It’s probably a mistake, but I’ve re-enabled comments on this blog. So fire away if you dare or if, you know, you just feel like it.

I don’t remember the first Tori Amos song I ever heard, though it was probably “Silent All These Years” if I had to guess.

Most likely on 120 Minutes, sometime in 1992.

I’m not sure then exactly what prompted me to buy the album Little Earthquakes that same year, but I did. And that was such a damn good decision.

Discovering Tori was like an explosion in my brain. I remember thinking, This is someone like me; she is weird and utterly wild and unapologetic for any of it. I must’ve listened to Little Earthquakes a thousand times in the first six months I had it. Maybe more.

I listened to it so much on repeat that when I hear one song singly now I still expect to this day, over twenty years later, to hear the next song that followed it on the CD.

I had no idea – nor would I have cared if I had – that Tori was only “supposed” to appeal to women. Her songwriting was amazing: raw and unrestrained, yet somehow brutal and controlled at the same time. She wielded her piano like a weapon, like a polygraph, like a feather-coated cudgel of absolute truth. I didn’t want to be like her. I wanted to be her.

It is no exaggeration as I’ve pointed out before to say that artists like Tori Amos and others saved my life in high school. I really believe that, because it is true.

I also recall hovering near the TV, my VCR at the ready, in case a Tori Amos video I didn’t have played. Before YouTube, before the internet was a thing, that was the only way to do it. I eventually got all of her videos on tape, but it took countless months in front of a TV watching Color Me Badd and worse. Much worse.

But it was worth it.

One last Tori memory. In 1994, she played a concert in Orlando, Florida. The tickets for me were expensive — around $40 each if I remember correctly – and I also bought one for a friend who could not afford to go because getting more people to be able to see Tori seemed like the best charity I could imagine.

In person, with only 100 feet of air between us, she seemed both more human and more fey than she did at the remove of TV and radio. I was captivated by her music, her presence, her artistry. I watched her sweat on her baby grand and belt out truth and pain and tell stories about her life that were both quotidian and twisted into shapes most of us can’t see with our only 3-D vision.

Anyone who says that art doesn’t matter, that the humanities are worthless, that music is just a diversion or a hobby: man, fuck you. Just fuck you. Some of used it to get through. To us it was a rope thrown down into the dark pit of our lives that we used to climb up and out and then say: I beat you. I made it.

That was what Tori was to me. She threw down the rope. I climbed out. We did it together, even though she didn’t even know it.

I’ll always be grateful for her — for her music and her truth. For me and for so many others it was that crucial lifeline thrown into the murk.

(Inspired by this found on my friend’s blur blog.)

Big Telco uses shills to smear book about Net Neutrality and telcom’s corruption.

Of course they do. I’ve seen people posting on Ars Technica, HardOCP and other sites that I am 100% sure are in the employ of the telcos.

Nearly every large company – especially if they are a tech company – has a large army of online shills who frequent such sites. It’s the way business is done these days.

For instance if you read the comments of many tech sites over the past two years, you’d think that Windows 8 was the best OS ever EVER EVER. But of course it sold abysmally and will soon be abandoned by Microsoft.

The disconnect is due to that many of the most frequent and most vocal posters were of course paid by Microsoft to astroturf support for the OS.

That the telcos are doing such things reference net neutrality is just expected behavior, though it should be utterly illegal in a sane world.

We don’t live in that world, though.