Late last year, we wrote a three part series on our attempts to de-tether music synchronization between computer and phone.

The experiments were unsuccessful – all we found is that 3G data speeds are insufficient for the constant playlist churn that we like to experience on our phone. But it wasn’t entirely a loss.

In the process, iTunes – arguably the worst software for a Windows machine on the planet – was ditched from my computer in favour of the incredible (and highly recommended) Media Monkey. And last.fm entered our life.

But you’ve been on last.fm since 2009.

This is true. In 2009, I wondered what this whole “internet radio” malarky was about. I got myself a last.fm account, and wondered how many plays it would take (with me loving or banning as many tracks as possible) to go from a blank slate to an accurate representation of my musical tastes.

I did no scrobbling. I answered no – or, at least, minimal – questions about my musical likes and dislikes.

That experiment, by the way, was another failure. I did not possess the patience.

But my Android Music Adventure experiments got me scrobbling. And I loved it — I cannot resist a good set of data about myself, with which to analyze what I actually like and dislike, rather than what I think I like and dislike.

I’m wise enough to know that I probably don’t actually understand what I enjoy.

Having stats on every song I’ve listened to (pretty much) over the last half year, we would now like to report on the following surprises:

#50: Segovia

There’s a four-way tie for the 50th most played artist since my last.fm revolution. And alongside Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bjork, is Andres Segovia.

I’ve always been a sucker for great guitarists, and Segovia is certainly that. But it is, nevertheless, surprising to see classical guitar land itself in the top 50.

#31: Frank Zappa

While Segovia gets credit for landing so high, Zappa is occupying a surprisingly low spot.

Your blogger listens to a lot of Zappa, or so he thought. And Zappa’s seemingly endless catalogue of music is the sort of thing that prompts increased listening, as there is more to listen to without listening to the same things over and over again.

And yet, he’s down in 31.

First thoughts were that “Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention” would push him up … but not really. Barely at all. And he’s hardly the only artist to appear as two (or more) in the chart.

#17: Lily Allen

I know I like Lily Allen. I know it’s a bit weird – she doesn’t seem, on the surface, to fit with other music I enjoy. But enjoy her music I do.

It’s just a little bit of a surprise to see how much. Lily Allen sits between Radiohead and David Bowie on my “top artists” chart.

#7: Raffi

Not the only sign of fatherhood in the list, but the one closest the top.

Raffi music was bought (amongst other things) so that we had some music we could play for Maggie (this was before we learned that she loved Kanye West). And I have played this music so often that it manages to rank in my top ten.

All the music I play for myself – to and from (and at) work. While sitting and typing blog posts. On airplanes. Except for a small group of six artists, I’ve heard more Raffi in the last six months.

That, for the record, is an awful lot of Raffi. The more we get together …

#1: Pink Floyd

Fitting and ridiculous, Pink Floyd sits at #1 on the list of most listened to music.

If this were high school, I would be saying: No shit, sherlock.
If this were university, I would be saying: Not much of a surprise there.

I was way into Pink Floyd. Given that I was three years old when The Wall was released, I spent a large portion of my youth far more into Pink Floyd than I had any right to be.

I owned every album. I owned every video. I bought books, t-shirts, bootleg albums, anything I could get my hands on. I knew – still know, pretty much – every lyric and every note of music of every song.

My wife doesn’t like Pink Floyd. It’s easy to see why people don’t like it. Above, I’ve linked to an album written and recorded by a white, male, mutli-millionaire who has the good fortune to be able to write and play music for a living. When he feels like it. Because he’s so rich he only needs to work when he feels like it.

And that album? Ninety minutes of self-indulgent whining about how hard it is to play music for millions of dollars, and how he misses his daddy. It’s easy to see why the teenagers who listen to Kanye West are more likely to get laid.

I like it all the same. But now that I’m a wise old man, it seems like I don’t really listen to it that much anymore.

Seems like that means listening to it more than anything else, all the same.

This probably happens a lot: a new bar is opening, and the local community church disapproves. They petition to the relevant authorities, and pray that divine forces will intervene in the bar’s opening. Construction goes ahead, regardless.

