I think it's funny that grown adults would find (the) writing style (of Lord of the Rings) too dense or boring when I didn't at eight years old.
–Slythwolf
I think the Wolf has her analysis backwards here, because what she observed coincides 100 % with what I'd expect.
If an adult reads Tolkien, chances are that they have already seen a lot of what's good in Tolkien's books in derivative works, so that the originals will hold much less wonder and surprise – leaving only the bits that weren't so stellar. If on the other hand you're eight years old and Lord of the Rings is one of the first fantasy books you read, it's far easier to get pulled in by universe and forgive the faults (the writing, the absence of women, etc.).
In other words, I think what you think of a work that counts as a milestone depends a lot on how many derivative works you have consumed beforehand.
Some things work only once, and if you had that aha! while consuming a derived work, experiencing the original later will seem much less impressive – it did, after all, not give you an epiphany (as you already got that from the enhanced work or copycat).
By that token, I also find the Beatles mindbogglingly boring, while some people credit them with the musical equivalent of inventing the wheel. Well, even so, their work has been expanded on so much that by now, it looks like one of those wheels they use in B.C. or the Flintstones. You appreciate the historic value, but you wouldn't want to use it on a daily basis. The WalkMan was a great step up in portable music from the ghettoblaster, but I still wouldn't trade you my MP3 player for one.
… but I love the world!
She's "almost 48." She's unemployed. She's not conventionally pretty. But she has a dream …
You show 'em!
Anyway, they won't let me embed the actual video, so this entry gets a splash image (haha, splash, get it?) instead, and you'll have to go to u-tube to watch it. Like right now.
Also check out how in love the judge looks four minutes in. : )
I had a good laugh when I found this cartoon. Because a) haha, funny, b) ooooooh, fruitbats!¹, and c) haha, Carmen Miranda hat!
And then I thought, wait, what do I really know about Carmen, anyway?
Famous for promoting Brazil all over the world, she was a Broadway star, the highest paid artist in Hollywood and the highest paid woman in the USA.
—Wikipedia
And apparently, she more or less died on Durante's show. I never knew.
This of course is from Vicious Lips, a movie so obscure that I had to write my own synopsis and (1st) comment. It's the sound of the '80s in one long hairotica music video. In a trashy scifi setting. Honestly, who cares at that point about it having no plot? : ) And yes, I'd still really, really like to be able to buy the soundtrack!
After all those years of trying to make my synthesizers sound like a guitar, I ended up making my guitar sound like a synthesizer.
(Strat knockoff played through Fender amp with overdrive, then souped up in audacity, totally love its speaker sim. Sounds like Carter USM or Armageddon Dildos, I reckon. That said, anything music is still a major pain on Linux; for instance, that's not quite how the riff goes, but play-through doesn't work right so I couldn't hear myself while playing. (For the non-musicians among my readers, playing without a monitor is like painting in the dark.) Also, don't read too much into it, this is just something that happened while jamming, I doubt it's going to be my new sound. But I'm busy explaining a joke, ain't I? Anyway, I'm half-tempted to go out and buy a Mac, as an appliance only, put Cubase or Logic on it (which I keep calling Live for some reason), and have at it.)
CD-baby, which I'm normally a fan of, now has MP3s for download. Good. You have to purchase entire albums though. Not quite so good. I like funk. There are, of course, pure funk CDs, but often jazzers, even those whose jazz I don't find terribly interesting, will have a good or even excellent funk track on their album. This makes the sales proposition essentially, buy our album for the single track you want, which is even worse than the usual, buy four good tracks and a lot of filler that the music industry usually offers us. I might still go ahead for an album that is 10 bucks or under, but most are in the $10 - $14 range, and especially in the jazz selection, there are actually $20+ albums, lo and behold. Now I know that the US dollar is essentially worthless these days, but still. $20 for one track is too much. I'm already paying more for CD-baby albums than I do for the few "normal" albums I still buy, since I purchase the latter via amazon "Used & new", which not only saves me money, but arguably also bypasses the bloody RIAA to an extent. Lastly, it'd be kinda nice if I could purchase the physical CD and the download in a bundle — essentially buy the CD so I'll have the media, and then pay a dollar or two on top of that for their bandwidth, that is, the privilege of downloading the music and listen to it immediately, rather than wait for international shipping. This doesn't mean pure download or "just the CD" should go away, it just means that there could be a third option which would make customers happy while not losing the baby any money. Or well, given that CDbaby's reply to that suggestion essentially was, yes, but you could buy both at full price!, maybe there are people who do that. Then the bundle option would lose the shop money. It's just that they've been so good in the "no evil" department so far. Finally, am I the only one weirded out by the download not being cheaper than the physical media in some cases?
