8-14-08 Parts and Labor – A Great Divide

Continuing the Parts and Labor theme today, we move on to A Great Divide, off 2006’s Stay Afraid. Never has alienation and isolation sounded so damn heroic. Worth a listen or three.

You can listen or download the MP3 version of A Great Divide by clicking on the link below. It comes courtesy of Parts and Labor and the Audio/Video section on their Web site.

Parts and Labor – A Great Divide (MP3)

Hurrah, I’m a Geek

Someone might think I’m a geek? They’d be right, Sean. I am a geek. And this is not particularly a bad thing.

And I know what you mean about pop music that rises forever. Take this song:

Bach's Endlessly Rising Modulation Canon

This canon is designed so that it keeps rising, and loops back to the same place, an octave higher.

I ran into it because I’ve read Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach”. Which *really* proves I’m a geek.

And I do read Slashdot. I ran into this video on Slashdot a few days ago, in fact:

Large Hadron Rap

I just thought this was really cool. How often do you get to hear people sings about particle accelerators?

Though this a a particularly cool one; the largest in the world. And know we know what physicists do when they get down.

Though if you have that much dark matter, bring a light, or you might be eaten by a grue. ^_^

It is Pitch Dark - MC Frontalot

Another sign of my being a geek; I love text adventures. And I recognized most of the references here, having played almost all of Infocoms games, Dungeon, and a number of other text adventures.

Of course, I personally frotz grues.

The Infocom games used a virtual machine that’s been ported across just about all platforms, so you can download an interpreter from here, such as Frotz, and play them with it.

And a lot of games have been written that use that interpreter. The ones here, for example.

Then there’s this song, which has references to quite a lot of video games:

Dead Again - Possible Oscar

This song certainly owes something to “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, by Billy Joel. And I’ve played a lot of these games: Gauntlet, Out of This World, Monkey Island, Kingdom Hearts, and Myst, to name a few.

And died in most of them. Though dying takes real effort in Monkey Island; there’s only one spot in the game where it’s possible. Stay underwater for more then 10 minutes. 🙂

Oh, and Seans headed to his grandmothers memorial service for a few days. He wrote posts for that time period, which I’ll put up, but obviously we won’t be bouncing off each others posts for that time…