free live music
Today I discovered the Live Music Archive which has thousands of guilt-free live shows of thousands of different trade-friendly bands.
So far I’ve listened to entire shows by Hit and Run Bluegrass, Old School Freight Train, My Morning Jacket, and right now, Spoon. I’ve just been streaming them cause I don’t know how to use the .flac format, but they sound pretty good just steaming anyways.
It’s pretty sweet. Just thought I’d share.
bravo, Bravo.
There should be a VCD reality show, all Project Runway style. Although, as Riley pointed out we’d have to figure out how to get models on the show too. Maybe they could wear our designs mounted on foam core like sandwich boards. That’d be cool, right?
Four Things
Because Zach told me to, even though I think I might have filled this out before.
Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
Ad Design @ The Daily
Illustrator For various things
Telefundraiser: “Hi, this is Jayne calling for…”
“Hourly Associate” at Bread Co.
Four movies I can watch over and over:
Amelie
Fight Club
Moulin Rouge
The Lion King
(I actually haven’t seen any of those in a long time, but I have seen them a bunch. I think it’s time for another Lion King showing.)
Four places I have lived:
(new apt.) Seattle, WA
(old apt.) Seattle, WA
(dorm) Seattle, WA
St.Louis, MO
Four TV shows I love to watch:
(or rather, shows I don’t mind watching)
Project Runway ( this is all Riley’s fault)
24 ( getting into it a bit, due to Zach)
Family Guy (haven’t watched in forever)
The Daily Show (when I catch it)
Four places I have been on vacation:
Thailand
China
Vancouver, BC
New York
Four websites I visit daily:
Gmail. but i don’t think it really counts, even if I check it several times a day.
Bloglines, which sort of covers all the blogs.
Flickr: Semi-daily
Google: Google knows everything
Four of my favorite foods:
Indian Food. Oh man do I LOVE Indian food. Soooo much. Chicken Curry and garlic naan have to be some of the greatest foods ever.
Thai Food, which is way better than Chinese food. Thai deserts are the best deserts.
Japanese Food: Mmm.. Sushi.
Italian Food: I miss St. Louis’ awesome Italian food.
Four places I would rather be right now:
My bed. 4 hours of sleep is not enough for me.
At Zach’s place, where there’s good company, good music, and a giant ball I could roll around on.
At the chai lounge… mmm. chai sounds really good right now.
In the kitchen. I have lots of food, and it keeps beckoning me.
(weird how I’d only like to be within a 3 block radius of where I am right now. apparently I’m happy with where I am.)
Four bloggers I am tagging:
Riley
Peter
who ever else reads this thing these days. (x2)
otterific
This is sort of how I feel right now. I’m not totally sure how to describe it other than a general “AH!” I just don’t want to do anything productive lately. Instead I’ve been wasting time looking for design internships and jobs I’m not qualified for yet, instead of working on my design projects… which is stupid for obvious reasons.
But it did make me realize how many places I could potentially work as a designer eventually, if I pulled my shit together and actually started making better stuff. I’ve started to compile a “companies I’d like to work for list” just for fun, although it makes me feel like a bit brand oriented, cause they’re mostly big name companies, and I know there are tons of smaller firms and companies that are just ast good.. but whatever, listy time:
Design Firms:
1. Digital Kitchen
2. Meta Design
3. Imaginary Forces
Companies:
1. Amazon.com
2. Apple
3. Google
It’s not so much an order of preference, just a top 3. The top one being so high because they’re Seattle based, and close to home. Although I don’t know why I would ever turn down any of those. Actually, I’d probably be pretty happy if anyone takes me right out of college.
It’s weird how much I’m looking forward to working lately when I’m so bored of school, cause I get the impression work is pretty similar… but I dunno. Maybe I just need something different. I want to stop pretending to make things, and start making real things..
late bloomers
I like looking at new pictures of my old friends from highschool. Everyone is like twice as goregeous. How does that happen?
I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what you were like in highschool cause everyone gets hotter in college. I wish that somewhere in my awkward middle school years someone would have bothered to tell me that.
apple lust.
Oh MacBook Pro, how I want you. so bad. I spent the entire day lusting. Hopefully we will be together by the end of Feburary.
in other news… my journal of others that I’ve been working on has been kind of interesting. It sort of forces me to notice what sort of information I pick up from different kinds of people, even if most of the stuff I remember is small. It also makes me realize how very little I can retain from what people tell me. I like to think that I remember things well, but apparently I’m terrible at it. Or at least I’ve noticed it’s a lot harder for me to remember things from people who I’m already pretty close with.
