, which required users to upload 1 byte for every y bytes they downloaded; and banner sites, which forced users to sign up for some free (often pornographic) service before they could download. and of course, many of the best sites were private, allowing access only to those who had ftp sites of their own or who could fulfill some of the sysadmin's requests.

the system was arcane, and i loved it. it was exclusionary to anyone who wasn't willing to learn the particulars of directory-surfing, hammering, ip-banning, and resuming. no one cared much about copyright issues at the time because music piracy was too difficult, and the average consumer was more likely to shell out $15 on a cd rather than spend all day searching for a song, locate a working ftp server, and blow 20 minutes downloading. but i showed all my friends the ropes, and soon some of them started running their own mp3 servers. by senior year, i was making custom mp3 mix tapes for my cd player-less car. i specialized in import-only and b-side tracks as well as singles by bands with only one song i liked. i still spent plenty of cash on cds, in part because i was connecting with a 56k modem and partly because i subscribed and still subscribe to the crazy notion of supporting worthy artists. mp3s merely supported my healthy obsession with the noize i loved so well.

my happy scheme got even happier when i arrived at college. the dedicated t1 pipes allowed me to download music much faster, and as long as the speed was 16 kbps or faster, i could listen immediately. so i was in heaven; or rather, i would have been, if by that point banner sites had not almost completely replaced leech- and ratio sites. slowly, sysadmins had learned that they could take advantage of the paying sponsorship programs many porn sites offered, and many a login message gave the name of some geocities url that gave instructions on how to download from the site (viewing the files was always free, of course). but i managed to get what i needed one way or another, for awhile.

a friend of mine from duke was the first to inform me about napster, a new file-sharing program that abolished the ratio and banner systems by allowing everyone leech access to each others' files. i scoffed at the idea: sure, i said, that's great if you like the backstreet boys and britney, but it'll never have anything i like. and for a while, i was correct: the early days of napster offered very little of interest to underground music fans. but sometime in late 1999, all that changed. one day, not really expecting to find anything, i fired up napster looking for some rare jawbox stuff, and the results amazed me. tracks from their out-of-print final album? napster had finally become a viable source of music for me. soon afterward i abandoned the mp3 search engines completely and relied exclusively on napster to provide instantaneous musical fixes.

nowadays, the old ftp scene is in pretty sorry shape. head on over to oth.net, if it's still up, and search for something. anything. you won't find much. by removing the restrictions that gave the old sysadmins absolute power, napster liberated digital music and made mp3 popular with the common user. of course, it also attracted the attention of the big bad riaa and major labels, who of course wanted the enterprise stopped. the press releases say that napster's deal with bertelsmann will result in a fee-based service. will the public swallow this? maybe. and maybe major labels will stop ripping artists off and begin promoting musical innovation by signing bands that aren't afraid to take risks. don't bother counting on it.