Quiet on the content front indeed.

Lately, my sleep patterns have taken on an odd twist. I come home from work ridiculously tired, and immediately plop on the bed. Sleep 3, 4, or 5 hours, and wake up feeling moderately refreshed right around the time everyone else is going to bed. Grab some food from the fridge, and proceed to enlighten my mind by voting on the k5 submission queue, randomly surfing, playing gameboy, or whatnot. Then, around an hour from now, when I get tired again, take a second sleep shift. Slightly deeper sleep, perhaps. A few hours later, be awakened in the morning by the cron daemon, and go to work feeling about as groggy as I would normally be at that time of day. Work during the daylight hours. Rinse and repeat.

Lately, I have going through what could be described as some sort of spiritual hibernation, from which I may or may not soon awaken. I don't know for sure. Life goes on in the world of the day to day. On the inside, I am still. Cyclical. Stagnant? Waiting for something, perhaps. But what that might be is difficult to fathom.

Last night, I spent altogether too much time on what could be the new cover page for Bitscape's Lounge. Maybe by the end of this rambling, I'll actually put it up. I was planning to do so last night, but when I had finally perfected it to my satisfaction (spending most of the time on nitpicky trial and error synchronization to the degree nobody is going to know the difference anyway, unless they sit and try to match it exactly to the cd like I did), I took a look at it, and thought, this is great, but it has absolutely no bearing, nor does it give any accurate indication regarding the actual contents of the website. Oh well. To hell with consistency. I think I'll put it up anyway. If the default.ida seekers happen to wander in, and are led to believe they have found the great goth NIN retro fanboy site, so be it. They will be sorely disappointed when they click on the link, only see... this. Hahaha.

Besides, just about anything beats, "We want our content solutions to be your content solutions too." Don't you think?

...

Despite the increasing frequency of insepid popup ads, I still find myself wandering over to Salon every now and then. (I keep telling myself that one of these days I'm going to add that disable popups line to my mozilla config file, and at least make it apply to sites which abuse them.) This recent article, and the letters that followed hit home this time.

Usually, when I'm in the car, I listen to the radio. Almost always, it's music stations, although lately I've been tuning into KGNU's (long live local independent radio) morning news on the way to work. After reading an article like the one above, it's gratifying to be a be able to say "It's not just me" when I observe that the general state of music on the radio around here has gone way downhill just in the past year. So here goes the "me too" rant...

Perhaps the biggest case in point for this region, at least that I've seen: 93.3 KTCL. I remember a time, not too terribly long ago, when they would play quite a nice variety of songs and artists. I could regularly turn on that station, and hear something I had never heard before. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't. But at least it was something different. Lately, every time I tune in, I hear mostly mushy pop. KBPI-lite. Same songs every day. Some of the songs that they play every day during my listening window, I enjoy (up to a point). Some of them, I don't like. But it's the same damn stuff i>every time I turn it on!

Second case in point: KBPI. Historically, my favorite station for years. I still like most of the songs and artists they play. However, they too seem to be suffering from the "same songs every day" syndrome, worse than ever before. The notable exception to this is the time every hour or so when they turn back the clock to a previous year and play some big hit from year N. (Where N = now - (rand(30))) That's fun. It's not new music, but it's not the same stuff that gets played everyday, and it brings back memories. Still, I wish they would put a wider variety of artists on the current playlist. (And please, less of the constant Limp Bizkit barrage, okay?)

The Peak. They don't suffer from the "same songs every day" syndrome nearly as badly as the above stations, although they could still use a bit of improvement in that department. Mostly 80s music, which is good. Every city needs one of those.

I'm wandering here. I guess what I'm getting to is that it's not hard to see why the revenues for the music industry lawyer scumbags are down. Besides pissing everyone off royally with the whole Napster thing, they have simultaniously failed to come up with any compelling new music to offer. Or if they do, it's not getting played on the radio. I know I haven't been buying nearly as many cds lately as I did in years past. There's just not that much that appeals anymore.

Um... At this point, I could babble on randomly about various other trivial topics, but the sleepiness is kicking in again. Time for the second sleep cycle.