Dj Skunk Diesel

So I met this chic on the Internet right… She said on her profile that she was 6’0” and I am just a hair shy of 6’2” so I figured we should be at least eye to eye right? So I entered in knowing she was gonna be tall, but she talked like she was happy with her looks. Confident that I would be attracted to her so I figured I would take a shot and meet her for drinks, who knows maybe she would turn out awesome. You never know right? Well she was my age, which should have clued me in that she was gonna look old. I rarely ever date women my age unless they have no kids and are still really good looking. From the pics she had up there she was clearly not fat so I went ahead and setup a meet up.

So the night of the meet comes and she seems clearly nervous leading up. I figured well she tells me it’s been a while since she went on a real date so I paid no attention. Well we show up at the pool hall we were gonna shoot pool was our first idea. I was waiting out front and up she comes in a hoodie and jeans. . . A hoodie?? WTF? This is a date! Then I realize she isn’t walking on a curb like I originally thought, she was just on the other side of the cars. She gets all the way up to me and I am suddenly looking at her chin. This is interesting! Like I said I am 6’2”, I can count the number of times I have met girls taller than me on one hand. This girl was at least 6’3 & a half! Maybe more, like I said, she was all hoodie and slouching with hand in her pockets. I mean it WAS cold that night. I regretted not bringing a jacket, so I understand why she might have just threw on the hoodie from the car last minute cause I would have thought about it had I had a hoodie in the car. At any rate, here I am with Sasquatch, sitting at the bar slurping down vodka cranberry’s. I decided to pay it no mind and try to have a good time. Turns out she was actually not completely boring!

This is usually the case, people who were not born with good looks have to develop good personalities in order for people to want to hang out with them. Hot chics just be hot and get what they want. All they need is their looks to get them anything and everything they want. Who needs to know how to make conversation when you are hot? Why develop a sense of humor? It’s just not a good way to spend your time if you’re a hot chic. At any rate, I quickly ordered a series of stiff drinks to lubricate the situation. I find that alcohol can make almost any situation more enjoyable. Think about it, would you like to goto a Family Christmas party? Maybe not, but how about a Family Christmas party with an open bar and a keg? Exactly. Plus I figured shit, how many times do you get to interview a true giant?

It was just as I suspected, she had plenty of weird stories. Including how she is wealthy without doing anything by somehow getting knocked up by a guy with wealthy parents. She tells me they pay for everything. WTF is that? So you are used to not having to work for anything? But it was impossible to ignore the size difference. I mean at one point she checked to make sure her seat wasn’t somehow raised up higher than mine!! Uh no bitch, were you not aware how tall you are? I’m serious like looking for the release lever that would make her bar stool as low as mine. WE AREN’T IN OFFICE CHAIRS!! Oh well it really wasn’t that interesting so I sobered up and headed home. Better luck next time Skunk!

A new frontier, five or six years ago it was just starting to become partially acceptable to even use the Internet as a way to find people to meet in real life. Now it seems there is a new trend. I have been involved in a few and know many friends who have as well. I feel like we all have them now days on some level, especially my friends that I met through Twitter. Not sure why Twitter tends to draw the type of people who are interested in Cyber Love, but it is what it is and it happens ALL the time. We all desire friendship, we also probably all desire love and it’s pretty obvious that most want sex or at least some form of it. The problem is that people don’t communicate to the people they meet exactly what they are interested in having with others. I understand that you don’t always know right away when you meet somebody what you might want from them. But if you are in the situation where a real life physical meeting could never be possible and you don’t disclose that information early on then I have a real problem with you. A real problem.

Unfortunately I also think there are far too many people who don’t put enough thought into it. Don’t understand how to respect others, and simply press that all too convenient ‘delete’ button when things don’t go their way. Because the main difference between a real life relationship and an Internet only relationship is one thing, and it’s right there in the name. REAL, one is real and one on many levels isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the feelings people put into Internet only relationships are VERY real. But I am pretty sure people would not get hurt so badly if things were discussed early on.