I think part of that is alot of information gets sort of sucked into a massive archive of info about them, and not really specific to an instance, where as people I don’t know as well seem to stand out a lot more. Probably cause I have so little other information about them. I dunno, but I swear I’m really trying to be a better listener & remember…er. This, combined with my communications class is sort of making me hyper-aware of all my interactions. It’s sort of strange to constantly feel like I’m watching myself talk to other people. Or when people are perfect examples of things we’ve talked about in class.
We talked about how people gather information about other people, including things like facebook, and google. And how we’re increasingly being more personal in public spaces (like blogging). It makes me wonder how many people here at UW are reading this outside of my “known” readership. I mean, aside from the flatmate, the neighbor, and the boyfriend who I would think get enough info from me to not need to read it again. Of course I’m pretty awful at disclosing things, so maybe not. But I know people are getting here via facebook occasionally, I just don’t know who. Not that it really matters to me. I obviously wouldn’t post things I didn’t want people to read. But I’m just curious. I wish facebook stalkers would at least leave me comments or something.
Sort of back to the begining, I think one of the neat things about Apple has been their way of democratizing the media, allowing people to create all sorts of neat things without being extremely specialized. I think that’s what really gets people into The Cult of Mac. They seem to actually care about people and support our various personal creative endeavors. I mean, even just things like GarageBand or iMovie or whatever.
I think the new iWeb thing sounds pretty neat. I don’t think I’d really use it that often, cause I’m not much of a podcaster. (Although maybe I will be someday). But it’s cool how Apple sees that people are increasingly wanting to make things and share things with people, in a mass-media sort of way, and its cool that they make it easier.
I’ve always been for becoming part of the media, cause I think it’s a lot harder to be overyly controled by media when you’re the ones shaping it and spreading it. Maybe that’s why I made zines, and why I blog, and why I work at a newspaper, and why I’m doing VCD. And to some extent, part of why I like printmaking. I’d rather be part of creating mass media instead of absorbing it. (although I do my share of absorbing as well, like when I kept hitting refresh on the live updates from Macworld this morning).
I guess I’m done rambling…
newness
Ah.. A new year and a new quarter! Although new calendar years really don’t mean anything I think they help me organize my life. It’s occured to me (after it was pointed out to me) that I like cycles. I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about them extensively, maybe because I spend so much of my life going after new things and trying to avoid feeling like I’m acting primarily out of routine or habit. Perhaps I don’t really like cycles so much as the beginings of them.
Anyways, break went pretty well. I felt like I missed out on some pretty prime makin-stuff-for-jayne’s-amusement time cause I spent so much of it finishing those illustrations. But I know it’s just my fault for not planning out my time better… which is something to work on.
New years weekend was spent at The Mountaineer’s lodge up at Steven’s Pass with the Hales, which was pretty cool. Nice, relaxing and communal (shared chores, volunteer cook). It was pretty interesting how friendly everyone was with everyone else at the lodge. I’m pretty sure most of the people didn’t know any of the other families or couples there, but they seemed to be relatively social with each other. I mean, contrasting with say a standard hotel or something where people hardly interact with each other at all. And the volunteer cook happened to be a chef at one of the downtown seafood restraunts, so the meals were all really tasty. And Zach’s mom brought tasty trail mix fixins for when we went cross country skiing, which was fun.
Today’s also the first day of class, which went well. General new quarter anxiety, but I’ve come to pretty much just expect that, and figure I’ll get over it in a few days.
The Interpersonal Communications class seems pretty awesome and fun. We have to write stuff but half of those are journal type things, which I think I can handle, and the other half is stuff I’m interested in anyways… so yeah, I’m excited for it!
And my Communications Programs (VCD) class should be pretty good. We’re doing one large quarter-long conference project about “The Future of the Oceans.” It looks pretty cool. I’m glad it’s Oceans and not cities or natural disasters like they’ve done the past few years, cause the ocean itself is just pretty damn sweet in general with it’s creepy deep sea creatures and pretty coral reefs. I feel like I should have a giant squid in there somewhere, just for Riley.
And I suppose now would be a good time for those New Years Resolutions. Nothing terribly inventive I’m afraid.
Start running again. It’s too cold, but I should try anyways. I’m going to try tomorrow morning… hopefully.
Eat out less. I am perfectly capable to throwing together bag lunches and eating dinner at home, esp. durring the week. and I HAVE to learn to make chicken curry. I love it too much. Notice this isnt really about eating better, persay, but providing my own food and cooking, maybe even planning my food in advance to avoid the “omg I am so damn hungry, screw it.” thing.
Schedule my life better. I suffer from serious distractability. Despite my distaste for general routines and all, I feel like it would help me get things done and in the end give myself more time to make random stuff.
Buy less shit. I am always putting this on my lists of things to do… but I seem to forget about it pretty quickly. I also seem to suffer from seirious ratpackability.
I’m also starting a journal about other people. Zach calls it my stalker handbook, but it’s not really. More about this as it develops though.
