StinkFight.com

Review written by prominent gun rights blogger and author David Codrea.

Review: “Self-Defense is more than physical”

It’s some incredibly nice words about my book A User’s Manual for the Human Experience.

(Including “How to soundproof your home studio for under ten bucks.”)

I’m often asked how I get such a great sound on my home recordings, be they Podiobooks, podcasts, or especially music. (Listen to my great new band, Right Arm of Wyoming.) (get MP3s of these songs on Amazon)

Well, I’m gonna lay all of my secrets on ya, here and now.

There is a lot of stuff out there that they try to sell to musicians. I’ve tried a lot of it, and ended up selling most of it. Here’s what I’ve kept that has stood the test of time (thirty years of playing music and recording, and 12 years of computer recording):

First thing you need is a good microphone and a good sound booth. Both are easier than you might think.

The best mic for the money is the Rode NT1-A. Buy it for $229 here. It is a very low-noise high-quality condenser microphone. Since it’s a condenser, it will need a pre-amp, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

You’ll need a shock mount, a pop filter and a mic stand. I use these. The RODE SM1 Shock Mount for NT1 Studio Microphone, 25 bucks.

Nady MPF-6 Nady 6-Inch Clamp On Pop Filter is 17 bucks.

Mic cables, you’ll need at least three. These are cheap and good. XLR male to XLR female Microphone Cable.

Here’s a good microphone stand for 25 bucks: On Stage Spotlight Tripod Microphone Boom Stand.

SOUND BOOTH:

(How to soundproof your home studio for under ten bucks)

This is easier than you’d think, and easier than I used to think it was. At our home in California, I’d spent a lot of money and time converting a whole room to be a studio. At our new home in Wyoming, I simply stuck some rugs up in a closet. It didn’t cost any money, works great, took about ten minutes and only about ten nails. Some of the rugs and foam are just wedged in there, not even nailed up.

This is a closet in the basement. If you don’t have a closet, you could even hang up some ropes and make a little tent-type room with blankets.

SOFTWARE:

I do my drum looping and multitrack recording in Sony Acid Pro 7. It’s an incredibly versatile program.

For mastering, and MP3 creation, I use Sony Sound Forge 9.

My book $30 Music School has good basic tutorials on using Acid and SoundForge.

Mastering is probably the trickiest thing I do of all of this, and it’s a bit of an art. If you want, I will master music for 50 bucks per song. Most people charge 100 bucks per song, and totally sap the life out of the music, trying to keep up with the Loudness War. As you can tell by my samples above, I master plenty loud, without squishing the music and ruining the dynamics and tone. You’ll like the result. e-mail me if you want that done. e-mail address is

kittyfeet70

at

yahoo.com

HARDWARE:

For headphones, I use Sony Pro MDR-7506 headphones, the best phones in the world under 100 dollars.

For a microphone tube preamp and compressor, I use the SM Pro Audio TB202.

Here it is at night, working in the spooky studio darkness:

They’re 250 bucks new, I bought mine used on CraigsList for $150. It smooths out vocal dynamics and adds a “warm” sound. It also has an instrument input which makes bass guitar sound great, and it has a powered output for your condenser microphone. I plug it with XLR mic cables into my $133 Alesis MultiMix USB 8 Mixer (which also has a powered output, if you’re on a budget and need to skip the preamp). This is a great unit, and has USB output to plug into your computer.

One secret about this unit, it is great except for an engineering flaw whereby it overheats and dies. This can be fixed by putting it up on a couple of blocks of wood so you get an airflow underneath it, and turn it off when you’re not using it. I’ve had mine for three years with no problem, whereas people I know who haven’t put theirs on blocks fried it in a few months.

A power conditioner is a good idea (to plug everything into, including your computer) to protect from surges and keep noise out of your signal. I use this Furman unit.

My guitar player, the mysterious Office Huttskew (who must disguise his identity due to the the highly sensitive nature of his day job) records his Fender Stratocaster direct into the board, without an amp, using the amazing Line 6 POD 2.0 for tone.

I record the drums, bass guitar and singing, and e-mail an MP3 to Office Huttskew. He pulls it into Garage Band (comes free with Mac computers, but here’s a good book on using Garage Band), and adds guitar. He sends me the separate guitar tracks as 192k MP3 files. I drop them into Acid and mix.

I do a bit of cutting and pasting in Acid. I’ll usually take the best four measures of my bass playing and loop it for the verse, do the same for the chorus, and the same for the middle eight. That serves two purposes: 1) it gives a more consistent and precise performance than playing all the way through the song. 2) it interfaces well with electronic drum patterns to give a more “industrial” feel, while still maintaining the “rock” sound and feel of actual playing. (Think “Nine Inch Nails.”)

I’ll often do the same thing with the singing on the choruses - I’ll sing several tracks, either doing harmonies, or on the more “punk” numbers I’ll overdub several tracks of yelling in unison (for that 80s hardcore “the whole band yelling backup in brotherly unity” feel), then mix down to a single stereo track, then cut and paste everywhere there’s a chorus in the song. I do the same trick with the more “industrial” sounding rhythm guitar parts, especially on the verses.

I’ve been recording the guitar with me playing on some of the later songs. Here’s a thread on what I use.

I think that’s about it, people. This is all you need to make kick-ass music without spending a fortune or bugging your neighbors with the noise. This is the basis for a totally functional, professional home studio, just add talent!

–Michael W. Dean

(click on photo to see it big.)

Trip total: 3219 miles, slept in six Wyoming cities, two Utah cities, in ten days. We got three tiny spider cracks in the windshield from pebbles thrown by trucks (two in Wyoming, one in Utah.) There was snow in one part of the state while we were there, tornado in another (we missed both). Even so, we loved every minute of being there, and feel like we left home when we came back to Los Angeles.)

Leaving Wyoming. Sad. But…”Objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.”

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We packed and pumped at the Pump & Pack in Douglas:

Open carry dinner at T-Joe’s Steak House in Cheyenne:

Entering Colorado:

Entering Utah:

Our car at this amazing stop. We were the only people there:

Rainbow in Utah:

Utah, car carry only:

California. Guns back in the cases. Meh. How come the places you need ‘em the most you can have ‘em the least?:

DJ started to cry, literally, when we hit Los Angeles. It took us 90 minutes to go the last thirty miles:

Back in the nest.

