The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

Grabbed from sarolynne

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results.

---

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in
You fight me
Well I loved my Aunt
I've told you this once before

Falling victim to neglect
I try to keep my faith alive
You were the girl that changed my world
Words fall from my mouth
Happiness is just a word to me
Memories consume

Do we know how to get the message across
You crawled away from me
I walk alone, think of home
What do I do to ignore them behind me?
Don't say you can't
I don't know anything at all

I know that life is empty and you hate to face this world alone
Yes, so the message goes
When the little things are tearing you apart
What was it like to see

---

I admit, I skipped things that weren't in English.

Set to Tool's Lateralus, loaded with series spoilers for Fullmetal Alchemist.

I've been having issues with last.fm for about the last week. Playing music at their site often breaks up and loses connection (which doesn't happen with Pandora) and the same happens when I use their client. Additionally, I sometimes get an error where they say there is no more material in collection when I give it an artist to start from.

I'm not the sort of person that has any success at starting LJ "memes" but maybe some of you will jump into this.

1. I'm going to post some songs that I literally cannot listen to enough.
2. If you're game, you will download one or more of them and have a listen.
3. Then you will recommend some music from your collection that you think I might like based on that song. You don't need to upload anything if you don't want to, but please include enough information so I can find it myself (artist, title, and album would be nice.)
4. If you post the same in your journal, I promise to download and try to recommend stuff to you in return.

Pick one! (Or more, I'm always up for more music.)

Steve Conte - Call Me, Call Me (from Cowboy Bebop's OST3, composed by Yoko Kanno, get the OSTs, they're awesome)
Mai Yamane - Got to Knock a Little Harder (also from Cowboy Bebop, Tank! The Best! CD)
Kenny Wayne Shepard - Blue on Black (from the Trouble Is CD)

Totally fannish edit to add: I so want to see a good Naruto AMV with Team 7 and Call Me; Naruto and Sakura toward Sasuke.

Of course, with my friends list I'm probably the last person to know about this site.

"The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs."

Interesting what you can find when you put "windchime mp3" into Google.

*goes back to making a playlist for her NaNo writing*

Is it crappy covers day on Pandora or something? Every third song to come up for me today has been a bad cover of a song I actually like (or in one notable case, Madonna doing a crappy remix of one of her own songs.)

So I have this MP3 player that hafoc gave me for my birthday. The LCD went screwy and the warranty ends in a couple weeks so I emailed Creative for an RMA. They sent a canned email suggesting I try upgrading the firmware and if that didn't work email them back. Okay, I can do that.

So I do the firmware upgrade thing but several steps they mention don't occur. It's cool though, the LCD is fixed! Insert much "It works!" happiness.

Then it stops working.

So I do the firmware upgrade hokey pokey with the connect, disconnect, hold down the power button and reconnect, find new hardware, upgrade the firmware steps.

It works!

... for about 2 minutes.

Turn off. Turn on. It works! ... for a minute.

Do many, many variations for the firmware hokey pokey, never see the "add new hardware" stage happen again. Never get more than 2 minutes of functioning LCD.

Decide that I will do it one more time after rebooting my PC while everything is "fresh."

Forget to check the "format data drive" option the first time I do the firmware upgrade. Figure I'll just do it again right now without the hokey pokey steps and run the upgrade immediately with the format option checked.

Toss on about 8 songs and disconnect.

It works for about 2 minutes. Fuck it, time to get an RMA, try turning it on and off just to see if it's going to do the work for less time thing again.

It's been an hour. It's still working.

WTF?!

Now I only have a couple weeks left on the warranty so I'm left with the "will this thing keep working or not" problem.

havoc should expect this thing to be surgically attached for the next week or so. If it's going to die again it needs to do it soon so I'm going to use it as close to non-stop as I can manage. :P

And mom just called so I put it on pause and the LCD died. Turn off. Turn on. Working again. O.o

For a minute, maybe.

Turn off/on.

Well about three and a half minutes so far....

ARGH!

And I really need to add more music because the same eight songs for a hour is a bit much, no matter how awesome they are....

And dead again. Emailing Creative and either getting more firmware hokey pokey steps or an RMA.

So I figured I'd trying this encoding from the line input thing with my MP3 player to make some MP3s from cassettes. After all, I am a child of the 80s and I have about 250 cassettes around and I didn't replace all of them with CDs (some aren't available in CD form at all).

So I dig out a tape (KLF if anyone remembers them) and pop it into the A deck of my stereo and let it play while I go looking for the line out on the stereo... not in the front, but that's not surprising. Get the flashlight and turn the stereo around... not in the back. The hell? Stereos have line outs, that's Just The Way Things Are. Check again, still not there. Check the front again. Still not there either. Remove the docked speakers, not hidden there (even if it would be odd to have it there I had to check.) My stereo has no line out. *blinkblink*

Okay, so maybe this stereo is too new or something. It's got a three CD changer in it so the fact it has dual cassette decks is a bit odd really. So I go into the office/hobby room/vacuum cleaner lair and check the boom box I have in there. That's at least ten years old or so and I know it had auxiliary inputs so it must have a line out... not in the front. Didn't expect it in the front though so I undo some cabling from when I used to use my portable CD player to play CDs with it and turn it around... aux in left, aux in right, mic... no line out. WTF?

I own the only four cassette decks in the house, in two units, and neither of them have line outs! Do they even sell things that play cassettes and have line outs without charging an arm and a leg (because it's obsolete tech or something) these days?

Yet another shuffle meme, load up your whole collection, randomize, take the first 14 songs as your answers.

1. How does the world see you? Big Bluff - Tsuneo Imahori Well, that's a good start. :P
2. Will I have a happy life? Another Brink in the Wall - Pink Floyd Yeah, we're on a roll here.
3. What do my friends really think of me? I will do as freely as I wish - An offering to the Gods Is that good or bad?
4. Do people secretly lust after me? Forgive Me - Wumpscut Um....
5. How can I make myself happy? Talking to My Angel -Melissa Etheridge Er...
6. What should I do with my life? Call Me Call Me - Steve Conte This song makes me cry when they use it in Cowboy Bebop. ;.;
7. What is some good advice for me? Fallin' - Alicia Keys I think the fortuneteller is broken.
8. How will I be remembered? The Antagonizer - Sister Machine Gun *laughs*
9. What is my signature dancing song? Drivel - Union Underground I so can't dance to that....
10. What do I think my current theme song is? Sit Ups - Jude Right....
11. What does everyone else think my current theme song is? Paper in Fire - John Mellencamp If you say so.
12. What song will play at my funeral? Machine No - Sister Machine Gun Well that should be pretty obvious, if I'm dead I probably wasn't a machine.
13. What type of men/women do you like? Don't Stand So Close To Me - The Police My MP3 collection thinks I'm a pervert.
14. What is my day going to be like? Batavion - Wumpscut This thing might work better if it only used the songs with English lyrics... or any lyrics.

Between this toy (brought to my attention by morganalilith) and this song I'm in a snarky political mood.

The toy gives me sadistic pleasure.

The most relevant portion of my current music (lack of capitalization due to source):

cuz take away our playstations
and we are a third world nation
under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
who stole the oval office and that phony election
i mean
it don't take a weatherman
to look around and see the weather
jeb said he'd deliver florida, folks
and boy did he ever

and we hold these truths to be self evident:
#1 george w. bush is not president
#2 america is not a true democracy
#3 the media is not fooling me