Welcome to Land of the Crazy Face!

What is Land of the Crazy Face? Why, it's the personal website for me: the one-'n'-only Alex Wroten!

I'm a composer, filmmaker, software/internet developer, and... internet personality? This site is full of anything and everything I deem appropriate, from my music to pictures of misspelled signs at Wal Mart.

Have a look around, and have fun!

Most recent post: LV for Lameness Vendetta (August 14, 2008) I was pretty happy with my post from two weeks ago about lameness.  I felt that it was decently clever, and that's really all I ever wanted.  I didn't know it would have such a quick ripple on the internet (And I mean ripple. Not wave. I don't even know if anyone other than my friends read my site regularly). But before I get to this I want to cover a few bits of news that I find interesting: Last night my cell phone illuminated without being touched or plugged in, and it wasn't ringing.  For about 3 seconds I imagined that it had become self-aware, and I assumed that I would wake up to a technological protest and be unable to write this post.  What a silly idea! Twenty minutes ago I saw a very heart-touching commercial for OnStar that ended with a glaring typo.  What should have read "Automatic Vehicle Response" actually read "Automatic Vehicle Repsonse".  And this was a nationally-broadcasted commercial. I hope someone got fired. Announced today: Julia Child was a spy.  Who would've ever guessed that? More news at 11. An Example of My Personality A few days after I wrote the last post, I went out to lunch with some friends at a local restaurant.  I ordered chicken stir-fry.  When the food finally came out, I was dissatisfied with the 3 tablespoons of rice that accompanied my order. The waitress asked if we needed anything.  I politely requested more rice. This is where things turned sour. The waitress told me she would get me more rice when I needed it.  I didn't understand the need for sarcasm.  But more than that I didn't understand why I would be denied rice!  Without thinking, I immediately poured my meager helping of rice from its aluminum receptacle onto my stir-fry and said something along the lines of, "Okay, I need it now."  I can see why my friends thought this was bitchy and rude of me, but I had already been denied a simple request.  The waitress didn't seem offended.  All was well.  It was over. After we had nearly finished eating, the waitress asked me if I still needed rice. But I had already gotten the extra rice from one of my friends since she wouldn't help me. I had two choices here: 1.) be nice and politely say, "No, but thank you," or 2.) tell the truth and say, "No, I already got more from [my friend] because he didn't want it all." Clearly I chose #2.  I couldn't let her think she was right for not getting me what I politely requested.  She couldn't win.  She denied me rice. So why did I start with that story?  Partly because I think it's worth telling, but mostly because I want to establish that I can't let bitchiness or lameness go by unchallenged.  This brings us to the official second part of a story that should have only had one part. Here it is: Lame and Uninformed, pt. 1 - redux In LaU, pt. 1 I discussed a particular case of lameness over believing that I lied about my remixes of Pink Floyd discussed in my music section (I don't feel like peppering my post with links this time around.  You can find it if you believe in yourself).  I'm just going to pretend that no one has read about it.  Here we go. In seventh grade, I started to make music electronically on the computer.  At the time I was still obsessed with Pink Floyd, and had recently discovered MP3s and bootleg trading online.  I amassed a tremendous collection of Pink Floyd bootlegs, including so-called trance remixes of their studio albums.  These remixes used samples of Pink Floyd songs and redefined their contexts in a framework of repetitive electronica.  Search for them online if that floats your boat.  I hadn't yet decided that I find techno and electronica generally very boring, and I was greatly inspired by the contextual reimagining of Pink Floyd music. Also, there was a website at the time that was dedicated to these remixes.  They had all been created in the early 1990s (~1994 is the generally-accepted timeframe), and they were credited to The Orb most of the time (although surprisingly some think that Trent Reznor had something to do with them.  Seriously?  Could he do something that interesting?).  The website had an open invitation to all visitors to submit remixes for inclusion.  That seemed appealing to me.  Since Ummagumma was a little too experimental for me to wrap my mind around and I had already experimented overdubbing onto Cirrus Minor from Pink Floyd's soundtrack album More, I decided to take a crack at remixing the whole album.  It took me about a week, and I submitted the remixes gleefully.  They received surprising praise, and within a few weeks I decided to do another album.  For some reason I chose The Final Cut next.  In my opinion, these remixes were much better - although still awful. After more praise, I was feeling pretty confident, and I started working on remixing both Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets.  