Charlie cat happy to see us:

We’re trying to move to Wyoming within a month.

Doing this back where I’m from would get you a year in prison (if you weren’t shot by the cops first):

But in Wyoming, it’s legal and nifty to protect your life. That’s part of why we’re moving here!

(Note: We’re crossing our arms in all these so you can see the guns. We didn’t cross our arms the whole trip, lol, just in the pix.)

——

DAY 2: So, we left the hotel in Provo. We were really psyched to enter Wyoming, and we were not disappointed. It’s a wonderful state, we love it, and we can’t wait to move!

Provo. Pretty town. Can’t open carry though. We did see some college students marching with M1 Garand rifles, practicing drills. You’d only see that California in a Military setting. This was at a community college. But unfortunately, we couldn’t get a picture of it.

Mister Hedgie liked Provo too:

Outside of Provo (Provo Canyon):

FINALLY! Wyoming line:

Immediately, there’s lots of fireworks places. Here’s one called Pyro City!:

We stop in Evanston to put on our guns. I look down in the parking lot. I see it. I’m outside. I’m not breaking the law. I feel like I’m walking on the moon for the first time, just like I thought I would:

Debra Jean’s happy too:

We went for breakfast at the Main Street Artisans Cafe & Gallery in Evanston. It’s a fine place with a nice, hippy-ish vibe, cool art on the walls, and Bob Dylan on the stereo. We open carried. Everyone noticed our guns, no one had a problem with them.

There’s a lot we saw in Wyoming that we didn’t get pictures of: 1 wild bison, lots and lots of antelope, and for some reason, there’s a lot of seagulls in Wyoming. I don’t get that, I’ll have to ask someone. But here’s some ground squirrels prairie dogs:

Click on this next photo and see it big, see how many ground squirrels you can see standing up behind me:

I talked to two young truckers on a long haul from Wisconsin. They asked me what kind of guns DJ and I had. Only time anyone asked about them all day. They were really polite, and curious. A retired man who grew up here talked to me about ground squirrels, and about how he shoots ‘em with his .22 to help his neighbors (cows and horses break their legs in the ground squirrel’s burrow holes).

We stopped in Rawlins, open carried, no problems. Took some photos, but they were too boring to share.

We open carried at the Burger King in Casper near the intersection of the 220 and the 87 (by Evansville). People who worked there were super polite to us. We forgot to take pix though.

Below is me leaving the Kum & Go in Buffalo. (Buffalo is a BEAUTIFUL town. We could retire there. It’s wonderful and quaint and sweet.) No problems open carrying there (or anywhere we went).

On the street in Buffalo:

We were really even more polite than we usually are, we considered ourselves emissaries for open carry, and wanted to reflect well in all that we did.

Here’s a stunning scene, with Alcova Reservoir:

All in all we had a great day, and the only time we saw an Obama bumper sticker was ON A CAR BEING TOWED BECAUSE IT HAD BROKEN DOWN.

We love Wyoming!

Tune in tomorrow for more on the Open Carry Vacation to Wyoming!

Getting ready for an open carry vacation in Wyoming:

Charlie says “This is an initiation of force!”:

Happy squit beasts in catente (Cat Détente):

Peanut: Cat without a face:

Inside of a USB drive. It went through the wash and died, so I took it apart to “see what makes it tick”:

Peanut put himself in “kitty jail”:

Debra Jean gently noshing on Fuzzy’s tail:

Fuzzy being a scardy cat:

MEW! Have a wonderful week! We sure are so far!

I got a quarterly check for sales from $30 Film School yesterday, 850 bucks. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember, first edition of that book came out in May of 2003.

I’ve made 30,000 bucks on that book. It’s trickled in, but has been a perennial favorite, for sure. There were many times when I lived alone that a check from that book meant not getting evicted, and made me able to pay my late rent, buy a week’s worth of burrito ingredients and get a carton of smokes. And a couple pounds of coffee to fuel more work.

I’m hoping the YouTube book will have a long life. It’s feeling like it will, based on early sales, and saturation in stores. Here’s a photo of the book at a Barnes & Nobel store in Virginia, sent in by a viewer.

I work my little butt off on whatever I’m doing, be it books, films, or non-commercial podcasts. Mailbox money from nine books and three films gives me some cushion to work on new projects. (Like my current book in progress, A User’s Manual for the Human Experience, I’m trying to get an agent for that, and one is looking at it now. Who knows if she’ll take it, or if anyone will. It’s pretty radical. That book may end up being a best seller on Oprah lol…or I may give it away free on BitTorrent, as well as self-publishing on demand. Don’t know yet, but it may be my best work yet.)

The “mailbox money” trickle lets me make things great without ever worrying whether or not they’ll make money. And that allows me to make everything great, without compromising my standards to the whims of commercial tastes.

Anyone who thinks that working at home self-employed as an artist is a life of leisure, well that person is insane. I work 80-100 hours a week and make about the same I did as an executive assistant in an office in 1999 (adjusted for inflation).

Some of my projects make money, some don’t. I just put it all out there and see what sticks to the universe. Even the ones that don’t make money help people, and the process of creating them helps me.

And some of the projects that make the least money (or no money) feed my soul the most.

OK, OK, I’d rather work than hack….

So, I pussed out and deleted Puppy Linux from the “System Tray of life.”

I had this great idea to get an old IBM ThinkPad laptop, remove the hard drives, install an internal USB drive running Puppy, and write my new book on it. Was also approved by Make Magazine to write an article on this process. Sadly, the article will not be written. Here’s why….

Here’s me inside the old ThinkPad:

ThinkPads are well made, and are easy to take apart. The manual tells you how. They’re made for scientists, not grandmas. Want proof? Here’s a 2004 NASA photo from Wikipedia of a cosmonaut with “Several ThinkPads in use aboard the International Space Station”:

The one he’s using is the exact one I bought for 200 bucks on eBay.

It was all going well until I spilled hot solder on the motherboard and ruined it. I threw the 200 laptop in the trash, and immediately drove to Circuit City and bought a brand new HP Pavilion with 4 gigs of RAM running (gasp) Windows Vista.

