Mine In Mono

Strategems, gambits and wiles

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  • Will You Dance?

    The latest casualty of the streaming wars is The Bird and the Bee’s 2015 album Recreational Love, which unceremoniously disappeared from Qobuz sometime recently. The album still shows up, but lists all the tracks as “unavailable.” Usually this is a sign that the service has loaded a newer version of the album to select. Not so in this case.

    Music by The Bird and the Bee can sometimes be hard to find. The band followed up their first volume of Interpreting the Masters, an album of Hall & Oates covers, with a volume of Van Halen covers. The first is readily available, the second, almost impossible to hear on any format other than used vinyl.1 All the album’s listed on the merch site that the band links to are sold out. When there are so many music services out there, it seems careless not to make your albums available somewhere digitally.

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  • Down With Podcasts

    At this point, I tend to average 1–2 podcasts a week. I’m in hybrid work mode, which means I drive to an office on a local college campus two days out of the week and work remotely from my home office the other three days. That gives me time for about 90 minutes of podcasts on my commute. My number one selection currently is Not Dead Yet (Apple Podcasts) hosted by Ben Sasse and Chris Stirewalt. As Ben Sasse undergoes treatment for his pancreatic cancer (and faces his own mortality), he’s been interested in discussing what comprises the good life.

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  • The X Return

    It seems more people and organizations that were principally opposed to the X (ex-Twitter) network a few short years ago are now returning. Sometimes, they are doing so with apologies, as if they know it’s a bad look. The latest is the Apple-centric publication Macstories. The move was accompanied by the requisite explanation that they do not support the politics of Elon Musk or the direction he has taken the platform.

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  • I have to say, I’m really looking forward to The Blockbuster Chronicles from Brandon. He writes about working at a Blockbuster at the turn of the century.

    That’s what The Blockbuster Chronicles is about. Not really the rise and fall of Blockbuster Video. Plenty of people have already told that story. This is the story of one Blockbuster store in Millington, Tennessee, during the last few years when video stores still felt like they were going to be around forever.

    Having worked in retail for years, I think I’ll be able to relate.

  • These Dreams

    Heart was the band that broke the glass ceiling and bought women-fronted hard rock to the masses. By 1985, they had expanded beyond just pummeling riffage and Renaissance Fair folk that betrayed their love for Led Zeppelin. They didn’t completely eschew the hard stuff, but they had synths and they were going to use them.

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  • Jokes From Truth

    Bluesky CEO, Toni Schneider, was interviewed by Nilay Patel on a recent episode of The Decoder podcast. I like Patel’s interview style and thought he brought a good selection of questions to the discussion.

    After much business strategy and technical discussion, Patel asked Schneider about the common perception that the network is full of left-leaning users. Schneider acknowledged that as an issue and mentioned several times that he wanted to expand the user base. It’s certainly true that the social network is home to many emotionally dysregulated political progressives. I know several people who don’t use it primarily for that reason.

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  • I Set My Face to the Hillside

    Tortoise – I Set My Face To The Hillside (YouTube)

    Last year, I bought TNT by Tortoise on CD from a Discogs seller.1 I should tell you, this sort of activity is as sure a sign of my devotion to a particular album as any. After all, I’ve got access to high-quality digital copies of albums like this through streaming. I don’t need to seek them out on an online marketplace, where, let’s face it, you don’t always know the quality of the merchandise.2

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  • A Room You Can’t See

    Terry Godier might be something of a genius, as evidenced by his masterfully crafted RSS reader, Current, and the ideas behind it. So when I saw he had created a short documentary about musical formats, one of my favorite subjects, I had high expectations.

    Godier hits upon a lot of the problems intrinsic to streaming media in the video. When he discusses the limitations of physical media, he’s able to make them sound like desirable features.

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  • Forgotten Favorite

    Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it’s a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slumberland Records. The collection is called 1989-1992 and the contents are precisely what it says on the tin.

    The first available track from the release is my favorite song by the band, “Forgotten Favorite.” Even after the remaster, it’s still a bit muddy, but I’m not sure if there is anything more the band could do apart from rerecord the track completely. It’s still a stellar song through, with a shoegaze-worthy crush of guitars that’s as propulsive as anything put out by UK pedal hoppers. Despite some muck still on the recording, the vocals are pristine, and Sarah Shannon sounds heavenly.

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  • I’ve been getting car sick when trying to read in a moving car since I was a kid. Little did I know, my favorite computer manufacturer has a solution for that, which was brought to my attention by this piece in The Verge. The technology is called Vehicle Motion Cues.

    According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion Cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left; when the car brakes the dots slide forward.

    I can’t wait to try this out, especially on a long trip.