#it was a mashup/edit i made in early 2021

[dacuslucy]

wait what is your 100k post i want to see it

try and find it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Down in the (link)dumps

On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

Back when I was writing on Boing Boing, I'd slam out 10-15 blog posts every day, short hits that served as signpost and public notebook, but I rarely got into longer analysis of the sort I do daily now on Pluralistic. Both modes are very useful for organizing one's thoughts, and indeed, they complement each other:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The problem is that when you write long, synthetic essays, they crowd out the quick hits. Back in May 2022, I started including three short links with each edition of Pluralistic, in a section called "Hey look at this" (thanks to Mitch Wagner for suggesting it!):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#linkdump

But even with that daily linkdump, I still manage to accumulate link-debt, as interesting things pile up, not rising to the level of a long blog-post, but not so disposable as to be easy to flush. When the pile gets big enough, I put out a Saturday Linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

All of which is to say, it's Saturday, and I've got a linkdump!

First up, a musical interlude. I've been listening to DJ Earworm's amazing mashups since 2005 and while I've got dozens of tracks that shuffle in and out of my daily playlist, the one that makes me wanna get up and dance every time is "No One Takes Your Freedom," a wildly improbable banger composed of equal parts Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, George Michael and Scissor Sisters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaboIeW1A_4

I defy you to play that one without bopping a little. I think it's the French horn from "For No One" that really kills it, the world's least expected intro to a heavy dance beat.

Moving swiftly on: let's talk about fonts. I remember when Wired magazine first showed up at the bookstores I was working at in Toronto, and my bosses – younger men than I am now! – complained that the tiny, decorative fonts, rendered in silver foil on a purple background, was illegible. I laughed at them, batting my young eyes and devouring the promise of a better future with ease, even in dim light.

Now it's thirty years later and I'm half-blind. Both my my decaying, aging eyes are filmed with cataracts that I'm too busy to get removed (though my doc promises permanent 20:20, perfect night-vision, and implanted bifocals when I can spare a month from touring with new books to get 'em fixed).

Which is to say: I spend a lot more time thinking about legibility now than I did in the early 1990s, and I've got a lot more sympathy for those booksellers' complaints about Wired's aggressively low-contrast design today. I'm forever on the hunt for fonts designed for high legibility.

This week, Kottke linked to B612, a free/open font family "designed for aircraft cockpit screens," commissioned by Airbus. It's got all the bells and whistles (e.g. hinting) and comes in variable and monospace faces:

https://b612-font.com/

B612 arrived at a fortuitous moment, coinciding with a major UI overhaul in Thunderbird, the app I spend the second-most time in (I spend more time in Gedit, the bare-bones text-editor that comes with Ubuntu, the flavor of GNU/Linux I use). A previous Thunderbird UI experiment had made all the UI text effectively unreadable for me, causing me to dive deep into the infinitely configurable settings to sub in my own fonts:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css

The new UI is much better, but it broke all my old tweaks, so I went back into those settings and switched everything to B612, and it's amazeballs. I tried doing the same in Gedit, but B612 mono was too light for my shitty eyes, so I went back to Jetbrains Mono, another free/open font that has 8 weights to choose from:

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

Love me a new, legible font! Meanwhile, a note for all you designers: the received wisdom that black on white type is "hard on the eyes" is a harmful myth. Stop with the grey-on-white type, for the love of all that is holy. This isn't 1992, you aren't laying out type for Wired Issue 1.0. Contrast is good, actually.

Continuing on the subject of software updates: Mastodon, the free, open, federated social media platform that anyone can host and that lets you hop between one server and another with just a couple clicks, has released a major update, focusing on usability, especially for people unfamiliar with its conventions:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/

Included in this fix: a major overhaul to how you interact with posts on servers other than your home server. This was both confusing and clunky, and the fix makes it much better. They've also changed how sign-up flow works, making things simpler for newbies, and they've cleaned up the UI, tweaking threads, web previews and other parts of the daily experience.

