‘I hadn’t seen The Cat Empire live in over 18 months. I hadn’t seen any of the side projects (Jackson Jackson, The Genie, The Conglomerate, Peaking Duck, etc etc) AT ALL. That second point was a sticker for me, since I’d been listening to the side project music more than the Cat’s music for a while now. I wanted to see them live, dammit!
So, yesterday, after by chance reading on the .info forums that both The Genie and The Conglomerate had gigs coming up, I dragged S along (complete in Scouts uniform!) to Transit in Federation Square to see an acousticised Genie.
Ryan and I had exchanged a few comments over MySpace about Japan so when I noticed that Transit had Asahi on tap, I ordered a round for the band with a message: “Hope you enjoyed Japan -Chidade”. I wondered how good Ryan’s memory was, would he remember it was me from MySpace?
The tracks I had heard on The Genie’s MySpace had about a million of Ollie’s keyboards featured. I didn’t read the bulletin post too carefully, so I was expecting more of the same but instead, they had a very acoustic, jazzy, swinging sound. Will had brushes on the skins for half the night, Ollie was on a baby grand, Ryan alternated between his upright bass and the standard electric one.
The songs were fun too. I think a lot of them were covers of TV show or movie themes. The only two I definitely recognised were Dr. Who in the second set and Indiana Jones (bloody awesome) in the third. In the first set there was this track that S and I agreed sounded like the theme song to some corny 70s TV show, not unlike The Wonder Years, but we couldn’t pick it. There were plenty of melodies that we knew we recognised, but couldn’t place a name to.
I think they played a little bit of Me Babe Dubbin’ Out but because Ollie didn’t have his dozens of electric keyboards with him, the sound was very different and moved on quite quickly.
The night consisted of wine and snacks (mmmm…olives), bitching about men and discussing music. S and I had a good night. We hadn’t really done anything together since I came home from Japan. I promised myself that I’d get out more often when I arrived back home in Melbourne. Last night I finally started keeping the promise, heh. Only two months late.
Music finished up, boys started packing up. Approched Ryan to ask him about whether there was a CD to buy yet.
“Were you the one that bought us the drinks?”
“Ahh, yeah, that was me”
“Oh thanks! Good to see someone from MySpace here”
“Heh, well, yeah, but I don’t like admitting I have a MySpace in public”
So, I have become an official MySpace stalker. Oh, gods.
My MySpace bashing seems to have gone over his head, though. I told my sister this. She says that everyone thinks that MySpace is the shit. Except us, that is. So, I think I should explain why MySpace is teh suck:
Firstly, as an amateur web designer, I can tell you that it is horribly designed. It isn’t intuitive at all, it can take several clicks to get to where you want to go. Clicking on “Blog” will take you to your friends’ blogs when in fact you wanted your own blog, for example.
The URLs are ugly and open for hacking. Plus, MySpace doesn’t even stick to the URLs it assigns to people. When I right-click on Jackson Jackson in my friends list and choose ‘Copy Link Location’, I expect to get www.myspace.com/jacksonjacksongs when I paste again. That what MySpace says is their URL, after all.
Lies. Copying the link location and then pasting gets: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=58996280
They don’t need this information in the URL. At least, it doesn’t have to be visible! LiveJournal manages to do without! And it can still tell whether I’m logged in and a friend of the person. Bad design. And not very good security protection either.
It gets worse. I’ve decided to crosspost my blog entries at chidade.net there. An automatic syndication isn’t possible, despite Wordpress plugin developers’ best efforts. So it’ll be a manual syndicate update everytime I make a post on my homepage. Livejournal can do it automatically with a Pro account.
Anyway, this means uploading my old blog entries with a backdated entry. For some reason, MySpace doesn’t want to let me backdate any earlier than January 1st, 2006. Why? Who knows. They do deem it necessary to let people post with dates in the future though! I can date my post as far as ahead as December 31st, 2010! Why?! Who knows! I could understand if they didn’t want me to backdate any earlier than my signup date with MySpace, which was May 2006. But no, they chose these arbitrary dates within which my blog entries can be dated. I don’t know what this will mean for my 2005 entries. They either won’t get cross-posted at MySpace or all given a January 1st date with a header proclaiming the real date and how MySpace sucks.
