Monday, August 20, 2007

Nerd News in Brief

I envy those of you living within spitting distance of civilization.

This weekend, for example, musical dork Shael Riley and his allies from PBC Productions recorded a music video in his native NYC. Shael invited friends and fans to “show up and dance around and shit,” and I was totally down.

Except for the fact that I live an entire seaboard’s breadth away.

Damn.

Damn!

Double damn!

  • Illicit materials: I have been shirking my duty of enlightening the nerd populace to all the new, sweaty bootleg action going on of late, but let me shirk no further! The fine folks at Mashup Town recently released a little album called Number of da Boots. It’s an Iron Maiden bootleg compilation. Oh yeah. They went there.
  • Speaking of bootlegs: Deal Extreme currently has a Fire Linker and 128M re-writable flash cart for the GBA for, like, 10 bones. If you don’t know what this product is for, then you probably don’t need one. If, however, you are a portable gamer well familiar with its sinister purpose, you should totally snag that shit. I did, and, though the guilt is killing me, I am able to dry my tears with all the money I’ve saved on GBA games.
  • Let us flee from this legal grey area!: Now, before I further attract the attention of those unsavory lawyer-types, let me point you toward an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal that Church came across. It’s about the recent explosion of musical hybrids that touches on nerdcore hip-hop, and even features a little blurb from our beloved MC Frontalot.
  • And the Willows were properly Whomped: My friends Denika and Dennis also made it a point to check out the Remus Lupins/Whomping Willows tour as it passed through Orlando. Denika, of course, took some handsome pictures of Wizard Rock’s heartthrobs which she handily deposited over at Flickr.
  • Deliciously heroic: While some of you were getting your Wrock on, I spent the previous week tending to a sick wife and child. Thankfully, Church and Matt did their best to keep me entertained. Their most successful venture was sending me pictures of cakes shaped like Optimus Prime. We live in a wonderful world.
  • No stoppin’ us: Jarod from alienbobz.com also helped get me aboard the happy train by letting me know that his video footage of Optimus Rhyme’s acoustic gig in Seattle had finally been uploaded. Here’s a personal fave – the boys doing both “My Peroshky” and that song's reprise – but be sure to hit Jarod’s YouTube page for the rest.

6 comments:

Church said...

Iron Maiden mashups? This ought to be interesting.

Larry "Liontamer" Oji said...

Everytime Shael announces a performance of any type, I get pissed about not living closer to New York. :'-( You're not the only one! The fact that it's for a video is doubly :''-(

Larry "Liontamer" Oji
Head Submissions Evaluator, OverClocked ReMix
http://www.ocremix.org

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that GBA thing is nice, but I already have a... *looks* 2Gbit card.

Doc Pop said...

I have relevant WSJ info here.

Z. said...

Have you listened to ‘em yet, Church?

Misery loves company, ‘Tamer, and it’s good to know you feel my pain. :(

I should’ve known you’d out-tech me, Soc. :)

I’m sort of sad you didn’t get name-dropped, Doc. What up with that?

Church said...

Re. the IM mashups. Quality varies widely, sometimes within songs. On balance, it works a hell of a lot better than I thought it would (i.e., at all.)

Standout track: "Marley Maiden" (Seriously.)