As a reader pointed out last year, I spend a lot of time talking about Golden Robots here on 199X.
What’s not like to them? Its like the perfect merger of technology and art - a beautiful mechanism. I like nice watches, but I’d rather be friends with a Golden robot. It would probably be awesome to party with.
Anyways, here are a couple of tracks that might get you thinking about Golden Robots.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of vampires, and that might be one of the reasons why I’ve been digging Vampire Weekend so much these days.
They’re not really all that electronic, but here’s a good danceable remix of one of their tracks by Miike Snow.
I just picked up a pair of these futuristic Nike Lunarglides, and they’re pretty fast.
Anyways, I normally listen to music when I go running, and I’m pretty sure that this Blaze Tripp remix of 22nd Century by Kelis is going to make for a great soundtrack.
I went down to New Orleans to see a good friend of mine get married last week. Apparently its tradition at these things to get blasted and wear masquerade gear.
The band at the wedding was playing mostly Motown and blues type stuff, but you didn’t come here to hear that. Here’s beats from zomby instead. zombies are big in New Orleans, aren’t they?
Its been a while since a song made me laugh out loud. Thankfully, The Deli Boys dropped me their track PR Girls, Inspired by the chicks in public relations that they know.
Is it reinforcing the stereotype of PR girls as nothing more than dumb, gold-digging sluts that are into lattes, brunch and fashion? Definitely. But that’s what makes it good.
From their blog post about the track:
“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed “PR Girls”. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”
A few years ago, Jens gave me a CD that had a folder on it with over 1000 old-school NASA photos. He says he has no idea where he got them, but that doesn’t matter: all the photos are amazing.
I uploaded them to Flickr here, and while you’re looking at them here’s some music to get you into the orbital mood:
Back in the day when I first got into blogging I came across A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.
Back then, it was pretty much the most bad-ass thing I’d ever read.
From the text:
“Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.”
That’s some heavy stuff right there. Fight the good fight, Cypherpunks.
Then list to some equally heavy beats, courtesy of Borracho! and Cyberpunkers
I just saw the video for Alejandro by Lady Gaga, and I couldn’t believe how much it reminded me of an Alastair Reynolds book.
The world Alastair paints for his readers is far-future: humans can live for centuries and are able to genetically modify themselves, yet the world they live in is still very full of pain and suffering, much of it self-inflicted. The awe of long-distance star travel is coupled with dangerous and painful conditions for travellers that make it possible.
There’s this overwhelming sense of discomfort and unease in the books, like something terrible is going to happen. Most of humanity lives in an asteroid belt called The Glimmer Band, and it is full of remnants of previous advanced technology that has been rendered unusable by an alien threat. Constant reminders of that pervade that remind the reader that not everything is alright in this future, and while its unspoken much of the population seems to think the same. This has given way to bizarre decadence by some, and masochistic religious cults in others in the world of The Glimmer Band.
I liked the books, yet I have a hard time reading them: none of the main characters are likable, and terrible things happen to people. Everyone is uncomfortable, sleep-deprived, on-edge, going crazy or all of the above.
Like I said, I got pretty much the same feeling when I watched the video for Alejandro.
Anyways, here’s a Rusko rework of the Gaga original (via Gotta Dance Dirty)