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Buckshot Ep. 11: Shows

adam — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:21:17 +0000

Too many shows to make full length single show reviews:

Thursday: Opeth at Monarch event center. Monarch Event Center used to be a movie theater, it's not anywhere near Red River and 6th, it's in a strip mall off Airport Blvd. Not only that, they hung plastic butterflies (get it? monarch?) on shiny strings from the ceiling at 4' intervals. The string of metal kids queueing through the parking lot was all kinds of incongruous.
- Baroness: Your bog-standard post-metal band, longform crescendo dynamics. At least they didn't take themselves too seriously, with the singer playing his guitar by beating it against his head, and grinning furiously through the entire set.
- High on Fire: Nobody takes themselves less seriously than Matt Pike, though. The straightforward sweatyshirtlessmacho presence perfectly compliments their hard-hitting wall of sound and shouted anthems.
- Opeth: I'm an Opeth fanboi, I admit. A couple of false starts on A Fair Judgement and Face of Melinda are the only complaints. I love everything about their shows, the stage banter, the crowd that knows all the stops and starts of all the songs on all 8 albums.
Friday: Wolves in The Throne Room at Red 7. I love the oddball pairings of shows between the patio and the main stage, and this was no exception, with the super-indie crowd outside and the black metal kids spilling outside to smoke. In South America or Russia, this would probably have resulted in a riot, in Austin, I wasn't the only metal kid enjoying the blistering emocore:
- Bridge and Tunnel: An accidental show, outside on the patio while smoking and waiting for the show inside. I loved the two songs I heard from CYSTSFTS, but hadn't done anything about it, there's only so much music I can dig into in a year. Definitely digging into them now, though. Their high-speed mid-90's emocore with 3 layered vocalists is great.
- Nachtmystium: Their latest album, Assassins, lays bare their worship of Pink Floyd, from the Black Meddle subtitle, and the opening cover of One Of These Days (I'm going to cut you into pieces). They're in a tough niche, though, going up against Enslaved, who incorporate more psychadelia in their black metal at every outing. Nachtmystium has other tricks up their sleeves, though, pulling punk-ish shouted choruses into the mix, making their show an electric, fist-pumping shout-along, more so even than HoF the night before. They encored with a Motorhead cover, and it's appropriate. They retain the aggression of metal, despite their psychadelic experimentation.
- WITTR: Their albums alternate between atmospheric pieces and pieces played so fast, and so sonically compressed, that they feel ambient, because they just wash over you. Live, they have a similiar disconnect, but the effect is completely different. Their frontman doesn't look very metal, his short haircut, beard, and overly large glasses belie their eco-terrorist ethos. At the start of the set, he removes the glasses, and performs with his eyes closed for the duration. Live, the vocals are not buried in the mix, there's a man screaming his lungs out, completely entranced by his performance, and a brutal assault of insanely fast black metal that's too intense to participate in, even the band is headbanging at a quarter the speed of their riffs.
Sunday: Mucca Pazza at Maker Faire: Maker Faire was all kinds of brilliant. We saw robot wars, mentos/diet coke fountains, the world's largest mousetrap, and Mucca Pazza were the completely fitting end to it all. I happened to arrive at the right moment, to be followed by the band as they danced/marched from the mousetrap to their sun drenched fire truck of a stage. Their show is bungle-esque, this is the third time I've seen them (twice at Looptopia), and they're a blast every time.

Buckshot Ep. 7

adam — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:00:14 +0000

What is it the new winamp reminds me of? oh yeah, the open source product of one of the original winamp guys, Songbird. Except even with all it's podcatching and blog-reading capabilities, it still tries to manage my music collection, rather than just indexing it. so while songbird finds my new music in a couple minutes, winamp still chokes on the import, and I wind up dragging folders into the now playing window anyway. Open Source FTW.
from the Apple Sucks Department: Tuesday, my wife picked up her ibook from apple's genius bar. Wednesday, I went to pick up a new power cord from microcenter. Why? the genius bar has this policy that anything you leave on their counter, or that isn't itemized on the intake manifest, they can't return to you. Never mind that last time, it was the iSkin that we didn't see whether they listed on the manifest, or that the ~~idiot~~ "genius" set the power cord out of sight when testing the power connection with his own cable. If you think I'm being harsh on apple, imagine if this was an auto mechanic, and we were discussing a custom gear shift knob. 1 .

