Diffusers and Funnels: An Examination of Music Criticism

Paste Magazine is dead.

The website is going to remain running, but the paper-and-ink, blood-and-guts actual product-- the thing that you hold in your hands and experience, that's gone forever.

The Reality of the Digital Experience

All the work I do is on computers.

That's not that strange, in this year, in this decade, in this millennium. A lot of jobs require people to spend nearly all of their time on computers in one way or another. And it's not that strange on a personal level, either. With all of the handy, technologically advanced communication methods that computers offer us, more and more people interact socially over their computers.

The Long-Term Effects of Social Networking's Ubiquity

I like talking to people I disagree with.

Really, I do.

If you pay attention to my Shameless Self-Promotion series, you know that I do some writing as a critic, and I think part of my attraction to dissenting opinion is rooted in that critical mindset. If I can find another person who can give me a reasoned argument to a side of an argument I happen to disagree with, I find that not only impressive but respectable. Even though I have an opposing mindset to this person, the spirit behind our mindsets is the same. We've both come to our ideas from a place of intense thought, one that's carefully weighed the arguments for both sides.

Sex and the History of the World

I was watching the movie Public Enemies the other day, the Michael Mann-directed crime drama from this year starring Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger and Christian Bale as the FBI agent assigned to bring him in. Not a bad flick, overall, but it lacked some of the fire and intriguing moral ambiguity of previous Mann films like Heat, or even Collateral.

Still, worth a rent. Check it out.

Anyway, in that film there's a scene with Dillinger and his girlfriend, Billie Frechette (played by Marion Cotillard). Perpetuating the idea that women can be bought, Dillinger buys Billie a fur coat and, in return, she has sex with him. How fucking romantic.

Sonny Tzu's The Art of Television

Television is the basest form of entertainment. At its most crude, it satisfies our most instinctual urges - for sex and violence - in increasingly banal ways. The most perfectly distilled form of this sort of television is easily The Real World. Every subsequent season, the producers at MTV come up with more and more ways to convince people, in situations that are almost bizarrely mundane, to hate, love, fight, fuck and betray each other. Usually between the same two people.