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I’m listening to a crazy mix of music right now, some of which you might find entertaining and great to listen to yourself. Since before Christmas I’ve been listening to a genre of hip hop called Nerdcore. It’s all about the geekstas rappin’ hardcore style. I’ve also been into some nearly-emo rock and experimental heavy metal.

The nerdcore stuff is my favorite, I think. I’ve been listening to the following:

• mc chris (who has done a lot of voice acting work for Cartoon Network, especially as the voice of Hesh from Sealab 2021).
• MC Frontalot, who is considered by many to be the founder of the Nerdcore sub-genre.
• YTCracker, a hacker with an awesome album sampling old NES tracks
• MCPlus+, a computer programmer turned rapper.
• And last but definitely not least is the mega-talented Optimus Rhyme, a Transformers-inspired hip hop group with a great sound.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse. Modest Mouse is becoming one of my favorite bands of all time, and Death Cab for Cutie is a guilty pleasure.

The coolest new find has to be the experimental rock of Buckethead, former guitarist of Guns N’ Roses and guitar virtuoso. If you took the guitar work of Frank Zappa (whom I consider a deity btw) and melded his style with Richard D. James of Aphex Twin fame, threw in the playfulness of Les Claypool, and some hard rocking with some fried chicken, you’d have Buckethead. I can’t get enough of this music.

I’ve also been listening to another guitarist, named Adrian Belew. He’s an experimental guitarist, but he’s more refined than Buckethead. He’s played with big names such as Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and King Crimson. His guitar work is stellar and his solo stuff released this year is awesome. If you care for good guitar music, you must listen to him play.
That’s all for me right now, and that’s enough to keep you all busy for quite a while. Enjoy the music.

If you have iTunes, get the iMix playlist here and have a listen. Even if you just hear the samples its a good start.

I’ve decided to update the look of slaggle dot come for the new year. It’s a complete overhaul of the design to make it look grown up, and I’m also utilizing a new backend. No more blogger! Now I’m using Wordpress 2.0. I got tired of all the FTP issues I’ve been having with Blogger and I like using Wordpress on Dropping Weight, so I thought the switch was appropriate. It’ll also get me posting more, so you’ll have fresh content to read instead of a month of nothing.

Cya!!

I tried out an interesting web tool called “retrievr” (no that’s not spelled wrong). It’s a little flash utility where you can sketch an image and it will interpret what you’ve drawn to pull up images from the web. It’s really a lot of fun, but the results are a little off from what I’d expect.

For example, I sketched out the head of Optimus Prime (don’t laugh at my l33t skillz):

So it’s not too bad, right? I can tell it’s Prime’s head even though it looks like it was drawn by a drunk ferret on acid. So I clicked the search button, waited a bit, and got my results. Here’s what I ended up with:

Optimus Prime? Is that you?! Wow, you sure have transformed!I think it’s obvious this tool needs a bit of tweaking before it’s ready for “prime” time, so to speak. Lolzorz.