New gadget

I dislike that I have to display a big, ugly AT&T logo on my page, but Pandora Radio is awesome, so I'm willing to suck it up. I've played with the site in the past but only just created an account, so the selections you'll see aren't quite how I want them. I think it will pan out soon since I'll be using it a lot at work.

The gadget, which you'll see to the right, is pretty self-explanatory. I'm using their official widget because the regular RSS feed wasn't working properly. It didn't seem to update often enough, and Blogspot's feed gadget wasn't showing them in order of "newest first," so all you could read were the first 5 entries in the feed. Useless.

I added my Pandora stations as artist names in order to import them to Amie Street (since their field for manually adding artists seems to be made of fail); I don't think I'll be keeping them like that. Pandora's method of relating songs together is cool, but it keeps popping Incubus songs into the Coheed & Cambria station, despite my repeatedly moving them to the Incubus station. Do I even need to explain why that's incredibly silly? Really, now...

Aside from that, I think the site is so cool that I've decided to review it. That might turn into a regular thing; there are lots of music sites to either praise or castigate.

Moved

Well, all moved to Dubuque, finally. I'll try to contain my excitement.

I had taken the week off of work (which is where I tend to do my posting during downtime) for the move, thus the lack of posting this week. I'd like to get a review up this weekend, and there will be more to come. Some potentially great stuff came out this week, and I hope to do a lot of listening and writing tonight and tomorrow.

I'm also planning to start posting groups of "mini-reviews," which will consist of lists of several albums per post with brief remarks for each. Not everything warrants a full post, but I'd like to review as much of what I listen to as possible. I've pretty much just been doing the things that stand out to me; this does an injustice to the wide range of genres I listen to. I think keeping some of the reviews short and sweet will allow a more diverse assortment of reviews to come through. For now, the mini-reviews will just be for new releases.

Another idea that crossed my mind: it might be interesting to go back and listen to some of the mixtapes/CDs I've put together in years past, and write up a little something about them. More on that after an experimental run.

New Release: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

Yay, indie pop. Any group of bands that willfully accepts the placement of the label "twee" on their genre has no right to complain if no one ever listens to them. Especially if they suck like this band.

New Release: Muse - The Resistance

Muse is just plain awesome. I loved 2006's Black Holes And Revelations, so I was a little psyched about the new album. The band refuses to disappoint.

New Release: Gnaw Their Tongues - All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity

Originally posted 9/15/09

I saw this album on a new release list; having never heard of the band, I thought I'd give it a shot. Turned out to be noise metal. That would have discouraged me from even trying it if I'd known beforehand. But it wasn't all bad...

New Release: Ensiferum - From Afar

Finnish metalists Ensiferum released their first album in 2001, and I hadn't heard of them until their 4th album was released just 2 days ago. Upon reading up a little, I discovered that they are considered to be "folk metal" or "viking metal," fusion metal genres I've only recently obtained more familiarity with than the simple knowledge of their existence. It sounded interesting, but I was merely expecting something similar to Amon Amarth or other bands of the genre. Not exactly so...

Future reviews...

I think my second review should be for a new album, to get into the habit early.  For a while, the concentration is going to be heavier on the Retro side, since I have a large backlog to work with.  Eventually, I'd like most of my reviews to be current or new releases, with maybe 1/4-1/3 being Retro Reviews.  I'll see how it goes.  It depends mostly on what I enjoy writing more, and partly on what people enjoy reading more (assuming I acquire an audience of some kind).

This morning I checked out a new album from a band I've not heard of before.  I was impressed by it, and decided that will be the review that goes up next.  Others will follow closely.

Retro Review: Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

I have a very difficult time beginning to write about something so important to me. I think that's why I chose to review this one first--not because it's almost definitely my favorite album of all time, but because it will be the hardest one to write about.

Quick tip

I've been busy tweaking the look of the page, and needed to change some images to fit the new dimensions of the divs. In looking for a way to host the theme images, I ran across this post. The method involves saving the images you need in a draft post and copying the location to paste into your theme's CSS.

Great tip. Thanks, kranthi!

A (relatively) condensed bio

First things first. SaurianOverlord was a handle I adopted for chat rooms years ago. If you talked to someone online by that name between 1999-2005ish, it was probably me. The origin of the name is a story for another time. (I found out much later that it was apparently the name of a character on the short-lived Disney cartoon based on The Mighty Ducks; that has absolutely nothing to do with it.) These days, I usually just go by Saurian, or some variation thereof (Saurian3 on some forums, for example). Now that that's out of the way...

...and so it begins

Well, I finally did it. I created a blog. I wasn't sure I'd ever commit to an autonomous blog on a particular subject; I've had blog-like pages on my web sites, a LiveJournal (for about 2 months), etc., but I was never willing to focus on one subject to dedicate a blog to.

That's still pretty much the case. While I plan to use this blog primarily for yacking about music, there will be the occasional post about a video game, TV show, or movie that's outstanding in some way, as well as other general musings. It's really all experimental at this point; as much as possible, however, I'm going to stick to reviewing music albums.