Well, happy holidays and new year to everyone. I’ve been using some of my spare time to work on making a new video player that will have a lot of good functionality built in. For example it has a playlist to support multiple videos, and you will be able to copy link code and embed code very easily in order to paste it onto your blog/myspace/website/email/im/whatever in order to share our videos with a wider audience. It even has full-screen mode!

I expect it will be completed in the next month or so, but in case there is anyone reading this who is proficient in Actionscript 2, I would love to get some advice regarding problems I’m having that seem to have no good solution that I can find.

Anyway, here’s looking forward to new developments!

Been gone for a while but now we’re back with a vengeance and a new writer, Ian Sit. He is coming on board to help raise our posting frequency as we experiment with a new multi-writer format.

Together we hope to climb to at least one post per week now!

Check out his recent compilation, “Lounge Fight” which should give you a basic idea of his musical tastes.

The tracklist is:(

1) Lobotomy by Ogre You Asshole from Demo
2) Utatane No Hibi (L’ecume des jours) by Luminous Orange from Drop You Vivid Colours
3) Black Joe by Nirgilis from Vuna
4) Antenna by Supercar from Last Scene
5) Irie by Spangle Call Lili Line from Spangle Call Lili Line
6) Num-Ami-Dabutz by Number Girl from Num-heavymetallic
7) Lucky by Bugy Craxone from Sorry, I Will Scream Here
8) Hush and Vane by Condor44 from 00203
9) Ao to Akano sekijou by Niumun from The Beginning Of Everthing
10) Nantonaku by Sleepy.ab from Fantasia
11) Highway – Alternative – by Quruli from Jyoze to tora to sakana tachi
12) Shigatsu Ni Furu Yuki by Sloth Love Chunks from Shikakui Vision
13) Atmosphere by 9mm Parabellum Bullet from Gjallarhorn
14) Light Chair by Shugo Tokumaru from Night Piece
15) Drown by Farida’s Café from Gold
16) Ghost Song by Apogee from Fantastic
17) Waratte Sayonara by Fujifabric from A La Mode

So, without further ado, let’s welcome Ian!

All my creative energy is going into work at the moment, and having co-won a recent contest at StG I thought it might be beneficial to re-invest my winnings in a contest here.

I have been meaning for a while to come up with some interesting interview questions to submit to bands, finding the traditional gamut of queries to be rather dull and moth-eaten so to speak:

“So, who are your musical influences?”
“Well, um.. we pretty much create music purely from the ether… b-but we do like the Cure and Iron Maiden.”
“Wow, so do I! O-ok, how did you guys meet?”
“Well, we met in highschool… and just uh, decided to play music… from boredom.”
“Great!… Highschool!… Wow…”
“Yeah.”
“Well… thanks for coming out guys! Great talking to you!”
“Word.”

So the object of this contest is to come up with a list of interesting interview questions that I will try to submit to various bands/artists that I post about.

The questions can be eclectic, eccentric, or bizarre, but they should be thoughtful and creative, not just silly or random. The real goal of the questions themselves should be to provoke and elicit emotional and thoughtful replies from people instead of lists, like in the case of: “What are your favorite bands/movies/artists/etc.” or bland historical facts as in: “how old were you guys when you first met”.

I want as much as possible to cull the possibility of automatic, trite, or memorized responses, and instead try to give no escape to those interviewed except through genuine introspection and/or creative improvisation. Since these interviews will be conducted electronically for the most part, they will have time to think about their answers without the pressure of an immediate response.

So here are the basic requirements:

Come up with a list of thoughtful, intriguing, unusual questions.

Make the questions applicable to anyone, not just people in bands.

Try to make questions that elicit a genuine personal/creative response.

Post your submissions in the comments or email them to: interviewcontest at reduin.com

And everything else is up to you. This contest will go on as long as it has to, but I will tentatively set the end date as October 1st, 2006. If I haven’t found enough by that time I will extend the contest. Send as many questions as you like, ask your friends and lovers for ideas, ask a hobo, the more the merrier (especially since I don’t have a ton of visitors), but don’t just crank out quantity over quality; remember, these should be difficult but interesting to answer.

