The four weeks of ten thousand days

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Wed Apr 05, 2006 1:11 am

This is the thread that counts down until the release of the next Tool album, AKA the greatest moment of my life to axdate.

(Other than that battle of the bands where everyone had an actual band except me who just had a drum kit and a microphone and I still took second place. But it's a close second to that.)

(I played 46&2, Dreaming, Orestes and the S&M version of Battery. Just for the record.)

Today's number of weeks until the release of TenThousand Days is: 4

Today's number of days until the release of the first single, "Vicarious" to rock radio is: 12

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 10:55 pm

It's nice to look forward to things, isn't it?

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:44 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:It's nice to look forward to things, isn't it?

It certainly is. You konw, I get the distinct impression that you're hinting at something, but I have no clue what that might be. Regardless, the number of days until the first single is released is: 10

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 4:02 pm

Today's numberof days until "Vicarious" is released to all major rock radio outlets is: 7

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 6:44 pm

Is it on file sharing networks already, JB?

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 10:54 pm

It is not. However, I saw the first fake on Bit Torrent on the sixth.

Besides, *I'm* not *looking* for it. I refuse to lsiten to an album that has this kind of audio complexity until I can get it in FLAC, and that will never happen until mid May at the latest becasue the stupid worthless know-nothings who routinely make up the file sharing populous have no fucking clue about lossie VS. lossless transcoding. Because they're fucking retards. But i digress.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Apr 18, 2006 6:53 pm

Well, you can always buy it, I guess.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 1:41 am

See, this is absolutely hilarious, because the album leaked today. No shit. Robb, I'm blaming this entirely on you.

Oh, and the single got put on radio yesterday, it leaked a couple of days early but I didn't get it 'cause I, like, didn't care about the fourty-eight hour difference. Still, it's worth stealing online if you haven't heard it on the radio yet, since you can't actually listen to the single legally other than tuning into participating RIAA-payolaing scum radio stations that ruin it with their disgusting, disgusting dynamics compressers. My review of teh song is basically: think if "Jimmy" (song 9 off of Aenima) was recorded durring the same session as "Schism" (song 5 off of Lateralus). it's got the exact same quality to the bass and guitar relationship as that song in particular, with a main riff that sounds much like Jimmy, even though it's, you know, different. The vocals are laid back somewhat in the mix, no doubt causing a mob of annnngrrrry 15-year-olds to demand that they immediately remaster the entire album to correct this glaring deficiency because God forbid they listen to real music other than off of 128kbPS CBR MP3 through FUCKING ear buds . In this song though, Maynard chooses the somewhat interesting choice of 'hissssssing' the lyrics, rather than actually singing them for the most part. It works, although I could see it getting old very, very fast if he keeps it up the entire album. This also marks an interesting advancement in that he's trying out this whole "do a two-bit harmony with yourself" bit in a few places. Other than very few places like Parabola and Schism, Maynard doesn't do that--probably because he doesn't want to have to deal with it live. Will this continue throughout the album? We will see. Danny chooses an odd snare drum to use for this album. It sounds, to me, very loud and 'big'. Not at all what I was expecting from his style, it sounds like the kind of drum Seether or someone would use. It's just niggling, until Danny decides to do a snare drum fill, at which point it gets rather obnoxious and comes very very close to clipping. I don't care for it much. But yes, that's just one instrument out of basically 16 of them (if you count each ellement of the drum set as a separate instrument), and i'm being extremely anal. Everyone knows I do this. The last thing I'll mention is that "Vicarious" is song #1 on the album, and it starts up... immediately. I think all of yee toole fanes in the audience (y'know, all 2 of you) understand what I'm getting at here, but for the 'uninitiated' I'll expound. Tool albums have, historically, always started with some sort of noise at the top. With Opiate it was just white noise, on Undertow it was a... um... thing that sounds like water going through a pipe but seems too mechanical to be a bong hit, on Aenima it was this weird... bouncing... distorted guitar... *thing*, and on Lateralus it was a hydraulic lift powering up. I think. That's what they used it for in Sam and Max anyway, it's the sound the cone of tragedy makes when it starts up. I've seen that sound all over the goddamn place and I wish I could figure out what it originally was. Anyway, that paragraph is probably far too long for the point I am trying to make, which is that this album starts out right away without any intro.
Regardless!

The number of weeks until the album is released in stores everywhere is: 2

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue May 02, 2006 9:55 pm

So, the new Tool CD comes with two lenses you look through to view a composite screen.

HEY LYSANDER! WHAT'S YOUR TAKE ON THIS???

