HiWire

I'm pretty sure I dismissed it as dork fantasy in 2007. Finishing the first disc of Season 1 and the show's writing has surprised me with its combo of smarts, humor, and sheer entertainment value. And Sarah in her underwear... less surprising with each episode, but much appreciated nonetheless. Something else I noticed recently... when I'm reading Wikipedia entries on older tv shows, a lot of them are starting to mention the soundtracks getting pulled or replaced due to music rights. That's one reason I prefer to watch some things on disc instead of streaming.

Silly, but a lot of fun so far (I think I stopped watching TV during these years):

Trentemøller – The Last Resort A bit dancier than I was expecting (the album cover made me think "ambient") but an enjoyable listen – on further listening, it sounds a bit like minimalist ambient/dance or chillout music.

I'm looking forward to picking up more Dire Straits SACDs as well (Making Movies and Love Over Gold), but they're a bit pricey. This one has been in my cart for a while – it was great to come home yesterday, grab it out of the mailbox and put it right on the stereo. My only problem with these single-layer SACDs is that I have to listen to them at home... with hybrid SACDs, I can easily rip them for listening on my iPod or computer at work. Not a big problem for this kind of album, which is better suited to a comfy chair.

Mark Knopfler – Shangri-La

What's the politically correct alternative? Buying Huawei at Best Buy?

I don't have have any Robyn albums (a friend of mine likes her stuff), but I've always liked Scandinavian pop, going back to Roxette (my first cassette!) and ABBA. Which reminds me – I also have to catch up on a bunch of Raveonettes albums and I'm looking forward to listening to Trentemøller's The Last Resort. I never listened to Sigur Rós in their heyday, for some reason. Some of Annie's more recent work has been uneven (you can watch her newer videos on YouTube), but I don't think anyone else does what she does as well as she does. The version of Don't Stop I received also comes with the All Night EP, so I am pretty well set with Annie material for a while. She played a DJ set at a skating rink downtown last weekend – I wish I could have seen that. I only had Anniemal too, but then I was able to get a copy of her Two of Hearts Stacey Q cover sampler on eBay (this radio-length, slightly grungy-sounding Skatebård remix is the one I had been listening to for years, and it is superior to the longer one on the disc, in my opinion):

I bought a copy of the CD as soon as I found out about it a few weeks ago... finally showed up today, coincidentally, along with her 2nd album, Don't Stop.

Annie – Endless Vacation

What are you running the Qutest into?

The Beach Boys – Sounds of Summer An antidote (alternate reality?) for rainy days like this:

I was thinking about my small, messy CD/SACD/DVD/Blu-ray library and stumbled across this upcoming media format: https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/2017/49438.html Looks like Sony and Panasonic have been working on yet another optical standard: Archival Disc. They don't plan to sell them in the consumer market, but anyone who lived through the 90s is going to get déja vu reading this article... the same ambition, the same complex, expensive jukebox solutions, the same media/library customers...

Mansun – Six It's strange I haven't ever listened to this album, or its predecessor, Attack of the Grey Lantern seriously (i.e., not while distracted at work)... I have the US versions, which have rearranged and substitute tracks compared to the UK releases. Fantastic Brit-rock for people with eclectic pop tastes. Complexly layered, passionately performed, and brilliantly composed, but ear candy nonetheless.

Hop Along – Bark Your Head Off, Dog Folk / Punk / Art-rock from Philadelphia... love this album and looking forward to getting their previous ones

St. Vincent Her most successful pop album, I think. Masseduction was great, but her self-titled 2014 album has better, more emotionally honest songs.

I started Seveneves about 2 years ago with a library copy, but I didn't get very far into the book at the time (stopped just before the hard rain starts). Reviews have been a bit mixed but I'll get back to finishing it soon... usually, I wait until the mass-market edition is released to purchase the book. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. was a huge disappointment. It was still fun to read, but a lot of the ideas went nowhere and the characters felt a bit generic. On the other hand, I loved REAMDE, even though it probably has a ton of flaws. The mix of action, fantasy role-playing computer games, and interesting settings was right up my alley.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson Unlike the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, this is the first time I've re-read Pattern Recognition. I like it a lot more now, I think, than when I first read it in hardcover from the library. The characters, settings, and plot make more sense to me now than when I read it the first time. He's definitely become more sophisticated in his development of the branding-sensitive protagonist, Cayce Pollard, and his exploration of culture, marketing, fashion, and art (in this case, film theory). The other interesting thing is that this is now a "historical" novel and it withstands the test of time. The protagonists in the preceding novels of the Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties) are young people, whereas the characters in Pattern Recognition are all adults. The change in perspective is interesting – I think it's harder to write convincing adult characters (that aren't copies of the writer) because they require more imagination and context. Some of the attitudes in the novel seem dated, but they merely remind us of how much the world has changed since 2002. You can see in the cover images below that the designers had trouble conceptualizing his ideas (my copy is the upper-left version).

Clone High

I was most happy that 10 Gigabit Ethernet is an option on the new Mac Mini and that they are offering Vega GPUs on the MacBook Pros in November: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/30/18042572/apple-amd-vega-graphics-options-macbook-pro More details: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13532/amds-vega-mobile-lives-vega-pro-20-16-in-november

I'm listening to the Pretenders' first album (1979) on CD, apparently pressed in Germany, never remastered (since it was transferred to digital), and it sounds fantastic. You have to turn the volume up a bit more (double the Faith No More album), but it's clean, spacious, and dynamic. Remasters seem to be doing more harm than good... I'm not sure if the Mo-Fi SACDs of the Pretenders' albums are better (maybe just different) than this old disc. It's funny that people think the Pretenders are punk... they look punk, but their music sounds like pop to me, with a bit of an edge.

Faith No More – The Real Thing A good album, but remastered loud and probably right to the distortion limit. Enjoyable, but pull back on the volume a bit as it is fatiguing with headphones. Here's a brief discussion of the remasters: https://www.popmatters.com/194715-faith-no-more-the-real-thing-and-angel-dust-reissues-2495516233.html I also have the Mo-Fi recording of Angel Dust, which sounds excellent.

Father Ted https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/20/father-ted-legacy-20-years-on-up-with-this-sort-of-thing

The Crucifucks

Steely Dan – Can't Buy A Thrill

They hold up incredibly well. The passage of time has not diminished the power of his prose. Mona Lisa Overdrive is next. I don't remember reading the books together all at once. I've owned them for years, but reading them again as an adult (living in the future) seems to be different than when I read them as a sheltered teenager. For one thing, I'm actually bothering to look up every one of the words I don't understand this time – I admire Gibson's creativity and the breadth of his interests and vocabulary. I've read Neuromancer many times over the years, but I've only read the others once or twice. William Gibson's cyberpunk novels changed my life. I've been looking back at the cyberpunk era (triggered by the upcoming launch of the Cyberpunk 2077 game, I think) and few of his contemporaries' works can compare to Gibson's trilogy. I didn't even consider the books a trilogy (and the publisher has never numbered them as such), but the linkages are more apparent when you read them back to back. I've always found the covers for Mona Lisa Overdrive to be cheesy – I found this beautiful image on Google (art by Vladimir Manyukhin):