This was a question I pondered last night as Grand Wizards Of The Aryan Brotherhood Hawthorne Heights walked onto the stage at Cricket Arena. They were wearing all white, which I guess is to promote the Ohioan race? It just made me think “how cute, they wore matching rock band costumes! And it’s not even Halloween!” Oh, and when they came out, they had three guitarists, not counting the bass. And while I’m sure that talented artists could do some impressive things with three electric guitars simultaneously turned up to eleven, I didn’t hear anything of the sort last night. I mean.. seriously.. three electric guitars?? Other bands have successfully rocked out with a violin or a piano. How about two bassists? I can’t think of any band that’s ever done that, and a good bass player can do things much more interesting than just playing the root note of every chord. Or what about a rock band with a flute player? All I’m saying is that there are much more interesting ways to use a fifth member of a band than to give him another guitar. To be fair, I had a pessimistic attitude going into their set, since I only know one of their songs (“Ohio Is For Lovers”) that I don’t like (I mean, the chorus doesn’t make sense- “you know you do you kill me well, you like it too and I can tell”). Then halfway through the set, he told everyone to take out their cell phones and light the place up. After that song, he told us all to text “HH” to some number, at which point I leaned over to Garrison said “I think we’re too old to be here.” Now I can identify with senior citizens who are told that all they need to do to get medicare is to log on to this URL follow the hyperlinks to the appropriate form.
Maybe I’m getting too old to identify with songs that all the depressed and angst-filled teenagers like so much. I’m just not at a point in my life where I’m concerned with questions like “What am I going to do when I graduate?”, “Will I ever find love?”, “Why do my parents hate me?”, “Why don’t I have a cool cell phone?”, “How can I get more friends on MySpace?”, or <insert typically generic teenage moaning here>. I mean, I’m happy with my marriage, I have a good job, and being a geek isn’t a Bad Thing like it was in high school. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not really wanting or waiting on anything right now, the way I was when I was let’s say 15-to-21-ish. Not that I think I’m somehow more enlightened than any other human being. I’m really just saying my interest in music in general (and rock in particular) is on a decline because I just don’t identify with the lyrics as strongly as I used to.
So anyway, after Hawthorne Heights, The All-American Rejects came out and put on a pretty good (albeit short) set, and then Fall Out Boy played a better-than-expected show (I like their CD, but they were so terrible on SNL that I was afraid I wouldn’t like them live). But this post wasn’t about them, it was about the thoughts that were running through my head as I was watching five preppy kids from Ohio pretend to be a rock band while thousands of fifteen-year-olds screamed along and took low-res pictures with their cell phones, presumably to put them up on MySpace today.
I don’t want for anything that I don’t have, all that I want is waiting for me there
Over the weekend I put in some code to filter out comment spam on my blog. Most of it is Garrison’s code that has proven to be 100% effective on his site. I also added in a few heuristics of my own design. If you make a comment that it thinks is spam, it won’t be lost, but I’ll have to approve it. But that shouldn’t happen unless you include a lot of links (most of the checks are on referrer and user agent).
I’m not sure why someone is going out of their way to invest their advertising efforts on the five people who regularly read my blog. I guess you guys are really cool or something.
It’s that time of year again. That week in May when I am willing to turn my TV to the abominable G4. Yep, it’s E3 time! And this is looking like the biggest freakin E3 yet. G4 has 3-hour coverage of each day’s events, which I record so that I can watch all of it in 30 minutes, including the fast-forward time (yeah, that much of it is unwatchable garbage). Sure the trailers are available on the internet, but there’s something about seeing them on TV that’s more appealing. That, and they have had a few interesting interviews (most notably for me, Will Wright and John Carmack).
So Sony is pricing the low end PS3 at five hundred dollars!! What are they thinking? And if you want 802.11b (and HDMI output and a bigger hard drive), you’ll have to shell out six hundred dollars. I think I’ll pass. Up until a week ago, I thought BluRay was going to win over HD-DVD, because I thought that the PS3 would be most people’s first high definition DVD player. Now I’m not sure that the PS3 will be quite so widespread, and I have serious concerns regarding the content of their bloodstream when they decided this price. Microsoft couldn’t have asked for more. I’m now thinking maybe I’ll get a 360 some day, after the first price drop (usually comes a little over a year after launch). I think part of the death blow for the PS3 is going to be their cell processor. John Carmack said the cell is much more powerful than the 360 at peak performance, but that it would be very difficult to write games that took advantage of this power. If John Carmack thinks it is too hard to program for, what hope does Joe Developer have?
The big news of course is Nintendo. Look at all the games they’ve got:
Super Mario Galaxy: A really cool looking Mario game set in outer space. Check out that trailer!
The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Link is back and he’s not a cartoon.
Metroid Prime 3: Doesn’t look like a huge leap forward, but I imagine the Wiimote will make it feel incredible.
Super Smash Brothers Brawl: Smash is back!! With Solid Snake?? Maybe there will be other third-party characters.. Sonic anyone?