To be fair though, mealmaster — I mean kegelmaster, nay, ticketmaster — managed to have my credit card number stolen, so I got a new CC, and bollocky amazon made it a total nightmare to update the data, especially for already existing orders. And then, amazon US won't send me my fridge magnets. (I have an urge to mix-and-match the Yiddish and the Romance ones, and if you can't see the hilarity of that, I really can't help you.) Now, if it were a used-or-new reseller, fine. But if it's called an "amazon webshop", it could bloody well go and be subject to the same principle that governs my other transactions with amazon, which is I send them money, they send me stuff. If they can't do that, they can at least put a special badge on shops that do deliver to amazon standards. But even so, I'm logged in. They know where I bloody am. How about just putting a big red warning on a page when I go to an article they won't ship to me, anyway? If they don't want my business, that's one thing, but they should at least have the bloody decency of telling me before I spend an hour shopping. By that token, CDbaby is still lightyears ahead.
Way back in the seventies, before I was born, when the world was young and dinosaurs walked the earth, a Steely Dan promo for radio DJs came with a tacky t-shirt. It was pink. Which was useless given most DJs were men. And it only had the words "Steely Dan t-shirt" printed on it. It was, however, incredibly, -credibly rare, so it became a sought-after collector's item.
Steely Dan themselves commented on that in another song, Show Business Kids: "They got the house on the corner, with rug inside; they got the booze they need, all that money can buy; they got the shapely body, they got the Steely Dan t-shirt" — casting the shirt as the ultimate empty status symbol.
This is how I remember the story. I'm making a special point out of not looking it up to check, because it's a legend, guys, drift is practically a requirement! That said, the Steely Dan site usually makes for a good read. And so do the Steely Dan dictionary and possibly the interpretations site.
Anyway, I always wanted one, because it was so … HHOS or something. Not taking itself seriously to just the right degree.
I recently picked up some of the classics from Amazon's Used & New, like the CD reissues of Stranger in a strange land/Wasted Years and Aces High/Two minutes to midnight (that's right, boys and girls, each CD contains the material from two 12"s, plus commentary, and if you get those two, that's arguably all the Iron Maiden you'll ever need — in fact, I got A matter of life and death too, and the crystal case has a transparent tray: not to give you extra artwork, but so they could slink in some asinine plea not to steal the music, which for some reason pissed me off no end, so it's the last Maiden album I'll buy.)
Anyway, long story short, it had me wondering idly why we don't have some sort of Doomsday Clock (as opposed to calendar machine) for civil liberties, all things considered. Should be relatively easy to do, each "guaranteed" freedom that we lose advancing the clock by one minute. Well, if it ends up being another clock, anyway.
I don't normally care much for AMV, but this is so absurd it's almost good again. Mind the lip-sync!
via Schweinwerfer (like the name, was entirely too fond of the word as a kid)
John Watts, ex Fischer-Z mastermind, will tour and play in Karlsruhe, Germany on 07.11. Guess that makes for a more fun date than 9/11, anyway. Let's leave it to the businessmen to die young and enjoy the show.
Auf besonderen Wunsch eines einzelnenbesonderen Herren hier tagesaktueller Lall über meine musikalischen Befindlichkeiten. Während ich dies schreibe, rippe ich übrigens meine höchsteigenen CDs der Band The Nits — eat your heart out, RIAA …
When I was in school, the music teach taught us thus: There are innumerable sub-genres of metal — heavy metal, black metal, death metal, what-not. You can usually tell them apart by what size amps they have.
Of course, he was being sarcastic — it's not really that easy. In truth, it's more a combination of how many distortion pedals they have, how bad their "singer" is — Cradle of Filth and Subway to Sally come to mind as bands that are lethal unless played through a karaoke system —, and how inane their lyrics are (Blind Guardian are a good example here, as are, once again, Subway to Sally).
But of course, nobody's aware of these things anymore; apparently, they don't teach music like they used to. Kids don't know shit these days, and if you google that, your best match is in fact "kids don't know shit about music" — written by a 15-year-old. Good grief, man! Even teenagers are beginning to see through MTV! Eat your heart out, content industry! Die flaming death, techno rehashes!
Kris schreibt über WinAmp/xmms und amaroK und spricht sich dabei für media players aus die das widget set des desktop environment benutzen -- wenn man denn eines hat.
