TWOISM
Two things that irritate me:
1. Songs that fade out
This has always seemed like a cop out on the part of musicians and producers alike. It always feels like they couldn't come up with a decent ending for the track and chose to repeat the chorus and pull the master fader instead. Unless you're James Brown and your band could hold a solid groove for twenty minutes then you have no reason to fade out (or you're a jam band, then you have my permission to cut it short because you probably suck). What especially kills me is when people take credit for arranging a song that fades out. Would you accept the text in a novel simply getting gradually smaller at the end? I thought not...
2. "Hidden" songs
This is just stupid. It's barely even clever once to have ten minutes of silence at the end of a CD and then have another song or stupid skit crop up. It's mostly just annoying. What's even more irritating is when the silence is built in to the final track so that you can't easily skip it. You aren't clever for doing this, you are a gimp.
Two things that are awesome:
1. Downloading videos from YouTube
This pretty much rocks. This site allows you to download any YouTube video as an FLV file. FLV alone is pretty useless for personal enjoyment, but if you have OS X you can get iSquint to easily convert it to Quicktime (with iPod video compatibility).
2. Legos a la carte
Recently I went to the Lego store and in the back they have buckets of single types of bricks and pieces. You can get a small or large container to fill with the Legos of your choice for a flat rate. Pure unfiltered Lego goodness. I would have crapped my pants twice if I saw it when I was a kid.
1. Songs that fade out
This has always seemed like a cop out on the part of musicians and producers alike. It always feels like they couldn't come up with a decent ending for the track and chose to repeat the chorus and pull the master fader instead. Unless you're James Brown and your band could hold a solid groove for twenty minutes then you have no reason to fade out (or you're a jam band, then you have my permission to cut it short because you probably suck). What especially kills me is when people take credit for arranging a song that fades out. Would you accept the text in a novel simply getting gradually smaller at the end? I thought not...
2. "Hidden" songs
This is just stupid. It's barely even clever once to have ten minutes of silence at the end of a CD and then have another song or stupid skit crop up. It's mostly just annoying. What's even more irritating is when the silence is built in to the final track so that you can't easily skip it. You aren't clever for doing this, you are a gimp.
Two things that are awesome:
1. Downloading videos from YouTube
This pretty much rocks. This site allows you to download any YouTube video as an FLV file. FLV alone is pretty useless for personal enjoyment, but if you have OS X you can get iSquint to easily convert it to Quicktime (with iPod video compatibility).
2. Legos a la carte
Recently I went to the Lego store and in the back they have buckets of single types of bricks and pieces. You can get a small or large container to fill with the Legos of your choice for a flat rate. Pure unfiltered Lego goodness. I would have crapped my pants twice if I saw it when I was a kid.