Resolved

Aaron: It’s reaching the end of the year again. I can’t count how many times I’ve said it but every year passes faster and faster, while the perceived time between events from year to year stretches until time seems like one really warped Inception-esque dream. Last year’s New Year’s Eve was a strange affair, with the ups and downs and drama bookending my first year of University and giving me insight into what the next twelve months of my life would be like. And not in a good way.

I can’t remember whether I’ve written about that night, but the facts are that everybody made a whole heap of bad decisions while dealing with the New Year Void, and it all just turned out like a wierd television soap where a huge amount of ridiculous drama occurs within the space of half an hour of viewing, all to be finished with a foreshadowing of next season’s events. Very meta.

Over the next couple of days I’ll outline a couple of things that happened to me during the year, hopefully begin a couple of lame New Year’s Resolutions which I’ll think about for a while and then not complete and then to cap it all off, just try write more in general. I enjoy writing and don’t see why I can’t make more time to throw up (as in throwing it in an upwards direction, not vomiting) a blog post instead of doing a whole myriad of stupid things.

Not Pictured: Something Relevant

Today I’m just going to write about my music collection; something that has always meant a huge deal to me.

Sidebar: I’m not sure I’ll ever correctly grasp complete understanding of the semicolon. I’m going into my third year of my English/Comms degree, for poop’s sake. The sentence above this sidebar is probably incorrect usage.

I have a fairly large digital music collection, built up from years of illegal downloads, library rentals, friends music collections and some 100+ CDs that I’ve bought with my own hard-earned money (of which I don’t have that much of…hence the illegal downloads). Today I was in a strange mood and thought I’d listen to something I hadn’t ever listened to before, according to my last.fm and my Windows Media Player play count tab. So I went ahead and sorted my music by ‘Amount of Plays per Track’ and was astounded to see that I had a huge amount of music that I’d never even listened to. So as a nice little project for me, I’m going to listen to each and every song that has had zero plays in my WMP. Maybe I’ll learn something about my music collection, maybe I won’t. But it’s going to take a long time, I’ll keep you updated. Also, I may as well do it in alphabetical order, so…SO FAR…

3 Doors Down – Away From The Sun (album) – Okay, pretty formulaic boring rock. A couple good songs, but the bad songs sound very similar to the good songs.

30 Seconds to Mars – Self-titled – Pretty good, not exactly what I’d like to listen to all the time…Pretty samey. Maybe their new album’s good, I should get it at some point.

ABBA – ABBA Gold – Now I’m beginning to doubt myself. This shit is gold, but yeah. I’ve heard it all a million times before, just not on my computer. I’m not even sure why it’s on here.

 

That’s all for today, folks!

Facebook vs. Hipsters

Tom: In early July, while holidaying in New Zealand, I crashed my snowboard and wound up stuck in hospital, bedridden, for two weeks. After the first few days the pain subsided but I was left with basically nothing to do. New Zealand may be one of our closest neighbours but I was still stuck in a foreign country with very little in the way of company or entertainment. Smart-phone to the rescue! I was able to pay for internet access using my debit card and soon acquired a plentiful supply of megabytes to consume – the largest culprit being Facebook. It allowed me to keep in touch with people while I was stuck in hospital, look at all the photos of the rest of my friends as they continued their holiday and I even got to talking with someone I hadn’t seen in years. This may seem like old hat to you more regular Facebook users but this was the first time I’d used Facebook in months.

Sure, I jumped on the bandwagon when it first got going. But I soon found out my time was better wasted on other websites. While Facebook did offer an amazing degree of connectivity, I found that the people I really wanted to talk to I saw on a regular basis anyway. If not, I’d just call or text them. The games and apps were generally just rehashes of things that could be found better elsewhere and the ability to share links and videos inferior to bookmarking sites like reddit or digg. While easily accessible, I generally found Facebook to be just mix of activities I could do somewhere else and I gradually stopped using it. There was, however, one thing that kept me coming back on the odd occasion; the photos. If I want to see all of my friends photos from a concert for instance, Facebook makes it incredibly easy. In fact, I can barely remember a time when photos would be shared by any other way. That aside, I generally steer pretty clear of Facebook.

