Archive for category About
R.E.M.
The recent breakup of R.E.M. didn’t get me too upset. I was going to say their last couple albums weren’t great but checking their wiki it turns out they did a whole 6 albums out after Monster. Wow. Right now I’m listening to their new best-of on NPR. No regrets, I think. I thought Monster was good. It managed to be right on the edge of weird rock I was getting into. Post-Nirvana, a lot of people I knew got more into Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters was a big deal to them. That’s stuff’s ok but didn’t really do it for me. Post-Monster, R.E.M. wasn’t very weird or very rock at all anymore. They could have broken up in 95 as far as I’m concerned.
(Now this is just getting weird. I forgot all about this video.)
I remember a point when I stopped listening to them on purpose. Same thing with Nine Inch Nails, weirdly. I might still have a copy of Monster somewhere and I have a couple of the early ones on vinyl. But Automatic For the People was pretty heavy for a while there. Automatic into The Downward Spiral back-to-back a few times will give you an idea of the mood I sustained for long enough to not want to revisit it. Both great albums tho. (Great CD design on these too, wish I kept them for that alone but couldn’t even look at them anymore.)
Whoa, half way through disc 2 I definitely do not give a fuck anymore. I’ll admit the late 90s stuff was still good, I just wasn’t feeling it at the time. But after that, oh no, not at all. This makes me want to buy a new copy of Eponymous tho. I really recommend that one. All the best early stuff. I don’t even like Green or Out of Time as albums, never bought them. Some great songs, but they are all played to death on radio. (They do not even include Radio Song on here, which was kind of a hit, but was pretty annoying. [Sorry, KRS!] Not nearly as annoying as Shiny Happy People tho.) I think the only early song I knew when I got Eponymous was It’s End of the World, which is the last song and I decided pretty quick it was the worst of the bunch. Still like it but it’s that good of a collection. It also has the single version of Radio Free Europe, which is a better mix. It might have a couple different versions of other songs. All those songs have great production.
REM’s demo tape is now floating free. Worth a listen. Interesting back story on that tape going through a member of the Philly band Bunny Drums at a gig in a venue in Cherry Hill, NJ which I never knew existed.
So that’s interesting. %
1-11-11 11-1-11 11-11-1
Why celebrate a world divided by arbitrary date orders?
Save it. 11-11-11 Gelatine celebrates their 11th anniversary.
They seem to have dialed down the horror aspect of the image since I last checked in with them. (The singer used to dress as a bloodied, diapered mummy.) They’ve always seemed to be inspired a lot visually by Junko Mizuno. But it’s gotta be a good show either way. %
Apologies to RSS readers of the old blog
Sorry, I’ve turned the redirect on and off a few times. Thought I had found a way to redirect the main page without redirecting the feed but it hasn’t worked, so there’s a large gap that starts with talking about this blog like it’s been here for a while. It has, couple years now. You haven’t missed much (some top 10 lists). I didn’t plan the RSS to redirect at all it’s just a thing that happens. I liked the idea of a clean full stop to the old feed, which is why I stopped the redirection and deleted the feed. But I wanted the page gone without deleting the blog. I found a way to delete the feed (unless you were already subscribed), and everything looked nice and neat. But the internet is not nice and neat and apparently has its own idea of how things go down. It’s possible you’ve even visited the page without noticing the url change. I really didn’t make it clear. Or I might have in a posted the explanation in an entirely new feed. (Not much use to you! Heh heh, please subscribe to the new feed.) According to Google there are still 15 of you. (There were only 10 when the blog was running and that’s still 9 more than sub to the new one.) Of course the internet isn’t as popular as it was 2 years ago, so I can’t expect much. (Altho people say RSS is dead, but I gained readers on a dead blog.)
If I can keep it going in some kind of consistent direction, I might become a fan enough of my own work to make a facebook fan page. So far I’ve mostly been into the design of the thing. But if everyone looks at the net on their phone now (…when did nerds become such fashion victims, just saying…) it’s probably not a great idea to keep spending time on how it looks on the screen. “How about the writing, Jim, maybe work on the writing more.” Yeah, that’s a good one, Disembodied Voice Of The Blog. “Have you thought about maybe writing some record reviews?” This post is OVER. %
I got into Hello Project for the classy material.
[This has just been sitting in my drafts for a while. I have no further comment. Happy Halloween.]
Anki for October
In about a week, I’ll be finished all of the new cards in Core 2000. I’m not going to keep updating about it here anymore. I need to be writing in Japanese on a regular basis so I’ll be doing that on Netlog (There’s one entry!) Need to get over sounding clever. Spending the rest of November with the JLPT stuff on jpod101. I feel like this test is either going to real easy and I’m worried for nothing or I will mega-bomb it and totally blank. Either way it’s kept me focused on studying so no regrets there. The blogging also helps. It’s my damn blog I can hijack it for whatever. It would be really easy to give up on the Anki right about now. Shit just piles up like crazy. I don’t think you can do more than 3 at a time and really be learning. I am just powering through all these new cards, it’s stuff I’m supposed to know already anyway. It really tricks you into thinking it’s going to easy when it starts out—I’m just saying this for the noobs—do not try to start 10 decks at once. And really, if you really are starting out, I don’t think self-teaching even saves you that much money. Go to a class, make some friends or something. I have just doomed myself with this thing, it’s ridiculous. でも。。。fuck it. It couldn’t have worked out different for me. I should have done something different 10, 15 years ago not last week. So whatever. Gotta keep focused on what to do right now. %
Recent Comments