Let’s see how long I can manage to keep up a vague theme for these posts. This week I wanted to throw out some videos with some fancy “science-y” themes. I use that in the vaguest since, because at least one is kind of a stretch but it’s certainly nice to look at.
Also, it’s a bit “Music Monday-ish” as well, since it’s Tuesday, because yesterday I posted about the Alanis Morrisette Concert. (Unless for some reason I didn’t go and forgot to remove that line, wait, now I need to remove this line if it does happen….)
Lusine – Just a Cloud (feat Vilja Larjosto)
I am completely fascinated by this video every time it comes up on y playlist. I really like the sort of layering of patterns that is present across the entire length of the track. It does a nice soft build as the song goes along. What I really like though in this video is the use of light.
I mentioned those patterns, and they essentially each also have their own light effect in the video. It’s about as close as you can get to “seeing music” without, I dunno, dropping acid or something, I’ve never tried that I can’t really say.
Wintergaten – Marble Machine
This guy has essentially made a career out of this crazy marble machine. He’s got a whole series of videos about the process he is doing to continually update and upgrade and basically build a more perfect device. I still really love this version though, with all the shaky jank going on. It’s a nice pleasant little song too.
The Engineer part of my brain loves all the technical planning and design that had to have gone into making this all work as well as it does, and the work being put in on the updated device.
Nigel Standford – Cymatics: Science vs Music
I mentioned about about being the “best way to see sound” and I guess I was wrong, because this video is the best way to see sound. Quite literally. Most of the experiments featured in this video are sound based experiments. The vibrations in the water pans, the way the water curls with the base, the funny patterns made by the graphite on the trays, the way the flames pop up and down in patterns. It’s all matter reacting to sound in a clean enough way that we can see it.
Sound travels in waves, most of these are just the sound waves visualized.
Except the Tesla coil at the end, that’s just, “cool science” that doesn’t really have much to do with sound.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Alanis Morrissette, singing Ironic, the first song she has actually heavily encouraged audience participation in, and her mic goes out. The audience had already been doing like 50-75% of the song without her so the band just continued and no one noticed until it came back a few seconds later.
It’s it Ironic?
Don’t cha think?
Last night, I went and saw Alanis Morrissette perform at the Illinois State Fair. In traditional fashion, I’m going to ramble on a bit about the whole night’s experience. For the sake of simplicity, you can get a bit more highlights about my love of Alanis in my recent post about Jagged Little Pill.
A couple of years ago, I almost went to see Alanis and Garbage during their tour together, She was going to be in Indianapolis, and I have family over there I could see, I checked into tickets and they were, a bit more than I cared to spend, for where they were located. Plus it was still kind of “The middle of COVID” so it seems like maybe it was best to just not. Then a few months ago, she was announced as coming to the Illinois State Fair this year. Each year the fair has a large show, I think every night, maybe races a few nights. I hopped on over and signed up for her mailing list to get in the early sales window. My wife wasn’t interested and my brother was interested but that fell through. Since it was just me, I bought tickets for the standing area on the track. Later I learned the fair offers a “Pre Show Party” for pretty cheap, which includes early entry and a parking pass. That seemed like a good deal, so I spring for that.
I’m glad I did.
I opted to go right to the “wait in line” part of the Pre Show Party after buying a bottle of water (which cost me more than an entire case of water normally, but hey, it was some charity group running it). I was like, 25 in line I think, and people kept wandering out and back for more drinks. The only other time I’ve been to a show was like ten years ago for Toby Keith, my wife and daughter wanted to go. This was my view.
When we went in, I had a notion that most people would pile in on the right side of the stage since we were let in on the right, so I shuffled around past to the left side of the stage and ended up pretty much right in the center, I was next to the dude who had been at the front of the line. So this was my view.
Perfect.
Around an hour later, and some light rain, which threatened to become worse, the opening act started. I actually didn’t realize there was an opening act, nothing really mentioned it.
Tenille Townes
I don’t know what it is about opening acts, but it’s like they are required to do SOME cover songs. I don’t mind covers, but her set included I think 3 covers. Oddly enough, I could see the setlist taped to the floor and the second song listed, “Come as You Are”, was NOT a cover of Nirvana. It’s was a Tenille Townes track. She did do covers of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and The Beatle’s Come Together.