Vista had a LOT of problems at first rollout, but the big update pack (which is already in my version) fixed most of it, including providing drivers that weren’t there in the first rollout. That’s how Microsoft does things. They sell you a shiny new broken car, then fix it later for free (while you’re trying to drive it).

The very young, slightly rude salespeople at Circuit City, who were probably selling shoes last month, kept trying to upsell me, hard. They could not understand that someone would rather have a less expensive model with a nice keyboard click than a fancier model with an output for high-def TV monitor. I finally told the kid, “I’m going to buy a laptop within the next half hour. I know exactly what I’m looking for. I do not need your help, and I know far more about computers than you. I’ll come find you when I’m ready, so you can ring it up and get your commission. He said “We don’t get commission any more” and walked away. (I forgot, they fired all the knowlegable sales people nationwide to save money, and hired people off the street at minimum wage, and replaced commissions with quotas.)

I hated Vista before, and it still doesn’t run all my programs (I still have them running on my other laptop, which is running XP, and is set up to a monitor). I know I said I’d never use Vista. But if you turn off all the flashy bullshit that Vista has to try to make it look like a Mac, it runs screamingly fast. (Here’s a great tutorial on doing that.) Because the hardware needed to run Vista with all that stuff is powerful. So if you turn it all off, it’s great. I also like that Vista has true sleep mode, which is great for the way I write. I often write in bursts of 15-20 minutes, get up and do something else, then come back, write five minutes, get up, come back, write an hour, etc. Sleep mode enables me to have long battery life while doing that all over the house (or outside, when weather gets nicer.)

I also set it up to look like Win 98, which is easier, and uses less memory. (Right click on Start, go to Properties/Classic Start Menu.)

I love that everything is one click, not two, in Vista. I think they’re even imitating Linux with that, but I’ve always wondered, “Why two clicks? it’s a waste of my energy, it adds up, and it hurts my hands with my 2 million clicks a year.” (By the way, MouseCount runs well on Vista.)

Computer was only $750. Damn computers are getting better and faster and cheaper. I skipped getting the three-year extended warranty (for $350 bucks), partly because I replace my computers about every year, and partially because in this economy, Circuit City is likely to be out of business in three years.

I really do have the new laptop set up only to write my next book, which I plan being a bestseller. Did set it up for the Internet, but only to search web for research, and to FTP backups to a hidden folder on a website. Only other program I put on it is Microsoft Word 2003 (the best version of it. It reached perfection at that point, and never got better.

Also, one thing that would have made writing my book on Puppy Linux harder was the fact that the word processor, AbiWord, has a bug that makes the “find” function crash, and then you have to re-open the program. I use “find” constantly in my writing, due to the way I write. I sort of just start writing ideas, then go back and move them around and expand on them. I have to be able to find certain ideas, based on words in them, quickly in order to do that.

I did bring one thing over from Puppy Linux, and some Linux people may consider putting this on a Vista box as heresy, but I love the Puppy desktop art so much, I brought it over.

So - here’s my streamlined “write-one-best-seller-only” desktop, with only four icons:

I still think Puppy Linux is a great thing, but I need the right tools for the job.

Here’s an unrelated but nifty photo of our cats. It’s rare that Charlie (the middle one) puts up with the squittens being this close to her, so I had to document it for the ages:

Happy new year! (we slept through midnight, I’m up starting my new year now.)

I tried Puppy Linux on my laptop, it’s pretty amazing. Runs from a flash drive, can do a lot, including graphics, web, e-mail, word processing and photography.

I just bought this 200-dollar laptop on eBay. Bought it from a seller with nothing but positive feedback. It’s a Working IBM Thinkpad A31 Laptop,1.6Ghz, WiFi, 15″ LCD, CD-RW, 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and a USB port.

I’m going to install Puppy and use it to write my next book. My next book is called “Practical Emotional Self-Defense”, it’s about dealing with idiots, and it’s going to make me a millionaire. Mark my words. (I don’t believe in New Years resolutions, but how’s that for a plan. And we’re four hours into the new year, and I’ve already written 3000 words of the new book.)

Puppy Linux is a mindblowingly cool operating system, and easy as pie to use. I’ve always been afraid of Linux, thinking “Windowz works well enough, why bother?” But Puppy is no bother. It works BETTER than Windowz.

Puppy is free, and it will turn a slow older Windows machine into a fast little writing tool. The whole OS, with a bunch of programs, is only 90 megs! (as opposed to the 8000 megs of Windows with no programs). You can even run it entirely loaded into memory, from a CD ROM.

Yay! Happy new puppy hobby for the new year!
I have a friend who’s working her way through college, she’s smart and geeky, but under employed. I suggested to her that she buy lots of older working laptops with no OS (you can find them on eBay for like 50 bucks sometimes if you buy five or ten of them), install and configure Puppy, and sell them for a small profit to help with college expenses. She might do it. And that’s permitted in the Puppy license. The Puppy Linux website even has a link for people who sell pre-configured Pup boxes, though I didn’t see any who were doing it with laptops, just desktop computers.

Funny little fun commercial for the Free State Project, which DJ and I recently joined.

Visit and join Free State Project:
http://freestateproject.org

(Note: The creators of this commercial are participants in FSP, but are acting on their own by posting this. This video does not represent the Free State Project as a whole, or any other individuals in the project.)

CREDITS:
Story, male voice and editing: Michael W. Dean
http://www.michaeldeanvoice.com

Story edits, female voice and haberdashery: Debra Jean Dean
http://www.debrajeandean.com

LEGAL:
Most images were grabbed from the Internet. Used with a clear understanding of Fair Use.

File, story and audio covered by Creative Commons Share and Sharealike license 3.0. Anyone may reuse, remix, repost, for any purpose.

Contact us if you would like the high-quality audio as a WAV file to use for radio broadcast, or to remix.

I’m sick of making video. I’m only interested in making written word and spoken audio these days. Both are much easier to edit, file size wise, and much more expressive. And audio is quick. I can type up a few notes, yack into my Zoom H2, do a little editing, fluffing and folding on the laptop, upload it and have it heard by thousands within a day. I make a great sounding podcast in a couple hours. It takes a year to make a film of the same length, and the podcast can be just as enjoyable.

And I really feel audio on a Pod is where I want my audience. I like art you can consume while working in a factory or a cubicle. More subversive.

