Random Game and Music Thoughts
Blast. Someone else on MySpace asked me about my "music blog". Which is still snowed under the SXSW dump, my laziness, and a crisis of conscience about what makes for good music blogging. I mean, seriously, when was the last time I actually read about something I downloaded from We Heart Music? Of course, with that as my only ruler, I'm not going to get a lot of new ideas. I suppose I should check in with Stereogum or Hypemachine or something.
The only really fun "conversation" about music that I know of is the calliope but even that is sort of lost in the shuffle of new music from those two huge music grabs. Maybe I need to take the Dangermousian concept of the calliope a step further and make it like a musical version of The Connection. Carpet: Rug. Rug: Wool. Et cetera.
In other news, the beta version of Caption Booth on Tumblr is not going so well. I haven't added anything, and it's not been easy to get my two Beta Friends to contribute. After a short hiatus from KoL, I ended up back there. I find the twisted cosmology of the game to be immensely comforting. Meat Paste. Scrumptious Reagent. Pixels. Star Charts. There are all these clever (read: silly) ways of building items. I really want to take that kind of aesthetic and put it into some kind of community-building. I've got high hopes for Lila Dreams since all of the "smithing" is supposed to be done by gardening. That's clever.
Ikariam has me pretty hooked with it's slow-motion version of Civilization. I can check in a couple times a day, adjust resources, and watch my tiny empire grow. That's maybe what's got me thinking of places, instead of individuals. They just lanuched another server, and I had to resist the urge to set up a second empire there, just to see what it would be like to play somewhere that's still mostly empty.
Boots and I still muck around on NeoPets in spite of it's almost maddeningly late nineties aesthetic. There's always something nice about collecting stuff and playing with paper dolls. Every now and then I think about getting one of the goofy cell phone charms that would get me into Moshi Monsters. Seriously paired down stuff, but I'm really curious about how the same idea would work without the kruft that's holding NeoPets back in the 20th Century.
There's some larger post brewing about PMOG (which I've been noticeably absent from lately). It, more than anything else makes ideas fire out of my head like a Roman candle. Strangely, though, I felt like I hit a wall there, where I wasn't getting enough new and interesting interaction, only hitting snags. I just need to get my thoughts in order about it, though. The basic nut of it is a lack of interaction, based largely on my belief that BBSes are the worst way to keep people interacting.
Hm, music, music, music... This morning brought in Bad Veins which had a sound enough like The Killers, that it made me take notice. There's nothing really wrong with having a sound that's like someone else's sound. I think The Killers misplace the parts of their music that I like often enough that having a few back up bands, ready to pick up the fumble is probably a good thing.
Mannequin Men were the group that asked me about my "music blog." Naturally, I liked them, but I don't really have much to add about their music. It's good, solid rock and roll, that would probably make CCR proud. The trouble being that the CCR set is another thirty years older than my aging self, and more than happy to keep listening to CCR rather than letting music be organic and evolving. Me, I think it's important that someone is still out there, kicking out the jams. If I a). lived in Chicago and b). left my cave, I'd think that a Mannequin Men show and a couple of beers would be a pretty awesome evening.
The steady influx of RJD2 has piqued my interest in Shanghai Restoration Project which supposedly takes a lot of Chinese instruments and gives them a similar (at least to my ears) spin. The clips I've listened to so far don't quite seem to deliver as well as the background music to this commercial but I'll keep looking.
I need to look into a "three CDs I would buy if I weren't dirt poor at the moment" widget for this blog. Or for something else. Once again, I've ended up so diffuse that I'm not really satisfied with any of my online identities as the my Axis Mundi.
Goddamn it, you're clever people. Say something.
Comments
vu
Funny you should say "3 CDs" - I just picked up 3 :
Gorillaz - Demon Days
Faces - Definitive Collection
Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
All are very good and span a vast number of years!
After you set up your account, you have to monkey around under the hood just a little bit and add a code snippet to the tumblr template to enable the disqus commenting system - the instructions for this are pretty clear on the site, but let me know if you can't figure it out and I'll walk you through it.
Now, if you're trying to figure out how to post to the Caption Booth group tumblr, that's whole different kettle of fish - I'm sure I can walk you through that too, if you need it.
It's funny that you should mention Seventh Tree, as I just bought that CD recently.
v