As far as I know, this used to be a fairly ‘uncool’ thing to do. Facebook was growing and growing and people who still hadn’t migrated weren’t up-to-date. But in much the same way as its predecessor, Myspace, Facebook is beginning to lose its favour with the masses. Ironically, because of how large its getting. Where once Facebook was a place to chat to your close friends and tend to your farm it’s now been taken over by every member of your family, young and old. How can a place where your Auntie Ruth scolds you on your language be considered cool any more? I think Facebook is doomed to fail because of its accessibility.

Although It still has some way to fall before entering the ‘niche realm’ of Myspace I think it’s only a matter of time before people move on. But with such a large following its unlikely Facebook will ever quite fall of people’s radars. I just think it will simply become a smaller scale version of what it is now, and ultimately a place to share and view photos (the only truly useful function it has now). The question becomes: “Where will everybody go?”. I don’t see social networks dying any time soon, people love to socialise. A Facebook replacement will have to be similar enough for people to be comfortable yet different enough for it to be fresh. Well, if you followed the Facebook privacy issue a few months ago you may have already heard of Diaspora: the new kid almost on the block.

Facebook’s privacy has always been under heavy scrutiny (in fact, it’s privacy policy has undergone so many revisions it’s now longer than the United States Constitution) but it was a roll-out of changes in December 2009 that sparked an internet uproar. The changes included making user profile photos and friends lists publicly visible, even for users who had explicitly chosen to hide this information before. Information like the gender of partner you are interested in and relationship status became viewable to those even without a Facebook account. At one point it was actually impossible to keep information like your friends list private at all. Many people lost faith in Facebook’s ability to keep their personal information private, and among those were four college students who went on to design Diaspora. In their own words: Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network – or at least will be, it’s first release is in September. Will this be the new Facebook? I’m not entirely sure. It looks incredibly promising (I might just have a soft spot for open-source) and I think if people are willing to give it a shot it will prove to be much safer and far more useful than Facebook. While only time will tell, we migrated once already and I think it’s about time we migrated again. My only concern is for all those abandoned farm animals..

____________________

This is a submission for my University’s magazine, The Pelican. You can see Aaron’s here.

Birds of Tokyo

Aaron: A band deciding to release an eponymous album that isn’t their first is making a fairly large statement. Birds of Tokyo decided to use this statement to represent re-invention and rejuvenation for their third album, and it shows. Birds of Tokyo is their most polished and accomplished work yet, and from the first lilts of ‘Plans’ through the orchestral splendour of ‘In The Veins of Death Valley’ and ‘The Gap’ to the piano driven, 7-minute epic finale of ‘If This Ship Sinks’, the amount of work and life placed into each facet of this album is apparent.

Refreshing chord progressions spark in huge choruses in ‘Wild at Heart’ where Kenny’s lyrics really shine; “…Wear our bruises like watermarks… the Life and the Death of the Wild at Heart.” The song builds to a massive bridge and my definite favourite on the album.

The production on the album is subtly brilliant, and has a distinctly different feel from their previous work. Where Universes actually sounds ocean-esque in some places (owing its production nuances to a beach house in Yallingup) Birds of Tokyo‘s layering and balance between the thrumming guitars and Ian Kenny’s soaring vocals has been perfected to an extent not seen in Day One and Universes.

Birds of Tokyo is both pop and respectable music, musically and lyrically challenging.

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This was a music review written for the Pelican, the student newspaper/magazine for my university, the University of Western Australia. Enjoy!

Homosexuality vs. The Australian Way of Life

Aaron: We’re a land of hot wind from the desert, black soil from the plains, mountains and valleys and something something rains. Australia is among the most multi-cultural nations on Earth, and it is one of our greatest selling points as a place to live. We accept pizza and pasta, kebabs and felafel, curry and rice as much as we appreciate steak and bread. We’re  growing to accept, learn and teach other cultures and their significance in this nation, and becoming a better whole because of it. Religion barely seperates us, and in general, we accept our acquaintances and colleagues no matter whether they are atheist, Muslim or Christian. The only thing that seperates our fine country into ‘us’ and ‘them’? Gays.

