Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Mashups

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Lately I’ve been getting more and more into Mashups — songs created by taking two or more different songs and “mashing” them together into one. While some aren’t much more complex than the simple beatmatching I did while I was dj’ing, others I’ve found are jaw-droppingly cool, with layers of multiple tracks that really shouldn’t work together as well as they do.

The first one I can remember finding I stumbled across a few years ago, long before the term “mashup” gained popularity. A fairly simple mashup, it laid the vocal track from Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” over the acid electronica of Winx’ “Higher State of Consciousness”.

Over the past few months, as the mashup trend has become more and more mainstream, I’ve been able to find a lot of really good stuff, often thanks to links on either Boing Boing or Waxy.

The Kleptones‘ “A Night at the Hip-Hopera“, for instance, combines Queen’s music with a lot of old- and new-school hip-hop. More recently, they’ve released “From Detroit to J.A.“, which plays similar tricks with a ton of old Motown tunes.

DJ Danger Mouse‘s “Grey Album“, combining vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with The Beatles’ “White Album” got a lot of attention last year, leading to the “Grey Tuesday” campaign. It also led to more experiments with Jay-Z’s vocal tracks, including Cheap Cologne’s “Double Black” album using Metallica’s “Black Album” as the musical background.

The Beatles have proven to be a favorite of the mashup scene (much to the consternation of their record company and the RIAA). DJ BC combined the Beatles and the Beastie Boys to create The Beastles; and ccc just released Revolved, a re-working of their Revolver album.

The Who Boys is a mashup of The Who and The Beach Boys — not one of my personal favorites of the mashups I’ve found, but still interesting.

I also just grabbed a torrent of tracks from DJ Earworm that has some incredible work.

So, then, I’m curious about two things.

Firstly — is there anyone else dropping by here that’s been following this trend? If so, are there any mashup artists or particular tracks that you’d recommend?

Secondly — all the “how-to” tutorials I’ve seen for creating mashups so far have been PC-oriented. I poked around a little bit at GarageBand, but it doesn’t seem to be the best tool for this kind of work (specifically, while I can easily import tracks from my music library, there doesn’t seem to be a way to time-stretch or -compress imported audio to ensure that the tempos match). Any recommendations for Mac-specific audio software or tutorials in this realm? I may not actually be able to come up with anything, but there are a couple of ideas floating around my head that might be fun to play with.

iTunes “Policy of Sweet Dreams” by Depeche Mode/Eurythmics from the album www.djearworm.com (2004, 4:43).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are…on DVD!

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Finally!

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is coming to DVD!

I’ve been waiting for this one to come out for years, after having owned two copies of the videocassette in the past and losing them both to friends that I loaned them out to.

March 22nd, this one is mine.

(via Josh)

iTunes “Busy Child” by Crystal Method, The from the album Vegas (1997, 7:24).

Hitchcock

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A few weeks ago, Prairie and I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and tonight I watched North by Northwest.

Man I’m bummed I didn’t discover Hitchcock earlier.

That’s not to say I’m a complete neophyte — I’ve seen Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds in the past, and some time ago a reader was kind enough to send me a copy of a recent (and very good) Hitchcock biography, but really, I hadn’t seen much of anything of his oeuvre. After reading the biography, though, I went through and added every Hitchcock film that Netflix had available to my queue, and now they’re starting to filter in. This is going to be fun.

iTunes “Shake the Disease (Extended)” by Depeche Mode from the album Shake the Disease (1985, 8:46).

Enterprise

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Over the past couple weeks, I noticed something interesting during my wanderings through the ‘net. During my near-obsessive investigation into Battlestar Galactica, discussion threads would often end up contrasting the new series to Enterprise, and I kept seeing people openly admitting that the first few seasons of Enterprise were dreck, but then going on to claim that their current season was actually quite watchable.

While reading some of the reports about the current fan-driven campaign to rescue Enterprise from cancellation, the same general comments kept popping up. Then I got into a conversation with a customer at work, and he ended up saying much the same thing.

Unconvinced but intrigued, I decided to see what I could find, and ended up downloading all of the episodes to date of Season Four of Enterprise and watching them over the past few days.

While I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m impressed, I do have to admit that I found this season to be far more bearable than what I had seen during the first season. It’s still by far my least favorite incarnation of Trek (out of TOS, TNG and DS9, at least, I’ve yet to see more than a few random episodes of VOY), but the overall feeling I got was that someone on the Enterprise team got their head out of their ass started actually listening to the fans and tried to turn the show around.

