Dayvan Cowboy

Is it fitting that one of the best instrumental minimalist electronic tracks of all time should have the best video?

Yes.

why did nobody tell me the DJ Championships were going on in Paris?

Birdy Nam Nam - Absesses. 4 DJs, no MCs. a rockin' good track.

Are these guys signed?

Don't sound stupid.

Stop using comma splices.

Geez, Academy of Linguistic Awareness! Either of these would have worked:

Don't sound stupid; stop saying like.
Don't sound stupid. Stop saying like.

Now your cover is blown, and your chances of affecting a perfectly good cause are shot.

(via boingboing)

P.S.

This is sadly similar to Stephen Notley's attempt to correct society's greivous apostrophe errors. (He of Bob the Angry Flower fame.) He publishes this insanely brilliant, popular, and world-altering strip:

Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, you Idiots

But then he blows his cover with this one.

Worlds

He mistakenly thinks that the name of the competition, the "World's" is incorrectly pluralized, when in fact it is simply the World's Gymnastics Competetion or something like that. There are no multiple "worlds" participating.

To be fair, he fessed up to his error in the annotations of the printed book, and he more than made up for it with a series of other linguistic propaganda leaflets such as this one:

Bob's Quick Guide to French, you Idiots

P.P.S. The "Acadamy [sic] of Linguistic Awareness" is a satirical group. Notice the spelling errors in their poster, not to mention their name. Is the comma splice intentional? I don't know, but one thing is certain: people should stop saying "like" so often.

They Lied To Us

This was supposed to be the future apocalypse.

Where is my jetpack river of blood,
Where are my robotic companions locusts,
Where are my dinner in pill form boils,
Where is my nuclear-powered levitating house Earth rent asunder?

(thanks, The Bishop Of Turkey.)

The Cost

Schneier points out a Solzhenitsyn quote from Cancer Ward, and it got me thinking. (Thanks, James.)

As one of the comments says, there's a cost to everything nowadays. We're richer now, as a society, than anyone has ever been at any time. We have more than enough food, we have warmth and safety in the dead of winter, we have a say in our government, we have rich, soft clothes, we have entertainment, we have long lives, we know an incredible amount about how our world works, and those of us sufficiently 'net-savvy as to be reading this blog have access to the almost all of that knowledge. But there's a cost! We paid for our food with environmental degradation. We paid for our warmth with the creation of dams, and the exploitation of fossil fuels. We paid for our freedom of goverment with the requirement for eternal vigilance thereof. We paid for our soft clothes with the time and energy it takes to keep up with fashion. We paid for our entertainment with advertisments selling us things we don't need. We paid for our knowledge with immense amount of wasted effort pursuing ultimately worthless ideas, and lastly but certainly not leastly we paid for the internet with our privacy.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has a cost. Most times, we don't even know we're paying it, but we are.

Peter Gabriel

...writes good music. Or at least, he did on Us and So, the two albums of his I recently got in a fit of "hey, I remember liking that stuff in high school". It's like getting two more Dave Matthews albums for free! (OK not really, but they're similar enough that someone who doesn't listen to either at all might confuse them.)

I'd never really listened to his stuff all the way through before. I mean, sure, it's been on while I was over at people's houses, so it all seemed vaguely familiar (or is that just that all his songs sound the same?) but now, I'm actually listening to it. Amazing how long it takes to (re)discover some things.

The City of Brotherly Love and Spousal Castration

She's in jail, where she belongs.

Yup.

The Meme of Ten

Life is random, at least for the next ten tracks. Here we go.

1. The Zutons - Moons and Horror Shows

Oh thank heavens I got the one good Zutons track. I'm a big Album Person - I prefer to listen to whole albums in one sitting rather than one single at a time. Who Killed the Zutons? is on my iPod in its entirety despite the fact that I only like one or two of its tracks. This is one of them. Catchy!

2. Tea Party - Shadows on the Mountainside

Edges of Twilight. Now there is an album. Fraxas and I had an interesting conversation about it a while back, which I'll quote in the comments.

3. The Chromatics - Doppler Shifting

I have always been a huge fan of science-themed acapella. Finding it is tough. Thanks, Jeremy!

4. RJD2 - Since We Last Spoke

Is this Rock? hip-hop? Dance? Electronica? Who cares. I like it.

