Category: Post

My wife played the current number one song on Billboard’s Hot 100 for me today, because she “thought it would make [me] mad.” The song is Ke$ha’s ‘Tik Tok,’ and she was right, primarily because I was dumbfounded by how glaringly it rips off Uffie’s ‘The Party‘ (Or more specifically, the Justice remix which I am familiar with).

Consulting Google (“Uffie Kesha Rip”) and Twitter (“Uffie Kesha”) searches, everyone agrees.

The one thing I didn’t turn up in my quick searches was a Ke$ha / Uffie / Justice mashup, which seems so obvious. Here’s my 30 minute effort (MP3). Bravo, self, bravo.

[audio:http://www.kempa.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/kesha_uffie_justice.mp3|titles=Ushtice]

And for comparison, a bit of the real Uffie song…

[audio:http://www.kempa.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Justice-The-Party.mp3|titles=Justice / Uffie]

…and a bit of the real Ke$ha Song:

[audio:http://www.kempa.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Kesha-Tik-Tok.mp3|titles=Ke$ha]

It’s that first part that is just shameless.

Zach Curd points out that this is a “thing” now – as he put it: “the kind of ‘I’m a bratty girl’ singspeak.” As proof he passed along this music video which has convinced me the world is over. That is all.

I stumbled upon the following bit in the latest issue of the New Yorker and had to share, because the full article isn’t available online anywhere (Abstract can be found here). Google’s experimental OCR converter did most of the transcription work.

Anyway – this whole thing reads like a scene from a modern-day Spinal Tap. Weird music industry insanity crossed with internet startup hucksterism with a dash of awkward standoffishness. I love it.

All of this is heightened by the fact that BOTH parties are being followed by separate documentary film crews, who are filming the insanity. How weird is that? One side of the door: a couple dudes with a painfully conspicuous film crew. Door opens to reveal other dude with painfully conspicuous film crew. I want to see those two shots, in split screen.

The whole thing is amazing. I can barely stand it.

The documentary involved having the members of Vampire Weekend Interview what Koenig called “iconic California musicians.” One of the people they interviewed was Tom DeLonge, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Blink-182, which had its flash point of popularity in the nineties. Early one morning, they stopped, with the camera crew, in an office park off the freeway. A woman holding a Chihuahua answered the door, and led the band and the film crew into a lobby decorated with green Chinese dragon sculptures. They went into a garagelike room – DeLonge’s rehearsal space – with artificial turf for carpet and a chandelier in a plastic box hanging from the ceiling. There was a “guitar boat” from a recent tour, with a set list taped to it: “Dumpweed,” “Feeling This,” “Rock Show,” “What’s My Age Again?”

“It’s so hit-filled” Tomson said, admiringly.

DeLonge came in, wearing jeans and a short sleeved gray T-shirt over a long-sleeved white T-shirt. “Is this the whole band?” he asked. “Is this Vampire Weekend? You guys do quality shit. I’m stealing a lot of your stuff.” DeLonge, too, was being followed by a camera crew. “This is a Blink documentary we’re making,” he said. “It’s a Blinkumentary.”

They sat on a couch, and the Vampire Weekend members took turns asking questions. Both camera crews filmed the proceedings. At one point, DeLonge said, “One of the things that I always wondered, when you have some success as a musician, is, How the fuck did that happen? What am I doing that people like?”

After the interview, he led the band into a conference room with a flat-screen TV and launched into a long pitch for an Internet project he was working on – “a prepackaged Web site” for bands, called Modlife. “I term it an ‘operating system,'” DeLonge said. “You could sell music, you could sell movies, you could sell advance tickets, you could do advertising, you could do automated V.I.P. parties. We’re gonna be putting in live auctions, e-commerce.” He continued, “We’re doing it with the White Stripes.” He said Vampire Weekend could do all of its business through Modlife, with the Web site taking twenty-five per cent of the profits. He demonstrated a video chat-room function by talking to a group of his Fans: “Hey, everybody, I’m doing a demonstration with Vampire Weekend. If you want Vampire Weekend to be on Modlife, say ‘Yes!'” The chat-room users started responding: “Yes!” “Yes!” “Yes!” One wrote, “No!”

DeLonge ignored it, and talked about video blogging: “Do you want to do normal blogs – or do you want to do it in the dark and have lasers going and make it look like you’re from space? And not call it a blog, call it a space cam?” He asked, what have you guys been doing for a Web site?”

“Three out of four of us are on Twitter,” Batmanglij said. DeLonge shook his head. “I don’t want to be freaking on the money part,” he said. “But you guys know and I know that you’re trying to live in an industry that’s dying. And so Modlife is trying to give you the chance to survive.” Then he screened a trailer for a movie that his new band, Angels & Airwaves had produced, called “Love” – images of an astronaut in a space station over swelling music.