Look we all know the reasons why somebody would purposefully or accidentally get into an Internet only relationship. Maybe you are a very romantic person but for some medical, physical, or emotional reason, sex is not an option. Maybe you are married and just want to play with real people when you masturbate instead of look at porn. Or maybe it’s what I find to be the most popular reason. You want to experience a romantic relationship with somebody, but through a virtual version of yourself. You know, it’s YOU minus all the problems. Minus the things that would make nobody want to touch you or get involved with you.

So now you are thinking to yourself, “great job Skunk you have outlined a problem we all hate, now what?” Well I am certainly not going to just complain about it and not propose some solutions. First of all you should find yourself the right site. For instance, here is what twitter is “supposed” to be for:

“Instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world.”

I didn’t hear love or sex or anything about a relationship in there. You could give it a shot if you want, but believe me there is a site built specifically for the type of relationship you are after. Have you heard of google? Might be a good place to type in what you are looking for and go from there. Next you should prepare yourself for how you will react when you meet somebody you might want more from and most importantly how you will react when you realize that they don’t want the same. Granted, a situation like that should not arise if you communicate well up front and talk about each others feelings often. Last but not least is respect. There is a real person over there and I know it sounds crazy but maybe you should treat them the way you would want to be treated. No really. The way YOU would want to be treated.

Be safe out there boys and girls, cyber sex is dangerous too.

Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 3

In my last tutorial I went over how to use an old computer as a Linux media center for home entertainment. Now I am gonna explain how to use an old computer to store and serve your multimedia files to any network enabled device on your home network including that media center you just got setup. I am sure there are many of you facing the same problems as we speak. You have recently become aware that you can not only download music but movies and TV episodes as well. Only to find out that you can only watch them on the computer you downloaded them on, or even worse you have to copy them to a USB device and plug that into whatever you want to view it on. That works, but what happens when that device fills up? How long does it take to copy the media from one device to the next? As you can see this could all get to be frustrating and time-consuming and might even drive you to do something stupid. Like going to those crappy low def DVDs you get from Red Box. Just think, instead of that you could take an old computer that you probably have lying around, (or hell come grab one of the many lying around my house) and use it to solve all those issues in one fail sweep. Now please before anybody leaves comments saying, ‘a Buffalo NAS will do all that out of the box’, or ‘Windows Home Server does all that seamlessly’. Please remember, I am trying to give people a way to solve their problems for little or no money. Besides, what fun would that be to just throw money at it and not use our cunning Linux skills to solve things on the cheap?

Alright first things first, I don’t want you wasting a bunch of time trying to set this up on a computer that is too old and slow to do the job we need it to do. That being said I would suggest at least a Multi-core processor with cores that are at least 2Ghz. The reason is you need at least two cores at 1.8Ghz or one core at 3.2Ghz to process HD video. We don’t want our playback choppy! Cram as much compatible RAM as you can find in there and let’s get crackin! The operating system we are going to use on this old computer is Freenas. It is one of the greatest operating systems ever created. I could go on for hours about how awesome it is but let’s just put it this way. If you have never used it you will fall in love with it for sure. Go on over to HERE and get the latest ‘stable’ build in .iso format, 32bit should be fine since the machine is old anyway. If you are a Linux user you probably know how to burn an iso to a disk. If you are a windows user HERE are some dumbed down videos  that might help.

Now that we have our freenas disk and our old computer we are ready to install. Now here is the one thing I would suggest you spend some money on. If you are planning on putting movies on this thing like me then the hard drive that is probably in that old thing will not cut it. Plus the way freenas works it’s much easier to install the OS to a different disk then the one where your shared data is. It’s actually best to put the OS on a cheap flash drive if you have one or if the drive that was in the old computer died, but you are still gonna need a big one for your data. Fortunately hard drives can be had on the cheep now days so I suggest you get at least a 1TB drive that is 7200 rpm or better. HERE is some info that might help with getting that thing installed. Now, plug-in a monitor and keyboard for now and put the freenas CD in the optical drive. You might have to get into the bios to set the computer to boot from CD before hard disk. HERE is some help on that. Now it is gonna boot up and give you some number options. I think number 9 should be ‘install/upgrade’ so choose that one. Now it’s gonna give you some options on what type of install you want. We need to choose ‘FULL’ install with ‘DATA’ and ‘SWAP’. The reason we don’t want embedded is because we need a lager than default data partition because we will be loading additional packages that would fill up the partition if we left it the default size. One of the key things we will be installing is the PS3 Media Server software. It does a great job of streaming movies to the PS3 or Xbox 360. So during the next couple steps it will ask you what size you want your data partition to be. The default is 380 and we need at least 500, but was are talking about megabytes here not gigabytes so I usually give it over 1000 just encase I decide to add more software later.

