Hello, everybody! This review was slowly in the works over the month, which appears to be my new pace!
But anyway, I just made sure I had the Mr. Haynes and Cassidy Haley albums on my iPod, so I'll be sure I listen to those on my walk between classes and home. Maybe, just maybe, I'll ***FINALLY*** review those. Maybe.
Also, Trent had given me some grammatical corrections, which I haven't applied yet. I wrote those down, so I'll give those a good go soon. At the moment, I have to go to class and stuff. See ya!
I think it's safe to say that I'm not quite into this website as I once was, but that doesn't matter. I shouldn't consider it to be anything more than something I just occasionally work on.
I am no longer going to do promotional reviews, because they have been a major hang-up for me. I think if I didn't have them on my queue, this site would have been slightly more active over the last month. They've been getting more and more difficult for me to write, and I've finally hit the breaking point. Nonetheless, there are still two left that I promised to write, and write them I shall. This week. After that Velvet Underground review, which has been half-written for a month.
I have good news! I very nearly have a job! It's not official yet, so I can't get too worked up about it, but it's very close now. But it's hard not to. Holy crap, a career!! Independence! Some day, in the near future, I can do something for society. More importantly, I can have more than $20 in my savings account! I will be able to afford clothes! Health insurance! Car insurance! Food!! Maybe even some left over for fun things! After spending nearly 10 years in college (all very good years, mind you), this has been a long time coming.
Whew! Well, I hit a wall there! Luckily, I finally got over it and mustered up the energy to update the site.
I'm going on a 10-day trip to Michigan on Friday, so I'm not sure how many updates there will be until I get back on the 4th of July. I'm planning on bringing my laptop with me, so updates are possible, but they're hardly guaranteed.
Oh man, I started today thinking I was going to write *three* reviews. But I guess I'm too busy doing nothing, and now it's almost 7 p.m. already and I would have to be working pretty non-stop to get a second one in! ...I'll give it a go, though. Starting... now.
I had a weird day yesterday, hence the lack of updates. And it wasn't anything majorly weird... just a lot of tiny things that culminated in a power outage at 9 o'clock or so last night. Hopefully I'm making up for that today, since I did say I was going to ramp things up.
I added all those 10,000 Maniacs and Natalie Merchant albums to the queue. I missed a few of the Merchant-less live albums, but I'll gauge whether or not to review those when I get to it. The concert is August 6, which means I have until that time to get through all of those albums. (By the way, the reason I'm going is my parents are big fans and offered to buy me a ticket to go with them. Why would I refuse?) Since I want to finish those reviews in time while still concentrating on the main list, I must step it up a notch. (Plus, I don't think I'll burn out... I haven't been this relaxed in years.)
I'm going to a Natalie Merchant concert in two months, and I don't know any of her music. There's nothing lamer than going to a concert and not knowing the music, so I'll do some reviewing. (I have this theory that all her songs sound the same... We'll see how much that holds to be true.)
Alright, so only one review today... I'm blaming it on the fact that it took me too long to find a good Stephen Duffy picture. I was sort of hoping to get a good one with him as a member of The Lilac Time, but that'll have to do for now. Starting tomorrow, it's back to the good old main list with the next Moody Blues album... Oh yes, the world is rife with anticipation!
Argh! So, only one update today! ...Well, I got distracted! I'm almost certainly going to be cooped up tomorrow, so maybe I can pull off a double header then? (Whatever happened to the days when I'd write four reviews in one sitting? I don't even think I can do that now if I tried.)
I got my FE exam results today. I passed it even though I answered 'B' for all the electricity questions. I was worried that I would have to take the test over again and study electricity after that, but thankfully that won't have to happen. I only want the extent of my relationship with electricity to be limited to plugging things in the wall.
So now I'm going to review the Lady Gaga album and then (finally!) the first Stephen Duffy selection that I've been dying to review for more than a month now. I'll try to get these up tomorrow. I would do the Gaga album today, but I see that as an unlikely occurrence since I'm actually going into work today (gonna teach some kids some mathematics)!
So, Dream Theater wasn't the worst thing I could have thought of... I figured spending an entire day with a double-disc progressive-metal album would have upset me somehow. Maybe I'd better review that ugly Fugazi album I have coming up soon before my good mood diminishes!
I got slightly derailed, but rest assured I'm not planning on going months without updating like I have in the past. (Or at least not like I did last summer!) It didn't feel like I had to force myself to come up with this update, which is definitely a good sign.
The good news is that the interview was a success. Unless the economy falls apart between now and then, the job will be mine, and I will finally become a real tax paying citizen of the USA. This also eliminates 85% of my general anxiety, so I'm resting very easily now. (This also proves how nice it was to get a degree in a subject that's actually in demand... Holy crap, when I was looking for a job in 2007 with liberal arts degrees, I couldn't find anything.)
