On this episode of Nuno’s random thoughts: social calendar wars; Winter is coming and what’s good about it; and music on movies and TV shows. Skip it if none of these interest you at all.
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I’m a paying subscriber of Last.fm and I absolutely love the service. I use it a lot (as my numbers clearly indicate, 36.000 songs reported in roughly two years is a wholesome figure) and I use it for many purposes, not the least of which is to manage my music shows calendar.
I use it as my primary –actually, make that my only– repository for gig dates, interest, etc. If I’m interested in a gig which is not yet listed, I simply create it in the system and go from there.
But I obviously have other calendars to manage. And for those I use a mix of my own private calendar on my home server and, for other social stuff, I use Yahoo’s upcoming service.
Now, the thing is: while I really do like Upcoming, Last.fm absolutely blows it out of the water for the music events scene and I’m definitely not going to leave it. But then, I’d like to have all the shows I’m attending listed on Upcoming for my friends there to know about them.
I’m not going to even try to build something to that effect, this is just a thought that crossed my mind. -
Winter is coming. Days are getting a lot smaller (and we’re about to have DST thrust upon us to compound the effect) and souls are getting discouraged all around me.
Me? Well, I’m not all that worried about cold, rainy days… I’ve got a plentiful stash of great tea in the cupboard (more to come when I hit London again in November), the fireplace is clean and ready to go and, of course, with winter comes that wonderful time most people call “Christmas” and which I think of as “It’s time to watch ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ again.” And it nearly is time for that. Sweet! -
I’ve been finding some really good music in a few places which I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find it in. More specifically, in TV shows. Even more to the point, British TV shows.
American series have some fine music sometimes, but the ones I follow nowadays use it as nothing more than a nice background filler and leave it at that.
But take something like, for example, the Secret Diary of a Call Girl (if you’re old enough) ;-) and actively listen to what’s playing in the background during the whole show, paying special attention to the more thrilling or emotionally intense scenes. You’ll find lots and lots of music playing, a fair amount of it fairly recent stuff, and much of it really great. You’ll also find some lesser-known bands which are, by and large, well worth the effort to look into.
On a tangentially related subject, Paris (the film) also has some excellent tunes in it’s soundtrack (enough to make me wonder if I should actually get the CD) with the return of the most excellent Wax Tailor with a song which I assume is new (although I’m not really sure about it) and is sufficiently similar to “Que Sera” –from the great “Tales of the Forgotten Melodies”– to trick me into thinking it was a remix of that same song. Well, it wasn’t, and I let my film-companion think otherwise, so now you know. Sorry, my mistake! ;-)