Salme Dahlstrom

Salme Dahlstrom – Superstar Car Crash

link

Caught this one on AZLTRON. I figure we’ve had enough soft indie shit from me. Back to my first and favorite: synths.

AZLTRON described her music as reminiscent of Fatboy Slim and The Crystal Method, which I have to agree with. Say what you want about those two, but they’re what launched me down a dubious musical path lined with heavy bass and catchy loops that you can’t help but at least tap your foot to.

The Faint @ The Fillmore

It’s come to my attention (primarily through my having just purchased tickets for IAMX) that I never wrote about having seen The Faint at The Fillmore.

At the beginning of this month. I’m a timely SOB.

I’ve scant little to say, sadly. They were awesome. The openers were not so great, but the main show was awesome. Todd Fink cosplayed as Dr. Horrible, a statement which is true because I have declared it as such. (Come on, he came on stage wearing goggles and a white lab coat. There are scant few places I can go with that at this moment.)

The songs that I liked on the album I loved live. The songs that I hated on the album suddenly came to life. They took an album that I was ‘meh’ about and put so much love and force into their playing that I suddenly enjoyed it all.

I’m willing to ignore the fact that the show didn’t start until 11pm. Because at least it was worth it.

Graveyard Book Tour, San Francisco

It’s getting to the point that I should just make a category for ‘Neil Gaiman’–but I wouldn’t want to seem obsessive. (Let’s nevermind that I am. I just wouldn’t want to make it more obvious than it already is.)

So, I’m not certain who all reads this blog that is in the Bay Area, but is anybody else planning on being at both events?

I am.

There’s a narrow list of authors to whom I would do this, and sadly I doubt Bradbury will be up for whirlwind tours of the nation anytime soon. Still, my ear is kept to the ground on that front.

Strange: Where Life Takes You

A year ago today I was too poor to eat regularly, barely making rent, wasting my degree at a coffee house, fighting with my significant other that I was living with at the time, and scrapping together the cash to take a 24-hour bus ride to Seattle to see friends at PAX. I don’t want to talk about the rent situation.

Now, I’m single and free, buying a condo, have a wonderful, high-paying job (as evidenced by condo-purchasing), and am going to PAX by plane and paying for my hotel.

What a difference a year makes.

Bad Reputation

Gamers have one.

I can understand why. To the outsider, hearing the banter between two gamers heavily engrossed in CounterStrike or Soul Calibur can make us seem like a rather unwholesome lot.

I was tempted to give examples of said banter. But you know, I’ll spare you.

But when it comes down to it, many gamers are good people. In fact, some of the best people I know are hardcore gamers. And it’s not just a local thing.

In July, we posted about Zak Touilii, a disabled Australian teenager whose PS3 and games – donated by the Make A Wish foundation – had been stolen by thieves who broke into his home. Was a bastardly act. One which has in turn generated a very un-bastardly response: we’ve heard a bunch of Kotaku commenters got together, raised some money and presented Zak with a cheque for USD$425. Which should go a long way towards restocking Zak’s games library (Sony Aus having already replaced his PS3)

Things like this make me happy.

Suck on that, Jack Thompson.

Hitler Banned

Link

An oldie but a goodie.

Twilight I’d Totally See

Link. Shamelessly stolen from SBTB.

This is a movie I’d see. Hells yes.

Brought to you by a dempsey who is still at work.

Throw Me the Statue

Throw Me the Statue – About to Walk

I don’t see the point in saying anything about the music. The video’s right there. Or right here if embedding fails again (which it seems to love to do).

But… Eighty Six Percent!

I’ve been a fan of Ghirardelli since I was a wee one. Lately I’ve been enjoying their Twilight Delight squares, comprised of 72% cacao. Dark chocolate is commonly 60% cacao, so you understand that this is a thing for me.

I have discovered a new chocolate. Midnight Reverie. At 86% cacao, it is a concentration likely to kill me. And it’s not available in south bay. I have to go to the source to get it.

Understand what I’m saying here. I’m plotting a trip of 50 miles by train to pick up a bar of chocolate.

If there is a line here, I most certainly have crossed it.

Book Meme

Meme stolen from edittorrent.

Here are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school*, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

I’m adding a layer by striking through the ones that I do not own. So that I do not fall under the “I own it to look smart” category.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (currently reading)
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (en espanol)
• Wuthering Heights (hated it)
• The Silmarillion (if I want to read a history book, I’ll read real history)
• Life of Pi : a novel 2x
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote (tambien en espanol)
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice (hated it)
• Jane Eyre (hated it)
• The Tale of Two Cities (hated it)
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair (didn’t hold my interest)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations (hated it)
• American Gods (on publication date)
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged (couldn’t get into it)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha (had already seen movie, couldn’t get into it)
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera (en espanol)
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys (on publication date as well)
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons (isn’t this Brown? I could barely get past three chapters of DaVinci)
• The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility (hated)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune (boring)
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere (people need to get off their asses and read Gaiman already)
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road (except for Subterraneans, I cannot bear Kerouac)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield (bored me)
• The Three Musketeers

Maybe I’m ill-read, but at least I’m not a posturing asshole.