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Category Archives: Show-and-Tell
Somnolescent Record Club #1: Autolux’s Demos (2001-2002)
I’ve written a lot about music. Like a lot. A lot a lot. Usually, when I talk about music, it’s with this air of formality, either giving my opinion or digging into the details and investigating—I’m autistic, this is what I do.
I do listen to music for fun sometimes, though. I put on songs because they’ve been stuck in my head all day. I have characters and ideas I associate with albums and songs and specific times of my life. Sometimes, even—I will throw on a record.
I’d like to start up a monthly all-vinyl blog ramble series called the Somnolescent Record Club. For once, we’re gonna believe all the myths, get into the groove (quite literally), enjoy the tactility of the big art and the wax platters, and I’ll talk about my listening setup and all the things that run through my head when I put on an album. Today’s record is the vinyl-exclusive gold-colored Demos (2001-2002) from the mighty Autolux, whose debut album these demos were for I lived in in high school.
Hopefully, this runs more casual than you might be used to from me—that’s my aim.
ChromeOS To Go: Thoughts on ChromeOS Flex
You might have used a Chromebook, Google’s funky, moderately dystopian cloud-centered take on the netbook formula. If you owned one, you likely needed a lightweight, cheap little laptop (with pretty solid battery life) for school, light office work or entertainment. As most of these things are done reasonably enough in a plain old web browser, pitching a lightweight operating system specifically for that purpose isn’t too farfetched.
As the Gentoo-based operating system that runs the Chromebook, ChromeOS, is quite lightweight, it should be able to run well on anything that could run Chrome. It shouldn’t be too bad for an older computer, either: although aging, even a sufficiently specced 15 year old machine – 2010 as of writing – can totally run Chrome just fine.
There’s also a whole niche of Chromebook-inspired Windows laptops that came out in the mid-2010s, immediately stifled by stiff storage requirements and an operating system not designed for them. Out of the box, they’re effectively ewaste. But they have modern guts! They’re rocking UEFI, some Celeron with a generic Intel case badge, and typically fanless, with some amount of power efficiency! This makes them an excellent candidate for the ChromeOS experience.
I’ve used ChromeOS Flex on and off on secondary machines of mine, and I think it is pretty neat! I think it fits these cases pretty well, especially for users who aren’t as technologically savvy and just want to extend the life of their computer hardware. I’ll discuss this a little more later, but I think it’s worth some history first – because despite the somewhat recent arrival of ChromeOS Flex in 2022, this is not the the operating system’s first rodeo on non-Google licensed hardware.
Lighthearted fun with Minecraft Coder Pack
Back in the day, the only way to mod Minecraft was to open up the jar in WinRAR, delete META-INF, and then drag all the modded files into the jar.
Of course, this method has been obsolete for nearly a decade after the introduction of Forge (and now Fabric), but that’s what I grew up doing. Looking at all those seemingly gibberish .class files while trying to install the Aether mod for the umpteenth time made me wonder how I could make my own Minecraft mod.
I never figured it out, until now! Kinda. Continue reading
3-9-7-1-5: Exploring the Expanded Conet Project Boxset
Spring is here, my friends, and that means you’re all probably starting to leave your houses for sunny pastures. I have a bit of paranoia for you to take out there–obscured messages also sent out into the world, ones no one but the people they were meant for have been able to or will ever be able to crack. Who are those people? What do the numbers mean? Who are the Russian Man, the Spanish Lady, the Lincolnshire Poacher, Bulgarian Betty? What is Ciocirlia, the Buzzer, the Tyrolean Music Station? What the fuck does “snudering” mean?
Let me take you on a journey of circumstantial government intrigue. I’ll let the boxset explain before I do, run-ons preserved:
Almost every other piece of information on who is responsible for Numbers Stations comes from the part-time investigations of dedicated listeners. No government or person will admit to transmitting them, and only recently, due to the release of this CD set has GCHQ in the UK made its first ever public station on Numbers Station, saying that, “GCHQ are aware of the existence of Numbers Stations but cannot comment on operational matters”. Do “operational matters” include the ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ which is believed to be of British origin? With direction finding equipment it is possible to track down the location of transmitting antennas, and in the case of Numbers Stations which uses extremely powerful transmitters ‘Dfing’ [sic] the more powerful stations has proved an easy task for investigators but what exactly does it mean when you find an antenna farm on US government property blasting numbers in Spanish? Where and who are the recipients?
Promptly Forgotten: Remembering MyGameBuilder.com
“Hi! Welcome to this quick demonstration of My Game Builder, a new tool to allow you to build games for yourself and for your friends, online, using just a web browser. The tool is free to use, and free to share with your friends.” Continue reading
First Draft: Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim
Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
This review looks back on the Pixies’ debut EP Come On Pilgrim, the infamous purple tape it came from, and the re-records of the leftover material scattered throughout the rest of their initial run, and whether or not the EP would’ve been better served as a full album.
First Draft: Failure’s Magnified
Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
This second edition examines the home demos that almost comprised Failure’s second album, 1994’s Magnified.
First Draft: Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
This especially long-winded First Draft concerns the infinite permutations of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco’s 2002 art rock opus which streamed online officially for the first time 22 years ago today.
Bunch of random scans off the press plus bit of related rambling
As I’m getting rid of some part of my collection, the earliest one because I need money, I ended up scanning some which I’ll compile here. Some favorites from few mid 90s Dazed & Confused issues. It will be probably split in few installments I guess.
First Draft: …The Dandy Warhols Come Down
Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
This first review concerns the first attempt at the second Dandy Warhols album, 1997’s …The Dandy Warhols Come Down, as given to us by the band seven years later.