Been quiet lately.

Shallow Rewards deleted

Bummer.

Podcasts

J-pop vs. Metal is at rest, which may or may not be eternal. It could theoretically go forever, but it does take almost a whole day out of my week, and I will eventually run out of server space, and, if it was very popular, bandwidth, and, money because I would be sued. (It is not very popular.)

I have deleted all of the old talking podcasts from the server.

• The Requiem Metal podcast is still my favorite. Wish they did it more often, but it’s more about the depth they get into, so it’s worth it to go through all the old ones maybe multiple times.
• All of Benjamen Walker’s shows are great.
• The Metal Asylum is a really good show on Radio Valencia, which I think I found looking for the podcast version of the SubGenius show Ask Dr. Hal. But they’ve got a lot of good shows as podcasts. I’m stuck on this one right now tho, even tho it’s on hiatus or maybe done for good, but all those old shows are available. Some killer playlists.
• Hymns to the Dead Goddess is another Metal show on hiatus by another SubGenius, Popess Lilith. It features all bands with at least one female member. Maybe for more open-minded fans of the Female Fronted Heavy Metal project, it’s mostly more recent and more extreme stuff, mostly Death, Black and Grind. Some out-there experimental stuff too, love it.
• Vernon Reid & W. Kamau Bell tackle the question I dare not.
• I don’t always love everything on the It Came From Japan podcast but if you follow J-pop fandoms at all you hear so many crazy opinions and statements the most recent one was really good for my sanity.
• In Skeptics Guide to the Universe 424 they interview someone from the HuffPo which they’ve been really critical of. Which was fair, but I think that’s one of those things that’s alienated people. I think a lot of psudoscientific beliefs are a social or cultural thing where people don’t really believe them, but want to be the kind of person that does. I think they need to get more into the psychology of that. In SGU 426 they have a bit about Ayn Rand who I feel like was getting a pass before. Situation corrected.
• Boing Boing’s Gweek 111 had some interesting stuff about Mark Twain and Atheism.

Postcards

I didn’t forget the Equinox postcard; I’m not doing it anymore. Only doing End of Year/New Years cards now, except for exchanges if anyone still does that. Email for address.

Movies

• The Grandmaster
  I love Wong Kar Wai. I love Tony Leung. I love Bruce Lee. It’s a movie about Bruce Lee’s teacher in China starring Tony Leung. The pieces fit together even better than I thought they would. Seemed like a bit of a sellout move on WKW’s part to make a more or less straight up biopic that is more or less a straight up Kung Fu movie, but it works. Also Zhang Ziyi is still pretty cool. Why are people gonna pretend they don’t like Zhang Ziyi now? Almost half the movie becomes about her character and there’s less than a minute about Bruce Lee but it’s WKW so it just doesn’t matter.

• The Wolverine
  Another movie with Japanese villainry. I just enjoyed this as a dumb action movie and how close Hugh Jackman (+cgi claws) got to looking like the comic book character. Didn’t work in every scene but it was pretty cool when it did.

  I personally hate what they’ve done to the character’s origin with the bone claws and exaggerating the healing thing to where he’s like a vampire. It makes him more like a fantasy character. I used to like him as the hard sci-fi element of the Marvel Universe, where he had these mechanical claws installed somehow. (Finally explained in Barry Windsor Smith’s Weapon X—everything after that is garbage.) Not really the movie’s fault tho. Actually there was a bunch of other stuff that made no sense. The Viper went way too far, giving her random powers…whatever I can’t even think about it anymore. Random point: some people said Huge Jackman is too tall for the character who is supposed to be 5’3″ but did you notice they chose really tall Asians? (Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are models more than actors.) He’s only a few inches taller than them. And most of his bodybuilding was making his upper torso wider; check out how his arms are not that big comparatively. It’s the exact stout kinda look of the character. Pretty impressive. (Yes, I’m ignoring all the previous movies.)

• Life in Japan
  
  Just a doc from the youtube. Reality! Different viewpoints.

Books

David Bryne’s How Music Works is now in paperback. I just finished the (lusciously soft) hardcover. I’m told the paperback has some extra and updated stuff. I guess he talks more about Spotify and stuff like that. Seems like a detail to me. It’s more about a way of thinking about music. It’s not a technical book, it’s for everyone, altho if you aren’t a big Talking Heads/David Byrne fan the details of how he recorded every album he’s done might get boring.

This horse_ebooks thing was fucking bullshit

It’s weird how with the internet making it a million times easier to fact check and remember things people still don’t bother, or even get more forgetful. The New Yorker tracked down the real horse_ebooks guy last year. Now they cover this new story like the old one never happened.

Reporter Gaby Dunn has the insider scoop on this thing. The whole buying out someone’s idea in a non-transparent fashion and using it to market your whatever dumb thing is pretty standard ad world scumbaggery and its the kind of thing you expect to happen more often. But turning it around to where they’re saying they personally planned it that way as “Art” from day one is NOT ART. It’s just lying. That’s like Duchamp saying he designed the toilet. It’s not the point. This other thing they made as “the end product”, sure that could be art, but they’re just some ad dudes so it’s not that interesting by itself. I don’t know what the hell it is, so if it’s not anything else, it must be “art”. Why not.