That’s right, gays.

Hello. I’m a straight, white, male living in the most straight, white, male country in the world (citation needed). And the narrow mindedness of the country in which I live makes me sick. To demonstrate this, I’m going to introduce you to Barry.

Barry is 23 years old. Barry is Caucasian. Barry has browny-blond-y hair and green eyes. Barry works as an electrician. (from here on known as a ‘sparky’) Barry left high school in year 12 to go to TAFE and learn his trade. His parents are also Australian, and he likes to tell his colleagues (from here on known as ‘mates’) that his great-great-great-grandad was a convict. Kudos, Barry. Barry is agnostic, as he doesn’t ‘really think about that sort of thing that much’, while his parents go to church. Barry spends his weekends watching the footy, DIY-ing shit and having drinks with mates. Once or twice a year he gets some mates (and posibly ladies) to go to Bali and they sit around there for a week or two before headin’ home.

Barry knows what he likes, and doesn’t make that many changes to the routine he’s been in for the past few years. What does Barry hate? The sporting team that the majority of his fellow supporters also dislike. Why? Because they’re not like him. He doesn’t understand why they choose that team over his, it just doesn’t make sense. It just seems natural to support the team that he does, and why would someone purposefully choose otherwise?

This is mirrored when anyone brings up gay people. Barry sees ‘them’ on television, sometimes at clubs, sometimes in the street, and they wonder ‘Why?’. A majority of people like Barry and older generations won’t voice a problem with the homosexual population of Australia because they wouldn’t usually encounter it. They don’t have to be around people that conform to those practices, so why should they hold judgement? But when they are confronted with this, the reaction is large enough to think that you were shoving a penis (or vagina) down their throat.

Why is the average population so adverse to a lifestyle choice so similar to religion or team membership? Nobody holding a rainbow flag is protesting ‘No Straights’ and beating their children into becoming like them. They want equal rights to others in committed relationships, not complete dominance over the populace of the world. And the justification for the Straights’ barrage of hatred towards innocent people? It’s not natural.

What is natural? For the ‘average Australian’, being straight is natural. Liking beer and sports is natural. Liking a bit of T’n'A is natural. Can anyone say otherwise? The Australian way of life is counteractive to living outside of the box, and this is impressed on each generation from a young age.

If a kid in a primary school class likes playing fantasy cards and computer games instead of playing sports at lunchtime, what do the other kids call him? Nerd, geek, lame? What else fits in there? ‘Gay’. Why has a trait completely unrelated to homosexuality (liking computer games) become synonymous with liking people of the same sex? This desemanticization of the word ‘gay’ is half the problem. I am a user of ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘bad’, but it’s really not my fault! It’s those primary school kids that thought that video games really weren’t as cool as sports (even though I played them too). It’s at the point where the youth of the Western world use it so often that it doesn’t even mean ‘homosexual’ any more, it just means ‘bad’. But when describing something girly or even un-masculine, it becomes ‘gay’ with a different inflection. Gay. Ugh, s/he’s gay. There’s barely a harsher insult that you can give to someone.

Australia is an accepting country. We accept people of other races, creeds and religions. But as soon as you start messing with the Bible-given truth of Man and Woman, it pinches a nerve in the average Australian that not much else does. The problem lies in the children, and the parents of those children. Stop making it acceptable to call people gay as an insult. Stop brainwashing your children with religious bullshit about what’s natural and what’s not. Live your own lives and leave everyone else to live theirs in peace.

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This is about to be submitted as my first article for my University’s magazine, The Pelican. Hope you enjoyed it. You can see Tom’s submission here.

Another Year, Another Day (The New Year Void)

Aaron: It was my birthday yesterday. It’s 1am, Thursday July 15, and I am 19 years old.

