Archive for January, 2009

Meme-opolitan

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Ordinarily I don’t get on the meme train but this one from Courtney looked pretty promising since it requires more insight than just replying to a template.  I’ve been getting into a rut with blogging lately — as in, I mostly talk about myself superficially and not enough anymore about the pillars that are holding up my proverbial roof. So this is a good brain-stretch and refresher course about what are things I could be thinking about. Anyway. Allons-y!

A.) Leave me a comment saying, “Interview Me!” or raise your hand or something to that effect
B.) I’ll respond with 5 questions of my choice for you to answer
C.) You update your blog with the answers to the questions
D.) You include “The Rules”/the offer to interview other people
E.) Eat a blueberry… not really.. let’s go, shall we?

1) if you could pick three albums to listen to for the rest of your life, and you could listen to nothing else, which three would they be and why?

  • My Bloody Valentine – Loveless : Was this band named after the movie?  Yes, but the old one.  But anyway, why this?  It’s because sometimes I feel the way a lot of these textures sound.  I don’t understand my feelings very well, like most males, so communicating that in words is not as efficient for me as communicating them as sounds.  I guess this means my emotions are a warm, melodic, blur.
  • Bob Dylan – Blood On The Tracks : Hey, I like stories and poetry.  Besides, why would anyone have to justify loving Bob Dylan?  You just do.  :)
  • Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy : You know the wonder you get from a guitar solo?  As in, “Holy crap, how do they make a guitar sound like that?”  The soaring acrobatics of furious fretwork?  This is like that.  Only, instead of a guitar, imagine it being a computer.  That’s right: “How do you make a computer sound like that?” This is what happens when you give a jazz musician a bunch of drum machines and synthesizers.

2) What is the most ridiculous piece of inspiration you’ve ever had for writing a song/piece of music?

A jalapeno.  Here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

3) Do you have any long term plans as to your music? How you want it to fit into your life, release plans, a career move… or is it just a hobby?

When I was young, I really thought that taking music seriously was a way to make a living, but Los Angeles pretty much helped to quell that dream and I have a more realistic way to think about surviving as a musician. That is, music is more than a hobby, but it is less than a career aspiration. It keeps me sane.

As far as a release plan, I plan to release everything I write for free under a Creative Commons license. The only thing it has really cost me to make music is time, and if someone is going to take the time to listen to it, then I feel they’ve already paid for it. That’s not really how it works for professional musicians, unfortunately, but I have a whole ‘nother rant about that, as well as some actually pretty well-thought-out ideas about how to make money by releasing free music that I’ve run by industry workers. Foreshadowing: People in the music industry won’t like it, people in the ad industry will love it, musicians will be scared shitless, audiences will eat it up, and it would slowly bring the demise of illegal downloading.

You’re damn right you’re interested. ;)

4) Would you ever consider living anywhere but California? Why or why not?

I’m actually trying to move to Brooklyn, NYC this year. We’ll see how this goes.

And why? Well, have you been to Brooklyn? Yeah. That’s why.

5) Are there any ladies you’re interested in, even peripherally? This can be a singular or plural answer, and can include anything from celebrity crushes to blog crushes to real crushes. List and discuss.

You know what?  I realize I don’t ever talk about who I think is hot, cute, fascinating, pretty, admirable.  And I should probably get to posting about this!

  • “Celebrity” Crushes
    • Cali Lewis : I love her because she knows her shit, is concise about her writing, comes off as nerdy awkward in interviews in a very endearing way, and has this adorable laugh you can see when she posts gag reels.  Alas, she is married.
    • iJustine : Ordinarily I’m not into blondes, but are you seeing my trend of women who know more about me in technology and gadgets?
    • Kim Gordon : Coolest fucking woman alive.  I don’t care how old you think she looks, she is a goddess because of how much beauty she has brought into this world.
  • Blog Crushes
    • Free and Flawed : For the same reason I like Cali Lewis and iJustine, she likes gadgets.  I like gadgets.  I like watching her write about gadgets.  Someday, I’d buy her a gadget.
    • verybadcat : Been reading her for a long time, and because we both live a corporate life, and try to have fruitful lives outside of work, sometimes I feel like we work in the same office.  I dunno, she seems very realistic to me.  And realism is really comforting.
    • Angelaboration : Epicly long posts, it’s reminiscent of Romanticism à la Charlotte Brontë but placed in modern times.  She’s the only one I know that does this so that’s why I stuck around as a reader.  Also she seems to be an alto.  I know no altos (most women I know are sopranos) so this fascinates me.
    • i hate so much… : Ehl. Oh. Ehl.  Holy crap can this girl make me pee my pants.
    • Musicians : Courtney, Chelsea, Laurie, Clover, Karmen, etc.  If you are musically inclined and female, you pretty much already own me.  Though I suppose Karmen is unfair as a blog crush since I now know her in real life.
  • Real Life Crushes
    • I refuse to implicate myself.  But if you’d like to know, how about you email me for the juicy details?  They’re not bad, I just want to be respectful of the people around me in real life.  Hit me up: crushes@nicopolitan.com.

