Music Monday

Music Monday – One Take Edition

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I am an absolute sucker for one-take media. Movies and music. I’m sure this won’t be the last time I do a series of one-take videos. I prefer it when the one-take is real, but sometimes well-hidden cuts are acceptable.

Dodie – Cool Girl

I just love this song and this video. I really enjoy this style of sort of, “raw dancing” where it’s a little messy and unstructured. I also like the sort of, symbolism of Dodie being slightly “off” from the other dancers, it fits with the themes of the lyrics and theme of the song. It seems intentional because she will be slightly off, then in perfect sync, then off again. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. The song itself is really good as well. It starts out so light then the thumpy beat comes in and it builds up nicely from there.

Total side note, I am slightly enamored with the chest of drawers and nightstand in the opening bit. I have a collection of photos of furniture I have come across in this style because it seems weirdly prolific in the vintage furniture market for some reason.

Kiesza – Hideaway

I think this may be the first video I watched that turned me on to Kiesza’s music.

Something I find amusing about this whole video is that I am pretty sure that a lot fo the non-dancers, are just, people who were out and about. The dudes trying to go to their car. The person ho runs through he shot on the skateboard. One tell for this is how at the end, the Taxi almost gets caught in traffic and almost misses the cue. Also everyone seems to be having a good time, which I like.

OK Go – The One Moment

I could do an entire month’s worth of Music Monday posts on OK Go, instead, I’ll just sprinkle them in here and there. A lot of their videos are one-take videos or fake one-takes. This one is pretty amazing because it’s an extremely fast one take, that’s slowed down.

The behind-the-scenes for OK Go are almost always fascinating as well, or at least, the engineering part of my brain thinks they are. Like all the math that was needed to get the timing for this video down so it would work in the slowed-down version. I mean, I am sure there is some fudging going on, but it’s doing to be damn close.

My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 4 – Going Online

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The next phase of my computing journey would have been in High School. I am pretty sure this machine was some kind of Pentium, I don’t know a lot of the details beyond that. Like I mentioned last week, some of the specific details get a bit hazy for a bit here, though the next round is decidedly not hazy again.

While the main computer was still technically the family computer, I ended up with one of the older machines in my room at one point as well. There are a few key defining moments of this era in my computing cycle. I got a bit more experience dealing with computer hardware. I bought a 2.5 GB drive for the family PC because I needed more space. Which would lead to some fun because Windows 95/98 didn’t support a drive larger than 2GB. I actually don’t remember if I partitioned it or if it just, had .5GB unused.

I also got a ZIP100 Drive sometime around this time as well. These were like disks, but “huge” at 100MB each. I spent my own money on both of these things. I guess it was sort of the start of my digital hoarding life. I had a lot of disposable income around this time because I started working at McDonald’s at 16. Aside from the $20 each paycheck or two to fill my gas tank, I spent the rest on whatever. Usually VHS movies, CDs, and VHS Anime tapes. Sometimes expensive computer hardware. I had 10 of those ZIP disks and they cost me $100.

The bigger moment of this era was going online.

It was all done with dial-up, so it tied up the phone line and was slow slow slow. My dad worked for the phone company so our internet was through Ameritech, or SBC, or whatever it was called at the time. I had other outlets though, that I could use on my bedroom PC. I remember three specifically. One was some sort of message board for IUPUI, the university, though I was not in college at the time. Another was this dial-in BBS system for the Illinois Education system. My friends and I would post there and use the chat system. It was at that time I learned that things are not always as anonymous as one might think when this dude came to me at school one day and told me to stop talking to his girlfriend over the system.

How did he know that “Bevis” was me?? The world may never know.

I also posted some stories there that are, sadly, lost to time and the ether of the internet.

