Skyworld Project on Etsy has some pretty awesome prints available of cityscapes mixed in with nerdy things like the Bat-signal or Spider-Man.
Cool Etsy Shop: Skyworld Project
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FEATURES, BLOGS, & REVIEWS
Preparing for Record Store Day
This weekend is Record Store Day. A time for vinyl nerds to rejoice in a weekend dedicated to their passion, or wax poetic about how it was so much better before it got so popular. Thomas and I discuss this on the podcast this week, but, in preparation for the big day, I asked our friend William Angelos from Creep Records in Philadelphia to put together a write-up of the releases he’s most looking forward to and what to be on the lookout for as you make your way to your local shop.
No Guilt, Just Pleasure (Encore Episode 120)
This week’s episode of Encore looks at the first week of the website and how things are going so far, then we tackle a bunch of upcoming movies (Star Wars, Fantastic Beasts, Civil War) and give some thoughts on Batman v Superman. This leads to a little talk about comic books. Then we dive into this week’s main topics: Record Store Day, do we believe in “guilty pleasures” for art, our thoughts on buying albums when they’re on sale from a label, and if a bad album from a band can ruin future albums for us. We end by talking about if we’d leave our jobs for “The Ringer” and, of course, talk about Blink-182 finishing their new album.
The Voyeur’s Motel
Gay Talese, writing for The New Yorker, with the most bizarre piece I’ve read in weeks:
I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.
And the follow-up from Erik Wemple, at The Washington Post, that looks at the journalistic ethics of this:
Only in journalism would one seek to cultivate a three-decade-long relationship with a motel pervert. “The Voyeur’s Motel” reflects the anxiety of a writer doing just that. After his spying on the couple, for instance, Talese recalls saying to himself, “What was I doing up here, anyway? Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project?” Maybe: As Talese recounts in the story, he signed a confidentiality agreement with Foos upon his 1980 trip to the motel, before his trip to the peepholes. It was a “typed document stating that I would not identify him by name, or publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver,” writes Talese. “I signed the paper. I had already decided that I would not write about Gerald Foos under these restrictions. I had come to Denver merely to meet this man and to satisfy my curiosity about him.” And to watch some oral sex, too.
I am still skeeved out by this entire thing.
Helpful App: Chatology
Chatology is an app for OS X that allows you to search through your iMessage history. It’s one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you really need it.
If you use Messages, you probably know that searching messages to find important info from past chats can be frustrating. Perhaps you couldn’t find what you were looking for, or your Mac slowed down so much that you gave up.
Chatology helps you find exactly what you’re looking for without frustration.
A New Chapter for the Serial
Even Puschak’s new video “A New Chapter for the Serial” talks about the rise of the serialization genre. I found this really interesting.
HARPS – “Let Me In” (Live Studio Video)
HARPS will be releasing a remastered version of their EP, Marvelous Cheer, on vinyl via Rocket Heart Records on May 19th. Today we’ve got an exclusive live studio video of the band performing “Let Me In,” and I think the best way to describe this sound is lush, punchy, and full bodied. The plan is to bring you a new live video once a week leading up to the EP release. Head below to watch the video and if you like what you hear make sure to pre-order the album.
It’s a Tesla
Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery:
To that end, the significance of electric to Tesla that the radical rethinking of a car made possible by a new drivetrain gave Tesla the opportunity to make the best car: there was a clean slate. More than that, Tesla’s lack of car-making experience was actually an advantage: the company’s mission, internal incentives, and bottom line were all dependent on getting electric right.
Again the iPhone is a useful comparison: people contend that Microsoft lost mobile to Apple, but the reality is that smartphones required a radical rethinking of the general purpose computer: there was a clean slate. More than that, Microsoft was fundamentally handicapped by the fact Windows was so successful on PCs: the company could never align their mission, incentives, and bottom line like Apple could.
Helpful App: Thunderspace 5K
The last few weeks have been just a tad stressful. Needless to say my sleep schedule has taken a massive punch in the balls. Over the past few days I’ve been using this app, Thunderspace 5K, at night as almost a white noise machine. It’s been a revelation. It might be growing up in Oregon, and having spent many a night falling asleep to the sound of rain on the wood deck outside the window of my youth, but this app has replaced podcasts when I finally find my way to bed.
