More Tar being Tar. This one has crystal clear production and, wouldn’t you know it, a little bit of variety in the song writing. I think they recorded this record knowing they were about to call it a day as a band. Well, at least they went out on a high note. More bands need to realize it’s time to move on (Jesus Lizard.. ahem). But wait, they returned some 15 years later and “opened” for my band, Nonagon, at the summer PRFBBQ! The circle is complete.
Taking a break from my usual and completely unnecessary review posts, I thought I’d take a moment get a little technical. This site and many others I have developed use the Drupal open-sourced content management system. Drupal is great. It’s incredibly flexible, powerful and yet moderately easy to use if you have a little Web design experience.
Other systems I have used in the past, including Microsoft Sharepoint and WordPress, don’t hold a candle to Drupal. Sharepoint is an abomination and the only reason you should ever use it for a public facing Web site is if you work at Megacorp, Inc. and some idiot I.T. guy bought it as part of a multi-million dollar corporate enterprise package. Customizing Sharepoint is an exercise in futility and self-immolation. Just assume that your clean standards-compliant code with get destroyed and converted into a stew of redundant tags and impossible-to-style markup. WordPress is much better than that but it still falls short of Drupal when it comes to customizing your content types and controlling look and feel. You can hardly do anything custom in WordPress without having to hand code PHP. Simple tasks like adding an extra field to a post-type are just a pain and require some sort of third-party plugin (of which there are many and all of them do it differently). The only area where WordPress is better than Drupal is in installing and updating plugins and core systems. Drupal is getting better at this, but it still has a way to go to match the ease of use that WordPress offers.
For all my Drupal love, it still isn’t perfect right out of the box. Any Drupal install is going to require also installing a number of add-on modules to get your site fully reach its potential. So here is a list of the modules that I will include in every Drupal site that I create.
Views is the reason you are using Drupal. It allows you to build custom pages, feeds, blocks, etc. based on specific database queries. There is nothing like this for WordPress. You want a page of only posts created in June with the word summer in the body? A list of recent comments? A slideshow of art from posts tagged NSFW? Boom, Views can do that and sort it, make it filterable, restrict access… almost anything you can think of. Views puts you in control of your database. Installing views in Drupal 7 also requires the Chaos Tools Suite, so consider that an essential module too.
This module puts a thin flyout-menu at the top of all pages that will quickly allow editors and admins to perform tasks without having to click down through multiple pages of admin content. The default Drupal 7 toolbar plus shortcuts is pretty close to providing this functionality but Admin Menu just does it so much better.
Module Filter is like Admin Menu in that it takes a core system interface and makes it just a bit more user friendly. In this case it tames the often over-long list of add on modules. During the development stage of any Drupal site, this saves you a ton of time scrolling and searching that page.
This module has saved me many-a-time. It provides a way to backup your site’s data via a simple Web interface. You can also set schedules for daily backups and you automatically backup to the cloud if you so desire. It is also the easy way to get a site from a test environment to the live server.
The main thing that turned me off about Drupal when I first started using it was the lack of any sort of visual text editor when creating content. You still needed to know HTML to style anything. This problem is easily solved with the Wysiwyg module and another third-party visual editing library (in my case I use TinyMCE). The need for a library kinda makes this module a pain to install, but, once you get it up and running, composing posts becomes much easier especially for non-technical users.
IMCE also fulfills a very basic editing need that the Drupal core lacks. It allows users to upload and embed images into the body area of their posts via a pop-up file browser. It integrates smoothly into your visual Wysiwyg editor by also installing the IMCE Wysiwyg bridge module.
A final basic Web design flaw with the Drupal core is that it places a truncated post’s Read More link way below where a user might actually notice it. Read More Control brings it back where it should be, within the text of the post’s teaser content.
The default main menu of Drupal is okay, but it is limited in that doesn’t easily let you create CSS flyouts or create sub menus in the sidebar as you dig deeper into the site. Menu block provides you with a highly customizable way to display menus whereever you want.
Pathauto is one of those modules (like views) that really just needs to be part of the core. It gives developers a way to create custom URL aliases based on all sorts of variables (using Tokens… see below). I typically use it to fake an organized directory structure to my sites. And, unlike WordPress’s path customization, it can be as general or specific as you like and doesn’t need to be based on dates or content IDs.
This module is the second half of my strategy to get my sites to follow a psuedo-directory structure. It allows you to create rules that will make a particular set of content nodes appear as though they exist within a menu structure without having to individually assign each item to the menu tree.
Token is a behind the scenes module that provides a way for Drupal and other modules to use simple placeholders to output small bits of text like post titles, fields, tags, dates, etc.
There are a few more modules which I install most of the time but are not really essential in the way I believe the proceeding are. These include: Date, Field Group, Captcha, Webform, Colorbox, Entity and Libraries. Follow the links for more information.
