Ten Questions Internet Execs Should Ask And Answer

Great stuff.

I want to write a post about how growing up playing Mega Man recounts the tale of my generation's gamers. But not today...

Jambox

Drool.

Simplicity

in design.



Only until very recently I understood the power of simplicity in web usability. If you look at playing videos on Youtube, liking Facebook Likes, or searching via Google's search bar; the common theme strung throughout those popular services are their near-funnel-free usage mechanics.

It sounds obvious, but we can easily look at the variety of products and services we use everyday, and the truth is most of them are incapable and more inaccessible than the designer expected them to be.

The truth is that everyday user do not want to think. And designing products that don't require us to think is more difficult than it seems....how do we inform a user who doesn't think? Without thought, there are no rules. With no rules, it is difficult to provide a proposition of value to them. The key to designing mass-consumer products is to design for mental reflexes -'thought' is simply too big a barrier in conversion when designing for the masses.

For a while, I used to presume engaging products were about lots of connected features. But now, I think the key is simplicity.

Eric Lau

Eric Lau - For the D (feat. Guilty Simpson)


Eric Lau - Time will tell



Incredible Producer tip from Parker Fay. I love Eric's sound.

First it was CS5, now this!!

Gameday Tycoon

Been mum all summer working on Gameday Tycoon, and I think it's finally ready to be shown off.


Gameday Tycoon is simply a game where you stay in the loop with your sports friends.

Granted the game could still use work (a lot actually), its been a long dedicated summer for Mahmoud, Fies, and I. Proud to have gotten thus far, but not yet proud to publish would be the most accurate statement.

Our two main hypotheses for the product are that 1)casual sports fans also need a place to re-engage with their friends, and 2)hardcore fans want to re-engage with casual fans outside their fantasy leagues.

I don't think the service will ever be perfect because Gameday is supposed to be a marketing engine. The critical innovations of Gameday Tycoon will come down to three things: 1)engagement 2)virality, and 3)user acquisition. All marketing engines require periodic oil changes, and Gameday isn't any different.

Its interesting how most people don't understand how/where sausages are made.

Not rocking but addicted to 2k11

Absolutely incredible. If I were publishing/developing NBA2k11, I would consider splitting it into two games. The number of features and bells & whistles on this product is amazing. You can play online, join a league, create a legend, play regular season/exhibition games.

The My Player mode is my favorite so far. Made for and by basketball enthusiasts. How many other games evaluate your player performance based on boxing out, opening the lanes on fast break, attempting steals/blocks at the wrong moment? Just incredible how far basketball games have gone since the early days of NBA Live 95.

Proprietary sports game engines are milking cows.

Jimmy Eat World - Invented

Seeing them this weekend.

3 Years in 3 Minutes

It started on January 2007, when Parisian videographer Ramon captured the first image of the demolition work at Tour EDF. 45,000 photographs later, taken from exactly the same point with his Pentax K 110D DSLR, his work was done and a new building was in place. It was September 2010, three years later. That's an average of 42 images per day.

His patience paid off big time. The result is amazing.

What Are You Going to Do With That?

By William Deresiewicz

The essay below is adapted from a talk delivered to a freshman class at Stanford University in May.

The question my title poses, of course, is the one that is classically aimed at humanities majors. What practical value could there possibly be in studying literature or art or philosophy? So you must be wondering why I'm bothering to raise it here, at Stanford, this renowned citadel of science and technology. What doubt can there be that the world will offer you many opportunities to use your degree?

But that's not the question I'm asking. By "do" I don't mean a job, and by "that" I don't mean your major. We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major. Education is more than college, more even than the totality of your formal schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. By "What are you going to do," I mean, what kind of life are you going to lead? And by "that," I mean everything in your training, formal and informal, that has brought you to be sitting here today, and everything you're going to be doing for the rest of the time that you're in school.