Lastly was this MUD, or MUCK, I don’t know which it was. I know I could dial in, and it was this text based RPG thing. You could go around town, or go down in a dungeon deeper and deeper. I never really left the town, but I became extremely rich. I found a bug of sorts. I believe the process was something like…

  • Go to the inn.
  • Murder all of the sleeping player characters
  • Take and sell their possessions
  • Give the gold to an alt
  • Wait a day
  • All of the dead PCs would be revived
  • Wash, rinse repeat.

After I amassed enough wealth, I had enough money to buy the “fancy room” that had dragon guards. No one was going to be murdering ME in my sleep.

Aside rom these side escapades, there was the “real internet.” I spent a lot of time browsing all sorts of websites about video games and anime. Eventually, I started my own couple of pages on GeoCities as well. At the time using Microsoft Page, an early WYSIWYG editor.

I also downloaded videos and music, though they were hard to find at the time. There was no Spotify or even places to buy wave files at the time. For anything large, it meant starting it before bed, and letting it run for hours to download. There were special programs you could use to pause and resume large downloads.

It was all the start of something amazing and wonderful in this perfect digital world of the Internet.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap-Up (08.20.2023 to 08.26.2023)

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Not a lot going on this week honestly, it’s been kind of blazing hot which really makes some things difficult to do. Go Climat Crisis. I did start on a new project. Well, continued one I sort of started on. I have way too many bookmarks, enough that navigating them later is not useful. They are well sorted, but I need to make them more useful. I came across the concept of a “digital garden” recently. It seems to be just a fancy term for “personal wiki”. Anyway, I’ve started building a sort of personal wiki of bookmarks and resources, though it’s just lists of sorted links in markdown files, that I’ll eventually post out to Github for public use.

I may also do the Wiki thing as well, for other bits of information I want to keep, though most of that is already in One Note.

I just have been pretty down lately and not really motivated for much.

On a gaming note, the Aurora Concert is back for the next week or so in Sky: Children of the Light, it’s pretty neat, but there are also just, videos of it on Youtube.

I didn’t buy anything new this week either, like I said, boring week. Ok, technically I did pre-order a few things, but I don’t really consider pre-orders buying until they come in, because I often end up canceling them later.

I didn’t listen to much new music either, though I did start building a sort of “monster playlist to shuffle” in Apple Music. We’ll see what comes of that in the long term.

Albums

Nirvana – Unplugged in New York

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While I have a lot of “favorite albums”, there is one that I have fairly consistently considered my absolute favorite, and it’s Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York. Originally recorded as part of MTV’s Unplugged show. It was the first Nirvana album released after Kurt Cobain’s death. There are quite a few of these types of albums from MTV’s Unplugged show by different bands. From back when MTV actually played Music all the time.

I just love everything about this album. I love the goofy chatter between the songs. I love the fact that there are plenty of electric effects and an electric guitar in Nirvana’s “Unplugged Set”, because Nirvana doesn’t care apparently. I particularly love that it’s not just an acoustic greatest hits album. I think at least half the songs are covers and most are not their “top hits”. Come As You Are and All Apologies are probably the only real big hits on the album, though there are a couple of others. They aren’t even necessarily covering the big hits of other groups either.

While I really like every track, the covers may actually be my more favored tracks. The Man Who Sold the World, originally by David Bowie is excellent. Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam is great as well. There are three covers of Meat Puppets tracks, Plateau, Oh Me, and my favorite of these three, Lake of Fire. Members of the Meat Puppets also participated in this set.

The set ends with another non-Nirvana track Where Did You Sleep Last Night which is a folk song done by a variety of artists over a period and also goes by several other names. The whole, “angsty 90s Cobain” really shines through on this track and I really like it as well.

The set opens with About a Girl, which as Cobain comments, “this was off our first record, most people don’t own it,” which is certainly accurate as Nirvana wasn’t really popular until Nevermind and then later In Utero. It’s a nice and interesting throwback to the band’s origins. The last track I wanted to throw out as one of my favorites from this album comes from In Utero, Pennyroyal Tea, despite its kind of random and rambly nature, really fits this format well.

