Well, Beck, I thought it was rad. Haven't checked out Delicate Art yet, but many thanks for it. Also, I love the (obviously doctored) christmas message at 12:25 am.

Yay I have sound, and a diminishing number of viruses!

Hey Par that RSS feed is rad, and "The Devil's Chaplain" is great - thanx.

Visions of sugarplums shall commencing dancing in my head in T-minus 30 seconds.

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Good night everyone.

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A freshly nuked computer... now to fix everything anew

I just completed the Exclaim! Annual Reader's Poll. All in all, this year mostly sucked my asshole in terms of albums. Last year, there were like 3 or 4 albums that I could consider life-changing, but this year I can barely think of 1 or 2. Nonetheless, here's how 2004 stacked up for me (as according to my reader's poll entry):



Pop/Rock Album of the Year
The Go! Team
Thunder Lightning Strike

It's difficult to figure out how to classify the Go! Team, but the overwhelming desire to
make comparisons with the Jackson 5 or an obscure Charlie Brown soundtrack calls for a
kitschy pop category of some sort despite how hard these penny-whistle and schoolyard
double-dutch anthems rock. An impressive debut album, this collection of hip-hop-scotch-rock
compositions will have you out of your seat in seconds flat. Whether or not you'll
subsequently bust a queue red-rover style or shake your ass to the beat is a question I
haven't yet resolved. One way or another, this album ranks among the best of the must-haves
in the ecclectic pop collections of 2004.





Punk Album of the Year
Hot Cross
Fair Trades and Farewells

These days I don't even know what the fuck punk IS anymore. It used to be you could classify
music as punk if it somehow fit into the mold of that original punk-rock triumverate of the
Clash/Ramones/Sex Pistols. But now you have all this SoCal Fat Wreck Chords stuff and all
that pop-punk crap for skate kids with spastic cases of attention deficit disorder. And it
really didn't make matters any easier when Sunny Day Real Estate came along with a sound
which somewhere along the line turned into this emo trendwhore thing, and that whole
post-punk phase where everyone wished they were Fugazi (though promising) ultimately didn't
help us get back to the root of the punk classification problem either. All of this just
culminated with an influx of metal which gets you a new "hardcore" category that has nothing
to do with what the term "hardcore" used to mean in the first place. Is it just me, or is
this entire genre one big fucking mess these days? What does one so-called punk band have to
do with another anymore? Jack all, as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, this unruly
miscellany of sounds never fails to push the boundaries of music. Hot Cross' 2004 release,
Fair Trades and Farewells, picked up where At The Drive In left off. While the post-ATDI
offspring of Sparta and the Mars Volta push off in somewhat diverging directions, Hot Cross
took up the torch and plowed straight ahead to produce an album that is easy to imagine as the
successor to ATDI's Relationship of Command. I think in order to make sense of this
whole damned punk genre today, you gotta make little family trees that go something like
this:

Drive Like Jehu, Saetia, ATDI, Hot Cross.

Considering the impressive track record of the bands listed in this branch, you might wanna
keep tabs on Saetia's grand-children here. Well on second thought, maybe that whole
family-tree metaphor makes things a bit incestuous considering how Greg Drudy (drummer for
Hot Cross) originally WAS a member Saetia back in the day. Okay then, fuck it. Forget I
ever even tried to make sense of this punk shit. I'm done here. Just get that Hot Cross
album and don't ask questions that can't be answered.





Electronic Album of the Year
Wolf Eyes
Burned Mind

I'm not sure if this would normally be classified as an "electronic album" although clearly
it is. I'd be more inclined to file this under "punk" at the record store myself, but that's
besides the point. Here's what IS the point:

In the long history of music, no one has ever successfully written a song called "Stabbed In
The Face" that makes you feel like you're actually being stabbed in the face while listening
to it.

Until now, that is.





Metal/Hardcore Album of the Year
Blood Brothers
Crimes

While all the hipster indie-kids are making a big fuss over Arcade Fire and the latest Modest
Mouse, the genre that really did the most to push musical concepts this year was hardcore.
Whereas the whole dance-punk phenomenon had mostly been played out only months after its
inception (with the notable exception of a few bands like !!! and LCD Soundsystem), hardcore
was busy paving the way for a new musical gestalt entirely based off of distressingly
dischordant harmonies in complex polyphonies that have not been arranged so intelligently
since the passing of JS Bach. I kid you not. Cursive did it last year with their
brilliantly dischordant "the Ugly Organ", and this year the dischord was reprised thanks to
such hardcore acts as the Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge, but in 2004 the Blood Brothers
did it best. What makes the Blood Brothers' latest album Crimes so innovative is their
obvious ability to mutilate the concept of standard Westernized scales. Let's face it, North
America has become culturually stagnant in the wake of chromatic progressions. It's been
done to death already. In 2004, the Blood Brothers were but the best example of a handful of
bands that are actually attempting to reinvent music as we know it.

