• Fake U2 band plays roof show on NYC to unsuspecting crowd below - Incredible prank, totally worth getting arrested! Update: Andy Baio is hosting the video (via)
  

• Comic made with the Half-Life 2 engine - Entertaining if you've played the game (via)
  

• David Lynch's daily weather report (via)
  

Jeff Rowland posted a picture of his "messy" desk, so I did one of mine, only annotated. I've got to take care of this as soon as school's over... anyway, here's what I came up with:



-D

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• McDonald's: To Serve Man - Billboard prank celebrating 50 years of McDizzle's fat fast food (via)
  
  
  

• Professor Television makes photo-theramins and is in a Devo-esque Christian electronica band called Professor Small. I'm usually not a fan of Christian music, but I highly suggest listening to this anti-Darwin song "Don't Make a Monkey Out of Me" (via)
  

• Copyright law prevents aliens from hearing the Beatles - Can I please shoot a copy of "Here Comes the Sun" into space? No??? (via)
  

• Fainting Goats (.wmv video, via)
  

• Half-Life 3-D models placed into photographs - It looks so real because he used HDR lighting (via)
  
  
  

• graugelb - Strange Flickr photoset of guys jumping/rolling around in weird suits (via)
  
  
  

• Some kind of bizarre, musical space religion video - I will give a dollar to anyone who manages to watch this whole thing without gnawing their own legs off (via)
  

So, I bought this book yesterday called "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" by Steven Johnson. I finished it this morning. Let me start off by telling you that I have never before been so absorbed in a nonfiction book as I was with this. This is a topic that I have always thought about, but Johnson has pulled it up out of the murky depths in which it has always been hidden, polished it up, and made a remarkably persuasive argument for it. Allow me to explain.

For years, it's been drilled into our culture that video games and television will rot your brain. Supposedly, popular culture sinks down to serve the lowest common denominator, pulling the entire cultural IQ down with it. You've heard this before, we're all getting dumber and it's because we waste our time playing Halo and watching Survivor. In "Everything Bad Is Good For You," Steve Johnson asks, if pop culture is making us stupid, why have IQ scores been on a steady increase these past twenty years? He makes the point that those who dismiss video games as mindless entertainment are still thinking in terms of Pong and Pac-Man, saying, "the thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage, is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard." Early in the book, Johnson imagines a world in which video games were invented before books, creating an entirely new point of view:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying - which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimesional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements - books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring world together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.

Johnson makes it clear that his argument is not against books, however. He places great importance on reading, being a novelist and all. His argument is that activities such as playing video games and watching TV are not devoid of mental nutrition, that these activities are important in stimulating areas of the brain that a book can not reach. Why are kids so much better with technology than their parents? Why can junior program the VCR and grandma can't? It's not because he's memorized the manual, it's because he's so adaptable to new rules and systems.

I could honestly rant and rave about this book all day, but I will spare you and go bother my parents instead. If you are even remotely interested in defending your videogame and/or television obsession habits, I highly recommend reading this book.

-D

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The intar-webs are all abuzz over this list of Star Wars: Episode III easter eggs. For those of you who aren't interested in knowing exactly where in the movie you see the back of George Lucas' daughter's head for a quarter of a second along with many other equally inane bits of trivia about the final Star Wars prequel, I have boiled down the list in the hopes of making it moderately interesting for the non-obsessed. Here goes.

1. In the big space battle, stuff gets blown up and a kitchen sink flies across the screen. Oh, you crazy, bored CGI guys!
   
   
2. Look! It's the freakin' Millenium Falcon! It's in the movie... somewhere!
   
   
   
   
3. George Lucas makes a cameo!

Now you don't have to read the original three-page article, unless, of course, you're bored at work like I am.

-D

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• Mark Jenkins makes sculptures out of tape (via)
  
  
  

• The beautiful manhole covers of Japan (via)
  
  
  

• Mike Doughty played his guitar live outside to the people standing in line to see his show, and he recorded it for an EP - This is such a Dan Huff thing to do! (via)
  

• Honestly, of all the things you could have gold-plated, why an X-Box???
  
  

June is drawing near, and so is the DREADED TOUR! All of the shows we've booked are available at 2nMusic dot com, but numerous questions still remain. How will we get there? Who will pay for the gas? Where are we going to sleep? Who's going to come see us? Are we going to make any money? The answers to these and more questions lay on the long road ahead of us. Wish us luck!

Earlier this week, I 'composed' a little song on my computer for the piano. I printed out the first page and brought it in to my piano teacher, who seemed to like it, so I figured you guys might want to hear what it sounds like. Keep in mind that this is still sort of a rough draft and there are several aspects of it that are going to change when I get around to it, but you can get a general idea of what it's sounding like. I really don't know what I'm going to do with it right now, though. Anyway, here it is:

Untitled Piano Song version 1 (to save, right click and press "save as")

I've been really getting into Music Thing's series on famous short sounds. Did you know Brian Eno did the original startup sound for Windows 95? It's the truth. I'm thinking I should try doing a series of really short musical things that could be used for whatever purpose, and then publish them under a Creative Commons license and see if anybody uses them. I think it'll be fun.

-D

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Music Thing has a nice little post about the guy who wrote the Intel Inside chimes. You know what I'm talking about... DUM DUM DUM DUM! Anyway, if you're interested in reading about the guy who was commissioned to write the now famous three-second blip of music, you can do so by clicking here.