But they compare it to “a painting”. Gimme a fucking break. I think you could compare a twitter account to a career in stand-up: a never-ending series of performances. Even that’s a stretch, but what stand-up works for a few years, puts all his bits on youtube, stands back and says, “That’s it. There it is: My Painting”. You’d tell that dude to fuck himself in a heartbeat.

Now that I look into it more, I was thinking how lame it was that this Buzzfeed article left out the part where Pronunciation Book started posting joke pronunciations which seemed critical to the “storyline” of the dude behind it all having some mental breakdown, but now I see that was a parody account by someone else (with a better sense of humor):

Moving on.

Numerical notation project

Something I continue to work on. It could be more of a teaching tool than something useful. Is is Art? No I just told you.

New tumblr I already gave up on

I dunno, trying to organize things differently. Might use it again just for reblogs. I’m locked into this weird reblog idea I gotta get out of. Might be Art!

Digital Drums

Highly recommend this course if you are into that kind of thing. It’s changed my mind about working directly into a DAW (ProTools or whatever). I have been recording into either tape or digital recorders and assembling it into Adode Audition and that works so I wasn’t planning an upgrade. But I’ve kinda been planning my whole living situation around having to have a room with real drums setup that I can record, even tho it’s not a great drum room and I don’t have very good mics or know how to use them. Worth learning but if I can get some ideas down that sound good for less than the price of better mics (and I can do this in my own apartment) that’s gotta be the way to do it. Game changer.

What is Rock?

Thing in Sterogum about decline in guitar rock. Makes sense. Meanwhile Billy Corgan says “fuck music”. Is it really music, or Rock Music that kids don’t care about? Or just the idea of “Rock”.

What is Loud?

This thing on the new NIN gives you way more insight than any normal person might care about. BTW, when I make my J-pop vs. Metal mixes, if I have to raise a level it’s almost always on the Metal songs. (In the early ones I didn’t change any levels and you can hear it.) Even the loudest NIN song from the 90s doesn’t get to 0db, but a Perfume ballad does. When I finish the fix, I normalize the whole to -3db and it’s still really loud. If I don’t do that it distorts because I’m making an mp3 of mp3s. It doesn’t sound louder unnormalized, just distorted. When you keep the overall volume lower you can still turn it up and I think it still sounds good.

What is Good?

Nicholas Payton and Zac Brown try to deal with this one in their respective genres. Also, Patrick St. Michael on the music writing game in Japan.

Random followups

• It should be clear that I am only doing “better” financially than some other people because I’ve managed to hold onto my (mostly maxed out) credit cards. I kind of admire people saying fuck it and continuing at full speed ahead but I just made a different choice. If I were trying to be a part of the local music scene (which I’m not even sure I’m trying to do) and I was shitting on other people when I myself am not that big a deal, this would surely and rightly equal my doom. I am not even talking in general, I’m seeing some real specific, bizarre behavior which should not be stood for and if I’m doing 1% of that or if it even seems like it I have to change things up because I might be a total failure but I cannot be THAT guy.
• It should also be clear that I only do self recording right now. That’s all I’ve ever done. Other people are doing a great job recording other bands. I don’t have that setup. Don’t wanna make it sound like I’m doing something that I’m not.
• So anyway the other day I’m listening to myself tell my bullshit story about how I used to be in this band, and it’s not a bullshit story, but it’s bullshit that I still have the feelings and excuses about certain things but it’s like I can’t stop myself in the middle of the story. Gotta watch that.
• This is pretty dumb article for the Guardian. I thought it was supposed to be one of the only good news outlets left. Not worth refuting.
• The new Perfume video is a lot like the those lyrics videos that guy who I said should get paid for making videos made. I’m guessing he did not get paid.
• That course on digital drums reminded me about what I was saying about female drummers. The loudness setting for the drums is called “velocity”. Not “hardness” but “velocity”. That’s because to get the loudest sound out of a drum you don’t just hit it harder, you hit it faster. If you can’t simply crush the drum with muscle power, you can’t make the mistake of doing that. I realize of course that there are female bodybuilders with huge arms, but I’ve never seen one of them play drums. They would be susceptible to the same dude mistake of just slamming the stick down, which chokes the drum. In general it’s more about what they don’t do. I stumbled onto this series on youtube, but it’s pretty random. I’m thinking more like Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss.
• Turned off the follow feature on my facebook profile. I never got public posts to work without making it all public which is not happening. It’s the worst. My “page” (also mostly useless) is here.
• Dungeons & Developers may offer a way out of my Shadowrun obsession that could led to an actual job.
• I said something about how I was mostly into the nihilistic side of Punk, but wasn’t thinking about how much I used to listen to The Clash. Definitely not nihilists. My life did not really make any sense for a number of years, which I recommend, but sometimes it trips you up when writing a retrospective blog post. On the whole I think it’s worth it, and so is listening to Rat Patrol from Bragg which is the demos and outtakes from Combat Rock. (I have lost track of where I got it from but it’s not hard to find.) Only if you already know the album tho, some of the versions are pretty bad. Hearing really bad versions of stuff that a band’s gotten right later is always inspiring to me anyway, probably not fun for everyone.
• I think the period I didn’t listen to Metal at all is now pretty short in a longer view tho.
• “Yelling at the TV” in the real or metaphorical sense is not the same as heckling. Heckling is always intended to be heard by the performer. On the internet it is not always clear what people are intending to do because it is not clear if people are hearing them or not.

Anyway

The official cover to the new M.I.A. single is an animated gif. What, that’s cool. %