This can only mean good things.





Hip-Hop Album of the Year
K-OS
Joyful Rebellion

I'm perfectly aware that I'm not even remotely qualified to answer the hip-hop section, but
damn... that K-OS album was as catchy as the HIV!




Folk/Country/Blues Album of the Year
Johnny Cash
My Mother's Hmyn Book

Country music on the radio these days is bullshit. Thankfully we have a few champions like
Neko Case and Corb Lund who remind us what country music is supposed to be. But nobody did
it better than Jonny Cash. He did it better then, he did it better now. It didn't matter
whether or not he wrote the songs he performed; he made every last one of them his own.
Whether or not anyone put out a better country album this year is irrelevant anyway; none of
those albums would exist without Cash's influence. Properly honouring the legacy of the Man
in Black requires at least this much.





Year's best TV collection on DVD:
Roswell, season I

This is the only the show on television that I never missed an episode of. What more can I say?





Year's best film (movies that were theatrically released in 2004):
Spider-Man 2

Aw, what the hell... There's a lot of good independent films out there that totally deserve
this, but I love Spider-Man too much for that shit.

Yeah, I'm going to that show Paras. I don't know if anyone else is interested, but I'd highly recommend anyone going just for the cause alone. They probably had thousands and thousands of dollars worth of gear stolen. That's SO shitty. I would've cried like a fuckin baby if that happened to me.

(not eric or face??)
indecline:

The Simpsons meets The Office: Ricky Gervais to pen script for 'The Simpsons'

Alright I'm already starting to piss those guys off on the MMFT forum! Supposedly if they get pissed off with me enough they can ban me from that site! Should I dare push them a little more over the edge?

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the Net, There were hacker's a surfing. Nerds? Yeah, you bet. The e-mails were stacked by the modem with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

The newbies were nestled all snug by their screens, While visions of Java danced in their dreams. My wife on the sofa and me with a snack, We just settled down at my rig (it's a Mac).

When out in the Web there arose such a clatter, I jumped to the site to see what was the matter. To a new page my Mac flew like a flash, Then made a slight gurgle. It started to crash!!

I gasped at the thought and started to grouse, Then turned my head sideways and clicked on my mouse. When what to my wondering eyes should appear, My Mac jumped to a page that wasn't quite clear.

When the image resolved, so bright and so quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick! More rapid than mainframes, more graphics they came, Then Nick glanced toward my screen, my Mac called them by name;

"Now Compaq! Now Acer!", my speaker did reel; "On Apple! On Gateway!" Santa started to squeal! "Jump onto the circuits! And into the chip! Now speed it up! Speed it up! Make this thing hip!"

The screen gave a flicker, he was into my RAM, Then into my room rose a full hologram! He was dressed in all red, from his head to his shoes, Which were black (the white socks he really should lose).

He pulled out some discs he had stored in his backpack. Santa looked like a dude who was rarin' to hack! His eyes, how they twinkled! His glasses, how techno! This ain't the same Santa that I used to know!

With a wink of his eye and a nod of his head, Santa soon let me know I had nothing to dread. He spoke not a word, gave my Mac a quick poke, And accessed my C drive with only a stroke.

He defragged my hard drive, and added a SIMM, Then threw in some cool games, just on a whim! He worked without noise, his fingers they flew! He distorted some pictures with Kai's Power Goo!

He updated Office, Excel and Quicken, Then added a screensaver with a red clucking chicken! My eyes widened a bit, my mouth stood agape, As he added the latest version of Netscape.

The drive gave a whirl, as if it were pleased, St. Nick coyly smiled, the computer appeased. Then placing his finger on the bridge of his nose, Santa turned into nothing but ones and zeros!

He flew back into my screen and through my uplink, Back into the net with barely a blink. But I heard his sweet voice as he flew from my sight, "Happy surfing to all, and to all a good byte!"