May 2012
5 posts
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The Onion AV Club Interview's fun.'s Nate Ruess →
I’ve said it before more than once, but I’ll say it again: The Onion AV club consistently puts out some of the best pop culture writing on the internet. Their interviews are particularly insightful, and this one is no exception.
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Steve Albini's AMA on Reddit →
Steve Albini, famed, fiercely independent record producer of such bands as Nirvana, The Pixies, etc, did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at Reddit. The whole thing is worth reading, but I thought that his answer to a question about piracy and how it’s affected music is worth sharing:
I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other...
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April 2012
4 posts
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Sailing by Ear →
A great piece about rediscovering the art of listening to music, an art that, under assault from earbuds, MP3s, and shitty laptop speakers, seems to be dying. Michael Chabon writes:
I’m no audiophile; I want to say that right off. I have no idea what impedance is, or how to set the levels of an equalizer with any confidence or panache, and I still find infantile amusement in saying the word...
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“I’m just an actor. I’m not nearly as smart as the writers of this show. I’m only...”
– Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell) in an interview with Slate
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Paul Feig Walks Us Through Freaks and Geeks — Part... →
This is going to be a good series.
March 2012
5 posts
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Give it Five Minutes →
Great advice from 37Signals’ Jason Fried:
There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.
Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore...
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Why I Still Sometimes Buy CDs
It’s 2012 — why do I still buy music on CDs?
1. Included Physical Backup
I sleep more easily knowing that most of the music I’ve purchased can be restored from a physical medium no matter what crazy shit happens to my computer or other devices. Backing up something I’ve bought on the iTunes store requires me to do something. With a CD, the backup has already been done for...
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Letters of Note →
Letters of Note is a site that publishes correspondence of well-known people from history. The list includes people like author John Steinbeck, photographer Ansel Adams, scientist Albert Einstein, and editor/writer H.L. Mencken.
The selections are all great and worth reading. What I find most interesting is how good the writing is, regardless of the author’s profession. I wonder if...
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Ebooks and Self-Publishing - A Dialog Between... →
A fascinating (and lengthy) discussion between authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath about the current state of the publishing industry and where things are heading.
Eisler is a New York Times Bestselling author who turned down a $500,000 book deal to go his own way and self-publish.
It’s working.
As in the music and movie industries, the gatekeepers of content distribution are slowly...
February 2012
6 posts
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On Drowning — The Format's Former Manager on the... →
Holy shit.
Speaking of things I missed, the link above is to a post written by Tom Gates, The Format’s former manager, about the band’s breakup. He wrote it in 2009, exactly a year after Sam Means called to break the news to him.
Recalling the crazy reality of managing a band that got dropped from their major label and recorded an album that didn’t have a snowball’s...
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Flashback: Nate Ruess Discusses Moving from The... →
I stumbled across this 2008 interview with Nate Ruess of The Format/Fun that I had never seen it before. In it, he briefly discusses why The Format broke up:
“Nothing too specific that I could think of. I would like to believe with everything I’ve been told that it was more a matter of being burnt out and not feeling like we could make another record together because we never had a free...
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Fun's Andrew Dost Discusses the Making of Some... →
Great, in-depth article from the Seattle Post-Examiner.
I learned a lot. I had no idea, for example, that the band worked with Jeff Bhasker (a co-producer on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) on this album.
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I Haven't Been Drunk in 3 Years . . . and I've... →
I love alcohol.
I love the relaxing, comfortable glow of a night spent drinking with friends. I love that alcohol makes me more outgoing and comfortable in large groups of people. And, frankly, I love a good cocktail with dinner.
I hate alcohol.
I hate spending $20+ on a night out. I hate waking up the morning after drinking feeling like absolute shit. And I hate feeling like I need to drink...
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What Happens When You Swear at Users →
The interesting (and somewhat unexpected) results of a profane test email that accidentally went out to all users of the cloud-based notepad app fetchnotes.
via Hacker News
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Inspired Again
Inspiration is a strange thing. It can hit you quickly and surely, lifting your mind and your work to great heights in what feels like an instant. Or, more depressing, it can leave you and not come back for months.
Inspiration left me awhile ago. The lack of writing on here is a good indication of that, as is the lack of recorded music and uploaded photos. I don’t have a good explanation...
December 2011
1 post
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My cover of Alexi Murdoch’s “All My...
November 2011
10 posts
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Kickass T-Shirts →
There’s a United Pixel Workers t-shirt available for just about any internet geek/pixel pusher in your life. As you might expect, I picked up this one.
Three days left to order!
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Old Mac of the Month: The Macintosh IIvx →
Stephen Hackett over at 512 Pixels runs a monthly feature called Old Mac of the Month in which guest writers reminisce about an old Macintosh model of their choosing. This month, yours truly wrote a piece about my family’s first Mac, the Macintosh Iivx.
So, I guess that I am kind of published now.
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October 2011
18 posts
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“I’ve had a very lucky career, a very lucky life. I’ve done all that...”
– Steve Jobs, from Walter Isaacson’s biography
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“What’s important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we...”
– Dan Pallotta, “Jobs, World’s Greatest Philanthropist”
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Why I Read Fiction
“[Substantive works of fiction are] the only places where there [is] some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong...
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September 2011
28 posts
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