At this time, I met a local record store owner who had a hefty collection of Pink Floyd bootlegs, and I set up an exclusive trade with him.  I made CD covers (contemplating putting my email address on them - but I didn't want any legal recourse at the time; silly me) and traded my remixes (and one other self-made disc - read on for more) for some stuff with him.  The shitty thing is that before he had fulfilled his end of the deal he sold them on eBay for about $30 as "brand new, shrinkwrapped" discs.  He ended up making about $100 off of my free trade!  Over the years, I occasionally searched for them on eBay and every now and then found them.  I also freely gave out the MP3s on a Hotline Connect Server (now dead) for trading Pink Floyd bootlegs.  The whole experience of being ripped off, however, influenced me to never release my other in-progress remixes.  Actually, one other person has them.  So I suppose really that I am open to trading again. That's a newly-written version of the backstory.  I didn't even consult my other page about it because my server was down while I was writing it and I am too lazy to go find it on my other computer.  If that's not proof of it's truth then I don't know what is! (That was sarcasm.) In telling this story originally, I searched for the remixes on Google and found some pertinent results.  One of them was at the address http://www.ministry-of-information.co.uk/trade/floyd2.htm.  You will probably find that that link doesn't go anywhere useful. We'll get to that shortly.  Unsurprisingly, Neil Thomason (and I'm only assuming that is his name because I didn't dig around on his site - but the WHOIS info for it did wonders for my curiousity) believed them to originate from the same time as the other remixes.  So on his site it said that the remixes of More and The Final Cut were from 1994.  Can't blame him.  That's a good guess.  I think it's sort of cute.  That's why when I wrote my initial remix confession years ago, I said "Though according to this page [linked to the appropriate page], my first remixes were done in 1994, they were really done in 2000." I didn't think he was an idiot.  I just wanted to start with a baffling statement of inside information worthy of a Deborah Norville expose'.  That's where the story should have ended.  I also linked to this page: http://roio.alpha.pl/pink_floyd_69/more%20trance%20remixes.htm.  That one has the album cover that I made and the same tracklist (there's a Medley because I ran out of clever ways to remix the songs, and I needed to condense them to actually finish the project), so I have no reason to believe it's not mine.  I just enjoy linking to information about myself that I didn't make.  It makes me feel like a celebrity. But Neil Thomason apparently holds the remixes too dear to let a rice-requesting bastard like myself take unnecessary credit for them.  Sometime over the course of the last two years, he put a disclaimer next to the More and The Final Cut remixes on his site: A person linking to this page claims I am referring to 'his' remixes of 'More' and 'The Final Cut',which were made in 2000. That is untrue. Anyone could have attempted remixes, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that they're the ones mentioned here! My last post (remember, it only happened 2 weeks ago!) attempted to battle this statement a bit.  I have MP3 clips of these remixes on my discography page.  If the ones he has aren't the same as mine, that should prove it right?  I don't honestly know because I have a feeling he doesn't like to deal with factual information, regardless of what his website's address indicates.  You can read that post if you want to know more. So last night I asked someone what they thought about my post, and he said the links hadn't worked for him.  "That's strange," I said.  Sure enough, Neil Thomason's Ministry of Information had jumped ship right at the moment of defeat by my new information. (And what a defeat it was!)  No.  Actually, Sir Thomason decided to pull a Websites 101 trick on me and change the address of his page.  Are you ready for this?  The new address (as of this post) is: http://www.ministry-of-information.co.uk/trade/floyd02.htm. Do you see that zero? That's a number that can never be a divisor in a math problem.  The result is undefined, and it will crash a computer program if you're not careful. I'm being a bitch about this, yes.  But why he has to be so stubborn is beyond me.  To make matters even better, he has pushed his rebuttal further: A person linking to this page claims I am referring to 'his' remixes of 'More' and 'The Final Cut', which were made in 2000. That is untrue. Whilst I have no doubt that he produced remixes, it doesn't automatically follow that no-one else did too, and that 'his' are the the only remixes in circulation. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they're the same ones mentioned here – they could be anyone's. In summary, he changed the address of his page so that my link wouldn't work, and he continued to claim I am lying.  Just wanted to make sure you got all that.  Let's go one sentence at a time. A person linking to this page claims I am referring to 'his' remixes of 'More' and 'The Final Cut', which were made in 2000. I'm glad he got the gist of what I'm trying to say.  