katherine st asaph

piratemoggy:

truckzilla:

to all you americans out there

this is eurovision

This almost made me emotional with the sheer beauty of it- it was like Freddie Mercury had lived to make an EDM album, I am literally buying it right now.

Green: “Hi! I’m here! You can talk to me!”

Blue: “I’m here, and you only wish you could talk to me.”

Yellow: “I’m not here. (But we’re still cool.)”

Orange: “I’m not here. (And we’re not cool.)”

Chartreuse: “I’m not here… unless you know who you are.”

Red: “I’m busy. Don’t fucking talk to me. I don’t even know why this window is open.”

Pink: “I’m ‘busy.’ I would secretly love for you to talk to me oh god save me from my busywork.”

Brown: “We have not spoken in three years, and doing so now would be unseemly. This is not a green connection. It has rotted.”

Black: “I am only here because you back-and-forthed my Craigslist apartment or listserv entry. I don’t even know what you look like.”

Silver: “I am actually a bot.”

Gray: “I’m offline.”

White: “I’m a ghost: offline for you but online for everyone else, because fuck you, that’s why.”

Mint: “I’m here, because I am using Google Glass. (Very expensive.)”

shitmystudentswrite:

I strongly agree and disagree with that statement to some extent.

All of my writing can be reduced to this.

entergodmode:

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF THE PEOPLE AND ENTITIES WHO BENEFIT FROM A SYSTEMATICALLY ACCELERATED CONSUMPTION OF SUPPOSEDLY INDEPENDENT MUSIC (THEORETICALLY SPEAKING)

1. music playback hardware manufacturers such as apple and beats by dre (e.g. iphone, beats headphones)

2. music distribution platforms and services (more products to sell, more products to stream, the accumulation of microprofits, etc)

3. cloud-based downloading services such as mediafire

4. internet server companies that provide online data space for both #2 and #3

5. social media networks where music information is shared (tumblr, facebook both benefitting from more people using their services, e.g. for data mining)

6. music media (always something new to write about, more opportunities to create pseudo-narrative out of news cycle, more opportunities to be “first” both journalistically and critically, more opportunities to graft fictive-non-fictive theories onto content, greater likelihood that grafted theories will appear meaningful)

7. publicity firms (wider pool of represented ‘talent’ means more opportunity to broker deals with more and different kinds of media, e.g. more access given to more popular artist in exchange for smaller feature/debut/no-harm-done type press, e.g. debut, tour dates, any acknowledgement of new artist’s existence; publicists become integral part of controlling the ‘deluge’ and enjoy increasing degrees of setting agendas they are paid to set)

8. booking agencies and other 10- and 20-percenteries like management and music law. (greater nationalization of booking in the form of package deals, more younger bands with national appeal willing to be “put on the road” for $100/$150night, more power when negotiating fees and festival time slots, less pressure to ‘build’ an artist’s following because the artist will likely be made irrelevant in the deluge of new and more exciting artists; increasing profitability of picking up nickels and dimes)

9. new young artists whose content is loop-based, modular, capable of being quickly understood and cheaply produced (rappers, electronic dance music)

10. festival promoters (more ‘relevant’ bands means greater demand for festivals, rise in the number of festivals in US/worldwide speaks to the financial viability, festival brand becomes greater than the sum of its parts)

11. lifestyle brands (greater exposure to more supposedly independent artists drives down the cost of syncs and worldwide buyouts, no shortage of artists willing to have their music used for marketing purposes, more opportunities for festival sponsorships and promotional content)

12. people who enjoy the fantasy football-like qualities of the music world and take honest pleasure in the minting and accumulation of proper nouns (more ‘players’, more ‘teams’, more bowl games, more opportunities to be or to appear to be in the know, whether for reasons of self-definition or personal gain, social material or otherwise)

 I would dispute #6, dispute the implications of #9 and dispute #12 is necessarily invalid, but OK.

ourroyalcustomers asked: the emperor, the hierophant

Do you have any family traditions? Nothing major, nothing noteworthy. It tapered off over time.

What is/was your favourite school subject? Probably English. It’s something I’m regretting.

markrichardson:

If, when casually speaking with someone, you state an idea about a new record that your conversation partner might also be reviewing, you realize that this person might steal your idea for his/her review. If you are worried about your idea being stolen, you don’t share it in private conversation but rather write it down somewhere in public view first, so the fact that it is “your idea” is documented. In other words, you only share in conversation what you don’t mind being stolen. Am I right about this?

I think about this a lot. (How it plays out for me, generally: I want to cite/read as much as possible; I don’t want it to look like inside baseball; critical common knowledge / consensus opinion doesn’t necessarily resemble… well, a lot, but primarily the common knowledge a reader might think he had.)