The Best of 2010 - Part 5/5 - Music

Clicking on an album cover will take you to my favorite song from the album (via youtube). ;)

Top 4 Japanese Albums:

NoGoD | Kakera

Anna Tsuchiya | Rule

Creature Creature | Inferno

Dir en grey | With the Proof in the Name of Living (Live)

Top 4 Western Albums:

Danko Jones | Below the Belt

Soilwork | The Panic Broadcast
Megadeth | Rust in Peace (Live)

Star One | Victims of the Modern Age

No huge surprises here, these are the CDs I listened to the most ("more than once") in 2010.

The new Kylesa almost made it, as did Chemical Pictures (in the form of a hypothetical "CD singles collection"), but five albums don't display in a nice square like four albums do... ;^_^

Still haven't made it all the way through the torpid new Iron Maiden album yet.

What were YOUR most-spun releases this year?

The Best of 2010 - Part 4/5 - Film

Best Film:

Inception was cool but not magical. The Social Network was Sorkian but ick, legal dramas.

Restrepo was harsh but felt incomplete, Easy A was cute but not as heartfeltingly '80s at it thought it was, The Ghost Writer was slick but retarded, Shutter Island was moody with a twist that wasn't weakened by the fact that I had just finished the book a week prior, so I guess it wins? God that can't be...

Nor can the excellent How to Train Your Dragon or Toy Story 3 win because I am not ten years old.

I liked The American's painterly pacing. Un Prophet was dull. Green Zone was a little preachy and Iraq/Af'stan war movies depress me.

The Runaways was cool for an I'm-bored-it's-3am flick.

So was The Crazies. Fuck it, The Crazies wins. I like how it made sense in a way that most zombie movies can't, and most characters operated in logical ways. And it had a lot of phases, from normal to off to off-but-salvageable to why-is-this-happening to invasion-of-the-army-doctors to shoot-everyone to nuke-the-place.

Also, Timothy Olyphant is ~soooo dreamy!~

And it's on Netflix Streaming. Bonus points. :)

The Best of 2010 - Part 3/5 - Television

Best TV Show:

Justified was charming, Archer was slutty, Louie was suicidal, Detroit 187 got very nypd bluish, Hawaii 5-O was lush but because it's way more beauty than brains I stopped tuning in like six weeks ago...

Community has become a genuine winner, and Terriers was a great big clever secret that got cancelled purely because of its shitty name.

And Wallander is fucking fantastic but more of a movie series than a TV show... so my favorite show this year is [toot tootle tooooooo!] the all-too-brief (six episodes only!? what is this, England!?) The Walking Dead and its apocalyptic zombie hordes.

The Best of 2010 - Part 2/5 - Books

Best Fiction:

David Eagleman | Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

I liked this book because it delivered its injections of coolness efficiently. Like, in one full page or less -- it's the future, we've all got ADD now! (Runner-up: Craig Clevenger's Dermaphobia was cool in a longer, darker way.)

Best Non-Fiction:

Jake Adelstien | Tokyo Vice
By teaching me tons of cool facts about Japanese sex clubs, Japanese police and the Japanese press, it beats out Dave Mustaine's and Christopher Hitchen's you're-only-reading-this-because-we're-famous autobiographies.

The Best of 2010 - Part 1/5 - Games

Best Video Game:

I have spent FIVE HUNDRED HOURS immersed in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, according to Steam, which is more time than I've spent listening to music and watching movies/tv combined this year. 

KDR 1.67, WLR 1.77. :)

Nothing else even comes close, but I'll throw out Just Dance 2 for the Wii, for the kids.

At least 208 people hate me. ^_^

♣ SЯ : JROCK UK UPDATER: Dir en grey : New look 2010

♣ SЯ:



  
Kaoru Needs Sleep and Kyo the Littlest Gangster

thx wandervogel!

What'd Ya Gets?

Kate got Monopoly and skates and puzzles and Wii games and some N-Strike Nerf Guns and jewelry and clothes, Jack got a dump truck, my parents got an AppleTV, K got the new SMAP dvd and I got a new (4G) Touch. A pretty good year, and now it's snowing! :)

How 'bout you guys, give or get anything cool?

...comforting therein, that when old robes are worn out, there are members to make new

ORICON STYLE:

Luna Sea are: Inoran (g),  J (b), Ryuichi (v), Shinya (d) & Sugizo (g)

thx cockroach!

