old photographs from the summer of seventy four

What should I accomplish this summer? Last summer I set no definite goals and successfully accomplished all of them. It's easy to succeed when there's no standard. But this summer will be different, in so many ways. I have a job, which will give me some stability and foundation for being responsible. Based off of that foundation I want to set some goals. The usual ones apply: hang out with people a whole bunch, goto concerts and shows, and play music. I want to have less time spent sleeping in and doing nothing. I think that getting up everyday at a decent time will easily be the most important thing this summer to being happy and productive. I can't tell how hanging out with people will be, because I just started hanging out with a small group in morris and now most of them are still in morris. I liked hanging out with new people a lot, but I think that this summer will have a great balance of old and new friends. Last summer I hung out with people when I could, and because it was a smaller group, it only occasionally happened that we all were free at the same time. But now, if one group isn't free I can ask the other group. Crazy, I know. If someone is busy, instead of waiting around, do something else. It's a genius concept and I don't know why no one has thought of it before.

s/mu/g

There is this thing called 4chan. It is commonly called the sesspool of the internet, and it probably is, but there is a part of it that is it's music board. People talk about anything music, whats good, whats bad, but mostly whats bad, which is everything. There are a few bands/albums that almost everyone likes, and more importantly, mocks. It fits the idea of popularity and the internet: once something is popular, it is bad. This works with people looking at mainstream media, pop music sucks, but in small communities like the /mu/sic board of 4chan, the popular things are things that people actually listen to. We all can agree that Miley Cyrus isn't good music, but whats the fun in that when I don't know anyone who listens to her? /mu/ choses to mock the popular music of their world. The most picked on bands I've seen are radiohead and neutral milk hotel, epitomized in this mock album cover by what I will call mastohead milk collective. It takes the cover of mastodon's crack the skye with neutral milk hotel's iconic covered face and animal collective's newest albums cover with the title of radioheads album ok computer. The top title is a reference to some obscure norweigan band.

Give this Album Your Ears (day one)

For the next three days, I will be telling you what albums you should listen to. That's the deal. I don't know how many albums it will be a day or if you will like them or not, but you should listen to them. I am going to be gone Wednesday night till probably Tuesday going to animal collective then driving to Washington for a music festival. I will be ecstatically happy with music and I don't want to leave anyone out, so this is for you all.

Sigur Ros - ()
This album is a masterpiece and the one that I wanted to do as my next GTAYE post, so what better way to start off a streak of them. The band Sigur Ros is from Iceland and so they sing mostly in Icelandic, but for this album, the words are all in hopelandic, which is a made up language that has no literal meaning. Imagine the quintessential way of having lyrics mean something different to every listener and have every interpretation be unique, well this is it. The album is officially untitled, but there are a set of parenthesis on the cover and it is referred to as the bracket or parenthesis album. All the tracks have no official name as well, so they are referred to as untitled 1, untitled 2, and so on.
I love this album because it is played so wonderfully and composed so thoughtfully. There is almost always a feeling of continuity between each song and most of the vocals are repeated in different songs, but in different ways. The vocals are one of the best parts also in how amazing they are. It sounds cliche, but they are more of an instrument than anything else, but also one of the most emotional instruments possible. The high range of the singer will blow you away for sure.
You should listen to this album preferably in the car. I listened to it yesterday on my way home and it was so loud and amazing. If you don't have an hour plus car ride, then at least try and listen to it all the way through in one sitting. It flows too much to pick up where you left off. A comfortable and relaxing location is also needed. But wherever you are, enjoy it.