Alright once that finishes up it will want to reboot, make sure you remove the installation media. Now once you get it booted up one of the options there is to set the IP address of you LAN adapter. Just give it something that isn’t being used on your local network there. Or better yet you could leave set on automatic DHCP and make a reservation for it in the DHCP scope on your router. That way if you ever have to replace your router with one with a different internal subnet you can still find your NAS without too much effort by scanning your subnet for it. If that sounds confusing don’t waste time on it as long as you can access the IP address it has we are good. Alright once you have that done you shouldn’t need the monitor or keyboard any more. We can do the rest of what we need via the web interface or ssh. So head over to your normal computer or laptop and put the IP address of that thing in your browser. The default username is ‘admin’ and the default password is ‘freenas’. Now once you are in you will need to configure that big huge hard drive you bought and setup some shares. Some good tutorials on that can be found HERE and HERE. Once you get that done you just need to load the PS3 Media Server packages. A good how to on that can be found HERE. That’s really all you need. Freenas has the Transmission bittorrent client-server installed already. All you need to do is go into services and enable the bittorrent service and you can find torrents on the internet and let your NAS download them for you and automatically put them in the folder that your PS3 media server software makes available to the network. Now you can have all your media on one box and have it available to every device in your house. Enjoy!

Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 2

Before we get started I would like to clarify that the goal here it to inexpensively gain the ability to surf the net and playback audio and video content on your television. If you have money to blow on your home entertainment center then there are plenty of other solutions that would be easier to set up. All three of the current game consoles will do most of the things we are going to do here, but they also have their limitations. Having a computer with a 10 foot UI, a full-fledged browser, and access to a full desktop environment connected to your TV gives you many advantages over a game console or satellite/cable box. Another thing to consider and take some time figuring out is what your goals are by using a media center PC. For instance, if you are wanting to use this as a DVR then you would need a TV Tuner card. That would also limit your choices for distros. Also, where is the digital media that we will be watching going to be stored? Will the content only be streamed from the Internet? Differences in need could greatly affect which distro you choose and which software packages you would need to have installed.

One thing I have found to be true when trying to use Linux to solve problems and perform tasks is that half the battle is figuring out which of the different ways to solve the problem is the best for your situation. There is almost always more than one way to do something in Linux, so choosing which one best fits your needs is key to providing a reliable solution that you will be happy with in the long run. Doing a little research before hand to make sure that the software you install will in fact accomplish all of your goals could save you a lot of time and head aches. The last thing you want to do is spend hours installing and setting up your Linux Media Center box only to find out that it does not have all the features you want.

With that being said lets take a look at some of your choices for hardware combinations. If you are looking to use an older computer for this there are a couple of things to consider. Old computers can be found lying around all kinds of places these days. There are a lot of people who like to buy new ones even when there isn’t much wrong with the old one other than the fact that is was running windows. So find one that is at least a Pentium 4 or better and make sure it’s not a Celeron, add some RAM if you can, and you should be good to go. Here is the system requirements for Mythbuntu, a popular Ubuntu based media center distro. I would recommend more in almost every area, but that can be used as a good rule of thumb. Next we need to make sure that we can make the proper connection between the computer and the TV. Of course there is more than one way to do this, and we also need to think about sound quality. Most TV’s don’t have very good built-in speakers, and if you are going to use an existing surround sound speaker system then you will need to make sure you have the proper cables and adapters to get the sound from the Linux box to the amplifier if that’s what you are going to be using. Would it be naïve of me to assume that if you are geek enough to build your own Linux Media Center that you can handle getting the sound working on your own? I hope not because I don’t want this tutorial to be too long and drawn out.

