December 2011
41 posts
“I love this song so much, I spent months wondering if I actually hated it.”
—
The Top 25 Songs of 2011 | Rob Sheffield | Rolling Stone
Look out Kurty* Vile: the more I listen, the more this Don Henley Bon Iver song is becoming my favorite song of the year.
*Typo, left there because it felt like an appropriately affectionate diminutive for the guy.
Play
Bring the Pain
Mindless Self Indulgence
Mindless Self Indulgence / Bring the Pain
Posting something so the internet will stop asking if I’m dead.
Knowing nothing of Skyrim, apart from the fact that it’s a video game that made my cousin late to Thanksgiving dinner, I imagine this to be the soundtrack of Skyrim.
I imagine this, in fact, to be the soundtrack to ALL video games.
So simple?
Sooooo sick of the either/or conversations surrounding everything in publishing. It doesn’t have to be either Amazon OR the indies. It doesn’t have to be either ebooks OR paper books. Who is holding a gun to your head?
Here’s what you do: get yourself a tablet with the Kindle app (sure! why not? sometimes this will make sense) and another e-reading app that reads epub files (which you can purchase from many indie bookstores), line up some subscriptions to magazines or journals (paper or online! I don’t care!), a book club (in person or online! I don’t care!), find a friendly local bookstore where you can buy precious made-of-paper lovelies that you will put next to your bed and cherish and read again and again, and get a library card for the rest (audiobooks for long trips in the car! the book you wouldn’t buy in hardcover but want to read in hardcover!). ROTATE and MIX LIBERALLY.
The most important thing? READ THEM. READ those dang books. (Or at least try to.) Read read read. If everyone did this, we’d all be just fine.
“Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?”
—
A confused tech blogger
Better yet, why bother reading more than one book? It is very inefficient.
(via osmium)
The best book I read in the past ten years was recommended to me by a bookstore employee. And even though the analogy is dumb (and incorrect: this guy has obviously never developed a personal relationship with his local bookstore), I wonder how bad it would be to start taking recommendations from the guy at the box office; he’s seen more movies than I have and would probably know what’s enjoyable and what’s not.
(I have a lot to say on this topic, but not a lot of time in which to get it all down on the screen right now. Leave it at this: Amazon once suggested I buy a box set of sci-fi DVDs based on my purchase of German deodorant.)
“You don’t have to spotify and twatter up your rhapsody to be last eff em, know what I mean? […] FRIENDSTER. That’s where it’s at.”
—J, social media aficionado
Play
2011 Best: New & Old →
open.spotify.com
I couldn’t choose between Dan Fogelberg and Yuck, so you get both of them and everything in between.
(I’m not sure I’m even done with this playlist yet, but it’s a start.)
Damn, Gina: A letter to 14 year old me about marriage, written on my first wedding anniversary →
sarahb.tumblr.com
Dear 14 year old me,
Hey. What page are you at in No One Here Gets Out Alive? Cool. Anyway. I know you’re weirded out by the idea of marriage, and have some concerns about exactly what it might entail, so now that I’ve been married for exactly one year, I thought I’d give you a rundown of…
I love this, and not just for the Madeline Stowe Nightgown reference.
Still the best band that never existed. (And an amazing post about marriage to boot.)
Play
“I’m a backwards horse. I’m a demented whale. I’m a pessimistic sea lion. Those stories, and a stressed giraffe…”
—J, waiting for “60 Minutes” to load.
A Room Of One's Own
“Can you hear my football in there?”
“A little bit, but not really. Can you hear my Steely Dan in there?”
“A little bit, but not really. […] And that’s Stoke fans booing, not me.”