On an occasion like this, I’d usually say I don’t feel any different. But I do. I ‘feel’ 19. I feel like I’ve lived another year, and it’s been celebrated with another mediocre day in a whole year of mediocre days. Why we, as a society, choose to make such a big deal out of such banality makes no sense. In practice, it should be a day filled with joy and celebration of another year of living, however many years ago your mother brought you into the world. But really, it never is.

Why? Is it because we make such a big deal out of something arbitrary that nothing good is able to come out of it? In my mind, I call this The New Year Void, as calling it Birthday Syndrome sounds like some wierd medical condition which happens to be contracted and deadly at the end of a 365 day period. The New Year Void occurs when many people choose to make a huge deal out of a day that doesn’t mean anything, and hence the day’s meaninglessness makes the event implode, becomes a massive waste of time and effort and a huge emotional strain on everyone involved.

Today, my birthday was marred by fighting between the people I spend the majority of my time with. Events planned for my birthday became revealed as nothing more than events planned with an ulterior motive. Certain people took offence, certain people didn’t, certain people took offence at others taking offence. I can’t really do anything about that, and I’m not complaining. I just want to point out that’s exactly what happened 7 months ago on New Year’s Eve/Day.

The  New  Year Void in my chest grows every year around July 14. I realise I’m growing away from my family more and more each year, each day. The Birthday only increases my knowledge of this and makes me sad for close relationships that I just can’t seem to maintain any more. I receive cards from relatives I love, but never speak to any more. It makes me sad that my ‘busy’ schedule can’t fit in any time to talk to them, and I don’t know why. I receive less presents, but that’s because I don’t ask for any, because I don’t know what I want. That makes me sad, because I still feel that the people I choose to call my friends should know what to buy me regardless. Other people’s problems expand around emotionally high points within the year, and the actual cause of the emotionally high points gets swept aside in the problems.

As each year passes, I become sad around July 14. I reflect. I realise I don’t know much. I realise I know myself more, but also less and less each year.

Pop!

Aaron: Hey there blog-town. It’s been a while between posts, but this one should be the start of a new flurry of activity. From me, at least.

Tom and six of my other friends went for a skiing holiday to New Zealand for a couple weeks, I stayed in Perth, expecting the weather to be better, but it’s been quite horrendous. After only a week of gallivanting between North and South island, Tom decided to go snowboarding with my good Scottish friend Kevin, and was in a pretty bad accident. He ruptured his spleen and was pretty badly concussed, but is stable and recovering in a hospital near Queenstown.

Where my other friends are staying is a three hour drive to the hospital, but they’ve been to see him a fair amount, and are heading home tomorrow. On doctor’s orders, Tom can’t fly for a couple weeks, so he’s going to be chilling in New Zealand by himself for a little while, but should hopefully get internet as soon as he’s out of hospital, which should be this week sometime. Get well soon buddy

Last.fm is one of my favourite websites, ever. It utilises an application called Audioscrobbler to view the tags of the music you’re listening to in Windows Media Player or iTunes and uploads the data onto your public profile. I’ve kept track of my music listening habits for the past 4 years now, and there is a large amount of raw data available at your fingertips to make graphs, statistics and all sorts of lovely numbers, which I enjoy muchly.

Have a quick glance at my last.fm profile. What do you see? You see my recent listening habits (currently some classic blink-182), my top artists from the past three months (I fell in love with Vampire Weekend recently) and with a few clicks, you can view my top artists from the past six months, year or all time, and the same for top songs. I’m not going to go into the nuances of my favourite artists and their progression over time, but I want to point out one thing in particular about what I listen to.

I listen to a lot of pop-influenced music. The ‘pop’ being melodic vocals, simple choruses and fairly standard song structure, but I don’t like to think that I listen to ‘pop music’. Well, I do listen to ‘pop music’, but what I really hate about that is labels. Labels like ‘pop‘, ‘alternative‘, and ‘emo‘ make me feel kind of ill, because an artist can try their hardest to put their whole being and mind into a song and it’s dismissed with the ‘pop’ label that a catchy melody accompanies.