First step in the right direction was spending the first two episodes wrapping up the “temporal cold war” storyline. I thought that was a bad idea when it first popped up, and nothing I’d seen or read since then had convinced me any differently. Now that that’s over and done with, things seem to be improving.

They’ve also spent a few episodes working on the Vulcan culture, trying to explain why they’re presented so differently in this series than they ever have been before. It all came off as a little far-fetched, but at least they’re trying.

The storyline touching on the Eugenics Wars and augmented humans wasn’t bad (though I do wish that they’d used some other scientist as the antagonist — as much as I like Brent Spiner, how old must Soong have been by the time he died?), and it allowed them to finally create an explanation for the differences in appearance between the Klingons of the original series and those we’ve seen ever since The Motion Picture. A pity the second half of that two-part story became so muddled, as the first part was fairly strong, and the general premise is at least bearable (and no worse than some of the other convoluted explanations that have had to be created over the years to explain away various goofs).

So, I’ll admit that they’ve gotten better, and the current season of Enterprise is at least watchable. I still don’t think that there’s any great need for it to continue, though — let it die, and let the Trek universe have a few years to settle and regroup before trying to fire up the Paramount marketing machine yet again.

And please, please, please — no more bad ballads over the opening credits in any future incarnations of Trek. Someone (other than the people sitting through it week after week) really needs to suffer for that.

Saw

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Rick brought over Saw last night for me to watch. It’s a film that aspires to be a psychological/horror film along the lines of Seven…and fails miserably.

The premise starts interestingly enough: two men wake up chained on opposite sides of a room, prisoners of a psychopath who manages never to actually kill his victims. Instead, he puts them into situations where they have to kill themselves or others in their attempts to stay alive.

Unfortunately, Saw is burdened by two major flaws: a script that has a number of goofs, from plot holes to unrealistically stupid actions by the characters; and Cary Elwes, who continues to completely unimpress me as an actor. By the end of the film, the violence had gotten to the point where I nearly turned it off, and neither of the final two surprises surrounding the identity of the psychopath were surprising in the least.

I think the premise had promise, but the execution was so flawed that I ended up finding the entire film a waste of my time.

iTunes “Two Telephone Calls and an Air Raid” by Imrei, Shaun from the album Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997, 4:43).

Reconsidering

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I did something this morning that I’ve only done a couple times in the past, and have removed a post that had been published a few hours before. The conversation is still progressing (or, that is, it will be when I get home to check my e-mail again), I just came to think that it was a conversation better held less publicly.

So if you saw a post pop up and then disappear on this page or in your newsreader, that’s why. No glitch, just a reconsideration.

Keeping New Readers

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Problogger has a short series of posts with tips on how to keep readers who have stumbled across your site via a search engine hit or some other method. Interesting stuff, though nothing groundbreaking, and as it turns out, I do most of what he recommends already.

In Part One:

(Anybody surprised by those last two? I know I’m not…)

In Part Two:

  • Good individual page design: I think I’m pretty solid here. My individual pages match my main page, with some slight tweaks here and there to better fit their status as more focused pages than the main page is.
  • Make your message clear: I’m not so strong here, but then, I don’t really have a single focus for the site.
  • Provide pathways into your blog: Suggestions here include obvious links to the home page, an about page, and archives, all of which I have prominently displayed at the top of each page.

In Part Three:

  • Links to other relevant entries: Another one I think I’m pretty solid with, thanks to the category links beneath the title and the ‘Related Entries’ section of the sidebar.
  • E-mail this entry to a friend: This one I don’t have set up. I’ve seen it other places, but never figured it would have that much use. Maybe I should re-think that one.
  • Promote via newsletter: This one I’m not even interested in trying to maintain. I’m bad enough about keeping up with things (including, at times, this site), trying to maintain a newsletter of any sort would die a quick death. Again, though, as I don’t have a specific focus for the site, that’s probably less of a concern for me.

In Part Four:

  • Promote your RSS feed: Sometimes I wonder if I should do more here — while I have the ‘Feeds’ link in the site menubar, there may be people who don’t recognize the significance of that. Perhaps renaming that to (the dull but obvious term) RSS would be a good idea. I’m not sure if there’s much need or demand for me to start enabling RSS feeds for every post on my site, though I consider it from time to time.
  • Search this site: Again, we’re good here — the search box is nice, obvious, and ‘above the fold’ on every page.
  • Break up longer posts into multiple posts: My only difficulty with this one is that I never plan long posts, they just sort of happen…and then they tend to be stream-of-consciousness enough that it would be difficult to break them apart. I don’t think I’ll concern myself with this one too much.
  • Be interactive: While I don’t always respond to every comment left, I do keep track of any comments left here, and do my best to respond as much as possible (time, energy, and available brainpower dependent, of course).

