I’ve been waiting for years for someone to pick up where Hot Snakes left off, and White Lung gets closer to doing so than any band I’ve encountered. Savages got close, but their sound was never desperate enough, and their singer was clearly going for something. Blood on the Wall had some of the attitude, but their best songs were their quietest. This is fast, raw, and brutal, approaching speed metal levels on “I Believe You” but generally striking a happy (and furious) medium with tracks like “Face Down” and this one. Bonus points for having no song reach 3 minutes. (insound)
“A game performing method for executing a game by arranging a plurality of objects comprising a plurality of objects to be stuck and an operation object, in a virtual space, controlling rolling and movement of the operation object according to a player’s input, and rolling and moving the operation object while sticking the objects which the operation object comes in contact with”
John Constable (eng. David Lucas) – Weymouth Bay, Dorsetshire
There is no law, no principle, based on past practice, which may not be overthrown in a moment, by the arising of a new condition, or the invention of a new material; and the most rational, if not the only, mode of averting the danger of an utter dissolution of all that is systematic and consistent in our practice, or of ancient authority in our judgment, is to cease, for a little while, our endeavours to deal with the multiplying host of particular abuses, restraints, or requirements; and endeavour to determine, as the guides of every effort, some constant, general, and irrefragable laws of right — laws, which based upon man’s nature, not upon his knowledge, may possess so far the unchangeableness of the one, as that neither the increase nor imperfection of the other may be able to assault or invalidate them.
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Dntel (ft. Lali Puna) – “I’d Like to Know” Dumb Luck
This collection of collaborations is a cheerier affair than suggested by the pessimistic title track (the only one not involving a second artist), and a consistently surprising one as well. Lali Puna meshes naturally with Dntel’s fuzzy electronics and ends up sounding like Ms. John Soda played at 33RPM, while the (excellent) Jenny Lewis track sounds more like a sadistic remix than . “I’d Like to Know” feels extremely carefully crafted, yet at the same time, its 3 minutes and 47 seconds melt away like cotton candy until the sadly brief little breakdown at the very end reminds you what you’re listening to. (insound)
If you’d told me a year or two ago that I would in 2014 be deeply engrossed in a web-published superhero serial longer than the entire Game of Thrones series to date — I probably would have admitted that it was a possibility, and asked where I might find such a work before that distant, fated date.
To be clear, Worm isn’t exactly a book. It’s a complete “web serial,” published a chapter at a time over a period of about two and a half years by a man writing as Wildbow (alias John McCrae). It’s free to read, but was created under a donation system. You can start here, but you may want to wait until the author rereleases it in a more portable form. Personally, I put a complete epub version on my ereader, though the length (just south of 10,000 pages) caused it to seize up more than once.
The story, and bear with me for a moment here, concerns a teenaged girl, Taylor, who has received superpowers in a world roughly analogous to our own, except that people started spontaneously getting powers about 30 years ago. Meanwhile she is being brutally bullied at school and cities are routinely being attacked and demolished by mysterious and unstoppable monsters that also appeared recently, and her power — allowing her to sense and control bugs in her general area — doesn’t seem to be much of a help in either case. The next 1.65 million words follow her as she navigates a carefully-woven world of heroes, villains, conspiracies, friends, and all the rest.
