The story of the first two episodes of The Mandalorian, told to the tune of Big Iron. With thanks to JTA for sharing with me.
Big Mandalorian Iron
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Tag: music
The Happy Song
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I’m sure that this music video is supposed to be for children, but between its plasticine-and-fuzzy-felt simplicity and the delightful, joyous, carefree song I can’t help but dance along.
When you’re in the club and you’re hungry… (Misheard Lyrics… Round Two!)
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My mother has long argued that a large category of popular music, second only to those on the subjects of sex and drugs, are about food. This so-called corpus of food songs is, I’m pretty confident, mostly based on mishearing lyrics, but I think she’d have a friend in the fabulous Bec Hill who’s this month made a follow-up to her video When You Listen to the Radio When You’re Hungry. And it’s even better (and to my delight, paella still manages to make a cameo appearance).
Unfortunately Warner Music Group don’t seem to have a sense of humour and you might find that you can’t watch her new video on YouTube. But thankfully that’s not how the Internet works (somebody should tell them!) and if proxying isn’t the best solution for you then you can just watch her new video on the BBC’s Facebook page instead.
TacoBot 3000 (Part 3 of the Raining Tacos saga)
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And on a way, way lighter note to my last repost, Parry Gripp’s latest song and video is the catchiest song about tacos or robots that you’ll ever hear.
Without The Bod
Eight years, six months, and one week after I started at the Bodleian, we’ve gone our separate ways. It’s genuinely been the nicest place I’ve ever worked; the Communications team are a tightly-knit, supportive, caring bunch of diverse misfits and I love them all dearly, but the time had come for me to seek my next challenge.
(For anybody out-of-the-loop, I’m moving to Automattic after surviving their amazing, mind-expanding recruitment process).
Being awesome as they are, my team threw a going-away party for me, complete with food from Najar’s Place, about which I’d previously raved as having Oxford’s best falafels. I wasn’t even aware that Najar’s place did corporate catering… actually, it’s possible that they don’t and this was just a (very) special one-off.
Following in the footsteps of recent team parties, they’d even gotten a suitably-printed cake with a picture of my face on it. Which meant that I could leave my former team with one final magic trick, the never-before-seen feat of eating my own head (albeit in icing form).
As the alcohol started to work, I announced an activity I’d planned: over the weeks prior I’d worked to complete but not cash-in reward cards at many of my favourite Oxford eateries and cafes, and so I was now carrying a number of tokens for free burritos, coffees, ice creams, smoothies, pasta and more. Given that I now expect to spend much less of my time in the city centre I’d decided to give these away to people who were able to answer challenge questions presented – where else? – on our digital signage simulator.
I also received some wonderful going-away gifts, along with cards in which a few colleagues had replicated my long tradition of drawing cartoon animals in other people’s cards, by providing me with a few in return.
Later, across the road at the Kings’ Arms and with even more drinks inside of me, I broke out the lyrics I’d half-written to a rap song about my time at the Bodleian. Because, as I said at the time, there’s nothing more-Oxford than a privileged white boy rapping about how much he’d loved his job at a library (video also available on QTube [with lyrics] and on Videopress).
It’s been an incredible 8½ years that I’ll always look back on with fondness. Don’t be strangers, guys!
Rapper’s Delight, performed by Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant
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Enter The D&DDJ
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One way I’ve found to enhance my nights as Dungeon Master is to call on experiences as an amateur musician and fan, to ramp up the intensity and sense of fantasy with playlists of tunes from the history of composed and recorded music.
I realised that this might be something I was OK at when I saw our party’s rogue lost in imagination and stabbing to the beat of a bit of Shostakovich.
Over the months some of the collections I’ve curated have picked up a few followers on Spotify and upvotes on Reddit but I thought it was time to put more effort in and start writing about it.
The opening post from Lute the Bodies, a new blog by my friend Alec. It promises an exploration of enhancing tabletop roleplaying with music, which is awesome: I’ve occasionally been known to spend longer picking out the music for a given roleplaying event than I have on planning the roleplaying activities themselves! Looking forward to see where this goes…
Impossible Geometry
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Rapping about video games is one thing. Rapping about music/beatmatching video games takes this to a whole new level.
