February 2012
9 posts
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-02-05) →
I guess the last.fm to Tumblr weekly posts don’t work any more after all. As an exercise in actually writing something (anything!) once in a while, I’ll be throwing together a manual version with a few more words every week that I can manage it. Sorry!
1. Hüsker Dü (119)
This week I was strangely not in the mood to listen to most of my music. Fortunately, I have a handy text file...
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oneweekoneband:
Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5:55 (promotional video, 2006) 5:55 AM is the Janus hour. It offers a dual experience. The person who is “so much more productive in the mornings” eventually discovers that the earlier they rise, the more morning they have to be productive in; at 5:55 they’ve taken a shower and are drinking coffee and gearing up to answer emails, or to do...
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You know that thing where you have the same dream... →
I’ve never gotten into Jens Lenkman at all before; had, in fact, written him off as one of those artists I just wouldn’t find a way into and so shouldn’t bother paying any attention to at all.
But I’m loving this song.
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“We love, says Plato, that in which we are defective; when we see our magical...”
– Joanna Russ, The Female Man
Horrifying transphobia and misogyny in this book, as it turns out, but this particular quote still speaks to me.
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January 2012
34 posts
“I think the most common cause of insomnia is simple; it’s loneliness.”
– Heath Ledger (via ssilverspoon)
Ooh, ouch.
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“It’s monolithic and needy at the same time, like a godlike being who just wants...”
– Dave Bloom on Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972
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pica
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
I still have some of these that happened years ago,...
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“She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight...”
– Lydia Davis, Five Signs of Disturbance
“She cries and may be crying only because it is raining outdoors and she has been...”
– Lydia Davis, Once A Very Stupid Man
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We Need To Talk About Skyrim
hndrk:
So I was all like “Oh get a life you people, who gets excited about looking at video game sunsets” and who’s laughing now? It’s not me. Definitely not me.
Having spent I don’t know how many hours of my life playing Morrowind back in the day, it seems pretty inevitable that I’ll get into Skyrim eventually. But I resisted buying it during the Steam sales at the end of last...
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“… a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust...”
– Lydia Davis, “Liminal: The Little Man”
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Pre-ordered the new Shearwater album.
About to start my fourth listen-through of the demos you get for preordering from Sub Pop.
Happy days.
:3
Today’s unexpected encounters:
a big fat tabby cat on my way to the supermarket in the morning, who wanted to be patted for a while and then got cranky and hissy;
a tiny three-legged Siamese cat on my way to the supermarket in the evening, who when I sat down to pat her climbed into my lap(!) and proceeded to snuggle there, purring(!!), clawing at the front of my shirt now and then so I...
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oneweekoneband:
“808s” was a landmark record for Auto-Tune in black pop, proof that it could be a compelling aesthetic choice rather than an R&B-crossover crutch. Stripped of its natural authority, West’s singing becomes a pixilated whimper, the sound of a man trying and failing to insulate himself from hurt; the treatment throws the cracks in his voice (and his psyche) into sharp relief.
...
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The Last.fm/Tumblr weekly top artists service is... →
This is a bit sad. Unlike pretty much every other automated-posting thing I’ve seen, I liked that thing.
Update: Hm, I went looking around and it looks like the Yahoo Pipes thing to create the feed does still exist here. It does seem to break periodically but it looks like it’s possible to put it back again after all. Gosh, Tumblr is annoying sometimes.
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big day
Today I went to Centrelink with my identity documentation (so now my claim for Austudy can be processed) and came out to my mother.
Both of them things that past versions of me would have (and in fact have) avoided for way too long.
Progress!
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good news
Like a rare blood disorder. No, wait, stop quoting the Mountain Goats and tell your good news!
Okay.
I complain a fair bit on Tumblr, but today I have happy things to say!
As is probably obvious if you’ve seen my posts over the last few weeks (or months), things at my job were not going so well1 and I quit at the end of last year.
I did so having applied to go to university and study...
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ugh.
I just spent a longish and agonising while replying to an email from a member of my immediate family, which they sent me almost a month ago.
(Edit: In my not-especially-kind paraphrasing, their email basically said “although I have no real idea about what’s going on with you, and I’m basing this almost entirely on things you say on Twitter, I think you should take...
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“I don’t miss Facebook one bit. I’m sure if I knew what my friends...”
– Dave Winer
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imathers replied to your quote: It’s a common mistake! You understand. You see men… This is a really good thought, so I went to the site and… what? I can’t understand what’s going on.
Haah, sorry!
The letters columns are Jenna responding to comments (mostly?) by readers of Hitherby Dragons, which I guess is a long-running fictional universe with a lot of interconnected stories and...
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strange days
I have all these browser tabs open with articles and recipes and music in them but I can’t seem to get a handle on reading/listening/copying/otherwise consuming the content and then closing the tabs.
I’ve been getting a massive amount of Stuff Done but when I’m not Working On Stuff I’m weirdly aimless and I don’t feel like I’m using that leisure time well....
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“Bad people are sympathetic. Not all of them are sympathetic, I mean, monsters...”
– And again.
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“It’s a common mistake! You understand. You see men doing it with rape...”
– Jenna Moran, who’s been killing it in the Hitherby letters columns lately.
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“After all, what is the difference between pretentiousness and seriousness? Only...”
– John Darnielle
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megachiropteran replied to your photo: [image: a screenshot of my number one artist on… you’ve surpassed me! I need to start scrobbling again..
Not that I ever see this stuff as a competition at all, but you’re way ahead of me on percentage. I just listen to a stupid amount of music. :)
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It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Tumblr started deliberately breaking stuff (queued posts? tracked tags?) just so they could tell missing e users that it’s the extension’s fault and they’re not going to help.
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“You know, I can’t actually remember the details of Voldemort’s death. It had...”
– Jenna Moran <3
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“They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained...”
– Nietzsche, who apparently had to deal with People Who Argue On The Internet more than a hundred years early.
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Australia: It Might As Well Be On Fire
In news unrelated to being on fire, it’s three days after my last day of work (and in a way not even that long, as I would have probably had those three days off anyway) and my body has completely regained its ability to wake up early.
I love waking up early, so this is awesome.
I’ve fallen into this pattern of being super productive in the morning, napping in the afternoon, using...
December 2011
37 posts
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I removed all the work stuff from my bookmarks bar and now my browser is strange and unfamiliar.
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2011: Nothing Stays Buried
I won’t say much about 2011. A lot of it was pretty tough, but nobody promised me life would never be tough. And here I am, having come out the other side and feeling pretty good.
As usual, here’s my personal soundtrack to the year, in fake mix tape format: a bunch of songs that I got stuck on, in approximately chronological order, which tells the story of the year when I listen to...
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this morning I know who you are
Listening to my first album for 2012: Full Force Galesburg. (Fifteen years old this year! Good grief!)
I think this is going to be a good one. I hope I’m right.
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Got an email from the sysadmin in the middle of...
“Unless you think you’ll be needing them again I’ll be locking your accounts tomorrow night/sometime over the weekend.”
I guess this is it!
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“Personally I take medicine homeopathically all the time. I can’t hardly move...”
– Jenna Moran
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-25) →
The Mountain Goats (73)
Low + Dirty Three (36)
Robyn (31)
Low (29)
Bon Iver (24)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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imathers replied to your post: postscript re introversion Tell me more about the high price of Google Talk… I was about to install it on my phone.
Hah, the price I refer to is a general instant messaging thing and also fairly me-specific, but:
Instant messaging takes a lot more mental energy for me than more asynchronous communication, but I really like it. So I tend to chat forever and...