Who Has The Jitters? This Guy.

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Coffee makes me twitch.

Smattering of information! Here:

Nerdness: Remember I was talking the other day about a WP plugin that’ll let you incorporate code into posts? Turns out there is an even better one called Raw HTML, which lets you escape your code pretty easily and effectively. This means that, unlike the WP-allow tags plugin (which actually served me pretty well), this one can be evoked on a case-by-case basis and won’t apply to the entirety of the blog. Right on.

But does it work? You betcha:

Dude… why? Just… why? Not a day goes by where I really wished I had learned Hiragana. And now I may never know why these dudes are getting hit in the nuts by … what appears to be a “nut shot machine”… Why the fuck would you make a nut shot machine? I would never be on this gameshow.

Drama: I make girls cry. I didn’t mean to, really. In actuality it wasn’t my fault since I was only a messenger. I guess that doesn’t matter since I was still a bearer of bad news. I probably shouldn’t broadcast this over the internet out of respect to those this situation involved but let’s just say it has something to do with a missing automobile.

Musicianship: I know I started a musician blog already but I have to ask a question to everyone: If one writes enough sets of music in a number of different styles, are those sets still that one person or can they all count as separate solo projects? For instance, I’ve been writing an electronic shoegaze set for forever, a post-punk set only recently, and a folktronic set for ideas that wouldn’t fit into the other two. Those three styles wouldn’t make sense to release under the same name… or would they?

Corporate Life: The reason I’m so hopped up on coffee is from needing to take work home tonight. A lot of people hate being under pressure, but I am actually quite fond of it. No! Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic! I’m of the mindset that if you have too much to do, it suggests that you have a lot of opportunities to accomplish just as much.

And this is weird for me, because I was totally not an over-achievers in school. My grades prove it.

January: I realize that this is your last ditch effort to screw up my life by making it difficult for not just me but those around me, but you will not succeed if I can do anything about it.

And now I have a bloody nose. What the hell…?

Musical Subdomains

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Well, looks like I’ve fallen off the blog-horse again because of some other distraction, but I’m pretty happy with that distraction since it has already come to fruition.  I’ve now set up a whole subdomain for all of musician-related stuff:







That means this blog is free, then, to talk about:

  • Nico’s comfortable life in the friend zone
  • The uncomfortable situations in which Nico must circumvent the friend zone
  • Nico’s friends, who are the greatest in the world, and whose greatness is only matched by their dorkiness
  • Stuff that has fallen off of the interweb dump truck (like this, for instance)
  • Social Media and its entailing craziness
  • Los Angeles, since I live here
  • Coffee
  • Working at a bar quitting work at the bar
  • Getting drunk at other people’s bars
  • Drugs Altered States of Perception Ok we’ll call them drugs
  • Self: -absorption, -awareness, -deprecation, -reflection
  • Ads I like (like this one)
  • Video Games
  • Intermittent operation of ostentatiously polysyllabic solicitations of Nico’s speculative erudition, foremost concerning metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics — but largely an indication of a fallibilistic ontology.
  • Burritos
  • Photoshop
  • Web development, tech, gadgets

And to think, I only removed musicianship, which is a huge part of my life, from the subject matter of this blog.  Apparently there’s a lot more to my life than I thought.



That’s a good feeling.



Had I mentioned that I finally have a reliable source of internet at my house?  After 1.5 months?  I’m really happy about that.

Nerd Talk and Colloquial

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Nerd Talk: Ordinarily, this isn’t a WordPress development blog, but people have been asking me what to do about WP posts not allowing certain kinds of code in their posts, like video embed code for sites outside of YouTube or widgets or straight up Javascript. So I found this plugin.

But does it work? Let’s find out:

Your browser does not support iframes.



Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas, 2003, original flash animation by Michal Migurski

See, ordinarily, WP doesn’t allow iframes, but you can do such a thing with this plugin. Quite the Godsend if you’d like to embed things like widgets or javascript, since WP already detects YouTube videos.

Regular Persons’ Talk: I am currently experiencing the buildup of four straight days of going out and drinking, culminating at a really, really good drum&bass / dubstep show. I am still sore from dancing on Saturday night. I am sore on muscles I didn’t know could get sore.

But, in other news, it seems Karmen (AKA Stef) might soon become an official member of one of my music projects! It’s cool when friendships forged over the internet blossom into band members. Who knew that would work out? Besides, we needed keyboards anyway.

We’ll post demos sometime soon. When we record. When I find all of our microphones.

But to blogreaders: Do you guys have any good ideas for a band name?

Real Life Lemonade

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Angela of angelaboration has been so kind as to award me with the Lemonade Award!  I’m really not sure what that means, but it requires the passing it on to further perceived greatness, so I’m going to do just that.  But I’m going with a theme: People I know (even vaguely) outside of blogland.  This doesn’t mean I have to have met them in person necessarily, but have somehow had real communication with them (email, let’s say).

