Serenity

"WUOshang mayer, maysheen, BYEN shr-too. (I close my ears and my heart and I will be a stone.) Please God make me a stone." - River Tam, Serenity.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Tarantula

I don't want to fight
Every single night
Everything I want is in your eyes
You and me go back
To places I don't know to care
The spoils of all I got were left for scraps

Don't let me say this
But you're no worse than me
It's crazy

We are the real
If real ever was
And just because
We are the real
They feel we have enough
We are the real
'Cause someone gave us up

I want to be there when you're happy
I want to love you when you're sad
Can't stand the morning rain?
Get out I'll take your place then
Can't stand the blazing sun?
Then close your eyes you'll see
The angel dust

I don't want to be
Anything believed
A million watts of sound can't compare
Come along you'll see the world
The pulse ripples, the crowd unfurls
The current starts to flow and then you're on
Oh it's white hot soul they want
To sing for

We are the real
If real ever was
And just because
We are the ruin
Of every living soul
We are surreal
Cause someone gave us up

Don't break the oath
I want to love you when you're happy
Don't break this oath
I want to be there when you're sad
Freeze-frame the pouring rain

We are the real
As real as any ghost
So easy now
We are the real
In every living soul
Oh don't they know?

Can't stand the blazing sun?
Can't stand the morning rain?
Oh get out I'll take your place again

I don't want to be alone
I don't want to be alone
I don't want to be alone at all
If it's a white hot soul they want
Then a black heart they'll get

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Send a heartbeat to
The void that cries through you
Relive the pictures that have come to pass
For now we stand alone
The world is lost and blown
And we are flesh and blood disintegrate
With no more to hate

Is it bright where you are
Have the people changed
Does it make you happy you're so strange
And in your darkest hour
I hold secrets flame
We can watch the world devoured in it's pain

Delivered from the blast
The last of a line of lasts
The pale princess of a palace cracked
And now the kingdom comes
Crashing down undone
And I am a master of a nothing place
Of recoil and grace

Is it bright where you are
Have the people changed
Does it make you happy you're so strange
And in your darkest hour
I hold secrets flame
We can watch the world devoured in it's pain

Time has stopped before us
The sky cannot ignore us
No one can separate us
For we are all that is left
The echo bounces off me
The shadow lost beside me
There's no more need to pretend
Cause now I can begin again

Is it bright where you are
Have the people changed
Does it make you happy you're so strange
And in your darkest hour
I hold secrets flame
We can watch the world devoured in it's pain
Strange
Strange
Strange

You're accepted into the Home beta test

 

WELCOME TO HOME BETA

Congratulations! Your patience has paid off—you've been accepted to the Home beta test!
You can download the Home beta from the PLAYSTATION®Store using your PLAYSTATION®Network User ID. Simply click on the "Featured Items" tab on the PLAYSTATION®Store and you'll find the download waiting for you.
In addition, you can now access the Home beta website. Here you can access the forums and communicate with other beta testers, or fill out a problem report form. In the problem report, you can outline any problems you experienced with the beta, and let us know of any great ideas you have for new features.
To get access to these great beta tools, simply sign in using your PlayStation.com account email address and password and create a Message Board Handle (if you don't already have one). If you do not yet have a PlayStation.com account, just follow the prompts to register and create your Message Board Handle.
We're glad you had the patience to stick it out and we're happy to have you at Home. Enjoy the beta test!
Sincerely,
The PlayStation® Underground™

P.S. If you have problems accessing Home beta, please click here and send us an email. Make sure to include your account information (the email address you used to register for this Home beta) and a brief description of your problem. When you reach the Consumer Services page, be sure to select "PlayStation Underground" as the topic of your email.

Pseudopod: The Tomb

Very gory I think, but the sentiment is very sweet in the end.