I actually have a job interview Friday, amazingly enough. It would be really cool to have a job lined up before graduation. Especially at that company. It's a phone interview (they don't even have in-person interviews), so it won't take up very much time. However, I tend to get nervous about these things, and when I get nervous about anything, activity on this site will suffer. I'll certainly try to update, though. This site is my #2 priority! (My #3 priority is watching television.)
Two reviews today! (Whoah...) I'm planning on continuing to go through the main list until I have that Velvet Underground album reviewed. Then I'll go through the other lists again.
The first week of my final summer break is over! I can't say why, but I'm bored of it already... I guess that's what happens when I don't feel completely burnt out from the previous semester.
So I only seem to be managing one review per day. I suppose it's best that I don't push myself. I've also been taking long walks in the morning (while listening to the albums), and playing a bit of the new version of Colonization, too. I completely suck at it, of course, but I'm bound to get better. I think!
Whew! I figured it would take me awhile to write that Fugazi review, but I managed to get it in before the day was out. Well... it's technically May 11 right now, 12:47 A.M. PDT., but I haven't gone to bed yet, so as far as I'm concerned, it's still the 10th.
So tomorrow (i.e., the 11th), I will review one Lady Gaga album before going back into that main list. Amazingly Foreigner released a new album since I created that list, so you may have noticed that I put that one in there, too. Oh yeah, good times lay ahead of me for sure!
One thing I'm going to have to work out soon is my sleeping patterns. I went to sleep last night at 1 a.m. because it's Summer Break and I had no reason to get up early in the morning. But then I woke up at 6 a.m., because that's when I always wake up.
I did one cycle of reviews on the main list, so I'll be working off the other lists these next few days.
Finals are done, and I'm going home! I wanted to wait awhile for my roommate to wake up before I started moving around and packing and things, which is why I spent time this morning with a review. (And that was, for some reason, one of the more difficult reviews for me to write.)
So I do hope I will be busier this summer than I was last summer. I had such a terrible experience with my roommates last year that I wanted to do nothing but sit in a catatonic state all summer. This has been a very difficult and grueling but a much happier semester, and I think that means I'll be very productive. It's also looking like I'm temporarily getting my old job back at the math tutoring place where I worked in 2007 and 2008, so I maybe I won't be bored, either!
I said it a bunch of times in the review, but that soundtrack review doesn't really belong on the David Bowie page since he only contributed a few songs and hadn't influence on anything else. But until I get a page going consisting of nothing but Broadway soundtracks (which is something I'll probably do at some point), it will remain there.
Tomorrow is the day I have to really get busy with the studying! It's a good thing the two tests I have coming up on Tuesday and Wednesday I find pretty easy and they happen to be open book! But I can't go into the test without giving each of them a good 7-8 hours worth of heavy practicing.
I forgot to mention yesterday that another thing I have to do this summer is periodically go through all my reviews and try to make the sentences flow better.
Also, I should never have put the Michael Bolton and Arabesque reviews on the "rewritten" site since they were not actually rewritten. I don't want to remove them, so I will just redo them. Fortunately, writing about horrendous albums is easy for me and requires very little thought. I also missed a Michael Bolton album from 1985 that I can now catch. The good news is that the cover is hilarious, and I'd imagine that will take up roughly 3/4th of the review space.
Whew! This marks the near end of another extremely tough semester! I still have finals next week, but the tests are the least of my worries. Really, it was the *HOMEWORK* that kept me so busy. I had roughly 40 assignments in total, and I'm making a conservative estimate they took me an average of six hours to complete each. One notorious assignment in particular took me an entire day. I started it about 10 a.m. and finished it at midnight. No kidding.
I've also had really bad luck about having tests on the same day or very close together on the same week, which was extremely difficult for me to manage! So I'm not getting a 4.0 GPA, but I'm not even remotely in danger of failing anything (which in college-speak is anything less than a C).
I decided that I wanted to review the Stephen Duffy/The Lilac Time catalog this summer in addition to the usual stuff. When I decided to review Stephen Duffy, I didn't quite realize he was so prolific! So doing his catalog might actually take me the whole summer. If I somehow finish that, I'll think of some other discography of another somewhat obscure act. I'm thinking it'll probably be The Divine Comedy.
I'm also about 20,000 words into writing a novel, which I started on Spring Break and continued the following (relatively calm) week of classes. It won't be any great masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. It's meant to be a sort of comedy-fantasy, and what I've written so far honestly comes off a bit sit-commy. However, I think I've finally come up with a story line that's at least vaguely interesting, and it kind of goes in a different direction by the end than you would think after reading the first few chapters. So, unlike the rather poorly plotted novel I started writing last summer, I might actually complete this one.
