My name is Marlon

I make excuses

I don't have internet in my house.

I was recently on a slave ship; it was cold and uncomfortable and I'm still sore.

I'll be getting paid soon.

sometime after getting paid I'll be *hopefully* going to a voodoo glow skulls/great tortill heist concert

I'd like some people to join me.

I want to work more

I need a power cord

I want a ukulele, bnjolele, snair, high-hat, djembe, gong, vibraslap, lyr, small, jazz-sized bass drum and drum brushes.

My A key is acting up.

I need moar money.

I'm out;

-word to your mother

PiGGbot is officially back in business

Specializing in pwnage and mid-late game comebacks.

Yeah I figure the majority of people that read this blog (and 100%[both] of those who comment) are fellow fans of League of Legends, so here we go.

Normaly when a game has been going 3 minutes and I'm the only one that hasn't died yet (I usually specialize in early game deaths) I start losing faith in the success of the team I MEAN LOOK AT HOW MANY KILLS TWITCH HAD. But we made a big effing turnaround and luckily they were all physical attackers so I could stack the heck out of armor.

fun game.

while I'm at it, might as well post screen caps from before the losing streak.

first and only time I got the lead amount of kills.

If you play LoL, especially if you play as a tank, there will be guides telling you to stack sunfire capes. This time we played against a whole team who stacked sunfires (they changed their equipment some after we started owning them courtesy of mandog) and it was pretty difficult, but I have never lost to a sunfire stacker. (and, I reiterate, I'M NOT EVEN THAT GOOD)

That's probably the full extent of my League of Legends guide: one sunfire cape is enough.

-Marlon

PS. I CHALLENGE MANDOG TO CONTINUE HIS ANIVIA GUIDE.

dreadlocks.

Got my hair retwisted today. Dem dreads can now pretty much be shaken. It has these random curly, stick-outy parts from the hair clips that held it til it mostly dried, that should be going away soon. I'm happy with it.

meanwhile working on verbal clarity in text.

interwebs.

So it's difficult for me to blog now because my laptop's powercord died so I have to occasionally borrow my mom's. this led me to realize how incredibly dependent I am on my laptop. Seriously, everything I do ends up having a connection to this baby so I thought I'd discuss programs I use to do what it is I do and the saving grace for people with un-backed up files/unreliable computers or those who work on multiple computers, web-hosted applications.

Of course all of these are free because I DON'T BELIEVE IN PAYING FOR SOFTWARE.

Section 1. Music

One thing I do all the time is download music and that music needs to be played and tagged and whatnot also that music comes in various file forms and I use two programs to get that done

and Media Monkey

They're both pretty sweet in their own right, thus I use both, but I use foobar significantly more. I'm even using it now. I like its bare bones, highly customizable (but barely customized by me) format also, it's the least resource intensive media player I've heard of also it plays almost any type of music file you'll come across (m4a, flac, ogg, wma, etc.) only one I can think of off the top of my head it can't play is .shn files but the only player I know of that will play shorten is winamp and I don't like winamp.

I use it to listen to files, to rip cds, and conversion all of which it does extremely well and foobar does a really good job at not getting in your way. It doesn't monitor your files and add them automatically, which is a plus for me, personally. I don't trust too many automatic things.

Media Monkey on the other hand, uses more resources but is no iTunes and what it absolutely excels in, is tagging. When you get music that either isn't tagged at all or music that doesn't exactly have the most reliable tagging in the world (I get a LOT of those), Media Monkey will be your most trusted companion it has this sweet tag from the web feature, that you have to kind of help along, but it makes finding the name of the actual artist or album names, album art, full titles, etc so much easier than just googling part of the lyrics. (you might still need to use google sometimes though). Also in the tools>scripts section you can auto increment track numbers, basically this mofo has a lot of stuff to make mass tagging less tedious. another thing I love about it is it'll give you stuff like play counts and skip counts and a bunch of really fascinating ways to sort your music.

Media monkey does automatically update your library with the folders you tell it to monitor and I just recently learned is great at ripping cds as well. also it plays all the file types foobar does except some weird obscure type of wav or something I read about online makes it crash.

media monkey can also be used to sync your ipod, if you use one of those devil machines and you hate iTunes as much as I do. You at least won't have your crap erased if you use the pod with more than one computer.