On with the show:

  • Katelin of gorgeous footsteps in the sand
    • We were coworkers once, and I wouldn’t have even known about 20SB if it wasn’t for her, so there’s something to that.
  • Phil from All Things Phil
    • We’re going out drinking tonight in honor of his quarterlife!  And possibly with…
  • Ex-Everything
    • Don’t let her vitriol fool you, she’s a total sweetheart in real life.  Oh, but don’t let that get out.  I’m pretty sure she can kill me.
  • Starting Over @ 24
    • Interestingly, I only run into him when at least one of us is intoxicated in some manner.
  • Deutlich of Speak On It
    • Easily some of the most effectively entertaining IM conversations I’ve had in a while.
  • d-blogged
    • You all can expect an interesting little mashup project coming from us soon.  But I won’t say what it is.
  • Courtney of ’til the river runs dry
    • We’ve passed a couple of demos back and forth, and even her scratch tracks are stellar, inspiring me to learn how to sing again.
  • Karmen D Castro of Epiphanots
    • We might start a band soon, purely birthed out of the ether of blogland.  Will it work?  Only time will tell.
  • Gina Clover of The Internet Sensation
    • I’m thinking of putting this one front-and-center on the microphone for aforementioned band.  Of course, she has to agree to it first.
  • Michelle Woo
    • What an eloquent brain she has for one that is scattered.  Also someone I’d get drinks with again, easily.

Who Is My Opposite? And How Might I Attract Her?

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

First, I must say that it’s so awesome to have internet again on my home computer, and to have my feeds nicely nested in Net News Wire instead of its PC counterpart FeedDemon, which makes me murderous.  Wait, I just saw that they integrated nested folders for Outlook.  Why hadn’t I seen that before?  Bullocks.  My last statement is moot as I never needed to use FeedDemon in the first place.  But I’ll commit to it anyway.

[awkward pause]

So…

forgotcilantroBecause my failings at romance did so well when I talked about them before, I figure this is a fun topic to revisit upon my re-settling into the blogosphere.  It starts with a dinner I made for my roommate and her friend just because I felt like cooking. Upon serving Ahi Tuna steaks garnished with sliced lemons, some salad, and some modest pasta, roomie’s friend marveled, “Oh my God, Nico! What girl let you get away!?”

Side note: I was looking for an example of what I cooked and found this image, revealing that I should have also garnished the Ahi Tuna steaks with cilantro.  Aw crap.  I forgot cilantro… That’s cilantro, right?  What’s that herb on the edges of the plate?  What is the point of flavoring the plate’s borders and not the food?  Is it like salt on the edge of a margarita?  I somehow can’t see myself licking the plate before I eat a chunk of tuna.  Gourmet presentation confounds me.  Whatever.  At least quoting myself looks funny on an image of an Ahi Tuna steak.  Thanks, Adobe Photoshop.

So, to answer the question: Who let Nico get away?

(more…)

Friendly Disconnect

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I’ve been waiting for this to go public ever since it was announced, and I’m really fascinated with using this new little tool Google hath so benevolently bestowed upon us; but as of yet I only see possibilities — and no tangible results.

This is probably because I’m lazy and don’t want to learn the API to build my own tools with Google’s Friend Connect. Also I trust that others will think of tools I can’t even fathom, and then will subsequently build these tools. Which I will subsequently appropriate for my own purposes.  Which are incidentally malevolent good-natured.

As of now, though, it kind of works like OpenID. That is, a universal log-in status. You can see it beginning in my sidebar. The intent is to turn any website on which the scripts are dropped into instant social networks. Networked, yes, currently, but social, not as much. I’ll give it some time, though.

What would I like to see?

  • Wiring the universal sign in (à la Gravatar / OpenID) to blogs’ comment fields
  • In the user interface after signing in, an ability to aggregate activity on joined networks (like when you’re on a GAWKER blog how you can see all of your comments if you click on your user name)
  • Wiring into Ning networks (though I’m sure this would take little to no effort…)
  • Oh, I dunno.  What if every little app on my iPhone was somehow loosely translated to Google’s Friend Connect?  HOLY CRAP ON A CRACKER.
  • Cross-networking, similar to FriendFeed, incorporating Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, DeviantArt, etc.
  • In-network messaging, via masked Gmail or masked GChat (eg., “Some Dude on FriendConnect site, RadDotComrades.com, sent you a message” vs. Getting an email from “Specific.Name@gmail.com”), but making it spam-proofed (“LargeHardOnCollider sent you a message”)
  • Collaborative art projects
  • All the other Google technologies wired into Friend Connect

Ah, well.  At least Google is taking a step in the right direction.  And on a personal note, I do trust Google to help lead us into the future.  They’re doing alright so far, and if you told people 15 years ago about what Google is doing, they’d freak out about privacy and a ubiquitous technology.  But we’re fine.  Shit hasn’t hit the fan so far.  Seriously, Google it.

As I see it sitting in my sidebar right now, however, I can’t help but feel that being an early adopter won’t pay off for a long time.  After all, people have to give a crap before it takes off.