Purple Wyrm – Page 47

Warmest 100 – 2013

Tomorrow is of course Hottest 100 day. As happened last year some clever souls have – despite the best efforts of Triple J to stop their fun – scraped the net for vote data and compiled a list of predictions, which can be viewed here.

Last year’s predictions were pretty accurate, as shown by my overly obsessive analysis. I have stuff to do this weekend, so I doubt I’ll be live blogging/live calculating as I did last year, but I’ll certainly be keeping an ear out for how well they do. I am mildly surprised that they have Royals by Lorde at number 8, I thought it was a good contender for number 1, but statistics don’t lie. Riptide by Vance Joy (whatever the hell that is) is the predicted number 1, so we’ll just have to see.

Concerning my own votes, three songs don’t make it into the prediction. I’m particularly surprised about Birds of Tokyo, but then it did come out early in the year and people have short memories these days…

Lanterns – Birds of Tokyo
Jessica – Major Lazer
Lazer Gun Show – Hey Geronimo

As for the rest of my choices they’re clustered around the 20’s, which is pretty damn good!

31: Your Body is a Weapon – The Wombats
29: Tennis Courts – Lorde
25: Gun – Chvrches
24: Young and Beautiful – Lana Del Rey
22: The Wire – Haim
19: Pizza Guy – Touch Sensitive
15: Get Lucky – Daft Punk

Roll on the countdown!

PS: Oh, so this is Riptide. Yeah, that’s not bad.

The Silmarillion Project

I’m sure I’ve mentioned Aaron Diaz’s Silmarillion illustrations at some point, but he’s now put them all in one convenient place, with more to come!

The Silmarillion Project

As we have come to expect from Mr Diaz the art is fantastic – I particularly like his kickarse version of young Galadriel (she mellowed out a lot over the next 8,000 or so years).

Noldor Warriors - Aaron Diaz — Noldor Warriors - Galadriel on Left

Well worth a look!

Musical Tuesdays – The Inner Life of the Gay Computer, circa 1987

Well, it’s been a while, what with the Christmas Season and interstate holidays and server problems, but Musical Tuesdays is back!

To make up for the break, I’m presenting not two, not three, but four videos this week! Amazing! And the theme? The Pet Shop Boys.

The Pet Shop Boys formed in London in the early 1980s after a chance meeting in an electronics store. They developed a distinctive style of electropop and went on to become the most successful duo in British music history, selling over 50 million albums. In 1987 they also made a rather strange movie, which was really just an extended series of video clips, including the one I’m featuring for their version of Always on My Mind.

Some background – our heroes have just been warned via the radio of a murderous hitchiker who has already slaughtered three people who gave him lifts. They pull over to pick up a young woman, but end up with a very strange man instead…

With the massive success of the Pet Shop Boys it’s inevitable that they’d attract imitators. For example, the KLF who attempted to follow up the ridiculously massive success of their novelty hit Doctorin’ the Tardis with 1989’s Kylie Said to Jason.

It sank without a trace. Probably just as well.

Imitation of course is the close relative of parody, and we close today with two comparatively recent pastiches, one from New Zealand and one American.

So that’s it. Maybe next week I’ll have enough energy to actually write something interesting…

Oh, and credit to John Allison for the title.

Updates

I haven’t been making any posts this week as I thought it’d be better to wait until I got everything transferred to the new server, but as is usually the case this is taking longer than anticipated. I now hope to get it sorted early to mid next week.

In the meantime, the video card on my home PC has given up the ghost, which means I’ll have to put it into the shop all weekend. No internet access for an entire weekend – especially one with temperatures tipped to get close to 40° – may well drive me mad, so when the Wyrmlog comes back up please don’t be surprised if it resembles Sixth World Problems.

On the subject of numerical world problems, please take a look at how much fun I had this week pretending to be a 14th century peasant who stumbled over an iMac and mistook everyone on Reddit for spirits and demons.

OK, that’s it. See you in the funny pages.

Don’t Panic!

I went to Canberra, had a good time, came back, and in the meantime the Wyrmlog got shut down as a precaution to do with some server security issues. You win some, you lose some I guess.

I’ve turned it back on so I can back it up and then make the switch to a brand new, up-to-date and altogether awesomer Wyrmlog on a more secure server. This means it may be down for a little longer, and it may take a while for the styling to get back up to its current standard. But hey, you come here for the content, right?

So bear with me for the next couple of weeks…

Did I Mention I’m Going to Canberra?

Flying out this morning, coming back later this week. How about that?

Happy New Annual Cycle!

No musical Tuesday this week, it’s New Year’s Eve for cryin’ out loud!

(And you should have got your fix of music with my last post)

I’m tired out after a week of Christmas festivities and so will most likely be having an early night, but the rest of you bright young things have a fun and safe night!

Roll on 2014!

(If you have a minute or two to spare, visit Wikipedia’s 1914 page to see what happened a century ago.)

Hottest 100 – 2013

It’s that time of the year again when I vainly try and hold on to both any kind of musical relevance and my rapidly vanishing youth by voting in Triple J’s Hottest 100.

I went into assembling my shortlist without any great enthusiasm. Looking back, 2013 seemed like a rather flat year for music – I couldn’t think of any real standout songs. But once I trawled through the lists I discovered a surprising number of sleepers that – while not mind-blowingly awesome – were good, solid tracks. There were enough of these that I had some real trouble winnowing them down to only 10. Nonetheless after much girding of loins and grinding of teeth I produced the following list which has been duly submitted as of this morning…

Tennis Courts – Lorde

There’s an excellent chance that Royals by New Zealand’s own Lorde is going to take the number one spot, which is annoying as I can’t stand it. Tennis Courts though is a great song, and popular enough that may well come in at around the 20-30 mark (shame the video clip is so rubbish).

Young & Beautiful – Lana Del Rey

Does anyone actually like Lana Del Rey anymore? I’m certainly not a fan, apart from this song, and I can’t even explain why I like it so much. It’s certainly nothing to do with it’s association with The Great Gatsby, a movie that I haven’t bothered to see.

Lanterns – Birds of Tokyo

Lanterns is kind of embarrassing because its sounds like something written to capture the “Class of 2013” demographic. You know, like Friends Forever or Good Riddance. Sadly I’m a sucker for that kind of rubbish.

Jessica – Major Lazer

This song is a real sleeper. It didn’t do anything for me the first time I heard it, but then couldn’t get it out of my head. Smoothly insidious.

The Wire – HAIM

Oh Lord, how to pick just one HAIM track? They’re all so good! After much torment I narrowed it down to either The Wire or Don’t Save Me and The Wire got through by a hair’s breadth. Go and listen to HAIM everyone! Now!

Your Body Is A Weapon – The Wombats

The Wombats just keep on delivering – presumably via their backwards facing pouches. Who’d have ever thought that a bunch of cubic-poo producers would make such great music?

Lazer Gun Show – Hey Geronimo

This makes me think of good old Bill Shakespeare and his full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But it’s really good sound and fury!

Pizza Guy – Touch Sensitive

A laid back electronic track that sounds like it escaped from the set of Miami Vice. The TV series that is, not the movie.

Get Lucky – Daft Punk

I really didn’t want to vote for Daft Punk, because everyone will be voting for them. But Get Lucky is fun and catchy, and as such I had no choice.

Gun – Chvrches

Chvrches were another group where I had problems choosing a track. Gun won my vote for no apparent reason – If I’d put my votes together tomorrow I may well have voted for Recover instead. Lots of twinkly electronic sounds to tickle the ears.