W♥M Updates (November 2008)

 11/28/2008 22:38:20  ♥ written by vu ()

Happy black Friday!

I wanted to give you guys a November update, even though the month's nearly over. I'm looking over my pending music list right now and I have too many to cover before the year's over, but I'm going to give it the old college try and cover as much of it as I can before starting a fresh slate for 2009. I'm very excited about the new year, working with brand new exciting music companies that we haven't worked with before.

Also, I wanted to give a warm welcome to Jaklumen to the W♥M team, who I think will be handling most of the electronica/ambient stuff. I'm going to try and schedule to have all the active writers to appear on a future podcast (once everything is sorted out, I think our next writer appearance is Australian "Schnitzel" Sally). For those keeping track, previous appearances includes: Kate & Lara, Emelia, Brian, Alex, Derek, Dave, Ryan, and Christina. I would love to get a reoccuring co-host, but just getting someone to a commitment to a weekend recording session on a regular basis is harder than you think. Generally, I prefer taping on Sunday (daytime) so I can work on editing the show Sunday evening, whilst catching up on television I've missed via hulu.com.

Speaking of television shows, as I am writing this, I'm downloading the third season of Supernatural on iTunes for free. Technically, I have paid for it because I picked up the DVD. I'm starting to see more and more when you buy a DVD it comes with a digital copy of the movie for watching it on your computer or portable device. Since I have an iPod Touch, I have noticed I am starting to use its video feature a lot (especially when I'm sitting around with my cat and reading reference books).

Not to sound like such an Apple fanboy, but I really think it's one of the best looking and performing device. In fact, here is what W♥M looks like on an iPod. The Safari browser renders the page correctly, and the zooming function works like a charm. There is a lot of scrolling involved, but I reckon it's not a device that you're going to spend hours reading on it like a digital book. The way I see it, is that it's just to quickly look at website or catching up on some emails.

Sure, I would love another browser on the iPod, like Opera, but Apple does not play nice. I just want the freedom to add whatever software I want to it, you know? Quake (with physical buttons add on) is available on a broken iPhone, so the potential is there! They can really turn this into a PSP or Nintendo DS competitor, but perhaps that's fourth or fifth generation down the line.

If Quake is your thing, the best free first-person shooter on the iPod is Cube. This is such a great-looking game on the platform, shame the accelerometer control and gamma is pretty bad. For the price (free), I would still give it a five-star rating.

As for music, I've been listening to Camera Obscura on my iPod and as a special bonus, here is our own Emelia with her ukulele rendition of "Tears for Affair". Apologize in advance for photography cover artwork, just so you feel better, here's a picture of me & photogirl. I do have a funny story about that picture, but for the long and short of it, the photograph was taken at a Camera Obscura concert on a velvet couch at the Varsity Theater.

Of course you protest, that's what you do best
And you're modest and shy to the end
You're watching them as they're looking at you
And you know it was money well spent

She told me you'd given up drinking to be with somebody you knew
And you tried to get into the bible but it never got into you

Hey, if you use hype machine, twitter, or lastfm, please add us!  Also, we were recently on vox.com/music!

UPDATE 11/30/08: Normally we get one or two people who listens to W♥M exclusively through The Hype Machine, which is not a lot, but any new reader/listeners is cool in my book. 

Well today I checked our page and there is a huge spike (36 as of this writing) on the Camera Obscura's "Tears for Affair" song!