One Week in the Books
I wanted to title this, “It’s been one week …,” but the moment I even think that sentence I’ve got Barenaked Ladies stuck in my head the rest of the day. You’re welcome for that. However, now that it’s the weekend, it means we have officially gone through our first week on the new website. I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for the incredible response we’ve seen over the past seven or so days. I’ve been blown away by the outpouring of support, kind words, and all the amazing write-ups and tweets I’ve read remembering AbsolutePunk. I’ve compiled some of the articles from current and former staffers alike into a little round-up below, and put together some first week stats on the site as well.
One Song for Twenty Years
For this week’s playlist I asked everyone in the staff Slack chat to pick one song that came out between 1996 and 2016 (roughly the time that AbsolutePunk was sort of a thing). It didn’t have to be their favorite song from that time period, but it had to mean something to them and be special for some reason. I’ve compiled all the tracks that were submitted and put together a playlist on Apple Music and Spotify for your weekend listening pleasure. Below you’ll find a more extended break down of who picked what song. You get one song — what would you pick?
chorus.fm (Episode 119)
It was difficult finding something to talk about on this week’s episode of Encore. We almost thought about just continuing our little hiatus because we just weren’t sure if we had any good topics. We ended up settling on one and pretty much spend an hour or so discussing this new website, what led to its creation, some of the decisions made along the way, and what we hope the future holds. This episode is kinda like The Format’s “I’m Actual” and I feel a little awkward spending the whole time talking about me, but, we got it out of the way. Next week we’ll be back with a more regular episode about news and answering questions and stuff. Feel free to hit up the comments (click the little quote button on this post) and let us know if you have anything you’d like us to touch on. Thanks for dealing with our little break — we’re really excited to be back.
A Hello, A Goodbye
I started writing online by uploading HTML files to some free server in 1996. Angelfire? Geocities? Something like that. I was playing around with this relatively new thing called “the internet” and had no idea what I was doing. I created a little “about me” page that talked about how much I loved Blink-182, MxPx, and the comic Foxtrot. I’ve been doing some variation of this for over 20 years. When I first picked the name “AbsolutePunk.net,” it was because I saw a vodka magazine ad, I thought it would show up first in an alphabetized Yahoo! directory, and my adolescent brain thought I was a little punker. At the time I had no idea that this would end up being my career or that I’d gradually shift the website into an online alternative music publication that would cover thousands of artists, have hundreds of contributors, and be read by millions. The growing pains were tough. The servers couldn’t handle the traffic we were seeing, the overhead cost of running this website from my parents’ basement or my dorm room became almost unsustainable, and a little band called Fall Out Boy exploded into the mainstream and brought millions more searching for the exact kind of music we were talking about in our little corner of the internet. Searching for answers and help, I ended up selling the business I had created in my teens.
I think it’s safe to say that didn’t quite play out as I thought it would. However, the love for the music outweighed it all. In many ways running the website became the very job I had tried to avoid. Stress. Anger. Depression. A frustration brought on by the feeling of a constant cycle of defeat. But, so many of you still read my quirky sarcasm in the news. People still talked with the staff about music, life, and pop-culture. You’ve still read our features, read our incredible reviewers, pored over our articles, and listened to Drew, and Thomas, and I talk on podcasts. People still wanted to know what Jesse Lacey had for dinner. I had started my first business, AbsolutePunk, LLC, as a teenager with cargo shorts and puka shells. I started my second, Chorus, LLC, in my early thirties — an online consulting business that included running that very same website I had started when we all wanted to look like Kenny Vasoli. Today I’m writing to announce that my second company is buying back my first.
The Great Tank Top Purge (Episode 118)
On this week’s episode of Encore we start by talking a little about the Academy Awards, do some follow-up on last weeks “best 10 albums of the last 15 years,” and then tackle some reader questions. Thomas recounts his history with Set Your Goals, we give some updated thoughts on The Wonder Years’ last album, and we look at how we’ve changed or matured how we handle conversations on the forums. We talk a bit about “where to start” with different forms of art by well known musicians or authors or filmmakers and then get into some of the big news over the last week: Transit have broken up, Yellowcard are back with Hopeless, and The Hotelier have released the track listing and album art for their new album. We end with some talk of Rolling Stone’s top 40 emo albums and The 1975 aiming for that number one spot on two charts. And there’s the return of the siren. Rejoice.
Top 50 Albums From Past 15 Years
On this week’s episode of Encore we looked at the top ten albums from the past fifteen years. The goal was to pick our favorite ten albums that came out between 2001 and 2015. This was way harder than I expected it to be and I ended up cutting out albums I love, being surprised at what albums I knew had to make the cut, and you can hear my entire (strange) thought process on the episode. If you hit read more you can read the last 50 that made the cut.