Red Steel: If they get the alleged control issues worked out, this could be this generation’s Goldeneye. One neat thing I heard is that to open doors, you twist your left hand (as if using a doorknob). I thought that was pretty clever.
With most people guessing the Wii will launch at $249 or even $199, I could get Wii and all five games I mentioned for the price of a PS3 with no games. Seems like a no-brainer. Interesting side note: every Nintendo console system has launched at $199.
Some other games that look stupid hot (off the top of my head)- Halo 3, Too Human, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Spore (I’m looking forward to that one).
Something I haven’t seen addressed: Link is left handed. Will I have to swing my left hand to use the sword? I know that pushing your right hand forward will shove someone with the shield, and that spinning your left hand does a spin attack.. What about Red Steel, do you think you’ll be able to play with your gun or dominant sword in your left hand (if you’re left handed)? It’s an accessibility issue that developers haven’t had to address before..
Starting today, I’m planning on making my blog posts at regular intervals. The plan right now is to make posts on Mondays and Thursdays. If this ends up being too much, I may occasionally drop Thursdays. I guess we’ll see what happens.
Over the weekend I had some free time so I wrote up some code to give me a lot of statistics about my site. Think of this as Google Zeitgeist, only not as interesting, fun, or cool. Here are some of my findings:
Posts made on Monday receive the most comments. Tuesday was a close second. So I decided Monday would be a good day to begin making posts regularly. As I suspected, weekend posts averaged significantly fewer comments (just one per post). Note: does not include posts made before the comments feature was added to the site.
94% of comments are made within three days of the post. So making a post on Thursday shouldn’t steal the thunder from the Monday post. Also notice that over half of comments made (53%) are made within the first 24 hours.
Most of you are reading my blog at work. It’s okay, I won’t tell your boss. 90% of comments are made Monday-Friday, and 71% of comments are made from 8:00am to 5:00pm. Look at the hour-of-day stats: isn’t that about as close to a Gaussian distribution as you can hope to get for such a small data set??
I haven’t had much of a pattern in making posts. Sunday is the only day when I make significantly fewer posts than any other day. I also tend to make a lot of posts just before bed (..and also a lot at work..). :)
Kip’s mean time between posts is 5.47 days, or 1.28 posts per week. Sorry, no graphs for that.
Stephanie’s mean time between posts is 16.70 days, or 0.42 posts per week.
Some notes on the data:
All statistics include posts made by both myself and Stephanie.
Comments that I made to my own posts were disregarded.
Data size for all posts: n = 111
Data size for posts since comments feature was added: n = 32
Data size for all comments (excluding my own comments): n = 82
Statistics were collected 2006.05.13, around 2:00 PM.
If you have some kind of statistics fetish, or if you want to independently verify my findings, or if you just have a lot of free time on your hands, you can view the raw data here. It’s formatted (tab-delimited) to be pasted in Excel, not to look pretty.
The other day while walking through the parking lot at work, I noticed something that kind of annoyed me. Take a look at this picture and see if you notice anything odd:
It’s called the “Cobalt” but it is red! Didn’t someone at Chevrolet know that Cobalt is a shade of blue, not unlike the stone of the same name? Seeing “Cobalt” on a bright red car is just extremely distasteful to me.
However, this gives me a great idea. Check out these t-shirts I put up on CafePress. They rock hard.
For the last month or so, my mother-in-law has borrowed my copy of “Legally Blonde” and apparently watched it every day. So for Mother’s Day, Kip and I bought her a copy of the movie for herself so she could watch it whenever she wants. This also means that I will get to take my copy back to Charlotte with me, so that I can watch it. So what do I do? I get up today and decide to watch it right here in Newton this morning, and Kip’s dad commented that Deborah watches it like everyday. ;) It has been awhile since I’ve watched it, and it is “super fun!!!”
Also, I’m trying to win tickets to go and see the premier of “Cars”, the new Disney movie that is showing at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in like a week or two. The radio station I listen to in the morning on my way to work is giving tickets away by quizzing people on lines from Disney movies. So could there be a more perfect “game” for me to play to win. I mean, I have seen almost every Disney movie ever made!!! What I can’t get over is the fact that people don’t know these clips. One morning no one could figure out that this one quote was from “Aladdin”. I mean, am I that old that the children of this generation don’t know that movie, all they know are “Monster, Inc.”, “The Incredibles”, and movies like that. One guy even guessed “Shrek” as the movie and that isn’t even a Disney movie!!!! The deal is that they give you three clips and you have to get them all right or you loose. So I’ll keep trying all next week to get through to win tickets for us. Another funny thing is that you win four tickets to go see the movie and Kip and I don’t have kids to take, so we don’t know who we would take to see the movie. If you would like one of the tickets feel free to leave a comment with why you feel you should get one of the extra tickets. It will be enteretaining to see your reasons even if we don’t win.
