Not enough records, too much time

All you serious music fanatics should make a point to check out the pretty nearly daily review blog A Look Inside My Record Collection. It belongs to d.n.l., both one of my oldest friends and one of my earliest musical mentors. He's been a music journalist of one stripe or another for close to thirty years now, which works out well since he loves music and and loves writing about it.

We met back when he was working at the local indie record store and I was a teenager eager to discover new sounds. At first I thought he liked everything, but I quickly realized he was actually a very discriminating listener...with the broadest and most diverse musical tastes of anyone on the planet.

The point of his blog is straight forward enough: to review records from his personal collection. To this day I've only met one other person with a larger record collection than d.n.l. and I still have yet to meet anyone with even a fraction as much musical knowledge. I can guarantee you that you'll be entertained, surprised and more educated than you were before you started reading it.

Do you like my la la?

la la just created this cool little flash doo-hicky to let people browse the CDs I have available for trading via this here blog:





Pretty cool!

(In case you missed my earlier post, I'm pretty well hopelessly addicted to la la.)

The dance hit that's filling tubes worldwide!

In case you somehow missed this, the DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix:



Much love to Paul Holcomb for the music and 13tongimp for the video. Frightening to think that someone as out of touch with reality as Stevens can be a U.S. Senator, let alone Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Operation Depth Charge: Last.fm gets a makeover

The awesome social music networking site Last.fm has gone live with it's updates/upgrades for the summer, and things are looking pretty sexy.

I've been using Last.fm in one guise or another for the last three years. I love having charts and history of my listening habits, since music is one of the true loves of my life (taking a distant second to my incomparable wife of course). Given that the Internet is another of my loves, the chance to combine the two is irresistible – thinking about the number of music CDs and DVDs I've bought from Amazon over the years shows just how irresistible. A site that not only tracks my listening habits and allows me to share them with others, discover new music and fellow music lovers based on my personal tastes, and listen to my music from any internet-enabled computer anywhere? That's pure gold.

For some time now, Last.fm has had a quirky set of apps and plugins to do all this tracking and recommending, and a cool but cluttered interface for the website itself. This latest push, codenamed “Operation Depth Charge”, has made major improvements to the website's usability and given it a much more polished, fun and dare I say Web 2.0 look and feel. The Last.fm player has also gotten a major overhaul, improving it's usability and usefulness pretty dramatically.

Unfortunately the part that kind of got overlooked was the array of plugins and apps that allow you to report your offline mp3 player listening -- all but one of these, YamiPod, have been abandoned in the wake of the new upgrades and are no longer to be officially supported going forward. The jury's still out on whether I'm going to be as happy with that as I have been with the now-unsupported-by-Last.fm iScrobbler plugin, but I imagine I'll get inspired to let you all know when I've formed an opinion...

Ecto-riffic

The best blogging tool I've found so far is ecto, an editor for both Mac & Windows that supports multiple weblog formats. I fell in love with Fraser Speirs' excellent Xjournal back when I was active on LiveJournal, but that one won't help me here. (Don't miss his essential FlickrExport if you're an iPhoto user)

Ecto does a lot of the things I need it to, like keep an offline archive of my posts, allowing me to construct posts offline, and plugging in nicely to iPhoto, iTunes, Amazon, Technorati, etc. I used it for a few days and then happily paid the modest $17.95 fee to keep it. The only thing I wish it did better was image insertions from a URL. it just doesn't seem to offer as much flexibility as Blogger's own online composition tools in that regard.

I do certainly recommend it, but I'd be happy to hear from you, fellow bloggers, if you have another (Mac-compatible) tool you like better.

Sunshine on the horizon

Danny Boyle (director of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Shallow Grave and more) has a new sci-fi psychological thriller in post-production called Sunshine.

As a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris (yes, Soderbergh's version) and other intellectually charged “space” movies, I'm pretty well convinced that I am gonna have to see this one. From checking out the story, the visual approach, the cast, and the teaser at the movie's impressive website, it looks like it's going to be much more than the sum of it's parts....

Oh yeah, did I mention that the soundtrack for the film is going to be handled by UNDERWORLD? Yeah baby! Hearing the stuff they've been working on in the RiverRun series, I'm completely stoked!

Green Lantern as metaphor for U.S. military policy

Got turned onto this via the Blog@Newsarama today:

In a recent post entitled “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics”, political blogger Matthew Yglesias makes a dead-on comparison between the conservative view of U.S. national (read: global) security policy and the Green Lantern Corps.

Now I always knew Guy Gardner was a Republican, but now I have to consider the notion that all the best Green Lanterns are as well. Quite a blow to a liberal GL-lovin' fanboy like myself.

A year in the DCU, one week at a time

I just wanted to say a few words here about how much I'm enjoying DC Comics' fantastic experiment, 52.

The logistics alone of putting out a comic on a weekly schedule would be enough to crush the average creator, but this one is committed to unfolding it's epic, multi-threaded story line in real time -- when it's July 4th in the real world, that week's issue of 52 includes the fireworks. This series however, is the work of the very top creators in mainstream comics: Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison, and Keith Giffen. Imagine them co-plotting, co-writing, collaborating together with a rotating roster of artists. Seriously, what are the chances (even if they did manage to push something out the door every week) that it wouldn't suck eventually?

Maybe impossibly, 52 is the best read on the stands. It's serial entertainment at its most rewarding, combining the very best of of the comics storytelling form with the complexities and pacing of great episodic television like LOST. They have the job of telling the story of what happened in the DC Universe when Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman all decided to take a year off and rethink their roles. So what emerges in that power vacuum?

The story follows some very interesting characters that have not often seen the spotlight in previous stories, and uses the developments in their lives to paint a grand, sweeping picture of the state of the DCU. The tale is told in the exquisite, riveting detail that you could only get from a 1144-page epic, with great pains taken by the creators to flesh out the minutiae of life in this new world. There's even a website devoted to that minutiae, 52thecomic.com, complete with weekly articles and editorials straight from The Daily Planet.

It's incredibly compelling reading, and it's got me more excited about comics than ever.

Hello Squarepusher!

Just received this in my inbox from Warp:



Enjoy the musical madness!