I Wrote a Song Using Only Hate Comments
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Some people fight their haters. Some people ignore their haters. Madilyn Bailey goes one step further and uses hate comments as the lyrics to a song.
Metropoloid: A Metropolis Remix
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Yaz writes, by way of partial explanation:
You could fit almost the entire history of videogames into the time span covered by the silent film era, yet we consider it a mature medium, rather than one just breaking out of its infancy. Like silent movies, classic games are often incomplete, damaged, or technically limited, but have a beauty all their own. In this spirit, indie game developer Joe Blair and I built Metropoloid, a remix of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which replaces its famously lost score with that of its contemporaries from the early days of games.
I’ve watched Metropolis a number of times over the decades, in a variety of the stages of its recovery, and I love it. I’ve watched it with a pre-recorded but believed-to-be-faithful soundtrack and I’ve watched it with several diolive accompaniment. But this is the first time I’ve watched it to the soundtrack of classic (and contemporary-retro) videogames: the Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda, Mega Man and Final Fantasy series, Doom, Kirby, F-Zero and more. If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare and a love of classic film and classic videogames, then you’re in the slim minority that will get the most out of this fabulous labour of love (which, at the time of my writing, has enjoyed only a few hundred views and a mere 26 “thumbs up”: it certainly deserves a wider audience!).
Imogen Heap: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
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In the second half of this video (directly linked), Imogen Heap demonstrates how she uses her Mi.Mu gloves as an expressive music manipulation tool, and then goes on to sing the most haunting rendition of Hide and Seek you’ll ever hear. The entire video’s great – in the first half she brings Guy Sigsworth up to sing Guitar Song, finally answering after 17 years the question “What if Frou Frou got back together?” – but if you only listen to the second half of this video then it’ll still improve your life.
@AndyReganCDF: I nudged you about this last week but you were at Glastonbury and I don’t know if you picked it up after you got back, so here’s a renudge.
Note #14062
Jon Snow oh oh EXTENDED REMIX oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
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This epic video (which contains spoilers for Game of Thrones through the third episode of season eight The Long Night). If you’re somehow not up-to-date, you can always watch the earlier iteration, which only contains spoilers through The Spoils of War, the fourth episode of the seventh series.
And now my bedsheets smell like Jon Snow.
Non Stop Hammer Ti.me
You know how sometimes I make a thing and, in hindsight, it doesn’t make much sense? And at best, all it can be said to do is to make the Internet more fun and weird?
I give you: NonStopHammerTi.me.
Things that make it awesome:
- Well, the obvious.
- Vanilla Javascript.
- CSS animations timed to every-other-beat.
- Using an SVG
stroke-dasharrayas a progress bar. - Progressively-enhanced; in the worst case you just get to download the audio.
- PWA-enhanced; install it to your mobile!
- Open source!
- Decentralised (available via the peer-web at dat://nonstophammerti.me/ / dat://0a4a8a..00/)
- Accessible to screen readers, keyboard navigators, partially-sighted users, just about anybody.
- Compatible with digital signage at my workplace…
That is all.
Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track
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“aisatsana” is the final track off Aphex Twin’s 2012 release, Syro. A departure from the synthy dance tunes which make up the majority of Aphex Twin’s catalog, aisatsana is quiet, calm, and perfect for listening to during activities which require concentration. But with a measly running time just shy of five and a half minutes, the track isn’t nearly long enough to sustain a session of reading or coding. Playing the track on repeat isn’t satisfactory; exact repetition becomes monotonous quickly. I wished there were an hour-long version of the track, or even better, some system which could generate an endless performance of the track without repetition. Since I build software for a living, I decided to try creating such a system.
…
If you’d like to try the experience before you read this whole article (although you should read the article), listen here. I’m sure you’ll agree that it sounds like “more aistsana” without being aistsana.
Spoiler: the secret is Markov chains of musical phrases.