Matthew McVickar @matthewmcvickar@mastodon.social

Every year for the last eight years I have collected my ‘favorite sounds of the year.’ I make a note when something sticks out to me as I’m listening to music, and at the end of year I isolate the sounds from their songs and string them all together. Here’s twelve minutes of my 68 favorite sounds from 2018, fully annotated: http://matthewmcvickar.tumblr.com/post/181984287667/favorite-sounds-2018

On Twitter I @'d a comedian to tell them I was disappointed in some transphobic jokes they wrote, and they apologized really well, which is great! But they did so by quoting my tweet, so now I’m being piled on. It sucks and I’m having a hard time with it!

I’ve been listening to ‘To Face the Truth’ by The Pet Shop Boys a lot lately because it’s a really good song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNTdf36nX8w

I’m still working on my other 2018 music lists but I am calling this one finished. My top 65 tracks of the year!

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/matthewmcvickar/playlist/3DpMeuqgzl8iKDZB1HjRpC

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSj38B1CylAn71KGwgMWoc8yBTD_elyAj

And just a list of songs: http://matthewmcvickar.tumblr.com/post/181889186717/top-65-songs-of-2018

(I know it’s a lot of songs—4hr42min worth—but I couldn’t bear removing any!)

Palehound’s ‘If You Met Her’ is a
miracle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDnp-DbY3AU

I am so glad Resident Advisor shut off the comments sections and, importantly, removed all existing comments from their site. Long overdue.

For everything they get wrong, I’m impressed that the downloadable archives you get from Twitter and Facebook are complete websites you can actually browse. (Twitter’s archive doesn’t come with any of your media, though…)

Which, of course, contain only raw data. If I wanted to browse my Flickr collection by album, or see comments on a photo, etc., I’d need to manually pick through thousands of files and match photo IDs. (Or, like, write an app that rebuilds the Flickr UI to browse these JPGs and JSON files?) Unfortunately, it’s not much more useful than the folders of these JPGs that are already on my hard drive.

I have years and years of photos and albums on Flickr, so I wanted to grab all of my account data before they downgrade my account tomorrow with the new pricing.

Now I just need to download… 105 zip files. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, Madonna’s achievements are pretty incredible. Madonna is so Famous and Successful that she has *two additional Wikipedia pages* listing her awards and achievements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Madonna_records_and_achievements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Madonna

I learned this on the Hit Parade podcast, which is *endlessly* fascinating if you are a music trivia enthusiast. http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/hit_parade.html

I just learned that Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ is a cover (of sorts) of the 1971 song ‘Sepheryn’ by British folk duo Curtiss Maldoon. Check out that first verse and chorus: https://youtu.be/eQ5OtnBdcWw

The Field — From Here We Go Sublime

Although I must admit my interpretation may be off, since we have different ideas about what’s comfortable.

Sometimes I watch my dog spend fifteen seconds turning around in her bed, trying to find just the right spot and angle and direction and then, after a balancing pause, lie down—and then stare ahead in a way that I can only interpret as, “Ugh, well, that was OK, and I just know I could be slightly more comfortable than this, but I *really* don’t want to get up and try again.”

I feel like I must have posted about this already but Jlin’s ‘Carbon 12’ is a wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7fDXJ9jbWw

Tujiko Noriko’s ‘Narita Made’ and the album it opens are really fantastic. RIYL early-aughts bedroom-glitch-pop stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7JeYTXhMo0

Another jam is ‘Breadcrumbs’ by Jamila Woods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1f9_4AbzxQ