The best thing about the big CD-ripping project

…at least so far: I finally sat down and listened to the Ani DiFranco CD my sister got me, maybe a decade ago.

Before I continue, one funny note: I knew about Ani DiFranco before she did; I remember, albeit hazily, seeing video of a bald chick playing ferocious acoustic guitar in weird tunings on a public access channel in Boston. As is often the case with seeing things in weird venues like that, they never told me who the fuck it was I was watching. So, you know, years and years pass…

Anyway, I’ve had this on the shelf forever, listened to it once or twice, and I let it sit. For whatever reason, I wrote her off as too earnest, too literalist, I dunno, too unsubtle.

As often seems to be the case, I wish there were some effective way to reach back and slap the me of ten years ago.

Which isn’t to say that I think the music will appeal to everyone; it’s demanding in its lack of sentimentality–I think that’s what I had perceived as earnestness before–and at least in her older material, well, it’s mostly the narrative of intrapersonal relationships, so it’s not entirely outre to suggest that it sometimes sounds like a few songs repeated endlessly. And it’s all pretty specifically political. And sometimes It seems lyrically awkward, though sometimes that very awkwardness comes, after repeated listening, to seem inevitable and necessary.

But it’s also music that speaks of joy and hope and possibilities in a very unambiguous way.

And she can play the fuck out of a guitar.

What do you mean firsthand accounts are better than conventional wisdom

In response to someone making a comment about “the Osborne Effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect (how scary is it that you can guess URLs for Wikipedia entries with a reasonable assurance that they’ll be there?) on a photo forum, one of the people who was at Osborne at the time makes “a post to set the story straight”:http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=22319970

Basically: corporate infighting brought things to a halt in a company that _always_ had problems with cash-flow, since they were undercapitalized and in manufacturing.

“Via”:http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/32588?from=rss

So, I stumbled across this interesting juxtaposition during the Great CD-Ripping Project

So maybe everyone else on the planet earth already knew about this, but the idea that one of Judas Priest’s signature songs was originally a Joan Baez tune was somewhat, err, startling.

I am intensely curious to know what Joan Baez thinks of the cover version.

NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo

There is no way it can be a good thing to have “an emulation of the Amiga written in javascript”:http://www.chiptune.com/.

“via”:http://ajaxian.com/archives/amiga-emulated-in-javascript-2