The stuff NRA is against didn’t make sense to me at first, but more and more it totally makes sense. Assault weapon bans? ALL guns are assault weapons. Many guns defined as assault weapons are same power as hunting rifles, but just LOOK scarier. “Assault weapon” is a term made up by politicians to make people who don’t know the difference think that semi-automatic guns are machine guns (fully automatic). They’re not. And machine guns have been illegal in the US for non-military since the 1930s.

Gun registration? Will make it easier to round up guns from honest citizens if the gov decides to do so. And almost all gun crimes are committed with UN-registered guns anyway.

Waiting periods? Women have died waiting for their gun when the restraining order doesn’t keep their stalker from trying to kill them.

“Gun-free zones”? Mass murders love ‘em. That’s why they shoot at schools and malls, because there’s no chance someone who is legally packing will fight back and end it quick. “Gun-free zones” don’t work on criminals any more than “drug-free zones” keep drugs out of neighborhood. Criminals will bring guns into a gun-free zone. Criminals do not obey laws, that is the definition of a criminal. (Note: the only place I’ve ever seen a “drug-free zone” sign is in the most drug-riddle junkie ghetto neighborhoods I’ve ever had the misfortune to live in.)

Crime goes down, not up, in states that increase issuing of concealed carry permits for law-abiding citizens.

The new thing that anti-gun politicians are pushing for is mandatory “ballistic fingerprinting”. Two firms, Smith & Wesson and Glock, are already doing it voluntarily. It was done on our new guns. Each one included one fired cartridge in a little evidence envelope, with a printed note that it had been scanned by technician number whatever. The idea being that cops can compare firing pin marks on cartridges found at a crime scene with those in the database. Only problem is, killers will hook up a baggie to catch their own shells, and get my shells or your shells, that they scooped up at a firing range, and dump them at the crime scene. Then if we don’t have an alibi, we’re gonna have to spend a lot of money on lawyers to stay out of prison. If we’re lucky.

Also, a few hits with a nail file changes the firing pin marks. Or you can replace the pin. Or barrel, if you wanna change the rifling marks. Firing pins and barrels are not considered “guns”, they are gun parts, and can be ordered through the mail, purchased at a gun store or a gun show without a waiting period or background check, and they are not used to fire a round for any database before sale.

Gun politics are something politicians use to get votes. End of story. And all politicians, even the ones who want to take guns away, are protected 24/7 by armed guards and secret service, so they’re hypocrites. They can be protected by guns but I can’t?????

I really believe in smart self-protection, not gun control. The cow is too far out of the barn for gun control. When guns are outlawed..well you know the rest.

Arm everyone without a criminal record and enact nationwide Castle Doctrine. Turn everyone into a cop, because the cops can’t be everywhere, and I wouldn’t want them to be. This works in Texas. Low violent crime rate because everyone’s packin’.

The NRA is in favor of background checks, and so am I. The NRA wants them on the spot, but the gov has squelched attempts make the databases work together to do this on the spot, because the gov likes waiting periods.

I think that the reason the NRA is against any gun control is that with politicians, if you “Give ‘em an inch, they take a mile.” Bans on “assault weapons” today can mean a ban on all guns next year.

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P.S. A funny thing that store owners do in Texas is put a “No guns allowed” sign in the door. I’ve seen ‘em there a lot. But it’s only a “nod-nod wink-wink” to gun-shy people. People with carry permits in Texas can carry a concealed weapon in a business unless it has a very specific legalese wording in the sign. “No guns allowed” or a sign with a gun and a red line through it do not satisfy this requirement. Those signs are the gun-packin’ owner telling his gun-packin’ patrons “It’s OK” while assuring patrons who are nervous around an honest law-abiding armed population.

p.p.s., a very few states do allow NON-concealed carry, but I wouldn’t want to do that. In a bank robbery or mall shooting, a criminal is probably gonna shoot the one guy he knows has a gun first!

MWD

SO….We’ve finally become comfy enough around guns to keep them loaded in the house. Because you know, an unloaded gun isn’t really a gun, and there may not be time to load it in an emergency.

I put a notice by the gun to remind me. Will keep that up for a while. Seems like a silly thing to need to do, but I’ve been practicing loading dummy shells so long that grabbing the gun from the corner and  flipping it around has become second nature, so I need to un-do that thinking.

Also, we went and fired our new pistols today. Took a one-hour lesson, then shot 125 rounds each, at 25 feet. We were pretty good for first time with new guns. (DJ and I have both fired pistols before, but it’s been many years.) I think we did pretty good, below is the last target we did…the 10 head shots are mine, the 30 center body shots are DJ’s (she’s a better shot than me):

I actually think that shooting with the shotgun made us better shots with pistols. I wasn’t sure it would transfer over, but I think it did.

We shoot without our glasses, as we want to practice under adverse conditions, rather than under optimum conditions.

After shooting that much, we both felt kind of mellow and excited at the same time. Kinda high almost. Went to McDonalds drive through on the way home, then both napped, hard, for an hour and a half.

When we woke up, we took the guns apart to clean and oil them:

I found an amazingly helpful video on YouTube, here, on the disassembly of this particular model. I love the video, it’s the only one this dude’s put up on YouTube, but it blows most “how-to” videos about anything out of the water. It’s very no-nonsense, and shows you exactly how to take it apart and put it back together.

It’s not that hard once you see it done, but I really doubt I could have figured it out on my own, and the owner’s manual that came with the guns is pretty useless. It’s not for our particular model, but rather a generic manual for all Smith & Wesson pistols.

We’re really enjoying the handguns, and plan to shoot at least 125 rounds a night each, two nights a week, until we’re really really good.

The handguns somehow feel more like “guns” to me. Maybe because I used to associate handguns with criminals but associated shotguns with my kindly old grandfather. Or maybe it’s because the bullet and the noise come out closer to your ears than with a shotgun (even though a shotgun is louder).

We love our new hobby, and love that there’s a lot to learn. I’d kinda gotten bored with filmmaking and audio production, because I know so much about both. It’s nice to have a new hobby. And our hands hurt from loading, shooting and taking the guns apart. We got little raw spots on the tip of our thumbs from loading all those bullets into the mags….It sort of reminds me of when I first started playing guitar, when I was 14, and the pads of my fingers would be sore after, but I got callous and the pain eventually went away.