However, in Mount Vernon, Texas, the story takes a twist: the bar is hit by lightning before it can open, and burns to the ground.

Struck. By. Lightning.

The churchgoers are all smug, of course. Power of prayer, and all that. Until the bar owner sued the church, claiming that their prayers caused the damage to his establishment.

And the church is now in the awkward position of having to argue in court that the power of prayer is not real.

And we at the Big Bad Blog are left smirking.

Image is by Heng Swee Lim, and for sale on etsy.
Webcomic is Cat Versus Human, by Yasmine Surovec.

When I was a young lad, I loved Pink Floyd more than anything else in the world.

I loved their music. I loved their albums. And I loved their album covers, which were usually fantastic and impossible photographs.

Take this, for example:

This is the cover of Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Your first instinct these days is probably a lot like mine — this photo was created with a few beds, a clone tool, and a computer. Right?

Wrong. Storm Thorgerson actually had seven hundred beds on that beach. Other Pink Floyd album creations are similar — for example, the cover of Wish You Were Here, that man is actually on fire.

While it is clearly a matter of taste, there is something ineffably better about a beach with 700 beds on it than one with 7 beds that have been copied digitally 100 times. They are all the right size all the way down the beach, the focus is lost in a manner which is completely consistent with the depth of field used. And, perhaps most importantly, there are small differences between them, all the way down the beach. These are effects which are extremely difficult with a computer. In the Wish You Were Here photo, the man on fire looks like he is on fire, rather than on CGI fire.

The images are just more incredible, more moving. The real-world effort is visible to the naked eye, even if we cannot pinpoint the difference.

Truth be told, I knew all this stuff from when I was a kid obsessed with Pink Floyd, before I became interested in photography. But I had forgotten all about it by the time I bought my digital SLR and started to try to take interesting photos. Every photo I take is edited afterwards — it is the normal thing to do. Open it in a photo editor. Make some adjustments. Re-save the photo. I am fairly sure that everybody does it — even Mr. Thorgerson does some digital retouching, according to the interview linked to above.

But the changes I make tend to be limited to the “retouching” variety. While I am happy to crop photos, alter my camera’s own settings, make the image darker or lighter, convert it to black and white or play with the colour saturation, I do not try to change the actual image that I took. In the end, the photo is the thing.

This is not the case with everybody — there are artists such as Rosie Hardy who do some magical things with a camera and photoshop — but I would argue that images that require such drastic changes are not photography as such, but a different art form.

Seeing images such as those from Miss Hardy, or from HDR artists like Trey Radcliff have actually made me shy away from trying to take images that are fantastic in nature — images such as those produced by Mr. Thorgerson. But last week that thinking was put to rest by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, with this photo:

That photo is part of a set called Excess, and there is no photoshop involved. As Miss Guðleifsdóttir says at her blog:

Many have already seen [a different photo from the set] on Flickr, and surprisingly many of them thought the glass, cake and fork were photoshopped. (something people assume about a lot of photos of mine that aren’t faked at all).

The photo above is not faked — the artist used an oversized bowl, and baked giant sized Cheerios herself in order to create the photograph. A lot of effort went into it, but it is effort that is required to make such a fantastic photograph. It is reminiscent of the effort required for Mr. Thorgerson’s photos, and brought to light the amazing things that can be achieved with the camera alone.

Surprisingly, this was not the first time I experienced such amazement from Miss Guðleifsdóttir’s work. The first time was last year, when I read that she painted some tree branches white, and carried them around for over a year for use in a series of photographs. Somehow that display of effort failed to trigger the connection, and it took this year’s this is not photoshop commentary for such a simple concept to traverse the membrane of my thick skull.

Photoshop is not a necessity, for anything more than retouching photographs.
Similarly fantastic results are possible, through planning and effort.

Whether I am willing to put that level of effort into my own work — particularly when the first few attempts will likely result in failure — is a completely different (and open) question. But it is good to see that effort trumps photoshop.

As it should, I suppose. Things usually boil down to effort, in the end.