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The Tomb

Annie Abbondante

When you are dead on the smooth glinting autopsy table they will take out all your insides. The oily, yellow layer of fat that keeps your red muscles warm will grow tacky in the air and your blood will pool in the bottom of you, like puddles after the rain. They will ladel out the white, soupy vomit of your stomach contents with the same brand of ladel you have in your kitchen drawer. Seeing the bits of carrot and undigested corn from the meal you didn't know was your last. They will know you like to swallow your pasta whole, feeling it wiggle down your esophagus in one piece. You will still be beautiful. Like a sleeping child your facial muscles will relax angelicly, but you will still be you. Your lips will have the same 58 creases, dipping gently like rolling hills. Your ears are still mazes like conch shells, translucently white like coral sand beaches. Your skin will retain its same cottony consistency for a while. Smooth and cool under my fingertips as they percieve the curves and wells of you. But only my fingers will tingle with sensation as you remain breathless and still. Your hair will be messy and falling in your eyes, and so I will finger comb it, memorizing the texture and color before they split your cranium like a coconut to examine your brain. Before they peel away the skin of your face, I will commit all the slopes to memory, your geometry burned into me. I will be able to see you in constellations and building frames where ever there are undetermined shapes waiting for your form. Your nudity is as big as an opera, splayed and spread, skin and hair everywhere. You are art, NOT pornography. The heat you once generated, which pulled me in like a moth to your bare lightbulb, has now stilled like the blood on your veins. I wish to spread myself out on you, transferring life from my cells to yours via active cellular transport, absorbing as much mortality as I can until we both exist in a place between life and death. To see the insides of you, they will have to pull you apart. The doctor is really nothing more than a soft fingered explorer, who knows his way around the black lumps and brown chunks of the human anatomy. He knows which juices squish out from where and why; he doesn't know what a gift it is to hold your purple heart in his latex hands. He will make you an empty shell of yourself, with your breastplate screaming open loudmouthed. Everyone will be able to look inside you, like the crematoria at a concentration camp. I want to crawl inside where your heart used to be and warm up what's left of you. You will be my cave, your ribs arching over protection; your sternum the keystome of my tomb. I want them to sew me in there forever and let me go with you where ever you go, regardless of what rot or pungency or worm should occur. I want to be the stuffing in your turkey and the picture in your locket. In a thousand years, someone will find you and open you up carefully, lovingly, as the most precious artifact that ever existed, gloved fingertips touching every rotten hair on your putrid head with reverence. In all your gory glory, they will crack you open and find me inside, tiny and curled up where your heart once was, and they will shake me awake. Yawning, I will tell them of you.

Oh god I want one!!!

New Hard Drives Hold a Terabyte of Data

Lamont Wood
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Mon Apr 9, 8:30 AM ET

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes).

Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell, with “Area 51” game-oriented machines from its Alienware subsidiary. The 1T option initially costs $500.

In case you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music.

You might not have any songs that last for two years, but that’s irrelevant, indicated Henry Baltazar, storage analyst for The 451 Group, a technology analyst firm in San Francisco. “There will be a demand for it, since a lot of people have digital media, like movies, pictures and music,” Baltazar told LiveScience.

“Larger devices will become more commonplace, and we will see the same kind of transition from gigabyte to terabyte drives as we previously saw from megabyte to gigabyte drives—in fact, the move from 500 gigabytes to a terabyte has taken longer than expected.”

The leap from 500G to 1T required a breakthrough in “areal density” (how tight the bytes are packed on the surface of the disk), according to Doug Pickford, a marketing executive at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The trick, he explained, was to move to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), where each bit is a perpendicular rather than a linear magnetized spot on the disk—as if the bits were standing up rather than lying down.

Currently, areal density is growing at about 35 to 40 percent per year, and the techniques used to create the 1T drive are expandable to make a 5T drive, Pickford said. More work will be needed to surpass the 5T hurdle, but he foresaw no physical limitations until drives reach a capacity of at least 50T.

At that point, they’ll hold about a century of music.

Incidentally, for planning purposes, the next level is the petabyte (a quadrillion bytes); and then the exabyte (one quintillion bytes); and then the zettabyte (one sextillion bytes); and then the yottabyte (one septillion bytes.)

Everything I Need To Know In Life I Learned From Watching 'Star Wars'

Thirty lessons from the franchise that opened in theaters 30 years ago.

by Shawn Adler

It was on May 25, 1977, that "Star Wars" premiered and changed the world. Oh sure, you might have heard that it revolutionized special effects, ushered in the era of the modern blockbuster or any of a million things that are probably true but still downplay the film's massive impact. "Star Wars" changed the world by ultimately changing the way that we perceived it. It changed us.

In honor of the landmark film's 30th anniversary, then, we present the 30 most important things we learned from watching it.

30. Wretched hives of scum and villainy always have the best music.
It's no coincidence that the bar at Mos Eisley has the most kick-ass band this side of Naboo. Dives always have the best live music — directly proportional to how many felons they're serving at any given time.

29. Before making out with someone, make absolutely sure they aren't your sister.
This one goes without saying, but it's especially important for those who suspect they may have been adopted.

28. "Don't tell me the odds!"
According to C-3PO, the odds against successfully navigating an asteroid field are approximately 3,720 to 1. Buckle up and take some chances.

27. "These are not the droids we are looking for."
Searching is futile when you don't know what you're looking for.

26. Fear and anger always lead to the dark side.
Even if you're facing certain death at the hands of a playful sadist (who just happens to be threatening your sister), releasing your anger will only please him more. Relax — victory can only be achieved through calmness.

25. "Do or do not. There is no try."
Any task worth doing is worth doing right.

24. "At this moment, the Internet is completely empty."
Not strictly from "Star Wars," but said by the guy behind me in the movie theater as the opening title for "The Phantom Menace" crawled across the screen. It remains the truest statement I have ever heard.

