occasionally creative
August 2, 2012 Leave a Comment
The approach of a new school year is an opportunity many take to purchase new computers. The definition of “computer” has expanded somewhat in the past few years, though, and some parents will be sending their kids off with more than one device.
Read the complete article at The Hippo.
August 1, 2012 Leave a Comment
Sometimes I find it really difficult to enjoy great music.
Being a thoroughly amateur musician who once tried to go more professional myself, I’m constantly making comparisons. Melodies, lyrics, and production values can all be liked or hated as a matter of taste, but questions of success have more concrete answers. Even if you omit commercial success – because it’s supposed to be about the music, man, not the money – there are things like number of downloads, demand for live shows, and media coverage that one can look at. And Wildlife Control has me beat by a longshot.
When their innovative stop-motion and time-lapse video tore up YouTube, I moaned. When Analog or Digital, the song in the video, rocketed up Amazon’s charts, I groaned.
None of this would matter if the drummer hadn’t gone to my college.
I didn’t even know the guy; he started very late in my college career. I might have interacted with him a couple times. Somehow that’s far more galling than the success of Meg Hutchinson, who started school one year before me and played stuff far more similar to my music than Wildlife Control does. Maybe the fact that I actually knew her and remember her, even if not all that well, makes it different from sharing only a tenuous academic connection. Or maybe it was the Gizmodo article about their totally awesome tiny recording studio that really got to me, since I also record and produce everything myself.
All this is a shoegazing way of saying that Wildlife Control’s new self-titled album is awfully fun to listen to. And if I can say that when I’m constantly beating myself up, well, you’ll probably enjoy it even more.
July 26, 2012 Leave a Comment
A new group of superheroes is taking to the streets.
OK, not to the streets so much as their keyboards. The Internet Defense League is a network of websites banding together in common cause to protect the freedom of the Internet from meddling corporations and draconian laws.
Read the complete article at The Hippo.
July 23, 2012 Leave a Comment
It’s been three years since a Star Trek movie. I’m jonesing. So I’m making stuff.
Last year, I made a teaser trailer using footage from the 2009 Star Trek reboot film. I’d recently discovered the British band Sound of Guns and thought their song “Lightspeed” was perfectly appropriate.
The sequel to that movie, which I really really hope isn’t about Khan, but is probably about Khan, is set for release around May of 2013. That gives me ten months in which to splice up trailers for the previous ten Star Trek movies. Yes, I’ll be doing one of these a month. For the good and bad films, the evens and the odds. In order, of course, so the first one is 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with the song “Believe” by The Bravery. Enjoy!
July 20, 2012 Leave a Comment
What have I been writing this week? Glad you asked.