That was one freaky album but an ultimately rewarding one, and it's by far the most interesting album I got from a band or promoter. It was just a bit difficult to listen to, though, so I'm rather glad the review is done!
Alright. I had to hold my breath a bit before posting that OK Go review. I never thought in a million years I'd like one of their albums that much. I mean, I always thought they were a fun band and they looked good on those treadmills, but ... a 13? Making it weirder is pretty much every single music reviewer on the Internet is very lukewarm about the album. But I thought it was really good as I listened to it over the week and I really listened to it a lot. I only liked it better as I wrote the review. At any rate, whether you personally agree with me or not, I'm allowed to have any opinion that I please! I give Of the Blue Colour of the Sky a well-earned 13.
About the whole MOG debacle in case you were a little more curious... As soon as it became blatantly obvious to me that MOG was planning on doing nothing for me and all they wanted out of the relationship was to rake in 50% of my ad revenue, I severed the ties. I ripped those ads off my site like ripping a band-aid off my freakishly hairy arm. It's an interesting enterprise MOG has going and I can see how that might benefit someone who is just starting to get into the blogging "trade." Someone who wants at least the basis connections for an audience (and perhaps has some delusion that ad revenue can be profitable). But there really wasn't an audience there for me.
So thanks for bearing through this. I'll try to update, but keep in mind my homework schedule is starting to get heavier. ...But at least none of it involves MATLAB this semester, so I won't waste a whole lot of time screaming at computer code!
Did anyone subscribe to the RSS feed? If there's just one person who says he/she subscribed to it, I'll continue to update it.
Alright! The site is redesigned, and I'm back in business!
As I said in the last post, I'm a little disappointed about MOG since I thought it would entail integrating my site into their system. I was thinking I should give this a year to work, but ... honestly, I'm so disillusioned with it right now that if nothing changes, MOG would be lucky if I stayed with them for another week.
--M.L.
January 29, 2010
The messiness of those ads on the artist pages made me want to give this entire site an overhaul. I'm wondering what you guys think of it... If you don't like it, then you can tell me. It won't hurt my feelings.
I'm going to give this MOG thing a year. It's not what I was expecting it to be (i.e. there's not a good way for me to connect my reviews to their streaming music pages). Right now, it seems more like a scheme for them to generate ad revenue more than it is to provide a means for me to get more widely read. (They have "famous" blogs like Pop Matters and Tiny Mix Tapes in their system, so I don't think this is a full-on scam or anything.)
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now. Since they share half the ad revenue, I should reasonably expect my association with MOG to double my site traffic over the year. If it doesn't, then I'm gone.
By the way, when people say it's impossible to make money online, they aren't kidding! By the looks of it, I'll be lucky to earn 20 cents a day. That would come to a grand total of $73 a year, which isn't even half the dirt-cheap price it costs to run this site per year. Well anyway I had always been curious what ad revenue would be like, and now I have my answer. Let's just say I'm not quitting my day job. ...Or rather the day job I hope to get after I graduate college.
The only thing MOG does as far as I can tell is publish an RSS feed on their social networking community. I just set one up yesterday for those of you who actually use them. You can subscribe to it if you want... http://donignacio.com/donignacio.xml (I wasn't sure what an RSS feed was until yesterday. It will give you notifications whenever I update the site with a new review on my.yahoo or google or you can bookmark it to your browser... it probably wouldn't do you much good unless you're already getting RSS feeds.)
Surprisingly I've been able to keep up with schoolwork despite all this, so there should be time galore for me to write some new reviews. I have a hefty boatload of homework just assigned today, but most of it isn't due until Friday, and the material has been pretty understandable............... so far............
I'm just itching to write (as evidenced by the size and self-indulgent nature of this post), but I have to finish converting the pages. AND FINISH I WILL!!!!!!!!
Whew! Things are really starting to get swinging here at school. I have a mini-project due Friday (assigned Monday), and I want to take my time on it. Also, I have a few other small assignments to do. There are a few more long term things that need to get going pretty soon as well. Nonetheless, I'll continue on with this as much I can...
--M.L.
January 25, 2010
You might have noticed certain changes... Just in case you're curious...
The MOG thing looks like it is going to happen, and (yes) there will be advertisements on this site. I'm relieved that nobody has caused a commotion about that! (Sometimes that happens when sites like this start to get ads for the first time...) Just to be clear, the ads weren't at all what attracted me to MOG; it was getting my reviews attached to their streaming music service and hopefully expanding my readership! My front page gets about 50 hits a day, which is great, but why stop at that? I had also been submitting my reviews to epinions.com for quite a few years, which now has to stop according to the agreement. I had quite a few good readers there, but obviously this will mark the end of that. (I will finally come forward and announce the presence of my Blog on epinions soon... I had a certain issue with epinions once upon a time which kept me from making this "real" internet ego known there.)
