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Aimee Mann: Lost in Space

July 27, 2002
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Aimee Mann has announced her new album, Lost in Space, which excites and pleases me beyond all measure. Except not quite all measure, because the discovery that she has put the entire thing up on her Website (Flash, Windows Media, and RealAudio streams only) excited and pleased me even more. So I have at least one point from which to measure my joy.

I blame the tone of that on glenn mcdonald, whose online record review column The War Against Silence is near and dear to my heart. I’d just been reading him to see if he had reviewed Ms. Mann’s latest output. No such luck, although he was as distressed by the new Bob Mould as I am. I’ll have to give Modulate another listen with his comments in mind. In the meantime, if you’re an old school Mould fan who was thinking about his new records, you might want to stick to LiveDog98, as the other two are rather… full of synths and drum loops. They might grow on me. Haven’t yet.

I have nobody but myself to blame for the length of that last paragraph. There is some degree of connection between Aimee Mann and Bob Mould, however. They’re both charter members of United Musicians.

Anyhow, make sure to poke around for the animated stars on Aimee Mann’s site; they contain the two bonus songs from the extra CD you get if you preorder her new album today. Oh, and her Website is entirely Flash, so be warned.

Addendum as of 8/27: this page turns up rather high in certain Google searches, so I went ahead and wrote a brief review to perhaps satisify anyone who got here in such a manner.

Whassup RSS?

July 26, 2002
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Note to self: reinstall the RSS feed when the guy releases the more stable version. Current version is tanking on the Gaming Report feed, which causes my index page to not rebuild, which makes the Baby Jesus cry.

Fontalicious

July 26, 2002
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Every now and then I find one of those tasty indie fontdesigner sites and wind up spending half an hour downloading a bunch of free fonts and yeah.

“This font was started with the idea, “Make that cool ‘m’ that you see in magazines sometimes. Make a whole font out of it!!” So I did, and it was drab. Meanwhile, a new idea is creeping around. “Make it 2 lines thick, you love to make fonts like that!” So I did. Then, it was not so drab. I named this baby Supreme, because sometimes when you throw spectacular names on so-so fonts, people get all raged up to download them. But this font is not so-so, it is the most. You couple that with the name, and geez, you know what I’m talking about!!”

So Fontalicious is good and I should not forget about it. Like I’m ever going to use any of these. But so pretty!

Reign of Fire

July 25, 2002
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Reign of Fire was bad on so many levels. It was good on one level: exceptional effects. But the people were stupid, they had stupid plans, the biology was fairly insulting, and just oh geeze.

I’m not really the type to bitch about military deployment flaws and so on; I’m not a military history buff and I’d be a poor strategist. Same goes for my biological knowledge, actually. So when I realize I’m shifting uncomfortably in my seat due to the flaws, and when I realize that the logical holes have eaten up the fabric of story and I can’t care what happens to the characters because I don’t believe they could possibly wiggle themselves into their on-screen situation, it’s a bad sign.

The dragons were exceedingly pretty, and there were three excellent scenes involving oral tradition.

Operation TIPS Cruises Onward

July 24, 2002
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So this I just don’t get. Say you’re John Ashcroft, and you come up with a plan to do such and such. You properly sponsor a bill to allow the appropriate federal department to carry out that plan (among other plans; it’s a big bill). The House takes a look at the legislation and modifies the portion of it dealing with your clever plan. They feel you should not carry out your plan.

Is it not wrong to say “Well, they didn’t understand us, we’re going to go ahead with it anyhow.”? I mean, this is the checks and balances thing, here. The legislative branch does get to say “We don’t think that’s a good idea.” It’s sort of how the entire system works.

The trend I see — and note that I’m not calling these guys evil — is an imperial Presidency; they appear to feel that they are trustworthy people who should be given the power to do what’s right for us. I firmly believe that Bush and Ashcroft are trying to do what’s right for us in their minds. I suspect they just don’t get that some people don’t trust them.

When you think of it that way, it makes more sense. Sure, some of these bills would permit horrendous abuses of power. But Bush knows he wouldn’t ever abuse the power, so what’s the worry? I think it’s crippling to assume that Bush’s goal is to abuse power; it hampers communication. He’d probably do some of the things I consider abusive, but in many cases the things that strike me as abusive might well strike him as abusive as well. Mostly he seems to want freedom to do what he wants without pesky oversight.

Doesn’t make me any happier about a lot of the legislation he’s proposed, though.