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the old & new of serialized publishing, music & aging, blawgcastery, technology tedium

Listening to:	Daily Source Code
Reading:	Earthcore
Weather:	47, trying to get partly sunny

I'm being divebombed by gazillions of lady bugs here in the office-formerly-known-as-my-dining-room, so let's blame today's typos and errors on that, shall we? I should have vacuumed them up when most of them were sleeping on top of each other in the corner of the room last night. But I'm always afraid to vacuum these critters because they seriously stink if you touch them, and I don't want my vacuum to get ladybugstanked permanently. That would suck.

Remember the old serial books and movies? Most TV shows, though the characters and sets recur weekly, are just one-shot story episodes. There are a few exceptions, notably David Lynch's Twin Peaks, and Alias especially in the first season. I've been thinking about how TV and blogs and podcasts and magazines have tended to move us in the direction of short thinking rather than long thinking. I think you use different, perhaps longer, brain muscles, to mentally consume shorter ideas and concepts than to hang in there with a longer story. You have to remember character features and fact details to keep up, and more (mysteries) or less (humor) extrapolate from and manipulate that stuff to fully experience the story. Back to the point, I've just listened to the prologue to the first podcast novel, Earthcore. Combines some of my currently favorite stuff, fiction, podcasting, and long thinking. This first bit of the story was well-produced, though the reader's pace was a hair fast for me. He also could use an editor - some annoying grammatical errors. But I'm loving the concept, I'll let you know more as I get farther into the book.

Hot business. Went to see the Argument last night. Those guys are so damn good! Matt is a really fine guitar player, especially, I think. His sound is always top notch, and he's got very clean and sweet chops. All their vocals and arrangements are so excellent, high-quality melodic pop, my favorite flavor. Very enjoyable show at the Rosewood. It was all-ages, and loaded with the youngsters, their main market.

I haven't seen the guys in a while, and as usual when you don't see someone for a period of time the effects of aging are easier to recognize. I'm not saying they look old, not at all. But they are evolving in time just like all of us, and part of it is what you can see. Hair a little bit thinning and receding, faces not quite as new and pink as they were when they first began playing together, just more mature looking in general. It just brought me to think about how the age gap between them and their main fan base is growing, and how will this continue to play out? Will their fanbase age with them? Certainly many of us will, of course, as they continue to put out better and better stuff we'll keep buying and listening and enjoying. Will they slowly stop attracting new teenage fans? That depends. Depends on how their music matures (I've probably mentioned here before that I look forward to some songs from them about something other than an ex-girlfriend and I me my), and of course how they choose to market, and how pop music evolves, etc. It'll be interesting to watch. They'd have to take a giant step toward suck to lose me as a fan.

Speaking of the progress of time, I'm eagerly anticipating the changes of spring, so here's a springy photo from last year, a flutterby on mock orange blossoms in my yard.

Back to podcasting. Check out blawgcast.com for news on podcasts about law.

I spent about 1.5 hours today trying to get this fucking wireless gear to work for me. My pal Ed kindly gave me his wireless router and a USB wireless adapter. And I know it worked fine for him, I actually witnessed it! But it gave me some hell. I got the router working and non-wirelessly plugged my network card up to it without much trouble. Althought my internet speed took a nosedive and I had to click things 2 or 3 times often to get the page to load up. A bit of a mystery, but I thought it might just need to burn itself in a little and it might fix itself, who know. The first real prob was XP not letting the USB wireless plug and play after I unplugged the wire to the network card. Imagine that! So I install the driver, since Ed also gave me the disk. Great. Restart, right. OK, then XP started trying to disrupt the driver from doing it's thing by constantly detecting the hardware but neither automatically finding the right driver or letting me choose it from the dang CD. Whatever. Finally after about 9 restarts and reinstalling the driver, and reordering stuff, it works, though still slow AND I only get 4 bars EVEN WHEN I ACTUALLY HANG THE D-LINK FROM THE ANTENNA OF THE ROUTER. Hilarious.

As I commonly do, when technology tweaks me out a bit, I grab something that needs a detailed cleaning and go to it for a while. Today it was my cordless phone. I took off the plate holding the buttons, and Q-tipped off the grime in the crevices heretofore uncleaned. Very zen chilling effect, I highly recommend it.

Liv is in Wyomissing with her dad visiting her grandparents and some cousins and aunt and some uncles. Nice to have the house to myself today, so rare and cool.

permalink posted by cat 10:59 AM

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