Batmanglij started giggling, and DeLonge turned and looked at him.

“Uh, I just thought of something fun that we could do with our band,” he said.

“That’s rad,” DeLonge said evenly. “Cool.”

The Vampire Weekend members got up to leave. DeLonge shook their hands and said, “Consider this stuff.” Then he asked, “Why are you guys so mellow?”

They drove out of the office park and past some strip malls. Green Day was playing on the radio. The band members seemed rattled.

“I started thinking about all kinds of things while he was talking,” Batmanglij said. “Like what it means to be in a band. Tom DeLonge is not that old. He’s thirty-three. Seven years older than me – that’s crazy.”

Tomson said, “You gotta hustle.” No one spoke for a while.

Who is the crazy “Social Media Expert” vampire that got to Tom DeLonge and turned him into such a bizarre tech-startup pitchman? I love that his selling point for video blogging is that you can “do it in the dark and have lasers going” and “call it a space cam.” I love it.

While leafing through some sheet music I had bought at an estate sale, I stumbled upon a weird precursor to the thirty-second track preview. On the inside front cover: 6-7 bar ‘previews’ of other sheet music offerings! Now that I’ve seen it, this is the obvious way for sheet music publishers to advertise their other offerings, but it never occurred to me that this was done.

Hey, did you see those images of a miniature Nintendo Entertainment System built from Legos that made the rounds of all the nerd blogs a few weeks back? If not, it looks like this:

The model was built by a flickr user who goes by ‘Arkov.’ His photostream is here – there’s lots of other great Lego stuff going on there.

Everyone knows you can’t click three links on the internet without landing on some nerdy LEGO project, so it’s hard to put my finger on why I became so obsessed with this one. I think it has a lot to do with the scale (Low brick count, easy to build, reproducable) and the simplicity of the abstraction (visually it just seems to translate perfectly). Also the hinged cartridge door: perfect. Obviously, I had to build one, and so I did:

I’ve also made it slightly easier for other people to build one. I discovered that if you build a custom model using Lego’s Digital Designer software and upload it for ordering, you can share the link with friends so they can order your model too.

All the specifics are below – it’ll cost you about twenty bucks total to build one. I should be clear in saying that none of this money goes to me.

• You can buy a reasonable approximation of Arkov’s model in kit form here ($14.90). Note that this kit does not come with assembly directions! You’ll have to grab them from the links below. Looks like custom builds expire from the store after about a month. You’ll have to download the NES model below and place the order through the Lego Digital Designer software. Also note: this is not an exact copy of Arkov’s model – but a version adapted to only use parts currently available from Lego.
• The strings both Arkov and I used to connect the controllers are not currently offered by Lego. You can usually track them down on eBay for a couple bucks. This search should turn up several pair (I used 31L – or 31 stud length strings).
• You can download Mac or PC versions of the Lego Digital Designer (Which is used to generate nice animated directions) here, and the NES Digital Designer Model here.
• If you don’t feel like going the fancy route on the directions, you can download a copy of the HTML directions their program spits out here (Not as good!). Also helpful: the instructions Arkov generated for his model are here.
• If you build one of these, you can (and should!) donate five bucks to the guy who designed this model here. I’ve been in touch with him, and he clearly doesn’t think anyone would ever do such a thing, so help me prove him wrong.

Two random thoughts that this process generated in my brain:

• The Digital Designer software that Lego provides is insanely powerful – this was my first exposure to it. You can construct a model from a library of all extant Lego parts, and once you’ve tweaked it to completion, you can order the pieces with the click of a button. It also does animated, 360 degree rotatable build directions. All for free. Crazy. (Disclaimer: I had a few minor gripes with certain parts not connecting as they should, and the workaround for one of these bugs made it into the model, but trust me, this method of ordering the parts is WAY less painful than one by one via Pick a Brick. Lego – if you’re reading this: Digital Designer won’t let 1×1 circular plates connect sideways into technic bricks, like so.)
  
• I can totally see this “Custom LEGO models available as boxed kits” thing turning into a cottage industry for someone at urban craft shows, etc. I wonder if the 3 per person limit on these kits is some sort of preliminary effort by Lego to avoid that?

I think I’ve finally worked out enough of the bugs to mention without coder shame that Suburban Sprawl Music has launched our 2008 Holiday compilation.

44 artists from Michigan and beyond contributed songs this year. Ironically, I think this is the first time in three years that none of the songs are about unemployment.

This year I decided to update how the holiday page works, dragging it kicking and screaming into the world of 2007 web technologies. You can now play any song in its entirety by clicking on the title / artist, and we’ve cleaned up the downloading interface so everything is (in theory) easier to use. It should be working in all major browsers, but if you find anything weird, let me know. I might cry, but I still want to know.

