Wonderful account of the Blonde on Blonde recording sessions. On Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands:

Finally, at 4 a.m., Dylan was ready. “After you’ve tried to stay awake ‘til four o’clock in the morning, to play something so slow and long was really, really tough,” McCoy says. Dylan continued polishing the lyrics in front of the microphone. After he finished an abbreviated run-through, he counted off, and the musicians fell in. Kenny Buttrey recalled that they were prepared for a two- or three-minute song, and started out accordingly: “If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ‘cause we thought, ‘Man, this is it….’ After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”

Flickr person Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

Imagine getting access to all the data Google has about you, and everything they’ve learned partially based on observing you.

I have imagined just that with a friend several times - some way of seeing who/what Google thinks you are. Who do they think wants to advertise to you? What songs do they think you like? What is their profile of you? Who is the Google-You?

The problem with Google’s current tools for looking at their data on you - Dashboard and the Data Liberation Front (seemingly comatose) - is that they don’t show you the aggregated Google-You. They only show the component parts, and specifically exclude stuff like page requests, cookies, and advertising data.

The Google-You is obviously of great value to Google’s advertising partners and demographic data consumers. And their ability to make a Google-You out of all that we do online (and off) is a huge competitive advantage. But given we’ve provided all the data to create that virtual person, it would be nice if we could access it free. Actually it would be more than nice, it should be required.

(via Daring Fireball)

Who needs alt-country when you can have METAL. Though looking at the song titles & listening to this sample, it’s definitely more Lordi than Megadeath.

Announced at Google I/O - Google’s play to own the web app store market. The Google steamroller rolls on.

Google (open source) web fonts - really nice.

To make up for the shock of le pop française, have some stunning bluegrass. Lord have mercy. Harmonies to die for, guitar playing to die for too.

I laughed all over my keyboard.

Stunning short films about Cali. Borderland and Scrapertown in particular.

French pop geniuses Phoenix bop out acoustic style for National Public Radio. I love that they look like a bunch of nerds.

Lord British looks back. On PK-ing:

We definitely did not expect it to pan out the way it did; as it began to unfold we had mixed feelings as how to respond to it. The theory we thought was sound — we made the towns safe and guarded, you’d leave and have more of a free-for-all. But one day I was GMing as Lord British, and I saw a female character shouting for help. Right as I was talking with her, a thief shows up with macros, steals everything she has and runs away. I teleported ahead of him, froze him to the ground, and told him to cut it out. He promised to do so, but stole from her two more times. When I confronted him about it, he broke character and said, “Of course I’m going to do that, I’m a thief, it’s what I do. I’m operating within the rules of your game, and of course I’d lie to the king of the land.” I was like, “Damn! You’re right!

And on the best part of any MMO:

Conversely was the amazingly uninteresting feature of fishing that we put into the game for completeness. Even though it was extremely basic, that feature became stunningly popular, and a bunch of apocryphal stories arose of whether fishing worked better in streams or rivers (it didn’t). So we doubled-down on it and increased the sophistication of the feature.”