I think it will work the same with this.

(Coming in 2010:$30 Gun School. lol…)

MEW!

MWD and DJD

Debra Jean and I bought two new 9mm handguns today. We went to buy one, but couldn’t decide on which to get, so got one for her and one for me.

She got the “girly gun”, the Smith & Wesson Model 908S semi-automatic pistol. It’s a small concealed carry model. (We’re gonna apply to get carry permits. Wish us luck. We live in California.)

DJ’s gun (expanded photo size not actual size. They’re small, but not that small, and are pretty hearty):

I got the 910S semi-auto pistol. It’s basically the same gun, but an inch longer, a little heaver, with a larger-capacity magazine. (10 shots max in California, hers holds 8.)

My gun:

We have to wait ten days to pick them up, but we bought ‘em. They were on sale. They list for 650 each. We spent 1200 Including the testing, the background checks, tax, and a book on self-defense laws and technique, and a book on first aid.

We had to pass a state-mandated written safety test. It’s got 30 questions, you are allowed to get 6 wrong. We studied on the car ride there. DJ missed none, I missed one. Here’s the PDF of the California government study guide we used.

We’re psyched! Can’t wait to play. (And practicing at the range will be much cheaper than with the shotgun.  9mm parabellum ammo is about 30 cents per shot, shotgun is a dollar a shot.)

We bought them now instead of later, because if Obama gets elected, he plans to make it LOT harder to buy a gun. He’s got a bad record on legal gun ownership and gun rights.

The Simple Pleasures of a Complex Girl
Copyright ©2005 Michael W. Dean

–Download free eBook

–Buy this beautiful paperback book from the publisher online.

Description:

Sex. Anarchy. Rock ‘N’ Roll. (and a Naughtie Nursie or two.)

The Simple Pleasures of a Complex Girl is literary fiction with a strong narrative, written in the second person from a female POV.

Plot outline: Conservative young woman joins Texan anarchist polyamorous collective that takes down an evil corporate scheme to ruin the world.

Cover photos by Chas Ray Krider. Model: Ginny Hogan

This is a photo of the path that used to be solid ivy. It’s from two years of me walking every other day or so to fill the birdfeeder on the back of our house. I’ve beat a lot of metaphoric paths in my life, but this is my first literal path.

I’ve lived with Debra Jean for two years today. We call it our second “nestiversary”, i.e. two years to the day from when I moved in with her (I moved in with her on 8/7/6, we got married shortly after that, and had been together almost a year when I moved in.)

It’s been a wonderful time. I love her, and I love living with her, and I love being out of the hood - being where it’s safer, and quiet enough for me to think.

I finally beat my own path in life, with someone I’m loving being with.

MEW! We’re so very happy.

(Photo by Becky Haycox.)

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Me and the wife seceded today. Not from the USA, but from the WORLD. We’ve declared our property a sovereign nation called NESTLANDIA.

Does anyone know what it takes to get a top-level domain? We really want .nest

I heard something last night about home protection that I like, on this podcast, Black Man With A Gun: “You don’t shoot people just to kill people, you only shoot people to stay alive.”

But being prepared to do so involves training, practice, safety, and accessibility to your weapon. And accessibility to your ammo. An unloaded gun will not keep you alive. (Unless you bluff, the criminal isn’t brazen, and bluffing with an unloaded gun can get you killed. Non-brazen criminals rarely break into houses in the middle of the night willing to kill you. Non-brazen criminals steal iPods out of unlocked cars.)

There’s a lot of debate among gun owners about whether to keep your weapon loaded or not. Keeping it loaded makes it a better bet for home protection in split-second emergencies, but also can increase the chance of accidental discharge. Even though we don’t have kids, we do have cats, and they like to mess with everything. So I won’t keep my gun loaded. But I want shotshells readily available, and I can load them in seconds, even in the dark. (I practiced with non-active plastic dummy shells.)

I had bought this shot saddle (from TacStar, which is where this photo is from) to mount on the side of my shotgun:

(I was inspired to get it because Lem on The Shield has one. I am a little embarrassed to say that  - one probably shouldn’t take gun cues from TV shows, but it looked like it made sense to me):

But after I bought it, I realized that to mount it you have to push out the pins that hold your gun together. And that can, according to the directions, cause your gun to jam if not done right. So I decided to mount it on the wall in my bedroom.

I used a stud finder to find a place to nail it:

Had to drill a couple extra holes in the metal saddle. (I wore my shooting eye protection for that.) Then I just nailed it into the wall, and added shells:

Yay! Shells totally ready to go, without having a loaded weapon in the house.

Now, I can hear you saying, “But what if the crazed addict / killer / rapist gets into you and your wife’s room before you have time to load up?”

Well my friend, our bedroom has the window boarded up with three layers of plywood (we use it as a recording studio). We have a several-room house, so I would have some notice if I heard anyone come in the other windows or the door before they got to my room. (I did last year when someone tried to get in, I stopped the guy from coming in, called the cops, and they caught him). And I am an insomniac guy with audiophile hearing who works at home, is usually awake all night quietly reading, has cameras pointed out all his windows, and leaves the house a total of about three hours a week, not in any set schedule.

“Do you feel lucky? Well do ya?”

So, I bought a new computer. Transferred all data over to the new one. The hard drive (among other things) was failing on the old one, wasn’t really worth salvaging. And the hard drive has lots of saved passwords and personal info, so I didn’t want to just chuck it.

First, I formatted the drive.

Then, I took out the RAM, to keep as spares:

I removed the battery, as it fits my new computer, and I can keep it as a spare:

I figured the best tool for the job of making the hard drive absolutely unrecoverable was the shotgun:

My wife came home during this phase of the operation. She’s smarter than I am, and reminded me that we have neighbors who might not like the sound of a shotgun blast. She suggested an alternate tool:

I hammered away at the hard drive for a minute or so:

(A good-sized hammer would also work. But a crowbar is a lot more fun.)

It reduced the drive platter to glass dust. (Modern platters are made of metal-treated glass, not metal.) A little bit of it fell out, but I could hear a sandy shake of glass chips and glass dust when I shook the case. (Note the sticker that reads “Warranty void if seal is broken.” I guess the warranty is now void):

I threw the drive full of powdered, deleted data into the trash on top of the coffee grinds:

I covered that with used kitty litter (not pictured) and took the laptop to the recycling place (not pictured).

