Bikkuri Tales

Mates of State has been around for a good while now,but why the hell haven’t I heard of them until yesterday?! They have the hot, hot boy-girl harmonic action that I love about bands like Quasi and Rainer Maria, and they sound like something I would totally love. I’m actually quite angry that no one made me listen to them.

It’s like Rushmore: An awesome movie that everyone talked about but I never ever saw, and when I did see it, I kicked myself for not having seen it years earlier. The only explanation I can think of is that they were popular while I was in Olympia, and Oly had more than enough of its own music scene. It kind of existed in a bubble, because we had tons of bands to follow and go see and enjoy, so we rarely saught music outside the sphere. With Calvin Johnson, Mirah, The Microphones, The Blow, Liarbird, The Strangers, and countless others, why would weneed to look elsewhere?

Anyhow, if you’re reading this, and you like Quasi, Rainer Maria, and hot hot boy/girl harmonic action, go check out Mates of State’s new album Bring It Back. You’ll thank yourself like I am thanking myself right now.

That sounds… so wrong…

I must say that Sleater Kinney is one of my favorite bands of all time. They had their ups and downs and their share of growing pains, but honestly, if they’re going to bow out, The Woods is a great album to do it by. As a fan since the self titled debut (and technically, even from their early projects, like Heavens To Betsy and Excuse 17) until the present, I’m sad that they’re breaking up, but at the same time, all good things must one day pass.

The fans have their memories, and music history has Sleater Kinney’s rock and roll to inspire countless future rockers in the generations to come. Thank you girls. We’ll all be keeping an eye on whatever you do in the years to come.

Ps. Hey Janet, that last Quasi album was fucking awesome!

I'm a big fan of social networking, and I believe it's yet to reach it's full potential online. Myspace, the biggest of them all for now, is sort of the bane of the internet in my opinion. Marketing everywhere you turn, god awful profile design that makes your eyeballs bleed, and lots and lots of pointless posts about what band you saw first, 20 questions about nothing, and whatever chain letter that's going around at the time. So naturally, when something like fo.rtuito.us came along, I was excited.

fo.rtuito.us is pretty much the polar opposite of Myspace. It runs on serendipity, see. You have a profile which consists of nothing more than your screen name and a photo, and you're partnered up with a person at random. You see only their screen name, and it's up to the two of you to get to know one another via messaging back and forth. After 5 days, you decide whether or not you want to keep them as a friend, and a new person is served up to you. The process begins again.

I think it's an interesting concept, but after having been a user for over a month now, with 0 friends I see 2 main reasons why it's not so fantastic after all:

1) The 5 day waiting period: I understand the idea behind the 5 day waiting period, but sometimes you don't want to wait. Many times the person never writes back, and you're stuck waiting and waiting until you can try someone bew.

2) Language barriers: As is the way of the internet, fo.rtuito.us enjoys a widely international audience (or so I gather from the number of people I've been connected to who live all over the world). The system should have some sort of translation tool easily accessable to members to help facilitate communication between those who don't share a common primary language.

I think the idea of serendipity in social networks is an interesting one, and I do think I'll try to use the system for another month or so and see what happens. My main beef with it as it is now is something they can definitely fix, and the site is ever-evolving, so it will be interesting to see what sort of changes they make in the following months to come.

RSS feeds are so wonderful. I think many people don't really understand their value, but some people use what's called a feed reader to collect various RSS feeds into a single place so they can read all their news and updates quickly.

Personally, I use Firefox's live bookmarks feature. In my bookmarks toolbar I have various categories where I keep my RSS feeds. That way, instead of having another program open just for RSS feeds, I can simply browse headlines from my favorite sites right from my bookmarks toolbar. Some of my favorites are Google News, Craigslist, and Ebay as well as tech feeds from Engaget, MAKE Blog, and MacRumors to name a few. 

RSS feeds are so wonderful. Perhaps I'm just an information junkie, but I think they're essential time savers for anyone interested in staying on top of things.