I have spent enough hours in the past few days to find more free, legal music downloads, in order to comprise an ultimate top-100 of such music. Having listened to hundreds (thousands?) of available songs from many labels and band sites, I’ve come to realize that most of the music out there is actually indie rock (as in the genre, with the U.S. meaning), rather than alternative rock.

For example, there are way more copycats of Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, or Arcade Fire, than there are of AFI, The Strokes, The Offspring, or Green Day. Thing is, both myself and JBQ are more at the alternative hard/rock side of things than the folk-inspired indie rock that the independent scene is filled up with. There are really not many unsigned bands out there that sound like the kind of music we listen to San Francisco’s alternative FM station “Live 105.3“. The few bands that seem to be able to write such music are snatched immediately by the big-4 majors.

Two things are happening here:
1. The musicians that are able to write the kind of music we want to listen to so we can bang our heads and still keep the melody in-tact, are very few.
2. The world is moving towards a different style of music, and the indie scene is the one that’s driving it. In that case, JBQ and I are just old, and we don’t get it anymore.

There are of course unsigned bands that style-wise are in the middle of these two kinds of music, e.g. Ag Silver, The A-Sides, Capital Lights, The Crash Moderns, Death In The Park, Drist, Longwave, Magnolia Sons, The New Frontiers, Seabird, TV/TV, We Shot The Moon, Wiretree etc, but these good ones are also few. Funnily, these guys aren’t as easily snatched by the majors, and yet their music is — to me — much more accessible than the folk-style indie rock that the internet is filled with.

Finally, there is something very interesting I noticed about me these past few days while digging for good music. The kind of “alternative indie rock” Northern Europeans create is much more pleasant to my ears than the one American musicians do. For example, The Raveonettes, The Caesars, The Sounds, Lykke Li, sound to me much more pleasant than Flight of The Conchords, or The Decemberists do. Maybe there is something to be said about the music influences someone is growing up with, and maybe that’s the reason we don’t like the US-style of folk-sounding indie rock.

Sure enough, we can’t stand country music either. Ok, except the Blitzen Trapper, a band that defies categorization to this day.

I’ve been against Twitter since the beginning. I still don’t get it really. I find blogs and IMs a much better way to communicate. I think it’s a fashion that will just pass eventually, just like MySpace, or Orkut, or whatever. I’ve been vocal against it too. But Twitter found a loophole to draw me over.

jbqueru: Yeah, I’m crazy 🙂 http://twitter.com/jbqueru
Eugenia: why? 😮
Eugenia: I want a divorce
jbqueru: :*
***jbqueru tweets about that… or not 😀
Eugenia: now I HAVE to make an account to follow you, otherwise I won’t be seen as a supportive wife
jbqueru: You can just RSS me in your favorite reader
Eugenia: I don’t use RSS

So if you want to follow my shorter rants, follow me here: http://twitter.com/EugeniaLoli

The last “Lost” episode of the season was last night, which I watched on my DVR this morning as I am still so jet-lagged since our return from Europe, that I didn’t have the strength to watch it live. The finale was good, but it wasn’t super. Nevertheless, it was definitely better than any other Lost episode this year, and better than any other show on TV in general. Spoilers following.

I think it’s clear right now that the Lost grand story is nothing but a “game” between two ancient, omnipotent but equally strong forces: a benevolent and an evil one. Possibly Osiris and Anubis, or Jacob and Esau, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that through the eons they attract certain people to the island to play their game. The humans are pawns. As Jacob said, there’s only one end to the game, but each time new blood arrives to the island, there’s progress.

Other things we learned: the uber-sexy Richard was made ageless by Jacob, after he arrived with the Black Rock slave ship (although we kind of knew that given the clothes he wore when he meets young Ben in season 3).

For me, the worst part of the finale was the Bernard/Rose scene, which felt like a throwback to all of us who have been asking where they went for the whole season. It was a cheesy scene, and a very unbelievable one too. Either the Dharma or the Hostiles would have found them in 3 years time in that easy to reach cabin. Totally an illogical scene. Bernard/Rose *and* a few more 815 survivors should have simply be part of the Hostiles by now, that would have been a much more natural happening. Either that, or they should have been hiding in the caves, definitely not in that cabin in plain sight.

One more unbelievable point is having the Dharma village built on top of a huge ancient Egyptian temple and never taking notice. That was some stupid writing.

As for what’s going to happen, I think that the “incident” happening will result in our heroes moving forward in time (the ones around the Swan station, so possibly it won’t happen for Rose/Bernard). The fade to white (instead of the usual black), it’s a hint of the heroes jumping back to their regular time. And the detonation of the bomb always happened, Jack didn’t change a thing (the closed captions on TV mentioned the explosion, for those who aren’t sure if it took place). They will end up in 2008 or something, at the same time as everyone else, to take part at the story’s last act. We have enough hints that the nuclear detonation always happened, because of the big cement wall in the Swan, the Hazmat suits, the radiation-affected pregnancies.

