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May 5th, 2008
12:39 pm - Three Things
- Voted early! Woo! Yay, civic duty.
- Happy Cinco de Mayo, folks! Drink at least vaguely responsibly.
- Also, new (free!) Nine Inch Nails release. Go get it!
That's all for now.
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February 5th, 2008
09:42 pm - [Indiana] TMBG at the Bluebird
For those who are interested, They Might Be Giants are playing the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana, at 9pm on Thursday, February 28th.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) swan_tower and I have tickets. Hopefully, we'll see you there.
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October 26th, 2007
02:09 pm - Upcoming Releases
First off, Saul Williams is releasing his next album electronically in non-encumbered mp3 and FLAC formats. You can sign up for the 192 kbps mp3 downloads for nothing. Alternatively, you can get 320 kbps or FLAC files after chipping in $5 for a really phenomenal artist. The album, by the by, is produced by Trent Reznor, and this stuff all goes live on November 1.
Secondly, Guitar Hero III comes out Sunday. Expect me to spend at least some of Sunday rocking out. Setlist can be found here, and it's really, really solid.
Capsule review of Radiohead's In Rainbows: Really solid album. Not their best, but on a level with Hail to the Thief. Then again, since their best was OK Computer, "not their best" is unsurprising and still really, really, really good.
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April 2nd, 2007
12:22 pm - Digital Rights Management Coup?
So I'm having a hard time figuring out what it means that EMI just OK'd non-DRM tracks. (Thanks, by the by, to bryant for the link.) Overall, I'm not a big fan of digital rights management. It's a losing battle from a technical perspective, and from a commercial perspective, it's fairly clearly an artifact of an old(er) model for selling music. If we can draw lessons from history, I'd argue that we're highly likely to ultimately move toward a simpler model in the long run.
So is this, in fact, a death knell for DRM in the music industry, or is it just an ill-advised foray into treacherous waters that will eventually spell doom for EMI? Steve Jobs certainly made his position clear, presuming that it wasn't, of course, smoke and mirrors, and presuming that the clarity of his position wasn't just a reality distortion field.
Any thoughts on this one, folks? The tech-savvy consumer is probably glad that he can download unencumbered tracks from the iTunes Music Store now, but is this a watershed moment or merely an aberration?
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March 7th, 2007
12:14 pm - Impulse Purchase Desires
Not that I have purchased it (yet), but I really, really want to buy a theramin.
Is that wrong?
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February 7th, 2007
08:34 pm - Jobs on Music and DRM
Via brad, a link to Steve Jobs's thoughts on music. More specifically, it's his thoughts on DRM, how the record companies are confused about technologies, and how Apple doesn't have as vested an interest in DRM as one might immediately think. Worth a read, even if it does have a bit of Steve's reality distortion field surrounding it.
For those who are confused, Steve Jobs is the legendary CEO of Apple, which has expanded significantly into music with the iTunes Music Store and the iPod.
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January 17th, 2007
02:22 pm - Geek Techno Alert!
A coworker of mine just pointed me to the following two videos on Youtube. If you are a computer geek at all, you need to see these videos. If you're a techno fan, you need to see these videos. They are ... kind of phenomenal Euro-techno-geekcore:The group (or should I say, guy) is called Basshunter, and by God, I am in awe. His first album is entitled -- I shit you not -- "LOL <(^^,)>".
I am in awe.
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December 21st, 2006
12:05 pm - Volcano High
A few years ago, when I was still working for Akamai, I would often watch cable late into the night on the weekends. I worked midnight to 8am during the week, and there was only so much you could do to reset your sleep schedule for the two days you had off. Likewise, there wasn't much to do at 3am on a Saturday when your friends were mostly working stiffs. Hence, the cable.
In any event, I was watching MTV at one point after Adam West's Batman was done on TVLand, and a kung-fu movie called Volcano High came on. I rapidly recognized that the voices were, in fact, those of certain well-known US hip-hop stars. Apparently, someone at MTV thought this would be a cool thing to do, and got Snoop Dog, Andre 3000, Mya, Kelis, Method Man, Lil' Jon, and a few others roped in.
Browsing through the video store with moonandserpent and oddsboy last night, I was reminded of it and rented it. I am glad that I did.
Great action sequences. Surprisingly good voice acting. Good supplementary music tracks (volunteered by the various artists involved). Completely over the top. Highly recommended.
Just thought I'd mention.
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December 8th, 2006
03:48 pm - That 17 Songs Meme
1) Random up your music and get 17 tracks with lyrics.
2) Post the first line of each song.
3) Allow people to procrastinate by trying to identify the song and artist from those first lines. They'll post comments and then you cross out songs when people get them right. The ones who are wrong will be pleasantly mocked.
4) Smite all cheaters who go to search engines for their answers.