I am not familiar enough with her song’s to remember what most of them were called and Setlist.fm isn’t helping me here. Funny enough, I am pretty sure I have heard her music before because Somebody’s Daughter was very familiar when they played it.
For the most part, I enjoyed her set. They work the crowd well and she was pretty chatty the whole time. The whole band really seemed to be enjoying themselves. Based on her style and twangyness, she is a country singer, but it’s a very “Rock and roll” kind of country.
Alanis Morrisette
After the usual “tear down and swap over” it was time for the main event.
Pretty much as expected, most of the setlist consisted of songs from Jagged Little Pill. The recent tour was for the 25th anniversary of the album, and most of her well known songs are from that album. In face, the setlist included ALL of Jagged Little Pill, including the hidden track, Your House. It also included several of her other more well known singles as well as some of the less known tracks, though many of those were simply, brief interlude moments, and not the whole songs. I’ve embedded a neat little Setlist from Setlist.fm, but it’s deceiving because 7 of the tracks (Hands Clean, Diagnosis, So Unsexy, Nemesis, Losing the Plot, Sympathetic Character, I Remain) were not full songs.
Anyway, the show, was awesome. I can’t say it was the best show I’ve been to, but it was damn good. The music was of course, all very very familiar, but at the same time, as is usually the case, the live versions are different and just generally better. There was so much going on at times too, it was kind of hard to know what to choose to focus on, there was a large screen that was showing some interesting videos to go along with each song. Alanis herself, dancing around stage quite a bit, including that sort of, long stride walk she does (I’ve seen it in some other videos).
Then also the band. Man, the band was amazing, especially the bass player, Cedric LeMoyne, but I’ll say also especially the lead guitarist, Jason Orme. I am assuming lead, there was also a second guitarist, Julian Coryell, playing on several interesting looking small guitars, but he seemed, I dunno, less active in general, not just in stage presence, but also in his playing. I may be totally wrong though. The drums, Victor Indrizzo, and keyboard, Michael Farrell, were also very good, though of course, the nature of both of those means they are quite a bit less showy.
I do want to throw out my one complaint, since it’s related, the rest of the band was very often, in the dark. I couldn’t remember their names, though they were introduced, and finding them was actually kind of difficult. Or at least, it took a lot more work than expected. Like, I love you Alanis, but the these guys were amazing, maybe give them a little bit of that spotlight. Looking at a few other videos this doesn’t always seem to be the case so I almost wonder if there was something going on with the venue’s lighting, though this wasn’t an issue in the Tenille Townes set and if they needed more lights, they could have dropped the weird back of the stage spotlight that basically just, were blinding.
Back to the show though, and the band, that bass player, Cedric, dude was absolutely amazing. He had several moments where he did little solo parts and his playing was great, his stage presence, what you could see, was great as well. I am going to have to check out his previous/other band Remy Zero a bit to see if any of what he was doing here shines through there. The band name actually sounds familiar, so maybe I’ve heard of them at some point.
Alanis herself was amazing as well. There is a phrase “Eat the Mic”, which is to say, hold the mic so close you’re lips are touching it, because you’re too quite. I see this literally quite a bit on some of the videos I’ve seen of artists. Alanis, does the opposite, by a long shot. I mean, it’s kind of her entire style, the very loud screaming sort of singing, but she often had that mic feet away and she still came through fine. I do wonder a bit why she uses a corded mic though, as much as she is back and forth across the stage, it seems like the cord is kind of a hazard, plus cords are prone to failure with that much moving around (they actually swapped out her mic about 3 songs in, and it completely cut out during Ironic briefly).
I appreciate the use of some of the lesser known tracks as interludes. Understandably, she would go get a big drink between almost every song, and often would do a sort of, subdued little bit from a song, just standing in place near the back. I don’t know a ton of her feeling on it all, but i suspect that after 25 years, it gets a bit old singing the same album constantly, especially because she has had several albums since. There wasn’t any of the latest album at all, though that’s kind of understandable since The Storm Before the Calm is an electronic music based meditation album. It’s decent, but you don’t really want to put your crowd to sleep with calming meditative music.
Some highlights, Wake Up where they break out ALL THE GUITARS was pretty good. I do wonder a bit just how many guitars it takes to be “too many” sometimes.