This all sounds good, but I feel that having the heroes spending a whole season in the Dharma time just to get back to present time didn’t serve the grand story of Lost. I mean, we just had some people going back to the ’70s, and then coming back. They didn’t change anything that didn’t already happen and we couldn’t have watched via flashbacks. Except some character evolution (namely Sawyer’s), the whole “travel back in time” served no purpose in the grand scheme of things. And I am pretty sure we will never learn why the island pulled Jack/Kate/Sayid/Hurley back in time either — other than just to be able to do some episodes for the sake of making some episodes. The overall mythology/timeline was not affected, so having watched season 5, I feel a bit cheated. Sure, it’s cool to see the Dharma world, but not at the expense of a storyline that doesn’t feel negated at the very end.

Having said all that, Lost remains the best of the best on TV right now. I was watching “24” on the DVR the other night, and was having iTunes loaded too checking out some songs. JBQ, who was sitting next to me, made the sarcastic remark “oh, I see you enjoy that show a lot, you can’t take your eyes away”.

A new Brazilian series about homosexuality. Shot with an HV30 and a 35mm adapter. It’s so cool to see more serious works using a $500 camera. It’s a new age for video, and the HV series started it. Closed caption and better quality here.

On the subject of homosexuality, here’s another amazingly beautiful video from my online friend Matt.

It’s Fall Out Boy. I can’t get their music at all. It feels like I am eating McDonalds.

The All American Rejects are not great either, but definitely better than Fall Out Boy. I just don’t get why these people are famous. They feel more like sleezy pop than alternative rock to me. Then again, I don’t get hip-hop/rap and Jazz either.

* We had an amazing time in Greece in the past week. I stayed home to see my family while JBQ and his parents visited in the meantime several places, like Corfu and Meteora.

* My health was better while I was in Greece. It’s a bit curious, really, since my health problem started a few months after I moved to the US in 2001. Might have something to do with the climate, or water, or kind of food I eat here.

* My little niece is amazingly beautiful and smart. She’s a real jewel.

* In Greece, we usually say to little kids things like “one day, you will become a doctor”, or, “when you grow up, you will become a scientist”. The first thing that came into my mind and told my niece was “when you grow up, you will become an astrophysicist and you will be the first to find the aliens”. My brother, who was sitting close by and heard me, gave me a funny face, and said: “why? did someone lose them?”

* After 18 hours sitting on a plane on Sunday, I have many suggestions on how to improve the seats. From entertainment, to foot rests. Yup.

* I brought my brother an older IBM laptop of mine, with Ubuntu in it (fully supported). Every 3 hours he would come down stairs to tell me “let’s go put Windows in it” — which I declined every time. He would have roadblocks every step of the way, especially with ext3 filesystems on USB sticks that required to use the terminal to chmod the files in them in order to read/write. Or that some USB mass storage devices wouldn’t be FAT32-formatted by GParted without first be unmounted. Or that some umounted devices would remain on the Desktop with an icon as if they were still mounted. Not to mention the bugs Handbrake had because of the stripped down and old version of ffmpeg that exists in the Ubuntu repos. Other problems he had included the ZIP functionality of distros not supporting multi-part zip files that he had around. Another gripe he had was that not ALL system applications work with Ubuntu’s “remember the root password for X minutes”, and so he had to re-enter the password over and over again, to the point that pissed him off. To his credit, he managed to make the fingerprinting functionality work all by himself. Despite this, I imagine that he put Windows XP in there after I left.

* The third episode of Condition:Human. Great visuals, as always.

I am listening to quite some music on my iPod Touch recently, and I must say that the only songs that make me tap my toes and bang my head are these from Cloud Cult. Just like with “Lost”, it destroyed my ability to like any new TV shows, Cloud Cult has destroyed my ability to like any other music. Cloud Cult is so complex, twisty, and new, that everything else sounds pedestrian.

The Athens airport has free WiFi access, but iPod/iPhone/Android phones don’t work with it, because the idiot webmasters who worked on the registration pages used some stupid CSS/flash shit that don’t work with most phones. So, when you get to the registration page where you can’t click anything anymore:
http://portal.wiz.athensairport.gr/default.asp?langid=2
simply edit that URL, and change the word “default” to word “tryconnect”. That URL will register you to the system, and you will be able to use their free internet connection.

This is just plainly, fucked up.

They issued a take down notice for this video. Two things are happening here:
1. An stupid clerk issued the DMCA notice, without really understanding what he’s doing.
2. A legal team of Warner Music specifically decided to go against Lessig, and destroy fair use via legal precedence.

Of course, Larry Lessig‘s videos are fair use. Even if he makes money from his presentations and books, Lessig’s videos are more educational & journalistic (which are fair use points), than all Warner works put together. More over, Warner Bros will never be able to prove that they lost money on the examples Lessig shows on his presentations.

Not only that, but what’s really interesting here, is that Lessig’s part of the presentation that supposedly infringes are the parts where fair usage examples are shown. So basically, the “infringing” parts, are simply in there as EXAMPLES of fair usage. So, Warner Music will not only have to fight Lessig’s presentation, but they will have to DOUBLE-prove non-fair usage on the included remixed videos too. Good luck with that.

Which makes me believe that point number 1 above is true: some idiotic clerk, issued a take down notice, and now Warner Music will have to battle the bad PR. They won’t be able to battle this case in a court. If they go ahead, then there are some sinister reasons behind the whole thing, where they would use Lessig to “destroy all free thinkers out there”. A political move, in other words. If they win the double-fair-usage point I made above, then they will have destroyed fair use in the US.