HiWire

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):

Count Zero by William Gibson He mentions ray tracing on page 218 and Nvidia has just gotten around to doing it in realtime... the book was published in 1986. A wild ride.

Unkle – Psyence Fiction Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy

Will check them out.

'80s Nite! I'm looking forward to getting the Police's Synchronicity, but I have to pace myself... SACDs are getting rarer and more expensive as time goes by.

The Police – Regatta de Blanc (SACD)

That's a great album. It's sitting on my desk right now!

The Collector's Edition (2009) CD is definitely an improvement on the original recording, both in sound quality and breadth of content. I always felt the original was too short... the Collector's Edition is hard to find now. It took a few months to find this one, and I had to play it as soon as I got it!

Vintage Computer-Generated Imagery:

Thomas Dolby – The Flat Earth (Collector's Edition)

The black and white seasons are now in the public domain: It was cancelled in the Rural Purge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge But I think the success of the Dukes of Hazzard changed their minds... The early 60s had a strange idea of family entertainment. Here's Dennis Hopper as a beatnik: