Pixl

JAM High Five #2

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:36:04 -0800

A lovely complement to Butter, here is JAM high five #2: Jam

JAM high five #2: Jam - the setup.

JAM high five #2: Jam - the connect.

JAM high five #2: Jam - the follow-through

JAM High Five #1

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:24:57 -0800

The unstoppable bowling sensation Delicious on Biscuits (made up of team members Jim, Andy, & Megan) lives by a solemn pact:

Discover a New High-Five Each and Every Week; Honor and Respect all High-Fives Past and Present; Don’t Forget the Fun

Here is our first high five: Butter

JAM high five #1: Butter - the setup.

JAM high five #1: Butter - the follow-through.

Live Shows, Fifty of, Seen by Andy Pixel

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:25:07 -0800

Previously posted as a Facebook note, but worthy of repeating here.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead Bottom of the Hill in SF 2000 or 2001
Avail Velvet Elvis in 1998 or so. Danced so hard I almost passed out.
Aviso Probably saw this band in Tacoma.
Bad Religion Moore Theater, 1993. Green Day opened.
Badly Drawn Boy Showbox in 2001, he played for three hours, drank about 10 cocktails, and smoked at least a pack of cigarettes.
Bikini Kill Capitol Theater, 1993.
Boss Hogg Moe, 1996. Jon Spencer’s wife is HOT.
Built to Spill OK Hotel, 1994
Crackerbash OK Hotel, 1992, with Gas Huffer I think? Then again at the Crocodile for their reunion tour in 2006.
David Pajo Breakroom, 1999. He sat down on the stage and no one could see him. Intensely boring.
Do Make Say Think Paradox, 2002.
Fifteen Jalapeno House in the U-District in 1994.
Fugazi the first time: at the Oz, 1993; the last time: in Vancouver BC in 2002.
Godspeed You Black Emperor! Crocodile Cafe, 2000. One of the most engrossing sonic experiences of my life.
Harvey Danger Crocodile Cafe, 2004. Didn’t this band break up?
Hazel Velvet Elvis, 1995. With Sleater Kinney?
Jawbreaker Capitol Theater, 1994. Oh man what a great show.
Les Savy Fav Graceland, 2002.
Lucero Crocodile Cafe, 2007.
Lync Velvet Elvis in 1994. Hush Harbor also played. Modest Mouse opened.
Miles Tilmann 2002. Didn’t he play at the Moore Theater? Or was it just next door?
Mudhoney Paramount, 1992. Ultra Lame Fest. I got knocked unconscious in the pit. Held hands with a girl for the first time ever.
Nomeansno In Ireland in 1996. They happened to be playing the day my family was traveling through Dublin, and they were also on the ferry we took back to London the next day. I interviewed them for my “zine.” Also saw them at Moe in 1994, it was the first and only show I ever got into with a fake ID. The bouncer looked at Greg Noel’s expired license, which listed me as 21 years old and 6’. “You’re six feet tall?” he asked. “No, it’s a typo,” I countered. He shrugged and let me in.
NOFX King Cat Theater, 1994. How embarrassing.
Propagandhi Loved them at the Capitol Theater in 1994, HATED them at 924 Gilman in 1995.
Rancid Capitol Theater, 1994. Yo-Yo A-Go-Go.
The Mr. T Experience Radio House, 2000.
Rilo Kiley Graceland, 2002.
Sage UPS Student Union Building in Tacoma, 1992. My first rock show ever. With My Name and Inspector Love and the Ride Me Babies.
Screw 32 the Radio House, 1995. Was this the time they toured with Schlong?
Seaweed Temple Theater in Tacoma, 1992. The first two rows of theater seating got flattened under the pit.
Severna Park Breakroom, 1997. Met Adam McDaid for the first time.
Slint Showbox, 2005.
Smart Went Crazy Velvet Elvis, 1998. After the show I asked them for a ride to their next gig in Boise. They said yes.
Smelter my living room, 1993. Could this band get back together, please?
Sunny Day Real Estate Pain in the Grass at the Mural Amphitheater, 1994?
Ten O Seven Redmond Firehouse, 1994.
The Beastie Boys End Fest, 1992. MCA had a bright green flat top. One of the last times I crowd-surfed.
The Dead Milkmen OK Hotel, 1994.
The Decemberists Crocodile Cafe, 2004. I found them exceedingly boring live.
The Go! Team Showbox, 2005. Definitely one of the top five best live shows of my life. The entire venue was dancing.
The Halo Benders OK Hotel, 1994.
The Hold Steady Crocodile Cafe, 2006. The quintessential bar band.
The Most Secret Method Matt Hodge & Ryan Parks’s house, 1999? With Juno?
The Odd Numbers OK Hotel, 1994. This is one of my fondest show memories. A rainy day, a matinee show, only ten people in the club, and half of them were dancing.
The Promise Ring RKCNDY, 1999. Burning Airlines and Juno opened.
Thunderbirds Are Now! Chop Suey, 2006. Another one in the top five. The venue was at about a quarter capacity but they played as if they were in a sold-out stadium. I’ve not seen a band match their energy since At the Drive-In.
Treepeople OK Hotel, 1992. *Sigh*
Unwound X-Ray Cafe in Portland, 1994. My family was staying in Portland and they happened to be playing right down the street.
“Weird Al” Yankovic Paramount Theater, 1993. Nerdy!