But what does ‘pop’ mean? Last.fm’s handy-dandy page tells me the term is ‘flexible…usually refers to catchy melody and accessible style’. Has this become a derogatory term for music? A new album can be regarded as ‘too poppy’ and hence not as good as the previous ones. But again, I’ll cover this large and varied topic at some point in the future, as the main reason I came to write this was…

FIGHT!

Of course, unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock (or should I say, pop. a-ha. a-ha.) you should know who Katy Perry and Lady Gaga are. And apparently they’ve been having a bit of a verbal…spat, and have been quite harsh towards each others’ creative efforts. I don’t have any proof of this, you’ll just have to trawl the gossip columns yourselves.

I listen to both of these artists. Not a hell of a lot, but I know each of their music styles and sensibilities, and I have formulated an opinion of sorts. This opinion comes with numbered bullet points.

1. Both are ‘pop’ artists. They show up in the top ‘pop’ tagged artists on last.fm, Lady Gaga at No. 4 and Katy Perry at No. 21. One is quite a bit more popular than the other.

2. They both do ‘pop’ related things that I despise. Katy Perry uses her good looks and vague musical talent to make a crapload of money from people who enjoy listening to…good looking, vague music. Her newest effort ‘California Gurls‘ was just that. She sings about how great California is over a generic techno beat and (in the video, at least) then squirts whipped cream from her breasts. It’s had 13 million views, and it’s really not that great. I liked a few songs on her first album, backed up by the thought that she at least had the brains to say what she was producing was poppy, marketable rubbish. Unfortunately, with a new album of much of the same, that opinion died.

Lady Gaga is an innovator, pushing the boundaries of performance and fashion with every appearance…but still has to bow to the boundaries of ‘pop’ music, and release albums with massive singles as stand-out songs, and then the rest of the tracklist being filler. Her first album, The Fame, was far too long, and could have been condensed into a pop-powerhouse. Her second album could have been (almost was) a bonus disc with the first, but she’s produced a new being altogether, taking the best parts of the first album and condensing them into 8 fairly long songs. That’s more like it. Telephone is one of my favourite pop-songs/hooks of all time.

3. People don’t know how to differentiate ‘good pop’ from ‘bad pop’, they just lump them into the same ‘bad pop’ label. I’ve talked to many people who don’t care for Lady Gaga or Katy Perry, as they are obviously writing for radio. But Lady Gaga isn’t winning any new fans by playing acoustic sets and exclusive re-writes of her old songs, she’s performing for her old fans who love the music that she’s written. You don’t see Katy Perry doing any of that.

I do like them both. I just respect Lady Gaga more. But I suppose respect doesn’t matter too much in the world of pop, sales do.

How to Torrent Faster

Tom: Hello blog, it’s been a while. Be it busyness or laziness I’ve been neglecting you, I know. But I’ve got a lot of work to do today and I’m avoiding it at all costs so it looks like you’re going to benefit.

My name is Tom, and I am a leecher.

I’ve been addicted to leeching from the very beginning. In the past I’ve always had quite a slow internet speed; songs would take hours, movies would take days. I figured if I capped my upload speed at 1kbps I wouldn’t waste bandwidth. I was right, my download speed went up and I started leeching torrents off the community. Even when I finally got a decent provider it never occurred to me to give something back – I wanted my torrents to be finished as fast as possible. Just as a youtube commenter is happy to verbally assault a fellow tuber with abandon, I was never going to be in the same room as these people and I was happy to steal from them. In fact, I would still be leeching to this day if it weren’t for a single problem; my torrent down-speed slowed to a crawl and I had no idea why.

I made sure my firewall had exceptions, my ports were forwarded and I had a solid speed from my provider. Why was I torrenting at 3kbps? I scoured the internet for an answer and was quickly rewarded with one. Apparently most torrent providers keep a record of your download/upload ratio and will supply you with bandwidth accordingly. Basically, If you screw the community by leeching you will be punished with a terrible down-speed. The knowledge of this annoyingly fair system meant my leeching days were over, If I wanted a good speed again I was going to have to start giving back. I opened my clients preferences and made a life changing decision: I uncapped my upload speed. The result was astonishing, my download speed skyrocketed but my upload speed was still quite low. Only when my torrent finished did I understand. While I was torrenting my upload speed would stay low as to not impact my download but when my torrent was finished my upload speed would pick up. Mind = Blown.