Before I get started I wanted to clarify that I didn’t make a post on Monday because Stephanie had made one on Saturday. I’m still planning to make blog posts regularly.
Now onto my story. Last weekend I went to see Thursday at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem. I’ve mentioned on this blog before that the last time I saw Thursday was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been too. I was pleased to see that I wasn’t let down again.
However, I’ve noticed a pattern lately. I’ll go to concerts, and listen to the less-than-awesome opening bands and think “Is this really worth it? Standing for four hours just to hear some songs that I can listen to at home?” Then the band that I actually came to see will come out, and I’ll be like “Oh yeah, that’s why I come to these concerts--these guys are awesome!” But I’ll spare you another long, introspective rant today.
five four three two one let’s start a fire
My site now uses URL Rewriting. It was surprisingly simple to set up. I found this overview covered all the basics, and a few Google queries gave me this useful cheat sheet that covered pretty much everything else I needed. Both of them are kind of aimed at people who don’t know how to use regular expressions, but I do know how to use them so I can’t vouch for how well they explain them.
Any old links you have to my site should work (for now), but you may want to update them. In particular, the RSS feeds have changed:
Kip’s feed: http://www.vacant-nebula.com/rss/kip/
Stephanie’s feed: http://www.vacant-nebula.com/rss/stephanie/
Both: http://www.vacant-nebula.com/rss/
Like I said, the old URL will work for a while, but I’m not making any promises for what will happen two months from now.
May 3, 2:47 pm
Although I don’t own any of their work, Jethro Tull’s front man was a flautist (he played a flute, for those who may be vocabulary challenged). And the Mahavishnu Orchestra (which I highly recommend) included a violinist. But those bands were popular back before I was even born; I highly doubt anyone does that kind of thing today.
I’m of the opinion that no good music has been released since 1984 (with a few exceptions, including anything by They Might Be Giants, Brian Wilson’s SMiLE, and a small handfull of other similar acts). The Buggles correctly proclaimed it: “Video killed the radio star.” Music today is so over-produced. Anymore, it seems like it’s more about how it looks than how it sounds.
I’m just glad that Amazon carries all of the old, rare stuff that I’m into. Otherwise, I might really go crazy.
May 3, 3:57 pm
“Flautist”? That’s seriously the correct word? That’s kinda funny looking.
I think I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on the whole 1984 thing.. I mean, there was overproduced before then (see KISS, or The Monkees--the original boy band!).. and most modern bands aren’t very thrilled with big record companies (see the entire indie genre).
On a side note, Everything In Transit is easily the best album I’ve listened to in the past year or two.
May 3, 5:53 pm
You make a good point; over-production has been done before (I wouldn’t consider The Monkees to be very talented at all). But nearly everything today is over-produced. What bands formed during the 1990s consistently sell out arena sized venues, a-la the 30,000 seat venues of the 60s and 70s? Where are The Who‘s, The Rolling Stones, and the Pink Floyd‘s of today? IMHO, no one seems to be making an impact on music like those guys did. No one lasts like those guys have.
I also don’t deny that record companies are evil, and I don’t mind sticking it to them. But they seem more motivated today in making money at the expense of lackluster talent than they seemed to way back when. At least as I see it, they used to care about the music in addition to the money. Now, money is all that matters.
To each his own, I guess. That album you linked to reminded me of the theme song to “The OC” (which I’ve only ever heard via a spoof on The Simpsons (Milhouse of Sand and Fog)).
To quote Brian Wilson (from what might be the greatest album of all time, Pet Sounds):
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times...
May 4, 8:50 am
I’m not sure how an absence of extremely popular super-groups indicates that music is too over-produced. But I think the internet has been largely responsible for this decentralization of the music industry. In the 1970s, they had like three national TV networks and the radio, and that was pretty much the only way to hear music unless you lived in a city big enough to have a scene. In the last seven years the music industry has changed a lot, and it can support a lot more bands and genres, on small/independent record labels. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing personally. Not to mention that the shows I’ve seen in clubs with less than a thousand people present are much more enjoyable than those in big arenas (and I think most artists prefer the small venues too).
May 5, 1:28 am
Lack of super-groups...? Seriously? Two letters. U2. If they’re not the super-group of super-groups, I don’t know who is. Maybe The Super-Group. But, last I heard, their drummer was arrested for molesting farm animals. Or maybe that other super-group, Jesus the Christ and His 12 Homies.
But seriously, “flautist” is correct. As is, “pianist.” And there has definitely been good music since 1984. And no, Metallica is not part of that list.
May 5, 9:33 am
Haha yeah I forgot about U2, but they weren’t formed during or after the 90s either. I think Eminem can still sell out big venues, and he’s been around since 1998 or so. I think Pearl Jam can still sell a lot of tickets, even though they haven’t had a big hit in a long time. There are probably a lot more than we realize (like, I think Cher of all people had a tour recently that sold out some big venues).
And it looks like “flutist” is also considered correct, which is what I would have said. :)