He seems pretty reasonable.  I like how he uses apostrophes as quotes... around the word "his".  It makes it look like slang for "fhist". That is untrue. This is where our convictions seem to differ. Whilst I have no doubt that he produced remixes, it doesn't automatically follow that no-one else did too, and that 'his' are the the only remixes in circulation. This statement is also pretty reasonable.  It doesn't automatically follow.  That's what my whole story + MP3 clips thing attempted to remedy.  The whole "automatically follow" thing.  And yes, it would be silly to doubt that I produced remixes since I do have downloadable ones. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they're the same ones mentioned here – they could be anyone's. This is really the sentence that warranted my bitchiness. The truth of the matter is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that they're NOT the same ones mentioned there.  I have given a pretty reasonable story to support my claim.  I even provided MP3 samples.  I think that the burden of proof is on him. But, y'know what? I think maybe the root of the matter is either that: 1.) he doesn't want me to have made his favorite remixes while in 7th grade, or 2.) he wants his collection to seem more rare.  I'll give him #2.  I give him permission to distribute the remixes all he wants.  He can even charge money for them as long as he tells me how much so I can institute a competitive pricing plan. Our battle would be good for the consumer!  Maybe it seems to him like I'm overstepping my boundaries of fame. Okay, let's have some fun.  Maybe he thinks I have a poker face when I lie.  Let's see.... The following are not true: I am a woman. I was born in Caracas with a clubbed foot, and I spent most of my childhood recovering from an in vitro crack addiction. I wrote half of the songs on Pink Floyd's Division Bell and David Gilmour stole them. I programmed the operating system for the iPhone. You know, I could also throw in "In seventh grade I had a Super Nintendo."  But that's not outlandish enough, is it? So if I didn't do any of those things, what the hell have I done? The following are not false: I almost died when I was an infant, and an experimental drug saved my life.  Subsequently, I was in medical journals. I remixed some Pink Floyd albums when I was in seventh grade that were traded over the internet and through eBay (through a bad trade) and never credited to me. Through the same bad trade as the remixes, I put together a CD of various Pink Floyd tracks and such that I compiled from TV and VHS and MP3 files.  I traded this CD under the title "Hurricane Floyd" in 2000 as well, and eventually a German bootleg label got their hands on this CD and manufactured it to some extent, claiming its origin as 1992. (http://www.hokafloyd.com/CDHOKA/Hurricane%20Floyd2/Hurricane%20Floyd.htm) I am friends with the avant-garde duo from the 80s, Renaldo and the Loaf. I have a website full of stories from my life that are true.  But for some reason, people don't believe them. But honestly, how impressive are these things? Not nearly as impressive as my lies.  Seriously though, it is just not worth it to claim these things.  I know that third one is a completely new can of worms.  But it's also true.  That one's harder to prove. Oh yeah.... proof. Alright, I'm feeling generous, I'm going to help out Mr. Neil Thomason.  In fact, if I haven't heard anything from him in two weeks (alex at turkeyworld dot org is my email address), I will email him to get the ball rolling. Read This, Neil Thomason! Here's my plan.  I have all of the original files of my remixes in the *.acd-zip format (for Sony's ACID <- free download!)  I want Mr. Neil Thomason to send me a 1 minute clip from each remix CD in question.  Any track will do.  If I did the remix, I will post the full ACID file on my website immediately for download to prove it.  In return for being wrong, Mr. Neil will have to write a 3-sentence apology for calling me a liar without proof.  If I didn't do the remix, I will write a scathing story about how stupid and misinformed I am as well as write a 6-sentence apology to The Ministry of Information's finest.  I will also correct all of the misinformation on my site. Seems like a pretty damn good deal, huh? But what happens if Mr. Neil doesn't agree to the challenge?  Well - let's see in a month where we are. Read more

- For more 'blog' posts like the one above, check out the Daily section.
- For longer ramblings about various things, check out the Articles section.
- For insight into my musical accomplishments, check out the Music section.
- For short videos and writings on their histories, check out the Videos section.
- For pictures of Crazy Faces, lost and found letters, and hysterical blunders, check out the Pictures section.
- To play with some Flash applets, sign my Graffiti Wall, and send internet postcards, head on over to the Interactive section.
- To download and check out software I have written, go to the Software section.
- Need my services for a website or multimedia project? Check out the Services section.
- Wanna leave? Follow my awesome Links outta here!