Wow, embracing your roots once in a while rewards fan loyalty, strengthens fan loyalty, and makes your fans happy while increasing your own cool factor!?!? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.

DVDs on Your PC, Nicely

I've been ripping my DVDs using Handbrake, and storing the files on my PC, and browsing/playing them on the TV using WMC -- thru the awesome Media Browser plugin, which automagically grabs cover art and production details from The Movie Database.

But while this works well for wide-release films, it's not so hot with music DVDs. Metallica's stuff is up there, but there's no j-rock, for example.

(You can sign up and start uploading art & info instantly, and I'm just putting that out there if you're feeling bored over the holiday and wanna REPRAZENT! the cause...)

Oh, and breaking PV dvds into chapters (i.e. each song gets its own mp4/mkv) is NOT the way to go: it introduces hierarchy & folder & nav problems that are avoided when you just make each disc its own file.

• DVDFab 8 (free trial) http://www.dvdfab.com/
• Handbrake (free) http://handbrake.fr/
• Media Browser (free) http://www.mediabrowser.tv/
• The Movie Database http://www.themoviedb.org

Breen's wwwJDIC vs Denshi Jisho

Just discovered Denshi Jisho [link], a slick, quick new EN/JP dictionary. I've been using the ol' Breen JDic for forever. No more. Go paste in 夜想曲 and check it out. :)

Jared Diamond on Keyboards

UCCHH! The human detritus!

Discover:

...The Dvorak keyboard instead forces you to alternate hands frequently. It does so by placing all vowels plus Y in the left hand, but the 13 most common consonants in the right. As a result, not a single word or even a single syllable can be typed with the right hand alone (no, grr isn’t a word), and only a few words can be typed with the left hand alone.

QWERTY’s many words and letter strings for the left hand are especially unfortunate when you consider that most people are right-handed. Yet QWERTY allocates to the weaker left hand the most common English letter (E), the second most common (T), and the fourth most common (A), thus making the left hand perform more than half of all typing strokes (56 percent). We are condemned to struggle with a left-handed typewriter in a right-handed world. The Dvorak keyboard instead gives 56 percent of all strokes to the right hand.

QWERTY’s overuse of our weaker hand extends to our weaker fingers. On each hand, the pinkie (fifth finger) is the weakest, and finger strength increases from the fifth to the second finger (index finger). Yet QWERTY makes almost as much use of our weakest finger (left fifth) as of our second strongest (right third). In contrast, the rank sequence of finger use on the Dvorak keyboard is identical to the rank sequence of finger strength, and the typing load on each finger is proportional to its strength.

The QWERTY keyboard also condemns us to awkward finger sequences. As we already know, strokes that alternate between hands are faster than successive strokes of the same hand. But if you must type two successive strokes with the same hand, it’s fastest to do so with two remote fingers (such as at, left fifth to second finger), next fastest with two adjacent fingers (as, left fifth to fourth finger), slower with the same finger on the same row (ee, left third finger), and slowest of all with the same finger on different rows (ed, left third finger). Yet with the QWERTY keyboard, 20 percent of all English digraphs are typed by adjacent fingers, and more than 4 percent (such as the common ed) by the same finger; corresponding numbers for the Dvorak keyboard are only 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively.

The result of all these shortcomings is that typing on a QWERTY keyboard is unnecessarily tiring, slow, inaccurate, hard to learn, and hard to remember. In a normal workday a good typist’s fingers cover up to 20 miles on a QWERTY keyboard, but only one mile on a Dvorak keyboard. QWERTY typists achieve barely half the speed of Dvorak typists, who hold most world records for typing speed. QWERTY typists make about twice the errors that Dvorak typists make. For a beginner to reach a speed of 40 words per minute, the person would need 56 hours of training on a QWERTY keyboard (an average of four hours per day during my two weeks of chicken pox) but only 18 hours on a Dvorak keyboard.

N52, Kinesis Freestyle, MS Sidewinder, & ATH AD700s 

I've been rocking a Kinesis Freestyle in Dvorak Mode for two months now. It was brutal at first (i was fast before Jrocknyc, but I was fucking lightning after blogging every day for nine years... and then all of a sudden it took a second or two to find each and every letter...)

