Time Delay

I've been catching up on some TV I missed during one of my frequent hiatuses from anything tv-ish... specificaly, Lost and Scrubs - two shows that couldn't be more different. Well, mostly. I suppose both have a cast of charismatic villains and heroes, and a permeating fantasy...

Ok, that's stretching it.

Anyway, I just realized that part of the problem with watching two year old TV programs is that there's no one to chat about them with - no watercooler, so to speak. That's ok, though. With Netflix and BitTorrent providing me with a more or less constant stream of the better TV that's been made in recent (or not recent) years... I will be succesfully avoiding the outside world for some time to come.

Somnia

When you fuck with sleep, everything turns into an experiment. How little can I sleep before I start to see things? How much caffiene can I have before I get heart palpitations? Simple office lights start to feel like a lab, glaring and unkind, compared to the dark world outside. Night and Day turn to Sleep and Wake cycles, increasingly indistinguishable. The depths of night lose their sacred status as the time for dreams and take on new, stranger meanings.

I don't miss graveyard shift. The last few days, I've been covering one of my employee's shifts. It is a small recap to the times when I was sleeping four hours a day, when the whole world felt like a hallucination, punctuated with moments of blistering clarity, which in retrospect, were probably delusional epiphanies. Theories and philosophies formed and disintegrated over the course of nights.

I would like very much not to fuck with my sleep, for a while.

Silly rabbit. iTunes is for tunes.

Wow. I just watched my first download from the iTunes video store. Let me sum up, to prevent a long ranty post:

iTunes
Price: $1.99
Quality: Tiny and highly compressed. 3"x3" default size.

BitTorrent
Price: Free
Quality: 80% of TV quality, good enough to fill my whole monitor without artifacts.

If this is what they expect to save the movie industry... I hope they have a backup plan.

Maybe a pretzel stand. Or door to door popcorn.

Mmmm. Popcorn.

Corporate Radio Sucks ... Less

Live105 is sometimes less annoying than I give them credit for.

I may be misremembering, but in the mid-90's, they seemed to be a savior of relatively decent music in the suburbs, where college radio is nonexistant, and at a time where internet radio hadn't yet been born. Then, sometime around 2000, they got bought by Clear Channel and started playing a lot more crap. A lot of things like Linkin Park.

When I lived in the South Bay, I'd listen to KSCU, KFJC, or KSJS. I was utterly spoiled with a constant stream of new music vetted by real and honest college indie rock kids.

Really though, I mostly listened to the radio in my car. When I moved up to Berkeley, I stopped using my car, and thus stopped listening to the radio - and my stream of new music dried up. It's been rough.

Fortunately, Live105 is once again saving the day. On Sunday nights, they have their long-running new music show, Soundcheck. And it really is good. Every Sunday, I come away with a half dozen bands to check out.

Now one difference between now and my previous bouts of radio-driven new music obsession is the magic of soulseek. Being able to download a few tracks, see if it's my thing, has probably saved me hundreds of dollars I would have spent on albums I never would have listened to after the first time. I guess the argument could be made that I'm hurting the music industry, but I think there's a better argument that the music industry was hurting my finances.

Tonight's discovery was Hot Chip. So far so good. I may even end up with a new chunk of acrylic to show for it.