Here it is in two zips:
(gig's coffee's internet doesn't like mediafire apparently, so i'll upload the files laters)

Maybe I'm all I see sometimes

So, as procrastination does its part in my bioinformatics final, I started reading some old dude's blog. I don't know who he was or why he is famous or whatever, but he had some interesting blogs. A lot of them were about his interactions with other bloggers and other twitterers. I started thinking about how much blog content is created based on bloggers interacting. If 25% of blog posts are links to other blog posts, then 25% of all blog posts are irrelevant, in one way. I can't tell if people do it because they are avoiding having to come up with something to write about themselves or they really want to share this idea. I don't mind them really, because they do serve a purpose, which is: you read my blog, i like this blog, therefor you might like this blog. It makes sense.
But that doesn't stop the feedback loop of reposts. On twitter, people retweet other peoples posts by adding RT before writing mostly the exact same post. I get a lot of duplicates because I follow two twitters that are very similar. It's not a bad thing because I don't want to have to follow everyone and then sort through everyone of their posts (25% of which I imagine would be retweets anyways).
Part of it is also giving credit where credit is due, and that is important. But with 25% of the internet pointing at other points on the internet, that is just so much duplicate content that it blows my mind. I was thinking about tinyurls in the same way. Almost every retweet about a twitter setting they removed had a different tinyurl link. That means there is a lot of unique links that point to the same site.
It just seems like a lot of space that isn't unique.

Dropbox it like it's hot

So I am trying out this app called dropbox that could be pretty sweet. It basically creates a 2gb free folder for you on their server that you can access anywhere. That alone isn't the greatest part, when you install dropbox to your computer(s), it adds a synchronized folder to it. I just installed it on my desktop and put my files for my bioinformatic final in the dropbox and in theory I can goto school, grab the files and work on them, come back here and have them be the current version. It's kinda like a svn repository for whatever you want.
Try it out yourself: https://www.getdropbox.com/

Give this album your ear: week three

The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Graves

This guy is awesome, and you probably haven't heard of him. I don't want to explain everthing so here's a basic summary:

I saw him open for bon iver, and it was a great show. His voice is awesome. His guitar playing is amazing because it is pretty perfect and seems random at the same time. He is folk.

Here he is:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=2bada3e30b9de9fd61d4646c62b381cbe04e75f6e8ebb871

TGIF! Totally Getting It Free!

I have an awesome dilemma. It's not awesome in the sense that I enjoy it or that it will be the easiest choice, but it is the first time this decision had to be made for me. I need to choose between using an open source sound editor or using a pirated copy of one that is very not free. In leu of having a computer without Ubuntu studio and wanting to not use UbuStu again because I think there are more powerful linux distributions out there for sound editing. And so instead of picking a new distro I downloaded the next thing that I have used the most, Ableton Live!. When I bought my m-audio firewire solo to record my guitar, it came with a free demo version of Live! and I thoroughly enjoyed using it. It lets me do a lot of things, from create drum beats to adding guitar effects. The free version was limited to only a few effects running at once, which was annoying and so after I first got UbuStu I never went back. Colin and I used the open source program Ardour for the very first Hello Blacksmith recordings and it wasn't the greatest and didn't have as many features, it was open source.
Open source is something I support very strongly, it gives users the power to add the functionality that they want, ever improving the program. And as long as each version is maintained, it can result in very powerful tools, like GIMP, which has almost all the functionality as Adobe Photoshop. Granted, GIMP is a lot less user friendly and its window management still makes me almost smash things in anger, it works. Ardour has a lot of features that are great and recording and editing are very easy to do. Its main weak points are that it is all simplistic, you can do the basic editing functions, cutting, moving, layering, and looping. It doesn't have very many manipulation tools and the ones it has are weak and don't change all too much.
From that summary of each alone I don't see why I wouldn't use the more powerful Live! for producing the upcoming Hello Blacksmith EP, right? Wrong. (Doesn't that wording just make you feel bad inside? Sorry, just a common way to say something, no harm against you) The price point of Live! is $400. But Martin, you support free information and so why don't you just steal the full version and use that? Well, I do have a full copy it, and using it is quite great. But, I cannot bring myself to use stolen property to create something that I will be selling for money. It is an issue I haven't encountered until now because I never sell anything I make in copyrighted applications. Having to think about the decision, it wasn't a hard choice at all to use open source programs instead of pirated ones. I knew the answer as soon as I asked myself the question, and I guess I could have said that in the first paragraph but there should be some point to reading this far.
So, just so you know, and I don't know if HBS will advertise this on the CDs or not, but we use only open source applications in the production of our music. The sound is edited in (as of right now) Ardour and the images are modified in GIMP. I hope that eases your conscious a little bit.