Forgiven is already a pretty intense song, made way more so with the live performance, with all the drama of the song brought out for the stage.
Uninvited and Smiling both start out light-ish but build into an intensely chaotic but well done ball of energy and sound and guitars. Smiling may have been my favorite of the night.
As mentioned above, she really encouraged the audience to sing along to probably her most iconic song, Ironic, I think the audience would doing at least 50% of it with her holding the mic out to the crowd to sing.
The encore performance of Your House was so hilariously good. She kept stopping the band in feign disgust and they would start again doing a different style of music as the backdrop, all not anything like her normal style, like funky or jazzy riffs.
I will throw out there, I kind of wish there was a bit more audience interaction. I guess I’m used to some really talky artists, but I am also a bit more used to smaller venues, so maybe that’s just, not a thing at this level?
A few last wrap ups, the rain tried to come, and it sprinkled a bit before the show, during Tenille Townes, and between sets, but it managed to hold off despite the ominous overcast. The early access pre show ticket was 1000% worth it for a good spot. Bring right up front is so amazing, I strongly recommend some good concert earplugs though. For Alanis, the Encore was especially loud.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Let’s start getting to a much more robust part of my computer using history. The Commodore 64 certainly was the seed, but this machine was what really catapulted my interest. It’s the first “Real PC” I used growing up. Technically, like the Commodore and the next chapter, this computer belonged to my parents, but my friends and I used it a lot for quite a few things, beyond just gaming.
Though we did use it for gaming.
Gaming
Visually, it was actually kind of a downgrade from the Commodore. The C64 connected to a small color TV (which would eventually be my bedroom TV, with a big chunky couple of knobs on the front.) The Franklin has a monitor, with two colors, black and green. It had two whole 5.25″ drives in it, no 3.5″ disk drives and certainly not a hard drive. It did have a cool dot matrix printer though, which I’ll touch on a bit more in a bit.
It’s worth sidetracking a bit during this time period, and worth mentioning my out of state but fairly frequently visited grandpa had a Tandy 1000 machine, with a color monitor, and that was totally amazing. It pretty much overlaps with this same era of my home PC use and my grandpa was the source of essentially all programs and games I had at home. I have no idea where he got them, but I made copies of most everything he had and his disks were all copied from somewhere. Mostly I remember playing two titles on my grandpa’s PC, along with my brother and cousins. King’s Quest 1, which we never could figure out, but it was fun. And Leisure Suit Larry 1.
Now, Leisure Suit Larry, for the uninformed, is an old, “adult” game series. We did not know this, and we never did reach any of the old content, because like King’s Quest, we make some progress, and the game was funny, but we never did get past a certain point. Specifically, we never did figure out the door password (it’s Ken Sent Me), so we never could progress the plot beyond drinking at the bar, gambling at the casino and buying booze and “lubbers” at the convenience store. The age gate on this game was that it would ask a series of questions that “only adults would know”. So my cousin and I would load the game, then go to the kitchen where out parents were hanging out, and ask them the questions, to get the answers.
Anyway, I don’t believe either of these games worked on the Franklin PC we had at home, because it wasn’t EVGA.
There were others, but the two most notable games we played at home were The Ancient Art of War and Simcity. One was an early sort of RTS game, the other was well, Simcity. Both are notable here because they had user created content. Simcity is all about user created cities. Even with the limits of the game, I remember building out mirrored cities sometimes, then using the disasters to pretend they were at war. Simcity also had some DRM, because you had to enter the population of a city from a sheet of paper based on some hieroglyphs. My friend actually owned the game, so I would just, call him up and get the numbers, I also had a selection of them written down in a notebook, and would just close and reload the game until the random city was one I had marked down.
I also would use that sweet printer to print maps, because it was a feature of the first Simcity. You could print out your city, and it would spit out I think 16 sheets of paper that you could tape together in a 4×4 block of paper sheets and have a huge cool map poster. I may have one buried somewhere too. I would then color in all the zones with the correct colors with marker to make it look cool. You might wonder how I knew what the colors were, well, my grandpa had that TANDY 1000 and my friend had a color PC, so I was aware the game had colors, I just, didn’t get them.
