I Want Your Input

I'm in the process of putting together an Alternative Acoustic collection and I want your input.

I want around 100 tracks, with preferably no artist repeats.

I'm trying to stay away from live stuff, but will definitly not rule it out!

Here's what I've got so far:


Ben Harper- Forever
Blue October- Hate Me
Chiodos- You Wouldn't Last A Minute On The Creek
Coheed & Cambria- A Favor House Atlantic
Flyleaf- All Around Me
The Format- On Your Porch
From Autumn To Ashes- Chloroform Perfume
Incubus- Stellar
Placebo- Meds
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus- Facedown
Rise Against- Roadside
Rocky Votolato- Postcard From Kentucky
Senses Fail- Can't Be Saved
Shadows Fall- Lead Me Home
Silverstein- Call It Karma
Smile Empty Soul- Silhouettes
The Spill Canvas- The Night Will Go As Follows
Sum 41- There's No Solution
Wild Sweet Orange- Tilt
Yoav- Sometimes



Leave any suggestions in comment form or PM me.

Coming To Terms With The Fact That I'll Never Be An Expert Marksman

There are alot of unfulfilled dreams in every person's life. Maybe your dad wanted to be an astronaut when he was a boy. Perhaps you dreamed of being a firefighter, or an archaeologist like Indiana Jones, just whipping the hell out of savage cannibals while stealing their golden monkey skulls. Maybe George W. Bush dreamed of being president. The point is, there's a variety of reasons that a lot of people didn't end up where they wanted to be in life and instead are forced to clerk a two bit operation and pray intensely to nobody in particular that some hapless Jew broad leaves fifty dollars in change like that one time three months ago.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a sniper. I don't know why, but something about the art of putting a bullet hole in someones head from a thousand yards away appeals to me in a very special and beautiful way. Whenever we used to run around and play army as kids, I would always set up my camp in the bushes with my rifle and lay down a bit and relax. Probably because I was a pudgy shit and tired of running, but there in the trenches is where I learned to love the long range shot.

"I got you!", I'd shout. "You're dead!"

"Nuh uh! Nuh uh!" they'd respond, "How can you hit me from so far?"

I didn't know what a scope was back then, so I'd just say magic, which settled any and all arguements. Later on in my late teens when we played army, I finally knew better. It was sniper mojo. The art of firing a cylindrical shaft of death into someones unsuspecting face area.

Luckily for us sniper enthusiasts, there is no lack of media featuring our favorite melon poppers. There's always a sniper type weapon in most action oriented games, loathed by all except sniper enthusiasts who can appreciate the undeniable talent of sitting in a dark nook with a one shot kill weapon and lazily clicking on people when they chance to stop nearby.

Then there was the game that truly brought precision shooting to new heights; Perfect Dark. You know what I'm talking about baby. Right now the sniper fans are nodding and the fodder are getting ready to yell out "Fuck you cheater!" like an ingrained reflex because their friend grabbed that goddamned Farsight weapon again and shot them through five feet of concrete, a stairwell, a steel door, a marble pillar, a diamond window pane (possibly made of glass), and a miniature black hole that spontaneously came into existance in the path of the Farsights shot, so you'd get all pissy and start throwing N-bombs all over the place even though we agreed on no n-bombs beforehand, god I fucking hate you Alan!

Anyway. After several years of brainwashing by video games, movies, and true to life crime stories, I decided I wanted to be an expert marksman. That was my goal in life. My heroes weren't Batman, Superman, or other types of -men, but real life people, like Charles Whitman who landed a head shot on a pregnant woman's baby from three hundred yards, and Lee Harvey Oswald who blew away a President (barring any conspiracy, I know, don't black list me and bring up my alliance with the new world order at your next smoked out Ramada Inn bar meeting you conspiracy faggots), not because of what they did, which was heinous, but because they could shoot by god.

So what did I do to achieve this goal? Well. Not really anything. I want to be an expert marksman, but there are a lot of reasons this won't fly. First off, I have horrendous eye sight and am not eligible for corrective surgery, because I can't afford it. So just showing up at Sniper School with poor vision is probably some kind of problem right away. I mean maybe they'd let me be equipment manager or something, but fuck that!

Secondly, if you can't tell, I have mental disorders that would most likely prevent me from acting cool under pressure. Like if I were in Terroristan with a dope ass ghillie suit draped over me, and while laying on the ground I saw The King of Terrorists five hundred feet away about to push a comically large plunger that would detonate all the world leaders in the world, I'd probably have a hard time coming to grips with shooting him and making it a true shot. I'd miss and he'd sic some goons on me and I'd end up on my knees with a blindfold in some Al Zarqawi's Funniest Home Videos program. It'd be a whole messy affair.

These days I'm content to just keep using long distance rifle weapons in video games and watching movies that feature snipers (Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Enemy At The Gates, to name a few), and hope and dream and wish that one day I can be good enough to blow peoples heads off for money and fame. The dark thoughts have crossed my mind of course, getting a scoped rifle and just becoming some kind of vigilante crimestopper, shooting drug dealers, and crackheads and jaywalkers with wreckless abandon, but alas, I've never even fired a real gun, and I'm 90% certain that if I did, I'd wince horribly and mewl like a little girl and possibly urinate in my pants a little. The life of a sniper is just one I was never meant to know.

