John Zeitler

It’s almost two months now, or rather going on over two months, since the XM/Sirius channels merged. And by “merged” I mean “Sirius gutted all the good stuff”. I wound up cancelling my service that day, after discovering that their “classic alternative” station, Lithium, which replaced the genuinely quirky and very college-radio-like Lucy, was in fact just every album recorded by Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana lumped into an MP3 player set to shuffle. There might have been something else in there but when I heard three songs by the same artist in the span of an hour, that’s bad. Lucy at least mixed things up a bit, reminding me of some tracks I hadn’t heard in years– or at all (I was a sheltered kid, so I didn’t get into alternative until, well, I was actually at college, playing it myself). To make a long story short, the news that a combined Sirius/XM receiver is at last on the market utterly fails to impress me and in fact makes me wonder why they even bothered, if they were going to just make everything Sirius-y.

And I’m still royally pissed off that The System is gone. Best damn place to find new trance and progressive short of going to clubs for it which don’t seem to exist in Pittsburgh, and what happens? Gone, no real replacement, just pop-tronica that all sounds the same. (Think Freezepop, only irritating and not even half as clever.) In the end it’s all a wash; I have the Pandora client for the iPhone but haven’t used it as much as I should, and when I’m home I usually turn on the cable’s music channels, but they’re poor replacements.

Other things went very wrong today in terms of customer service, but they’re not important. What is important, really, is that I discovered that City of Heroes’ Mac client, just released out of beta today, runs beautifully on my machine. I indulged in a month pass, just to sate the desire to enter Scrapperlock again. I never much enjoyed the villain side of things, but all the same it’s just a fun game. I might not continue it after the pass expires, but one way or another it’ll all work itself out.

As for the movies, I’m still working my way through those when time and patience permit. I’m not likely to make it through the 30 in 30, but I’ll have taken a good chunk out of them. Which, really, is all I wanted to do.

Later, folks.