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Jams: Nightclub singers for robots

1035x834-20140221-phantogram-x1800-1393010482This week, as I was doing some writing, I realized it had been a very long time since I’d listened to Phantogram. And I listened to a whole lot of Phantogram when I was writing the very first draft of This One Project. As in, their first two albums were the soundtrack to the NaNoWriMo that originally birthed this weird YA fantasy, though the sound and lyrics are utterly unrelated to the story.

So it seemed appropriate to listen to Phantogram again this week, for reasons.

Since that very first draft, Phantogram has come out with another album, back in 2014. (I’m a slow writer in some ways.) The new album is really good, too, though the sound is a little different. It’s been good to pump it up (as I completely rewrite the first chapter of This One Project).

BAND: Phantogram
GENRE: Nightclub singers for robots
ABOUT: self-described as “street beat, psych pop” whatever that means
LISTEN TO: “Fall in Love” on the newest album is pretty good!

Honestly, because I listen to them usually while working, all their songs have melded together into a larger Phantogram sound so it’s hard to pick out single songs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good sound! Like a soundtrack to being productive.

Jams: Sweet Spirit

I desperately want to talk about music more. In that spirit, occasionally I’ll post about Sweet Jams, aka, I dunno, music and stuff?

Today we are going to talk about a band I discovered only today!

Bear with me a sec. Imagine it’s… say… late March. And it’s still cold, for sure in the morning, if not all day, and sometimes it’s cold and rainy, and sometimes it’s cold and rainy and windy, and you just wish you could wear a dress without tights, or maybe a light jacket instead of a coat; imagine it’s late March and though it wasn’t an extremely snowy winter it was still winter and it was cold and spring hasn’t really yet sprung. Imagine all that.

What you want, my friends, is music that can summon sunglasses and sandals and hot days and iced drinks. (I have a whole playlist.) What you want is Sweet Spirit.

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BAND: Sweet Spirit
GENRE: Shimmy On Your Friend’s Back Porch In Austin, TX On A Late Summer Night
ABOUT: 9-piece band from Austin, with horns, and country, and doo-wop, and fun.
LISTEN TO: Take Me to a Party: “I got a broken heart so take me to a party” repeated and growing in intensity until you’re like, yeah! Broken hearts! Let’s party!!

Runners up: Baby Doll, My Poor Stupid Heart, Poor

YEAH! Let’s summon summer via music.

Links: a mish mash

Being Edited

Em Short on editing in interactive fiction. I’m generally interested in interactive fiction, especially as it becomes a bigger form, nowadays. I’ve only used beta readers on mine, though I have tried a sort of exit survey for them. But because I’ve mostly done IF for fun, I wouldn’t dream of asking someone to do anything like a normal story critique. I’d like to, but it’s a lot harder.

‘Body Hacking’ Movement Rises Ahead Of Moral Answers

This is fascinating and I think a lot about transhumanism and body hacking, but clearly I have a line because the guy described at the end of the article creeps me the heck out. Like, the photo of him makes my scalp itch. However, I do like the line “The philosophers, he said, are letting us down.”

Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education | Dissent Magazine

What it means to move innovation into the academic sphere (spoiler: Nothing that great) and how it fails students. I want to quote the whole article, but will settle on this:

“A 2015 Pell Institute report demonstrates that the past three decades have seen drastically widening gaps between rich and poor students in attendance and completion rates. And Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton show in their 2013 book Paying for the Party how higher education reinforces inequality not only in numbers but in ways that permeate people’s lives and opportunities, from where they live to whom they socialize with. Those results might be fine for a country living under an aristocracy, but not for a democracy. And they have snowballed under the banner of innovation.”

Who Cares for Feminism?

Melissa Gira Grant in Pacific Standard laying down some historical truths very plainly. Feminism needs to exist for poor women and non-white women, women demeaned by capitalism and attacked by racism.

“Women took the women’s movement to mean their progress up the capitalist ladder,” James said. “Nothing has changed but the gender of those who exploit us.”

Emphasis added.

How Gallaudet University’s Architects Are Redefining Deaf Space

Accessible design is so fascinating to me. “Now 10 years old, DeafSpace is an architectural approach that springs from the particular ways Deaf people perceive and inhabit space. …That share is likely to rise as tens of millions of Baby Boomers reach their seventies and eighties. Why should the places designed for them take hearing as a given?”

Friendly Neighborhood Con

Though I’ve lived nearby for years, this year was the first time I went to Vericon. The sun was out! I didn’t want to sit down and edit! Friend was there! So what if I hadn’t read anything by most of the authors there? I was nearly done with Seth Dickinson’s novel! Good enough.

That ends up not mattering much, because authors are delightful, funny, excited people, and everyone is very nice.

I tried to come up with accolades for everyone on the panels I saw, but I’m not that prolific. Instead, the two notables:

Author who made me laugh the hardest: Seth Dickinson (lord, I’ll never think of vegetable oil the same way again. Or writer’s block.)

Author whose history class I most want to take: Ada Palmer (she made me deeply interested in medieval scholars debating the degree of divine inspiration involved in texts! That’s a trick.)

Next year I’ll have to go for a full day, gosh.