We should start by talking about how you did, in fact, get here. You got here by getting very good at a certain set of skills. Your parents pushed you to excel from the time you were very young. They sent you to good schools, where the encouragement of your teachers and the example of your peers helped push you even harder. Your natural aptitudes were nurtured so that, in addition to excelling in all your subjects, you developed a number of specific interests that you cultivated with particular vigor. You did extracurricular activities, went to afterschool programs, took private lessons. You spent summers doing advanced courses at a local college or attending skill-specific camps and workshops. You worked hard, you paid attention, and you tried your very best. And so you got very good at math, or piano, or lacrosse, or, indeed, several things at once.

Now there's nothing wrong with mastering skills, with wanting to do your best and to be the best. What's wrong is what the system leaves out: which is to say, everything else. I don't mean that by choosing to excel in math, say, you are failing to develop your verbal abilities to their fullest extent, or that in addition to focusing on geology, you should also focus on political science, or that while you're learning the piano, you should also be working on the flute. It is the nature of specialization, after all, to be specialized. No, the problem with specialization is that it narrows your attention to the point where all you know about and all you want to know about, and, indeed, all you can know about, is your specialty.

The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist. It cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in yourself. And of course, as college freshmen, your specialization is only just beginning. In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.

Again, there's nothing wrong with being those things. It's just that, as you get deeper and deeper into the funnel, into the tunnel, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember who you once were. You start to wonder what happened to that person who played piano and lacrosse and sat around with her friends having intense conversations about life and politics and all the things she was learning in her classes. The 19-year-old who could do so many things, and was interested in so many things, has become a 40-year-old who thinks about only one thing. That's why older people are so boring. "Hey, my dad's a smart guy, but all he talks about is money and livers."

And there's another problem. Maybe you never really wanted to be a cardiac surgeon in the first place. It just kind of happened. It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are easy. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves. You go to a place like Stanford because that's what smart kids do. You go to medical school because it's prestigious. You specialize in cardiology because it's lucrative. You do the things that reap the rewards, that make your parents proud, and your teachers pleased, and your friends impressed. From the time you started high school and maybe even junior high, your whole goal was to get into the best college you could, and so now you naturally think about your life in terms of "getting into" whatever's next. "Getting into" is validation; "getting into" is victory. Stanford, then Johns Hopkins medical school, then a residency at the University of San Francisco, and so forth. Or Michigan Law School, or Goldman Sachs, or Mc­Kinsey, or whatever. You take it one step at a time, and the next step always seems to be inevitable.

Or maybe you did always want to be a cardiac surgeon. You dreamed about it from the time you were 10 years old, even though you had no idea what it really meant, and you stayed on course for the entire time you were in school. You refused to be enticed from your path by that great experience you had in AP history, or that trip you took to Costa Rica the summer after your junior year in college, or that terrific feeling you got taking care of kids when you did your rotation in pediatrics during your fourth year in medical school.

But either way, either because you went with the flow or because you set your course very early, you wake up one day, maybe 20 years later, and you wonder what happened: how you got there, what it all means. Not what it means in the "big picture," whatever that is, but what it means to you. Why you're doing it, what it's all for. It sounds like a cliché, this "waking up one day," but it's called having a midlife crisis, and it happens to people all the time.

There is an alternative, however, and it may be one that hasn't occurred to you. Let me try to explain it by telling you a story about one of your peers, and the alternative that hadn't occurred to her. A couple of years ago, I participated in a panel discussion at Harvard that dealt with some of these same matters, and afterward I was contacted by one of the students who had come to the event, a young woman who was writing her senior thesis about Harvard itself, how it instills in its students what she called self-efficacy, the sense that you can do anything you want. Self-efficacy, or, in more familiar terms, self-esteem. There are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because it was easy." And there are other kids, the kind with self-efficacy or self-esteem, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because I'm smart."

Again, there's nothing wrong with thinking that you got an A because you're smart. But what that Harvard student didn't realize—and it was really quite a shock to her when I suggested it—is that there is a third alternative. True self-esteem, I proposed, means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. True self-esteem means recognizing, despite everything that your upbringing has trained you to believe about yourself, that the grades you get—and the awards, and the test scores, and the trophies, and the acceptance letters—are not what defines who you are.

