a compliment

11:24 Booj http://nedry.blogspot.com/
11:24 tumult haha why does your website look like micromusic

Fuckin' weird shit

This book is either amazing or really stupid.

Notice the site is hosted at my beloved university! (More on this at the bottom...)

It's called Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves, by Cliff Pickover. It's supposed to be this grand synthesis of all sorts of strange physics/mind/philosophical/mystical/scientific ideas. SOUNDS good, but it seems on the verge of being a fakey New Age type bullshit. For example, the website has a picture of a pineal gland as the illustration for Chapter 4. Presumably, then, Cliff here is going to be talking about how Descartes viewed the pineal gland as the point at which the soul interacts with the physical world. Well, that sounds all mystical, and it would be except for the fact that Descartes just made it up because he couldn't think of any better explanation for how his particular brand of dualism worked.

Still, it could be interesting. No way it can be better than my favorite.

Anybody else know of any books like this?

Edit:
Also, this guy's main site is just great. Lots of good stuff like aliens, mobius strips and an amazing graphics page.

He is also somehow involved in some of the weirdest blogs I've ever seen, including the Women of Wikipedia. He's pretty creepy, actually, and he definitely has some of the crazy charismatic cult leader thing going on. Notice the "crew" he has to moderate this really weird blog; they're all young women! Polygamist???????????????????

I also cannot find any information on WHY this site is hosted on wisc.edu--he doesn't say he has any connections to University of Wisconsin. Looks like this guy named Clint Sprott (what's with these weird names? Something weird going on here...) just wants to host this stuff for him. Cool, I guess.

Fuckin' weird shit.

Tracking in Mainstream - It's Time

Found this remix of Sebastian Tellier's big hit Divine remixed by Danger, who has been really quite awesome lately.

This song is DEFINITELY fucking TRACKED.
Listen to the beginning. That is a TRACKER.
And the rest of it bears hints of tracking. (listen to those drums (and how they're NOT hyper-compressed) and the distorted guitars near the end) In fact, it doesn't really sound like a Danger song because, while the other Danger songs do bear some marks of having tracked, they definitely don't sound like they're actually tracked.
But this does. It doesn't even sound like it's gone through any mastering to add the trademark blog-house hyper-compression. Weird.

Anyway.
I can't find a direct mp3, so that stream is all I got. Sorry babys.

UPDATE:
Found a zshare download for this mofo.

Here's the new WSUM-Badger Herald podcast!

Music Licensing

This is mostly a note to myself to remember this article on music licensing and how to make money off it by a very nice member (zircon) of my favorite IRC channel, #vgmix on irc.vgmix.com.
http://soundtempest.net/how-to-make-money-from-music-licensing/
Thanks zircon!

Update:
And a short but sweet vid.

Ironic

While procrastinating from doing homework, I found this article on how to be more productive. It's not mind-blowing, but it's not some shitty newspaper article either. This guy has a few insights. He introduces the idea of a "mental force-field" that your brain builds up around certain tasks that keeps you from being able to do them, and comes up with different reasons why these happen and how to fix them.
I also found this funny website called Smacklet that purports to help one focus by making you write down what you were just doing and what you intend to do next, so you have to spell it out for yourself and can look back and see what you were supposed to have done earlier.
So now that I know how to be productive, I guess I have to get back to work, huh?

Update:
Two more things of note I found tonight.
Article by the same guy called Who Writes Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales says it's an elite group of 500 collaborators. But our friend here does his own analysis and determines that these 500 elites only end up formatting the original content that many other small-time collaborators actually write.

Color photos from the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Covers

Everybody knows the Mario Paint composer. And how hard it is to make an actual song with it. Well, somebody can. He's got a ton of video game covers up on his YouTube account. Here are some highlights.




The Guile one is even better! YES! I SAID GUILE!!!

Some Castlevania song I should know--this is one of his more recent, so it's REALLY impressive.


And a video tangential to all this (warning, 12 minutes long)

I am proud to say that I discovered that you could go 3-D in Rad Racer LAST NIGHT, before I saw this! Bam Angry Video Game Nerd! Now I just need to find my 3-D glasses though.

Fuck Buttons

One of the songs on Fuck Buttons new album is really killer. It is called "Ribs Out". Very tribal. Animal Collective meets Gang Gang Dance meets the soundtrack to Shivers.

Here's a video of them performing it at SXSW, which I saw live when I was there with KCRW. The song doesn't sound as good as the studio version, but you get the idea.


Update:
Here's a sweet video somebody made for another one of their songs. A few of the songs, like this one, are very reminiscent of Dan Deacon blazin' on some hot digital distortion--pep!.

Funny Shit

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have a new album (their fourteenth) entitled Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. Yeah, I know, who cares, right? Well, I thought this video was pretty funny. Recommended especially if you're Shane. High quality version here.