Internet piracy saves the day again

Since I had to get a new computer (again) money's going to be tight for a while. (again) And my discovery that I've been getting free cable for no reason has also led to the discovery that there's still nothing on TV. (Although putting the History Channel and finding out all the whacky methods they used to kill Confederates and Hitler-dudes back in the day is okay sometimes.) So as a money-saving measure, I've forsaken the used DVD racks at Hastings and returned to the old ways of finding my entertainment in free and highly illegal ways. Ahh. Anyway, here's a brief rundown of the crap I've acquired lately:

Jurrassic Park Trilogy - All three movies, and I've never seen the third one, so it'll be a bonus, once I get around to watching it. But I think that's the one where they pretty much made up a new dinosaur to be badder than the T-Rex, so until further notice, fuck Jurrassic Park 3 preemptively. The Tyrannosaurus is king of animals, and even Spielberg cannot change that. I was willing to let the velociraptor thing slide, (the Hollywood version was more like a deinonychus [that's a different dinosaur, and I'm a nerd] crossed with some cyborg ninjas than a little piddly-ass velociraptor) but you don't besmirch Tyrannosaurs that way.

American Hardcore - Documentary someone made not too long about about the hardcore punk scene from the early 80s, back before "hardcore punk" meant "bad heavy metal played by short-haired dudes singing about unity." It was good enough to almost make me want to try to like Black Flag again, which says a lot. Highlights include the dude from TSOL casually mentioning being a grave-robber back in the day with no further explanation, that Moby dude talking about singing for this one band followed immediately by other band members saying it never happened, and the fact that Ian MacKaye somehow looks exactly the same as he did in 1982.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot - Short little documentary shot from the parking lot outside a Judas Priest concert back in the day, consisting of brief interviews with concert goers. It will make you ashamed to have ever listened to Judas Priest, any sort of heavy metal, or any other form of music made by man, but it's still hilarious. Oh, and you can watch it here.

GWAR - Phallus in Wonderland - 1992 movie by your favorite monster costume-clad shock rock band, GWAR. I haven't really watched it yet, but a quick skim through it seems to indicate that it's a bunch of music videos from the America Must Be Destroyed album, with interludes of goofy, retarded crap in between. And oh yeah, this was nominated for a Grammy and based (loosely, obviously) on a true story. Wow.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years - Another music-type documentary, this one being a sequel to another one that probably had a lot of the people from American Hardcore in it, now that I think about it. Anyway, haven't watched this yet either, but I'm pretty sure it's got a bunch of 80s glam rock bands in it, along with a bunch of Megadeth stuff. Should be okay.

An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder - Man, the first one of these was hilarious, but much like pretty much everything else Kevin Smith is involved with (I'm still bitter about Clerks II) this blew really, really hard. Basically, it's like three hours of Kevin Smith answering questions about the first Evening With Kevin Smith DVD, occasionally interrupted by him still trying to convince people that his wife is as hot as he thinks she is. Also, despite the fact that all of this was filmed in the 21st century, half of it has Smith STILL sporting some sort of crew cut mullet haircut disaster.

The Bill Cosby Collection - The greatest thing I've ever found on the internet. Essentially a file folder with about TWENTY Bill Cosby albums in MP3 format. This alone is why they started the internet.

Web Surf Nicaragua Colon Song Tune of the Day for Browsers

Mastodon - "Cut You Up With a Linoleum Knife"

Don't talk, watch!
Don't talk, watch!
You came here, watch it!
Don't like it? Walk out!
We still have all your fucking money!

Do not nudge, kick or jiggle the seat in front of you.
I'm sitting there!
I am everywhere at once
and I will cut you up.

If you make out here,
I will cut your lips and tongue
from your head
with a linoleum knife.

Do not explain the plot.
If you don't understand, then you should not be here.
Your money is our money
and we will spend it on drugs.

Do not crinkle your food wrappers loudly.
Be considerate to others,
or I will bite your torso
and give you a disease.

Did you bring your baby?
Babies don't watch this.
Take the seed outside. Leave it in the streets.
Run over it after the show.

If I see you videotaping this movie,
Satan will rain down your throat with hot acid
and dissolve your testicles
and turn your guts into snakes.

This is copyrighted movie for Time Warner.
If I find that you've sold it on eBay,
I will break into your house
and tear your wife in half.

