John Zeitler

I know I can’t be the only one to avoid syncing my music player unless it’s absolutely necessary. Granted, iTunes has been much better about speeding up the process, but in my case that’s not the reason. Primarily, I don’t sync unless I have to because of the playlists I set up. See, they’re randomized based on what I’ve listened to recently, and they don’t update unless I sync. So, if there’s a song I like or am in the mood for more than usual, and I listen to it all the way through or skip it at a certain point (the criteria for what counts as a “skip” are vague), it’s pulled out of “rotation” for at least two weeks. I just heard a song today that I don’t think I’ve heard since, oh, 2006, and I have to sync tonight so that a new audio drama gets onto the phone.

Yeah, it’s my own fault, and ultimately not listening to the same stuff over and over again is good, but not when it works against me.

The RSS feed might be temporarily screwed up. Mea culpa. This is because I forgot to set the time zone properly three weeks ago when I set up the blog. More or less it’s the Web 2.0 equivalent of leaving your VCR to flash “12:00″ forever. (On a completely unrelated note, my microwave shows “12:00″ in perpetuity primarily because I’m too lazy to set the time after each power outage.)

In an offering of thanks, mayhap I could point you to a 13-minute mix of Geometry Wars music?

Another quiet day, folks. Overall I’m just dealing with life day-by-day, so there’s not much to report beyond the fact that I’m still loving Tales of Vesperia, and that the ability to download music on-demand via the iPhone is very, very bad for me (despite the fact that I will end you if you try to take my phone). More as it comes along, folks.

The movies thing… is probably not gonna be finished in time. I’m resigned to this, because Vesperia is just that damn awesome.

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.

Quiet day today, huh folks? Oh, wait, maybe that was just me. Had my headphones on damn near all day.

Though I will say this, today was certainly a triumph for music-lovers everywhere, and I think you all know what I’m referring to. I can’t believe it, really. The first thing I thought of, so many years ago, was being able to play “Pretty Woman” on a plastic fake guitar.

…stop looking at me like that, Roy Orbison was a genius and you know it.

Couple things. I’m watching movies on the 30 days list in no particular order; however, indecisiveness got me into this mess to begin with, so I’m using a 30-sided die to determine what I want to watch if I can’t decide. So far it’s come up with the movies that are crossed off on the list, so you can tell– as if the constant stream of “My iPod is Trying To Kill Me” posts from before didn’t already clue you in– that the Random Number Gods do not look with favor upon my works.

Also, it really frustrated me that of all of the tracks claiming to be on The Shadow Out Of Tim, “Shhh…” wasn’t actually on the disc because “it didn’t fit with the narrative”. As I said, frustrated– for all of seven seconds, before I remembered that Google exists.

And now, another film. Ciao.