Where Should I Post It?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:12:00 -0700

If you’re like me, you have several options to consider when you want to tell the internet what’s going on in your life at any given moment. Should I tell Twitter? Facebook? Flickr? Foursquare? I didn’t even have a damn Tumblr until ten minutes ago, but now that’s an option too. And with the abundance of APIs and mashups for all these services, It’s easy to post once and distribute to all.

This decision should be based on the needs of two personas: 1) What’s best for me, the poster, and 2) What’s best for my audience (the consumer), whether that audience is friends, the general public, or posterity in general. The purpose of this post is to explore the pros and cons of each posting vector for the two personas.

What is Twitter good for? Well, although my tweets are public, it’s for my followers first and foremost, and the general public as an afterthought (assuming that what I’m saying is interesting enough that my followers or spambots will re-tweet it). It’s also a great way to connect to my followers immediately. Anecdotally, folks check their Twitter far more often than they do their Facebook, Flickr, or RSS feeds.

As a poster, Twitter is great for random announcements or questions that I want answered quickly (“Where can I get a decent cup of coffee near 85th & Greenwood?”), overly clever observations that I’d like to share with the world (“Play her off, Kanye”), re-tweets of overly clever observations, and direct replies to people I’m following.

As a consumer, Twitter is great for PSAs (“Game day traffic has turned 3rd Avenue into a parking lot!”), overly clever observations of people I follow but who aren’t necessarily friends of mine, and easy, on-the-go time-wasting in general. Because Twitter’s website and the iPhone apps I use don’t support filtering followers, I am extremely conservative with regards to adding people, and this enables me to actually keep up with my stream.

It hasn’t jumped the shark yet, and Facebook is bar none the most successful social networking site when it comes to the people I know. Infinitely more usable than Myspace and boasting five times the number of users in my peer group than Twitter, it allows me to follow the goings-on in the lives of 90% of my friends. This is an extremely good thing. It also makes for severe information overload when your friends list is pushing 500.

As a poster, I update my Facebook status when I want to share something with just my friends (and indeed, maybe only a subset of my friends) and I’m interested in my friends’ feedback. Granted, you can “reply” to your friends’ tweets on Twitter, but the @username syntax is rudimentary, non-threaded, and clunky. I nearly always read my tweetstream in reverse (top-down), and sorting out which @reply refers to which is annoying at best. Facebook’s comments trump Twitter’s @replies in both simplicity and usability.

As a consumer, I browse my Facebook news feed to keep up with what my friends are doing, especially the 80% that aren’t on Twitter. These updates are necessarily succinct, but are far richer than tweets: they can include inline images, videos, commenting, contextual links, etc. On the website I have the option to hide updates from mere acquaintances or boorish friends, but the mobile interface makes for extreme information overload unless I’m refreshing hourly.

And what about the others? This post illustrates the strengths of Tumblr: the posts are intended for public consumption but are obviously far too long for a tweet; Facebook has the “Notes” feature, but it’s rarely used (and I suspect rarely clicked-through) and discoverability is restricted to friends-only. As far as photos are concerned, Facebook offers a rich photo-sharing interface, but I’m far too invested in Flickr, and again, discoverability by the general public is severely handicapped on Facebook. Thankfully, both Facebook and Twitter have excellent Flickr plugins that allow for easy cross-posting.

This last point, cross-posting, is an interesting one, and in fact is the inspiration for this post. If my audience is following me on multiple services, reading the same update three times over can be tiresome indeed. Certainly posting to Facebook will reach a larger audience, but penetration will be higher on Twitter, where (presumably) my audience is more often engaged. Many of my peers use Facebook’s Twitter plug-in to automatically re-tweet their updates to my news feed, but I have a feeling I’m not alone in my annoyance with rereading these updates when I switch between the two services.

Of course, the goal of the poster is to combine the immediacy (and in many cases, accessibility) of posting to Twitter with the large audience (or perhaps intimacy) of Facebook. The user agent of the poster’s audience is also definitely a factor. An iPhone-less friend on the go will be deaf to your Facebook status update, while the majority of your peer group is completely ignorant of your tweet stream.

The conclusion? For the time being, for me at least, Facebook is the clear choice for utility and readership. I will always be mindful of Twitter’s immediacy and reach, but its usefulness in my social software universe has decidedly dried up.

Image courtesy of the|G|™