Mazblog

I came across two very cool and promising music sites today:

1. TheSixtyOne

I’ve only just started using this site today, but I already love it. Think Pandora + Digg + XBox LIVE + Virb + VH1 Pop-up Videos. Here’s the process. The whole idea is that musicians upload songs to the site, and listeners vote on the tracks they like best. The songs that get voted most (or “bumped”) get put on the homepage. Sounds simple, but that’s not all. To make the whole thing fun (and addictive), you can’t just bump up every song, willy nilly. Every user has an allotment of points; bumping a song takes 5. And to keep people from bumping songs up that they haven’t even listened to, you have to listen to a song for at least one minute before you can bump it. You start out with 100 points, and doing certain things gives you more points.

For example, listening to about 5 songs gives you 100 points (it also unlocks an “achievement,” just like xbox games; I am not kidding, and it is awesome). You can also earn points by listening to songs that are on “the rack,” which is a list of songs that haven’t yet made it to the home page. As you listen to music and unlock points, you also go up in “level,” which in turn unlocks new features, such as the ability to bump any single song up to three times.

What’s more, as you’re listening, little dialogue boxes pop up unobtrusively in the lower right that give you trivia info about the song you’re listening to, or tips and tidbits about the website. You can also add songs to your profile to listen to later. I can’t describe adequately how well designed this little aspect is. Oh, and did I mention that the music keeps playing even if you go to a different page on the site? It’s using some sweet AJAX magic.

I can’t tell you how cool this site is. In just the time it took to write this little blurb, I discovered at least three new features that made me go, “oh, wow!” I implore you to check it out. I’m already Level 3, so you better hurry and catch up.

2. TuneGlue

TuneGlue is a sort of music map that shows you relationships between artists that you like. You type in the name of a band or artist, click search, and a node appears with that artist’s name. Click the node and click “expand,” and you’ll see new nodes branching out from the first one, each one representing a related artist. It’s a very neat way to explore and find artists, and in a way that puts you at the driver’s seat more than a site like Pandora.

There are a few problems with TuneGlue, though:

• I wish you could move around the map. When you start getting a lot of nodes on the screen, it’s really hard to navigate. I also wish you could click and drag nodes and have them stay where you put them. [EDIT] I just found out you can navigate around by holding down shift on the keyboard, but I only found this out by accident. It doesn’t tell you this anywhere on the site that I can tell.
• It’d be great if you could listen to tracks by different artists right there in the interface instead of only being able to look at track listings.
• It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to save what your work as you go, which is disappointing.
• TuneGlue says it determines relationships based on data from LastFM and Amazon, which makes some sense, but it’d be nice if the process was a bit more transparent and customizable, and also if they could get iTunes on board.

Still, a very neat idea. I’ll be curious to see how it develops.

This video is crazy-amazing. The artist calls it, “an ambiguous animation painted on public walls
made in Buenos Aires and in Baden.” Prepare to be totally tripped out:

My roommate, Matt, decided for some terrible reason that it would be a good idea to have our friend Elycia come over and play GTA 4 last night, so I grabbed my MBP real quick and filmed her reactions.

If you’re the sort of person who Diggs things, digg this video here!

Sarah, Matt, Allen, and I got around to seeing the new film by Tarsem, “The Fall,” last Saturday. It definitely deserves a post. The story takes place in a hospital in LA in the 1930s, and centers around a stunt-double who’s broken his legs and who tells an epic story to an adorable foreign girl with a broken arm (I believe she’s from eastern Europe). The story and their lives begin to interweave, and the whole film has this amazing, surreal, dreamlike feel to it. I thought the plot was great, with one goofy hiccup in the way the conflict with the villain is resolved (our audience laughed). There are great motifs of redemption to be found, and I love the way the film interpreted the way dreams and reality can blur together (reminded me a lot of Michel Gondry).

If you’ve ever seen “The Cell,” you’ll immediately recognize Tarsem’s cinematographic style. It’s simply a beautifully shot movie; easily up there with “Amelie.” The opening sequence looks more like a slideshow of moving photography by Ansel Adams than a movie.

I decided to get back into the whole blogging thing (there must be thousands of blog posts that start exactly like that), I think partly ’cause of Trevor revitalizing his. I was not expecting to have 8,000 spam comments awaiting moderation when I logged in for the first time in a long time, though. So, after picking out a new theme and all that (how do you like it?), my first chore was to manually go through all my comments, 25 at a time, and mark them all as spam. No small task, and not really a fun one, but what was unexpectedly awesome were some of the fantastically weird titles that some of these comments had. I’ve decided to share the best ones with you, in no particular order:

• Freey Tranny Sex Thumbs (I’m guessing this refers to thumbnail images, and I really hope I’m not wrong…)
• Penis (this one gets points for being direct)
• Fifi and the Flowertots
• Boob Hanger (this conjures images of either a storehouse for enormous breasts, or a prosthetic storage accessory)
• Black People (a reference website for people who live in Minnesota, maybe?)
• Prozac Sex (together at last)
• Yugoslavia Information (I’ve been waiting so long for a robust website with exactly this sort of Eastern European information)
• Car Sex Story (sex in a car, or some sort of bizarre machine fetish fantasy?)
• Utah Prairie Dog (why would anyone click this?)
• Meatholes (speaks for itself, I think)
• Hot Grannies (I’m not making this one up. There evidently is a website out there dedicated to GILFs.)
• Noogies (This one cracked me up so much, because it’s as if a 5 year old wrested the controls of the Spam Comment Generator from the normal, sex-obsessed conductor.)

All these are hilarious, but the Grand Prize has to go to:
Lesbians Lactating. It has everything a terrible spam email or comment should have, with the exception of prescription drugs: lesbians, sex (implied), and breasts. But it implies so much weirdness. If they’re lactating, these lesbians presumably just gave birth, correct? (I’m a little hazy on the details.) Is this really about lesbians breast feeding?

If you’re curious about how long it took me to get through all these spam comments, here are some statistics:

• Time to delete 25 spam comments: 2.5 seconds (approx.)
• That means 10 deletions per second
• 600 deletions a minute
• Total time to delete 8,000 spam comments: 13.33 minutes

That should be a strong enough case to convince the WordPress folks to add a Delete All Comments Awaiting Moderation button…