Whoever sends the most questions that make it into the final list wins the contest and shall receive Sub Pop Records promo-pack of: Chad VanGaalen‘s album Skelliconnection, a Sub Pop sampler with actually a lot of good songs, a few stickers, and a Chad VanGaalen button (all pictured above). If by some unforeseen happenstance this is not your idea of a party, fear not! The REAL reward will be discovering how various artists and musicians from all over the world will answer YOUR marvelous and fascinating questions!

Everyone is a winner. Let’s go! ????~~~~~?

So basically Microsoft lost a lawsuit against a company called Eolas a long time ago; and now, unless you change your code and upload a certain script to your root directory, your Interactive Flash won’t work and will just look like a static image. Of course, if you hold your mouse over it for 2 seconds you’ll get a little “Click to activate and use this control” message, which effectively murders the convenience of the single click concept. This pleases me to no end, since it means I must change the code in every one of my music posts, and in doing so, manage to lose the review for Tokyo Police Club!

Apparently I missed the early warnings, so this issue seems to have only taken effect for me recently, like today? I have been able to use single clicks when checking in other browsers until recently. I did update Opera yesterday, so that might have kicked it in, but suddenly the problem is showing up in Firefox and IE as well, and on other computers, so I don’t know…

This is very excellent because it seems to mean that every piece of Flash and/or embedded media on the internet must be changed! The community is being brought together on a global scale by magnificent annoyance!

If you are having problems with embedded media doing this in your own sites, the following links have a few different fixes to the problem, which will allow you to configure your own content to bypass this little problem:

[“Quick and dirty” fix for “Click to activate and use this control” problem]
[Macromedia Flash Specific (and much more complicated) solution]
[Adobe article with another solution]

I used the first one, since WordPress apparently has issues with the Macromedia way, and the first solution is way easier anyway…
If you have any problems, just comment and let me know, and I’ll try to help you out.

Happy Fixing! (I’m not the only one having this issue right?!)

The samples used in that Gellers song reminded me of the voices in Kurekure Takora, (Gimme Gimme Octopus [and pals,]) a bizarre 60’s Japanese children’s show in whose first episode the main character, (a bipedal red octopus): assaults a police officer, (a badger?), steals his uniform and gun, uses it to threaten someone, (a dragon-rat?), steals said someone’s girlfriend, (a walrus-saur?), assaults his best buddy Chombo, (a pear? gourd?), gets chased by a water-spraying conical vampire ghost, and more! It must be a subtle use of reverse psychology to show kids what never ever to do, because the many short episodes depict gratuitous anti-social behaviour, violence, lawlessness and depravity in general! Good times!

Here are some mighty impressive watermelon carvings from Takashi Itoh. The multiple colors in a watermelon give the dedicated and insanely meticulous artist a bounty of possibilities.

It has been an exceptionally mild season so far in the Washington DC area; normally we jump from bitter winter to suffocating summer with only a week or two of spring between. This year however, it only snowed once or twice and the spring has been glorious and long.

That’s apparently about to end though, and golden summer swoop in on glistening wings of humidity, so it’s probably an appropriate time to showcase some people’s favorite viney, edible and nutritious summer friend.

There’s something for everyone in the Citrullus lanatus, whether you like them gargantuan, pyramidal, or cubist.

You should probably watch this introduction to watermelon eating if you are a beginner, and even the skilled melon masticator may learn a trick or two.

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Well, I guess it had to happen. As someone intending to facilitate the spread of music it seems almost impossible to escape the beastly yawning maw of myspace. That gaudy fiend has pursued me for years, hell’s swelter pouring from its heaving flanks. Now I guess I’m turning to meet it, more resignation than resolve.

In other words: Let’s be e-pals!.

Sorry to people who have subscribed to comments, there was a big spamwave there. Should be mostly taken care of now, I made a big list of banned words…