If you haven’t heard about Benn Jordan, The Flashbulb, or how itunes stole and sold his music, here’s that interesting story (which is yet another reason not to patronize Apple or itunes). Long story short: dude gets his music stolen, so he and his label give it away and win from donations; internet works. As far as I know, he is the first artist to work with a private bittorrent site to distribute his music freely.
I’d like to formally recommend the album to anyone interested in film soundtracks or ambient type things in general. “Soundtrack to a Vacant Life” is described basically as it is titled, and while normally a much more aphexy musician, on this album he has toned and tuned everything to the pace of his life. This is a mostly relaxing trip through what I see as a truly grandiose statement of electronic music. This is a project I would do.
This story is a couple weeks old, but I finally finished getting to the album and I really wanted to mention it. This is part of us moving on. Check it out online.
The ass-end of this speech makes up for not being able to keep up for a few days.
These points are all solid and the idea of real hope in a cynical nightmare government is refreshing unhorrible. What is anyone doing right now but talking anyway? It’s goddamn talking season; we have to hear about these things.
Incidentally, he stole a huge part of this speech from a friend that steals large parts of his speeches. Oh nos plagerism!
Tomorrow could be one of the biggest days in what will be our generation’s history. I talk about it too much already, so I promised I would keep this one brief (I lied). Also please don’t assume I’m jumping on some sort of endorsement bandwagon here, as I totally don’t care about endorsements outside of entertainment and I think it’s important for everyone to talk about this crap with everyone.
It is important that everyone makes time and goes to their polling place and sticks four fingers into the system that has been fucking up their lives for the past few years. The only way to beat this system is to use it; this is a basic fact of American civics.
I want to also note that it is particularly important for anyone under 25 to get the hell off of their lazy asses and just go to their polling places tomorrow and vote. Look up where it is, stop whining about it, and go do it. If you are an older person that cares about the horrors of government and interact with the 18-25s regularly, inspire them. Make it happen.
As for me, I will be representing my home state and the man whose birthday I stole next week (who understood the concept of inspiration as catalyst) by voting for the guy that announced his candidacy in the same place as some of the most eloquently backhanded speeches ever have been delivered.
I have been talking about this quite a lot over there on the twitter, but it’s not about buzzword bingo or hot shit trends or bandwagon bumblefuck. This is about reform that will relieve the poor of the rich’s burden (without empty leftist rhetoric promises). It is about technology not scaring off the elderly Washington geriatrics. It is about SERIOUSLY TECHNOLOGY IT’S THE FUTURE. It is about taking our country back from companies and stockholders by using it against itself. It is about diversity and proving to Negative Nancies™ that our country really has come this far.
I am a skeptic leaning far into the realm of cynicism. That cynicism is a result of the past seven years, and I don’t consider it permanent. I looked into this guy and the whole behind the scenes mess, and I said fuck libertarianism for a couple years if this will actually improve life. I genuinely think it will, and that is after excessive cynical review. I am much more surprised than I am proud to report that the state of Georgia agrees.
It is time to move on and up. This rutwalking can finally end with thinking positive, and I say that with the most respectably desperate tone possible. I already voted for this guy in Illinois, watched what he did after that, and now I’m going to vote for him again. Thank you for listening.
The horrors of Jimmy Buffett are thwarted in the holy-shit-they-really-did-it new episode of Yacht Rock. It was such a goddamn surprise, there was an announcement.
Featuring Vatche Panos as a drug user! JD Ryznar and Hunter Stair live up to the Yacht Rock name. What could happen next? Is it a one shot to tease the masses, or a sign of continuance? Proper link.
Too bad about Jason Lee, especially considering his recent career choices.
Right, so I think it’s important to note that no other candidate talks about political and government reform. Meanwhile, this one guy is tired of the same old shit. From here:
Barack may be inspiring, and we may like his ideas, but he hasn’t been in Washington long enough. He hasn’t been stewed and seasoned long enough. We haven’t boiled all the hope out of him.
There’s a lot of connections being made here. It’s seeming less like impractical idealism and more like urgent reality by the day.
Tonight, many people in Georgia snow the biggest snow they have ever seen. Some saw it for the first time, and some were merely amused by how ridiculously retarded everyone gets when something falls from the sky.
Seriously. The roads become much like a pinball machine. Everyone talks about how they next day is already a snow day even though an inch hasn’t stuck and it’s going to stop soon. They talk about being trapped at work and having to sleep there.
It’s hilarious. Oh and certainly a bit more in a few hours than we’ve gotten the past two years.
Of course it was shitty frozen rain by the time I left, but that doesn’t matter.
Well, this is a goddamned hell of a good way to get the word out about last.fm:
That is the most disgusting code I’ve ever seen on anything that you’re supposed to embed on a webpage, ever. It’s really a damn shame because it’s slick. And I will say this station (Buckethead similar) is the best station I’ve found in a while.
Today we’ll talking about how to import your bookmarks from browsers and convert your browsing methods to focus on the idea of remembering important things about the links instead of remembering where you put them. When you are considering hundreds of bookmarks, as many people have, this method is necessary for scaling and to prevent incredibly unnecessary limits.
The idea here is that using del.icio.us to do the work for you, it is possible to think about bookmarks, the internet, and navigation in a new way. The old way could be considered a rigid, organizational construct that is a leftover from a few decades of simple, common sense-based professional computing. This new way of approaching it is basically a by-product of the wholesale industry adoption of tagging, which is a construct of a lazy new generation really making computers do the work for them. The sad part is that this time laziness triumphs. Firefox makes it even easier.
If you don’t have a delicious account, go there and sign up, and then in the settings you will want to import or upload your current bookmarks. Don’t feel pressured; it took me about three years to do this.
From here, the flexibility of the system gets pretty insane. You can tag things however you want (for example, I didn’t tag anything old but tag everything new). This contrasts bookmarks in that there was only one place you could put one bookmark without duplicates. Now, you can have one bookmark with an endless amount of ways to organize and find it via infinite tags.
There’s more. You can subscribe to tags and get alerts from fairly specific triggers. You can add people to your network. You can add me and see what I mark. I watch people that I know have an eye for trends and the like. The great downfall of the networking on delicious is that right now (changing in 2.0) there is no simple way of inviting people or adding people; the only way is to visit their profile and hit add.
(Side note: you can bundle tags. This essentially means that you can tag tags. That drives me a little beyond the edge as it’s time to get less organized, not more!)
Supplemental: To go along with yesterday’s crying about how good adult swim was this week, I wanted to mention another two videos that are retarded for different reasons and involve prototypical, non-Japanese, foreign superhero images.
Now I know these things are old news, but I just can’t shake the feeling that they’re too related. After further review they’re not nearly as similar as I thought, but just retarded. Hilarious, but retarded.
Also, painful, vcr-edited, clip-sound low-fi is hot shit right now.
