What I'm listening to: Spring '09

I found some new music that I like a lot, and for whatever reason I've lately felt compelled to promote some music I've had for a long time. I have started writing down song titles that I think friends might like in my phone. That's great, but I never write down why I think the friend might enjoy the music, or what made me think of it. I do the same thing with Netflix, and the result is the same: I'm always wondering why the hell did I get this movie (or song)?

These songs are from my list of music for bill, one of the two (three?) readers of my blog. I had already published Mum's "Nightly Cares" here, so I left that out, and unfortunately I was unable to easily download an MP3 version of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Cheated Hearts". Perhaps the industrious reader can find it himself. Of the remaining five songs, two are old favorites: PJ Harvey's The Wind, and Cash by Sugar Ray.

The other three are new(er). Everybody loves M.I.A., but not everybody loves her new, weirder album. That's because not everybody has heard "Mango Pickle Down River (with the Wilcannia Mob)". I hope to rectify that lack here. Similarly, some may have heard Simple Kid's "Little King Kong" on the radio, while not realizing that his album is actually fantastic. "Serotonin" is a nice example, but really the whole thing is good. Last and definitely not least is the little gem that apparently made everybody's 2008 top ten list: "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver. I'm posting Blindsided, but in fact every track on that album is fantastic, especially if you like quiet music to go into a remote shack in the woods and shoot yourself to. Well, actually I don't really think it's that depressing, but it is darkly emotional and moody. Hopefully you will enjoy it as much as me.

The Wind, PJ Harvey

Cash, Sugar Ray

Mango Pickle, M.I.A.

Serotonin, Simple Kid

Blindsided, Bon Iver

Liz Phair

My friend Derek developed a sudden interest in Liz Phair. Who wouldn't? Anyway, he asked me to post some stuff by here so here it is. Not much of a blog entry, I know, but I guess my "new" music distribution policy requires me to post music here rather than distributing it secretly.

California
Can't Get Out of What I'm Into (Steady Job)
Johnny Sunshine

The Occasional Blogger

The way I see it, one can't blog all the time. It helps me a lot to have two long weekends in a row and nothing in particular to do during either of them. In order to avoid feeling like a total slug while sitting around all day watching tennis, I blog.

Bill and I have recently had an email exchange about music. I don't like to be elitist or preferential, so instead of just mailing him some music I'm putting it here on my blog in the usual way. If there's anyone else actually reading this, you need not expect to enjoy this music as it has been selected to match Bill's particular tastes. Of course, Bill may not like it either. Time will tell. Here's the new music.

Sun Kil Moon: Carry Me Ohio
Loose Fur: Chinese Apple
Dizzee Rascal: Dream
Poe: Haunted
Múm: Nightly Cares
Amadou & Mariam: Politic Amagni

PS I bought a condo!

Now hiring: QA personnel

I made sure to set expectations low when I published version 0.1 of Domination. Maybe they were a little too low. A few people ran it, and to their credit, they did get back to me to mention that it didn't seem to work. But I knew it had a few annoying but ultimately non-critical bugs that might make it appear not to work. Plus I had, of course, tested the program quite a bit. I'd even smoke-tested it from inside the jar file, to make sure it worked from that way, by starting it up and moving a few units around. Everything was fine. Well, it turns out if I had just tried to play through to the next turn, I would have seen the crippling bug that stopped all my friends from playing!

As if that weren't bad enough, as soon as I shipped that program, I simultaneously moved to a new source code repository and ripped the game apart for a total rewrite. This meant I was unable to even publish a fixed version (the bug was quite minor). But I haven't forgotten you my dear and unfortunate testers - I've been hard at work over the past two weeks and finally I am pleased to announce: Version 0.2! As far as I can tell, this one actually works. It even has help, kind of.

Please play, enjoy, and tell me what you love and hate about it. I'm not planning on ever getting rich off this program, and I already have the final feature set (including multiplayer) in mind, but I think it would be nice if people eventually wanted to play it a little, so I'm interested in any advice anyone has that might contribute to that. Oh, and of course, if you want to get your hands dirty and write some code, contact me and I will set you up right away!

Domination

Wow, almost five months have passed without a blog entry. That's really a bit much. I wanted to put up a couple of songs a week for a while, but I guess I never got around to it. Well, at least I've finally gotten around to releasing version 0.1 of the game I've been working on, Domination. It's a cheap rip-off of some old Mac game I used to play and enjoy, but that I've forgotten the name of. It's also barely functional so be prepared for a lot of bugs, including some nasty display issues. Oh, also be prepared to have no idea what's going on, because I'm not going to give you a help file or anything. But the right mouse button moves a unit, the left button selects a unit (and the hex it's in - cities are hard to notice but rather critical!), 's' puts a unit to sleep (there's a menu item too), space skips a unit and enter ends the turn (when all your units have either moved or are following orders from a previous turn). There's no sound but there are some rather pathetic graphic effects. Oh, and the game saves automatically at the end of every turn, so if it goes kablooie, you can always select Game/Open and start where you left off. One more thing, of course it requires the Java 5.0 Runtime Environment (which you don't have) - "java -jar domination.jar". If I could release a half-game faster than Sun releases an entire major revision of their language, you wouldn't feel like you have to download 200 megs of cruft every time you want to play my 150K programs. Anyway, good luck!

PS I got a job

Fading into Obscurity

I bet some of you out there would have expected me to get a job by now. Well I guess you are going to be surprised because I still haven't started looking. I guess the word is disillusionment - although spending all day every day lounging around the house isn't always exactly pleasant, it's slightly better than working (except there's no money in it). I'm not enough of a hedonist to believe this should be the case. Ideally, work would be stimulating, exciting, and fulfilling - at least some of the time. Not so with the last few (several?) jobs I've had, so these days lounging looks pretty good.

Well, at least it lets me occasionally take some time out to peruse my music collection and bring some (possibly) new and exciting tunes to you, my dear reader. I've decided to replace my music page with direct links from here, and I'm also going to retire songs once they've been up for a while, to save space.

This latest batch started as a coincidence of two musical interests. A friend went to see Blackalicious and reminded me I hadn't pushed any Quannum propaganda for a while; and I finally watched Three Kings and heard some cool French rap in the soundtrack. So all this thinking about music created an urge to update my blog.

I've been trying to track down good French rap for some time, with limited success. One band I found a while ago is called Loco Locass. They're actually French Canadian but whatever, I'm sure it's basically the same thing. So here's their song Groove Grave. The band from Three Kings is Plastic Bertrand, and you can listen to their song Stop ou Encore. As for our Northern California friends, many of you hopefully are already familiar with 8 Point Agenda, a song Latyrx did with backup from the Herbalizer. Perhaps you have not heard Burnin Hot in Cali on a Saturday Night, an excellent Latyrx-Blackalicious enterprise.

Enjoy!

New Music and a New Year

Yah it's 2006. So far I can't say I'm exactly fired up about it, but somehow it always feels nicer starting something new than finishing something old. I enter the year - again! - at loose ends. I haven't even started looking for a job, though after the astounding unpaid tax claim I just got from the IRS, I may have to start. But I have a couple of things to take care of first. Sundance is looming in the near distance, and I have to finish reading the Illiad. But after those items are taken care of, it's Next Stop The Future and I will be getting on with finding a depressing and menial, though well-paying, line of work to follow. One wonders where one will be in January 2007.

Check out the new music, including Imogen Heap's scarily good new song.