Palebear Archives

December, 2006

OK, so I felt like writing another post again. It’s suddenly nice to be able to write about anything I want without feeling the pressure of having to churn out succinct reviews.

It turns out that those huge empty Amazon boxes that are littering our living room right now have a use after all - for holding all the manilla padded envelopes that people send CDs to me in. I was going to alternatively use the box as a sled to ski down the hill, but (un)fortunately there is no snow in Southern California.

Yesterday, I went through all the remaining packages in the review queue… hey, I can finally see the floor of my closet again. I would’ve taken a picture of the closet floor instead of the Amazon box, but I didn’t want to show the one inch thick layer of dust that had collected on the ground.

So, you might be thinking that there isn’t that many empty packages in the box. Well, I actually EMPTIED the box after filling it up 3 times. That was an insane amount of CDs packages. I had them lined up on the couch and just tried listening to them one after the other to see if they might be something I might be interested in.

I know you’re thinking - oh boo hoo, you had to listen to music all day long. Trust me, it’s not all fun and games especially considering some of the shyte that I fed to my poor CD changer. Incidentally, I’m rather thankful to have a disc changer that allows you to “Ex-Change” (sic, their spelling, not mine) discs while one is still playing. Makes things a bit quicker.

Anyhow, it feels a lot better having exorcised the closet of all those packages, some of which dated back to July. I had previously used a screening process to divide the obvious wheat from the obvious chaff. If a CD was tolerable, it got put into the queue and was dated with a month.

Judging by the state of my closet after a year of this, it’s clearly not the way to go. This coming year, I’m not going to use a pre-screening on CDs - I’m going to open them all and toss all the manilla packages and then just integrate the ones that strike me as reviewable into my collection. That way I won’t feel like they’re hanging around my head. And my closet will actually be navigable.

P.S. You may notice I jacked the blog’s font size up by one notch. It’s for all the hip senior citizens that flock to Palebear to read about indie music. Hello, all of you.

by Palebear | No Comments

I am sure that it is just about NOW that you’re saying, my god here is a farking posting about a Giant Squid in a music blog. This person is certifiably insane.

But, you see, I really like giant squid and this is the first time it’s been filmed continuously while still alive. I’ve watched all the Discovery Channel specials on squid. So this is cause for some sort of celebration at Palebear. I promise this won’t become the central focus of the site. But for now… HOORAY GIANT SQUID, HOORAY.

Read Giant Squid Captured

by Palebear | No Comments

I know I’m supposed to be taking a break, but hello anyway. Well, I’ve started the process of converting Palebear into the half personal blog and half review beast I spoke of earlier that hopefully will save it from an untimely demise. This involves some cavorting around with the code, so excuse me if things break.

Hopefully, the personal side of the equation will allow a little more “human” feeling into the reviews (not that they weren’t written by a human before). They’ll be less formal. Also, I never guaranteed a review previously, but if you’re a serious promotions company - feel free to drop us from your promo list if you absolutely need to have reviews done on time. No skin off my back. But we’ll still always accept submissions if you choose to send them.

Things are going to be a bit different around here: I’m only going to review what I want and when I feel like it. I might go months without reviewing anything, and then do 50 reviews in 2 days. It’s the only way the site will survive. If you’re a friend or music contact, take note that I’m not going to guarantee reviews of material or special treatment as well. I actually hope to get back into being more friendly on the indie music front.

I just don’t want the pressure of having to churn out music copy anymore. This isn’t a newspaper. It’s a blog, or at least it was supposed to be a blog. As for what kind of non-music things you might read about here, it’ll pretty much be anything under the sun from hockey scores to php coding to cooking with cast iron to comments about NASA building that base on the moon.

I’m kinda looking forward to Palebear in 2007. See you in a couple weeks.

by Palebear | No Comments