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The challenge is over, the songs are back to their new bland standard, and Robin Hilton is talking over the beginning of any songs that stand out, making it impossible to clip him from them.

I give up.

It hasn’t gotten much better. What’s got me talking about it again is, in fact, NPR’s co-opting of the RPM Challenge.

As I mentioned before, Second Stage has slacked for me as an indie music discovery vehicle since it’s opened up to music that has label support. The quality stayed about even, but the variety slacked off, more songs sounding like stuff striving to fit into the indie scene than songs trying to stand out. (Robin Hilton’s grating intros and disdain for anything indie-folk just adds to the displeasure.)

Second Stage, though, has been featuring artists from the RPM Challenge, and - lo and behold - the best songs are coming from unsigned unknowns recording in bedrooms.

Many of the RPM Challenge songs featured are more original, more beautiful than what’s come out since the change. Of note that I don’t want to forget: Sarah Kenvyn and The Missed Connections. Both unsigned, both relying on MySpace and YouTube and such to get their music out with little, if any, outside support.

That’s what Open Mic was all about, what it did best — getting the word out about awesome artists who are stuck doing their own PR, publishing their own music. That it took an outside event to make Second Stage as relevant as it was before it opened up to labels — even small indie labels — is telling as to how wrong a turn NPR took in ditching the old format.

Play Burn the Rope. Yes, it’s that short and easy. Yes, you only do it for the ending song. Don’t forget to right-click on the game.

Pulling Del for bridge quiz answers and knowing that’s the intended result. That’s the target audience.

I’ve been hard on the 360, but damn. “Worst gaming console?” on Yahoo!’s front page?

The story links to a relatively vanilla Yahoo! Games story about RRoDs — how to futilely try to prevent them (best advice: Buy a newer one. Gee, thanks) and what to do when one happens.

The timing is also a little hilarious: Clint Hocking — UbiSoft’s creative director, who worked on Splinter Cell and Far Cry 2 — saw his 360 RRoD again. Its first death, less than a year ago, lead to a fairly epic delay. And that Halo fan who had irreplaceable Halo art and autographs wiped off his RRoD’d 360 by Microsoft saw Bungie do their best to comfort him. Good on Bungie, but damn, how did they beat Microsoft to the PR punch? Bungie wasn’t even directly involved!

Still, I can’t agree with Yahoo!’s headline writer that it’s the “worst console” — the only way you can give it that title is to be extremely generous to the PS3 and count the Wii solely on the Wiimote’s value, and limit the scope to those three consoles.

It has a lot going for it, but with the PS3 improving and the Wii a monster, the fact that it simply breaks so often might be enough to kill the 360’s momentum. Even if new-architecture 360s, with cooler CPUs and GPUs, have a lower fail rate, that stigma will still be there. Read more »

I wonder if anyone in Lafayette will talk about this? Associated Press:

ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) — No matter what the cameras say, some drivers are refusing to pay dozens of $40 speeding fines.

Who? Police officers.

In the last eight months of 2007, Montgomery County’s new speed cameras recorded 224 cases in which police vehicles were recorded traveling more than 10 mph over the speed limit, according to department records.

Supervisors dismissed 76 of those citations after determining the officers were responding to calls or had valid reasons to break the speed limit. But that left 148 who didn’t have that excuse, and about two-thirds of those citations haven’t been paid, said police Lt. Paul Starks.

The police union says officers shouldn’t pay because the citations are issued to the owner of a vehicle, in this case the county, and not to the driver.

Police Chief Thomas Manger doesn’t buy that argument.

“We are not above the law,” Manger said. “It is imperative that the police department hold itself to the same standards that we’re holding the public to.”

Manger said officers who continue to ignore citations might be disciplined.

Via TechCrunch, Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg:

The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.

I think only an Open Source solution can do that.

By none other than the immortal dread pirate Ron Gilbert:

Cloverfield is a great movie because a bunch of whiny self-absorbed twenty-something New York hipsters that live in apartments no one can afford all die. For those of you working on your term papers dealing with film deconstruction and plot subtext for your Understanding Film class, let me break it down for you. The whiny hipsters all represent whiny hipsters we hate. The monster is metaphor for a giant monster, and the shallow asshole good looking people all die because they should.

There. I saved you an evening in the library.

Nintendo Announces Wii Pay & Play (Kotaku):

Today, during a GDC presentation, Nintendo’s Takashi Aoyama announced a new expansion to Nintendo’s Wi-Fi services called Wii Pay & Play. Aoyama explained that Nintendo will begin “collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly.” In other words, by subsidizing additional, unnamed service and feature costs to consumers, Nintendo feels they can explore new concepts and channels.

He added that it was a Nintendo initiative to avoid misleading consumers into thinking they can buy games that can be played entirely free when they cannot (whether or not this implies an initiative to begin charging for multiplayer content was unclear). To aid in a clear cost presentation, the blue WFC logo will be joined with a similar red logo featuring the line “Pay & Play.”

While we were offered no additional details, we understand that the red stands for danger.

Xbox Live is why I don’t have a 360 yet. PSN is my last hope, and it’s probably not going to stay free.

But the audacity of Nintendo to charge for the shit online offerings they have, that’s Microsoft’s playbook: Take over the market, then shove spiked poles up asses once everyone’s locked in. I hope they realize their lead is still as fragile as their GameCube sales were.

Wright, in a Newsweek interview about Spore:

We naturally are seeing people have their you know favorite level; they really enjoy Civ, but Creatures is a little too laid back for them, or they love Space because it’s so elaborate. People are paying for the game. right? I mean, it’s their game. They bought it. I don’t feel right as a designer locking them out and forcing them to watch my cutscenes, and play this level before they get to that level.