Lip synching exercise

Following hot on the heels of our pixilation project, we received a lip synching exercise and a cel animation exercise. This in addition to our actual term project, which we received too little time for from the outset.

What I wanted to submit

Lip synch test from Garg Unzola on Vimeo.

Turns out blunt honesty isn't that great for marks, so I scrapped that idea.

What I submitted in the end

Lip synching exercise from Garg Unzola on Vimeo.

Unfortunately I suck at exporting Flash files to video so you don't get the full effect of the movieclips at the end. The quality is bad, but you get the idea.

Hot hot rack

This chick has the hottest rack I have ever seen:



At least, I hope that's a chick.

Blocking Para Sites

My week hasn't gone particularly well. Firstly, my computer blew up in blue smoke. Then, my replacement computer ended up not being all that compatible with software I need to run for projects. There is also a distinct possibility that I may have swine flu. Some members of the Illiterati tried to mug me three times this week. I say try because there is circumstantial evidence that implicates me in assault and propagating hate speech. The lesson you learn from this is don't fuck with me. In more diplomatic terms, this rule is expressed as do unto others as you would like to be done unto yourself. Same thing, if expressed with more syntactic sugar. I don't like being fucked with, so I do my best not to fuck with other people. You get the idea.

What to do if a website fucks with you

Suggest that you have a particularly shitty ISP. Suggest that this ISP is called isturb. Suggest that isturb decided it's an anurism inducing brainwave idea to hijack your browser and redirect it when you've reached your cap. Suggest that it doesn't help to try and reason with their technical support because they are shaved apes trained to answer: "Eish hauwa I duno maybe you should buy more bandwidth?" to every query they get. The lives of homo habilis must be eventful, going from one angsty, vengeful, ranting nerd to the next, interspersed with the erratic lunch break or two.

Stop spam websites from hijacking your browser

Enough pointless rage for one day. Let's look at an amazingly blunt way to stop any website from hogging your precious bandwidth. The answer lies in your hosts file. More classy nerds than I have figured out bigger and better tricks by now. But seriously, my computer is just a fancy mp3 player, so this is what you and I can do to stop these cretins from fucking with us:

1. Find your hosts file. This is not as hard as it sounds. Unfortunately, suggest that your ISP is so shitty that it doesn't provide software that runs on Linux. It claims that it supports Linux, but those half-baked jackasses would probably suggest to you to install wine and run an exe. Suggest that you are vendor-locked on Windows, find your hosts file here. Linux nerds will find their hosts file in the /etc/ directory.


2. Ensure that you have the righs to edit your hosts file. Windows users: this means right clicking on the file, clicking on properties and unticking the box that says Read only. Open the hosts file in notepad or something similar. Linux nerds need no lecture on rights or where to find the hosts file on Linux.


3. Edit your hosts file. After you identified the source of your peril, simply tell the source of your peril to redirect to your ass so it may kiss your ass. Your ass naturally lives in your home. In PC speak, home is 127.0.0.1. Suggest that the source of your ISP peril is www.isturb.co.za. This means you add the following line to your hosts file:
   
   127.0.0.1 isturb.co.za
   
   This line says home is the place where isturb may find your ass to kiss it. By the way, the first line in your hosts file is generally:
   
   127.0.0.1 localhost
   
   This wasn't in my hosts file, so I put it there. Seems to work better with this line.


4. Save and close your hosts file. Don't be a bright spark and save it as a text file. The hosts file should have no extension. It should be hosts. Period.


5. For the paranoid: Ensure that you don't have the rights to edit your hosts file. After you edited the hosts file, right click on it, select properties and tick the read only box again. This is probably not necessary until it's too late.

From now on, isturb will no longer redirect your browser to their spam infested hades. Nay, nay, from now on, whenever isturb tries to do that, your browser will redirect to some arb place hosted on your local computer. My other computers on the home network sometimes do funky google searches, or they simply give a 404. Bitchin. No more hogging my browser, hypothetical fucktards.

Update

Some websites, like the hypothetical isturb, might use slightly different URLs to try and spam you with their malware. To counter this, you might have to add the different URLs to your hosts file. In theory, you can add all the aliases for a particular IP address next to it in the hosts file, like this:

127.0.0.1 isturb.co.za www.isturb.co.za http://www.isturb.co.za/whatever.html

However, I found that it works better to use all the variants on separate lines in Windows XP, like this:

127.0.0.1 isturb.co.za
127.0.0.1 www.isturb.co.za
127.0.0.1 http://www.isturb.co.za/whatever.html

Note that there should be a space between the IP address and the URL. I use tabs just to make things neater. That seems to do the trick.