I'm sure iTunes is great if you buy all your music from itunes and you only listen to mp3s and aacs, and you own a mac and are retarded, but on a pc iTunes acts like a foreign body and tries to destroy your computer and everything you hold dear from the inside and if I ever see iTunes on the street it won't walk away without at least a black eye to match that stupid freakin mock-turtleneck. Eff that program. Stay away from it unless your last name is Stanley or Jobs. It really doesn't help that everything Apple makes seems specifically geared to destroy me.

As far as downloading music goes, a thousand or two of my 7000 song library comes directly from the free safe and legal archive.org they have this live music archive where thousands of artists/bands approve their shows to be recorded and uploaded. This includes ones I listen to semi-religiously Jason Mraz, Bushwalla, and Bob Schneider and ones you might know, Maroon 5, the Grateful Dead, and John Mayer.

You can see the full list and number of shows each artist has in the archive here:
http://www.archive.org/browse.php?collection=etree&field=%2Fmetadata%2Fcreator

most of them will be encoded loslessly in wav, flac, or shorten files, but you can find a good amount of mp3s or convert them with flac frontend or Mkw audio tool.

Another thing I do is make music. Since I broke my mp3 player, lost my camera, and bought a computer mic, I've been recording with audacity. but one online application I absolutely LOVE is called Noteflight



You can write sheet music on it and it's all stored online so your effed up computer can't ruin it all. It's not FULLY featured I guess unless you buy crescendo, but it's really great you can do so much with it. If you're into composing music with, like, actual notes I highly urge you to check it out. You can even compose with guitar tablature. I don't, cause eff tabs, but YOU can.

As far as listening to music online. I used to use imeem, until myspace ruined it. if anyone knows of a website that is what imeem used to be, let a brotha know. I miss that thing. I'm not too into last.fm or pandora. I guess, for those you have to be in the mood to listen to stuff similar to what you like but not exactly what you feel like listening to at that moment.

To be continued (hopefully)the sequel will be about writing.

-Marlon

Talking points

I was told that since I clearly intended on blogging today (yesterday) It would be fair for me to make it say i published it before I actually did, but I won't. I really did intend on blogging and did right a lot of words early in the morning but no blog today.

• I did go to two birthday parties for two people born 20 years apart though, and ad the second party there was a girl who may have been hot or may have been a subject of both the "prettiest girl in the room" and "it's dark in here" phenomena that totally wanted Mandogs neckdicks.
• I imagine Hell is a place both hot and sweaty that's just a little too dark with a lot of glowstick-like materials, animal print cloth stuck in random portions on the wall and much-too-loud techno music. And nothing interesting would happen there, just some of the people getting intoxicated and playing with glowsticks while the rest of us, the sufferers, sat and wished we were somewhere else.
• I've started 3 very extensive blogs but haven't finished or published them yet.
• Today seemed to be the day to ask me about things I have no plan to participate in in the near future, drinking, swimming, and marriage.
• I love lesbians. not just for obvious reasons, but with most girls there's this weird dynamic with talking to them, they either have the "I want you to like me romantically (whether I like you or not)" vibe or the "I really don't want you to like me romantically (most likely because I think you're gross)" vibe. With lesbians, it's like, "I'm a person, you're a person, let's be people together".
• Most of the songs I write tend to be from the perspective of someone/thing other than myself.
• I'm somehow very attracted to girls with little-to-no interest in romance.
• I'll probably blog again before the day is over.
• I appreciate the ability my best friend and I have to take things and make them fun.
• I'm currently writing a song about a dinosaur; this is the hardest I've ever worked on a song.
• I'm so glad I'm not going to Hell.

That's all for now. Gosh that was so focused on "I" I guess that's the way blogs are formatted though, maybe that's just the way my thoughts are formatted.

Until next time, blogger,

-Marlax

DELICIOUS EFFING FOOD

To day was apparently cooking day at Stanley's house and ish got pretty intense.

Cheddar biscuits, pizza..somethings and soon to be brownies.

also there's a video game with Tits.

and apparently we're about to watch the worst movie ever.

What?

No I didn't fail the last two days of BEDA, YOU failed the last two days of BEDA! I'm sick of your accusations, blogger; sick of them!

I watch this youtube channel called vlogbrothers in which my now favorite author and his brother communicate with eachother (and the people that watch their videos) via. . .um, video and John (the author) made this one about college and his advice on getting through.