Ancient Art of War let you make custom maps and missions. Which was so awesome and I spent a lot of time making maps. Assuming the data hasn’t been corrupter, I have copies of those maps somewhere, maybe I’ll post them. There were several other games I played a lot that also had user generated content. There was a golf game where you could make courses with dinosaurs and play as Jack Nicklaus. And me back then, had no idea what the Joker Guy (Jack Nicholson) had to do with golf but ok whatever. There was a baseball game called Earl Weaver Baseball where you could do custom teams, and I would make teams themed around video games, like a River City Ransom team, and a Mega Man team where every player had maxed out stats (because robots are perfect).
I think my point is, that this was part of the birth of my interest in digital creation. But not just for games.
Programming
During this time period, my dad was going to college through his job, and getting a degree in Computer Science. I have no idea what a Computer Science degree in the 80s involved, but I remember going to the graduation (vaguely). Or at least him graduating. At some point though, presumably because he was learning it as part of the curriculum, he taught me a bit of BASIC computer programming.
I would have been like, 8 or 9 at this point. I showed my friends how to do it as well, and we would make silly little useless programs that would print out funny patterns scrolling on the screen. Or “super secure password” systems, along the lines of:
10 IF password="SECRETPASSWORD" THEN 30 PRINT "SECRET DATA" 50 ELSE 70 PRINT "NO WAY LOSER" 90 END IF
I have no idea if that’s actually valid BASIC code, I pulled up a guide to IF/Else in BASIC and cobbled it together.
The point is, it was fun. And it was my first experience with actual programming.
Newsletters
Then there are the newsletters my friends and I would produce using a program called Newsmaster. I have this vague idea that this was the “start” of my writing desire and the newsletters we made, were the precursor to The Chaos Xone, my first website which evolved into Lameazoid.com. These were simple 1 page video game themed “newsletters”. You can actually read these here (Issue 2, Issue 3, Issue 4, if you want, translated into HTML. They are, as basic as you would expect for something produced by 10-12 year old kids.
But that was yet another growing seed of interest. So much started with this machine, a real actual PC with actual useful programs. This doesn’t even touch on the part where it was an 80s IBM PC, which meant booting to DOS, on a floppy, because there isn’t any hard drive in it at all. There was no Windows, it was all a CLI interface. Yet another skill and seed learned from this machine.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Another week, another weekly wrap-up. This is technically the trickiest post I’m doing right now, since it’s the only thing I can’t really pre-write up. If I were not trying to do 31 days of posts for Blaugust it wouldn’t matter, I’d just, skip it sometimes probably.
Not a lot new or exciting anyway. I had some craziness at work but I don’t blog about work.
Probably the most exciting thing this week was Guardians of the Galaxy 3 coming to Disney+, so I finally got to watch that. It’s not exactly glowing praise, but at the very least, I didn’t come off it thinking it was very “meh” like all of the newer MCU projects. Like Secret Invasion, which I think I finished last week. Secret Invasion was, ok, but not super impressive. A few things on GotG3, I kind of wish they had toned down some of the end a bit. Mild spoilers, as generic as possible but it felt like they needed to save that “large group of people”, entirely because for some reason every Marvel climax has to have huge stakes where the heroes have to save large groups of people. Like, maybe they could have just, gone there, and faced off with the bad guys and had a little fight, without all the extra.
The Activity Log
This part is partially just for my future reference, and it maybe deserves its own name. So we’ll call it the Activity Log.
No new toy stuff this week, not directly toys, I did buy another set of acrylic riser shelves from a daily deal off Amazon. I kind of needed one more set and now I’m pretty good for little shelves for a while. Being able to lift some of the stuff in the back side of a deeper shelf really helps with the aesthetics of a display.
I did pick up a bundle of games on Humble Bundle Because Baldur’s Gate III is the recently released hotness, Humble Bundle has a bundle (affiliate link) of older titles, including Baldur’s Gate I and II, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights. I think I may have a couple fo these on CDs somewhere but I don’t seem to have them on any modern platforms, and the bundle was cheap (a lot of HBs have become overpriced) so I figured why not.
Another one that is probably worth tracking a bit, if only for my own sanity, is books. Because I often will impulse buy books that seem interesting from Kindle Daily Deals (and elsewhere). This week’s books:
The Elderon Chronicles (Books 1-3): A Space Colonization Science Fiction Collection by Tarah Benner – I usually steer clear of these “bundles of Sci-Fi Books” but this one seemed appealing so I figured why not.