I think one thing I really like about this album is just how much it’s Nirvana’s messy and gunge style, cleaned up in a slick format, which still keeps the messy and grunge feel. I don’t really know how else to describe it. That isn’t to say Nirvana isn’t a great band, but I really feel like this album lets them really show a great other side to the band and everyone seems to be generally having a good time making this music as well.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Why Can’t I Hold All These RSS Feeds

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I’ve mentioned my woes with my RSS reader off and on in posts here, but I almost had another one. Thankfully, I learned my lesson last time. I ended up breaking my Fresh RSS install. I came across this post on Hacker News, where someone had asked for people to post their personal blogs. Someone had set up an OPML Feed for this list and stuck it on GitHub. I thought to myself, “Why not, I like these types of people, surely there are some good things in here”.

So I hooked the OPML up to my Fresh RSS. This tripled how many feeds I was subscribed to. It also broke my reader. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it stopped updating feeds, and would not even load the main page. I did some investigation and found that one of the SQL tables had become corrupted. THANKFULLY it was not the one with the feeds themselves. Literally everything else can be rebuilt if needed, easily, but recovering the feed list is paramount. I immediately created an export dump of the feed list. After some troubleshooting, I completely deleted the Fresh RSS database, then reloaded a months old backup, then reimported the recent feed list tables.

The only thing that was missing, I had added some categories since the last backup. I created some dummy categories, “Category 32, Category 33”, that sort of thing. Due to the relational way databases work, feeds automatically fell into these categories, which allowed me to figure out what the actual category name was. For example, one has some comic and book feeds in it, so clearly, this was originally my “Books and Comics” category.

Eventually, I’ll weed some of these feeds out. There are some in languages I don’t understand, nothing personal, but I have plenty to read without hassling with translations. Some feeds tend to post TOO MUCH and dominate the RSS reader. I’m pretty relentless about chopping these and Hacker News is pretty much the only one that floods, that I allow to remain. Techmeme and Slashdot are sometimes borderline but not usually, so they get to stay as well.

Everything is sorted into categories, and I usually read through in category chunks, and no, I don’t read everything, I skim for interesting headlines or updates from my favorites and read those. I can’t find a good number for how many feeds but I think it’s just over 1200 now, sorted out across categories. Currently, I use the following categories.

  • Anime/Japan
  • Books and Comics
  • Food
  • Friend’s Blogs
  • Games – Deal and Bundles
  • Games – Tabletop
  • Games – VG News
  • Games – VG Reviews
  • Language Learning
  • Lifestyle and Family
  • Movies/TV
  • Music
  • My Blogs
  • News – Conservative Bull Shit (Currently all Muted)
  • News – Illinois/Decatur/Local
  • News – Liberal Opinions
  • News – US News (Empty, they all end up in World)
  • News – World
  • PersBlogs – Tech Enthusiasts
  • PersBlogs – Toy Collectors
  • PersBlogs – Gaming
  • PersBlogs – Nerd Blogs
  • Photography
  • Science/Space
  • Second Life and Virtual Worlds
  • Tech – Coding and IT
  • Tech – Crypto Bullshit
  • Tech – General
  • Tech – Security
  • Tech – VR/XR
  • Toys – Transformers
  • Toys – LEGO
  • Toys – News
  • Uncategoriezed
  • Webcomics
  • Writing and Writers

This is essentially the gamut of my interests, and sometimes if a category becomes too unwieldy, I’ll break out some of the feeds into a refined category. Which is where the prefixes come from (News, Tech, PersBlogs, Toys).

I mentioned before, I mostly read in the category view. Anything I find interesting I’ll tag with either BI or Lameazoid tags, and then my news digest script goes to work, I think at 11 PM each night. I don’t always check it every day, which is fine, sometimes I check it 2-3 times a day. Often while eating breakfast, sometimes again in the evening.

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