Ha, keep in mind that you can search for entries on my blog homepage from January 1st, 2000. Such bad design. It could be easily fixed if they took time out to debug the damn site instead of rolling around in their mountains of cash, Ducktales-style.
Even if you have no clues about web design and you don’t care if the website is standards complaint (it isn’t), the website still effects the average web user’s experience. There are dodgy cookies throughout, heaps of advertising (some of it the insidious adware/malware variety) and even having an automatic popup blocker, AdBlock and FlashBlock plugins on a Firefox browser doesn’t save you from being bombarded with advertising. After spending a few hours on MySpace, I always feel dirty, like I need to wash out my web cache.
Then there’s the people spam, on top of the advertising spam. People I don’t know message me to ask for a cyber or to sell me something. Or chain letters. Gods! Changing the settings to “paranoid” still allows some people to message me. It’s tolerable at this level. Mainly it’s just bands that ask me to listen to their stuff. It also happens rarely. But it’s still unsolicited advertising.
One more thing about settings: they could be better. I get an email (most of the time) notifying me of a new blog post by someone on my friends list. A notification system for Bulletins or page updates (particularly when there’s new songs or concert dates, for bands) would be more useful. As it was, I could have missed last night’s gig if it wasn’t for someone on the .info forums - MySpace needs to be checked thoroughly everyday it seems, to make sure I don’t miss anything important. And I don’t want to waste time on that. It needs a better and more customisable notification system.
The system in general could do with some tweaks! Well, the server anyway. 20% of the time, loading bands pages causes their music player to have a “Loading Error”. 40% of the time, clicking any link gets “Sorry! An unexpected error has occurred!”. If the link does choose to work, then it takes a long time to process! And why can’t MySpace actually remember that I’m logged in everytime that I check the checkbox to remember that I’m logged in?!
Character encoding is just useless. Copying and pasting from my webpage to my MySpace blog has somehow magically removed punctuation. It only reinforces the belief that MySpace users are uneducated teenagers that think “you” is spelt with one vowel.
There’s many more reasons that I dislike MySpace, but the last one I’ll mention is how it encourages people to be idiots. As Ryan himself says, people feel the need to make “myspace layouts that are so clever that they’re entirely illegible”. LiveJournal has the preset layouts to help curb this. If you really want complete control over your LiveJournal layout, you pay for the pro account. Presumably you’re a bit better with web technology then than the average 14 year old emo kid that wants to get attention with suicide notes or animated backgrounds of sparkly stars.
ANIMATED GIFS SHOULD NEVER BE THE BACKGROUND IMAGE, PEOPLE!
There are some things that I like about MySpace though, despite the several paragraphs above. It’s the only community website I know of that has a musician focus. Bands and artists can set up their own webpage (but then again, imitators can set up pages too, and not just for musos) and network with their friends/collegues/inspirations. They can put up a gig calandar that I can add to my own calendar (though I’m notoriously bad for not using calendars). Because of the networking culture of the site, I found out about Jackson Jackson, sodomy county and Martin Martini and the Bone Orchestra (I will definitely be at that gig with The Conglomerate!), as well as several Japanese indie bands.
The same seems to apply for comedians and general friend networking (although meeting people from MySpace frightens the bejeezus out of me), which is useful. But with a bit of extra work, the same can be done at other networking blog sites like LiveJournal. You wouldn’t need to be restricted to 4 songs or videos or whatever either.
MySpace has its uses, but its design, layout and spam/idiocy culture makes me cringe everytime I visit it. So, Ryan, I love your stuff, but I can’t forgive you for obliging me to sign up for this piece of tripe! MySpace needs a huge makeover! From the ground up! I spent so many hours wandering through this site getting frustrated and I want them back! Damn you! *shakes fist*
Oh what the hey, I can’t stay angry at that mop of hair.
Just buy me the drink next time and we’ll call it even.
