I got my monthly Jetpack report, dig it1Do cool kids say “dig” now? I want to be hip again. I want to be lit, or a banger, or something.:
That number of visitors translates to about 12 per day! A dozen people! That is double digits. Double digits is only one away from triple digits, and from there the sky’s the limit.
I want to thank the following for making this success possible:
Over the course of its ten albums, The Alan Parsons Project released 20 instrumentals, though more on their first five albums (four of which start with an instrumental and the fifth, The Turn of a Friendly Card, starts with a pseudo instrumental that runs about two minutes before the vocals begin).
What follows are lists, because I love lists!
Top 5 Favourite Instrumentals
Honorable Mention: Sirius (Eye in the Sky). This song is probably indelibly tied to sports team introductions now, but it’s still a terrific and dramatic intro to Eye in the Sky. “Mammagamma” from the same album is also very good, if a bit slick.
What all of the above songs have in common is atmosphere. “In the Lap of the Gods” is mysterious, soaring and melodramatic (see more here). “Lucifer” starts with somewhat unnerving strings and sound effects (including Morse code), fades, then comes back with a staccato drum and ringing guitar, before adding in the requisite choir. “The Gold Bug” does feature vocals without words, but these really serve as another instrument in a lovely, layered song. “Pipeline” is perhaps the most conventional on the list, but it’s so incredibly smooth it feels wrong to omit it. “Paseo de Gracia” ties–this closing instrumental is the only one to have a Spanish flavour, with horns and more fine guitar work by Ian Bairnson. “Secret Garden” also features worldless vocals (again by Chis Rainbow) and has a sunny, almost Beach Boys sound to its harmonies.
Top 3 Weird Instrumentals:
Honorable Mention: The two instrumentals from I Robot that aren’t “I Robot”.
“Total Eclipse” is the only Project song solely credited to conductor Andrew Powell, and it’s this weird, almost discordant song that sounds like a portent of doom, perhaps reflecting how ancient people feared eclipses. “Chinese Whispers” is an odd, short piece featuring a vaguely Asian-sounding acoustic guitar, with Eric Woolfson’s daughters providing murmured vocals. “Usher” is the longest song the Project did at over 15 minutes, and it’s divided into movements that encompass sound effects of a storm, the house collapsing, choirs and everything else. It sounds entirely different from everything else on all ten of their albums. The two “I Robot” instrumentals, “Nucleus” and “Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32” are largely mood pieces.
Probably the Worst Instrumental:
It’s not bad, per se, it’s just very bland. Without any orchestration, it leans heavily on sax and keyboard, which also helps date it as a very 80s song.
Apple held its annual iPhone event today. They showed two new phones and two new watches. This took 82 excruciating minutes. Behold below, my summary written in a magical list as I watched/endured.
First, some alternate titles for the event that Apple didn’t use:
And, of course:
And now, the event, minute by agonizing minute!
NOTE: Gratuitously bolded words and phrases ahead.
Seriously, the padding of this particular event was downright silly. If brevity is the soul of wit, Apple has no soul and no wit. But they have sizzle reels. Boy howdy, do they have sizzle reels.
Next year’s sizzle reels will be made entirely from recycled titanium. You’re going to love them.
Time for another list. Is my blog becoming some hack listicle site? Maybe! Mostly I’m just in a list kind of mood.
Saturday’s Lotto 6/49 jackpot is $46 million. Even in Canadian dollars, this is a lot of money. What would I do if I had this kind of essentially bottomless wealth handed to me out of the blue? A lot of things. Some of them might even be sensible.
In no particular order:
A short list.
More later, perhaps.
It’s the end of the month, time for a list!
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
In no specific order:
I told you it was a short list.
This post sponsored by Post Something Positive!™
Yep. Let’s take inventory:
Really, I’m just surprised I find myself thinking, “COVID-19 wasn’t that bad.” Because it really wasn’t.
Here’s one more (tiny, adorable) kitten:
I woke up fat and unrested. Is unrested a word? Apparently not. I will add it to Nedlish!
Day 10 my remaining symptoms are the same, but milder in all cases. The nose is a bit stuffy, the chest feels a bit congested (though no coughing unless I contort into a cough-friendly position) and the ears are just a touch plugged, depending on which way I turn my head.
Despite feeling better in all regards, I had an allegedly poor sleep last night and also managed to gain 1.2 pounds, like secret night gnomes were directly injecting fat into my body as I (poorly) slept.
In all, I am nonplussed.
Here are more words for Nedlish:
It’s 2023 and that means the big thing is AI (that’s Artificial Intelligence, not some guy named Al). If you are reading this in some other year, you may be wondering what the fuss is all about from your tiny, climate-ravaged hovel. Or you may be wondering the same as a gleaming machine built on AI yourself! Who can say what the future holds?
As for the present, it started in 2022 when AI-generated art became a thing. That’s still ongoing (see the controversy over Marvel using AI-generated art for its opening credits to Secret Invasion), but things kicked into high gear right near the end of the year when OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT website to the public, allowing you to query an AI built on all kinds of data scraped from the internet through 2021. You could ask for recipes, have it write haikus, or generate code, or just write your crappy books and list them on Amazon for you. There are concerns, as you might imagine.
Given the recent implosion over at Twitter over what Elon “Galaxy Brain” Musk has called “extreme levels of data scraping”, I wondered, might my own humble blog be subjected to the same? It is, after all, a treasure trove of my collected thoughts and wisdom, stretching back 18 years! In internet time, that’s like going back to the dinosaurs. Or at least mastodons (not to be confused with the social media platform). What can I do to protect my sacred words from evil, exploiting AI? How could I stop some young lad from going down the wrong path by using text from creolened.com to, in some small way, help write his homework, leaving him bereft of critical thinking and writing skills, and therefore destined to a life of petty crime and indolence?
I have the answer.
I’ll fill every post with words I’ve made up. Eventually, Nedlish will become the universal language Esperanto could only ever dream of becoming. This is a perfect plan. Let’s get started.
More to come. Get to work, AI, on the glorious Nedlish future!
As noted previously, being sick sucks. I had forgotten how much through the benefit of not being sick for a long time, but now that I am reminded, here are a few aspects of the misery I wanted to record for posterity.
5 Worst Things About Being Sick
Bonus!
2 Best Things About Being Sick