Now let’s talk about some of your options for distros and software packages. There are a few distros that are specifically made to act as media centers. I have tried a few of them out and there really was not one that sticks out as the overall champ. Some are better at one thing but lack the ability to do other things. If you are wanting to use this as a DVR and record TV shows then Mythbuntu is the clear choice for you. It is pretty solid all around being based on Ubuntu. In my situation I don’t have a TV service since I don’t watch TV, so that settles that. I only wanted to stream movies from my Linux Media Server to my TV and be able to surf the net. For those reasons I went with Element. It does those two things great and also boots and shuts down pretty quick which is important for a media center. People are used to their entertainment center turning on quickly when they are ready to sit down in front of the TV. I have tried a few of the others, actually most of them are applications which can be run from nearly any distro. Element is one of the few distros that comes out of the box with the Ten Foot UI. Another one is GeexBox. It seemed pretty functional when I tried it and also comes ready for your living room out of the box. My choice of Element was simple personal preference. I am sure that once later releases of each come out I will try them and see where I want to go. I love to distro hop and try different flavors of Linux out on a regular basis.

Among the software packages that give a media center experience and can be run from any distro but aren’t a full-blown distro themselves, a few stand out. Boxee is a decent one. It looked like it would have everything you need and would be pretty easy to set up. Unfortunately I don’t think worked well with my video card and my patience was thin the day I tried it, so I gave up on it. The others I tried were Moovida, XBMC, and Enna. LinuxMCE also looked promising, but is still in development. Of those three the one I liked the best was Moovida. It seemed the most mature and functional but of course all three are still very young projects that need work to really be killer apps. At any rate, the choice is yours and I would recommend trying more than one setup. You never know which one will work best with your particular hardware configuration.

Finally you will need a way to control this from your couch or recliner. The best way I found to do this was with one of these. They do have infrared remotes and adapters to use them with your Linux box, but this seemed so much simpler to me. It’s USB, looks like a remote, and is very functional. I love mine, but the choice is up to you.

So there you have it! I didn’t want to get terribly technical and bore people with details, I simply wanted to give an overview of things to consider since I just recently tackled this project myself and finished with great success. I now have a setup that I am very happy with. If you found this tutorial helpful then stayed tuned! Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 3 will be How to set up your own Linux Media Server. I use mine to keep all my digital data in a central location and stream it to all the other devices in my house.

Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 1

As you all probably know, I am a systems technician for an IT outsourcing company, so I work in the computer field. Over the years I have become quite the Linux enthusiast and along the way I have learned how to do a lot of cool things for little or no cost. That concept is at the core of the open source community. The first thing I want to talk about it hosting your own web site. [note: if your website is going to generate a lot of traffic then this probably wont be good idea for you] Having a computer at your home of office that hosts your own personal or business website can save you a ton of $$$ over time. The average  cost per year for a decent web hosting package can run you anywhere from $100 per year to $1000 depending on your needs as far as content updates and number of mailbox’s. NOTE: If you have more than ten mailbox’s with a lot of email and email addresses that already receive a lot of spam then I would not recommend this setup. If you are just staring a new blog or business, or you have a pretty static and small site that doesn’t get a lot of traffic and you are tired of the reoccurring cost  then this might be just what you need.

First you will need to buy a domain name. I have a few, the main one being djskunkdiesel.com. You can buy a domain from godaddy.com pretty cheep now days. Be sure not to let them fool you into buying a hosting package because that is what we will be setting up in this tutorial. You DO want to make sure that your cart includes DNS hosting. We could set this up on the computer we are configuring, but I have learned over the years that it is better to have your DNS on “the cloud”. This way if your server is down for maintenance people will not get errors in their browser and you can even direct them to another site if you want. Also it is usually included for free when you buy a domain. If not then buy through godaddy. If you aren’t sure what DNS is then you should either abandon this tutorial now or go here and do some research. Some info on how to get in and make changes to your DNS can be found here. You will need to point traffic to your homemade Linux box by changing the ‘A record’ for your domain to point to it’s public IP address. You might also need to forward the proper ports in your router if you have one that is between you and the internet. Some good instructions on how to do that can be found here. If you don’t have a static IP from your ISP I would recommend calling them and finding out how much they would charge you to change your service package to one that includes a static IP. There are ways to setup DNS using a dynamic IP address, but I have found it much easier to just bite the bullet and get a static IP.  I could explain it all to you, but I didn’t want this tutorial to be too terribly long. Besides, if you don’t have the ability to figure some things out on your own then go back to using windows. Or better yet, get yourself a mac. [can you smell my sarcasm?]