She also claimed, this young woman, that Harvard students take their sense of self-efficacy out into the world and become, as she put it, "innovative." But when I asked her what she meant by innovative, the only example she could come up with was "being CEO of a Fortune 500." That's not innovative, I told her, that's just successful, and successful according to a very narrow definition of success. True innovation means using your imagination, exercising the capacity to envision new possibilities.

But I'm not here to talk about technological innovation, I'm here to talk about a different kind. It's not about inventing a new machine or a new drug. It's about inventing your own life. Not following a path, but making your own path. The kind of imagination I'm talking about is moral imagination. "Moral" meaning not right or wrong, but having to do with making choices. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.

It means not just going with the flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success. Not simply accepting the life that you've been handed. Not simply accepting the choices you've been handed. When you walk into Starbucks, you're offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another choice. You can turn around and walk out. When you walk into college, you are offered a choice among law and medicine and investment banking and consulting and a few other things, but again, you can also do something else, something that no one has thought of before.

Let me give you another counterexample. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that touched on some of these same points. I said, among other things, that kids at places like Yale or Stanford tend to play it safe and go for the conventional rewards. And one of the most common criticisms I got went like this: What about Teach for America? Lots of kids from elite colleges go and do TFA after they graduate, so therefore I was wrong. TFA, TFA—I heard that over and over again. And Teach for America is undoubtedly a very good thing. But to cite TFA in response to my argument is precisely to miss the point, and to miss it in a way that actually confirms what I'm saying. The problem with TFA—or rather, the problem with the way that TFA has become incorporated into the system—is that it's just become another thing to get into.

In terms of its content, Teach for America is completely different from Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Harvard Medical School or Berkeley Law, but in terms of its place within the structure of elite expectations, of elite choices, it is exactly the same. It's prestigious, it's hard to get into, it's something that you and your parents can brag about, it looks good on your résumé, and most important, it represents a clearly marked path. You don't have to make it up yourself, you don't have to do anything but apply and do the work­—just like college or law school or McKinsey or whatever. It's the Stanford or Harvard of social engagement. It's another hurdle, another badge. It requires aptitude and diligence, but it does not require a single ounce of moral imagination.

Moral imagination is hard, and it's hard in a completely different way than the hard things you're used to doing. And not only that, it's not enough. If you're going to invent your own life, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus famously say, about growing up in Ireland in the late 19th century, "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."

Today there are other nets. One of those nets is a term that I've heard again and again as I've talked with students about these things. That term is "self-indulgent." "Isn't it self-indulgent to try to live the life of the mind when there are so many other things I could be doing with my degree?" "Wouldn't it be self-indulgent to pursue painting after I graduate instead of getting a real job?"

These are the kinds of questions that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little bit different. Even worse, the kinds of questions they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves. Many students have spoken to me, as they navigated their senior years, about the pressure they felt from their peers—from their peers—to justify a creative or intellectual life. You're made to feel like you're crazy: crazy to forsake the sure thing, crazy to think it could work, crazy to imagine that you even have a right to try.

Think of what we've come to. It is one of the great testaments to the intellectual—and moral, and spiritual—poverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel like they're being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity. You are all told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you're being "self-indulgent" if you actually want to get an education. Or even worse, give yourself one. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not OK to play music, or write essays, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is OK to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it's not selfish at all.

Do you see how absurd this is? But these are the nets that are flung at you, and this is what I mean by the need for courage. And it's a never-ending proc­ess. At that Harvard event two years ago, one person said, about my assertion that college students needed to keep rethinking the decisions they've made about their lives, "We already made our decisions, back in middle school, when we decided to be the kind of high achievers who get into Harvard." And I thought, who wants to live with the decisions that they made when they were 12? Let me put that another way. Who wants to let a 12-year-old decide what they're going to do for the rest of their lives? Or a 19-year-old, for that matter?