5. Cello Suite I in G Major by J.S. Bach, Edgar Meyer, Unaccompanied Cello Suites on Double Bass

As a lapsed bass player, I enjoy listening to ridiculous acts of virtuosity that hardly sound like they could have been performed by a human being. Oh wait, no, that only depresses me.

6. Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

Hey, there's Bono of U2 covering a Leonard Cohen song in a trailer. Leonard Cohen is probably the only buddhist monk to ever write a song that Bono covers, which is a strange distinction indeed.

7. The Odds - Domesticated Blind

Finally, my iPod takes me to a song I've never really listened to before, which is odd (no pun in ten did!). I'll pay attention now.

Hmm. Clever lyrics, jangly retro tune, what's not to like? Next.

8. Boards of Canada - ROYGBIV

The bright, sinuous airiness of this track is what launched me on a Boards of Canada obsession. It's a perfect 2-minute morsel of music that solidly anchors rest of the album Music has the Right to Children, which otherwise consists of fleeting, fragmented melodic structures that play patty-cake with your brain.

9. The Roots - Distortion to Static

Okay. This is from a playlist that a friend put together for me. I have only recently started to discover hip-hop, so I'll try to sound off on this track without sounding maximally lame. It is - how you say? Fresh. Its qualities are not what you would call "whack" at all, as far as I can tell.

10. Rondellus - Rotae Confusionis

This is from this album, a bunch of very authentically delivered medieval-style latin-language covers of Black Sabbath songs.

metareview: The Onion AV Club "savages" the "summer" "movies"

The Onion's ridiculously highbrow lowbrow highbrow ironic AV Club has a feature on summer movies. It's run-of-the-mill fare for them, but it did have this gem:

Suggested alternate activity: Dressing up as Depp's character [from the new Pirates of the Carribean movie], saying 'Arrrr' a lot, quoting the first film extensively, taking a long, deep look in the mirror and admitting you live a sad and lonely life."

When you think about it, that's actually surprisingly widely relevant advice.

Back On The Wagon

My name's Fraxas, and I'm an addict. I've been clean for 2 days now. I still think about it all the time; sometimes, I even talk about it. I know I had some good times while I was using, I know the use let me discover things about myself I couldn't have found out any other way -- and they weren't all bad things. I learned about loyalty, I learned about teamwork, I learned about mastery, I learned about conflict resolution, and about perseverance.

But it hurt me, too. I'd use and use and use, trying to fill that void in my life, succeeding in the short run but failing in the long. I lost a lot of sleep. I lost some friends. I got a lot worse at my job. I almost lost my relationship with my wife.

And that's why I quit Everquest 2.

This isn't the developer's fault, any more than alcoholics can blame Diageo. This isn't the media's fault, this isn't anyone's fault but my own. I'm flawed, have always been flawed, in that computer games suck me in and entrance me more effectively than anything else I know of. It seems silly to admit this; after all, "video game addiction" is still pretty fringe as a concept, and I'm not sure it holds water as a Real Psychological Condition rather than a character flaw. But it's a useful metaphor if nothing else.

I've tried to get over this pastime hobby problem before, taking periodic breaks and switching flavours of poison every once in a while, but ultimately they're all the same. All these slow-advancement, highly-social, highly-time-dependent games trigger the same pathological behaviours in me. So I have to stop them all, or accept the life my flaws force on me when I play MMOs.

And I'm not willing to lose any more of my best years to any game, no matter how good it is.

I can't play Fallout anymore.

If it looks like mastery and it smells like mastery, it's probably mastery

The fine folks at eGullet show us how to sharpen a knife.

In mind-crushing, fifteen-thousand-word detail, getting into math, specializing knives for different jobs, and the various theoretical disputes still extant in the field of knife geekery.

cool!

not dead, just....resting.

Recent interesting things: I received for my birthday (which was recent) 4 killer old games -- Fallout 1&2, Planescape: Torment, and something else that I can't remember. I have started playing two of them. I have made some progress in them. No super-mindblowing moments yet though. I also got Oblivion and Stubbs The Zombie and (oh god) the hardware to run them well. So what did I do with the New Machine Of Hotness?

yeah, you know it.

Everquest 2, all day and all night.