I won’t guarantee that the drive is 100% unrecoverable, if one had NSA-level resources, but I’m not that important. And I still think it would be a hell of a challenge. If anyone knows a way to turn about a thousand tiny chips of glass back into data, let me know. This process is good enough for me.

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(Note….I wouldn’t REALLY have used a shotgun like that, especially without hearing and eye protection, and not where it could ricochet and hit me or the house. But if I lived in the country, I certianly would have set it up further away and tried it.)

Well, we finally got to shoot our shotgun (which the wife suggested we name “Li’l Debbie) at the range. It was a BLAST, no pun intended.

You can see the expended shell flying out of the gun in this photo of Dollie:

Below are a few of the targets. We were told it was pretty awesome for first time. We hung the targets up in our window, facing out to our patio. Crime deterrent….It lets people know what they’re in for if they jump our fence and keep going.

…your wife looks better than you with a shotgun in her hand.

We got the gun today. 10-day wait was up. Yay!

And we did a series of pix inspired by American Gothic (this pic) :

(Note to self: don’t ever commit any violent crimes or these photos will end up on the evening news.)

Download episode 0070 of Clone The Homeless

THY WILL BE DONE. hy Will Be Done

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean, being of sound mind and body, have a will-signing party. Their friends George Earth, Becky Haycox and Lydia Lam come over and sign as witnesses. Everyone has a great time, nibbling good food, giving each other backrubs, laughing, and chatting. They play with some electrical devices, then talk about personal stories about The Mentors, El Duce, MDC, Franco from MDC, Danny Plotnick, Moterbooty magazine, and Bomb touring with the Flaming Lips.

They talk about Jethro Tull (greatest band ever, sort of), people who don’t take care of their kids, why all humor is to stave off fear of death, fun with guns, home security and spy cameras, and they wonder if Kurt Cobain was murdered or offed himself.

Shawn replied (to the post below, about the new gun DJ and I bought today):

“I like that you went for the shotgun. It’s not the usual choice for home protection. That’s cool.”

I started to reply as a comment to that post, but decided my ranting reply was too long, so I started a new post:

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I agree…most people get hand guns, which is scary, as people tend to take them out of the house, because they’re so small.

Shotguns require the background check and the ten-day waiting period, like pistols. But unlike pistols, shotguns don’t require registration. Because they’re harder to conceal. (This is why sawed-off shotguns are illegal.) But I don’t plan to ever take it outside the house, except to go to the shooting range, and I’ll have it empty and with a trigger lock then.

Proof that few people choose shotguns (at least in California, I imagine it’s different in Texas) is that the store had about 500 handguns to choose from and about a dozen shotguns. And they had a rack of books on handgun safety and use and ONE on shotgun use (I bought it), and it was mostly for hunters, with nothing on home protection.

We got the shotgun for home protection and to take on dates to the firing range. The place we bought the gun includes a free one-year membership at their range. The salesman seemed into the fact that we were a couple buying a gun. Everyone else in the shop was a lone male, and not many of them seemed chatty or friendly.

You don’t really need to practice accuracy in the same sense you do with rifles and pistols, you don’t “aim”, at least at close range, you more or less just “point” shotguns, the spray is much wider. They also don’t shoot as far, which is why cops use them in urban settings, the bullet on a rifle can travel a mile and kill someone. With a shotgun, it’s lethal to far less of a distance, something like under 100 yards. Powerful handguns can fire much further also.

Then we’ll only take the gun out of the drawer if someone is coming INTO our house, fire a warning shot in the ceiling first, and only shoot them if they have a weapon and they don’t stop after the warning. I hope to never use it. Especially since California is not a “shoot the bugler” state. In some states, (mostly in the south), you can shoot to kill if someone breaks into your house, even if they’re unarmed. In Texas, a guy recently shot and killed two buglers coming OUT of his NEIGHBOR’S house and didn’t go to prison. In California, you can usually only shoot an intruder if they come into your house, AND they have a knife or gun AND they seem like they’re going to use it.

Good news: the police are pretty bored in this town and incredibly fast at getting here. When I called about the guy trying to break in, they were here in under two minutes. I was still on the phone with the dispatcher when they knocked on my door.

I think that shotguns are better than pistols for home protection. Not only is there less chance of a stray bullet hitting a neighbor, shotguns are way more intimidating than pistols. They’re bigger, look way more redneck/crazy, and they are LOUD AS FUCK if you fire a warning, WAY louder than a handgun. And for warning shots, a pistol would put a little hole in the ceiling. A shotgun would remove a of couple feet of the ceiling. Better for scaring crazed junkies into being sensible.

We also bought a security camera system, six cameras, hard drive, 1000 bucks. Covered all the windows and the door with ‘em.

Shotguns start at 150 bucks. Way cheaper than security cameras, which is kind of sad, and is why more people own guns, I think. (We’ve spent more than the minimum on the gun. I don’t wanna cheap out on something that could jam or blow up, ya know?)

We got it because someone tried to break into our home last year, while we were home. I confronted the guy outside, and called the cops. They actually caught him. It was strange though, we live in an upscale neighborhood with little crime. But someone was mugged and cut last weekend in our town, DJ says that hasn’t happened in nearly 20 years of living here, nor has anyone ever tried to break in the house before last year.

And I think that the economy is going to collapse soon maybe, with gas prices going up, people may freak out.

I’m sane enough to only take the gun out if me or the wife were in mortal danger, which is really the only use to take a shotgun out, unless you’re a hunter. And believe it or not, I find the idea of sport hunting fairly barbaric. (Strange talk from a soon-to-be gun owner, but it’s how I feel.)

But that’s just opinion, I don’t think hunting should be illegal, I just personally find it distasteful. I’m probably a hypocrite, because I do eat meat. But then again, I have shot and killed a couple rabbits, skinned, cooked and eaten ‘em. And I think who anyone who eats meat should do that at least once, just so they know what they’re doing. When you buy meat in a store, you don’t think about the fact that something screams and bleeds and dies before you eat it. I reflect on that every time I eat something that was once alive, because I’ve done it start to finish myself a couple times. But on a day-to-day basis, I’m just too damn much of an animal lover to enjoy shooting them. Call me a disingenuous pussy, but that’s how I feel.

Michael W. Dean

p/s. Here is a PDF about self-defense gun laws in California.

The YouTube book I’m writing with Alan, YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts, doesn’t come out for four months, and we’re still writing it. But it’s not only on Amazon, but it’s already at #76,142 in sales on Amazon!

It’s on Target too.

It’s common for publishers to put the book on Amazon before it’s done, but I’ve never had it rank this well in pre-order sales this far out from the street date. Yay!

article I wrote for the O’Reilly Digital Media site.

Digital Home Recording Tips, Part 2

here.

You can download my template HERE, or make your own.

Enjoy your more-organized life, and tell two friends.

(Kitty in photo is Fuzzbucket McFluffernutter. Photo by Michael W. Dean)

I turned in a sprawling 18-page manifesto on life for the YouTube book I’m working on with Alan. Our editor (Sandy Doell - best editor I’ve ever worked with, she edited $30 Film School too, and I brought her on for this project because I dig her work so much) wisely suggested I cut a lot of the more negative stuff out of that chapter, and also cut it for length. I agreed, but didn’t want to “waste words”, so I’m posting here what I cut.

I look at working with the right editor as a collaboration, not as someone “messing with your work”, which is how it feels with the wrong editor. And I look at this one chapter as the same as painters who slather on a lot of paint, then scrape it off with a knife to make a masterpiece. It’s taking several rounds back and forth, but the end will be great.

Sandy wrote this very excellent book, Mom’s Field Guide: What You Need to Know to Make It Through Your Loved One’s Military Deployment. I read it and I really dug it.

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STUFF I CUT FROM THE LAST CHAPTER OF MY NEXT BOOK:

The world was already overpopulated when I was born,. and the population has doubled in my lifetime. If you’re 20, it may double again by the end of your lifetime. There are too many people, and we’re running out of resources. And that just increases everyone’s willingness to stab his neighbor in the back in a frenzy of “I gots to get mine.” It’s not a good world to bring children into, and I would encourage you not to. (I got a vasectomy in late 1999. That’s how I brought in the new millennium.)

The world is overcrowded, and things may get a lot worse. Don’t have kids. If you already have kids, make them your priority. While you’re at it, care about your fellow humans, even the ones you haven’t met. But don’t drown yourself trying to save people who can’t be saved. Remember what they say on the airlines, “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before your child, because if you pass out, you’re of no use to your child. Take care of yourself. Not in a selfish way, but in a way that keeps you around sucking air and making a difference, then you’ll be there for your own children, biological as well as spiritual.

Mine is probably the last generation that will have a somewhat comfortable old age, and even that will require a lot of money. If you’re 20, the way things are going, by the time you’re 70, the world will be really really hot, really angry, really polluted, and there will be very little drinkable water and no gasoline. I wish you luck. Let me know how that works out for you.

I’ll be dead, so I can’t help you then. But I think I can help you now, by pointing this stuff out and asking you to think about it. And by asking you to direct at least some of your art into processing it, commenting on it, and preventing it. (In between, of course, making cute kitten videos and bitchin’ skateboard trick videos.)

Gas costs a lot of money because investment corporations are exploiting loopholes in the stock laws to speculate on futures in the market in a manner similar to what the Enron corporation was found guilty of. It should be illegal, but as of this writing, it isn’t. As of this writing, gas is $4.50 a gallon in my state. Who knows what it will cost by the time you read this. If it gets much more expensive, the economy is going to collapse. People won’t be able to afford to drive to their jobs. Truckers won’t be able to deliver goods. Food (and other necessities) as well as luxuries we consider necessities like cell phones, flat-screen TVs, spinning hubcaps, and fancy clothes will be unaffordable. We’ll be out of luck, largely because we believed the lies of corporations who pumped TV full of slick ads with sexy people driving SUVs and trucks for the last ten years, and a lot of stupid people who do what their TV tells them to.

And the “I’ll bust a cap in your ass” mentality exists between nations. Many countries, my own included, often behave in a way that shows this. They (we) do not look at the military the way the founding father’s defined it in the Constitution (a defensive, not offensive, force). Many governments, including my own, look at military might as an offensive tactic, re-branded as a preemptive strike, sold to us by the same tricks they use to sell trucks, jeans, jewelry, the latest music, and the latest Hollywood Blockbuster. Often marketed by the same people who sell all that.

It has been said that democracies generally exist for around 200 years, 300 tops, before they collapse. That they are theoretically a great form of government, but with a major flaw. Democracies allow lazy people who don’t want to work to vote in people who will let them not work. We are at the beginning of the end of this. At best, it will morph us into some sort of half-broken version of socialism. If we’re unlucky, a malevolent dictatorship.

Never stop learning. Learn as many skills as you can from everything you do, from your natural curiosity, so when the world is really really hot, really angry, really polluted, and there won’t be much drinkable water, you can have some money to buy some water. Or use your skills to figure out how to pull water out of the air. And trade your skills for some pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, own a little land you can put a fence around so you can drink that water without being killed for it by less-skilled people. Seriously.

(And this is coming from a guy who used to get in trouble for skipping school to go to the library so he could actually learn things. I’m now very much in demand in a bunch of cool worlds, and most of the kids I went to school with now have jobs like working on the line in the box factory. The coolest thing any of them is doing is one guy who used to beat me up is now writing for the local paper. But the last thing I read by him was a story about how evil rock music is and why Nirvana should be banned and all their records burned.)

When I was a little kid, there was no cable TV. TV only worked as an analog broadcast, over the air. (Analog broadcast is being completely phased out in 2009.) When I was growing up, there were only three TV channels: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Programming was kind of quaint, occasionally funny, all scripted, and moved kind of slow. Then MTV started, in 1981 (when I was 17). And it changed the media…all of it. The quick-cut style of editing immediately influenced advertising (because what are music videos, other than ads?), movies, cartoons, even print advertising, all that took on a “quick and dirty” sheen. I loved it. Older people were baffled. They were suffering from “future shock,” the feeling that the world was becoming too fast, and even that change was happening too fast.

