I seldom bother to look at the links in the footer of a webpage, but this time I'm glad that I did. If you click on the Build link at the bottom of the Last.fm pages, you'll be whisked off to build.last.fm—a site full of "free extras built by the community to extend your Last.fm experience."
Many of them look pretty cool, but the one that I liked the best was Gijsco's Desktop Generator. This free application is full of customizable options that allow you to tweak everything just the way you like it: from canvas size to individual album size. It even lets you select what pool of data to draw the albums from, whether it be from your Top Overall, to All albums listened to in the past 3/6/12 months. The result is a beautiful collage of album covers that make for a stunning desktop wallpaper or page background.
I settled on a simple grid of 16×16px album covers, randomly drawn from the pool of albums I've scrobbled from in the last year. Here's a full-scale screenshot showing just a portion:
Six years after the release of his solo debut Sleeping On Roads, the former Slowdive frontman returns with Oh! Mighty Engine. It has been an excruciating wait for some of us! The album is available from Brushfire Records.
I am beginning a new series of posts where I share music videos of cassette singles I bought as a kid and have managed to hold onto up through the present. I'll try to keep this going as long as I can, though lack of reader interest would probably be a dealbreaker.
Oh, what the hell. For anyone interested, here's an audio rip of the full track, downloadable if you want it. I'm even throwing in a 25sec clip for strategic ringtone purposes.
Full Track
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DESCRIPTION:
A four-hour exploration into this versatile genre of electronic music that flourished in western Europe during the early 1980s.
PRESENTERS:
Shawn C
AIRDATE:
May 31, 2008
RUNTIME:
3h 16m 10s
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I didn't have much prep time, so the program wasn't recorded. In light of this, I was inspired to recreate the show by (tastefully) mixing together all 38 tracks that were originally aired, in the order of broadcast. The file may be streamed above or downloaded below.
This briefly came up in discussion at Cattle Call the other night as some friends and I were sitting around waiting for the meeting to be called to order. I forget exactly how it came up, but I'm quite sure that I was the one to bring it up because I don't recall anyone else having ever heard of it before. It's a compilation that came out in 1991 of various artists performing their own spin on the Suzanne Vega track, "Tom's Diner," replete with Vega's original a capella version (1981) and the more recognizable remake done by The DNA Disciples (1990). I probably picked up my cassette copy around 1995. Overall, the tracks are quite diverse—and although some of them are unforgivable crap, there are a number of standout gems. This is one of my favorites, a crude summary of which I shared with the others while it was being discussed.
"Jeannie's Diner" by Marilyn E. Whitelaw
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QBoy (b. Marcos Brito on 10 October 1978 in Basildon, Essex) is a UK-based rapper, DJ, writer and presenter. One of only a few openly gay rappers in hip-hop, he is part of the new sub-genre colloquially known as "homo hop".
Yikes… colloquialism, or not, they really need to revisit the drawing board with that term.