Since it's still vaguely (vaguely? who am I kidding? DEEPLY) shameful to admit you play One Of Those Games, I haven't been posting much. After all, do you really care that I now I have a 70 Coercer on Lucan Dlere, and that my guild Transcendance is running a Mark of Awakening raid this coming weekend? 68+. Bring your Mental resist gear.

Ahem.

A short, sweet nugget from a founder of Brunching Shuttlecocks

Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg of brunching fame is writing a regular collum for Wired online. I will quote from this week's entry, which contains a high density of truth.

3. More Grav Guns

Let's be honest here, game developers. There are maybe three of you who are working on new game ideas. The rest of you are just combining turn-based sandbox squad shooters with extreme sports party RPGs and wrapping it all in a Shrek license. I know you rip off all your ideas, you know you rip off all your ideas, so let's get down to it: Rip off the Grav Gun from Half-Life 2. I just got a chance to try out Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and it was not only like finding God, it was like finding God in an inexpensive but excellent Asian-food restaurant that always has a table open. Now I require the ability to throw a toilet at my enemies in every single video game in existence, including the Bible quiz games. Especially Bible quiz games.

I have no idea what he's talking about, not being a huge gamer myself, but dang if that doesn't sound fun.

RIP Stanislaw Lem

The seminal Science Fiction writer died today of heart problems at age 84.

He lives on in his work.

What You Really Own

In his most recent blogpost, Raymond Chen thirdhands an expression I now fourthhand to you:

you don't really own anything you can't carry at a dead run while firing an AK-47 over your shoulder.

Ha ha, we think; how glib. But what about data? One thing you can carry at a dead run while firing an AK-47 over your shoulder is passwords, and the mobile phone in your pocket -- you know, the one with more compute power and local storage than the entire WORLD 35 years ago -- probably doesn't slow you down that much. Not to mention the fact that, as long as the war you're in the middle of isn't global, you probably have some safe (virtual) place to store a bunch more bits. Greg Papadopoulos, in a spiel I attended, made the analogy between data storage and money storage. Nowadays, it's totally obvious that the safest place for your retirement nest egg is a bank and not your mattress. But not only was that not always the case in the past, but it took people's perception a bit of time to catch up to the reality that yes, banks are safer. Not always more convenient, but safer. And the money's no less yours for you not having actual specie in your posession.

And the same thing goes for data, we just don't all know it yet.

Charlie's Diary

Charles Stross on his new novel:

"Being inclined towards crazy stunt performances, I'm planning on writing 'Halting State' on my mobile phone. This is technologically feasible because the phone in question has more memory and online storage than every mainframe in North America in 1972 (and about the same amount of raw processing power as a 1977-vintage Cray-1 supercomputer). It's a zeitgeist thing: I need to get into the right frame of mind, and I need to use a mobile phone for the same reason Neal Stephenson used a fountain pen when he wrote the Baroque cycle."

As I just mentioned to a close friend, not one of Charlie Stross' books has failed to break my head open and induce at least one thousand-yard-stare "Oh. My. GOD." moment.

Shirky on CMOMENTS ON THE INTERNETT!111!11!!! -- good stuff.

Clay Shirky gave a talk on moderation strategies at ETech. The following quote grabbed me:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right.

Heady stuff.

How to convince the Japanese to Stop Smoking

Writes the band Cake on their update website,

Are you trying unsuccessfully to quit smoking? Perhaps this Japanese argument against smoking will help you.

I love it. There are pages of these zen-like, haiku-like, stirringly poignant, puzzling, and beautiful anti-smoking ads. Here's another one of my favourites. And here are the rest.

Death Cab for Cutie

I mentioned to my illustrious co-blogger today that I'd listened through a Death Cab for Cutie album today (We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes, if you care) . He expressed surprise that I was listening to pantywaist indie girlman music, and my reply was that although they do make pantywaist indie girlman music, they make very listenable pantywaist indie girlman music. Which (far from it!) I am not above. I'm not even sure it's something that you can be "above". From one listen through, I'd put their sound at Weakerthans Only Less Maudlin And More Twee.

Pharaoh mentioned that he'd judged that particular book by its cover, and avoided the music of Death Cab for Cutie because they had a clever name, and that clever names are -- his words -- Signposts for Avoidance. He'll check them out now though, on my recommendation.

BAND NAME ALERT: Signposts For Avoidance is not a bad Clever Band Name. heh, neither is Clever Band Name (though it's taken). meta-heh, so is Band Name Alert!