A man dies and, due to his decisions through life, gets sent to Hell. After entering, the Devil takes him on a grand tour where he’s shown three rooms from which to choose his torture for eternity.

The first room is full of people standing on their heads upside down in an ankle-deep pool of shit. The man curls his nose and asks to move along.

The Devil takes him to the second room, where everyone is standing on their hands upside down in a knee-deep pool of shit. Desperate, the man asks about the third room, and the Devil takes him there.

Inside the third room, everyone is standing upright in a hip-deep pool of shit, milling about and drinking coffee. “This doesn’t look so bad,” says the man. “I choose this one.”

The Devil nods and ushers him in, points to where he is to stand, and then rings a bell, telling everyone in the room, “OK, break’s over. Everybody back on your heads.”

Keep this in mind when you go back to work this week.

I’m still trying to piece together the correlations between the two ends, marking events on the front half and matching them with events from the back half. The plot is episodic in nature, so it’ll take some mulling over in my subconscious to assemble the order and draw parallels.

If you’ve not seen “Dead Man”, you should see it. It’s slow, poetic, and through its sparse use of dialog tells a serious story. A man who’s had a rotten run of luck attempts to make a fresh start. Instead, he reaches the end of the line and through a rotten run of luck reaches the end of the line and makes a fresh start to the next spirit plane.

“The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow.”

• Digitally-Imported: DI has a wide-ranging selection of electronic music streams, but the free versions get lower bitrate and jarring advertisement drops.
  • Chillout: “Ambient psy chillout, check out our trippy flavors!”
  • Ambient
  • Trance
• Blue Mars: These streams are the love project of a guy named Lone; they were off the air for a while during the bad old Internet-streaming copyright wars, but are back. His playlists feature a handful of select artists, but sometimes you’ll hear new stuff. Very good for being not in your head.
  • Blue Mars: “In Memory of Earth”. Space music to travel the stars.
  • Cryosleep: “Zero Beat, Guaranteed” This is the most ambient of ambient. Nothing is more mellow.
• Digital Gunfire: “Long Range, Hard Hitting.” Futurepop, Darkwave, Industrial. Sometimes hard, sometimes aggro, sometimes hopeful. I fucking love this station. Listener-supported.
• Soma FM: Unique in that they have a strong selection of electronic and non-electronic streams. Top-notch music directors. Entirely listener-supported. My favorite streams:
  • Drone Zone: “Serve best chilled. Safe with most medications.” My other go-to ambient stream.
  • Doomed: “Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls.” You’ll hear stuff on here not even Digital Gunfire will touch.
  • Tag’s Trance Trip: “Progressive house / trance. Tip top tunes.” High-energy stuff.

“Sucker Punch” was alright, but it would be a great movie if it knew what it wanted to be. It was as split-personality as the girls in the asylum. The optical and visual production values were so high, even the dirt was crisp and clean. But the story needed a lot of work. I guess the plot bend at the end kinda justified most of it, but it left me feeling like I just ate some clean dirt.

Picked up a copy of “Star Trek: First Contact”; hadn’t seen it since theatrical release. It was an important movie in the series, but understated. I’d forgotten about it in the shadow of “Star Trek: Generations” and the rest of the Next Generation movies. Had a good visit from our old enemies The Borg, but the dialog had a few rough spots where the writers assumed too much.

Found a copy of the original “Nosferatu” silent film on archive.org. A bit slow and tedious, even for silent films, but you can see where some of our horror movie tropes originate.

“The Day the Earth Stood Still”, the recent remake, was a decent reinterpretation of the original film. It occurs to me that Keanu Reeves prefers to take on “Christ roles”, where his character commits the ultimate sacrifice to save the world.

I also put on “The Matrix” some time later, speaking of. That movie, sad to say, is the closest thing to a perception-altering religious experience I’ve experienced in the 18 years since leaving religion. I’m not sure how to feel about that. But I replay it every now and then just to feel a glimpse of that wonder again.

If you want to see the origin of phrase “that’s two D’s, for a double-dose of my pimpin’” (as heard in “Idiocracy”), then watch “American Pimp”, a documentary about pimps, pimp ethos, pimp style, pimp history. Made in the 90′s, but most of the lessons learned stand the test of time. It may be the world’s second-oldest profession, but bitch betta get my money.

