![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Farchgfx.net%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2FarchGFXv4%2Ficons%2Femail_link.png)
It's a funny name for a show, presumably playing on the testosterone orientation of the audience. Ironic, then, that the gender ratio of the audience was the closest to even of any metal show I've been to. Perhaps that owed to the outdoor show, with most of the bands being local and having female members who brought friends. Or perhaps it's the rising popularity of post-metal like Mouth of the Architect.
Rise Thy Ruin opened, and they were possibly the best opening band I've seen. Their post-metal tends toward the zappa-prog end of things, with a solid groove. The singer appropriately shook what his momma gave him, in between spazzed out yells. Add in the light show, and it had me grinning ear to ear.
The best thing about Red 7 is that not only can you smoke on the patio, there's another entire show going on out there. I showed up to see 5 bands, and actually saw about 9. The first band, Unravel Mars, were a female-fronted hard rock band, who haven't quite gone completely goth yet, which meant I could still enjoy them for a smoke break.
Mouth of the Architect were probably the best attended act of the night. They stick the closest to the build-explode-repeat formula of post-metal, although they do it beautifully. Behold... The Arctopus were kind of an odd fit. They're easily the wankiest prog-metal I've ever heard. It's great music, the kind I work well to, but live it's nothing short of hilarious.
IntrOnaut are definitely post-metal. All the elements are there: the spacey naval gazing, a la Cave In, the angular breakdowns, the muted vocals. But where MOTA and the rest play dark against light, IntrOnaut plays dark against darker. Their sound is almost impenetrable; monolithic and unyeilding, it just keeps going, building heavier and heavier all the way. They played almost exclusively from their forthcoming album, save for "Gleamer". By the end of their set, Brodeo seemed much more appropriate: the ratio had shifted towards heavily male, and there were no more polo shirts or sandals.
Comment Authority
Every few months, a new service comes out with their own WordPress plugin, to add their centralized service to the standard wordpress comments. Dutifully, I try them all out, and inevitably decide that there's no value add for me. A lot of this has to do with my relatively complex comment layout. Most of these services aim to get as many members as possible, so they try to make installation as painless as possible, often at the cost of losing customization.  Most of them hook the comment's content. Disqus, the newest fad, actually hooks & replaces
comments_template();forcing users to completely restyle their comment section.The issue that most of these services seems to be trying to mediate is "truthiness" or "authority". Assigning some sort of integer to the value that a commenter typically brings to a discussion. The first such plugin that I tried was Buddycards, which were relatively non-invasive as far as layouts go. The problem being that not enough people use the 30boxes service, or were willing to create another profile just to have an identity to map to their truthiness.
The next one I tried (that I remember) was SezWho. All of my comments were imported there, so that users can claim their comments here, to obtain better karma elsewhere. Disqus followed later this year, you can claim your comments at archgfx.disqus.com.  The problem with both of these is that the company's entire business revolves around comment authority, which is inherently tarnished by a profit motive. If we can't trust the company, how can we map real trustworthiness to their scale of authority?
Centralized anti-spam services play largely the same game, and indeed disqus appropriately cuts out Akismet, Defensio, or any local spam prevention measures. Ultimately, anti-spam services don't try (yet) try to merge disparate communities. That's the biggest problem I see with comment authority - The authority I would have on a music blog is different from the authority I might have on a tech blog. The comments I might leave on a feminist blog would be little more than conjecture or anecdote.
Ultimately, the reason that I, and most people choose to run our own blogging app, instead of using a hosted service like wordpress.com or blogspot, is that we don't want to be dependant on the standards and defaults of a larger, authoritarian group. By removing the ability to customize, and normalizing the authority of commenters, commenting services like disqus take away the things I like about having my own blog, even while they attempt to mitigate the unpleasant elements of spam and trolls. Anonymity and decentralization are linchpins in the present nature of the internet.
I haven't bothered installing Intense Debate or JS-Kit yet, because each new plugin from a non-reputable source is another security risk, as I allow it to rummage through my database for comment information, and email addresses of people who wordpress assured wouldn't be shared.