Dell Dimension Trials and Tribulations

With major system upgrades comes major problems, like how moving up to XP in 2002 left me without a scanner or a cheap, shitty digital camera. So far, here have been the issues I've had to deal with: (WARNING: If you're normal enough a human to not know stuff about computers, this is all going to be a bunch of nonsense)

• Had to download new drivers for my printer. No big deal at all, except for the fact that HP's download servers are slow enough to take an hour to send me a file that would take less than twenty seconds to get from anywhere else.
  
• Onboard graphics have no DVI connection, meaning I have to hook up the monitor with a VGA cord. Only available VGA cord is horrible and unshielded, meaning everything is all ghosted, like cable TV that's being stolen from a neighbor or something. I could have sworn I had a better cord somewhere, but apparently not.
• Old graphics card, (ATI Radeon 9250, for the record) despite not being as good chipset-wise as the onboard GeForce 6, has more video RAM and a DVI connection, so it would be something cool to use until I find a real VGA cord. The problem? Despite being fully able to run DirectX 9, it's still somehow totally incompatible with Windows Vista. Basically, it would work, but the Windows Aero theme wouldn't be available. And Windows Aero is basically the main difference between Vista and XP. D'oh.
• Hey, the new computer uses SATA connection type stuff to hook up disk drives, instead of IDE, which works a lot better. The problem? My old (as in maybe six months old) DVD-RW drive is IDE, meaning it's useless to me now. Not too big a problem, since this computer came with one, but I lose LightScribe functionality that the other drive has. (That's the thing where you can flip the disk over to the label side and basically burn a picture on there) So, uhh, anyone who wants a DVD-RW drive that can do LightScribe and about 15 or so LightScribe CDR disks can make me and offer or something.
• PS2 connections are old as hell and outmoded by USB 2.0, which is the new hotness, at least as long as FireWire never really catches on. So this computer got rid of the standard PS2 mouse and keyboard connections in the back, making USB the only option. No big deal, seeing as how my mouse was USB and a new USB keyboard came with this thing. Oh, except they didn't think to add more USB slots when they got rid of the other stuff, meaning I effectively go from six available slots to four. And between a mouse, a keyboard, a video game controller, a printer, an external hard drive, the external DVD burner I use to capture videos with, and assorted other cameras, MP3 players, and bullshit like that, I have something like ten things that need a USB slot to connect to the computer, and of those things, six are pretty much never disconnected. So I had to steal back the old USB hub thingy I bought to put in my old, ancient computer that only had USB 1.0 and then gave to my brother, whose computer had similar problems. So that problem's solved, giving me a total of ten slots, not including the bizarre, useless one that's housed inside the computer. But now, I only have one remaining PCI slot (old school PCI, not PCI Express) for internal-type expansion.
• I've only ever used Windows Media Player for audio and video files, and I've never had any complaints with it. But with the new and improved Windows Media Player 11, (exclusive to Vista, oooooh) videos slow down for the first few seconds, and MP3s start cutting out toward the end of the song. Also, if you've got a playlist and want to skip to the next track, it takes like ten seconds to do so, when it happened instantly before. So ITunes is looking really good right now, and I usualy hate Apple stuff. (Seriously, fuck Quicktime.)

Yeah, Technology's Gay.

Ahhhhhhh

Well, I'm in close to 800 bucks of debt right now, which means eating tuna and noodles for a month or two in the hopes of paying this thing off before interest kicks in, but I've got a PC that works now, and there is hella-computing going on right now. It's not the one I really wanted, (which was way better and would have been about $100 less, but I couldn't get that one because I didn't want to wait another month of saving up money, because Dell seems to be the only place willing to give credit to people who actually pay stuff off quickly...) but it's still a huge upgrade. I go from a fairly robust 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 to a freaking sweet dual core AMD processor running at the equivalent of about 4.4, and the available memory has quadrupled from 512MB to 2 gigs. Nice. There are some problems though, like the graphics card. It's a GeForce 6 series, which is way better chipset-wise than what I had, (the $65 Wal Mart card) but it has half the video RAM (64) of what I used to have, and there's no DVI input, so I have to run to Best Buy to try and find a VGA cord for my good monitor, so I can stop using this blurry, eight year old one. Also, contrary to my fears, Windows Vista seems fairly sweet so far. I like having stuff like headlines, notepads, and local weather on my desktop without having to be slowed down by massive spyware to do so. And it looks all pretty and stuff. Aww. But yeah, this monitor is killing my eyes, so I better head out before the place closes. Later, jerks.

Soon.

New computer has been ordered. I am in debt again and old computer is now my brother's problem. Updates to come... Soon.