Onyxia is one of the toughest bosses in World of Warcraft. My guild has been trying to kill her for several months.
Tonight we finally succeeded! We're having a guild meeting next weekend to hang the head of the dragon on the gates of Stormwind.
Vae Victus!
This morning the shuffled playlist on my iPod served me up Bjork's "Big Time Sensuality." "Debut" was one of the 12 CDs I brought with me to Hong Kong when I lived there for 6 steamy weeks in the summer of 2000. I kept all the spare CDs in the punchcode safe of my overposh hotel room and would parcel a couple out at a time to feed my discman.
As a result, "Big Time Senuality" is, for me, the smell of the Hong Kong subway at rush hour and the 7-storey astonishment of a Kowloon electronics store after work.
Sadly, I didn't keep a blog, didn't have a digital camera and didn't have an iPod at that time. Aside from some lengthy emails (one a 20-page review of the 2nd Eminem album) there are hardly any digital artifacts of that trip.
But here's an idea that would make the iPod Photo more interesting to me if there were. iTunes keeps track of your listening history, including songs you heard on your iPod. iPhoto knows when you took the pictures that it stores. What if when you're listening to a given song on your iPod, it showed you pictures taken around the time you'd previously heard that song. To me, this would be much more interesting than just showing a random slideshow or the album art.
I would also like it if my iPod stored a copy of my blog's posts (partially available in XML, just like the iTunes history) so that it could toss up a couple posts from the same time period.
Of course, this is only interesting if you've had iTunes, iPhoto or a blog for a couple years. But that will be increasingly true.
Basically, the most valuable data on my laptop are my iTunes music history (from December 2002), my photos (June 2002) and my email archives (August 1996). This is the stuff that has to move with me when I switch computers. And as time goes on, this is the stuff that will be more and more rewarding to review, combine and surface in new ways.
Le Cheval 2.1 is a 90 second film that was shown tonight before Me, You and Everyone We Know. Both movies are absolutely incredible. But you can watch Le Cheval 2.1 on the internet right now.
Also, for the past 24 hours I've been repeatedly listening to DJ Food's hour-long megamix, Raiding the 20th Century. It's both entertainment and musical history lesson, combining a total overview of remix culture with wacky commentary on significant moments from british weirdo Paul Morley.
Not to give everything away, but the end of the whole deal is the Kylie Minogue/New Order mashup "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head" over which Paul Morley pronounces,
"From somewhere I get a message from Kylie. It comes to me at the exact moment I first hear 'Can't Get You Out of my Head' blended with New Order's Blue Monday which is a lot of the time my favorite piece of pop music by my favorite group. As I hear Kylie virtually sing her happy song of loss, it's as if the new lead singer of Joy Division is Kylie Minogue. And for private reasons there's something fabulous and irresistible about that."I'm so with you, Paul. And here's the torrent.
Ever since my trip to New Zealand I've been listening to the Dune books on my iPod. They were a great companion in New Zealand - although there were some unintended side effects. For example, after a day of listening to Dune Messiah, I would attempt to winkle out the hidden meanings in whatever was being said to me.
"What plans within plans lie behind her question of whether I want dessert?"
Anyway, I'm now in the middle penultimate novel, Heretics of Dune and it's a great return to form for the series. That is to say, stuff actually happens as opposed to the prior book, God Emperor of Dune, which is 400 pages of philosophical bullshit espoused by some dude who's transmorphed into a sandworm over the course of 3500 years but who still has his hands and misses his penis very much.
Despite the wormpenis bit, Dune has never had quite the same geek-adolescent obsession with sex that's common in sci-fi. At least until you get to Heretics. This morning, the following passage tickled my eardrums on shuttle ride into work ... at which point I busted up:
"Agility!" Lucilla allowed her tone to convey the full weight of a Reverend Mother's outrage. No matter that this might be what Sirafa hoped to achieve, she had to be put in her place! "Agility, you say? I can control genital temperature. I know and can arose the fifty-one excitation points. I --"
"Fifty-one? But there are only --"
"Fifty-one!" Lucilla snapped. "And the sequencing plus the combinations number two thousand and eight. Futhermore, in combination with the two hundred and five sexual positions -- "
"Two hundred and five?" Sirafa was clearly startled. "Surely, you don't mean --"
"More, actually, if you count minor variations. I am an Imprinter, which means I have mastered the three hundred steps of orgasmic amplication!"
