Apparently half of the pranks on the Internet this year involve something called “rickrolling,” and I guess there’s some 80’s pop star involved. Apparently you’re not one of the cool kids until you’ve “rickrolled” somebody.
Fine. I can do that. Here you go. I’m getting it over with. This is a one-time opportunity, so enjoy it while you can.
[audio:Rick-DanceThisWorldAway.mp3]I feel dirty now.
“Now, my friends, without further ado and to permit those holding their breaths to breathe…” — Masterharper Robinton, from Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonsinger”
Here, then, is the back half of the crazy project of the week.
[audio:PMMP-2.mp3]Nobody who knows me at all will be surprised to learn that I used to make mix tapes, the real thing, back in the 80s and early 90s. One of my favorite tricks was to use one set of artists or title elements or what-have-you in one sequence for side ‘A’ of the 90-minute cassette and then reverse the sequence for the ‘B’ side. The effect, especially in the popular players of the day which would play both sides of the tape over and over until someone pressed the Stop button (or until the tape jammed or broke), was that of a musical journey, bouncing back and forth along some theme or another.
I moved on to burning CDs when technology left cassettes behind for good, but it’s just not the same. CDs will cheerfully repeat their lone sequence and that’s all they can do. I can’t play the same thematic tricks in a simple circular form that I could with two “sides” of tape. Complexity is limited by the seventy-or-so minutes you have to work with. The one new feature, that of shuffle play, is nearly useless for my purposes.
I must admit, of course, that this little project doesn’t fit the mold of the classic mixtape either. It’s two gigantic MP3 files separated by journal post numbers, launched by two different player widgets, and so forth. All this will really do is give you an idea of the kind of things I like to do, namely playing around with themes and patterns. Oh, and many of these are among my favorite songs, so there’s that benefit as well… dubious as it may be for someone who doesn’t share my particular tastes. (That would be 99.99% of humanity.)
I tried to use one “current” and one “older” song from each artist as well as differing the tone between directions of travel. Duran Duran’s upbeat “Nice” is balanced by the somber “Winter Marches On,” while the Pet Shop Boys’ dystopian “Integral” and exuberant “Metamorphosis” neatly showcase the dark and light sides of their musical output. The plan didn’t always work, and in crafting the two mixes I ended up with imperfect pacing both directions due to the multiple restrictions and challenges I’d faced coupled with my lack of recent practice. I was also forced to cheat a little bit on one of the artist selections, as Kevin Gilbert’s limited musical output didn’t give me any choice if I wanted to keep him in.
Yet, I’m generally happy with how it turned out… all things considered.
Part One:
Part Two:
I hope you enjoyed this little trip into both my psyche and my music library.
As promised, here’s the first installment of my brilliant idea. It’s a there-and-back-again music set using the same artists on the way back as on the way out, in suitably reversed order. I cheated in one particular case, but it was a case of “close enough” as well as “look, he just didn’t put out that many albums, okay?”
So. Enjoy, if you’re so inclined.
[audio:PMMP-1.mp3]If the gods are kind, I’ll have the second half posted tomorrow night…
First, I wasn’t going to post anything so I could goof off and listen to music. Someone on my LJ friends list requested a mix tape disc archive and I figured I should get my brain percolating on ideas for what to include.
Then, I thought I should work on a playlist for a new music mix post, since I’ve been pondering making more of those. Even though nobody seems to like them much, hey, it’s my damned site and I’ll post music mixes if I jolly well feel like it. So there, and stuff.
Once I started assembling the playlist, I had a brainstorm. The brilliant idea will require a fair bit of additional work, but I figured I could do that on Thursday night and have the setup all done tonight.
Finally, I got carried away and assembled the first part of the project tonight. I’d just post the silly thing… but my computer’s still saving the compressed mixdown file, and I need to get to bed.
Ahem.
So, some time between now and bedtime on Thursday I should have at least half of the silly project posted. Watch for it, won’t you?
Let’s see… Arthur C Clarke is gone, the Killer Death Flu Of Death has made merry havoc for everyone I know over the last couple of months, fuel prices keep going upward, taxes are hitting me (and a few others) harder than they did last year, I rarely see more than a couple of my friends anymore, I’ve lost touch with several others entirely, I still can’t find comfortable sheets for my bed, I’m getting older and creakier, every one of my computers has some kind of annoying problem getting in the way of my doing what I actually want to use them for, nearly everything worth watching anymore is old stuff, let’s not even go into the fact that there hasn’t been a movie worth seeing in the theater since mid-2007, and, and, and…
2008? You can go sit in the corner. Don’t come out until you can play nice.
Because I said so. That’s why.
Year of the Rat, my ass.
I’ve been multitasking heavily all day. At one point I used my console connection to this server to look up some port-to-service mappings. (Firewall logs at my employer’s colocation facility showed a couple of minor anomalies. I was tasked with tracking them down.) The grep session gave me more results than I needed, but I did find the desired information so I left the terminal session be and moved on to other things.
I just came back from foraging for foodstuffs, sat down, looked at the laptop screen and thought for a moment that my server had become possessed by LOLcats. At the tail end of the results from earlier, something that originally escaped my notice:
nomdb 13786/tcp # Veritas-nomdb nomdb 13786/udp # Veritas-nomdb
Perhaps I’ve been reading too many cat macros, because I should not be seeing “NOM NOM NOM NOM” when perusing the /etc/services file…