There's also a lot of changes to search, but search still remains less than ideal, with multi-server search limited to hashtags. This is bad, actually. Thankfully, we don't have to wait for Mastodon devs to decide to fix it, because Mastodon is free and open, which means anyone with the skills to code a change, or the money to pay techies to do it, or the moral force to convince them to do it, can effect that change themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

Case in point: Mastoreader, a great new thread reader for Mastodon:

https://mastoreader.io/

Every time that guy who owns Twitter breaks it even worse, a new cohort of users sign up. Not all of them stay, but the growth is steady and the trendline is solid:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/

It's the right call: while there are other services that promise that they will be federated someday, promises are easy, and there's world of difference between "federateable" and "federated." As GW Bush told us, "Fool me twice, we don't get fooled again":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

One big difference between the kind of blogging I used to do in my Boing Boing days and the long-form work I do today is the graphics. When you're posting 10-15 times/day, you can't make each graphic a standout (or at least, I can't). But I can (and do) devote substantial time to making a single collage out of public domain and Creative Commons graphics every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/

I am not a visual person – literally, I can barely see! – but my daily art practice has slowly made me a less-terrible illustrator. I got in some good licks this week, like this graphic for the UAW's new "Eight-and-Skate" work-to-rule program:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

That graphic was fun because all the elements were from the public domain, or fair use. I love it when that happens. I've spent years amassing a bulging folder of public domain clip art ganked from the web and this week, it got a major infusion, thanks to the Bergen Public Library's Flickr album of high-rez scans of antique book endpapers. 86 public domain textures? Yes please! (Also, the fact that Flickr has one-click download of all the hi-rez versions of every image in a photoset is another way that it stands out as a remnant of the old, good web, not so much a superannuated relic as an elegant weapon of a more civilized age):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergen_public_library/albums/72157633827993925

Speaking of strikes: there are strikes! Everygoddamnedwhere! After 40 years in a Reagan-induced coma, labor is back, baby. The Cornells School of Industrial and Labor Relations' Labor Action Tracker is your go-to, real-time observation post as hot labor summer turns into the permanent revolution. As of this writing, it's listing 968 labor actions in 1491 locations:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu

There's no war but class war and it was ever thus. Brian Merchant's forthcoming book Blood In the Machine is a history of the Luddites, revisiting that much-maligned labor uprising, which has been rewritten as a fight between technophobes and the inevitable forces of progress:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

The book unearths the true history of the Ludds: they were skilled technologists who were outraged by capital's commitment to immiseration, child slavery, and foisting inferior goods on a helpless public. You can get a long preview of the book in Fast Company:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90949827/what-the-luddites-can-teach-us-about-standing-up-to-big-tech

Merchant also talked with Roman Mars about the book on the 99 Percent Invisible podcast:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/transcript/

If that's piqued your interest and if you can make it to Los Angeles, come by Chevalier's Books this Wednesday, where Brian and I are having a joint book-launch (I've just published The Internet Con, my Luddite-adjacent "Big Tech Disassembly Manual"):

https://www.eventbrite.com/o/chevaliers-books-8495362156

Where is all this labor unrest coming from? Well as Stein's Law has it, "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." 40 years of corporate-friendly political economy has lit the world on fire and immiserated billions, and we've hit bottom and started the long, slow climb to a world that prioritizes human thriving over billionaire power.

One of the most tangible expressions of that vibe shift is the rise and rise of antitrust. The big news right now is the (first) trial of the century, Google's antitrust trial. What's that? You say you haven't heard anything about it? Well, perhaps that has to do with the judge banning recording and livestreaming and not making transcripts available. Don't worry, he's also locking observers out of his courtroom for hours at a time during closed testimony. Oh, and also? The DoJ just agreed that it won't post its exhibits from the trial online anymore. You can follow what dribbles of information as are emerging from our famously open court system at US v Google:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

If the impoverished trickle of Google antitrust news has you down, don't despair, there's more coming, because the FTC is apparently set to drop its long-awaited suit against Amazon:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftc-poised-sue-amazon-antitrust-163432081.html

Amazon spent years blowing hundreds of millions of dollars of its investors' cash, selling goods below cost and buying up rivals until it became the most important channel for every kind of manufacturer to reach their customers. Now, Amazon is turning the screws. A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance details the 45% Amazon Tax that every merchant pays to reach you:

https://ilsr.org/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023/

That 45% tax is passed on to you – whether or not you shop at Amazon. Amazon's secretive most favored nation terms mean that if a seller raises their price on Amazon, they have to raise it everywhere else, which means you're paying more at WalMart and Target because of Amazon's policies.

Those taxes are bad for us, but they're good for Amazon's investors. This year, the company stands to make $185 billion from junk-fees charged to platform sellers. As David Dayen points out, Amazon charges so much to ship third-party sellers' goods that it fully subsidizes Amazon's own shipping:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-21-amazons-185-billion-pay-to-play-system/

That's right: as Stacy Mitchell writes in the report, "Amazon doesn’t have to build warehousing and shipping costs into the price of its own products, because it’s found a way to get smaller online sellers to pay those costs."

