general

The Senate seems incapable of stripping Joe Lieberman of his Homeland Graft committee chairmanship--this after he actively campaigned against the President-elect and "endorsed and supported every last radical Bush policy to expand executive power and surveillance activities," per Glenn Greenwald.

It's obvious Senate collegiality and bonhomie trumps the popular will regarding this unsavory sociopath. They're all so afraid of Lieberman--he must give them bruising eye contact in person and threaten to get really, really mad.

Update: Senate capitulated to Lieberman's ego and allowed him to stay in his Homeland Graft slot. That's change we can believe in. Yes we can.

Thanks to Travis for recommending Mazemod.

It's mostly tracker-produced music but only the "Chip" category has that "8-Bit sound."
Was pleasantly surprised by the tunes under "Acid" - lots of nice drum and bass and breakbeat stuff with samples* as opposed to square waves, very clean and pure ideas.
It seems to be kids recreating the early '90s (house, 'ardkore rave, early jungle) using software very much at the level of the original gear, but there are surprises--it isn't just nostalgia.
Unfortunately the published playlists are just a small part of the music on the site. You have to page or play through the songs under the categories "Chip," "Bass," and "Acid"; no search function is available and there appear to be hundreds of songs. So if you hear something you like odds are you will never hear it again.

*Disclaimer--Am still getting up to speed on how .mod files work so "samples" is mainly used to distinguish the texture of the sound from raspy videogame blorts--"low res sample data" is probably more accurate. Also, I have no idea when most of the tunes on the mazemod site were actually produced. We discussed at length on my old blog the difference between the tracker scene and old school rave/breakbeat and I still don't entirely understand it.

found on my hard drive--tiny GIFs* from a NetZero-emailed PayPal receipt had their dimensions enlarged and normalized by the Windows XP thumbnailizer

*clockwise: 59 x 29 pixels, 1 x 1 pixels, 2 x 2 pixels, 1 x 1 pixels

Compare the Flux Capacitor Jumpers photos from the noisesource blog to Damon Zucconi's Continous Line Drawings. Aside from the obvious similarities of angular zigs and zags of green light against a black background, what do the pieces say about period assumptions, analog vs digital, science vs art, "visual music," photos vs Flash, bitmaps vs vectors. (Whoops, there's your essay.) Does the Pink Floyd laser show enhance the connections among works?

...by Joel Holmberg after it found him. Can think of about a dozen abstract artists this would put out of business.

The URL is http://www.schnell-u-sauber.de/ if you are curious about the origin.