Keeping this account strictly for lulz. It makes even less sense to be under the “hakujins” name than the twitter account it used to be linked to. I had another one under “jimhaku” (I guess) that I’m sure I had excellent and well thought-out reasons for deleting. I think it was one of those sites that didn’t seem like it would last for legal reasons (like the original muxtape) but they seem to have gotten around it by linking mostly to youtubes that get deleted a week later (seems to happen less with more legit accounts/faster deletions you never even see/people wising up and ordering less takedowns). Anyway, I rejoined because a few people kept using the thing pretty decently and bookmarking one of these pages feels pretty dumb (do they even have feeds?). Namely, there’s Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelly and sometimes Sonic Youth producer John Agnello, who I used to see all the time in Jersey City and never knew who he was but he just seems like one of those guys, “who is that guy? I that guy…some guy? I should know that guy.” Like he looks like a guy from a band you saw once but can’t remember the name. Except he’s not in a band. Or maybe he was but now he just records other bands. One a those guys. Maybe Steve Shelly reblipped him and there’s his pic, I dunno how I figured it out.

So my early blips are all Principle Skinner quotes for some reason, then it became other Simpson characters, but only ones voiced by Harry Shearer, then quotes from other Harry Shearer acting roles, then briefly quotes from his radio show or maybe just stuff he said randomly in an interview or something. Seemed funny at the time. This was before I realized you could post without commenting at all. Most people get pretty silly with trying to be profound or quoting lyrics, I dunno.

You’ve also got Giant Robot’s Martin Wong on here holding things down. Lotta people have ditched the thing, just unfollowed a bunch that were dormant. Seems a lot of people joined just to have an account there but it hasn’t become a big thing so they don’t bother. I think it’s in a steady nerd-niche state. I don’t have it linked to twitter anymore because I think it must be just annoying to people that don’t use it. Why did it even keep working after I changed my twitter name? I guess I won’t use it for RIP posts at all anymore. Better to keep them all in one place. (Is this anything but pure asshole shit with the self-links? Seriously what am I doing.)

Up next, record reviews!

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Added a youtube playlist to the sidebar. It just has one video in it right now: Evelyn Glennie’s TED talk which I used to have embedded in there direct from the TED site. It never really embedded right, but I kinda liked how it looked in there provided the screen resolution was set to whatever. The youtube embed adjusts along with the resolution:

Here the TED version is an obvious win, but it’s pretty zoomed in. What happens the smaller you make it:

I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. I needed the module to be 300 px across to match the width of the album covers and that mattered more than getting all the frame in there. Everything else distorted the video itself withing the frame. (I didn’t think of screencapping my attempts when I was originally working on this, here is the page with the original code; here is one with my code.) I kept it like that for so long cause I was proud of my half-solution to the resizing problem, because it really seemed like that thing did not want to be resized. If anyone can figure it out I’m still curious. This started as a design issue, but I should really learn more about code in general.

Now that I’ve changed it, I kinda like that the TED slogan isn’t there anymore. But the slight border was nice and I’d like to change the thumbnail. I think there might be a way to change this within the youtube code. I’m going to keep messing with it. And I keep messing with the links, I dunno. Some links I took off if I’m following them through blogger, or twitter. It’s the ones I’ve subscribed directly to the RSS or sites I don’t want to forget. Every time I try to split up the links into more categories it causes a glitch that erases the underlining on the category name, which is awful, just awful! I know. This is all ridiculous. Also I’m keeping the Japan Society donation thing, which is not ridiculous, even though donating to the Red Cross at this point may accidentally be helping Americans hit by tornadoes and such, which you would never do otherwise, obviously. Man, I joke about my record collection and what not being a disaster, but at least it’s only scattered around this room and not over several square miles and/or the bottom of the ocean. Maybe it would be a huge relief losing the ability to obsess endlessly about it. Hopefully it never comes to that.

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Deleted my podomatic account. Second time. The less said about the first one might be the better. It was a futile attempt to stop myself from ruining my old blog, which I started doing something like a podcast on, but it kept derailing miserably. The move to the podomatic site did not improve things. Let’s say it was a learning experience. But the learning didn’t stop there, oh no. After writing the site off completely, I found several people doing interesting shows, and it looked like they were fixing up the site quite a bit. I made a new account, and lost no time turning a whole new show into a whole new complete disaster. I was working through some stuff. But forget about the show, I could now use the site to keep up with all these new podcasts! I can follow 10, 20…no better keep that within multiples of 3 so the grid fills out evenly…yes, yes!

Now, most of the shows I was following have stopped and the site’s updates have stagnated. Plenty of people still use the site, but 90% of them appear to be house DJs* and they’re all friends with each other and they all want to be friends with you if you play even one housey J-pop track (which, I did…nice video). I don’t hate it, but it’s become like the myspace of podcasting sites. It’s a good place to start.

So here are the ones I was following at one point or another:

 
I should really post some stuff to Soundcloud.

*probably not true; probably should be

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