23. All things are true ... from a particular point of view.
This is what Obi-Wan tells Luke when asked why he didn't reveal the truth about Darth Vader. But truth is a delicate and malleable thing: Is Luke Skywalker a freedom fighter or a terrorist? I guess it depends on what side of the Death Star you happen to be on when he blows it up.

22. If your girlfriend tells you she loves you, it's totally badass to reply, "I know."
She will love you more.

21. Always let the Wookiee win.
Why? Because Wookiees pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose. Knowing your opponent is integral to defeating him, and conceding a small battle doesn't mean you forfeit the war.

20. Everybody means something to somebody.
Remember that scene at the beginning of "Return of the Jedi" when the Rancor dies and a guard comes in bawling after him? Even the most twisted, deformed and evil beings can be loved for who they are. Everybody is somebody's child.

19. Don't ever apologize to your boss.
Especially if you did something really dumb, like jump out of hyperspace close enough to be detected from the ice planet Hoth. It will only get the goofball next to you promoted while you are Force-choked to death.

18. People who smoke need to "rethink" their life.
Obi-Wan's moralizing encounter with an alien shilling death sticks in "Attack of the Clones" is a bit schoolmarmish but nevertheless true. It shouldn't take a Jedi to tell those things are bad for you.

17. Crime doesn't pay.
Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett, Sebulba, Greedo — the bad guys in "Star Wars" always get what's coming to them, even if it takes a while. The reverse of this, however, is not true. While crime doesn't pay, not paying for your past crimes does pay. Just ask Han Solo.

16. Don't trust a liar to save your girlfriend from prophesied doom.
They're lying.

15. Never desert your friends.
The best we can hope for in our journeys across the galaxy are good, honest companions. They stick by you through thick and thin and won't judge you based on your crazy family. So next time you're debating leaving Jedi training to rescue your friends from Cloud City, remember who it was that shot down Darth Vader during the Death Star attack. You owe them.

14. Girls are really good shots.
If you must fight a tyrannical empire capable of sending endless waves of Storm Troopers, bring along a few girls. They never miss.

13. "Size matters not."
This is a cooler, more complicated way of saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover."

12. "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
People can become heroes in life, but only in death can they become legends.

11. Dictatorships run much more smoothly than democracies.
At the beginning of "Phantom Menace," the Republic is a shabbily run confederacy that can't even protect a sovereign planet from being gobbled up by warring trade unions. That's why Queen Padmé calls for a vote of no confidence. By "Revenge of the Sith," it takes Darth Vader roughly 10 minutes to end the threat. If you can stand a little repression, nothing beats an empire when it comes to efficiency.

10. Everything smells better from the outside.
Some mysteries are better left unsolved. Slicing through a Tauntaun is like breaking a trash compactor to see how it works: The only thing you're going to discover are some really bad smells.

9. No matter where you are or what you're doing, someone is going to have a bad feeling about it.
Go ahead, say it aloud: Admitting your fears is the first step toward overcoming them.

8. If you want the job done, it's sometimes necessary to call in bounty hunters.
Even the most powerful Sith lord can't be everywhere at once, which is why to get what you want you sometimes have to associate with less-than-reputable fellows. There's little shame in finding the most capable aides. And none at all in admitting you need help.

7. Sand people always walk in single file to hide their numbers.
If something's bothering you, chances are it goes deeper than what appears to be the immediate cause. Look closer. Troubles come not as single spies but as battalions.

6. Life is better the first time around.
Often imitated, never duplicated. The original is always the best.

5. Even if you're the galaxy's most powerful army, never underestimate guerrillas defending their home turf.
Not even laser canons and AT-ATs can defeat stone throwers like the Ewoks at home. Regardless of your ideological persuasion, feel free to make your own contemporary political joke here.

4. "It's a trap!"
Rest assured, the battle station you're attacking is fully operational. Don't assume your enemies are idiots, no matter how many Bothans died to bring you the information.

3. No matter how many people you kill or how many galaxies you destroy, one good deed can make up for everything.
Anakin Skywalker gets to go to Force heaven, or whatever the heck it's called when he's palling around with Obi-Wan and Yoda at the end of "Jedi." And this is after killing roughly 8 billion people (give or take the population of Alderan). Can we be forgiven for our crimes? Can we forgive ourselves? A lot depends on whether or not you believe the next statement.

2. The worst enemies you'll face are those you bring with you.
When Luke enters the forbidden tree cave on Dagobah, Yoda tells him that all he will face is what he fears inside. Evil doesn't come from some external trickster — it is a reflection of our own foul natures ...

1. Use the Force.
... but the tools to our salvation lie within us as well. Discovering how to channel these forces is what makes our journey. Let it go. The greatest lesson "Star Wars" teaches us is that the hero is within.

This report is from MTV News.