Since OiNK is gone, I am having a hard time discovering new music. I went from a couple new albums every couple of weeks to absolutely nothing and my general happiness and mood has taken a dive since then. (Fallacy!) I was thinking: how can I possibly discover new music now? I can go to Metacritic and look at their list, but I have to click on each one to see if it’s any good or anything I’d actually like. I can go to Pitchfork, and again, the interface is clumsy and reading their reviews makes me feel like I am dusting my brain with a heat-ray. OiNK was brilliant because I could go and look at something really easily: what the most popular albums for the day were. The internet has nothing else like this. Albums would download in seconds so I could listen, decide if I like it, and then get stuck seeding it forever, but that was the price I paid.

Now I’ve got nothing. So, how about this: a music service, preferably free, that scans your entire music collection and tells you what albums you don’t have, what albums are coming out soon, and maybe what albums you’ll like based on your collection’s similarity. This service would work surprisingly well even without listening data. You tie it into your Last.FM account, or your iTunes database (why doesn’t iTunes do this already! they even have a MUSIC STORE built in!) and your recommendations get even better.

But the important thing is this: if it sees that I like Queens of the Stone Age, but I don’t have Songs for the Deaf, it should say, HEY YOU! You should get Songs for the Deaf! Or if Eels are coming out with a new album in a few weeks, notify me and never stop notifying me! Give me a COUNT-DOWN on the front page of whatever screen I go to. “Two weeks until the new Eels CD comes out!” would be incredible.

Most of all: make it automatic, I don’t want to have to go in and put in all my artist and album names. Make it Web2.0, so I can easily modify what bands should be a part of my collection and what bands shouldn’t be, (in case you download music for your girlfriend). Make the ’scanner’ a small program you download that scans all your ID3 data (or MusicBrainz if that is your bag) and then uploads the data to the server.

Someone make it happen. If this already exists (and not bundled within some bloated software), please let me know that I am stupid.

I wrote this in response to someone who simply said, “I agree, it is sad that MySpace is a necessity of communication between friends these days. Perhaps we could sabotage the system?” in reply to my rather sad return to MySpace after about a month away from it.

It would be nice to go back to the days of AIM screen names or just email addresses, but it’s far too late for that.

If you’ve seen the movie Network, and if you haven’t–you should, there is, I think, a great parallel between the anchorman who was once a rising star now being the burden bringing the network down, and MySpace once seeming like such a great idea that has now turned into a clumsy lethargic beast that is bringing all of us down. The fate of the anchorman and the fate of MySpace should be one in the same.

As someone who has spent over half his life on the internet, it is amazing how awful it has become. There was always bullshit on the internet, but Blogs and MySpace have made it all so easily accessible that it’s impossible to escape from. Small islands of reprieve, there are, but amid an ocean of people screaming ‘look at me! tell me i am interesting.. or at least just tell me i’m hot!’ and I guess I am one just like all the others.

You probably didn’t expect a lengthy rant, but I’m not done yet, oh no! I suspect our lives would be better without the internet. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never lived a life without the internet or a cellphone, but I have this nagging suspicion that things would simply be easier. Our lives would be smaller. People would be more valuable to us if we couldn’t look at our MySpace profile and say, “Ahhh, it’s OK if I lost one friend, I’ve got hundreds more!” I wonder if people were happier back before telephones, when the only way to communicate with someone was to walk over to their house, and if it was too far to walk you just didn’t know them.

I remember growing up that all the neighbors on my street knew each other, we all talked. They were all old people who have died and the people who have moved into the houses to replace them don’t talk to each other. I’ve been back here for three years now and I don’t know any of the people on my street, and my parents have since grown reclusive like the majority so they don’t know either. It seems so strange to me. I, myself, am reclusive and made uncomfortable by the presence of unfamiliar people in social settings, and I wonder how much of this is the responsibility of the internet neutering my ability to comfortably meet new people through anything except a screen?

There’s a story, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, that you should read. There’s a copy of it here.

What is amazing is that about seventy years before the internet even begins to exist, Forster accurately describes all the social dysfunctions that are only now beginning to plague us as a society. I already have friends (friends Juan shares with me) who would rather stay home and play videogames on Xbox Live rather than get together and, well, play games face to face, or anything else. I’ve got a friend who isn’t addicted to videogames or anything of their ilk but is more than willing to admit to the fact that he just doesn’t like to leave the house any more. People like this have always existed, I guess, but they were people on the fringes of society. The internet is the great uniter, people of all sorts of fucked up quirks can find each other and breed their sicknesses (think of furries, the whole YIFF thing, underground communities of pedophiles who once had to trade kiddie porn secretly through envelopes passed hand-to-hand can now just upload it to a server where hundreds of them can receive it all at once!) in relative private, or in many cases, fully public. How unfortunate it seems to me, then, that the internet is uniting us all in one big anti-social dysfunction and the programs behind it–Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, et al.–are actually crafted under the guise of being “social applications”.