Torrenters of the internet, my bad.  I was not aware of this ridiculously simple system of downloading/uploading. In the future I will endeavor to reach a ratio of 1.5 or something. To those of you who leech as well, turns out there’s a system for rewarding those who give back to the community so we’d better get on that.

Photo Time!

Tom: I tend to pick things up quickly then drop them just as fast. Something I’m determined not to give up on is photography, so to motivate me into taking more photos I thought I’d post some of my better ones on here. Feedback, both positive and negative, is much appreciated. You can click on any of the images below for a larger version.

First up is a few of the better macro shots I got from Aaron’s garden. I think this is the style of photography I enjoy the most.

This last photo is one I took while experimenting with long exposures at night around my neighborhood, I think this one was about 20 seconds. The photo is unedited; my see-throughness is from only being in the shot for about half of the exposure.

I may have looked a little crazy while I was taking shots like the one above. In one of them I set the exposure to about the 30 seconds and tried to get as many poses in as possible. That meant setting up the camera, opening the shutter and dancing around in front of it periodically stopping for a moment to expose myself in that position. Good times.

After looking through my photos I think I’m sufficiently motivated to take some more. If they’re any good, I’ll put them on here too.

KICKIN@CHAIRZ

Aaron: I think the titles of my blogs are having less and less to do with what I write. Everything’s pretty snazzy, really. Not much to complain about. I’m sure I can think of something.

Not pictured: Something relevant.

OH YEAH. I’m not making music any more. There was a period of time in my life where I was a member of a band, we wrote songs and played some (very) small shows, but it was an awesome outlet and one of the better things I’ve achieved off my own back. Long story short, I fell out with our guitarist and the other three of us are not the most motivated, so an indefinite hiatus seems to have presented itself. I love writing songs, and miss it every day…but now it just seems there’s not much time to do it. I don’t want to lose those ideas, and I definitely want to play those songs again, but how can I do that?

Not Pictured: Something that isn't some old coins.

Me and my friend Fridge (bass player, also… Fridge is not his real name) see each other quite often, but I go to uni four days a week while he’s working, so there’s not really much natural time for that to happen. When I wrote songs before, I was always

motivated to make an idea, not really finish it, then take it to my band to refine and make into a song. We turned out some quality tunes, which I’ll always be extremely proud of. We don’t have any recordings, but I’d like to think they’re good enough for other people to enjoy. It was always my dream to have people hear those songs and say ‘Wow, that’s actually good’ and listen to it over and over and enjoy it more each time they listened to it. Ten years ago, the dream would be to get that fabulous record deal and hence play shows around the world and let people hear your music that way, but that doesn’t look likely at this point in time (for many reasons).

This blog post was a consolidation effort on my behalf, to put into writing something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Record those songs, and put them somewhere on the internet so they never die and I don’t forget their chord progressions. I’ll post links when I do so.

Sesame Street

Tom: Like many others, I go to bed very late and spend a large portion of my evenings on the computer. I do not plan this, I just seem to find myself stumbling bleary eyed into my room at three in the morning far too often. While the subject of my late-night browsing varies from night to night two things are inevitable; I will start with reddit and finish with youtube (it doesn’t need a link, you know damn well what it is).  This means that I generally start my evening reading a left-wing slant on current events and the wee hours of the morning watching people fall down. Such is life. What was special about last night was that rather than bounce between various genres of youtube videos I spent the majority of the night watching Sesame Street. I will now share with you the highlight of said viewing session.  You may wish to remain distanced from fragile objects as the combination of nostalgia and laughter can result in a kind of tearful thrashing about.

Side note: Anyone else totally forget about Snuffy??