Fave 2013 records (actually done before the end of the year!)

I'll make a spotify playlist eventually … in the meantime 

Records I liked in 2013:
=================

My Bloody Valentine - MBV. A shoutout to their past that evolves into a futuristic sounding thing. 
http://pitchfork.com/news/49344-my-bloody-valentine-share-new-album-mbv-site-crashes-check-out-cover-art-and-tracklist-now/

Savages - Silence Yourself. A dark nervy record. And they are absolutely fantastic live. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuIB8HEmnoY

Devendra Banhart - Mala. Very underrated and cheeky album. 
http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/mala

Bleached - Ride Your Heart. I'm a sucker for shambly C86 style indie pop
https://myspace.com/hellobleached

Kids On A Crime Spree - Creep the Creeps EP. A garagey take on indie pop. Oakland style. 
http://www.slumberlandrecords.com/catalog/show/253

Legs - Pass the Ringo. Can I say indie pop Oakland style again?
http://logladyrecords.com/ll012-legs-pass-the-ringo/

Lorde - Pure Heroine. I know she was overplayed, but this kid is only 16. and writes her own music. and she is good. and she is from NZ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcIKh6sBtc (Yes - you've seen this before, but listen to again anyway)

Daftside - Random Access Memories Memories. Daft Punk never really did it for me. This remix record by Nicolas Jaar et al. (Darkside) was much weirder and far more interesting than RAM IMO.
https://soundcloud.com/daftside-2/sets/random-access-memories-1

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City. They do well-crafted studio pop and they do it right. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANznirklths

Disclosure - Settle. Dark, dancey and british.
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18091-disclosure-settle/


Older records deserving a shout:
=======================
Various Artists - Rocket Infinity: The Global Rise Of Rocking Music, 1942-62 - digs up allfthese gems from around the world interpreting early rocknroll. Ace Bunny Killer! 
http://www.discogs.com/Various-Rocket-Infinity-The-Global-Rise-Of-Rocking-Music-1942-62/release/4219704

Suicide - S/T - Holy crap - this is so good and so different from anything else that came out of the 70s. Fuzzy distorted almost-electronic music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LayQ98lR8I

you down with btc?

is there a non-sketchy way to do bitcoin?

Open Letter To Myself

Don't try twerking. You are not a sex object. Plus, you lack the necessary rotational flexibility in your hips.

Also, white lines - don't do it.

Call Me Carly

First read this.

If you still don't appreciate the best song of the decade, well, maybe you hate life. Or maybe you haven't watched the actual video which was kind of a game changer and a subtle sign towards the upcoming political upheavals of the following summer.

Go watch it. I'll wait. There! Feel better? Also - catchy as hell, innit!

OK - you've caught the earworm. Go try this:


Now that you're in the mood, let's slow down the original by a teeny bit:

And we'll close it out with some Star Wars action:

There you go. coredumpin - your one stop shop for the greatest song of the decade. 

Link Dump Saturday

• Octopus Project - Truck: http://vimeo.com/5656770 OMG Earworm!
• Entropy is not as entropic as you think: http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/encryption-is-less-secure-than-we-thought-0814.html
• CS Refresher - Topological Sort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting
• Back when the North Sea was landlocked, we had Doggerland: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-18687504
• This is everything I love about little indie Flash games: http://jayisgames.com/games/experimental-shooter-2/

'twas a good day

• Listening to: Tristeza - Paisajes
• Drinking: Ryan and the Beaster Bunny
• Easting: Leftovers from Nick's and Homeroom
• Reading: Dai Sijie - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
• Earlier in the day: 
• Coffee at CRO
• Doughnuts at Doughnut Dolly
• Breakfast at Homeroom
• Biking up Cyclotron road (demons bested!)
• Swimming in Roberts Pool

pre-retraction

So I was about to embark on one of my unsolicited rants re: the whole BBQ thing and how I don't get why it is such a popular phenomenon when most barbecued foods are kinda meh etc., when E reminded me that this is probably because I don't eat meat. Oh yeah - good call. I guess barbecue makes a lot more sense when meat is involved. I got nothing.

non-gate

Oh man. The conspiracy theories are starting to fly again. In response, I give you the words of Alan Moore:

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
–Alan Moore, “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” (2003)

  
I am a big believer in incompetence ultimately triumphing over any well-orchestrated secret plan. Over time, stuff goes wrong and things come out. If anything, the age of the internet has proven that there are no secrets. There is always a whistle-blower, always an anonymous tip that makes it impossible to hide anything for very long. This is not to say that conspiracies don't happen. It is just that incompetence and dysfunction are often better explanations than any grand unified theory of whatever. I've seen all sorts of badly photoshopped images trying to link the Boston / Sandy Hook / 911 etc. to a government cover up, when the reality (botched foreign policy over time leading to radicalization) is more complex and harder to actually fix.