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Tue May 02, 2006 11:21 pm

I think it's gay. And by that I think it fellates penis. I'm more interested to see if there's some sort of extra content with the CD like a DVD-Audio layer or something like that.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue May 02, 2006 11:34 pm

Lysander wrote:I think it's gay. And by that I think it fellates penis. I'm more interested to see if there's some sort of extra content with the CD like a DVD-Audio layer or something like that.

I do appreciate that they included something in the disc that makes you look like the name of the band when you try to hold it in front of your face. HA HA I bet everyone made that joke.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Wed May 03, 2006 12:49 pm

The Tool teeshirts opperate under a similar premise. iF you're stupid enough to buy a teeshirt that proudly proclaims "TOOL!", you are a tool.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Thu May 04, 2006 2:37 am

Okay, so now that the album is, like, out, I'm downloading it. The theory being that now that it's in retail, someone has converted it to FLAC. This is a good theory, that works. So I'm getting it now.

Let me just say, right now, that I hold a special place in my heart for anyone who can fuck up the very simple process of setting up a torrent. It's very extremely fucking simple. The first torrent I tried I wasn't allowed to use because the absolute worthless nothings that run the tracker--yes, Oink--banned bit comet. I understand it was misreporting ratios or something, whatever, that's not the point because that got fucking patched. So these snobbish elitest fucks go "no bit lord or Comet, try another one oh and we wont tell you were to find another one cuz we hate you lol". I'm still hoping that JC has its ridiculously high Google rating so that I can get the maggot who made that pointless decision all worked up and whining that I dared sully the great name of his tracker blah blah blah so I can inform him of "the real world," and what it thinks of him. So anyway I can't use uTorrent because the equally worthless nothings at my university block Bit Torrent--nevermind that it's a perfectly legitimate source for downloading files that are free or in the public domain, never mind that it's completely legal to use, never mind that even if someone was using it for illegal downloads the university is not in any way responsible for it, despite what the slug-like sue-happy mongrals at the recording industry would have the spineless dicks who run this place believe--it's evil! Block it! (I actually went and downloaded uTorrent again, just to see if it would work--as usual, nothing.) For some reason it works on Bit Comet anyway, but only on a certain port because they're so fucking stupidly paranoid about this that they throttle (not block, but throttle) all the trafic that's not on the standard VOIP, HTTP or streaming media ports. And I'm guessing on the VOIP thing. So I've got Bit Comet set to port 1755 because that's the only way I can actually use the fucking bandwidth I'm legally paying for to illegally download legal music thought of in the middle of two lawsuits between the band and recording industry*. So that torrent is out, and i'd like to take this time to give an extraspecial warm welcome and say FUCK YOU OINK! Oink. God, what an incredibly stupid pointless name for a fucking torrent site. Oink. Who the shit thought that up? oh yeah, someone from the UK. Clearly, they have something weird in the water down there that makes everyone a flaming homosexual. (CF: Placebo.) Next torrent. (This is the next torrent that's FLAC, incidentally. I'm skipping all of the MP3 ones because God alone only knows how fucked up those are, who knows what encoder at what stupid bitrate. If you're not using LAME3.97 Beta 2 at 128 VBR New, (and that's Q6 for those playing along at home**!) you are an idiot, fuck you, goodbye.) Ah, where was I before I opened those parentheses? I may have edged, just slightly, into editorializing. Ah, right--the next torrent. What is the next FLAC torrent? Oh, it's FLAC, all right--encapsolated in a .RAR file. I fucking hate RAR. I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning hot Mini Driver inflateable dolls. There is absolutely no fucking purpose for the existence of .rar files thanks to Windows XP and the preincluded zip utility, except for the rarlabs desperation to squeeze an extra few pennies out of stupid people who actually think it's good for something, anything at all. Which it isn't***. But even if it was a zip file this still would have set me off because the kinds of people that put multiple files into a torrent so that it'll all copy nicely into a directory without me having to do anything, and then wrap them all into a .rar file, are the kinds of people that I want to give a very large hug with the jaws of an industrial strength YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON crusher. (Pattent pending.) That kind of behavior is completely pointless and serves to make the job of me, as the torrent downloader, more difficult. And fuck you for making me do that. This gets even tripply-retarded when we remember--what are we downloading? Oh yes that's right, FLAC FILES! As in, AUDIO FILES THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN COMPRESSED!!! Putting a FLAC album into any sort of data compression scheme be it RAR, Zip, LZH, ZOO, or fucking ARJ, it does absolutely nothing--because it's ALREADY COMPRESSED! YOU RETARDS! What kind of fucking brainless blithering piece of shit puts a fucking compressed file into a compression scheme? That's almost as stupid as... fuck, I was going to say as zipping an installer, but then I rememberd that the "hackers" AKA 13 year olds who stole their mother's serial number that the internet community sees fit to call hackers now already do that with depressing regularity. Okay, that's almost as stupid as... as... *FUCK*, I was going to say as stupid as putting the lyrics into a torrent and .RAR-ing the what, 3-KB file? Until I remembered--I FUCKIN' SAW THAT TOO! The lenghts you people go to to be as numbskulled as possible never ceases to amaze me. As if this wasn't bad enough, it's actually not one .rar file, but multiple. Don't ask me why the labotamy candidate decided that it was sheer brilliance to span 400 megabytes over 10 .RAR partitians, I'm still stuck on why someone would fucking compress an ALREADY COMPRESSED FILE! Gads, that absolutely flips my switch every timeI even think about it. Anyway, so I go to a third torrent. This one is FLAC, the files are FLAC... oh, whoops. Files? Sorry, I meant "file." Yeah, this one's just one FLAC file and a qsheet. Hey, I appreciate the fact that you wanted to show off how encredibly 1337 you are because you use Exact CD Copy-- but I mean, come on! All I want is that I have a copy of the album in FLAC that has each song in its own file. Is that really so incredibly mondo-fuckign difficult to ask for? I didn't really have a point to this, I'm just killing time whhile the album downloads. Which has failed, as it's still going. Curses. Anyway, the first time I listened to this album I was not, shall we say, in complete control of my faculties. Well, that's only true for about the second half of the album--AKA the last couple of songs but I digress. I was also listening to it on a sound setup that was not ideal for capturing the nuances of the recording of an epic band such as this. So, review tomorrow!