I know no one's asking, but, if I were to give someone my collegiate advice, it would be this in addition to what John Green says:

I've been going for four years now and there are a lot of things I love and am grateful for. The people I've met, the discoveries, the adventures, oh, the adventures, skipping a day of school to go see a concert my friend agreed to pay for and trying to hide the fact that I was running out of gas cause they already bought me oil too (and making it home like a badass), the parties, the open mic nights, the classes. So many things. But there are two things I regret 1.Not passing English the first three times. 2.Not going to a residential college.

I've mentioned (and demonstrated) before that I am sort of an expert at not writing things, in fact I'd estimate 94% of my time is spent not writing DON'T BE ME! When you have a teacher and that teacher assigns an essay or research paper, don't put it off with "I don't know what to writes" or writer's block excuses or "this isn't good enough so I wont finish/turn it ins"(God, that one's such a dumb excuse THAT'S WHAT THE CLASS IS FOR).

Look, to be honest, the majority of teachers don't grade that harshly, you see, their expectations have dropped due to how much the California public school system has failed. So many students don't even know there are 3 "theres" and certainly don't know how to use them, so if you, unlike them, know..like, words... can form coherent sentences and put them in MLA format, you'll be leading the curve (seriously, I've proofread some peoples stuff and it's not pretty).

I don't remember who said it, exactly, it may have been John Green who said something to this effect.

Writer's block doesn't exist, it's just an excuse lazy people give for not being writers. There is no such invisible force that keeps you from putting words on paper, only yourself; so write. The only way to be a writer is by writing. You may not want to write because nothing good is coming out, but you have to get all the crappy stuff out to make way for the good stuff. In short, you're the one in control not some imaginary writer's block.

So advice number 1 is, do your work.

Second, is embrace your sense of adventure. Adventure is a word I don't like using for reasons I CHALLENGE MANDOG TO DISCUSS IN HIS NEXT BLOG, but it's immensely important there are things that will happen that you never would have expected to experience once you decide to take some risks, and go to another state on a whim or into an abandoned building, or just drive into the desert or something. There are things I can't even explain in words, but adventure, friends, and you'll see.

Third, tied into the adventure is to do things that are unconventionally fun. There will always be opportunities to get drunk if that's what you want to do and let's face it, beer pong gets old. You go some place, you've never been, play instruments in an empty parking lot, sing, dance, write, fly kites, play foursquare, make up a game, something to that effect. The it'll be infinitely more memorable than... getting to drunk to remember what happened. DO things.

4 LEARN! This is the perfect opportunity, seeing as how there's never before been so much information readily available to you not just new things, but things you think you know. Like you may think you know what "your" means or how to correctly punctuate sentences, but probably not. Whatever it is, learning it will feel good.

Fifth, take any class that includes the word "improvisation" truly life changing things are learned and life changing people are met in these classes I doubt any advice I'll ever give will not include this.

as for the residential campus thing, I imagine so many more vital experiences are had when you're not living with your family and you're getting used to fending for yourself. But there's so much I've had here that I'm glad I didn't miss out on.

and now, I need to (TOTALLY LEGALLY, I SWEAR GUYS) watch animal house. Even though i have this problem where it's hard for me to sit through a whole movie unless I'm in a theater.

-Marlon

Why is it

That no one is concerned about robots the way I am? I mean, these things are like level seven terrifying. Ebola is level 9. Level ten involves robots using biological warfare among other things simultaneously going wrong.

I've been working on a longer entry discussing the horrors of robotics/artificial intelligence/how technology ALWAYS has to follow science fiction.

Maybe another time.

grrr

well, still playing league of legends.

After a series of completely awesome games, yesterday, I started losing every single one I entered today. It's ridiculous, I don't even know how I'm messing up. Wow, all these "things I'm currently doing that no one has a reason to care about" blogs are really lame. I wish I didn't write them.

I also wish I slept at regular hours THIS IS WHAT YOU DO TO ME SUMMER also I missed possible the greatest concert my home town has ever seen five days ago. I'm really bummed about that.

-Marlon

So, aparently...

I'm a miserable blogless hack. I must post something so I may not fail because Fall Out Boy told me failure wasn't flattering. I must succeed for once. I'm so incredibly undedicated it's ridiculous.

But, uh, yeah I really want to go to school.