Next find an old computer with enough computing power for the job. A Pentium 4 that is 3.0ghz or better might do the job, but I recommend at least a Pentium 4 HT 2.4ghz or better. That way you have two cores working in your favor. Now make sure you have enough RAM. Anywhere from 512mb to 2gb should work. We don’t need any kind of fancy video card for this install since this thing will most likely be headless and not even have a monitor plugged in when we are done. From here we are going to setup our web-server with ISPconfig control panel. It is the best of the free web-based control panel suites that I have tried. It allows you to host multiple domains and as many email accounts as you like and it can  manipulate MySQL and PHP which is what we need for WordPress, along with webmail, ftp, and many of the other features you would normally pay your web host for. A good how to on setting this up with Ubuntu server can be found here. That should keep you busy for a bit! Now, if you successfully complete that, the core software of your server will be done! Let’s continue.

For the remainder of this tutorial I will refer to “yourdomainname.com”, please substitute with the actual domain name that you purchased. Mine would be djskunkdiesel.com.

Now we are ready to get WordPress setup. The full version of WordPress has many advantages over the free version that you have access to with a free wordpress account. This was the main reason I decided to host my own. Now before we can install WordPress we have to get into the ISPconfig web interface on our server. Learning how to get into this was part of the install instructions I directed you to earlier, but to do so point your browser to http://yourdomainname.com:8080 and login with the admin account you setup during the install. If you are behind the same router as the box itself you might have to use it’s local internal IP address instead of it’s fully qualified domain name. If so it would be something like http://192.168.1.2:8080, but with the machines actual internal IP. From there goto “sites” and add in yourdomainname.com the only thing that is not a default option is under ‘php’ you want to choose ‘Fast-CGI’. Next over on the left click on ‘database’. We need to add a MySQL database for WordPress to use. You can call it what you like, I called mine ‘wordpress’. If you are going to host multiple domains you might want to name it according to the domain that will be using it. For the database user you can use whatever name you want. I used ‘admin’. Make sure you give the user full rights to everything. This will install a MySQL database called ‘c0wordpress’ with an admin user of ‘c0admin’. We will need those to put into our WordPress config file later. While you are in there you also need to create yourself an FTP account. On the left click on ‘FTP-User’, and from there add a user for yourdomainname.com and choose a username and password, we will need those later. There are a lot of cool features in ISPconfig if you wanna poke around in there, but this should be all you need, we will do the rest via ftp.

Next you will need to establish an FTP connection to your newly configured server. You can do this any number of ways. Hopefully if you are interested in WordPress you have transferred files via ftp before. My favorite way is with a firefox plugin called FireFtp. It is a full featured ftp client that runs inside a tap of firefox. If you use firefox you can find it here. Otherwise just use whatever FTP client you are familiar with. Now you need to click and download the latest version of wordpress from here. Unzip it some place and then connect to your server via FTP with the username and password you created from inside ISPconfig earlier. For some reason ISPconfig puts the word ‘default’ directly in front of the username you specify. So for mine the username was ‘defaultadmin’. Sort of like the way it puts the ‘c0′ in front of your MySQL database name. I guess this helps it differentiate between ftp accounts you create there and ones you might create via SSH with the normal ftp administration. Anyway, once you are connected transfer everything inside the wordpress folder you unzipped into the /web folder that you see in your FTP session. Now you need to edit the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ file that was in that wordpress folder and change the lines that talk about your database name and username and password to make them represent the actual database username and password that we created while we were in ISPconfig earlier. Then save the file as ‘wp-config.php’ instead of ‘wp-config-sample.php’ and transfer it to the server. Now you should be able to goto “http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/install.php” and get a nice window that will ask if you want to install wordpress. Click on install and it should give you a temporary password for your wordpress admin account. Highlight and copy that to the clipboard or write it down. Then goto “http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin” and log in with it and congrats! You have access to your wordpress. If you don’t know what to do from here you are screwed. I don’t have time to write a tutorial on web design using wordpress.