I generally find conspiracy theories to be far too simplistic and neatly tied together i.e. made up. Real conspiracies, more often than not, look nothing like the theories surrounding them. We're at a point where any given major event (good or bad) evokes a set of conspiracy theories without a lot of critical thought going into [i] whether said theory makes any sense, and [ii] whether the conspiracy theory actually detracts from a very real underlying problem. For example it is a lot easier to claim that climate change is a conspiracy and much harder to deal with the reality that we may have irreparably fucked our ecosystem. 

Which is all really just a longer-winded and less articulate version of Alan Moore's quote.

(cobbled together from a longish Facebook thread)

schadenfreude

[Warning: Sports related post ahead]

Top 10 schadenfreude inducers

1. The Utah Jazz (BTW - can we all agree that this is the most ill-fitting team name of all time?)
2. Ryan Lochte
3. Skip Bayless
4. Clay court tennis specialists (Rafa leads the charge on this one)
5. Smokin' Jay Cutler
6. Atlanta Sports Teams (Is it just me or do all Atlanta sports teams blend into one? Like a giant ball of slightly above-average mediocrity)
7. Cristiano Ronaldo
8. The Dallas Cowboys
9. The New York Jets
10. Tim Tebow (the Tebow-NYJ nexus has been schedenfreude heaven)

also, happiness is all the rage

ah - emo! :)

flat design is all the rage

• http://designmodo.github.com/Flat-UI/
• http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/32267022219/flat-interface-design
• http://sachagreif.com/flat-pixels/

wait

When did I turn 36?

dst

Some Observations:

• People are not happy about Daylight Saving Time.
• (Some) people are finally catching on to the proper spelling: Daylight Saving Time - no trailing 's' in 'Saving'.
• Be honest now, people. Don't you like having an extra hour of sunlight in the evening? Also, you can look forward to that extra hour of sleep when November 3 finally rolls around.

expiration date

This needs to be a rule: Technical articles and blog posts *must* have a date. Always.

I was looking around for articles on how to merge my Twitter feed with Blogger. I found a ton of outdated information, that was, of course, *not* actually dated, making it was impossible to gauge relevance. I think I poked around the internet for about half an hour before stumbling upon something that worked.

(Solution that works as of 2013/02/24: Embed the code snippet generated by https://twitter.com/settings/widgets into your blog layout HTML)

With rapid release cycles and constantly evolving software, blog posts have limited shelf-lives and often only apply to specific versions of the product. It is incumbent on anyone that seeks to document or write about software to understand this. The crazy thing is I've seen this on Wired, Salon and a bunch of other reputable publications. A Google search for "add twitter feed to blogger" yields a surprisingly high number of outdated AND undated results.

Now part of this is Twitter's fault for messing with their API and terms of service. But this is unfortunately the way things are when software isn't completely open. The end user is held hostage by the folks controlling the software. OK - Now I'm starting to sound like RMS. Which probably means I should sign off.

But seriously - software really does need to be open.

apologies for 2012

So I never did post a best-of list for 2012. I listened to a lot of music, but somehow very little actually stuck. In the end I felt like I could throw something together but it would be the equivalent of fakin' it.

There was certainly some interesting music. Fiona Apple and Neneh Cherry put out some pretty cool weird-good records (mad newfound respect y'all!). I mean, you can't go wrong with a name like "The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do".  And Ssion did a wonderful Erasure reprisal.

But ultimately, the record that completely and totally rocked my socks off, and made the infinte-repeat playlist for the year was something that was released in 2011. Wax Idols - "No Future" on Hozac. It made a best-of list completely meaningless because nothing in 2012 came close. Yes - it is that good!

The good news is that 2013 is already starting out pretty solid - MBV, Veronica Falls, Eat Skull, Matmos ... and we're only in February.

<full disclosure>I still haven't properly listened to the Frank Ocean album, and I should pretty much stop talking about music until I do that.</full disclosure>