I'm not even close to my old speeds yet, but I recently got to the point where it's faster to just delete and re-type a word than it would be to use the mouse or arrow keys to fix a typo. Milestone!

D covers MM's "Moon Under Night Something Song"

thx henrique!

Ain't doin' nuthin' fer me. Too dense. The "dunt dunt dah dunt!" orchestra hits are as loud as the guitar fills are as loud as the guitar riffs are as loud as the cymbals are as loud as the drums are as loud as the bass are as loud as the orchestra hits. ONE BIG MUSH.

Have I ever expressed my irritation over using the word "song" in a song title? It's like saying "Finnegan's Wake Book" or "Godfather Movie".

At this point I question if D could even kaisan right.

:(

DIR EN GREY、ニュー・シングル「LOTUS」に関する詳報が到着 （BARKS） - Yahoo!ニュース

Yahoo!ニュース:

回、ミキシング・エンジニアとして手腕を振るっているのは、トリヴィアムやオール・ザット・リメインズ 、ザ・ブラック・ダリア・マーダー、デス・エンジェルなどとの仕事で知られるジェイソン・スーコフ。

Jason Suecof is mixing "Lotus"... b-sides are the new version of "Vulgar" "Obscure" (as played on the Oct/Nov tour) and "Reiketsu Nariseba" ("Being cold-blooded or something?" Kayo suspects.)

Also the DVD in the first press will include, ahem, quote: "enjoyed keloid milk frenzy" -- one of Deg's finest songs.

Dir en grey management requests that we omit certain comments from our article

Japan Times Online:

One shirt's sleeves are too long; the other's are too short... but together, they're just right!

"One of the bad things about Japan — and maybe some other countries are the same — is that you can't say anything (in public) but positive things," laments Toshiya. "Anything negative is buried; (unfavorable historical information) is not allowed to be included in textbooks, and so on."

(Toshiya's point is ironically proven — and augmented — when, after the interview, his management requests that we omit certain comments from our article, including the next part of our conversation. This common practice among larger Japanese management companies and labels shows that while the media may be all-too complicit, revisionism can often start closer to home.)

When "Vinushka" was refused airplay, how did Toshiya feel?

"Well . . . I thought 'Again?!' It wasn't the first time. We've had that problem so many times before. I could understand it when we made videos that were really obscene, but for a video that had such a broad message to be refused was really disappointing. The Japanese media?" he laughs. "It's shit, isn't it?"

thx reitsu!

That's pretty cool to have so blatantly flipped off his management like that, so I forgive the writer for putting Iron Maiden third in a list of four bands that also includes Korn, Linkin Park, and The Deftones. ("I bought some underwear, socks, a house and some aspirin.")

The only good Malice Mizer song

Youtube needed a higher quality version of this video, and I'm ripping all my DVDs for convenience, so...

Twain's Appetite

The New York Times:

This is the Mark Twain people love to quote (“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.” “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way”), and whenever he hits his stride in the “Autobiography,” you feel happy for him — e.g., writing about Virginia City, Nev., in 1863:


“I secured a place in a nearby quartz mill to screen sand with a long-handled shovel. I hate a long-handled shovel. I never could learn to swing it properly. As often as any other way the sand didn’t reach the screen at all, but went over my head and down my back, inside of my clothes. It was the most detestable work I have ever engaged in, but it paid ten dollars a week and board — and the board was worthwhile, because it consisted not only of bacon, beans, coffee, bread and molasses, but we had stewed dried apples every day in the week just the same as if it were Sunday. But this palatial life, this gross and luxurious life, had to come to an end, and there were two sufficient reasons for it. On my side, I could not endure the heavy labor; and on the Company’s side, they did not feel justified in paying me to shovel sand down my back; so I was discharged just at the moment that I was going to resign.”

I only managed a couple iPod Touch-sized pages before becoming fabulously bored. So I've moved on to GNR drummer Steven Adler's autobiography. So far, meh.

Dir en grey's cover art for "Lotus," because it's a Slow News Day...

thx Macro!

Seems sorta... colorful and non-gritty/grimy/gross, but the image is hosted on their official site so I guess it's the real thing.

Photoshop contest! Make a better one.

BAAAARRRRRRR-NEEEEEEEY!!!!

(click to enlarge)

Jack has Barney Fever.

