11,100 gecs, on cinema, snow, 15 icons

[bluelander]

11,100 gecs

A few years ago I decided I didn't like the band 100 gecs based on the first song of theirs I looked up, "Money Machine". Well, recently I had seen a couple tracks recommended on youtube while I was looking up some other music, and I heard two that I really liked: "Ringtone" from their first album, 1000 gecs (1Kg) and "Hollywood Baby" from their second album, 10,000 gecs (10Kg). So I decided to give them another shot, and I'm glad I did.

1Kg is my less favorite of the two, but there are still a few tracks I enjoy. I can tolerate or even enjoy heavy vocal modulation/distortion up to a point, but 1Kg crosses that line more than I'd like. "745 sticky", "800db Cloud", "Ringtone" and "gec 2 U" are the 1Kg tracks I enjoyed.

I liked 10Kg quite a bit more. The standout track for me is "The Most Wanted Person in the United States", which I've listened to dozens of times. I also really liked "I Got My Tooth Removed". I found it incredibly relatable, and I liked how earnest and vulnerable the song was compared to their other ones.

Across the whole album, the speech distortion and modulation has been toned down to a level that I'm able to enjoy. I think the only track on 10Kg I actively dislike is "One Million Dollars", but I've always had an aversion to speech samples repeated ad nauseam without sufficient variety. I like how Hideki Naganuma uses them, chopping them up and mixing them in different ways throughout the song, but "the system is down"-style repetitive techno sample drops always grate on me.

Other than that, 10Kg is a great evolution of their style. 1Kg felt like they were trying to make a meme album, 10Kg feels like they're getting more confident in their songwriting without sacrificing the humor. They're still not taking themselves seriously but their new music has a lot more artistry and maturity than 1Kg, in my opinion. I look forward to seeing what they do next.

On Cinema

There's a new season of On Cinema On Demand (FKA On Cinema! and More in the Morning, FKA On Cinema At The Cinema) which is exciting. Other than the Oscar special in March, they took 2023 off in solidarity with the writer's strike, which worked out for me: I discovered the show in mid-2023 after watching The Trial of Tim Heidecker on a weird random whim, and spent a few months getting caught up on everything from the On Cinemaverse I could get my hands on (which is most of it: there's some bonus material I haven't seen because I don't have a HEI network subscription, but all the main content I've been able to watch either free on youtube or find on soulseek)

They've released 3 episodes so far, and I've enjoyed them. I'm a little surprised the Amato Group storyline is still going, I sort of expected there to be an off-screen universe reset at some point, but Tim's more dedicated to the Amatos then ever. Tim (sorry, T. Amato) now has a fictional mental illness with the sole symptom of being unable to tell movies from reality; now that he's medically unable to watch movies, he brought on a mysterious new cohost, Joey P., a really great Joe Rogan-style meathead podcaster character, who for reasons unexplained records all of his reviews in a separate segment which is spliced into the main show, much to the confusion and consternation of Gregg. Gregg consistently asking Joey what score he gave the movie and Tim getting more and more pissed off as he repeatedly has to explain that the audience saw the rating in the other segment is great. Also Gregg doing the math in real time to convert from Joey's 4-star scale to On Cinema's traditional 5 buckets of popcorn is a great bit. I'm a Gregghead, so getting to hear Gregg explain movie runtime trivia before giving them five buckets of popcorn in the present day is like a warm blanket, although it loses a lot when you don't have the graphics and the "pop" sound effect. Hopefully this is addressed later in the season.

The most interesting thing about this season so far is that it's also being released as a podcast. On Cinema started out as an audio podcast in 2011, but it's been exclusively a video series since 2013. It's especially strange that there would be a free podcast feed now that the videos are locked behind a paywall. I got even more curious when I saw how much longer the audio episodes are than the videos. I assumed it would just be the audio tracks from the episodes: did they record additional material for the podcast? It can't all be ads, right?

Friends, it's all ads. At first, I wasn't sure whether it was a bit. Every ad in episode 1 was for Carrabba's, an Italian restaurant I had never heard of, and they were maximally intrusive. Ads would be played randomly, interrupting people mid-word, and it was always two 15-30 second ads back-to-back. I thought it was a fictional restaurant and was a meta-commentary on the state of podcast ads, but I looked it up, and it's a real restaurant, there just aren't any around where I live. "Huh", I thought, "maybe the ads are real."

