30Nov2016 1930: Welcome Home

While I was away at Gluttonalia No Man's Sky dropped a hot patch. You can buy a freighter! Build a base! Recruit alien companions! Except -- as far as I can tell -- you are only allowed to recruit specific new alien companions, so I'm just sitting on Niji-Owshe Raxisir like:

18Nov2016 1830: Corpse D'Etat

I was still reeling from the loss of my weekly music singles. What is my blog even about if I can't fill the bottom 80% with curmudgeonly bon mots? But then I let my post schedule slip a little bit and

kek i ded. A month of travel done did me in; even if each individual weekend was full of lobster and beer and boardgames and light, four consecutive weekends of not being home to sleep in my own bed and eat my own food destroyed me in aggregate. Before and through and around it all, Edmond decided that after nine years of not waking me up at 3AM he was just going to go ahead and start doing that.

I may post about the actual travel later (I won't), but my time in Iowa crystallized what I hate so much about radio streams taking over Internet music. It can be the most accurate approximation of your musical tastes, you can fuse three disparate Pandora seeds into one mega-stream, you might even be able to upload your own tracks to fill in the gaping Carbonated Mayonnaise or Red Delicious holes. It doesn't matter because radio is and always been about playing hits multiple times a day. As often as they can get away with. So when Glitzch turns on his 90s alt playlist all the individual songs are great, but then you hear the song every hour -- EVERY HOUR -- and it drives me crazy. I get agitated when I hear the same song twice a few days apart.

So here I go into Google's Blogged 50, hoping that each week I'll actually get different songs. [Austra - Utopia] is some Enya-ass dance pop. A ghost lady paints smooth auditory brush strokes over a bass beat.

[Soft Hair - Relaxed Lizard] begins in much the same way, pairing an annoying female voice with dance beats. This time the annoying voice was CoCo Rosiesque. But then the Smiths come in to lay down the chorus and it got marginally better? Really you're not supposed to be sober and stationary when hearing this song.

[NoMBe & Sonny Alven - California Girls] makes a serious initial play for my Not Covers collection, being neither a cover of the Beach Boys nor Katy Perry. But this is the third song in a row that fits in the same chill dance groove. At this point I attempted to click back to Austra to make a better comparison and discovered that Google's radio stream allows me to pause but NOT to replay songs. Already hating this brave new world, guys!