If you liked this tutorial stay tuned. The next two will be on how to use an old computer as a Linux media center and how to setup a Linux media server.

Later!!

People keep asking me about this and I finally had a reason to figure out how to do it, so here ya go!

• Log into your blip.
• Click on your listeners, find the person you want to block.
• Click on their avatar which will take you to their page.
• Now look for the little pull down arrow next to the small gear symbol under their listener number.
• Click that and choose ‘Block Listener”. There ya go. Done deal.

I think I may use this new section of my blog to post short how to’s for things I get asked about a lot.

P.S. Lick My Nuts.

You know I once wrote a blog entitled ‘Mouth Zipped‘. The main point of that one was that if you aren’t sure what to say, you should just say nothing at all. This blog has a very similar theme, except the main point being that you shouldn’t stick your nose in places it doesn’t belong. It is one thing if somebody chooses to confide in you with their problems. It that case it would be your obligation as a friend to keep that information private and not to tell it to others. Especially people who you were explicitly instructed not to tell. I know what you are thinking, “that sounds like a no brainer Skunk”. Well you would be right, it is a no brainer. But evidently some people don’t have much in the way of brains. With that being said I would like to cover my next point.

Jealousy and envy are not the same thing. Let’s analyse this a bit. First let’s take a look at the definitions of each. I am going to use askoxford.com because sometimes you have to go back to the old English or even further to Greek or Latin to find the true meanings of words. So first let’s take a look at Envy.

envy

• noun: discontented or resentful longing aroused by another’s possessions, qualities, or luck.

I will expound upon this a bit. Basically it is the feeling of sadness or ‘discontent’ as a result of wanting what others have. This could be possessions or qualities or even situations. The things is, envy is completely natural. Everyone feels it at some point. Envy can cause ill will, sharp words, and of course depression. But it almost never results in lashing out against the person you are envious of. This is where Jealousy comes into play. Let’s take a look at it’s definition.

jealous

• adjective: 1 envious of someone else’s achievements or advantages. 2 resentful of someone regarded as a sexual rival. 3 fiercely protective of one’s rights or possessions: they kept a jealous eye over their interests.

Notice the multiple definitions. At it’s core it is very similar to envy, but once you get deeper into the meaning you realise that it is more than just envy. It also involves people’s perception of who should possess what. See definition number three, that is the one that gets people into trouble. When they actually believe that something or somebody is ‘theirs’. Or better yet that it ‘should’ be theirs, that they truly ‘deserve’ it. When you start to believe that something somebody else has is supposed to be yours and they don’t deserve to have it, is when people start to lash out and try to harm or damage the person who possesses what they believe to be rightfully theirs.

When you find yourself thinking those kind of thoughts, and having those kind of feelings, do yourself a favor and squash that shit before you do something stupid. If you hear one of your friends talking like they have those feelings or intents, do them a favor and tell them to chill before they do something destructive. Because I would be willing to bet that the percentage of times that lashing out in jealousy ends in the jealous person getting what they want is EXTREMELY low. What people should probably do is spend more time working on improving themselves and trying to achieve their goals rather than worrying about what others have and do. THAT would be a much smarter investment in time.

You are probably wondering why I have chosen this as a blog topic. Without sharing too much I will say that I have found a girl that makes me very happy, and I would like to think that I make her happy as well. Love is a very rare thing to find in the grand scheme of things. So is true beauty, real honesty, and people who are truly genuine. These are most definitely things that would make someone envious. They are also evidently things that make people lash out in jealousy. I will leave it at that.

P.S. Lick My Nuts!

So it’s been a while since you guys have heard from me. Basically things have been slightly on hold for a couple reasons. I know how the Internet works though. It’s like a plant, If you don’t feed it (get on there and add content and talk to folks), then it whithers and dies. This is very clearly evident. Look at myspace. Or better yet go back and look through your own timeline. See how 6 months ago you were probably sending @’s to quite a few tweeple who might not even be around any more. Sure there are your core friends who would never unfollow you and who have other ways of saying hi besides twitter. But then there is this other group of friends that grows or shrinks proportionally based on your amount of interaction. Unless of course twitter has put you in the Suggested User List or you somehow got mentioned by some celebrity or have some other avenue of sending followers your way like being on the radio or TV. For the rest of us we must always remember to feed our plants.