Also, I have completely severed ties with the old reviews on the old front page just to make things simpler. The main counter (which was at 1023) doesn't exist anymore, and we're just going to follow the 701 that is currently on the front page. I confess I'll miss recalculating the "percent complete" number after finishing every review, but that had to go too! (The old reviews can still be found, but it doesn't officially exist.)
One of the main reasons I wanted to sever ties with the old pages was because I actually want to start an entirely new rewrite process on the reviews I already have. ...Don't worry, they'll mostly just be touch ups for grammar and wording and things. It will probably entail a few quick re-listens to albums I hadn't heard in awhile, but nothing major.
I've been getting these e-mails off and on from Mog asking me to join their advertising system. I haven't been too interested in putting advertisements on this site, but I looked more into their offer, and it would seem to entail linking my reviews with their music streaming service. So, anyone who is streaming an album from Mog that I have reviewed has the option of clicking on my page, reading the review, and seeing whether they agree with what I say or not. I say that is pretty cool, so I have started the beginning stages of joining the site. That would also potentially give this site a little more exposure to people who might want to read it.
I checked out from the human race last weekend to play a video game, but I'm back... I think... School is going OK so far. My next homework assignment that I haven't completed yet isn't due until Friday. (Yes, my nerddom hath returned.) It actually looks like a fun assignment so I'll probably do it tomorrow. (Yes indeed, my nerddom hath returned...)
As far as this site goes this weekend, I really need to work on the promotions/new releases/Babbletron list. If I don't do those soon, they'll cease to be topical, and they will cease to have a point. And I just got two promotional review requests! I've been getting a lot of those lately...
School is going fine so far although we still haven't gotten into the meat of anything. In fact what I anticipate to be by far my worst class (Concrete, Part II) hasn't even met yet, because the professor is off participating in some conference on the East Coast. When he gets back, I'm sure all hell will break loose in my brain, just like Concrete, Part I! At least the weekend shouldn't be too terrible, so maybe I'll write some more reviews...
Well... The album seemed to grow colder on me as I listened to it more. It's one of those albums I listened to with a strong first impression, but then it seemed to lose its appeal the more I listened to it. Now it got a weakish 11, but that means I still liked it of course...
Anyway, I started a new 2010 page, and hopefully there will be more than five reviews on there before the year is out. I already put Ringo's new album on my queue. I guess there's an OK Go album too, which should be OK.
It looks like I'm probably going to be fairly busy with studying/homework this semester, but I'm going to at least try to keep updating the site with some regularity. One of the ways I'm going to do it is to try to do all my assignments as early as possible to decrease my anxiety. (There's nothing more frustrating than doing homework at the last minute and not really understanding it, and there's nothing as soul-sucking as getting it back with a crap grade.) I'm happy to report (to myself!) that I completed about 95 percent of a very lengthy homework assignment that wasn't due until Friday. I felt so good about it that I felt extremely comfortable spending time writing a review. ...We'll see how well I keep up with that especially since I haven't had homework assignments yet in two other classes that promise to be intense, but this is going to be my strategy.
My next review will definitely be Phil Lewis, since that is a promotion review and I indicated to him that I was going to review it last week, and I want to get to it before things start to get too busy. Surprisingly, it's very good, and might be the first promotion review that I give a 12 (or maybe a 13?) to. Don't quote me on that, but I've really enjoyed it the two times I've listened to it so far...
Oh, and I listened to some albums besides The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway while I was doing that lengthy homework assignment. Anybody who likes catchy pop music that has passion, attitude, and humor should definitely check out Miss Li's Dancing the Whole Way Home, because that made doing my homework assignment a fantastic experience. I also finally got around to listening to The Flaming Lips' Embryonic and thought it was really great. I took my third or fourth listen to Lou Reed's excellent Coney Island Baby, which I realized I don't listen to nearly enough. ...And then Enya's Watermark, which has a few glorious moments, although I can't help but agreeing with the masses and saying that it's rather dull overall.
I don't know why, but I had awful trouble writing that Fugazi review... It's a band I'm brand new to, I guess...
Anyway, the break is really coming to an end now. I'll be busy tomorrow preparing to go, and then I actually leave on Sunday. I don't know how active the site is going to be this semester, but I do think it's likely that it'll be more active than it was last semester. (That's a safe bet because I'd only have to write about seven reviews to be more active than I was last semester!) There are no programming classes, and my living arrangements are the same as they were last semester, hence I don't have to adjust myself to a new environment. Also, I'm partly getting motivated by the fact that this is my very last year of college, and who the hell knows what's going to happen to me after that. I kind of wanted to get those stupid rewrites done before I graduated. That was a long, long way away when I started them! Grrr....
