Wolfshead lays the boot into the MMO industry, and Blizzard in particular:

As long as is there are copious amounts of reward with almost no risk, as long as content remains static and non-dynamic, as long as players have no sense of ownership in their world, as long as players have no need of other players, as long as player freedoms keep getting curtailed, as long as extracting money from subscribers is the end all and be all of game design - you will have the disease that is World of Warcraft…

…When I survey today’s MMO scene I wonder what God must have felt like when He looked at the mess that humanity had gotten itself into. It’s no wonder He decided to create a flood that would reboot humanity and start fresh.

Makes me feel guilty for still enjoying it!

Browncoats: Redemption, a fan made Firefly feature.

Great site that allows you to play tracks from Girl Talk’s all-sample Feed the Animals and see the samples being used as they come up. Now we just need someone to do the same for Paul’s Boutique.

The lead singer of Sigur Rós brings us a beautiful album of crisp Icelandic ethereal elfin epic orchestral pixie pop. Sample at Pitchfork.

I was at a market the other day and one of the stallholders looked at me funny and said “You know, you look a lot like Pat Metheny.” Speaking of which, Pat Metheny on Kenny G:

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible.

Zing!

Wonderful account of the Blonde on Blonde recording sessions. On Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands:

Finally, at 4 a.m., Dylan was ready. “After you’ve tried to stay awake ‘til four o’clock in the morning, to play something so slow and long was really, really tough,” McCoy says. Dylan continued polishing the lyrics in front of the microphone. After he finished an abbreviated run-through, he counted off, and the musicians fell in. Kenny Buttrey recalled that they were prepared for a two- or three-minute song, and started out accordingly: “If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ‘cause we thought, ‘Man, this is it….’ After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”

Flickr person Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

Imagine getting access to all the data Google has about you, and everything they’ve learned partially based on observing you.

I have imagined just that with a friend several times - some way of seeing who/what Google thinks you are. Who do they think wants to advertise to you? What songs do they think you like? What is their profile of you? Who is the Google-You?

The problem with Google’s current tools for looking at their data on you - Dashboard and the Data Liberation Front (seemingly comatose) - is that they don’t show you the aggregated Google-You. They only show the component parts, and specifically exclude stuff like page requests, cookies, and advertising data.

The Google-You is obviously of great value to Google’s advertising partners and demographic data consumers. And their ability to make a Google-You out of all that we do online (and off) is a huge competitive advantage. But given we’ve provided all the data to create that virtual person, it would be nice if we could access it free. Actually it would be more than nice, it should be required.

(via Daring Fireball)

Who needs alt-country when you can have METAL. Though looking at the song titles & listening to this sample, it’s definitely more Lordi than Megadeath.

Announced at Google I/O - Google’s play to own the web app store market. The Google steamroller rolls on.

Google (open source) web fonts - really nice.