Maybe I am being overly doom-and-gloom about it, but I have been watching it build over the last couple years, and a lot of it hasn’t anything to do with the internet specifically–Los Angeles has always been an anti-social kind of place, and America at large is becoming a national full of people isolating themselves from each other–but the internet is certainly helping the process along and I don’t think it’ll be long before what Forster describes actually happens, but his story has a protagonist that tries to wake us up from a bleak future, albeit somewhat accidentally. By the time our future becomes that, will there even be an organized machine to bring down? Myspace itself is already too big to be taken on by a single person, no hacker no matter how experienced could possibly delete MySpace entirely from existence. What happens when it’s the whole of the internet that becomes the slowly lumbering beast of burden weighing down our ability to communicate with people face-to-face?

I’ve had Stuff from the Park in my Google Reader for quite some time now. I am not sure how I stumbled upon it. The gist of it is this: Matterhorn1959 collects relics and slides from people’s trips to Disneyland, and posts the stuff… wait, considering I’ve been reading it for so long, you would think I know whether or not Matterhorn is male or female? How do I not know this? It’s not on the site anywhere. Oh well! Anyway, they post the stuff they collect. It’s a simple idea.

I’m not a big fan of Disneyland, but I can understand the draw to post these sorts of photos and old souvenirs. I remember when Disneyland was a magical place for me, and I remember when Disneyland started to get rid of, or change things, that I thought were perfect as they were. Cory Doctorow’s book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (easily one of the most inventive, and confusing, sci-fi books I’ve ever read) deals somewhat with this issue, being about people living within Disneyland and trying to preserve the original rides against the attempts of others at updating (destroying!) them. If it was up to me, Disneyland would never have changed from my youth, but even if it never changed, it wouldn’t change the fact that I have changed.

Simply looking at these old photos from a time that I didn’t even know helps me relive my memories of Disneyland. I can look at a photo of a little boy from the 50’s in his short-shorts and pomaded hair with a huge smile on his face, and it makes me think about how excited I was to take the rafts across to Tom Sawyer’s Island and run through it as fast I can. I don’t know why I always enjoyed it so much, but I did, even when I would awkwardly run into kids much older than me making-out in the caves. I remember being twelve or thirteen, maybe a little old for Disneyland, and feeling deep pangs of disappointment when I discovered that the fort on it was closed up for good. (Found this cool Tom Sawyer’s Island facts page randomly on Google right now, and it’s a joy.)

More than anything, Stuff from the Park reminds me that I’m not alone in my longing for the Disneyland of old. There are probably more people out there than I can even imagine who long for their own version of Disneyland that now resides only in their memories. The Disneyland I enjoyed from my youth may be gone, and the kid I was may be gone, but at least I can sit back and remember a time where Disneyland meant nothing but pure joy, wonder, and happiness. I hope that it still brings that feeling to kids today, even if it’s not the same park it was when it did for me.

I fucking hated Juno. I seem to be one of two people in the whole world who hated Juno, the second being Sarah, who sat beside me in the theater groaning along with me the whole time. From the very first couple of minutes of film, where it broke into that ‘cute’ animation with those ‘cute’ washed out pastels that unapologetically ape everything good about Wes Anderson films while leaving out all of the honest sentimentality and good writing, I hated it with all of my being. Then, the characters spoke, and the audience laughed at things I didn’t even think were funny. A teen utters, “Honest to blog?” and I groaned, involuntarily.At one point early on I turned to Sarah and I said, “The biggest, and only, laughs are the ones in the trailer.” The biggest laugh for me? “Oh, like in Alaska?” “No.” “Oh… k…” which, again, was in the trailer, but no one laughed at it in the trailer and I was the only person who laughed at in the theater. I guess I’m quirky, but I hoped the rest of the film would be full of subtle Arrested Development style humor (I mean, it’s got the two primary actors, right?) but instead what I got was a film full of characters who never, ever, not even once, talked like real people. The only honest character in the whole film was Jennifer Garner’s baby-crazed wife. Everyone else was some bizarre fun-house-mirror style characterization of… who? Who were they even based on? I’ve never known anyone like anything depicted in Juno, and it completely ruined the movie for me.

I wasn’t going to rant about Juno. I posted something to Twitter saying that it was the worst movie I’m sure I’ll see in theaters all year, and I saw it within the first week of the new year, but I have never been more certain of anything in my life. I wasn’t going to rant, but I stumbled across this movie.