The other thing is the radio show. I asked about whether I should keep doing it on twitter the other day and a lot more people said for me to keep doing it than I expected. So I guess I will keep plugging away at that. I really wish I had somebody who was a little computer savy who could help out a bit with that because I ‘feel’ like I am too busy to properly plan the shows out and come with good content. I love Chip, but he is really bad with computers, so he is no help. Anyway, I will leave that discussion for another time. Idea’s for show topics are always welcome. You can check the show info out here. Also don’t forget, you can ask me questions about anything over here on the ‘Ask Skunk’ portion of my blog.

P.S. Lick My Nuts.

What’s wrong with Hollywood? I could go on and on for hours about it, I am going to use Avatar as a prime example. Don’t get me wrong, it was good in some ways, and certainly visually stunning. But the political over tones were sickening. Also the fact that it was aimed at our youth almost guarantees that most of the people who watched it didn’t even comprehend the things that were backwards about the movie. Let me explain.

CAUTION: SPOILER INFORMATION IS INCLUDED IN THIS POST. IF YOU DON”T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT GO WATCH THE MOVIE FIRST.

Alright, let’s take a step back from the enchanting jungle and CGI animals and look at this from a real life point of view. A couple things jump out at me right away. Number one, making it seem like one day there will be a magical way to escape reality and live in a fantasy world is not a cool thing to sell kids. Number two, making the American soldier into the bad guy is just wrong. Marine’s and other members of our military deserve our utmost respect and should always be portrayed as the ‘good guys’ because that is what they are. Period.

If you don’t think that Hollywood studios have a liberal agenda to push, then you need to wake up and smell the roses. I can name countless movies in the past ten years that were saturated with political statements and liberal over tones, it makes me sick. Now let me prove the fact that it’s political. If the people who made this movie didn’t hate the US military they could have easily made the soldiers Chinese or Russian or even make it like the United Nations or something. But no, they were clearly American whites with a few black guys sprinkled in. I didn’t see any of the soldiers who were of any other ethnic background. Now me personally I hate to EVER bring up race, but when the negativity is aimed at me I have to say something. I am an American and I believe that any time you choose to hyphenate your name (African-American, Latino-American) you are making the mistake of separating yourself from your fellow Americans. I mean if the goal is not to see people by their race then why constantly point out what race you are? But I digress. This is about Hollywood.

Like I said, I cold go on all day, but I am gonna try and give a ‘big picture’ type summary of what all is wrong with this movie and let you draw your own conclusions about how this relates to the rest of Hollywood. Fist of all there is the whole ‘escaping reality’ part. Like if your real life is messed up like the guys legs were messed up, you will someday be able to lay in some fancy machine and escape to a fantasy world that is actually real, not a video game.  Then to top it off, at the end he gets to lay under some voodoo tree and actually transfer his being into this ‘Avatar’ and leave his ‘evil white American’ body behind. Also, the amount of tree hugging going on in this movie was sickening. Yes we should respect nature, no we should not sacrifice great forests for some precious metal, but really, what were they trying to say? Do you not enjoy your running water? Do you not need electricity? Is civilization wrong? I am getting the point and missing the point at the same time.

Let me see if I can sum it up. Nature good, civilization bad. Jungle people good, American Military bad. Science good, Capitalism bad. They even named the mineral they were after ‘unobtainium’. Haha, so that means we should have known from the get go that they weren’t going to get the mother load? By the time the final fight came around I looked around the theater and it was clear that they had successfully brain washed the audience and had them rooting against the US military. Now if we could all just get it through our thick sculls that the American White Military Corporate Complex is the root of all evil life would magically fix itself right? No! The truth of the matter is that it’s the Rock Ribbed White Americans that made this country the greatest country ever. If America is so evil and bad then why are people all over the world trying to get in and very few trying to get out? Anyway, I will let it go at that. Just know this Hollywood, that we aren’t all asleep and you can’t pull the wool over everyones eyes. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool ALL of the people ALL of the time. Oh and you can’t fool me ANY of the time!

P.S.  Lick My Nuts!