Of the other movies up there, Queens Blade and Cashback were not worth more than five minutes of my time but Restrepo was awesome, exactly like watching home videos of you and your friends except instead of shots of you getting your long hair in the toilet as you drunkenly puke, they're getting surrounded, outnumbered, and somewhat frantically but still professionally returning fire.

Death to Smoochy doesn't seem very funny OR dark after 25 minutes; Chocolate has a kick-ass, long, and creative multiple-level fight scene that is worth fast-forwarding to. 2012 is cool, Alice in Wonderland is okay enough. SNL is better via Netflix than live or on Hulu -- no commercial interruptions, easy to skip thi skits that are clearly over-relying on overusing the same joke more tan three times... and if once in a while NBC removes a skit from the Netflix version, whatever.

But god, Barney. AAAARRRGGGHHHHHHH. That voice! You thought VK singers were bad!

I'm a little worried about what'll happen when Netlix's Starz deal runs out -- lots of the good movies on Netflix Streaming are from Starz's library.

Doko desu ka...

Five iPhone/Touch Apps as we enter 2011

This is my home screen. There are many like it, but this one is mine. 

So it's been a year since my iPod Touch came into my life and it's truly The Device I Cannot Live Without.

I've got the screen laid out with the most-used buttons nearer the bottom center (Stanza, Pulse, Music, Safari).

Stanza is BRILLIANT. It organizes your library (with easy re/tagging and coverarting) and provides a slick, fast, customizable reading experience. (Apple's iBooks is slow, clunky and unusable in comparison.)

Also awesome is Pulse, a newsreader:

The Chicago Sun-Times, Jrocknyc, and Evolutionary Psychology in Pulse News.

I've got twenty news sources loaded into it, easy as a search. Slick, smooth, intuituve' and saves me from going to twenty different sites each day. I haven't used Google News or Fluent News since installing Pulse.

VLC's handy for the occasional Curb, Netflix is more for the kids than me. Instapaper's collecting dust. (Hey, I didn't say "~Top~ Five" in the title!

So: STANZA & PULSE. Both free. :)

Chaku Uta, When the Walls Fell

Néojaponisme:

"...digital distribution has arrived through establishment channels, leading to digital products like the Chaku-Uta Full download. ¥350 gets you a single song, packed to the brim with DRM. This prevents you from sharing it with your friends, but also prevents you from, say, taking a song you bought on your phone and playing it on your PC.

People continue to buy these Chaku-Uta Full by the truckload despite their inherent inflexibility. Their sales comprised about ¥12 billion of the ¥21 billion worth of digital music products sold in the third fiscal quarter of 2010. But the genius of the format is that the act of paying for a Chaku-Uta is completely abstracted. The charge for the song appears on your wireless bill, and it’s not even a single line-item. You’re sold the right to download the song for ¥200 and another ¥150 for the bandwidth required to transfer it to your phone. The upshot: There’s very little chance here for the final cash-register moment of reflection....

The issue is the widespread adoption of smartphones. When your phone is a computer and your data plan is unlimited, you move from a closed consumption environment to an open one. And from the perspective of the Japanese music industry, the track record of monetizing music within such environments looks bone-chilling. In the US and Europe, the iOS and Android App Stores have set users’ expectations with regard to how they’ll pay for digital content, as well as opened up the market for a variety of new sellers...

thx anonymous tipster!

(Japanese chakushin, meaning reception, and uta, meaning song. [link])

I love Japan, but the people can really be suckers, accepting the faux apologies of corrupt government officials and paying fucking ¥350 for a single fucking song! Jiminy Christmas!

Julian Assange? Yoshiki? NO! Just an overeager anti-spam roll-up over at Blogger HQ.

When I saw that "Blog Not Found" screen this morning, I was like... "oh snap, PWNED" followed quickly by "eh, all good things..."

But it wasn't hackers or the government, just an unexciting error on Google/Blogger's part. Thank you Nitcrzr [link] for pointing me toward the fix [link].

During the hour or so that I thought Jrocknyc might be gone forever (tho every post and comment gets auto-backed-up, btw) I toyed with the idea of jumping into Twitter whole hog. No more big blog to maintain! Just tiny little zings all day! But it's not my style.

But it's handy to know about: http://twitter.com/jrocknyc.

Anyways, we're back up, and if I ever decide to close up shop, it won't be out of the blue like today -- I'd at least say goodbye first. :)