The Afterlife

Considered by a majority to be one of the most baffling problems facing mankind today, death has played a part in several people's lives since the dawn of life on Earth. While in itself inevitable in all regards, leaving one with a dizzying retch at the idea of mortality and the end of existence as one would know it for all eternity, let us not say that we, as the first species to hammer out the tenets of optimism, cannot look upon the pale horseman's grim visage and find something to love.

• Oblivion
  There's a lot money riding on this bet into the (lack of) afterlife in the modern era. To wink out of the world like a light bulb is a very logical and natural idea with all the comfort of a frozen marble slab resting on one's chest. That's not to say that oblivion does not have it's own austere charm. For one, anybody who has had a lifetime of more bad days than good immediately gets back into a 50/50 for themselves as all thought and mood is dispensed with. What's more, who doesn't enjoy the feeling of a pair of shoes being removed after a long day of work? Now imagine slipping free of a tired old body after a lifetime, what a relief! Not only are those tense muscles relaxed at last, they're gone baby! Another benefit of this credit roll is not having to spend the afterlife as a modern art piece if you were mangled to death in a crane collapse. Hello sirs, don't mind my calf muscle touching my pectoral muscle and that shrapnel sticking out of my taint, I'd like my harp and halo please.


• Reincarnation
  Hell yeah! For my money, this is the absolute greatest batshit insane theory to hope for when you find yourself wondering at the strange lack of internal vigor when your heart stops after six dozen years of dutiful beating. Karmic caveats aside, you basically get to hit the reset button on your life and come back and run through the whole gamut again, only this time as a new person whose mysterious past life histories can only be unlocked by the rare talents of carnie fortune tellers and huckster psychics for nominal fees. Anything other than hack, wouldbe writer please, if you're listening universe. I'll take a slightly daft Singaporean heroin mule with a game leg and that gland disorder that makes your sweat smell like potent mating season trout cunt. That has to be more exciting than joyless cynical white man with dysfunctional relationships and mother issues.

• Traditional Heaven
  
Reports vary on this one. The bible isn't exactly a concise reference book when it comes to the logistics, but if popular media is any indication, you get to roam around a cloud fortress of dead people for an eternity while every few thousand years a Holy Father Disney-esque parade happens down Main Street and everyone gets to admire old man God in hushed awe. Popular depictions of heaven strike me as being like one bad endless wedding reception, where the only escape is the sudden collapse of existence, and sometimes, when you're glazing over at a particularly bad shindig as a mysterious aunt that reeks vaguely of some old lady perfume made from laurels and mixed gin drinks deigned it necessary to run through the Rolodex of failure that is her family for bail & jail updates, your brain itches into a frenzy, as if the molecules begin a ritual to summon this calamitous end. Plus, only nerds go to Heaven. Nerds and dogs apparently. The last thing I want to do is spend eternity watching the same Bob Hope set circa The Great Depression with Shari Lewis at my table doing a puppet voice while Lassie pisses on my foot and all the while my penis was replaced with a sensible spigot that produces rainbows or some kind of wholesome garbage not conducive to creating the raging orgies that would go on after everyone got sick of pleasant eternity.

• Traditional Hell
  
Despite what a bible scholar (virgin) will tell you, Hell sounds like a pretty banging place to go. Lets look at the facts, the book itself is written solely from God's point of view. It's obvious The Morning Star had some beef with the Main Dude, Main Dude casts him out, or some such. Now supposedly he's the God's hatchetman under the earth torturing "bad people" for eternity? I don't buy it. Either the whole thing is a work, or Hell is just a place that would abhor Christians/Catholics with holy sticks in their asses, and is actually more like an ethereal Las Vegas. We already know all the cool people are there, as any 1980's brickwall open mic act comic would tell you, and I'm going to bet it's really easy to hit the torture quota for the day and then get some off time to pick the brains of dead rock stars and teenage icons. Like being in prison with maybe some more ass rape thrown in for good measure. For me to suffer for eternity, there has to be a whole infrastructure created and maintained, dedicated to making people suffer for eternity, and why would any loving God create that!? WHY!?

• Valhalla
  
Not a very pervasive belief today, but the allure is there. Basically, you kick it with Odin in his giant crib with doors as wide as football fields where you prepare to do battle with monsters until the end of time. Then after you're done for the day, you get to feast with vikings on boar and get crunk on various wines, ales, and other intoxicating brews. You go to bed, and you do it all again the next day! The only problem with this scenario is that I'm sure it will get a bit boring after a few centuries. I mean you got a whole battlefield to scope every day and probably five or six types of weapons to master, and after the dozenth time you dive roll away from an arrow and then sever a burly man's head with your iron axe before driving the spiked pommel home in another dude's eye socket mere seconds before he gutted you with a scimitar, it'd all be rather "ho hum". I mean, I only watched "300" once and it was enough. Plus there's a distinctly small chance of getting this afterlife, probably even smaller than the rest due to its antiquity, but lets hope for some kind of wacky universal mix-up! Unless you're a woman, because then I'm pretty sure it's searing ass rape by an endless parade of bearded savages for eternity.

So there you have it. These are the five options you'll face at the end of your days. The definitive list for all time, no changes or errors expected. Pick your favorite and cling absolutely, death isn't so bad. But dying is probably a bitch.

Hello everyone out there in cyberspace

I figured it suiting to start off with some sort of introduction, however bland it may be.

My name is James
I'm 22 years old
I live in Rochester, NY
I work
I play
I write (sometimes)

I've rounded up some close friends to get this blog off the ground and hopefully generate some interest.