The best of the rest, as it were

Good vibes, global beats, and the life changing effects of brain surgery abound in Sofia’s debut.

Like a yomp in the countryside, but it’s a psychic topography made up of all modern dance music in James Holden’s brainy but democratic masterpiece.

Get up and go delivered in spades in this sunny happy dance album.

Two new albums? And they’re both better than the last one? And now with added Taylor Swift? You spoil us!

Chilly and delicate synth missives from the lockdown.

Grails’ latest album gives you plenty to lose yourself in (for forty minutes at least).

Because sometimes you can be relaxed by drum and bass. Sometimes.

Kiss me while the world decays because I miss you like the deserts miss the rain.

Features odes to carbon dioxide, bullying your kid’s bullies, and candy/kandy.

Anyone for Japanese Techno via German kosmische music and Philip Glass operas?

It might have been a good idea to write all the reviews prior to publishing this summary. You’ll get ten eventually, I promise.

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote my last Civ VI leader post about Amanitore of Nubia and there’s been a whole host of new leaders and personas added to the game since then. Among these the number of Chinese leaders has increased from two to five. Therefore it’s probably a good time to start writing about one of them, and where better to start than the OG himself, Qin Shi Huang.

It strikes me that it is better to sit and think about what you need to do, rather than endless try out new tools and hoping you end up with a use for them. I’m not saying that innovation is bad, or that you shouldn’t stretch yourself into some new spot once in a while, but you will become more valuable to others if you can identify what it is you are supposed to be doing and then use your existing skills to get that job done.

So today my random album script picked out “Bright Lights” by Ellie Goulding, an album I wasn’t sure I’ve ever listened to. I looked in my music library and there it was! As a result this is not so much an album revisit as an album _visit. Anyway, this album was released in 2010 and did quite well. In fact, “Bright Lights” is a reissue of an album that was originally released as “Lights” (February 2010).

I’m a massive fan of hot chocolate. Recently a friend recommended M&S hot chocolate flakes. Thanks to a promotion it was about half the price of the Montezuma’s hot chocolate discs that we usually buy. The Montezuma’s ones are lush (that’s official hot chocolate tasting terminology) but in this economy anything that saves a bit of money has got to be good right? However, there are other things to consider. For one, what’s the cost per drink?

This is one of my more played Fabric mix CDs so I decided to go for it when my random prompter plumped for this earlier today. One constraint of these posts was to write it in roughly the amount of time it takes to listen to it. You’d think that for a mix CD that would be ok. After all, this mix is a full CD and 74 minutes long.

I’ve managed to extract my music library, including all the albums I’ve added to streaming, as a CSV file and write a routine in R to select an album at random. The plan is to write about that album for the blog in roughly the time that it takes to listen to that album all the way through. I already did this yesterday for Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry. But I have to level with you.

This is the first in an unplanned series of album revisits, I will write a post explaining the process soon. “Black Cherry” is the second album by Goldfrapp, released in 2003. I bought the lead single Train while I lived in York and also the single of the title track because by then I’d discovered M83 and they’d done a remix of it. “Black Cherry” finds the band faced with following their successful and chilled out debut album “Felt Mountain”, which back in 2000 had sounded notably weird.

White rabbits and all that. Even more than during the pandemic, I’m feeling these days like the days, weeks, and months are all blurring into one another. It’s getting harder to figure out what year something happened, how the old the cats are, and just how overdue all my promises are. It’s definitely getting harder to look at this blog and wonder whether it will ever get back to its heyday of regularly posted updates.

I gave up writing reviews of movies because: I never felt I got the balance right between describing the plot and why I liked the film. I don’t watch enough movies to be able to draw comparisons that are interesting, just between the small subset of total films that I have watched. I don’t know enough about film making to properly describe why a movie made me feel a particular way and how to discuss the different possibilities available to the director, the actors, and the other artists involved with creating a movie.

A set of rules for living from now on (in no particular order) Life is too short to look at adverts. Avoid them where possible. Block them if you have to. Embrace risk and chance, as they have contributed the most to where you are now. Intervene into physical things and leave your mark upon them. Draw pictures on the blank pages of books, even if they are dear to you.

Because I am bored of forgetting what’s in my website’s Rakefile, I thought I’d write a list. Also, as I’m probably going to move over to a node based approach soon, it’s a handy wish list for my package.json file when the time comes. Make a new post in _posts named “Title” rake post["Title"] If no title is given, you will be prompted for one. The post will be opened in the editor specified in the Rakefile.

As with most years, I had hoped to start off 2023 with a flurry of new blog posts. Instead I caught Covid, which knocked me out for most of ‘betweenmas’ and put paid to my hopes for a productive start to the year. At the time of writing this post, I only just feel like I have begun to get back to ’normal’, or at least as normal as things have been since 2020.