There’s a thought that’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I need to get it out. I don’t want to, because it’s depressing and unhealthy and generally something on which I don’t like focusing, but at this point it’s become like holding in a fart on a crowded bus.

I’m 33 as I write this. Let’s say, for the sake of simple math, I live to be 93. As well, for simplicity’s sake and a touch of optimism, let us assume I am able to travel and function and enjoy my faculties right up to the end. That gives me 60 years. 720 months. A little less than 22,000 days. Most people would say that sounds like a lot. To me, it is a terrifyingly, infinitesimally small amount of time.

There is something like 195 countries in the world. I used to consider myself fairly well-traveled, fortunate enough to grow up in a family with the means and desire to see the world. But when I really think about it, I’ve maybe visited 8 actual different independent nations (E.g., Canada, USA) . Some for only a day, which can hardly be considered a true experience of the culture. That leaves 187 countries in which I’ve never set foot. If I want to see them all, that means I need to average just over 3 new countries a year, for the rest of my life. This year, our big travel plans are Vancouver. Maybe, if we have a really good year, Mexico in the winter. Those will be great trips, but I still haven’t eaten a-ping in Cambodia or wrestled a zebu in Madagascar. It is a 100% impossibility for any one person to experience every culture the world has to offer, or will offer. And some days it genuinely pisses me off.

Here is Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books.

Here’s Time’s ALL TIME 100 best English-language novels.

Here are 100 Must-Read Books for the Essential Man’s Library.

Here are the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.

Here are 1001 books you MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE.

I love to read. Most books take me a long time to get through; I usually only read a few pages at a time before going to sleep. Let’s say I read 6 books a year (which is probably optimistic). That means I will likely read approximately 360 more books before I die. Even if I double, or triple my reading rate, how many books is that? If I just decide to read all 1001 books (BEFORE I DIE), I’ll need to average about 16 a year. More than one per month. Just for those “classics” that “everyone” “should” read. No room for small-time, self-published books that I might love, that I might connect with on a deep personal level. No cult-y, off-beat stuff that no critic would ever consider essential reading, but that I might thoroughly enjoy. Comics? I’ve read Watchmen, the only one that ever seems to show up on these lists. I just finished re-reading the whole Transmetropolitan series; one of my absolute favourite stories and characters from any media. Which “best” novel must I give up so I can finish reading The Walking Dead? Or the next Dark Tower novel? Again, it is a 100% impossibility for any one person to experience every piece of literature the world has to offer, or will offer. And some days it genuinely pisses me off.

(This is becoming a very negative post, and I apologize for that, but for some reason these thoughts of mortality and lost experiences have been stuck in my head for a while, and I’m really hoping that this will exercise those demons.)

I often share this personal maxim with friends: “You haven’t had your favourite meal yet.” I mean it in the sense of “You don’t know if you’ll like it until you try it.” I believe that in a broad sense, also more literally there is so much food out there to try in the world, that (statistically speaking), you probably never will get to try what would be your favourite meal. That upsets me. There is more music and movies and games and art that has been created and will be created than can ever be heard or watched or played or experienced. That upsets me. But it also motivates me.

I crave new experiences. When I visit a new restaurant, and there is something on the menu that I don’t already know what it will taste like, I have to try it. If I’m going somewhere new, I’m going to seek out things unique to that place, experiences to have that I haven’t had before, or won’t be able to have elsewhere. This is a vital part of my life. At least I want it to be. But like so many people, so much of my life is safe and sedate, rote and routine. This is a conscious and accepted choice; I want financial and familial success, stability at the core of my life, and a future certain enough for me to take greater risks along the fringes. I live where I live and work where I work because I believe it likely to lead me to a place of financial means and flexible time enough to do many of those adventures that I crave, and to do them with people I love and a family to grow with. There are people who make different choices, and I am grateful to know of them. I may not be able to experience everything the world has to offer, but I can experience so much more vicariously through the sharing of others’.

OK, thank you Internet, for letting me get this off my chest. Writing it did what I hoped it would: get me to break the mental feedback loop of focusing on all the things I won’t get to enjoy in this world, and instead fire me up once again about all the things that I will! One final extra-nerdy thought: we level up by gaining EXPERIENCE; don’t let your life become a grind.

(TL;DR – Try the special.)

Top Music in 2010

(play count of the last 12 months according to last.fm)

Artists

Tracks

Twitter

I see "mountain", "awesome", and "happy". Good sign.

Facebook

"awesome", "beer", "happy"... "hurts"

Top words (in order) were awesome, happy, may (?), time, morning, hurts, weekend, snow, halloween, facebook, find, mountain, anyone, room, really, mountains (plural should count together IMO). Not sure if the word cloud or that list includes captions on posted links/pics/videos, comments, or just straight status updates.

Bookmark Tags

I tag a lot of videos

Not feeling like writing a heck of a lot right now, so I’ll just end with a sentiment I agree with whole-heartedly:

I take a look at the iTunes window: “a rural holiday”, from an album called “Snake Fence Country”. Cool name. I summon Google.

Cool name, and local too!

It’s from the CBC Records label… hey sweet! Edmonton Wind Ensemble! My home town. I think I would like to give them money in exchange for my own copy of this album to enjoy at my leisure! Back to iTunes. Search for: “Snake Fence Country”

D’oh. Disappointing, but not everything is in iTunes. Back to Google. First link is Classics Online: Your Classical Music Download Source. Sounds promising… but then I see:

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???

Not available in my country? It’s from my country! My city! The label is our national media company! This can’t be right. Trying somewhere else. Amazon.ca:

A HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ONE… ok, ok. It’s obviously out of production, fairly obscure, not completely unreasonable that the CD would be unavailable. What about Amazon.com:

Ah-ha! So it is out there somewhere! That gives me an idea. Back to iTunes, change the store to U.S…

What the hell!?

How can an album made in Canada, by Canadians, and released by a national Canadian government funded organization not be available to Canadians!?

Stupid, ignorant, hateful, petty… who wins here? Tell me. What possible benefit is this situation to anyone involved in or interested in this music? How the hell did the CBC allow this to take place? Since the CBC is publicly funded, which means that Canadian tax dollars were involved in the production of this album, how is it that the rights have become locked up by a foreign entity that can block Canadians from purchasing it??

This is everything that’s wrong with our intellectual property legislation today. Pointless and ridiculous interference that doesn’t help anyone. Well, except for the ignorant politicians that get bribed into passing this bullshit and the soulless corporations that seem to exist only to drain money away from the people who actually care about music.

Unfortunately this particular album is obscure enough that I can’t seem to find it on any of my usual torrent search sites, otherwise I’d be freely enjoying it while writing this diatribe (“free” being a key word there). I do have my fake US iTunes account that I set up last time I ran into this stupidity. But honestly, as much as I enjoyed that one song, and I’m sure I would love the rest, I have my doubts as to whether any of the money would actually get to the artists if I were to purchase it this way. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find the CD in a second-hand music store somewhere. More likely I’ll just never hear it again, and no one will have got any of the money that I was happy to spend. Lose-lose.

So here’s the list of my top 25 songs of 2009, in order of the number of times I played the full track on my computer, iPod, or iPhone:

1. Joel Plaskett Emergency – Nowhere With You
2. Flogging Molly – What’s Left of the Flag
3. Hi-Standard – Wait for the Sun
4. Portal – Still Alive
5. Leonard Cohen – Waiting For The Miracle
6. Enter the Haggis – One Last Drink
7. Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
8. Jonathan Coulton – Mr. Fancy Pants
9. The Salads – Get Loose
10. Styrofoam and Sarah Shannon – I Found Love
11. Jonathan Coulton – The Future Soon
12. Finnegan’s Lads – Dirty Old Town
13. Da Vinci’s Notebook – The Gates
14. Semisonic – Closing Time
15. Jonathan Coulton – Code Monkey
16. Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie – The System Administrator Song
17. Dean Elliott & His Big Band – Lonesome Road
18. Corb Lund Band – The Truck Got Stuck
19. The Tossers – Altercations
20. John Coltrane – Giant Steps
21. Dropkick Murphys – The Dirty Glass
22. Patti Smith – Gloria
23. Tenacious D – The Metal
24. Rancid – Roots Radicals
25. Flogging Molly – Rebels of the Sacred Heart

Of course, the math geek in me just screams at the idea of using raw play count data that doesn’t take into account when any of these songs actually became available to me. For example, I bought Enter the Haggis in November, and they made it to #6. I bought Jonathan Coulton’s album in March, and he appears three times (four if you count “Still Alive”). And yet, bands like Flogging Molly and Corb Lund, oft-stated “favourite” bands of mine of which I own many albums, only appear once or twice. Some of these tracks I don’t own at all, but have appeared often enough as “recommendations” on my last.fm station that they make the list!