I couldn’t decide on a song from the Ventures Christmas Album to attack this year, so I made up one of my own – a sort of Ventures Holiday Music Fanfic offering, if you will. As with everything, I put this off until the absolute last second, and ended up learning all the parts, recording them, and throwing together a final mix in the span of about six hours.

My one regret: I was without a drum key, so the snare sounds like balls. I will get over it though. I always do.

You can download the MP3 here, or I’ve embedded it below for easy listenin’.

[audio:Adam Kempa – Jailhouse Angels.mp3]

Earlier this year, I made the mistake of downloading “Dr. Mario: Online RX” for the Nintendo Wii. I promptly became completely addicted, playing online every night for about a week. At this point, my wife Sarah was moved to give it a shot. Sarah is not a big videogame person, but did get sucked into both Wii Sports and Big Brain Academy in pretty serious fashion. Needless to say, she developed an obsession with Dr. Mario that handily surpassed my own. She challenged all comers: houseguests, strangers on the internet, and most frequently, me. Demands that I report to the livng room for ‘Battles’ became a nightly ritual.

That said, when it came time to come up with Halloween costumes to wear to our friend Asif’s party, it seemed like a no brainer to go as Dr. Mario (Sarah) and one of the viruses from the game (Me) – I chose the red one. For the record, Wikipedia can’t decide if the red virus is officially named ‘Red Virus’ or ‘Fever.’

My first instinct with respect to the oversized pills / capsules was to google around and see if anything usable already existed on the internet. I turned up one other person who created a giant capsule, and a billion of those ‘put your logo on a minimum of one thousand of our crappy promotional items’ sites pushing capsule-shaped “stress balls” to pharmaceutical companies. Neither of these options appealed to me (Though I did try unsuccessfully to get several companies to send me samples of the blank capsule stress balls), so paper mache was nominated the best candidate.

Sarah’s costume was easy: wig + mustache + stethoscope + head mirror = Dr. Mario. I volunteered to create some oversized pills, and I had a couple ideas on how to tackle the Virus mask as well. A few weekends before Halloween, I invaded our local Target to gather two key elements of my planned costume: Balloons, and a Mr. Potato Head.

I ended up creating the form for the pills out of balloons, 8.5 x 11 sheets of cardstock, and masking tape. In retrospect, there are two things I probably would have done differently here – things I will definitely do next time I create five oversized medicine capsules out of paper mache. One: I should have covered the cardstock completely with masking tape, as the wetness of the paper mache process cause it to buckle in, deforming the pills. Two: I should have taped the seams where the cardstock met the balloons, as the lip of the cardstock curled away from the surface of the balloon once it got wet. Take these bits of knowledge, future constructors of Dr. Mario costumes, and use it wisely!

I also paper mached-up a giant balloon to use as a mask in case I didn’t come up with anything better in the meantime (I didn’t). Way to cover your ass, past self!

Once I had spent far too many evenings simultaneously watching election coverage and applying layers of paper mache to my various objects, it was time to paint. I actually used primer this time, which is completely uncharacteristic. I am always impatient when it comes to painting things, so I usually skip this step. I think I have to admit that it helped, though.

Once the priming was complete, I began applying coats of rustoleumcrazygloss spraypaint. Again, I am super impatient with paint, so it was a tortuous week of applying coats of paint at various intervals, all the while completely ignoring the mask.

So about that procrastinating on the mask issue: I probably spent a good 5 days or so liesurely applying the various coats of spraypaint to the giant-size pills. I finally realized I hadn’t started the mask at all with about two days left before halloween, so I immediately began applying a frantic procession of improperly-dried coats of paint to the Balloon. I applied the last coat of yellow (The eyes) before leaving for work on the morning of Halloween.

Finally, on Friday evening after the last of the trick-or-treaters had come by, it was time to apply the finishing touches: Some hands and feet stolen from a Mr. Potato Head, and a pair of Devil horns. All of these were cobbled onto the mask using a Dremel and gobs of Gorilla Tape, which I had never used before, but now heartily recommend.

Below is a photo of how the finished costumes ended up. Immediately after putting it on at the party I realized two things. One: “Oh shit I can barely hear anything AT ALL.” Two: “Oh shit, no one can hear me AT ALL.” Lesson learned.

     I was contacted by several friends about an article I wrote being linked on nerdblog powerhouse BoingBoing this morning.

     This was interesting to me, because not only did they link to the article when I first wrote it back in 2004, but the same person (Cory) wrote it up!

     Therefore, I hereby break my extensive internet silence to declare membership in the elite ‘Wrote an article nerdy enough to be posted to BoingBoing twice by the same person’ club.