Bile of Man free mp3 download promotion

Bile of Man is a South African death metal band I've had the pleasure of seeing once or twice. I also included them among my best bands on myspace list. They are currently giving away free mp3s as part of a promotion.



You may download the mp3s here:
Bile of Man promo tracks.

To the real geeks, the tracks are also available in ogg format.

Descendant of Desecration

The first aspect of Bile of Man that kicks you in the face is the strong Dying Fetus influence. The second aspect is the foundation of some fine sound. The guitars are still a little raw, but for the most part the production serves to build a wall of sound, with some interesting stereo effects and a few disembowelling bass parts. Oh, and they can keep time, which is something of a novelty for most South African bands.

Wrath of the Stillborn

Descendant of Desecration has a few risky tempo changes, but Wrath of the Stillborn is the better of the two tracks in my opinion. It kicks off with some arsenic blast beats that flow into even more putrid blasts. Then, some awesome diabolus in musica riffs, followed by an orgy of chaotic chromatic riffs that reminds of Cryptopsy before they became Coretopsy. For the grand finale, you get some blasphemous pinch harmonics that would get Zakk Wylde fired from Ozzy Osbourne's band.

White South African gets asylum in Canada

Brandon Huntley made the news this week because he managed to convince the Canadian authorities that he was being targeted by criminals because of his race. He also opened a can of worms because South Africa is meant to be the land that Nelson Mandela magically fixed with his pixie dust and his car bombs.



Brandon Huntley, the South African refugee from racial persecution.

Brandon Huntley's refugee status

Refugee status is granted to those who meet the following United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees criteria:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it

Brandon Huntley's refugee status is thus granted because he feels that:

• He is being persecuted in his own country due to his membership of a particular ethnic group.


• The South African government is unwilling or unable to protect him.

We can determine whether the Canadian government made a proper ruling without applying political pressure. It is a simple matter of answering the following questions:

• Do other members of Brandon Huntley's ethnic group in South Africa agree that they are being persecuted due to their race?


• Is the South African government unwilling or unable to acknowledge that they feel this way?

The feeling of white South Africans

The majority of white South Africans feel that the government's affirmative action and BEE policies amount to persecution for the sins of Apartheid. This is judging by the main reasons given by those who are leaving the country in drones, namely the high rates of violent crime in South Africa and the government's employment policies.

65 % of the participants in a recent South African newspaper survey answered that they do believe that applying for asylum on the basis of race is justified ("Is applying for foreign citizenship on racial grounds justified?").

It is hard to determine whether these figures have a racial basis, but it is clear that the majority of those who leave the country are unhappy about the South African government's interference with the labour market and that the majority feels South Africans are justified to apply for foreign citizenship on racial grounds.

Clearly, Brandon Huntley is not alone in feeling persecuted in South Africa because of his race. It is thus not a case of determining whether or not some ethnic groups feel that they are being persecuted in South Africa. Rather, it is a matter of determining how the government is dealing with the problem of this feeling of racial persecution in South Africa.

The South African government's response

This is where things get really interesting. Recall that asylum status depends on the feeling of being persecuted and the inability of a government to respond to these feelings.

The South African government responded to the news by labelling the Canadian decision racist. Way to go, South Africa. You just legitimised Brendan Huntley's claim that your government is unable or unwilling to accept that some of your citizens feel persecuted because of their race.

The South African government is now in talks with the Canadian government to review the decision. Way to go, South Africa. You have now also shown the world that your legal system is so entwined with your political system that your politicians can attempt to overturn independent if embarrassing court rulings - even when they are from another country.

Is the refugee status justified?

What we have here now is a South African population that feels applying for asylum based on your race is justified and a government that denies them the opportunity to apply for asylum from foreign governments, going so far as to use diplomatic pressure to seek to overturn independent court rulings regarding asylum. In my opinion, the refugee status has been legitimised not by Brandon Huntley's asylum status, but by the response of our government. I think Minor Threat said it best but Slayer did it best:


Slayer's cover of Guilty of Being White. Taken completely out of context and whatever other lame excuse you may find to try and undermine its message.

Syd Kitchen is right: Africa is after all, not for sissies.