February 2012
113 posts
“A different kind of hip-hop epiphany: Going to a small liberal-arts college and...”
– Brandon Soderberg (via SPIN)
This is important. (via theremixbaby)
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The Love Letter →
Yeah, this is actually pretty cute.
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andyhutchins:
To determine if a thing on the internet is for real:
allimmaturityandallcaps:
1. Copy a selection of text that is unusual enough to get you a solid search result. Copying the dateline—probably no good. Copying generic who/what/when/where/why text—also probably no good. Copying specific details given three paragraphs down in the article—probably going to get some results for the...
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the moment
when you do a serious sit-down and assessment of your own writing skills, let alone get-up-the-gumption-to-write, and realize that nope, they’ve gotten worse over the past year, not better.
But this is a serious post, so — how does one pull oneself out of a writing slump? As much of a slump as you can even have as a daily blogger, but still?
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a little late, but our "Idol" thing is up →
Why it’s a little late will be posted in a bit. But yes: singers!
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“Susan Hockfield, the first woman and the first life scientist to serve as...”
– Something’s up.
“Thanks to the loyalty of their fans, these collaborations matter. In real life...”
– Caramanica’s thing in the NYT
I really hope this is just an accidentally unfortunate word choice. (The word called for is “ambiguous,” no?) But I’ve sat on posting this for about half an hour, and it still seems… off. More loaded than might be needed?
(via katherinestasaph)
i for one am...
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“Buttermilk is terrible for drinking but a godsend for baking; the chemical...”
– So this happened. (It happens quite a bit! Second time I’ve quoted one.)
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“what leaped out at me as the gold mine of the piece”
– Forbes aggregator, quoted on Romenesko
As gold mines do.
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But I can still be grossed out by the notion of... →
WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME THERE'S A VERONICA SAWYER... →
Isn’t this, like, blog bait laced with blog crack, coated in blog candy, covered in blog flashing lights and tossed into the blog sea amid a big puddle of blog blood for the blog sharks?
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five words awesome to see first thing you wake up →
= “Fiona Apple live in NYC.”
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how many ways is it possible to swoon, even? →
At least two ways. Capsule write-ups of the new tracks by Charli XCX (who I assume needs no introduction here) and Swedish indie/teenpop group Little Marbles (who I assume does.) They’re both great.
Back to Bedbugs →
cureforbedbugs:
Here’s an old-school rant in need of some healthy pushing back (like most of my recent writing it’s all polemic with few concrete or useful examples), but I’m asking people to actually come back to “my house” to fight about it or like it or whatever else. New Echo comments are terrible, but I can’t seem to get rid of them without deleting the most important Bedbugs comments...
“The comments under a newspaper article about music, a blog post, a video,...”
– From Nitsuh’s typically excellent column today on rockism, which is worth reading in full; the below is a tangent.
The thing is, I’d argue that it is a silent, depressing plurality. Yes, most of these arguments fall apart under scrutiny (don’t write your own material? Why, you...
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“Lana Del Rey recorded a version of Shirley Bassey’s “Big Spender”
– 1. YOU MEAN “BIG SPENDER” FROM SWEET CHARITY, GOD.
2. Of course she fucking recorded a version of “Big Spender.” It’s one of the first songs belters want to try during lessons and in the top 5 Broadway songs you’d expect Lana to cover. (The rest of the top 5 is...
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This is part of my stance on the Chris... →
My stance is generally “ugh,” but here’s the fuller version. Summary: there are a few astoundingly obvious things people are ignoring.
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in which I try so hard to make an "Idol" recap of... →
And fail, and just go off:
Vegas Round is one of the worst “innovations” <i>American Idol</i> has ever introduced. There is only one reason ever to go to Las Vegas on a reality TV show: pure, inky evil, the sort of junket that encourages singers to ply each other with diamond-infused vodka and go on poker-table crawls and whittle away whichever savings give them other...
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“He is almost as enthusiastic about PacMan, although you get the sense that he...”
– I’m not really an expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a common-sensical limb here and suggest there’s no way someone on GameFAQs hasn’t used this construction.
(Seriously, though, this is fascinating.)
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today I get to recap ACTUAL SINGING! →
Two things about today’s Idol recap:
- The cake story is a true story, except it actually happened with brownies, DESPITE the oven. I’m not the best baker sometimes.
- I guess now I’ve achieved my life goal of referencing “Cold and Fugue Season.”
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“By almost every other measure, media remains overwhelmingly male, and it’s...”
– Caveat to that last statistic: Journalism and mass communication programs often include PR and advertising, so it’s not quite a one-to-one comparison. But nevertheless, this is important.
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Today's edition of Stuff I Wrote
In lieu of a bunch of links, a linkdump:
- Riffing on Bonnaroo and reviewing Usher.
- Whitney.
The Visual Language of Dashed Lines →
abbyjean:
The dashed line is exquisitely rich with information. A line formed from a continuous series of dashes is diminished in strength when compared to a solid line, yet in terms of visual language, it is just as powerful. The weakness of the dashed line is it’s strength. Through a combination of our perceptual apparatus and sophisticated visual literacy, dashed lines represent meanings...
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girlboymusic asked: 18, 23, 24.
Anonymous asked: 1,5,9,13,19,24
girlboymusic asked: 14, 15, 29.
Anonymous asked: 22, 30
dalatu asked: 6, 15,17,20
imathers asked: 4, 19, 28
isabelthespy asked: 1, 15, 30
Sure, why not. Everyone else is.
THY QUESTIONS:
1. Who was your first kiss and what was it like?
2. Are you in a relationship? If so, are you happy?
3. Do you have a crush?
4. Who is your crush?
5. Are you a virgin?
6. What do you think of Valentine’s Day?
7. Who is your Valentine?
8. Have you ever asked anyone out?
9. Who is your celebrity crush?
10. Has anyone ever asked you out and you turned them down?
11. Do...
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presented without commentary
Bonny Bear:
It’s hard to accept this award because of all the talent out there, but also because Bon Iver is an entity and something that I gave myself to. A lot of people give themselves to it, so it’s hard to think of Bon Iver as an artist. Bon Iver is not an artist. Bon Iver is an idea.
Also:
You can’t calculate all that shit, so it weirdly puts it in perspective for...
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Whitney Houston
thesinglesjukebox:
Whitney Houston’s voice was built for the ages. Fittingly, her success spanned a long period in a time when pop changed at a rapid rate. When presented with a fizzy 80s dance track, she sang the hell out of it and lifted you as high as her upper register. When an enormous ballad was required, she was emotive and controlled, and so when big movie tie-in ballads were big, she...
strictlyalright:
I know that mashups are, in general, terrible because the idea is that the juxtaposition is just the grafting of a less acceptable song onto a more acceptable one, much like its 2011/12 equivalent, but there’s no reason to instantly react so negatively to the Whitney/Robyn mashup (my dash is mostly, if not all, positive but this is for the Max Read’s out there, I guess; also,...