I've decided that I'm going to finish reviewing Led Zeppelin's studio albums, since there are only two left. It's kind of silly to let it remain incomplete like that. At some point I'll do the live albums (and probably the solo albums too)!
So, I started to review that Ruff Sqwad album, which is UK hip-hop, and I hated it. I got through maybe a third of the track reviews, and then I decided to just give up. Thank god the Crime in Choir album was quite a lot of fun! And now for the first Fugazi album. (Yay!)
Whew, I didn't expect to take most of the day on that one Genesis review, but I suppose I have to take extra time to work on reviews of my favorite albums... So, now on with that Led Zeppelin double album thingy...
Alright! Things have been going steadily lately, and I'm satisfied! I just finished the band/promoter/label request review of Research Turtles, which was my ultimate reviewing goal for the break. (For once, I actually hit one of my short term goals for this site!) I only have one week left of break, unfortunately, so I'll try to goof off as much as possible. That is, I'll update some more.
In case anyone actually cares about this, I mis-scored Let's Dance... It should have been an 11... Using my robotic "mathematical" method, it was a 10, but I didn't factor in the fact that those three great pop songs make me pull out the album very frequently.
I know how complicated these queues have been getting, but I'm very behind on the Babbletron 2000 reviews and I just got another band/promoter/label request review. Given that those actually somewhat have a deadline unlike the request reviews or the main queue, I don't know what else to do but start a third queue...
Looks like eboards is having some issues... I haven't been getting it to load for the last 18 hours or so. So, if you want to request a review and you haven't done one already, please send me an e-mail. Likewise, if you requested something before and I already reviewed it, you can request something else right now! Of course it'll be awhile before I actually get around to writing it, but at least it'll be put on the list.
Alright, I thought more about the "reviewing new albums" message I had here earlier, and I don't think that's going to work out too well. At best, I might do five of them, and then completely lose interest or become too busy with schoolwork. So, perhaps it's best that I concentrate on rewrites and finishing the huge discographies, as slowly as that has been going.
And there is another useless Led Zeppelin review. (I actually enjoyed writing it, though, which is a relief...) I did two request reviews, one of which was from a promoter, and now I'll work off the regular queue some more.
Hi! I was a bit distracted these last few days (we got a Blu-Ray player that streams Netflix from the Internet! I spent most of Christmas day trying to set it up, and then the subsequent two days watching stuff). But I do not feel whatsoever burned out writing reviews. I'll work off the main queue for a bit, and then go back to the request queue. Actually I should probably try to finish most of the requests up to Fugazi before the break it out since some of those are for indie bands and publishers...
I was worried that that review was too negative, but I guess it's OK... I dunno... If Julia Clarke-Lowes ever visits this site, she'd probably be pissed at me for putting The Indelicates review on The Pipettes page. ...But that page was pretty lonely, and it's not like I'm dating her. It'll be turned into a whole Pipette's related extravaganza. Anything even vaguely Pipettes related will be thrown on there!
I got my grades! A 2.93 GPA! ...That's not good at all, but it's better than I was expecting. I can sleep easy tonight! ...But before that, I'll try to start that Apples in Stereo review. And then I'm going Christmas shopping tomorrow! (...........yeah, I know.)
I got surprisingly a lot done today considering I slept most of the morning! (I had 12 hours of sleep, approximately... I must really be making up for that string of 4-hour nights I had over the semester.) Don't get used to this flurry of activity. Believe me.
So I got three separate requests to review three different Fugazi albums, so I'm just going to do the whole discography... That's a band I was almost certainly going to look at shortly after the rewrites anyway, and I'd much rather do the whole thing in order than out of order. So, there...
As I suspected, I demoted Birds of Fire. Although I wasn't anticipating demoting it by two entire points! Interesting! So, I'm listening to The Lost Trident Sessions for the third time as we speak, and I'll try to update with that review either today or tomorrow morning. (I probably could update four times a day like I've been known to do occasionally, but I'm just gonna take it easy...)
For some reason I thought I was going to revise the Mahavishnu Orchestra reviews quickly, but I forgot that this band demands a lot more time and attention than most other bands do! Especially that pop-rock stuff I seem to like so much. So, just to keep things moving this break, I think I should only re-do the two controversial ones for now (their first two), and then review the Lost Trident Sessions, which was a request.
See you in a bit! (By the looks of things I might actually demote Birds of Fire to a 13... It seems like I overrated it... But we'll see in a bit...)
Ha! I said I might not update today, and I updated first thing in the morning! Isn't that better than saying I'll update and not updating? ...I think so. Really the effects of being free from the grasp of the semester is beautiful. Maybe even magical. I can see unicorns!