It's been a week and my hair is locking nicely. Also, I hate robots, but, Nickbot is uber. Supremely uber beyond all ubers. he destroys all that lies in his path.

-marlon

Uuuuuumm..

It's going to take too long to blog the things I want to blog, which conflicts with the things I want to do irl. Yeah, I realize that the purpose of BEDA is to prioritize writing and generate the habit of working diligently even when it's not recreationally convenient, but come on.

That's really the only argument I have. I'm about to play some ultimate frisbee, which I suck at because I'm extraordinarily unathletic but I"m playing anyway because there's good company and I need to exercise every once in a while.

but first some Lol

Christmas 1991

My parents were younger than I imagined they ever were.

My dad still had to go to work later that night.

My mom had a camcorder

I had red footie pajamas.

I was 3 years old and received my favorite gift of all time.

It was a Batman Bike. Gray, black, and light blue, it caught my attention the way an expert angler could catch a goldfish from the aquarium at Wal-Mart. Effortlessly. Inescapably. Ultimately. With a few bows lovingly placed on its frame and a long strip of computer paper strung across it with the name "Marlon" clearly written, in it, I saw my destiny. I steadily walked toward it without feeling my legs moving, only seeing Batman Bike filling more and more of my field of vision. As is the customary ritual of claiming one's Christmas prize, I stripped it free of all it's papers, dressings and wrappings leaving it pure. Questions were asked for the sake of the camera and I answered just enough to get back to my business, but in truth, at that moment, there was nothing else. Just Batman Bike. There was a black shield on the front in between the handlebars with a large bat symbol, the black tires had a red ring on each inner edge. Covering the spokes were blue plates with large images of Batman in action poses and the word "Batmobile". There was a cloth sleeve on the bar connecting the seat to the handlebars that had varios villain pictures on it and the paint, plastic, metal and rubber came together to create the semi-sweet aroma of paradise. It was the most beautiful piece of assembly-required machinery ever conceived by sentient beings and I believe God created the universe just so one day this mode of children's transportation could be built by man.

I have no memory of any other presents received that year. Those memories weren't important.

My dad spent a considerable amount of time and effort putting it together.

The next day I awkwardly rode Batman Bike (with training wheels) while dressed as a cowboy (guns and holsters included).

The day after that I was hospitalized for asthma-related complications and released within a week.

Some time between 1992 and 1993 Batman Bike was stolen. Of course, I cried.

My mom drove around with me looking for, and probably ready to fight, any kid riding the same bike. None were found.

I never forgot Batman Bike.

-home movies from 19 years ago.

follow up LoL

I'd never seen anyone get more than four buildings destroyed in a game so it was my goal this game to be the first.

and well. . .

someone beat me to it.

another 4v5, a longer game, another win, this level 13 Pantheon user was the TOTAL mvp.

he destroyed everyone's scores overall.

blog of substance coming later today, hopefully.

This is what i've been doing with my free time

4 versus 5, the other team got baron, I had the second most deaths on my team and the least time spent dead (excluding the quitter), the third highest assists overall, and I'm so geektastic right now. League of Legends is pretty fun and I think I'm getting pretty good at it now (not to toot my own dick, but I've only had one loss in the last ten games). I'm not going to do a guide on it like mike, though because A) I'm not THAT good, B)I'm not that dedicated, and C)part of what's good about the way I play, is it's kind of obscure--you've probably never heard of it.

I'd hate for my natural technique to go mainstream.

You know what?

I hate the summertime, blogger. I hate it. Because nothing productive gets done in the summer and often times nothing interesting either. And I can only be as entertaining as my surroundings, man! It's like a catch 22 of boring or something. I need school to start for reals.

This is lame.

I have however experienced two awesome summers in my life at ages 20 and 21, but now it's back to normal.

count down to the 23rd.

hello

blogger

Now that we've gotten the salutations out of the way I'll pretend I have some thing to talk about.

Two days ago I began the "journey" to get the one hairstyle guaranteed to increase both, my hip-hop and indie cred, dreadlocks. I figure, a few people suggested it and I don't comb my hair anyway so why not? I watched some youtube videos where people chronicled the progression of their dreads and it took about 6 months to get were I thought they looked pretty cool so that's most likely how long it'll take me.

Oh yeah, if you're reading this you might be wondering why I'm blogging all of a sudden. Well, it's August, and BEDA all over again.

-Marlon