*: In fact, the legal battle was durring Lateralus's stewing process, but I didn't want to ruin the highly theoretical "joke" with lousy facts. Tch.
**:Er, I think. Go to the hydrogenaudio wiki or just download winLAME and use the "low bitrate requirements" preset, it makes this so much easier. "LOL n00b WTF AAC IS TEH BEST MP3 IS TEH OLD SUX0RZ!111!" --ignorant teenager who knows nothing about sound and just repeats what he hears from people who at least think they know what they're talking about even if they don't. If you can stop gargling Steve Jobbs's sperm for a few moments, i'd like to point out that as of January MP3 and LAME AAC were tied in a public ABX listening test--and don't even start you, Mr. Ogg Vorbis; your encoder faired just as well as the other two. They can all achieve transparency at 128 kbPS, now stop fuckin' fighting over it. Jesus.
**: Unless, like, the RAR compression is actually better than zip or something. In which case I'm wrong. But still, come on, it can't be much better, and the XP thing is just so much more convenient.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu May 04, 2006 8:27 am

RAR is great because it does a crc check as it's extracting and won't let you extract corrupted shit.
It also lets you split files into 15mb (or whatever) segments for posting on usenet.
You're also not polishing Microsoft's knob by using it.

I think that you'd save yourself quite a bit of stress and very likely add a few years to your life if you just bought the tool album. Is the Tool album really worth shaving years?? IS IT??!

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Thu May 04, 2006 11:32 am

Jack Straw wrote:RAR is great because it does a crc check as it's extracting and won't let you extract corrupted shit.

See, that would be a good reason, but all the torrent clients I know hash-check while they download.

Jack Straw wrote:It also lets you split files into 15mb (or whatever) segments for posting on usenet.

Again, great for usenet. On bittorrent? Completely useless. Similarly, it's a useless "feature" for--say--anywhere except Usenet.

Jack Straw wrote:You're also not polishing Microsoft's knob by using it.

Yes, Adam. Every time I open a .zip, Bill Gates gets a free Taiwanese child to rape. Please.

Jack Straw wrote:I think that you'd save yourself quite a bit of stress and very likely add a few years to your life if you just bought the tool album. Is the Tool album really worth shaving years?? IS IT??!

It's a moot point because I have the album now ^_^ But basically, it was like, 'I don't want the album in a couple days, I want it NOW.' Because I, you konw, have a certain difficulty going to stores. Also, I'd always feel bad giving money to "the man". If I like it enough (which I'm almost sure I will) I'll cut the band a check for ca$$ that totally bypasses the recording industry fucks.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu May 04, 2006 1:06 pm

Sure you do. I believe you.

record stores · Post by **record stores** » Thu May 04, 2006 6:12 pm

wasn't this album on sale tuesday?

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu May 04, 2006 7:44 pm

Jack Straw wrote:Sure you do. I believe you.

*I'm* not buying the new Tool albumn, but then, I'm not downloading it either, so.

Vitriola · Post by **Vitriola** » Fri May 05, 2006 12:28 am

I heard the new single today. New song, same as the old song. Long, doesn't go anywhere, gotta be high to like it.

co · Post by co » Fri May 05, 2006 7:46 am

I'm not sure why I would buy the new tool album when I can just listen to Undertow again.