Speaking of hard pimpin’, “Black Dynamite” is smartly written as a farcical look at blacksploitation films of the 70s with all the pimpin’, ass-kickin’, whitey-punchin’ karate you can handle.

“Salt” features Angelina Jolie as a secret agent turned double-agent on the run for her life and her sleeper mission. Jolie proves she has the chops to look stellar in the heat of action. Not much range in her character’s emotions, but it’s a star vehicle nonetheless. There was a surprise twist at the end, but worth it. High popcorn value.

If you haven’t seen or heard of the German-directed film “Hanna”, and you’re into Europe-trotting action films like “Bourne Identity”, you’re missing out, my friend. Hanna is a 16-year old girl specially trained by her survivalist father to kill (and to do so with ruthless efficiency), and her target is her father’s former boss at a top-secret American-funded eugenics program. I haven’t seen a little girl putting the boot to this many people since “Kick Ass”. Do yourself a favor and hunt this movie down.

I felt uneasy after watching Darren Aranofsky’s “Black Swan”. It was a very good drama of the highest caliber, on par with all of Aranofsky’s other works. I palpably felt the solitude and loneliness of Natalie Portman’s character, the unhealthiness of her mother’s smothering and manipulation, the gradual descent into delusion and madness in the hopes of being absolutely perfect, flawless, and complete. The only air in the suffocating environment was Mila Kunis’ portrayal of the light, thrillseeking, flaw-embracing counterpoint to Portman’s perfectionistic insanity.

On a dark note, you haven’t seen a bleak film until you’ve seen “The Road”. Bleeeeeak. I finished it feeling hopeless for my future and for the future of mankind. I was a little stunned, and obscenely hungry for the following week. An unspecified environmental disaster befalls the earth, and a permanent winter sets in everywhere; all the animals die, no crops will grow, and it’s forever overcast. Mankind is doomed, and a father and his son fight to scavenge for food, clothing, and seek shelter from bands of survivalist cannibals. It’s a hard movie to watch, but when it all comes down at the end of our human history, this is what it would be like.

Earlier this week, I woke up feeling like Joe Banks. Lost in the shuffle, driven to show up, clock in, do my work in a overcast daze. Doctor told me I had a brain cloud. So that night, to console myself, I watched “Joe Versus the Volcano”. I never saw it when it came out, but picked it up in the past year and return to it every so often to help me remember that I can change my fate if I wanted.

And finally, tonight I watched “McGruber”, and I have to say, it was mildly amusing for its send-up of its namesake TV series on which it’s based. Nice Molsen Beer jabs, too, a reminder that the original show and its actor are both from Canada. And it was good to see Val Kilmer acting again. Campy, cheesy, way too much man-ass, but funny nonetheless if not braining is what you’re in for.

So, that brings you up to speed with my recent movie habits. Keeps me busy until I pass out in bed. Most people have cable to keep them from living their life to the max. I have this.

I use Rhythmbox for my music listening. It’s OK as a player, and it’s got some…idiosyncrasies, but it’s usable. Usually. In my early phase of ripping my collection, I examined Rhythmbox’s handling of FLAC content. It plays fine, edits tags fine. It will even transcode the FLAC if you transfer it to a portable media device. The selection of file format is automatic based on the player, but will default to MP3. In your preferences, under “Music” tab, use the dropdown to select your preferred format — this is usually for ripping CDs with Rhythmbox (ugh, use Sound Juicer instead), but also applies to transcoding for media players. I edited my MP3 profile to encode at 256KB instead of my old 192KB.

That leaves the final piece of the puzzle: sharing this collection with portable thumbdrives. According to some docs out there, you can have Rhythmbox automatically transcode when copying media to a flash thumbdrive by placing an empty file called .is_audio_player in the root folder of the device. Then, when you insert the thumbdrive, Rhythmbox will notice, check for the file, and act like it’s a portable media device if it sees the file. Then you can drag-drop the files to the drive, and everything will be automatically transcoded. It’s a cludge, but what the hell.

As an aside: I know the latest version of Ubuntu desktop ejected Rhythmbox and is now using Banshee as the default player. I assume it’s got similar functionality, but I’ve not tested it myself. I’m just not ready to jump into “Natty Narwhal” or whatever they’re calling it. Progress comes with clenched fists.