You have to keep in mind that there were people alive at that time who had been alive before automobiles existed and who had also seen people walk on the moon. And there were a lot of people alive who had grown up in a prosperous, gentle world where ladies were ladies, men were men, folks kept their clothes on, didn’t cuss, went to church, paid their taxes, and worked hard to retire and get a gold watch and live on a pension comfortably in their old age. MTV was the culmination of a lot of things: the sexual revolution of the 60s and the rock explosion of the 70s. The 80s fostered the Me Generation because many people felt that the activism of the 60s had failed, but hedonism was nice, and suddenly the focus was on “getting mine” and “looking out for number one.” The focus was especially on money.

I dug the 70s. While I liked the fact that the hippies cared about the world, and so did I, I felt that the hippies didn’t get it 100% right. I felt they were on the right track, but most of the less political ones struck me as a little old fashioned, self-righteous, spoiled, and more about identifying problems than solving them. I liked my music, and my media, a little more fast-paced and “in your face.”

My parents were shocked by this type of new media. The previous generation was shocked by Elvis Presley’s wiggling hips on TV (which I found quaint), and when I got into punk rock in 1983, MTV also seemed old fashioned to me. Yet I quickly wondered what would come along that would shock me. I predicted “The only thing that would take it further would be musicians who murder or maim their audience.” Well, with gangster rap, that has sometimes come to pass, sometimes in deed, and often in spirit. (GG Allin, of the rock band, The Murder Junkies, certainly tried to physically harm his audience, and often succeeded.)

Don’t get me wrong. I like rap, but I hate the mentality of some of it. Much of it seems like “I gots to get mine, I gots to get paid, and I’ll bust a cap in your ass if you get in my way.” More on this in the following “What’s Wrong with The World” section.

Basically what’s wrong with the media is two-fold. One, it’s turned into crap. Two, it promotes a “screw everyone else, step over anyone to get ahead” mentality.

There’s always the question of does the media (TV, music, video, magazines, radio, newspapers, blogs, all the old and new methods of getting the word out) influence reality, or merely reflect it? The answer is both. I am not in favor of the regulation of media. But I would love to see media producers and programmers have a little more self-policing, in the form of creating useful content that educates, promotes love of your fellow human and contains far less “kill everyone, blow stuff up, get thin, get laid, get rich” B.S. (If anything they’ve got it backwards, if it HAS to be regulated, I’d rather see more sex and less violence. You can show people dying graphically brutal deaths, get a PG rating, and get on TV. But if you show a sweet couple romantically making love, you get an R or NC-17 rating, and can’t get on TV.)

I’m far more offended by a diamond commercial than a nice art film with a little nudity, because the art film is honest and diamond commercials lie. Diamond commercials basically say “If you don’t give us four months salary now, you’ll die sad and lonely.”

So, back to when I was a kid and there were only three channels…. They were a little boring, but they didn’t offend me much. Now I’m middle-aged and I have 120 channels of mostly crap to choose from, and most of it offends me. Not for the same reasons conservative people are offended by TV. Britney Spears’ tight clothes and rehab visits don’t offend me, they don’t even enter into my “need to know” (or care) level. Yet somehow I’m aware of them, even though I don’t want to be. I channel flip past that stuff, as it has no bearing on my life at all. The only time I’ve noticed her lately is when people said “she’s getting fat” and I thought “Wow, she looks a little better, not so much like that media-influenced unnatural starvation look that’s considered “normal” and “glamorous.”

I’m offended because the media is feeding us flavorless gelatin, sprinkled with car explosions, and, and we’re idly sitting by and saying “Nifty! Neat! This tastes pretty good!”

“We’ve got a bigger problem now”

(Title of this section borrowed from the Dead Kennedys song of the same name.)

The bigger problem of big media is not just that they own everything, and shove it in your face 24/7, and they “wiggle in front of you like a shrunken head.”

And watching COPS also demonstrates that most of what cops do with their workday amounts to babysitting idiots who have neither the life skills nor the moral compass to take care of themselves without infringing on the constitutional rights of others. And when this cat-food-on-the-hoof is being hauled off for whatever they did to violate someone else’s constitutional rights, they’re usually screaming “You’re violating my constitutional rights!” when this has not happened. They’re also often screaming “Don’t you know who I am?” (More on this soon….)

I find it all pretty amusing.

The potential for TV and movies is astonishing…. It’s sad that it’s so underutilized. Most TV has no meaning. Most TV glamorizes bling and gets a laugh by being genuinely cruel. This is interspersed by people barking at you trying to sell you crap that you don’t need. And most indie cinema has its heart in the right place, but just ends up being Hollywood without money. Most indie cinema, while it may deal with slightly more “edgy” themes, still cloaks them in boring three-act format where the hero learns a valuable (and predictable) life lesson. It’s just Hollywood with shaky camera work and mediocre audio.

Someone once told me, “People have two basic desires. To keep things the same, and to make things different.” It’s true. Basic human needs must be met before we can have civilization. You need a roof over your head, and you need to know that your house and possessions will be there when you get home from the hunt (the office). Otherwise, you’ll have no time, energy, or inclination to “progress” and invent (buy) more things to fill your cave (condo). This is what separates modern civilization from the hunter-gathers of old. We create shelter, utilities (heat, cooling, fresh water, energy, and sewage systems) to make our caves comfortable. We create police and military to make sure no one destroys our cave. All well and good.

But once things are “good” being “the same,” we want things different. This impulse can lead you to buy a new iPhone, or pillage a neighboring country. The world grows increasingly complex until people aren’t smart enough to govern themselves, so they elect people to do it for them. Unfortunately, all too often the people who seek such positions have motives other than ruling the land equitably. Politics attracts people who want power. The world is a balancing act of give and take, of agendas and demands, of every splinter group demanding rights for their special unique brand of humanity when it should just be based on human rights, rather than special rights for every one of the thousands of groups demanding their due. There are too damn many agendas in the world.

These same corporations who put people there will be happy to still make a buck off of you once you lose your home. I recently saw a cell phone commercial about a guy who is “couch surfing.” Not traveling America, not hitchhiking around Europe, but couch surfing with various friends in his own town. No home, but he’s got his cell phone. Gotta stay “plugged in”! It’s a commercial aimed at homeless people. Plan to see a lot more of these.

Sometimes the world is horrible, but life can also be amazingly beautiful. It’s mostly up to you.