( Cut for the meme-averse... )
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November 8th, 2006
03:37 pm - Gods Be Good!
Not only are the political prospects of the country looking mildly positive, including Hastert stepping down from the GOP leadership since my last post, but it would appear that the major power outage that we haven't really been preparing for appropriately at work has been pushed back from next week to the week after Thanksgiving.
This is clearly a day for great celebration. Well... celebration for people other than Faith Hill at the CMAs.
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November 3rd, 2006
01:18 am - Guitar Hero
Damn, but this is an addictive game. I've just an hour or so ago won it on Medium, and I'm now five songs into Hard. "Bark at the Moon" can bite me, however, even on Medium.
If anyone out there hasn't played the game, run from it. Seriously. It'll eat your life. It's that good.
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November 2nd, 2006
06:10 pm - Linkity Link Link
Being a brief collection of interesting links:- True Porn Clerk Stories: an oldie but a goodie. alidavis, an improv comedienne / actor moved to LA in the last few years, but around 2000 / 2001, she was a video clerk in Chicago, and she chronicles her adventures in addictive and provocative detail. Set aside a couple hours for this.
- Emergency Kindness: an informal network of (mostly) women who try to provide emergency contraception to those women in need.
- kitsune_zen went and put together a rundown of Indiana elections, which would have made my post superfluous. Hers, like mine, is Bloomington-centric.
- Brilliant parody by "Weird Al" Yankovic, which is actually off of his previous album, Poodle Hat. If you're at all familiar with Bob Dylan, go listen and watch.
- A list of tumblelogs. What is a tumblelog? This.
- The Perry Bible Fellowship: a raunchy but quite clever webcomic.
- Exclamation Mark: a blog which appears to be dedicated to nifty artwork found on the web. I can get behind that.
- A mathematician's beer glass if I've ever seen one.
OK. That's enough for now.
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November 1st, 2006
04:57 pm - Thoughts on iPods and Podcasts
So, for those who aren't aware, I drive an hour each way to and from work each workday. This means that I spend about two hours in the car, Monday through Friday. Ten hours per week. That's a fair amount of time, particularly in an area with no kickass radio stations. As a consequence, I have grown to consider my iPod to be indispensable. I've had people ask me what the hell I listen to on those trips, and ... well ... I might as well tell everyone in one fell swoop.
First off, I'm a big fan of Audible.com, where I have a Premium account. This means that I can get the New York Times (hour-long) daily digest for free, and for some time, I did precisely that. Unfortunately, the narrator they have for the digest has a somewhat soporific voice, and I generally started to drift off around the business pages. Plus, given the Podcasts I've been listening to, this has become somewhat redundant. More important is their audiobooks. I've long since gone through most of the audiobooks I found interesting in my local library, so Audible's selection is awfully nice. At present, I'm working through George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. The first three books are all narrated by Roy Dotrice (who played Wesley Windham-Price's disapproving father in Angel and Mozart's disapproving father in Amadeus), whom I can recommend wholeheartedly. (The same goes for Lenny Henry's narration of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.) Believe me: with audiobooks, the narrator is about 70% of the selling point.
This accounts for about 30-40% of my listening time. The rest is generally eaten by Podcasts, of which I can recommend several (most pulled down through the iTunes music store, rather than through an explicit RSS feed):- CNN and NPR offer five minute news summaries, which are updated hourly and which I listen to nearly without fail.
- Ebert and Roeper's movie reviews are also available as Podcasts (generally released on Thursdays), though I'm a much larger fan of Roger Ebert than of Richard Roeper; consequently, Ebert's recent absence due to cancer-related surgery almost prompted me to remove this one from my list o' podcasts.
- Jim Lehrer's NewsHour also offers most of their stories, interviews, and panels as podcast downloads, which accounts for the majority of my news consumption.
- NPR's All Songs Considered has a weekly podcast (released Thursdays) which accounts for much of my exposure to new and offbeat artists. If I were to point to a single one of these as a recommendation, this would be the one, as the sheer breadth of music they present means that you will find at least one track on a given show to be interesting.
- NPR also offers their "Story of the Day" and their "International Story of the Day," which they cull from their various news programs (All Things Considered, Day to Day, Talk of the Nation, etc.).
- Have Games, Will Travel is a more-or-less-weekly podcast by Paul Tevis (ptevis), focusing on board games, card games, and role-playing games. There's a surprising subculture of gaming podcasts out there, and Tevis is perhaps my favorite.
- The Viking Youth Power Hour is a group of four Chicago guys in their late-20s to early-30s range who put out a surprisingly interesting show which explores largely left-leaning modern popular culture, magic(k), and the quality of the alcohol they're imbibing during the show. moonandserpent introduced me to this show a while back, and I am slowly working my way through their archives.
