M.I.A.

Academics and responsibilities at school are preventing me from updating this as often as I'd like. But I'll return when the workload lessens.

I promise?

Thesis Statement

People who use samples shouldn't have to pay for shit- but they should be encouraged to record what they used so the transmission of society from a mass culture to a multimassive culture can be better documented.

Blahblahborama

The longer it takes for the Democratic party to pick a nominee, the more entrenched each both Hillary and Obama become entrenched in the status-quo. (Never mind the fact that Hillary is already pretty status-quo). Running a campaign this long cost $$$money$$$, and money don't come cheap. Lobbyists and corporations hold the purse strings, and to get at them the candidates are gonna have to make concessions. AKA, no hope or change. Only despair and stagnation.

Let's also not forget that even if you elect a black dude who kinda reminds people of JFK, only time can heal the wounds of the Bush Presidency. Whoever inhabits the office next will be distrusted and ineffectual. It's like a 'bad president' ripple effect. What people who want to move beyond the last 8 years of poor job performance should look for is a strong Congress. But that'll doubtfully work either.

Hope. Change. Ha ha ha, yeah right.

...and on the Third Day

Happy Easter to you, if you're into that kind of thing.



I saw a Justice concert on Thursday. It was awesome. One of the loudest concerts I've even been to. I've never experience sound on such a tactile level before. Diplo opened for them, he was great too. The bass was ridiculous. Good time over all.

Is there a program that let's you tag mp3s? Not id3 tags for identification purposes, but keywords, the way blog posts have tags. The kind of tags you can make a tag cloud from. This would be a great feature for either the filetype, or a media player to incorporate. A feature of this nature would have multiple benefits.

It would allow easier playlist creation. I like creating playlists, but the way iTunes is set up, it's hard to create a flexible playlist. It's also annoying because a good playlist is complied organically, as one finds songs that fit together thematically. Usually I get an idea for a playlist when I think of two songs that would work well together. With a tagging system I could label them both, say "smooth," then move on. When I hear more songs that fit that description I can tag them as well. When I want to see how far along that playlist is, I can just pull up all songs labeled "smooth."

Now sure, I could just make a playlist on iTunes called "smooth" and throw songs into it, but it doesn't allow the same flexibility. First, a tagging system would reduce clutter as the playlists would just be a function of searching, not a slew of seperate lists. It would also allow much greater flexibility. The two examples linked to above are both hip-hop songs. However, my collection of songs labeled smooth will cross many different genres. Assuredly, the interface will support boolean operators. (Something iTunes has lacked for too long.) I could limit my playlist to songs with the genera hip-hop, but with the tag 'smooth' This would allow playlist creation to be extremely flexible. Suppose I want songs tagged "one-hit wonder" but only from the 80s. Easy. What about songs tagged both "smooth" and "love song"? Simple.

Boolean logic could extend beyond the realm of tags as well, allowing a user to generate playlists with AND, OR, XOR operators, etc. I could make a playlist of songs with the genre "Electronica" but exclude everything made before 2000, or only songs that are 'remixes' would be included. The functionality of a feature like this is open-ended, both as an organizational and informational tool.

So why hasn't anyone done it yet?

Reminder

I would like to lucid dream. If you do enough 'reality checks' during your waking life, you'll be more likely to check if you're dreaming when you actually are. To help remind myself to make reality checks a habit, I made a wallpaper. It's horribly garish.

http://www.zshare.net/image/9165610c3acce6/