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Category: bullets & links.

music recommendation.

Posted on by Marko

I’m sort of a late adopter, but I love Pandora now. I was suffering from severe Playlist Fatigue Syndrome with my iTunes library, and Pandora has fixed that issue for me rather handily.

We paid for the annual subscription to get commercial-free streaming. It’s nice to have an infinite playlist matching a particular mood or kind of song, but it’s also damn nice to discover stuff you hadn’t heard of before. I like writing to movie soundtracks and instrumentals because there are no lyrics to distract me from what’s on the page, and some of the very best stuff I’ve found has been by the Nick Cave & Warren Ellis collaboration. The soundtrack to The Road, for example, is very powerful and haunting.

But the best of the Cave/Ellis albums so far is the soundtrack to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It’s a great, great album of elegiac mood music, and the last track (“Song for Bob”) is worth the purchase price of the album all by itself.

I’ve discovered so many of my favorite writers or musicians this way–there’s a sample or a free copy available online, you sample, you like, you buy. Reading the free copy of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, for example, resulted in me buying all the rest of Scalzi’s books with cash money, so I’d say that the “First One’s Free!” strategy really does pay off.

bullets & links.

Posted on by Marko
  • Gogol Bordello. Holy shit, why haven’t I heard of these guys before? It’s exactly what it says on the tin—gypsy punk—and for some reason I can’t stop listening to it. Robin hates the one song she has heard so far, but you know what they say about taste. Let’s just say that the Vanilla Ice “To The Extreme” CD that I found in our combined CD collections after we got married wasn’t mine.
  • Readercon. I’ll be there for most of the weekend, from Friday afternoon to Sunday noon-ish. Most of the Viable Paradise crew from last year will be there again, and I’ll get to meet a few new VPers I’ve only met on the Intertwitters so far. This is my one big con event for the year—I go to Boskone as well, but only for the day on Saturday—so I’m looking forward to talking shop and destroying ethanol with some of my favorite unsavory writer types again.
  • A Swedish zookeeper was eaten by wolves. She was delicious.
  • I finally finished watching all the Avengers precursor movies. The last one on the list was 2008’s Hulk. All of them were perfectly serviceable and entertaining, but if I had to put them in a ranking, it would go Iron Man > Thor > Iron Man 2 > Captain America > Hulk. It seems we needed to get to 2012 until a SFX crew managed a CGI Hulk that doesn’t look like he was Rotoscoped out of  a mediocre video game.
  • Chicken count: still 9. They needed a bit of coaxing to accept their new digs. The first night, I had to get their little wooden coop out and move it to its original location, at which point they all breathed a collective “Thank fuck” and filed in to roost for the night. Then I had to carry the coop back into Cluckheim Keep, chickens and all. The second evening, we had to corral them and herd the flock into the Keep. The third evening, I just had to kind of walk them in, no coaxing required. Now they actually use the roosting spots in the Keep to hang out during the day, so they must be taking to it.
  • Friend Mark pointed me to a website that sells repackaged old DOS games, rigged with DOSbox to be playable on modern Windows XP/Vista/7 boxes. (All the games are licensed from their original copyright holders.) Just for nostalgia, I bought a copy of Wing Commander III for $5.99. If you young whippersnappers want to check out what kind of games we old geezers played on our 50-megahertz 486s with 8MB of RAM, there are some fine classic examples of 1990s PC gaming on there for a song and a dance. The graphics are way dated now, of course, but the games are still fun, and surprisingly complex for programs that had to fit into 1/1000th the memory you carry around in your cell phone today.

Thus endeth today’s linkapalooza. Now I have to make some lunch to feed the beasts, and the chickens, too.