All you can decide is what you think now, and you need to be prepared to keep making revisions. Because let me be clear. I'm not trying to persuade you all to become writers or musicians. Being a doctor or a lawyer, a scientist or an engineer or an economist—these are all valid and admirable choices. All I'm saying is that you need to think about it, and think about it hard. All I'm asking is that you make your choices for the right reasons. All I'm urging is that you recognize and embrace your moral freedom.

And most of all, don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure. Yes, you will make mistakes. But they will be your mistakes, not someone else's. And you will survive them, and you will know yourself better for having made them, and you will be a fuller and a stronger person.

It's been said—and I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's an idea that's worth taking seriously—that you guys belong to a "postemotional" generation. That you prefer to avoid messy and turbulent and powerful feelings. But I say, don't shy away from the challenging parts of yourself. Don't deny the desires and curiosities, the doubts and dissatisfactions, the joy and the darkness, that might knock you off the path that you have set for yourself. College is just beginning for you, adulthood is just beginning. Open yourself to the possibilities they represent. The world is much larger than you can imagine right now. Which means, you are much larger than you can imagine.

William Deresiewicz is a contributing writer for The Nation and a contributing editor at The New Republic. His next book, A Jane Austen Education, will be published next year by Penguin Press.

Keeping up with Music

Following the trajectory of an artist and their albums is one of those simple things in life I love to do. There are two awesome websites I use to make sure I stay up to date with the scene:

http://www.albumreminder.com - It's pretty simple. You upload your iTunes library and create email notifications or a RSS feed to notify you when your favorite artists release a new album.

http://www.bandsintown.com - It would be great if this website also allows you to upload your iTunes library, instead you need to manually enter in your favorites. What bandsintown does is help you discover who is playing in town in the upcoming months. It's also great for traveling when you want to check out whose playing this weekend. The band tag cloud they offer is pretty useful as it indicates which bands are popular.

Punk’s Influence on Design

Punk Lesson 1: Don’t Sit on Your Ass: Go Forth and Design For Others
As the “social design” movement seems to be kicking into high gear, I’m very excited that we have the power to “be the change we want to see in the world” (quote by Gandhi, the punkest of them all, who gave a big pacifist-fuck-you to the status quo.) and while the rest of the world starves, dies from Malaria, hides from genocide, and is tricked into slavery, I sit in the comfort buxom of America writing about design. But, “I recognize the irony that the very system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. But that’s exactly why priviledged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream- until everyone has everything they need.” (quote by Propagandhi, the second punkest of them all.). Which is why designers should all use this given freedom and luxury to create solutions to make the world a little bit better. It’s punk to challenge the luxuries of our world and use our power to bring design to the global masses.

Punk Lesson 2: Without the good idea, the design is shit.
I can sum up the four years of my $160,000 education in one line from a song “Good frames won’t save bad paintings” by The Refused. What this meant to me is that the Concept is the most important ingredient in a design. Regardless of how “good” something is, whether its aesthetics, function, ergonomics, etc, it won’t save a bad Concept. It’s all about the Concept.

Punk Lesson 3: What You Love Is the Most Important
My last day at Nissan, instead of a thank you/goodbye/keep-in-touch email, I sent the lyrics from “South East First” by Hot Water Music to all the departments I worked with
“it never mattered who you were or where you worked
it never mattered who you were or what you earned
what mattered was what you gave and what you loved
what mattered was what you gave and what was learned”
Design needs to know what matters and this quote says what does, and does not matter.

Punk Lesson 4: Play at Eye Level
Punk is about equality. Elitism isn’t tolerated and icons and heroes are to be scoffed. There is no distinction between audience and musician, which is why they play at the same level, and not up on a stage (the real deal anyway). Inaccessible design or elitist design is never going to be for the masses. Keep it at eye level, on equal footing.