While this disc starts out with a couple of great Tar tunes it doesn’t quite keep the energy up like Jackson does. As I will say every time I write about Tar, they aren’t know for wild experimentation. They established a sound early on and just decided not to mess with the formula. If anything, this recording sounds better than its predecessors perhaps at the expense of some of that aforementioned energy.
Billed as a first person shooter RPG, Borderlands focuses on collecting loot over story. There a lot of superficial similarity with the recent Fallout games: large open world to explore, quest-based goals and a little bit of humor thrown in. But the world of Borderlands is barren and devoid of interesting people and stories. You just get your quest marker and then go and shoot everything in your path. All the while you are hoping the next gun that is dropped will be slightly better than the one you are holding.
The game’s saving grace is its emphasis on co-operative online multi-player game-play. I played through the whole game with a partner’s help. It may have felt more like an enjoyable pastime rather than a challenging game, but as long as chat was on it was pretty fun just grinding through the cell-shaded levels with a friend. We have already moved on the Borderlands 2 (which is a much better game).
This feels like it must be outtakes or extras from Jackson. “G7” and “Teetering” are the best tracks on the EP. Some really great cover photography of the band’s custom aluminum guitars.
This probably is Tar’s best record. It’s a wall of loud, lumbering guitars and driving bass lines. This is pretty much what every Illinois-based hard rock indie band aspired to sound like back in 1992. This contains some of their most memorable tracks: “Short Trades,” “Walking the King” and especially “Viaduct Removal.”
This CD actually compiles Tar’s first two releases: Handsome and Roundhouse. While I like many of tunes on this CD, it’s my least favorite of their releases. Tar never strays too far from the formula so, if you haven’t heard much Tar, this will be pretty indistinguishable from later records. For me this record lacks the droney, bass-heavy sound defined their best records so it tends to get played less.
Over the past few years I have had a love/hate relationship with The Walking Dead T.V. show. Unlike most of the trash in the zombie sub-genre being released these days, the pilot episode was simply one of the best zombie stories ever filmed. However, as the series progressed, it has sunk in quality where at times it just feels like a bad soap opera filled with characters who make the most unrealistic and stupid decisions. The fact that there is a zombie apocalypse going on has little or no bearing on the plot most of the time (you can just replace “zombies” with “earthquake” or another major disaster and you would have the same show).
The video game adaptation is different because now you can make the stupid decisions! Rather than a standard point and click adventure, Telltale has created a system that is essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure audio/visual experience’like Dragon’s Lair except your choices actually effect how the story progresses. Most of these choices occur in dialogue interactions as a timer ticks down waiting for you to pick your line. Choose to be a rational human being or a dick, it’s all up to you.
If I may go on a bit of a tangent here, I’ve noticed that most end of the world stories assume people would all just become horrible to each other and betray their fellow survivors just to gain a modest advantage. I really doubt this is how things would unfold. I think 99.9% percent of people are good and humans would be resourceful enough to team up and rebuild. My anecdotal experience with neighbors helping each other with snow shoveling this morning is what I am going on, so that that with whatever grain of salt you want.
Anyhow, back to the game: There are points where your choice is between rescuing character A or character B and those are the moments that supposedly can really change the story. I went back and replayed the first episode picking different options and the changes aren’t that huge. The key plot points remain the same. In theory, this should make for an awful game, but The Walking Dead is saved by its engaging story which avoids most of the melodrama of the television show. Because I was the one making the crucial choices, I was even more invested in the characters than I could ever be if I was passively watching the show. Maybe not a great “game” per se, but definitely a great piece interactive fiction.
This is the better of the two Supercollider CDs. The sound is much bigger and they had gotten much more skilled at crafting atmospheric loops of guitar sounds and electronics. They still exist in their own little musical niche and I find myself going back to their music more than most of the bands that I loved during the early nineties because of this uniqueness. Supercollider is a band that more people need to hear. Just watch out for what you find out there because there have since been about half a dozen other bands that have named themselves “Supercollider” (it’s called Google people!).
Supercollider is my favorite band from the nineties that no one seems to know about. I found about them after reading a short interview in Flipside (Nov. 1991) where they were described by their use of sequencers and guitar. I was intrigued and bought their CD, Dual, not knowing exactly what to expect. I slowly fell in love with it and eventually got my hands on this, their first CD.
I had never heard any band that quite sounded like them before or since. They make heavy use of looped samples of guitar noises, sparse drums and Joy Division-esque vocals on top. Despite the electronic underpinnings, they are very much a guitar band and much more atmospheric than say the thump-thump of an industrial band from around the same time. The minimalism (this is much more sparse than Dual) and repetition might grate on some people’s ears but I get lost in the music every time I listen to this CD.
