At BOOOOOOOM you get a lot of art for your proverbial buck as well as exposure for your art if you have the real bucks.
It has an art & design blog with a focus on painting and photography and the occasional film and music entries sprinkled in between. They let the art speak for itself. Besides some short intro and links to the artists’ website there is no text just big, beautiful pictures.
It also features ways for up and coming (Canadian?) artists to get into the business of promoting themselves. If you pay a monthly membership fee you can submit your works either for a virtual portfolio or as entries to one of the many projects they have going on.
Technical note at the end: I just noticed that one has to subscribe to three different RSS feeds if one wants to stay up-to-date with their blog as well as the artists’ submissions and the projects.
It took me about five episodes to figure out which male actor Jodie Foster reminded me of in the recent “True Detective” season. By this point it was also the only mystery I was invested in.
The first episode started strong. It set up its main mystery and introduced its cast of characters as it is wont to do. We get a no-bullshit chief of police played by Foster, an even less-bullshit, demoted, native cop played by Kali Reis (who I just learned is/was a boxer), some trouble in the past, and a corpsicle of research scientists that went FKK-ing in the arctic ice. Some standard fare, but it’s obvious that the cast is enjoying themselves.
Though, over the course of the next four episodes it telenovela-d its way around any kind of mystery and only on a few occasions did it feel like I was watching a detective-show. We get mail-order brides and one too many disgruntled wife instead.
Considering the subtitle – “Night Country” – and the constant reminder via overlays that it has been x days since the sun set, neither darkness nor snow are used to much effect. I still have one episode to go, but I don’t expect anything good like the snowstorm shootout scene from Fargo’s first season. A rehash of the night vision goggles scene from “Silence of the Lambs” perhaps, but I hope somebody vetoed this.
To solve our initial mystery: The actor Jodie Foster resembled, not just physically but also in her mannerisms, is Michael J. Fox. Looks like I’m not the only one who noticed this.
Appendix: The 75 minute finale was okay with spotty but fine resolutions on the major cases. The heroes’ journeys completed once more.
Let’s talk breakfast. I start most days with a cup of coffee or black tea; both milked. Once hunger strikes its first bell of the day, I head to the kitchen and prepare my müesli (I really like the e after the umlaut):
Seedy Müesli Recipe
Grab a bowl and pour 50 to 70 gram of rolled oats (they sell a soft and a hard variant here; use the hard one). Throw in a handful of washed and dried blueberries. Top those with additional handfuls of flax seeds, nuts (almonds, go crazy), sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. As if you want to start a garden in your belly. Dice a banana – not too big (I use a spoon and break off little pieces) – and add it before you top it off with another 50 to 70 gram of “basis müesli“, which is a mixture of different cereals they sell in discounters in Germany. It includes spelt (aka dinkel), wheat, even more oat, etc.
Stir the dry mixture. Finally, fill the bowl with milk until it covers all the cereal and fruits and only the occasional floating blueberry can be seen. Wait 20 to 30 minutes before you eat it. I take a dump and a shower while I wait.
Potentially Asked Questions
Are other fruits okay? — Sure. I prefer mushy bananas and the acidic stab a blueberry can provide. Dark grapes are also nice. I tried apples and pears, separately, but haven’t found the right variety yet. Most sorts feel too fresh and juicy for my taste.
Why the oats as a basis if you literally use “basis müesli”? — The prices for the basis müesli have risen from 1,79 Euro to 2,29 Euro within the last year or so. There are obvious reasons considering the Ukraine is one of the main suppliers for cereals, but 30% are 30%. So I cut the good stuff with the cheaper basic rolled oats.
I have a folder in my browsers’ bookmarks – ‘listen’ – that houses links to various albums and webradiostations. Last week I thought, how nice it would be if I could click something and it opens a random link from that folder. If only there was a thing I could click on and it would play random music from preselected sources.
Of course, there are extensions for the former but I would need to fill my bookmark-folder with a plethora of links. Problem is, I actually want to slim down on the bookmarking. I feel like I just drop stuff in buckets until they overflow and then I throw them out without ever taking at least a sip of the concoction.
Of another course, there are services that would let me define, or buy, or steal a music collection I could play from my Winamp-clone of choice. This entails ads and mails and ads in mails or, less bugging, viruses. The only service I use in this regard is Soundcloud. It is as close to a social media site as I was willed to register at, where I like and repost electronic mixes which keep me entertained while I work.
What is missing is a solution for non-work related times. Or work-times where I want fewer beats and more guitars for example.
Ergo, JSukebox. It’s a file that lives on my desktop. I doubleclick it, it starts a browser, opens one of about currently 30 links, I press play and – voilà – music. A bookmark within a browser is used when I’m in the mood for a new random selection.
In technical terms it’s an HTML-file with some JavaScript inside (the JS in ‘JSukebox’). The JavaScript has a list of links, picks one at random and redirects to it. When I find new music I can edit the file to append the list. Not exactly rocket science.
If you want to have a go at it, perhaps create your own version or laugh about my middling JS-skills, download the file (rightclick the link and save it) and edit it. If you just want some music, click on it. Please note though, that I probably won’t ever update this first version with further links, like they can be found in the Media Bites category in this blog for example (current ones are all included, bythyway). Subscribe to my RSS feed for that!
Originating in 2005 and based in Los Angeles, Aquarium Drunkard is an eclectic audio journal focused on daily reviews, interviews, features, podcasts and sessions. Digging globally, AD bridges contemporary sounds with psych, jazz, avant-garde, folk, garage, funk and beyond. For heads, by heads.
That was easy and is stolen right from their about-page.
While their textual output is as eloquent as it is vast, I mostly consume their audio-features. Either the Transmissions podcast that very often features new-to-me artists and ideas. Or their regular gig on Dublab, Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard. However you might ingest their offerings, I’m sure it <stonervoice>will expand your mind</stonervoice>!
Haven’t done a blogroll-post in a while. This won’t be one either. Expect a lot of tech-related things instead.
I started 2024 with a nasty cold and Chris Coyier’s OPML file of Personal Developer Blogs. After importing it into my feedreader I had a nifty 17.000 unread posts, which kept me busy for a while. I purged most of the dead stuff, the ones about technology I have no clue of (i.e. ruby on rails, ai, and tailwind css), and those which became too political for my taste.
The start of a new year might be the best time to see whether a blog is subscribe-worthy or not. A lot (capital L lot) of folks summarize their previous 12 months, which makes it easy to see if what they are writing about is interesting.
The tech-blogosphere has sort of a midlife-crisis right now. There is talk about a “dark forestization” of the web, and you know it’s serious when they write a book about it (they actually rehashed some older blogposts; see Good Internet for further links). After the whole Twitter-spiel people – again – realized that it’s not good to rely on walled gardens. Personal blogs are up and coming. Google is thinking about digging up Reader from the dead. Capitalism is still bad. But at least we have a diagram of the web now (courtesy of Naive Weekly), to show us that the internet is indeed a net(work). Now all we need is a good search engine to find stuff. Or we could use links. I prefer links. Hence more links. I will also start updating my blogroll again. But first links (I haven’t actually checked most of those, just bookmarked them, but I need to clean my bookmark-bar to position it next to the address-bar, which one can do, which is a fact that blew my mind last week):
Finally, considering that I mentioned Naive Weekly and Good Internet, there is also webcurios for even more link curiosating. That is what you get when you try to mix curating with curios.