- Woot.com, which amounts to a Home Shopping Network for the techie set, also puts out a daily podcast which is short, amusing, and occasionally informative, which is more or less all I ask of a podcast.
- Likewise, The Onion produces a daily faux-news short that I listen to, generally before I even leave the house.
- Edit: I nearly forgot that NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also podcast. For a humorous run-down of the week's news, you could do much worse.
There are also a few shows I've been made aware of relatively recently that I'm meaning to look into, but that I might mention:- Occulterati, which I found on jeregenest's del.icio.us feed.
- Though this wouldn't work well in a car, Battlestar Galactica producer Ron Moore apparently puts out an episode-by-episode podcast, which is meant to act as a secondary audio track to each episode. My friend Chase, who pointed this out to me, claims that half the fun is listening to Moore pour himself scotch and get pleasantly drunk during each podcast, describing behind-the-scenes stuff that you wouldn't necessarily get for a television show. Definitely something to play around with once we've caught up with our DVD watching.
This is probably more than any of you ever really wanted to know, but I figured that some of you might find this useful. There you go.
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March 30th, 2006
02:46 pm - Been A While
I've been remiss in being entertaining and interesting here. A few mentions:- swan_tower's novel is starting to appear in stores across the country. Go find one, tell her, and cause her to hide under the bed again.
- In the SpecFic world, the last week or so has been a sad one:
- ICFA was interesting and fun. Apparently, despite my goofy smile, James Patrick Kelly believes that swan_tower and I are the power couple of 2012. Best start gathering power, then, I suppose. The eight-Bloomingtonite-strong contingent was a lot of fun and a change from the previous years.
- While I was in Florida (basking in sun that was similar to Indianapolis today), a crew of us also went to see V for Vendetta, which I highly recommend if you want to see one of the best comic book adaptations ever.
- I've been obsessing about espionage lately, and I've been availing myself of my local library, which has lots of books from the '90s and before on the topic, but precious little covering post-9/11. Any recommendations from folks in the audience?
- [Indiana natives:] They Might Be Giants are playing the Vogue Theatre on May 8. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. Anyone interested in going to this?
That's about it for now.
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February 6th, 2006
09:00 am - Mario Media Monday!
Two things to entertain people (one of which I may have posted before):- An awesome Flash page which you can use to duplicate the audio from almost any Super Mario game from the original Nintendo
- A video of a guy (the "Video Game Pianist") playing most of those old songs on the piano
Enjoy!
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December 5th, 2005
04:40 pm - Meme! Why not?
( The Seven Song Meme )
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October 26th, 2005
04:04 pm - Sick Post
So I woke up this morning feeling much like a punching bag. I staggered around for about fifteen minutes, emailed in sick, and went back to bed, waking up at noon, feeling better, but not well. I did, however, receive a care package from Amazon, which I'd placed an order for when robin_d_laws mentioned that Old Boy was cheap there. Along with it came:As a consequence, I've been entertaining myself reasonably well with said media, and trying to get some work done, despite my condition.
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August 10th, 2005
05:07 pm - Leo Kottke / Mike Gordon
So, I make no bones about it. I believe that Leo Kottke is perhaps the best guitarist on the planet. At the very least, he's really kinda kickass.
Apparently, this fall, he and Mike Gordon (formerly of Phish) are touring, and they will be playing The Music Mill in Indianapolis on Friday, October 21st. Tickets are already on sale ($25 per, general admission), but I'm delaying a little bit, just in case there might be someone else who might want to go, who is on my friends list.
Get back to me soon, in any event. In the meanwhile, I'm going to go listen to One Guitar, No Vocals on the way home.
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July 14th, 2005
12:49 pm - They Might Be Giants
All in all, a really fun concert last night. I got to have dinner with sarcastibich and Mike W— at the restaurant attached to the venue, and then we proceeded in as Corn Mo was underway. ninja_turbo and saracariad joined us shortly thereafter, but I believe we managed to catch most of his set.
( Rambling about the show itself. )
It was also nice to meet up with my coworker Ted S— and his friends, even if it was fairly brief. All in all, a good time, even if I didn't get to bed until 2am.
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July 11th, 2005
12:50 pm - TMBG on Wednesday?
So, as most of you are aware, They Might Be Giants is playing in Indianapolis on Wednesday evening. I have two tickets, but bneuensc is not going to be able to attend. Consequently, one of those tickets can go to someone else, if they are interested in attending. I will be in the Indianapolis area between getting out of work (circa 5:30-6pm) and the show (8:30), so I can pick folks up in town, if need be. Similarly, I believe that ninja_turbo and others are making a trek up from Bloomington to attend. So... if you're interested in coming, speak up!
Edit: Ticket has been claimed.
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