Would you look at that poster! It’s actually the opening credits to Juno! I bet this film will be like Juno! Check out the trailer, which takes less than 30 seconds until you’re introduced to some random character who says something really edgy and unusual and, again, completely unlike reality! But, wait, let’s not ignore the most important thing…

Would you look at that! Notice the subtle use of washed out pastels! Look at that suit he is wearing, how unusual! His hair, even, is a relic of some by-gone era! Holy crap, I think, wait for it, this is an indie movie! IS IT? IS IT AN INDIE FILM?

You would think so, but I say no. Juno, this film, and others of the same ilk are all movies about boring, typical subjects (kids getting pregnant, kids being awkward in high school!) that are dressed up in new clothes. Those new clothes are this ridiculous slightly-removed-from-reality indie-sweetheart style shamelessly aped from, again, Wes Anderson, and even more disgustingly, Napoleon Dynamite.

I wonder if there is some sort of guidebook detailing for directors exactly what to do when they want to make a film like this. Cover the set in dust? Put your actors in clothes from the 70’s that don’t quite fit them? Score your film with either off-beat and unusual b-sides or forgotten album tracks by artists from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, and/or music by current artists no one has heard of but your college-bound niece who sits on the internet all day looking for twangy guitar tracks that accurately express the mood prevalent in her chipped toe-nail polish? Style their hair as if the characters themselves were trying to emulate Robert Redford from Three Days of the Condor but hopelessly fuck it up–and have the girls do this as well? I mean, what the fuck people, I want this playbook! This shit sells!

I’m done. I’ve had enough. You can only try to sell me so much bullshit wrapped in a coating that I enjoyed when it was done by the artists who pioneered it before I eventually lose taste for the coating and only experience the bullshit. I know that this post is just part of the cycle, something gets popular, something gets hated, but I just can’t take it anymore. If I see another goddamn film in this same bullshit style, I am going to go to the mall, rip off all my clothes, dive into the fountain, and be all like “ARG I’M A KRAKKEN FROM THE SEA!”

Fuck, I hate myself. Now even I am pandering to the typical moronic movie-going public by ripping off indie-style films.

This is another one of those ideas where I’m sure someone has thought of it before, and probably talked about it before, and it surprises me no one has done anything about it. I want multiple queues. Yes, Netflix already has support for this, but you have to enter a name and all sorts of other info. On top of that, it separates ratings for that queue from your main account. I don’t want that. I don’t want to make a queue for another person, nor do I want to have to make up fake information for that person, and end up having to juggle ratings back and forth for that fake person.

I want to be able to make a “Television” queue, where I can queue up as much television as I want and not have to worry about getting three discs of television all at once, because I’d have it set to only account for one disc of my account at a time. If queues could be unlimited, I’d actually end up with a queue for every genre of taste I have, that way I don’t have to continually juggle my queue so it can be balanced. Queue management is fun–until your queue becomes so large that you don’t even know which way is up anymore. If I could separate my queue however I like and assign certain queues to a set amount of discs within my Netflix subscription, it would automate a process that is somewhat aggravating to me now.

In short, I am a lazy, lazy person, and Netflix has been around so long that I am really surprised this isn’t already an option. Maybe it is and I am missing something. I beta test GameTap and one of the great things about their service is that if you have a complaint or a suggestion, as a tester, they almost always listen to you and give it a shot. (And here’s a small example.) If Netflix has beta testers and they haven’t suggested this after all this time, and if they have and it hasn’t been implemented, it really makes me wonder.

I assumed Flickr would be great to use for the moblog on this site, but apparently not. Yesterday it took nearly an hour and a half for Flickr to register that I sent them an email. Today, about half an hour ago, I sent a picture with a decent sized post in it to Flickr and it still has not appeared on my site. I am, well, furious. I don’t really understand how things can go from ‘within minutes’ to ‘taking hours’ somewhat randomly, but apparently Flickr’s upload-via-email is not an exact science by any means. This is a rant, I am ranting. Going to figure out a better way to do this.

Update: If I set it up so my phone emails only to my Gmail account, and have a filter set up so Gmail automatically forwards them to my Flickr 2blog email address, it seems to work fine. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet without really screwing up some of my settings and ending up with duplicates of every post in my gmail account, but at least this is the first step. Guess I’ll make a dedicated Gmail account for posting to Flickr. Lame, but necessary.

Update 2: I am using one of my secondary Gmail accounts as my dedicated “post to flickr” email address. For some reason my Sidekick LX’s mail server doesn’t play well with Flickr. This should be a good, solid, permanent solution, I suppose.