I've worked in an auto shop, and we made damn sure that if a customer left something on the counter, it got attached to the work order or left in the vehicle. This is evidently too much work for geniuses.

Buckshot Ep. 6: ReBlogging

adam — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:13:44 +0000

My feed reader landed me a couple things I agree with whole heartedly this morning:

Rick Rubin, Radiohead, and the record industry at Invisible Oranges is everything I've been saying. every Warp should have a Bleep, the loudness wars and shitty albums killed the music industry long before downloads got to it, and Trent Reznor is one of the few people who gets that the download edition of an album should have its own appeal.
Breast cancer will remain a cash cow until something comes along to replace it, another illness common among upper middle class citizens with the money to pay for new and expensive treatment, something to feed the greed of corporations who use breast cancer as a pubic relations tool.

from WonderLand or Not
I feel no shame pimping my own pink for october theme (from last year) to people who are into branding and memes, but it's just not a vehicle I see as effective.

Buckshot, Ep. 5: Sidegrading

adam — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:39:22 +0000

WordPress is on Slashdot, courtesy of the above image.
I've upgraded myself, although based on the number of offers for help installing Habari I landed myself with one comment on WW, I'm going to give Habari another shot in the near future.
That thread made me realize that Habari is not a WordPress fork at all, but a WordPress clone. It's the same relationship that Pidgin (Gaim) has to AIM: most of the features, none of the crap, none of the code.
My only reason for upgrading is to work on adding the tagging features to Disconnected and Dream in Infrared. Dream in Infrared will most certainly drop support for UTW, as well as any compatibility with 2.01 . Disconnected will be a bit more difficult, since I'll need to maintain UTW/2.0 support in parallel with 2.3's tagging.
The above assumes, based on the announcement, that there were no security patches in 2.3. Like Anil says, though, things like that should be crystal fucking clear in the announcement. Then again, we are talking about matt, who needs public outcry to explain simple things like privacy policies.
Further problems resulting from the Refusal To Explain Anything:
as I was going through my list of plugins and upgrading them using SVN (it's even suggested in the announcement), i ran into more than a few plugins that are hosted on wordpress.org, but have to be updated the traditional way, because no one knows how to organize their repositories. The biggest offender is the Google Sitemap Generator, which has all of the translations in /trunk/. Subversion naturally balks at the encoding. Wget to the rescue.
This is surprisingly not related to Matt or privacy, but I've switched to defensio anti-spam, because I'm a fickle sum-bitch, and easily enticed by betas. So far its false-positive ratio is about on par with Akismet, which has the usual social consequences (sorry Trent, Engtech). It does marry the excerpt concept from Akismet Auntie Spam with "Spaminess", which is vaguely similar to SK2's karma, giving it the best usability of the 3.

does this affect anyone? my information says no, please comment if it will.

Buckshot Ep. 4: Last.fm

adam — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:31:40 +0000

Last.fm released their facebook widget. I really like facebook as a place for real-name-real-life type interactions. I'm not so sure about it as a "platform", Since not all my web profiles are as real.
they also finally started a blog.
which led me to find their solution for subscribing to my shoutbox: hAtom markup (mad props for microformat adoption). They're linking to an hAtom converter on microformatic.com, which you could also use to subscribe to, say, this blog!
I also found out that last.fm has been bought by CBS. i have a hard time imagining this not leading further to further agglomeration of the internet into old mass media. the only way i can imagine that not happening is that audioscrobbler is still open source, so using amaroK or songbird will definately not submit content-type information (information about the source of the song, i.e. mp3's). (the official client may now be suspect, since CBS does also own a record company which is a member of the RIAA).
The viability of their business model, however, has drawn in competitors. previously, i had little to no interest in iLike, virb, et al, but the submitting my play count to the RIAA seems like a really bad idea.