Um. I haven't driven to Seattle yet. I should probably go do that now. I'll either write that Foreigner review or start revising those Mahavishnu Orchestra reviews when I get there. ...I was being lazy keeping those reviews in that state anyhow, so that'll be a good thing. A very good thing. Very, very, very...
Whew!!!!! Now the semester is officially over. All I can possibly do now is sit and wait for the grades to come in. I'm a bit afraid to look at those actually seeing there's actually a chance I might not have passed something. I suppose that fluids final I just took could have went better (it was quite a bit more intense than I was anticipating), but no matter. It's all overrrrrrrr!!!! And what a better way to celebrate that than by writing about one of my favorite albums of all time?
I'm not too sure about updates tomorrow, because I'm driving back to Seattle. Looks like the roads are clear, so that's good news.
As I said in yesterday's post, request reviews are going to be permanent... But don't be too shocked or disappointed if it's months before I actually get around to reviewing it... Of course I'll probably be working pretty busily on this site over the break seeing that I have a lot of pent up emotions...
I had three finals in my three hardest classes squished together in the first two days of finals week. The concrete final was optional... I studied for it, but I came to the conclusion that I was hardly prepared enough to actually raise my grade at all. ...I looked in the classroom at the time of the final, and there was only one person taking it. Wow... The geotechnical engineering final was mostly a disaster... I don't know why the professor has to write test questions that seem more designed to confuse you than to actually test how well you understand the basic concepts. (If I understand the material well enough to quickly redo homework assignments while understanding the ideas behind what I'm doing, I don't see why the test has to be anything more than that. I'm sure that test would have confused most professional geotechnical engineers...) I did the best I could on it, and I hope I at least did well enough to pass the class. I was at a very high C+ before the test, and at this college, anything less than a C including a C- is essentially a failing grade since that means I'd have to retake it. The indeterminate structures final was shockingly doable, though! The class itself was way more complicated than geotech, but that professor didn't actually expect any of us to be wunderkinds! ...I mean, the test was hard, but if you did the homework and went over the solutions of the previous tests, then it wasn't too bad. There was just one part that I wasn't too sure about...
Anyway, enough about my moaning. I only have one final left Thursday night, and that's in my easiest class, Fluid Dynamics. I mean, I always get stressed out before finals, but the amount of stress I'm feeling about Fluid Dynamics compared to the other three is practically no stress at all. Heck, maybe my hair will start to grow back! ...Nah.......
OK, here's some news regarding this actual site. (Is anyone reading this? Maybe I'm writing this more for my own benefit... Putting in stone my immediate plans for this site...)
I decided only to review the two remaining Neil Young studio albums. I was actually dreading those live albums and archival releases, so I thought it would be best to put those aside for now. I'll do them eventually, but I only want to review fun things right now. I'm also going to delay finishing the Led Zeppelin page past Presence. I have enough trouble writing about that band as it is, and those later albums aren't fun for me at all. So, I updated the queue... This means I'll get to the Moody Blues, Moose, Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan quicker, which are bands that I LOVE!!!!!! and I think some people were looking forward to seeing. I even have on there a bunch of archival Velvet Underground releases even though I reserve the right to remove those from the queue if I don't feel up to it. (And yes, I'm going to review Squeeze! Actually, I don't think I could possibly skip that one.) For the record, I'm still planning on doing Kiss, Booker T and the MGs, and Peter Gabriel rewrites after I finish out what's presently on the queue...
I also sort of have a desire to start reviewing albums as they are released, but I don't think I have the time/stamina to pull that off regularly. At any rate, I think I'll be reviewing new or recent releases more frequently than I have been. I don't seem to be nearly as adamant about finishing the rewrites as I used to be, even though I still eagerly anticipate the day those are actually done.
This also means that perhaps request reviews will be a slightly more permanent feature... I don't want people to give me entire lists of albums to review, but one at a time would work fine. There is a separate "request queue" and a "main artist queue," and I'll just choose to work on one or the other. (Probably I'll concentrate mainly on the "main artists," though.) Anyway I requested myself to do a review (the new Flight of the Conchords album!) and I'm also going to review the albums people are picking for Music Babble's best of the 2000's list... I happened to have already reviewed the first two albums that were picked! Well, half of the reason for that is I picked one of them!
Lastly, I know this is going to be hard to believe seeing how long this journal entry is, but I've decided to shorten the length of my average review by two paragraphs. Those two paragraphs are usually spent dwelling on something irrelevant or repeating myself... I'm tired of repeating myself. Seriously!!!