In episode 2 I started using a stopwatch to time how many minutes of the show were commercials. Of the 25m44s runtime, 11m30s were ads. There were still Carrabba's ads, but other ads started creeping in. Some were very typical podcast ads, stuff like Blue Apron and T-Mobile, but it was starting to get weirder. There was an ad for the Morongo Casino Resort and Spa, a real business located in Cabazon, CA. At the end of the ad the announcer assured me it's located less than 90 minutes from wherever I am. Which for 2100 miles would be a pretty impressive trip.

Episode 3 was 12m30s of ads for 27m02s of runtime, and this is where it really starts to go off the rails. It's still the audio from the show, but now the ads are playing on top of each other, 2 or 3 at a time. You'll get a few seconds from the middle of an ad sporadically interrupting the show, then an unbearably long block of ads a few minutes later. There was an ad for a Philippines airline and Malaysian pizza hut (when I looked up the promotion, I found a 2016 upload of the ad on youtube.) Total chaos. I still have no idea how many, if any, of these ads are legit.

I'm kind of conflicted, because as much as I hate listening to real ads, the bit wouldn't work if they were obviously fake. It's an incredible parody of the state of podcast advertising in 2024, I just don't know where it can go from here. There's usually 10 episodes in a season and they've reached peak unlistenability by episode 3, so I'm really curious what happens next. I'm expecting bits of the show audio will start to be cut, and eventually it's just a wall-to-wall cacophony of random ads. How long I'm willing to endure this for the sake of art remains to be seen, but I'll definitely listen to the next one. Whatever it'll be, I'm intrigued. I hope they're making at least some money from the podcast. Whether I keep listening or not, I'll download each episode. Maybe this can be my requital for pirating the show.

Snow

Yesterday it got above freezing for the first time in a couple weeks. It got up to 40F, but there was still a fuck-ton of snow on the ground. What the hell. How did it stay frozen if it's above freezing? Messed up.

Snow didn't use to bother me so much, but I used to live somewhere people shoveled and salted sidewalks. I guess they don't do that anymore. I love snow in theory, I love the cold, I love how freshly fallen snow looks; I just don't like having to choose between walking in the snow and maybe slipping and dying, or walking in the road and maybe getting hit by a car and dying. I usually pick the road. Most people are usually slightly more careful in snowy conditions, and I figure I have better odds of making it if my feet and ankles aren't in pain from walking on hard uneven terrain. We didn't get a real snow this year until relatively late, well into January, and I was hoping I wouldn't see any this year, but alas. It's currently 51 and there's STILL snow on the sidewalk, it's soft and slushy and patchy enough that I can walk through it with a minimum of pain, but it still got pretty slick in spots. There's a lot more traffic when I'm leaving work than when I'm walking to work, so I'm more hesitant to walk in the road in the evenings. It's going to be 60 on Wednesday and 66 on Thursday, surely that'll be the last of it, if there's any justice in the world.

15 icons

To end on a happier note, one thing I didn't realize I was missing about a livejournal-like writing platform is the ability to upload multiple icons, and choose which one you want to set for each post. How sad that this 25-year-old feature still feels fresh and novel. I have a bad habit of being mercurial about avatars on social media. I'm sure I change mine enough to be annoying for fediverse posters who rely on visual cue to keep peoples' identities straight. It's not like I change to a different raccoon picture every time, I pick wildly different avatars based on how I'm feeling at the moment I decide to change it. I feel bad that some people are frustrated by it, and I understand if they want to unfollow me, but if I see the same picture next to my name on whatever I post for too long, I start to feel resentful at pigeonholing myself. Like there's more to me than just being a raccoon, y'know?

But on Dreamwidth, it's okay! I'm meant to be mercurial, it's how the platform was designed! Even the 15 icons I get as a free user is plenty to make me feel able to express myself. I've been slowly adding old and new avatars, and I'm up to 11. I'm sure I'll be fine once I hit 15, I'll probably delete old ones and add new ones periodically, as old interests fade and new ones appear. It's a cool way to express myself that I didn't know I wanted. Maybe that subconsciously influenced my decision to switch to Dreamwidth. Whatever, I think I'll be happy here