Punk Lesson 5: Design Is Not Design Without Ethics
Fugazi/Minor Threat was never a fan of capitalism and so has never made merch to sell at shows. At the request of loyal fans, they reluctantly pressed music and sold their music, but they didn’t want to be owned by some record label so they started their own. They were a large part of the DIY movement of today which combatted mass commercialization and the removal of ethics that was inherent in mass-consumed goods. DIY went hand-in-hand with a set of ethics. Now the ballistic Etsy missle, is full charge ahead raising craft DIY WITHOUT the ethics. Individual copycats galore, trying to make a quick buck, undermining the design process. Design without an infusion of ethics will be guaranteed to do humanity an injustice.

Punk Lesson 6: Design for the Unpopular
Glen E. Friedman and Ed Colver are a couple of the most prolific photographers of our time. Glen Friedman photographed portraiture for unknown musicians like Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Ice-T, Black Flag. Ed Colver captured the rising culture of the punk rock shows of the early 80′s. They became popular in the 90′s because they did stuff that no one bothered doing at the time. Design things that you love, though it may be unpopular, the world will appreciate it later. Unpopular design won’t make you famous, it won’t make you rich, but you won’t regret it. As HWM said, “Live your heart and never follow”.

Punk Lesson 7: Stop Being Sarcastic and Ironic
Punk always gave a big ol’ middle finger to the mainstream media so it’s no wonder that every flyer was a mishmash of cut-up clippings and text from existing media. Your punk rock friend at Kinko’s would make your photocopies a thousand times for you, free of charge. The master of this art form in the visual scene was Art Chantry, who made flyers for Nirvana, Mud Honey, and every other punk-grunge band of Seattle. In music terms, Girltalk’s work is totally punk. Mixing up things you’re not supposed to mix got pretty popular in design but it came out as Ironic-Williamsburg style. That’s not punk. If you’re going to do it, mean it.

Punk Lesson 8: If You Are a Designer, You Are Automatically Not Special
So the urban legend goes that a few friends just stole some band’s gear that they left outside. The friends took it home and sat on it for a while and then thought “we have all this music equipment, we should make some music”. The Sex Pistols was born. The point of punk was that ANYONE could play the songs, and it’s still true today. I can teach you how to play pop-punk Blink or GreenDay songs in one sitting. Just like punk, anyone can design. Design is accessible to anyone. Design can be done by anyone. Design IS done by everyone. So I never think I’m all that special being a designer.

Punk Lesson 9: Do not $ellout
Don’t do things for money. It keeps it authentic. Do take money if you think you deserve it.

Punk Lesson 10: Change Starts with the Consumer
By the time I got to Nissan, they’d already been talking about building an Electric Vehicle. Consumers wanted it and so the market responds. I had protested and faught against corporate designs that were oppressive like child labor by Nike in the 80′s and 90′s, or biodesigned foods. I never quite gauged how effective protests and consumer opinions were. So I thought I could make a bigger difference from the inside creating great designs that helps people and participates in the market-game. The truth is that both is important. You need people on the outside raising awareness and desiring good and ethical designs. Then you need the people inside to design it and convince the business-types “hey, the consumers really want this”. Business isn’t evil or good, it’s just devoid of ethics. Design and Research is where you can infuse the humanity. Companies sometimes try to slow down individuals or groups, but they can’t stop a movement. They’re smart, they always join the winning team.

I want designs to have the Punk attitude. It’s rare that I see a design that makes me grab my hair in utter confusion and ask “WTF!?” Designs, so good that it brings me to tears. I want designs like that. That emotion, the rawness of punk, is what’s missing in my designs, and am working to acheive.

- Ko Nakatsu

Linkin Park - A Thousand Suns

We were not making an album.

For months, we'd been destroying and rebuilding our band. The experiments that resulted filled the studio hard drive with diverse, abstract sounds. Amorphous echoes, cacophonous samples, and handmade staccato merged into wandering, elusive melody. Each track felt like a hallucination.