-D

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The Adventures of Pete and Pete on DVD??? MUST BUY IMMEDIATELY!

-D

PS I saw Star Wars last night and it was enjoyable, but forgettable.

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I just saw the season finale of CSI. You know, it's the 2-hour one written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. I just wanted to tell you guys that it's a pretty sick and weird episode, and you should probably see it immediately.

Sorry for not posting too much, I'm pretty busy.

-D

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I just made a new ringtone for myself. With a little help from the site formally known as Smash the Tones, you too can have an I Need Sleep ringtone. Here's the MIDI file:

I Need Sleep - Oh, Invisible! (the ringtone)

Enjoy!

-Dave

UPDATE: Okay, I lowered the volume on the drums. Hopefully that will make it better.

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Jim has called to my attention a series of flash cartoons called "Salad Fingers." They are incredibly strange and disturbing. They are the best thing I've seen on the intar-nets in a long time. There are five episodes so far, all of which I demand you watch now.

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5

It's best to watch them in the dark.

-D

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• Frank Zappa on digital music distribution in 1983 - So far ahead of his time (via)
  

Mr. Abderhalden has written a review of last Friday's basement show, which you can read here. He showed up late, so he forgot to mention XYU, but other than that he's pretty much spot-on.

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Ben Shin and I had an awesome jam session yesterday. All the I Need Sleep equipment was still set up in my basement, so he grabbed a guitar and I got on the Drums/Synth bass. Dan Nagy is off to Russia for the rest of the month, so I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to learn how to do what he does. I'm getting pretty good at it, Ben and I came up with a couple of really cool songs, which gives me hope for a side project. Dan's kick drum pedal is broken, though, so every time you hit the drum, the hammer swings back and hits your foot. Now I've got this big circular bruise on my right foot... it's pretty cool if you want to see it.

DL tells me the new album will come out on May 31st. I'm excited... are you?

-D

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I just read that the FCC's attempts to mandate a 'Broadcast Flag' (which would essentially prevent all future computers and other pieces of technology from making copies of broadcasted material) have been SHUT DOWN by a federal appeals court. I don't know if you guys are aware of all the evil stuff the FCC has been up to lately, but this broadcast flag thing had me worried sick. You can read more about it here, but the short of it is that the court decided that the FCC was overstepping its boundaries by trying to put restrictions on the hardware that people own.

Long live freedom of information!

-D

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Last night's show was incredible. Thanks to everybody who made it, you guys were great. As for those folks who said they'd come and didn't, you really missed out. It was incredible that we didn't even have to encourage people to get up and dance... as soon as we walked on stage everyone was on their feet and ready to shake their asses. You guys rock.

It was awesome to see some folks I haven't seen in a while, like Karen, DL's sister, Bhen, and Erik. Erik grew this really awesome beard and now he looks just like this:



I'm moving into the city in July, and I think my first order of business will be to grow a beard.

But I digress.

Thank you all for coming to my show. Thanks to XYU, Brandon Rios, and Long Distance Runner for playing great music. LDR, I'll buy your CD next time I see you if I have money. Brandon, Bhen and I want you to do the soundtrack for a short film. I hope we can do more shows in my basement, because that was awesome.

-D

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Thanks to the free ringtone service Smash The Tones and Starmen.net's library of MIDI files, I now have several ringtones from the greatest game ever made: Earthbound.

Quality.

If only I had one o' them fancy mp3 playin' phones, I would totally have the Katamari Damacy themesong for a ringtone. A man can dream...

Tomorrow is the wild dance party in my basement. Here's the info, for those of you who are lazy:

I NEED SLEEP (us)
BEFORE THE SILVER SHORTAGE (Brandon Rios' band)
XYU (???)
LONG DISTANCE RUNNER (Perty rocking folks!)
A DJ (?????)

In the basement of:
348 Great Oak Court, Naperville, IL

FREE!
Starts at 7pm

I Need Sleep plays last, so plan to stay up late because it will be quite an experience. See you there!

-D

PS If you take pictures and send them to me, I will post them on the site

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Some ideas for T-Shirt designs. I'm partial to the piranha one, but what do you think?

I think it should be glow-in-the-dark.

-D

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• What could possibly be happening in this picture? (via)
  
  
  
  More insane pictures here.

• Bacon Strips Bandages - With a free toy, too! (via)
  

I finally got my "Bring ODB Back to Life" shirt from Jeffrey Rowland (who was resurrected, by the way, so it's a good thing I didn't get that tattoo). I even got the special gold teeth even though I didn't pay the extra $5 to get them. I am convinced this is because J.Ro loves me.

I can't wait to see what people say to me.

-D

PS if you ever wanted to see what I look like at ten in the morning... there you go.

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I have suddenly become horrifyingly aware of the importance of regular vacuuming. In preparation for friday's basement show, I moved around a lot of furniture/exercise equipment and sucked up a lot of filth (pictured above). Now that the space has been cleared, we need to move in with our Minister of Decorations: Sgt. DL Bergmeier. I expect Christmas lights and streamers to be the most basic of his ideas.

This is going to be something...

-D

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I just found this review of the band. Wowee! That's one for the scrapbook.

-D

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