Category: Narrated

Long-winded, rambling, or otherwise lengthy.

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Narrated

Follow The Trail

Wrap your head around this one:

The big gaming geek news today is that there are official Katamari Damacy shirts available in the US. This is a Big Deal(tm) because Everybody Loves Katamari Damacy. (Before anyone else asks, yes, I’ve ordered a handful of shirts to help the perpetual shuffle of t-shirts in my wardrobe.)

But notice the site the shirts are being sold on – Panic. To 95% of the computing world, the name means little, but to us huddled in the Macintosh corner, Panic is revered for making a lot of kick ass software, including the best FTP client on OS X. Panic was founded in part by Cabel Sasser, who was the originator of the Cloudmakers. The Cloudmakers, you ask?

In April 2001, the very first [alternative reality game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_Game) was unleashed on the world. Codenamed “The Beast”, it was a promotion for the film *AI*. The Cloudmakers were the group of roughly 7,000 players who worked together to crack the case. The whole thing drew a lot of media coverage and, as a result, served as a launching point for all ARGs that followed in its path. The team that created The Beast would later go on to do (you guessed it) [ILoveBees](http://www.ilovebees.com/).

I’m not sure what this all means, mind you – but it was a fun stream of consciousness while it lasted.
(Personal aside: My connection to all of this? Besides being in the Mac shareware industry for a good four years, I played for a good long while in the follow-up to The Beast put on by Cloudmakers (including Cabel) called [Lockjaw](http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,46672,00.html). I even shilled it [on this very blog](https://vjarmy.com/archives/2002/02/lockjaw.php) back in 2002.)

Categories
Enjoyed Narrated

This Is The First Day Of My Last Days

Ithaca Festival, 1996. A young unsuspecting fiften year old boy walks into the horribly-named “Sounds Fine” on the Commons and, on the recommendation of a close online friend, purchases The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. He takes it home and listens to it.

This was the point in his life that his musical tastes would change forever, swinging from – well, let’s be honest here, mostly crap, to industrial rock and a wide range of electronic music. He would obsessively collect every album by Nine Inch Nails, even the obscure (both halves of the Closer single) and the mundane (the Down In It single with a whopping three tracks, all repeated on the Head Like A Hole single). T-shirts were purchased and worn proudly. Bumper stickers were put on cars. Lyrics were memorized.

You get the picture.

Tonight, after nearly ten years of on-again off-again fan-worship and countless money spent, this slightly older, much more cynical twenty-five year old man will walk into Madison Square Garden to finally see the band he’s been obsessing about for all this time.

Excited? You bet your goddamn life I’m excited.

Categories
Narrated

Biomusicology

I found myself this morning in a scenario I couldn’t have typically pictured myself in, but faced it anyhow:

I was storming – annoyed, livid, call it what you will – towards the office. Nearly three full weeks into the semester, I’ve admittedly grown more than a bit frustrated with small technical issues that keep piling up – no fault of any one party, but constantly there and things haven’t really smoothed out yet. Given the number that I was facing this morning, I was feeling myself start to slip from my traditionally calm mood.

This was compounded this morning by an “ongoing police investigation” that had screwed up service on roughly five subway lines, including mine. This means my usual office walk (four blocks crosstown, one block up) was considerably longer (four blocks crosstown, nine blocks up).

This was also compounded by the fact that [I was wearing a suit](http://www.flickr.com/photos/remydwd/45165255/in/photostream/). Sure, it was for a good reason, but it’s also still damn hot in NYC, and having to walk that far in a constricting suit is far from pleasant.

In total, these three disjoint items had formed a hell of downer. But as always, I found myself pulling myself back together through music. I drowned myself in a sea of unlike sounds: Kanye West transitioned into Clap Your Hands Say Yeah over to Japanese teenagers shouting hip hop onto Bloodhound Gang.

Sometimes, I worry about how much power music holds over me. I am running out of space on a 40 GB iPod, which I didn’t think was possible all those years ago when I started collecting. I fixate on songs, associating them with people, places, times in my life, or moods. I realize I’m not alone in this, that it’s a shared behavior the whole world around; that we all make these connections between the things we do and the things surrounding us when we do them, or the things that remind us of them.

Anyhow – [here’s my song for right now](http://www.tedleo.com/audio/Biomusicology.mp3). Lots of things I needed to hear said.

> Had we never come across the vastness of pavement,
The barrenness of waves and the grayness of the sea;
Never lost, or ne’er been misguided,
We’d have ne’er reached seas so shining —

> Or come from out of a hansom in Camden to a bar in the basement,
While all the while it rained;
Or come around to the friendliest of faces,
Handsomest in ugly places —

> Or come from out of the tunnels we dig in
To see that tunneling’s not living
And working doesn’t work;
Or come to find that loving is labor,
Labor’s life and life’s forever —

> Or come to see that keeping’s not giving,
You get what you’ve given,
You get what you deserve;
And in the midst of all of the action,
Maybe only there found satisfaction…

> Chasing sea-foam dreams around another dirty old town;
Parallel run streams toward the gray ocean from the green ground;
“Oed’ und leer, das meer,” but look beneath the glassy surface —
All the songs you hear: down there they have a purpose.

> All in all, we cannot stop singing,
We cannot start sinking —
We swim until it ends.
They may kill, and we may be parted
But we will ne’er be broken-hearted.