Blech!!! This semester has been awful, and I'm really looking forward to through with it in three weeks. I'm easily spending triple the amount of time on these classes than I was last semester, and all I've been able to get out of them are C+s. I managed to land three out of four professors who give out material that caters well to the geniuses of the group, which there are plenty of in civil engineering school, but I'm unfortunately not a genius... You can't get more complicated and convoluted than some of these classes. So, I'm in survival mode right now... Just need to last three more weeks...
The good news is that I finally finished this review I spent forever working on. I've also been listening to *a lot* of music lately, in fact a lot more than I probably would have had I been updating the site.
And look! That's my 1000th review! Hooray!
Request reviews are coming in three weeks. Start thinking, and then post your requests on the message board if you are at all interested. Remember, anything goes, as long as I have access to it... I'll probably request myself to do some reviews, too... Yeah, that made total sense. My brain is totally fried...
Once again, just one update today. (Notice we're in the final days of this site's "total reviews" counts will ever be in triple digits! It's also funny that right now, my "rewritten" count happens to be 666. That sounds like something that I would purposefully try to plan, but I promise, it was 100 percent unintentional.)
Just one update today. I might work on the Neil Young review I'm writing next, but it will be back at my apartment where I don't have the Internet. (I'm getting outta the library!)
Another update! And this marks the end of the request reviews. ... Except for a Pippin Sparks album, but it'll be about a week or so before I get to that.
You can still request something if you missed it... I'll review any album you want. You'll just have to wait a week before I can get to it.
I have a one-hour break between classes, and I'm sitting here on a chair in the engineering building updating my site! This *is* the 21st Century!
As I was driving to Pullman yesterday, I put Pet Sounds, which I haven't listened to for awhile. ...I love the album of course, but was a 15 overrating it? Now, I think a 14 might have been more proper. ...I'm not going to do anything about it now, but I'll continue to keep asking myself that.
Sometimes I forget that I'm living in the 21st Century. There is such a thing as "wireless Internet" and they have it at my school! I am living in a sci-fi world!! I didn't see anything on there about "school related activities only" on their wireless Internet info page and it looks reasonably fast, so it looks like I'll still have a web presence. I could probably get away with streaming music... but I shouldn't push it. But that's why I have 122 albums saved on my laptop! My roommate also surprised me, and he didn't opt for the cheap-o internet connection at the apartment. So nothing is going to inhibit me from this site over the fall semester, it seems.
Alright. There's no chance in hell I'll finish these request reviews today. Well... maybe in hell I would write quicker, but here on earth I seem to be writing slowly. I probably won't finish them tomorrow either, since I have to do things. Sunday of course I'm going back to Pullman where I will be without Internet connection.
But I'm enjoying these request reviews, as usual. You've guys put forth some really interesting things! Especially Bad Brains, since I didn't think I would've liked that. ...You can still request reviews today or tomorrow morning. But if you wait until Saturday night or Sunday, then it'll be awhile before I'm able to get to it. You can read more about that whole sordid story below.
I found out this morning that there's a very good reason that Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson are the only two members of the Jackson family to have particularly made names for themselves outside the family. All the other guys suck ass. LaToya, Jermaine, that old one... Blughhhhhhh!!!!
Then I had this funny idea to review every single Jackson-5-related album and put them all on the same page. ...I'd be reviewing those Jermaine Jackson albums side-by-side with Michael Jackson's world-famous ones!! ...But there I go dreaming again, and not concentrating on what I should be doing at the present. Request reviews. And then Led Zeppelin and things. (But seriously, a Jackson 5 page would be cool. And fun to do. Something for the future.)
It turns out that I won't have Internet connection at all next week. (I guess the cable company is lumbered with new Internet connection requests at the beginning of the school year, or something ridiculous like that.) But I prepared for that. I'm still working on my master/evil plan of writing reviews on this laptop, saving them to my freshly purchased flash drive, and updating them in the computer lab. That's why I downloaded every single album in my queue to my hard drive! (LEGALLY! I can save Rhapsody files to my hard drive so I can listen to them without an Internet connection. That was nice/clever of them!)
Hoh yes... These are the sorts of schemes I spend all my day thinking about!
And, I'm going to do my utter best to finish the request reviews by tomorrow. I spent a little bit longer with the Sean Altman review than I would have wanted to. (All morning and a chunk of the afternoon.) But it's all in a good day's work.
I have decided that having only 78 albums on my "tentative" review queue for the fall wasn't being optimistic enough. So, I have extended it to 122 albums. It ends appropriately with Booker T. and the MG's In the Spirit of Christmas, which will be my symbolic reviewing goal for Christmas. (I'm not getting my hopes up that I'll actually make it... but you never know. I could be supremely bored/motivated.)
No matter what, I'll plan on doing the next round of request reviews at Christmas break. (The current round is happening right now, so DO get those in by Friday! Put your request on the message board!!)
