I’m once again participating in Holidailies but not with this site (although I’ve got enough backlogged content to supply more than a month of daily updates.)
I moved my Vox site, VexVox, to my personal domain, so I’ll be hanging out there for the entire month.
I could conceivably update both sites, but if you head over to VexVox, you’ll understand why I won’t. I’ve been in Honolulu for the last three weeks because of it.
This site achieved something of a milestone this past Tuesday (Sept. 21, 2010).
It was the 10-year anniversary of my registering the domain name Musicwhore.org.
It’s probably the most definitive birth date I can muster for the site, mainly because the content here evolved from numerous sources in the past. Back in 1997, I published two issues of a print zine called The Soloist’s Notebook. In 1998, I moved that zine online. In 1999, I merged it with my online journal. In 2000, I relaunched the journal/zine combo as Greg’s Music Reviews, till I later that year, I registered the Musicwhore.org domain name.
Go to the archive, and you just might find reviews dating back to 1999, before Musicwhore.org actually launched.
I registered Musicwhore.org right around the time I started listening to music from Japan. A trip back home to Honolulu in February 2000 introduced me to Utada Hikaru, Shiina Ringo, L’Arc~en~Ciel and the brilliant green. I had already been listening to Cocco since 1998 and wanted to hear something similar. I spent the summer exploring music by NUMBER GIRL, eX-Girl and m-flo.
When Musicwhore.org launched, Japanese music became my “beat”.
I know I make all sorts of excuses for why I don’t update, but this one is pretty major.
I started a new job a week and a half ago.
It’s a web development job similar to what I was doing before but different enough to consume a lot of mental energy. I’m going through a lot of training right now, and unlike my previous job — where I could sneak in quite a bit of writing — I barely have time to keep up with the news, let alone get through reviews.
I don’t know if it will level off because the new office is staffed by eight people, with four developers including myself. And the plate, it is full. I get the sense that once I get up to speed, I’ll have more than enough to keep me occupied. (By comparison, my previous job employed 4,000 worldwide.)
I tend not to write on the weekends because that’s when I do stuff with Eponymous 4, but I may have to reconsider. The change in work schedule alone has forced me to rearrange a lot of things.
Of course, I’ll pop up on the Facebook page if I run across something interesting, so please consider becoming a fan. (Yes, that’s antiquated Facebook terminology now, but I refuse to use "like" as an action verb.)
Till then, keep listening!
As evil as Facebook may seem to a growing number of users, the site’s interface offers some nice conveniences for lazy content providers such as myself. In the case of the Musicwhore.org Facebook page, it’s become a link log.
I’ve pretty much moved new release postings there, and every so often, I’ll post a link to something I find interesting. If you haven’t already checked it out, I encourage you to do so.
Some news I posted there that I haven’t gotten around to cross-posting here:
The Facebook group for Musicwhore.org is no longer. The Facebook page has now replaced it.
When I first subscribed to Facebook way back in 2007, I created a group for this site. It didn’t really go anywhere because I would never visit any of the groups to which I subscribed, mine included.
Facebook launched Pages not long after, and the tight integration between Pages and the News Feed — or whatever they’re calling it this week — gave them much more presence than Groups. I became more inclined to become a fan of a Page — or "like" it, as the current parlance goes — than I was to join a group.
With that in mind, I created a Facebook Page for Musicwhore.org. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it just yet, especially since I don’t really update this site very often.
But I think I might be posting a lot more short-form content there than here. Making two-sentence posts here seems like a waste of page real estate, and the interface is a lot easier to handle than my clunky Movable Type 3.33 installation. (I could probably upgrade, but that might break a few hooks I have into this application.)
So, we’ll see what happens. I already notified group members that I’ll be shutting it down but probably not until I see everyone — all nine of you — have moved over. If you’re a regular commenter with a Facebook account, please consider stopping by and giving it a thumbs up. (It feels weird for me to ask you to "like" it.)
Wow. So I made it to the last day of Holidailies. Of course, it helps to cheat.
Allow me to confess that I’m currently writing this entry on New Year’s Eve, during a time when the office is pretty much empty. Most of the entries I’ve written for this month were done ahead of time.
Yes, it helps to have a backlog of music to review, news to discuss and a year to review. But did I really need to spend five entries counting down my favorite albums of the decade? (Padding.) I did enjoy writing about my trip to Japan, which was very tangentially musical. But that kind of personal writing would have gone on my Vox site instead.
I did like the fact I created a new channel for music-themed book reviews, and I like how I’ve gotten back into the habit of recreational reading. I hope this fascination with non-fiction lasts me for the rest of the year.
I also hope this GTD thing keeps. Maybe the shift in priorities about which I fretted at the start of the month is a good thing.
None of my entries earned special recognition for Best of Holidailies. Eh, I figured music punditry wouldn’t go over well on a project based more on personal storytelling.
And as I predicted, I don’t think I’ve captured any new readers as a result. (If I did, holler out in the comments section. Did you enjoy the Holidailies Audio Guide to Musicwhore.org?)
I have to say I’m exhausted. That’s a lot of writing. And this weekend I’m taking a trip to San Francisco as research in my effort to relocate from Austin. In other words, the radio silence that befell this site before the trip to Japan is re-emerging once again.
Don’t worry. I still have that big-ass backlog to get through.
You may have noticed Musicwhore.org is branching out into book reviews with a new category, Book Club.
While I was staying in Honolulu before and after my trip to Japan, I started reading for recreation again. Recreational reading was pretty much been squeezed out by music-making and Internet-surfing in the last decade, and I don’t have a good reading chair.
If I get too absorbed in a book, I’ll contort myself on the futon uncomfortably, then realize I strained something when I reach a stopping point. If a book bores me, I end up messing up my sleep schedule because I dozed off. Those are my hazards of reading while prone.
This time, I’m reading non-fiction. Most of the non-fiction books on my shelves are references, guides or textbooks. No narrative non-fiction. So I used all the flights on my trip to read such books as Freakonomics and Blink. I also passed some time re-reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise.
I’m staying away from fiction for the time being because whenever I read fiction, I feel the compulsion to chip away at my own. Non-fiction gives me the luxury of distraction without distracting me to work. That’s really a weird circular reason there.
My friends Jette and chip organize this online event called Holidailies, in which participants vow to update their blogs and journals everyday for the month of December (rather, from Dec. 7-Jan. 6.)
I’ve participated in Holidailes before, but not with Musicwhore.org. Given the dearth of content on this site in the last six months, I figure I may as well try to put myself in a position to produce.
I’m skeptical.
I’ve returned from Japan, but I’m still in Hawaiʻi. So I’m pretty much still on vacation. But what would a trip be without pictures?
Most of the photos are from Kyoto, because that’s where my brother and I stayed, taking day trips to Tokyo, Hiroshima and Osaka.