uTorrent Mac

Finally.

Mac users have been stuck using Azureus/Vuze for the past God-knows-how-long. Sure, there are alternatives to Vuze, but none of them offer the same features. Windows users, on the other hand, have been blessed by the bittorrent gods with uTorrent. It has all the useful features of Vuze with none of the bloat and useless crap. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you uTorrent for making a mac version.

Bands I Discovered While Waiting for Insurgentes

As rough this month has been, I was able to add some truly amazing artists to my music library. My first exciting discovery was the band Slowdive. Slowdive was a shoegazing band back in the late 80’s/early 90’s. I found them, naturally, by clicking the “Shoegazing” link under Insurgente’s genre on Wikipedia.

Shoegazing

Apparently, Slowdive is what amounts to the archetypal shoegazing band. “Shoegazing,” a term that refers to bands whose guitarists would stare at their feet during live performances, is hard to appreciate until you’ve listened to a fair sampling of shoegazing music. There is nothing complex or particularly musically interesting about shoegazing music; it’s plain, droning, and monotonous.

Yet somehow I’m drawn to the style anyway. There’s some sort of melancholy, not-quite-depressed-but-certainly-not-happy emotion that I’ve found only expressed in shoegazing music. Imagine, if you will, an emotion that would compel you to gaze at your shoes. This is the emotion expressed in the typical shoegazing song (duh).

Acid Jazz

“Acid Jazz” is, if possible, a more elusive term than “shoegazing.” I’ve only listened to one “acid jazz” band–Zero 7–but I think they’re fantastic.

The designation “acid jazz” doesn’t quite do the genre justice. Acid jazz is not big band jazz with saxophones and swing beats; rather, it’s laid-back, relaxed music in the vein of Massive Attack, but with less focus on electronic sounds.

Of course, I have Insurgentes now, but Zero 7 and Slowdive were definitely worth picking up.

Ratatouille Recipe

In the past 60 days, over 50% of referrals linking to this blag have been from web searches with the term “ratatouille.” Many of these specify “ratatouille recipes” or “ratatouille movie.” Neither of these things are to found here at critacracy. However, I do have a review of ratatouille which is, admittedly, not nearly as interesting as ratatouille recipes or the Pixar film Ratatouille. But since I am first and foremost a public servant, I have decided to post my mother’s ratatouille recipe.

Ingredients

1 Onion

2-3 Cloves of garlic

Olive oil

1 Eggplant (medium or large)

3 Tomatoes (canned are OK too; Muir Glen is the best kind for canned)

A variety of spices: bay leaves, oregano, thyme, basil

2 Zuchinni

Instructions

Chop the onion, mince the garlic cloves, and sauté until soft but not brown

Add the eggplant, peeled and cubed, the tomatoes all chopped-up, and the spices (use your own descretion here, but 1 tsp. basil & oregano, 1/2 tsp. thyme is recommended)

Bring the concoction to a simmer and cook for 15-20 minutes

Chop the zuchinni and add them, then cook for about 10 more minutes

She notes that it’s often tasty to add red or green bell peppers and maybe a splash of red wine.

Insurgentes… Waiting…

For those of you who have been refreshing insurgentes.com every 30 seconds for the last 20 days like I’ve been, your wait is… almost… over. As far as I can tell, Insurgente’s official super-duper, actual, legit release date will be next tuesday, the 25th of November. I say official, but should probably actually say unofficial, because all reliable news sources just say “November 2008″ (hence the constant refreshing–after all, it’s been November for a while). The source of my information, rather than something normal like Wikipedia, is mostly comments at Last.fm and like sites. So yeah, unofficially predicted, super-duper-legit release date is November 25th.

The Loss of the “Album”

Back in the day — and I mean like way back in the day — music was sold on a recording medium known as the “record.” The record had the peculiar property of being able to accurately reproduce sounds in a specific sequence even though it was almost physically impossible to skip to a specific point in that sequence.

Facetiousness aside, my point is this: before modern media like the CD were first made, it was very difficult to skip tracks on and album you were listening to. It was difficult enough that it would probably take more time to skip a track than to just sit through it. So when you listened to, say, Led Zeppelin I, you didn’t just listen to Good Times Bad Times; you listened to the whole thing.

Dark Side of the Moon

This notion of listening to an entire album all the way through played a significant role in the construction of contemporary albums. Consider Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), one of my all-time favorite albums. Each track flows into the next as though they’re both part of the same whole (and they are). You get the sense that the only reason that Pink Floyd bothered to distinguish between tracks is so that they could play some of the album live without playing the whole thing.

Or consider the extreme case: Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. Thick as a Brick is an album with exactly one track. It’s reminiscent of a symphony or something, though Jethro Tull would never be presumptuous enough to call it that, but the comparison isn’t completely ridiculous.

Thick as a Brick

Even albums that weren’t so clearly unified as DSotM or TaaB still had the cohesive album “feel.” Bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden released albums with tracks that were certainly individual, yet all of them had some quality — whether lyrical or musical — that connected them.

Modern Media

I hold mp3-encoding and CDs responsible for the loss of this way of constructing an album. Pop albums nowadays are nothing more than a collection of songs under one name. It’s perfectly feasible to skip tracks you don’t like. In fact, you don’t even need to have the ones you don’t like. iTunes Music Store (or Gnutella) allows you to download just one song if you want, so most modern artists don’t bother being creative with their albums.

Fear of a Blank Planet

To be clear, not all modern artists uninspired. Particularly in prog-land you find artists who work very hard to make their albums be a unified entity, not a series of disparate songs. Bands like Porcupine Tree and The Mars Volta are perfect examples of this sort of artist. Porcupine Tree albums tend to be like Pink Floyd ones in that they strive to carry a common lyrical theme much more than a musical one. The Mars Volta is the reverse: their albums tend to carry a musical theme (and their lyrics are too bizarre, in my opinion, to have anything resembling a theme).

Frances the Mute

The new media for music do provide a distinct advantage, though I’ve yet to see anyone really capitalize on it: albums and songs can be really, really long. Since we’re no longer constrained by the physical dimensions of the vinyl record, an album could in theory be several hours long.

Ubuntu 8.10 – Ibex

I’ve finally upgraded my Linux box to Intrepid Ibex.  I say finally because Ibex has been out for a solid two-ish weeks now but it took me this long to upgrade. Of course the hardcore Ubuntu fans out there are all, “how could you possibly wait that long to upgrade? Don’t you want all the fancy new features?”

Of course I like new features, but there weren’t really any that leapt out at me. Ubuntu.com has a “techinical overview” with the official list of such features. Most of them, admittedly, would be pretty exciting if you spent your free time doing stuff like recompiling your kernel for fun. I, on the other hand, don’t.

The one feature that I actually appreciate — and I’m not even sure if it’s an official feature or just a fluke in my Hardy install that got fixed during the update — is that my computer seems to understand how to stay connected to a wi-fi network for more than 10 seconds.

On the downside, I have noticed that my computer is having trouble booting up as fast as it used to. Maybe I should recompile my kernel.

My Desktop with Moomex theme

Vote

V

O

T

E

votevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevotevote