Digital Nostalgia

One of my favorite things to do is go through old family photo albums of my childhood.

Being able to 'watch' myself grow up is pretty interesting (especially with parental commentary), and I'm thankful my parents took as many pictures as they did of family outings, holidays, and vacations. But you know what I'm afraid of? That my (potential) children won't have stuff like that.

With the advent of digital everything - most of the pictures I take never take a physical form. I have lots of photos, but they're all stored digitally. I don't want to gather the family around a computer screen and click through photos, there's a lot to be said for perusing actual, physical photo albums. Aside from that, technology is progressing so fast these days, are my (potential) children going to have a cd full of .jpegs that their fancy future-computers can't read?

When the time comes, I think I'll buy a photo printer to keep them around the old fashioned way.

Whiners

We're all apt to whine a little bit here and there, but excessive complaining gets real old, real fast.

We used to have to whine to each other - expressing concern and lamenting on it to some poor, uninterested soul who could just go away (or at least stop listening). But now the cranky people have found a way to sneak up on me.

I like Twitter. I do. But the problem is that you have to actually read a tweet before you can determine whether or not it's something you care about. Every once in a while, I get a long, drawn out sob story spanning multiple posts that I just don't care about. It's gotten worse recently with this while FMyLife thing (I bet you can guess what 'F' stands for), where people post the trivialities and problems (that most people have) all over the place. Facebook, Twitter, even FMyLife.com...

Are people so insecure these days that they feel the need to publicly 'F' their lives because the the Apple Store Genius Bar is taking a little too long to replace a hard drive? It's astounding.

I do realize that I'm whining. fml.

Heima

I have to write this while the experience is still with me.

I bought the musical documentary 'Heima' and it came in the mail today. It's about the band Sigur Ros and a concert series in their country of origin, Iceland. And, it's incredible.

Listening to their music I didn't think any visual could ever match the depth, power, and emotion of their music. But I was wrong. It's hard to describe, but the Icelandic scenery coupled with some really powerful imagery of people make for a powerful and emotional documentary/art film.

What Is Mae?

There's a rare few albums that are good the whole way through.

I think Mae's got the best one: The Everglow. Taken as a whole, it's probably my favorite album in my (iTunes) music library. No song has less than four stars, and I'm kind of picky with my stars.

It's designed like a story, and it flows like one too. The tracks move seamlessly from one to the next - there's even a prologue which encourages you to follow the music with the booklet from the cd case. I love this album. How it's non-traditional. How it's not based around a 'single'. How every single track is outstanding.

And I listened to the whole thing again this evening. Start to finish, as it should be appreciated. Although this time in lieu of the booklet - the iTunes visualizer provided some strangely emotive stuff.

Tennessee Tornadoes

I'm in Florida for Easter weekend, but apparently missed quite a storm in Tennessee.

Tornadoes. South of Nashville. Crazy. Is that even how you pluralize tornado? Anyway, I just an article about this guy who's house was flattened in Murfreesboro - but not only that, his wife and infant child were killed in the storm as well. That's pretty much the worst day you can have.

I don't mean to trivialize the saddening paragraph above, but I'm not into this blogging thing for sadness - which is why I'd like to comment on 'worst day ever' guy's neighbor, who the AP interviewed about the storm:

"It sounded like seven freight trains and 22 vacuum cleaners all going at the same time," [Eric] Funkhouser said.

Really? Of all the people they could have found to give profound, articulate commentary on the tragedy his neighbor just experienced, they got the guy who compares it to something he could not possibly have experienced. Well hang on... it IS Tennessee, maybe Eric Funkhouser and his freight trains and vacuum cleaners was the best they could find.

...and sometimes, MSPaint is the best tool for the job.