Hmm… I wonder how hard it would be to build an algorithm that could level out the initial enthusiastic repetition of a new album or song, consider the time of year it was added to the overall library, and assign an appropriate weighting as compared to those that have been in rotation for more than 12 (24? more?) months. I wonder how clear the pattern would be if I could go back and track plays of a new song from purchase, peak, trough, to plateau. What kind of timeline does there need to be for a song to stabilize into regular rotation, or just be forgotten until it gets picked up by a random shuffle and brought back into play? How much of an effect does placing the song into a playlist have versus leaving it in the overall library?

How much time can I waste discussing pattern analysis of my music listening habits before I get back to work?

That one I think I can answer.

1. Flogging Molly
2. Gogol Bordello
3. Great Big Sea
4. Dean Gray (Green Day mashup DJ)
5. Corb Lund
6. Captain Tractor
7. The Free Design
8. Blink-182
9. Death Cab for Cutie
10. Jack Johnson
11. The Flaming Lips
12. Dropkick Murphys
13. Rancid
14. Feist
15. Dungeons & Dragons podcasts

My Top Tracks (according to Last.fm):

1. Big Audio Dynamite – Rush
2. Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
3. Webb Wilder & The Nashvegaans – One Taste Of The Bait
4. The Flaming Lips – Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
5. Scissor Sisters – I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’
6. Gogol Bordello – Sally
7. Trace Adkins – Honky Tonk Badonkadonk
8. Flogging Molly – What’s Left of the Flag
9. Ian Tyson – This is My Sky
10. Tenacious D – The Metal
11. Dean Gray – Boulevard of Broken Songs
12. Montgomery Gentry – Gone
13. Flogging Molly – Sentimental Johnny
14. Dean Gray – Dr. Who on Holiday
15. John Michael Montgomery – Sold (The Grundy County Auction Incident)

Movies I saw that were released in 2008 (not necessarily the best, just some of the more memorable; in no order):

• WALL-E
• The Dark Knight
• Kung-Fu Panda
• Iron Man
• Cloverfield
• Quantum of Solace
• Mamma Mia
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Horton Hears A Who
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• The Incredible Hulk
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
• The Forbidden Kingdom
• Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
• Semi-Pro
• The Ruins
• Be Kind, Rewind
• Futurama – The Beast With A Billion Backs
• Tropic Thunder

(If I tried to remember ALL the movies I watched last year, it would take me until the end of ’09!  The most watched movie of the year was a tie between WALL-E and Shoot ‘Em Up, 3 times each.)

Some of the best stuff I read in 2008:

• The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by Wil Wheaton
• World War Z, by Max Brooks
• Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis
• The Gunslinger Born (The Dark Tower Graphic Novel)
• G33k Mafia, by Rick Dakan
• Godel, Escher, and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
• Y, The Last Man, series
• Transmetropolitan, series
• The Boys, series
• Planet Hulk/World War Hulk, series
• Punisher MAX, series (Garth Ennis’ run)
• Wanted, series
• Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
• Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
• Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, core books and supplements

Teh awesomist tubes on teh internets:

• Wil Wheaton dot Net: In Exile
• The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
• Lifehacker
• xkcd
• Garfield minus Garfield
• Least I Could Do
• Questionable Content
• Penny Arcade
• Tcritic – Daily T-Shirt Blog
• io9
• Boing Boing
• Ain’t It Cool News
• Horror Movie A Day
• PostSecret

Favourite Online Video of 2008:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Favourite Video Game of 2008:

Tie: Guitar Hero III and Portal

October 20… can’t wait!

\m/

Courtesy of Topless Robot’s The Best 11 Songs From Geek-Movie Sountracks

Batman, meet Prince’s dirty mind. Prince’s dirty mind, meet Batman. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about! Man, try to imagine modern-day Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan turning over the soundtrack for their ponderous Batman Begins to, I dunno, OutKast and you’ll have some idea of how freaking crazy it is that this song and video ever even happened. Torn between his brother-in-mononymhood Batman and his fellow purple enthusiast the Joker, Prince created a hybrid character called Gemini, who presides over a berserk interpretive dance involving women in batsuits, a parade of Vicki Vales led by a woman in a shirt reading “ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO ” (an homage to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns!), cheeky references to the ’60s TV-show theme that still have over-serious Bat-fans sputtering with fury, collage-style lyrics culled from all of Prince’s other Batman soundtrack songs, and a fucking vicious guitar solo. The end result is a ballsy slab of industrial-dance-funk-rock-madness that proves superhero soundtrack music doesn’t have to be kid-tested and mother-approved.