Phew!!! I had quite a day! I drove five hours there, moved in, and then drove five hours back! (I know, I could have just stayed there, but I get the feeling that I'm going to delay the possible/inevitable feeling of getting sick and tired of the place as much as I can.)
Anyway, that Pippin Sparks album is delightful. She recorded it on her laptop and asked me to review it a long time ago (AKA right when I went on that unscheduled reviewing hiatus). It's inventive and fun to listen to. You should hear it, which you can for FREE on YouTube. (Give it a few gos to get used to her voice, which ain't exactly Pat Benatar.)
I'm actually leaving tomorrow and not today. My biggest activity today has been making sure I have enough albums downloaded onto my computer to last the semester. My schedule is such that I'll probably be carrying my laptop around with me. If I need a break from studying I'll probably do a track review or two. ...Just to keep the sanity.
Anyway, I put The Moody Blues and Moose on there as I promised some time ago, and I made the executive decision to start reviewing The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan.
It's also possible I'll review some super-awesomely-obscure '60s albums I've been getting from blogs. Although that'll only be if I feel like it.
There will probably be no updates tomorrow since it looks like I'll be driving to Pullman to take care of apartment matters.
I'm continuing to take requests, but you can take all the time you want to. It no longer looks like there will be a period of time I'll be without Internet.
But please try to come up with something by Friday!!! I'm pretty sure we're getting "lite" Internet connection in Pullman, which means that all downloading should be done while I'm still at my folks' house.
Well, I didn't review as much this summer as I originally hoped I would, but I guess I needed to take a break from it. The vacation has been more relaxing and refreshing than I could have hoped for considering what I was subjected to last spring, and I feel that I'm ready to hit the new semester on the ground running. All of my classes this semester are pretty hardcore engineering ones and probably relatively easier to handle. No thermodynamics or differential equations or microbiology or anything annoying.
Even though I'm not quite to 66.6%, I'm taking request reviews now, because I won't initially have an Internet connection when I move back to Pullman. ...I could probably still write reviews and upload them using a pen drive in the computer lab, but I don't see how I would get away with downloading albums that anyone requests...
Phew! Well, I completely lost my will to review there, but I finally got around to updating. I wanted to work on this site all along, but I just couldn't seem to get myself to do it. I would open the word document (as late as yesterday) and try to write, but the words just weren't flowing. Then a few hours ago I was watching a South Park episode about the town dividing themselves between pro-war and anti-war. At one point, somebody mentioned something about hippies listening to rock 'n' roll music, which somehow triggered me to immediately turn off the TV and start writing this "Heroes" review. ...That was weird.
I know you guys probably djon't give a crap, but I wrote a few songs last week. The one that I submitted to midi-contest.com is called Wisteria. I wrote it specifically to get a lot of points, so it's pretty freaking cheesy. Writing these things is a weird process... I was pretty hopped up on sugar and I decided to interrupt all the strings, harps and woodwinds with an ugly guitar solo that obviously came from listening to all these Neil Young albums. I tried taking it out later, but the song as a whole just wasn't working without it. It just sort of pops up all of the sudden and doesn't really fit, but it's a cool contrast to the rest of it I think. Anyway, there's my first ever attempt at a guitar solo. Also, last Christmas, I wrote a song called Dreams, which I don't think I ever announced. For what it's worth, that's by far the best thing I ever wrote.
So, will I write more reviews in the next few days? I think so...
I took a slight break to go on a Civ II marathon, which I have to do at least once every two years. Well... I took over the world twice, so now that's out of my system.
Whew! Well, the Duran Duran and Rolling Stones pages are finished! I can't believe it! At some point I'll go back and do some solo albums for both bands, but that'll be a long time from now.
Also, I wish I could update everyday with four reviews. But this pace is insane, and there's no way I'll be able to keep it up. So don't get used to it! I'll try to keep the momentum going, but I think probably two per day is more reasonable.
Hi! I have now added the first Genesis, Led Zeppelin, and Foreigner albums to my queue. I also wanted something to do while I was listening to these albums, so I edited my review of ABBA's Ring Ring. (I changed quite a bit of the wording, added a tasteless joke about Pearl Harbor, but I didn't actually listen to it again. I was listening to Foreigner!) I also succumbed to peer pressure and changed my Ziggy Stardust rating to a 15. ...Ah, it was really a 15 all along, if you couldn't tell by that huge paragraph I originally had explaining why I could only give it a 14. ...Also Station to Station is a clear 14, and it's not as good as Ziggy Stardust.
Looks like I'm starting to get back into the swing of things! And it won't be too long before you'll start to see Genesis and Led Zeppelin pop up on my queue!
