Upgoer Five

I blame Chanaleh, and my dedication to Feynman's philosophy that if we cannot explain something simply then we haven't adequately explained it.

To wit, I took my own verbose explanation of What It Is That I Do (from 2006, holy cow I've been on LJ a long time) and ran it through the upgoer five text editor. The result is this:

I make stuff from which people get whole answers that they like. I make situations in which conversations can take place between people and the things people use. These conversations are about what people do and the conversations happen over a long time. I deal with how people get confused, with how people feel, and with what people have done in the past because this matters to what they do now.

I could not do what I do without an understanding of thought, memory, attention, and seeing. I use simple things, I watch carefully, and I try to care for other people when I make these situations. I use what I have made to deal with problems in business and problems with stuff everyone else uses. When I do my job well, things that are busy seem easy; things that seem too big to deal with feel smaller.

I'm surprised that the vocabulary includes polysyllabic words like "conversation" but I couldn't find a good word in there to use in place of "exchange". I used a thesaurus to help me on the first pass, which was just word substitution, then I did a second pass of sentence restructuring and simplification. I then did a final pass in which I rearranged the sentences themselves in order to improve the flow.

If I was trying to be really simple, I think, I would stop after the first paragraph but that felt like cheating, given the original text I was working from. I started out being frustrated by this exercise but in the end I found it quite interesting and useful. Also, I realize that I don't have a "wiitid" tag in my LJ, though clearly I ought to have one.

Pump up the goddamn funk (music)

Some seriously funky stuff in this batch, plus a surprise or two.

http://audioporncentral.com/2013/01/blende-surrender-circus.html
One of the things I like best about modern electronic dance music is that deep in the genome is funk. Sometimes it has to pass through disco to get here, but even that can be tolerable. This groovy funky dancey track is a collaboration of two UK-based artists who go by the names Blende and Surrender!. They have an EP coming out next month and this "Circus" is the first single off it. Boppin' good.

http://audioporncentral.com/2013/01/reset-stealin-your-soul.html
Last time I promised you TURBOFUNK and here it is. I do not believe it's possible to listen to this without turning it up loud. The track is by Reset! (http://soundcloud.com/reset-1) who are a new name to me but definitely now on my to-check-out list. There are two other mixes available, and of the three I think I like the original video version best. That's a narrow win, though, because both the vocal mix and the Monique Autoerotique remix are pretty good. Three times the turbo!

http://djsteveboy.com/groovelectric.html
DJ Steveboy's latest mix, "Chimera", is one of his funkiest, and finest in recent memory. It's got some good vocal bits, but the real win for me here is the middle acoustic sections, which spread across a variety of modern styles, all of which have some connection back to the base funk roots.

http://soundcloud.com/mashupgermany/mashup-germany-we-are-the
Mashup Germany continues to surprise and delight. He may be the most underrated mash-up DJ working today. Here he tosses off a casual 11-track beauty that I can't stop dancing to. This is a traditional dance-floor destroyer done beautifully. One of the things I like about his productions is that he's not afraid to let them be quiet for a bit. Listen from about 0:45 here to see what I mean. Then he starts to pull in "Kids" and the whole mix takes off. The bit up to 1:05 where the mix hits full stride is just brilliant, and who else would think of using "Tom's Diner" like that?

http://audioporncentral.com/2013/01/tegan-sara-fool-to-cry-produced-by-rac.html
I continue to think that one way to make the world better is to have more Tegan & Sara in it. This cover of the Rolling Stones' "Fool To Cry" was put together by RAC and it's a surprise and a delight. I'm not that fond of the original but the harmonies in this one really do it for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8e2fJfiddx4#!
This one I'm blogging because it took me by surprise. It's Heart, doing "Stairway to Heaven" as part of the Kennedy Center Honors Led Zeppelin. That's not hugely surprising, as Heart have done Zeppelin tunes for many years as part of their regular sets and the Wilsons have been forthright about how much Zeppelin influenced them. It was somewhat surprising to see them doing it with Jason Bonham and also how much I liked the orchestral arrangement. True, prog rock has a long and storied history of orchestral arrangements but part of what makes "Stairway" is its sparsity. The choral bits here just... work. The guest guitarist (unnamed here) is really good. And the bowlers are a nice touch.