Not a bad set of tips, all in all. Maybe I’ll tinker with a couple more things here and there.

(via Neuvo)

iTunes “Acperiance 1” by Hardfloor from the album Harthouse: The Point of No Return Chapter 1 (1993, 8:58).

Battlestar Galactica Season 1…done!

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Up until this week, I never got the whole thing with people downloading and watching shows on their computer. I’ve got such a low opinion of the majority of TV shows that I just couldn’t see spending the time and resources on such a project.

Then I got bit by the Battlestar bug.

Suddenly, I can see the appeal. Three days ago, I got curious enough about the currently-running Battlestar Galactica series to ask for help on finding the episodes so that I could watch them. Now, as of just a few minutes ago, I’ve watched all that there is — and, amusingly enough, I’ve actually watched more than has been broadcast here in the US. All thirteen episodes were broadcast in Britain a few months ago, and those are the copies available on the ‘net. So, while the broadcasts on the Sci-Fi Network are only up through episode eight, I’ve just finished off the entire season.

End result? This is really good stuff. They’ve done an incredible job of re-imagining the show, and even better, have managed to keep up an extremely high level of quality throughout the show. Since the broadcasts here in the US still have another five weeks to go before they hit the season finale, I won’t go into any details or spoilers, but those of you who might be watching the show as its broadcast are in for quite a treat.

The DVD of the miniseries is now very high on my “to buy” list, and I’ll be picking up the DVD set for the miniseries as soon as it comes out — while I’ll admit that the quality of the shows I downloaded was far better than I expected, it still won’t compare to full DVD resolution and (I hope) full 5.1 surround. Battlestar may not be getting any ratings points from me during its broadcast run (though they wouldn’t in any case, as I don’t subscribe to cable), but they’ll definitely be getting my money for the DVDs. Hopefully they’re gathering enough eyeballs during their broadcast run to keep the show on the air and at its current level of excellence for a good long time to come.

(Yes, I know that this is a sticky situation legally, and in all honesty, if I did subscribe to cable, I probably would have been quite content watching the episodes as they broadcast and contributing to the ratings. However, I continue to hold fast to my belief that cable television is, on the whole, an incredible waste of money. As stated above, though, once the DVD sets are available, they’re going into my collection.)

iTunes “Track 06” by Grover from the album One With the Universe (1998, 7:00).

Halle Berry wins Razzie…and respect

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Kudos to Halle Berry for actually showing up to accept her Razzie award for Catwoman!

Halle Berry staged an Oscar-worthy parody of her Academy Awards meltdown at last night’s 25th annual Razzie awards in Los Angeles. Breaking with tradition, the Catwoman star showed up in person to collect her award as the worst actress of 2004.

Explaining her decision to attend the event, Berry said: “My mother told me that if you couldn’t be a good loser then there’s no way you could be a good winner.”

Berry famously broke down at the podium upon winning the 2002 best actress Oscar for her role in Monster’s Ball. She mimicked that moment again last night, faking sobs on stage for a full minute while clutching her Academy Award in one hand and her Razzie (actually a spray-painted golf ball) in the other.

But her speech, when it finally came, went out of its way to spread the blame for Catwoman’s failure. “I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit,” she announced to tumultuous laughter. She added: “I’d like to thank the rest of the cast. To give a really bad performance like mine you need to have really bad actors.”

I’m impressed. Good for her!

iTunes “Feel the Fury” by Merlin from the album Just Say Anything (1991, 4:44).

MT-Blogroll

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I’ve just updated and revised my blogroll over to the right. Instead of relying on an external service to manage my blogroll, I’m now using a new plugin from Arvind Satyanarayan called MT-Blogroll that implements blogroll management directly into the Movable Type interface.

So far, I’m definitely liking it — it allows for categorization of links, descriptions, and XFN data (though I’m not currently using the latter two items), has a bookmarklet for quickly adding links, and seems to work just like it should. The one downside is that I’ll no longer be able to display recently-updated weblogs in bold, but I can live with losing that for being able to manage everything centrally on my own server.

I’ve also updated my list of currently running Movable Type tweaks to include MT Blogroll (and one other tweak that I’d forgotten in the initial post).

iTunes “Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix) (1997, 1:04:33).