Now, one of the amazing things about antitrust coming back from the grave is that just the threat of antitrust enforcement can moderate even the most vicious bully's conduct. Faced with the looming FTC case, Amazon just canceled its plan to charge even more junk fees:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/amazon-drops-planned-merchant-fee-ftc-lawsuit-looms-bloomberg-news-2023-09-20/

But despite this win, Amazon is still speedrunning the enshittification cycle. The latest? Unskippable ads in Prime Video:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-22/amazon-prime-video-content-to-include-ads-staring-early-2024

Remember when Amazon promised you ad-free video if you'd lock yourself into shopping with them by pre-paying for a year's shipping with Prime? The company has fully embraced the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."

That FTC case can't come a moment too soon.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/23/salmagundi/#dewey-102

[biolizardboils]

my fanmixes (mobile-friendly edition)

(click on a title to see that mix’s dedicated post, where you can choose a platform to listen to it on! if a song is missing on any platform, please let me know so I can fix it asap!! also feel free to ask me about why i chose specific songs, pretty please)

(as of 2023 i also make mashups! more on those here!)

(last updated on May 21st, 2023!)

Sonic the Hedgehog

UP / DOWN / ALL AROUND (2015) — OUTDATED.

the chaos is the constant (2016) — OUTDATED.

REVELRY (2017)— Made for the release of Sonic Mania. New jack swing, 80’s dance-pop, future funk.

REVOLT (2017) — Made for the release of Sonic Forces. Hard and alternative rock, post-grunge, house, drumstep.

circumnavigation (2018) — A tribute to Sonic Unleashed. Alternative rock, movie soundtracks, and various selections from around the world.

READY TO RUN (2020) — A personal mix for Movie!Sonic, aka Sonic Wachowski. Folk rock, pop punk, electronica.

Here Come the 90’s (2021) — A retelling of the four big Classic-era games. New jack swing, 80’s synth rock, 90’s pop rock, r&b.

Above the Waves (2021) — A tribute to Sonic Adventure, with songs for each major location and playable character. Jazz fusion, hard rock, and techno-pop from the mid-to-late 90’s.

Among the Stars (2021) — A tribute to Sonic Adventure 2, with a heavy focus on Shadow. Hard, punk, and alternative rock from the early 2000’s and beyond.

MMVI (Due Mille Sei) (2021) — A somber reflection on Sonic ‘06, and its effects on both the characters and the entire series. Acoustic-heavy indie pop and alternative rock.

Chromaticity (2021) — A rave-worthy tribute to Sonic Colors. House, EDM, and dance-pop from the early 2010’s.

AGES (2021) — A tribute to Sonic Generations, featuring the stylings of the last five fanmixes. Pop rock, dance-pop, EDM, and miscellaneous.

THE WAY WE ROLL (2022) — A sequel to READY TO RUN, as wild and eclectic as Sonic Movie 2. Pop punk, acoustics, atmospheric rock.

POV: You live next to Club Rouge (2022) — Not a playlist, but otherwise self-explanatory. Miscellaneous EDM.

digitally_restored (2023) — A structured recounting of Sonic Frontiers, and how it reestablishes the world and those in it. Pop punk, metalcore, artpop.

Gravity Falls

steady as the stars in the woods (2016) — A goodbye mix made a few days before the show ended. Indie folk, folk rock.

A REAL WISEGUY (2016) — A tribute to Bill Cipher; his deceptive charm, his depravity, and his possible regret. Electro swing, drumstep, moombahton.

faded pictures bleached by sun, vol. 1, 2, 3, and 4 (2017) — Four playlists that capture the general mood of 10 episodes each. Indie folk, folk rock, alternative rock.

How To DJ R-R-Right (2022) — Not a playlist, but an hour-long mixset to celebrate the show’s 10th anniversary. Folktronica/folk house, glitch hop, trap, and miscellaneous EDM.

Captain Underpants

Extra Crunchy Playlist o’ Fun (2017) — OUTDATED.

Usually Responsible (2017) — A tribute to George and Harold’s lifelong friendship, as shown in the books. Acoustic, alternative, and pop rock, 90’s and 2000’s hip hop.

SIDE A: The Warden / SIDE B: Mr. Blue Sky (2017) — Two mixes about Mr. Krupp, the Captain himself, and how they might feel about each other if they met. Bluegrass, piano rock, chiptune, TV show theme songs, indie rock.