Bilbo’s Last Song by J.R.R. Tolkien – I have most of Tokien’s works already, and I didn’t have this one.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips – I have a bad habit of picking up randomly are these sorts of, “cultural exploration with witty titles” books.
Nordic Tales: Folktales from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark (Tales of Book 5) – I have a variety of these folktale books from different cultures because one of my many interests, in general, is various world cultures and history.
Lastly, there’s Music. I didn’t listen to anything new really, just a lot of stuff I already listen to. A little Nirvana, a little Orla Garland, a little Alanis Morrisette, a little Sigrid. Not trying anything out of the ordinary this week. It’s just been kind of a boring week overall I suppose.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Here’s another album for the “This is already so popular” list of albums, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Per Wikipedia, it’s the 13th biggest-selling album, ever, and the 3rd biggest put out by a woman. There is a good chance that you’ve at least heard a song from this album, somewhere. It’s an album that really sort of embodied a lot of the 90s feel at the time. It’s an album that I listened to a lot in High School and beyond, and it’s a strong strong contender for “Most listened to album”. I like to track music as much as possible these days with Last.fm, but there are a lot of gaps in that record, from the before times, and this is one of them. Others include Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits, and probably a few Aerosmith albums.
Why cover this album now? Because in a few days, I’m going to see Alanis in concert at the Illinois State Fair. I don’t really have a “bucket list”, but if I did, going to an Alanis Morissette concert is one of them, even if it’s 25 years late. I have not really picked up on a lot of Alanis’ later music, though I want to. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie is the only other album I have really listened to by her and it’s ok, but not quite as good as Jagged Little Pill. Something I wasn’t aware of until recently after watching the documentary Jagged, is that Alanis actually had a few albums before Jagged Little Pill that were essentially just regular boring pop music.
Which was part of what made this album blow up and become a huge hit. There was plenty of angry rock alternative music by dudes out there, but not a lot by women at the time. The whole album is this crazy ball of angry rage for a lot of its tracks. The first single from the album You Oughta Know has long been rumored to be about her former boyfriend Dave Coulier (Joey from Full House, the goofy guy) but it’s never been confirmed. With such lovely lyrics as
Cause the joke that you laid in the bed that was me And I’m not gonna fade as soon as you close your eyes And you know it And every time I scratch my nails Down someone else’s back I hope you feel it Well, can you feel it?
– You Oughta Know – Alanis Morissette
The lyrics in general are part of what really makes the album appealing. It’s all so poetically blunt at times, full of anger and trauma. It also becomes self-reflective and vulnerable in other places. It starts out very in your face with All I Really Want, You Oughta Know, and Right Through You. Even the slightly more subdued of the early tracks Perfect has a built to how it’s all just too much trying to be perfect. As the album goes on it becomes a lot more subdued, but still tells a string of stories about broken history and broken relationships.
Probably the most well-known track on the album is Ironic, which is an extremely popular and enjoyable song, but it’s also the subject of ridicule and jokes as most of the scenarios in the song are more straight tragic than actually ironic. Rain on your wedding day, ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife, that sort of thing. The real Irony I suppose is a song called Ironic without any irony in it. I doubt it runs that deep though.
Probably my favorite tracks on the album are Hand in My Pocket and Mary Jane. I really like the whole building optimism of the former, and how it almost feels like it travels through stages of a life with it’s slightly evolving Chorus lyrics. Mary Jane is a nice slow ballad where Alanis really throws out those vocals.
This is also the other reason this album became so popular I think. It’s not just the lyrics, but the way they are delivered. No one thinks twice about scream-singing with male bands, but Alanis helped bring this concept to her music. She has a very distinctive almost yodeling screech at times in her voice which feels like it should be off-putting but instead, it just drives the whole energy of the album. It pushes the rage when needed. It pushes the 90s alternative “who gives a shit really?” vibe when needed. There is also a lot fo interesting almost folksy feeling to her tracks
There’s probably a reason Alanis Morissette never really ended up with a ton of staying power on her future works, because Jagged Little Pill just really embodied the times, and left an influential legacy on music, but released any other time, probably wouldn’t have even taken off at all. I definitely am not saying it’s a bad album, I am just saying that it probably just doesn’t resonate with people who weren’t there, so to speak.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie 
