Author: Chris Barrus

LucidaGraphite style for Vienna RSS newsreader

I switched over to Vienna as my main feedreader once the Great Google Reader Diaspora began. Until there’s an obvious choice in alternate feedreading-with-sync market, I’m back to the old era of downloading feeds directly. As a relucantly-former NetNewsWire and Reeder user, I’m damn impressed with how snappy Vienna loads everything.

LucidaGraphite is a Vienna style-sheet based off of the FeedLight style. I prefer Lucida Grande in black as my primary body text font and, well, perhaps someone else would like it too.

Rugby font again

This time courtesy of enigmatic German pop sensation Heino in 1971

Heino In Einer Bar In Mexico

This sighting courtesy of the Font Feed blog, who add:

Another rarely seen Mecanorma typeface can be found on Heino’s In Einer Bar In Mexico. The character shapes in Contest are created by elliptical counter forms cut out of curved square outer shapes. This is a great typographic choice as it reprises the typically shaped glasses of the German schlager star.

I knew that in the 1980s, Rugby font was available from Mecanorma as dry transfer lettering, but never knew Mecanorma’s name for the font family. I haven’t dealt with (or even thought about) dry transfer lettering in 25 years, but it was a somewhat easy way to get a good looking design. I’m damn pleased that this era of analog tech has been buried for good. The transfer sheets weren’t cheap, the letters tended to stick to them, and woe unto you if the letters were misaligned.

Armed with the font family name (really, “Contest” for this one?), I found a scan of the 1982 Mecanorma catalog (courtesy of Matt Howarth) and there it is: Contest font. Wonder how many of them Spacemen 3 went through while lettering those album covers.

Contest font

Episode #004

No theme this time. Just music…

Hedgehog – “The Burning Sun In The Morning”
Föllakzoid – “99”
Beaches – “New Knowledge”
Sun Dial – “You’re Still Wondering”
Ojos Rojos – “So Wrong”
Steven R. Smith – “Old Skete 11”
Avrocar – “Tetra”
White+ – “silveR”
Matthew J Tow – “Night And Day”

Also available on Mixcloud & iTunes

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Episode #003 – The Obligatory Covers Mix

There’s a time when every podcast does a mix of cover songs. This is that time.

The Saints – “River Deep Mountain High”
Luis & The Wildfires – “Digital”
Fireball – “Archangels Thunderbird”
Kinski – “Point That Thing Somewhere Else”
Lumerians – “Chevaux Fous”
Wooden Shjips – “Contact”
Jessamine – “Cheree”
Alphastone – “You’re Not Foolin’ Me”
Denial – “California Dreaming”
Anomy – “TVC 15”
Accelera Deck – “I Believe It”
Band Of Susans – “Ahead”
The Raveonettes – “I Wanna Be Adored”
Britta Phillips – “How You Satisfy Me”

Also available on Mixcloud & iTunes

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Episode #002 – Recent Things

Quartz City Podcast #002… recent things that I’ve been listening to.

The Limiñanas – “(I’ve Got) Trouble In Mind”
Emma Acs – “We Make Sense”
Cobalt Cranes – “Head in the Clouds”
Echodrone – “Cold Snap”
Speck Mountain – “Young Eyes”
Terrapin – “Cirrus Minor”
Chasms – “Heavenly Blue”
Richard Skelton – untitled from Dreamsheep Vol. 1
The Holydrug Couple – “Out Of Sight”
The Roswell Incident” – “The Stars (Are Out)”
Khun narin phin sing – untitled ordination ceremony jam
Emmalee Crane – “Crowd of Reeds”

Also available on Mixcloud & iTunes

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Episode #001 Quartz City Podcast

Assuming that all appropriate plug-ins are configured correctly, this post will be the official RSS-ified beginning of the Quartz City Podcast. Right now, I’m going with a bi-weekly schedule – potentially subject to change as we move along but I think I can handle bi-weekly for now. Music mix episodes will still be posted on Mixcloud, but as we push forward with this I hope to feature more than just music. Here we go…

Track listing:
The Brian Jonestown Massacre – “Seven Kinds of Wonderful”
The Vandelles – “All Aloha”
Savages – “Flying To Berlin”
Moonbell – “Still Motion”
Steve Moore – “Dawn Of Primordial Life”
All India Radio – “Tomorrowland”
Marie-Pierre Arthur – “À partir de maintenant”
School of Seven Bells – “When You Sing”
Brother Sun, Sister Moon – “All You Need”
Jessica Bailiff – “Take Me to the Sun (So Warm, So Ready)”
Allah-Las – “Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind)”
Flavor Crystals – “Broadcaster”
Persephone’s Bees – “We’ve Just Begun”
The Hives – “Insane”

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What I liked from 2012 and the rough beginnings of the Quartz City podcast

I still haven’t found a way to extract my Last.FM data in such a way to give me Most Listened to Albums by Year of Release, but as I was preparing another yearly infodump I suddenly realized… duh, why not make a one hour mix? At least something a little more than just a Spotify playlist, so here you go.

Quartz City podcast 001 – 2012 Mix by Quartzcity on Mixcloud

One of my long term projects has been to get a regular podcast going (yeah yeah, I can hear the “guh, not another one!” contempt already), so consider it episode number one. For now, I’m using Mixcloud as the host, but once I get my storage and bandwidth situation worked out there will be a RSS feed for a direct download.

By the way, there was much more from 2012 I liked than could be crammed into a hour, so it more a reflection of my current state of mind than anything representative of the year.

Track listing:

  1. The Brian Jonestown Massacre – “Seven Kinds of Wonderful”
  2. The Vandelles – “All Aloha”
  3. Savages – “Flying To Berlin”
  4. Moonbell – “Still Motion”
  5. Steve Moore – “Dawn Of Primordial Life”
  6. All India Radio – “Tomorrowland”
  7. Marie-Pierre Arthur – “À partir de maintenant”
  8. School of Seven Bells – “When You Sing”
  9. Brother Sun, Sister Moon – “All You Need”
  10. Jessica Bailiff – “Take Me to the Sun (So Warm, So Ready)”
  11. Allah-Las – “Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind)”
  12. Flavor Crystals – “Broadcaster”
  13. Persephone’s Bees – “We’ve Just Begun”
  14. The Hives – “Insane”

Just pretend to buy records

I’ve been doing some background acting lately… it’s fun, the food is good, it gets me out of the house, and I don’t have to worry about chasing down syntax errors in code. I was an extra in last night’s episode of Parks & Recreation.

I’m on the right hand side. My instructions were to “just pretend to buy records” and as they say… fell into character extremely quickly.

Par et

I believe I’m looking at a Guitar Wolf LP.