Other

the hero of time descends. (2015) — A somber mix for Link from Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Indie folk, stomp and holler, art pop.

‘til i’m done growing up (2015) — An eclectic tribute to the MOTHER/EarthBound trilogy. Alternative rock, soft rock, worldbeat, folk.

and the world’s gonna know your name. (2018) — A tribute to the Super Smash Bros. series, made for the release of Ultimate. Chiptune, hip-hop, EDM.

“if you wanna be saved…” (2019) — A super-late retelling of Cuphead. 1920’s big band and swing.

AiR BALLOON (2019) — A loose retelling of NiGHTS’ backstory and character arc, combining the stories and musical stylings of both NiGHTS games. Dark cabaret, electronica, indie folk.

[matpisound]

memes, and the role of music

Yeah, you heard me right. I'm gonna be talking about memes. Lately, I've been thinking about how much music has become intertwined with meme culture, and how certain songs can become memes on their own. Given that I write a music blog, I thought I'd write about my thoughts on the subject. How DOES music reach meme status?

Well first, we have to define what a meme even is. Obviously it's not just an image edited with a funny caption in Impact font or oversaturated to the point at which it's incomprehensible. Music has to be involved somewhere in there, or else this whole argument falls to pieces. There has to be a broader definition somewhere, right? Yes, there is, and it gives us a perfect grounding for establishing the meme status of music. According to Wikipedia, the term "meme" was coined in Richard Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene, and it defines the word as a cultural entity that can be considered a replicator; basically an idea that can be spread by people copying it and showing it to others, and it can include images, melodies, behaviors, and anything else that can easily be transmitted.

So why does this matter? We can now devise a way to categorize music memes based on what aspect of culture they appeal to. I won't go into every single meme song that exists, but I will go over some of the biggest meme songs in the past couple of years, and there are four main categories that all of them fall into:

Songs that have some sort of cultural significance on their own

Songs relating to shared cultural experiences

Songs that serve as part of a meme, without which the meme potential is lost

Remixes, typically of a sound that has cultural significance

For songs with their own cultural significance, we need look no further that January 2021 with the sea shanty craze; specifically, "The Wellerman". It's a perfect example of how social media has become embedded in musical culture and how sites like TikTok can bring people together through features that allow collaboration. Adam Neely made an in-depth video on this, but the gist of it was that the duet feature in TikTok allows people to come together with collaborative projects like singing sea shanties in a time when we're forced to stay apart. There are other songs that became memes through similar means. "Gangnam Style", "The Cha Cha Slide", and "The Cupid Shuffle" all became popular to the point of memes because they went viral on social media (mainly YouTube) and they were participatory in the sense they had signature dances, which were easy enough for anyone to do, solidifying them into a widespread culture. Some songs are memes due to their established presence in this culture, and they're songs people are expected to know either within a certain group or just in general. Just think "September", "Mamma Mia", and even "Renai Circulation" all became memes simply because of their existence within modern culture.

Culture also follows songs that are entertaining, i.e. funny, and funny songs are part of the epitome of meme culture. These come from the very early days of YouTube all the way to some of the newest TikTok audios. Take the keyboard cat on YouTube for example. Who doesn't love a cat in a suit playing some funky tunes on a keyboard? And Nyan Cat; an upbeat tune made out of synthesized meows while a cat with a PopTart for a body flies through space while farting rainbows. These random gems reflect the spirit of the internet in terms of creativity and just pure fun. There are also songs that are almost like musical shitposts; songs that have almost no meaning but exist for the sole purpose of entertainment through the random. Big Shaq's "Mans Not Hot" is such a fun song, and was really popular a few years ago because of its random lyrics and especially the verse that was just beatboxing. Songs that are so bad they're funny are popping up a lot as well. "Gucci Gang", sporting a laughably terrible sounding beat and 99% of the lyrics just being "Gucci Gang", climbed its way up to meme status just because of how bad it was. The meme status of these songs depends on the hilarity and ridiculousness that internet memes were founded on, and because of that, have embedded themselves into the worldwide meme culture.