We didn't know if any of those unorthodox ideas could be incorporated into a traditional album, but we knew we didn't want our next album to be predictable. Sitting together in the same studio where we made our first album, all six of us voiced a commitment to going out on a limb, to making something truly daring. We asked ourselves: were we all earnestly willing, more than ever before, to abandon the precepts of commercial ambition in pursuit of what we believe to be honest art?

The inclination to begin writing conventional songs for a conventional album came and went. The temptation to adjust our creative vision to fulfill expectations beyond our studio walls yielded to the audacious ambition of what we hoped to achieve as a band. The two years of making 'A Thousand Suns' marked our exhilarating, surrealistic, and often challenging journey into the creative unknown.

On the eve of its completion, this body of work, assembled through unconscious inspiration and unmitigated exertion, has revealed to us notions both stirring and surprising. The album's personified imagery is neither dogma nor political premeditation. The emergent themes and metaphors illuminate a uniquely human story.

'A Thousand Suns' grapples with the personal cycle of pride, destruction, and regret. In life, like in dreams, this sequence is not always linear. And, sometimes, true remorse penetrates the devastating cycle. The hope, of course, springs from the notion that the possibility of change is born in our most harrowing moments.

Enjoy the music.

Linkin Park

Co-produced by Rick Rubin and Mike Shinoda.

HDR Video Demonstration - too cool

Growing up PlayStation

Marketing

Most of all successful businessmen have an adeptness for what sells. Sometimes they don't even understand the product/service they are selling, but they just know how to sell it.


Ray and I were having this discussion about the genius of marketing while we were at Tsinghua. Back then, I remember stating something along the lines of how "marketing is arguably the most difficult aspect of a business operation."

I still stand by that point. Now I'm not talking about marketing in the sense of using resources to buy your eyeballs (like buying keywords or print/tv ads.) But actually coming up with effective and efficient solutions to reach your customers.

In this world today, you would think coming up with interesting marketing ideas and implementing them is easy enough with all the social media tools around... I'm not so sure about that.

Pretty Lights - Total Fascination

Tipped by Franzi - Download Pretty Lights music free at http://prettylightsmusic.com

Releasing Beta in Less than a Month

Support Us!

Are you good?

Next time someone asks whether you're good at something, just say "I enjoy it."


Being good at something is what most people only care about. Either you play the guitar and you're good, or it's not important. Somehow being in the pool of mediocrity and having a good time at something is not worthy enough. In the case of zero sum games like most sports, there can only one winner -do we seriously only care about winners?

Being a participant should be equally worthy. We can't all be winners of a marathon, we should respect everyone for finishing.

True winners enjoy the process.

The Airbourne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight

And it starts
Sometime around midnight
Or at least that's when
You lose yourself
For a minute or two

As you stand
Under the bar lights
And the band plays some song
About forgetting yourself for a while
And the piano's this melancholy soundcheck
To her smile
And that white dress she's wearing
You haven't seen her
For a while

But you know
That she's watching
She's laughing, she's turning
She's holding her tonic like a crux
The room suddenly spinning
She walks up and asks how you are
So you can smell her perfume
You can see her lying naked in your arms

And so there's a change
In your emotions
And all of these memories come rushing
Like feral waves to your mind
Of the curl of your bodies
Like two perfect circles entwined
And you feel hopeless, and homeless
And lost in the haze
Of the wine

And she leaves
With someone you don't know
But she makes sure you saw her
She looks right at you and bolts
As she walks out the door
Your blood boiling
Your stomach in ropes
And when your friends say, "What is it?"
You look like you've seen a ghost

And you walk
Under the streetlights
And you're too drunk to notice
That everyone is staring at you
And you so care what you look like
The world is falling
Around you

You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her

And you know that she'll break you
In two

Arcade Fire - the Suburbs

Switchfoot - Enough to Let Me Go

Incredible Animation

Vox VT15 Tube Amp

Starcraft 2 might just need to move over now. Since having gotten re-acquainted with my electric earlier this month, I've had no gear to practice on. Today I added a VOX VT15 Valvetronix tube amp to my rock inventory.