good morning

This is probably gonna be it for election posts from me. Sorry about the giant layout-breaking letters last night - but having the first Presidential candidate I ever voted for without holding my nose a little win kinda demands 500px blink.

One thing that bubbled up into my mind is this: Who owns Obama? Candidates have some debt to the people and organizations whose money paid for the campaigns that got them in office, often far more than to the people whose votes put them there. Well. A little googling got me lists for Obama and McCain. McCain would have been in debt to bankers, first and foremost. And to the war machine. And, oddly enough, FedEx. Obama, on the other hand, is a mixed bag: an investment banker sits between two universities in the top donors, and then we have Microsoft and Google followed by a couple more investment firms. He also has a larger percentage of "uncoded" contributions, which I'm assuming are donations from assorted individuals.

Of course, Obama also avoided money from the standard Washington insider sources, so he'll be relatively free of that.

So maybe he'll manage to hold onto his idealism and feel like one of his primary electorial debts is to the American people. That would be a refreshing change from the past eight years of the idiot with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Also, he is primarily indebted to NERDS: coders and universities. I like that.

I still feel like there was a point in the campaign, shortly before Obama got the Democratic nomination, where his position changed. Where he was taken into a smoky back room and got the law laid down by the alien lizard illuminati, where he agreed to their terms and was given the Presidency.

So we'll see what happens. We'll see whose pockets he's really in over the next four years; we'll see what he does after cleaning up the massive pile of shit Dubaya left on his desk. Which he's doing his best to make higher in these last few lame-duck months, too.

Hell, if all he does is shovel that pile of shit for the next few years and fails to get us in new wars, I'll be pretty damn pleased.

c64 music abuse

Rob Hubbard's One Man And His Droid played on piano. Originally never meant to be played by human hands, the meticulous reproduction of the arpeggiation that the c64 arrangement relied upon to produce a sort of simulacrum of chords turns into something delicate and feathery, almost reminiscent of Bach's ornamentation.

(Also by the same person: Hubbard's Lightforce mashed up with Martin Galway's Parallax - the empty, apocalyptic power of Galway's slowly-evolving loops goes surprisingly well with Hubbard's throbbing bloops.)

I dunno if this stuff resonates if you didn't grow up with a c64. Most NES covers do nothing for me, because I never had one and barely played the games. This music is from when I was innocent and hopeful.