Next is songs that relate to shared cultural experiences, so basically all of the movie tunes, game soundtracks, and just other experiences that aren't inherently musical, but contain musical elements. Everyone loves Smash Mouth's "All Star", and was popularized through none other than the hit movie Shrek. On its own it's a great song, but it's unlikely it would have reached the fame it has today had it not been for Shrek, which in and of itself has become a meme. Of course, the other one that everyone knows is "Megalovania" from the game Undertale. Its simple musical motifs combined to make it the insanely recognizable tune it is today, and has almost detached itself from its source entirely. Mario Kart has had several songs that have become memes, including "Coconut Mall" as well as "Dolphin Shoals", which gave birth to the famous Mario Kart Lick. And who could forget about Star Wars with its main theme, "The Imperial March", and "Duel of the Fates" among others. Lazy Town gave us a few gems as well, like "Cooking by the Book" and of course "We Are Number One". Most of these reach meme status because there are simple musical elements that make them instantly recognizable and can trigger pleasant memories of whatever media they came from, that media being a shared piece of culture among the majority of a generation. "All Star" begins that iconic leap from the the root to the fifth of the scale on the opening line, and "Coconut Mall" creates that frenzied feeling like entering a Macy's on Black Friday which just makes it so fun to listen to.

I need to take a minute to comment on the songs in this category that arguably had the biggest impact on the culture of this generation: Minecraft Parodies. Simply say "Creeper" in a room full of high schoolers and I guarantee you it will be followed by a chorus of "Aww man", most likely followed by the rest of the song. You probably already know what song I'm talking about. "Revenge" by CaptainSparklez and Tryhardninja was the song that powered a generation of Minecrafters, and its resurgence in recent years was met with a flash flood of nostalgia and overall good vibes. We had other hits that grew to immense popularity, like "Fallen Kingdom" and "TNT", along with countless others (and I really do mean countless). The parody craze was so prevalent, some people who otherwise probably never would have gotten into music began releasing hit songs. Not to mention all of the original Minecraft songs that came into the spotlight, like "Take Back the Night", "Creepers Gonna Creep", and so many others. This craze spread beyond Minecraft to some newer games like Fortnite, which allowed the creation of one of the most popular parodies today: Leviathan's "Chug Jug with You". Overall, these helped define a generation and not only allowed musicians to be involved in the things they like, but also allowed many people into the world of music.

This next category involves music that became associated with a certain format, as in there's little to no meme within the music outside of that format. The one everyone knows is the iconic Rickroll, the act of building suspense and breaking the tension with the beginning to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" rather than whatever else would logically release tension. Meme formats are tailored to the individual song, and this is no different. The song begins with a sudden electronic drum fill before going into an upbeat 80s dance tune. Often the video preceding the Rickroll will build up to something desirable to the viewer, and that sudden fill subverting their expectations invokes a sense of disappointment, having been cheated out of their reward. However, the fun sound of the rest of the song helps ease that disappointment. The Coffin Dance and Shot on iPhone memes employed a similar concept by building up tension and releasing it by cutting to the music. However, here the music played throughout to help build up that tension while a video, often depicting someone doing something risky or getting hurt in some way, cutting to just the music at the climax of the clip. This employs driving principle of EDM, building up tension and releasing it at the drop. The meme works by mirroring that suspense and resolution of the video with that of the song, and that resolution being different than what would otherwise logically happen is what allows the meme to spread. Obviously, this isn't the only way songs can be part of a format; songs like "Baka Mitai" and "Shooting Stars" have all had their time to shine. However, these memes that work to subvert the expectations of the audience arguably have the biggest impact of the songs in this category.

Finally, we have the remixes, which typically involve altering any of the songs from the above categories. One of the most popular forms of the remix is the mashup, and who better to bring up here than the legendary SilvaGunner, whose videos advertise a track from a video game OST, but end up being some other meme mashed up into it. The reason mashups work as memes is because it subverts our expectations, even when we know it's a mashup. Our brains know how each song goes, but when we listen to them together it creates something completely new that either sounds great or absolutely horrendous. Yet we still listen to them because they're interesting. Additionally, remixing a meme song in a funny way is a common form of musical meme. It can occur through, super heavy distortion, or repeating a section of a song throughout the song at a level far more than a mere motif, or deleting parts of a song leaving only the memeable parts, or simple pitch shifting, among so many other ways of remixing. The possibilities are endless. The reason remixes are such good memes is they take songs with cultural significance and change them entirely, giving them a whole new meaning.

Well there you have it. Music and memes have gone hand-in-hand since the very beginning, and as culture evolves and memes become more advanced, there's no doubt that these threads will entangle themselves even further. Thanks for reading and if you have any interesting thoughts on music memes or just wanna talk about your favorite ones, feel free to share! That's all, and I'll catch you at the double barline!