The blog of a person....yeah that sounds good.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Big McLargeHuge

Remixes are usually not good. At least compared to the original song, usually.
I mean hell, lets look at "Stronger" that hit song by Kanye West from his Graduation album. Its a nice song, for mainstream rap/hiphop standards. Its not an offensive blemish to the ears like most stuff played on the radio and TV is. But the song is, and formost, a remix of the Daft Punk song "Harder Better Faster Stronger" that makes up the main beat. While yes, there are other beats layered on, and a few synths as well....is it as good as the original Daft Punk song? Hail, naw!
Of course, you cant really improve any of the first half of the tracks from Discover by DaftPunk anyway. Those tracks are perfect.
Another example is the song "Fell in Love with a Girl" by the White Stripes. Not long after the song came out, a musician named Joss Stone made her own cover of the song. And honestly, it sounds like crap. It's a creepy airy Sara Mclachlan styled song. Except unlike Sarah, it isnt pretty to listen to. Later, comedy-musicians Weird Al and Richard Cheese made their own variations of the White Stripes song. And while these covers were good, were they as great as the original? Hail naw, yet again!
tl:dr
Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent. My point is, usually remixes degrade the song.
There are some that I like though.
And as of late, I've been having fruitless attempts at finding one of my favorites.

Not too long ago, mildly famous alternative musician and mixer FatBoySlim made a remix of "Magic Carpet Ride" by 1960's asskicking band, Steppenwolf.
It's one of those very very rare cases where not only is a remix as good as the original song itself....it's dare I say.....catchier? Yes, you may throw rocks at my face for uttering such a statement. But that remix made me cry manly tears.
My friend has had it on a cd of random tracks for a while.
But finding this song is an utter bitch.
And I like it so much. :[ And I'm not really even a fan of FatBoySlim.

Oh well.

In other news, as a small gaggle of you may or may not know, I made off with some cash at the newgrounds contest. I lost to two good cartoons, and a third one that was like a clone of mine, except with ghosts instead of skeletons. (and with a much less catchier song). Of course, I'm surprised I even made it to 4th place, considering all the things I had to compete with. So I didn't win 1000 dollars.
But I DID win 500 dollars. Apparently. I'm still waiting for it to arrive in my Paypal account. Once it does (hopefully) arrive, rather than spending it on necessities in my life, or to clear up problems that have been hounding me for months (aka getting new glasses so I can fucking see properly), I am instead going to spend it on something I WANT. My dreams of one day getting a Cintiq tablet are impossible. There is never anytime in my life where I'm going to have 3000 dollars. And certainly, never will I be rich enough to have that much to toss away on fancy studio equipment. So I'm going to get something I both want and NEED at the same time.
A Tablet Pc. A good Toshiba tablet pc, when they were new, were roughly 700 bucks. You can easily get them online for 300-500 dollars.
User reviews indicate that their touch-screens are as good as a Wacom or Cintiq. And while slightly smaller, they are not so small that they are unusable.
User reviews are pretty much all positive, with the only dislike from a few being that it's a heavy laptop. But it's not like I'm going to be carrying it around everywhere.
Of course, I've also heard that HP makes a mean tablet pc as well. But I haven't researched that one yet. All I know is, it costs 2,000 dollars, so fuck that, tbh.
Either way, I'm going to research a bit longer before I go for a Toshiba. Poke around on some pc websites a bit longer.
But more than likely, I'm going to spring for one of those.
Of course the problem with buying things online is that you cant return them. But I can always sell it on ebay, if it's not what I'm looking for.

Luis sent me a Munny.
A munny looks like this:



They are part of the urban-flavored independent toy and art show movements that have been part of popular underground culture for a while now. All sorts of great artists and designers get to paint and decorate these in their own special way for the company Kid Robot. You can buy blank munnys and colored ones off of KidRobot's official site which I have in my big list of links on the left.
Of course, I'm not a great artist or designer, but Luis seems to have enough faith in me to make this thing look nice. And honestly, I did really want a blank one because:

A.) I've always wanted to try my hand at doing something like this
and
B.) ....refer to reason A

So I have it. It's sitting on the fluffy manila envelope that Luis sent it to me in. Now I have to color it. I was originally going to use tempera paint, but a friend of mine who's really into coloring things like this, told me an alternative way. Cheap markers, cotton balls, and q-tips. I've got the supplies. I just have to man up the courage to start decorating this little critter.

Man. I wrote alot of crap.

I should post some art....or somethin'



Click it. It animated. Badly.

Used to be my avatar on some message boards.


Tiny youtube player! :D
See that? Inspired the theme song to futurama. Its also a cool song. And a cool stop-motion music video as well.


Anyway, I have work tomorrow and over the course of the weekend as well. Foshizzle.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, fantastic job on horkin' some loot from the Halloween contest... looks like you won a monthly award too.

Also, do you want me to email you that Magic Carpet Ride remix?

Pinao said...

That animated face... thing... is awesome!