Music, Vinyl, and Paying Attention.

Today, with the plethora of devices available for media consumption, people use their devices interchangeably. Most people would argue that they are getting the same experience from watching a TV show on an Ipad versus watching on their living room TV screen. In general, people focus on the TV show itself and not the experience of how they watched that show.

Famous media scholar, Marshall McLuhan famously declared that “the medium is the message”. He argues about the importance of studying the medium in which you interact with rather than the content on that medium. He says that the form of the message determines the ways in which that message is perceived. If he were around today, he would say that watching TV on an Ipad is a fundamentally different experience than watching the same show on a traditional television.

The internet has fundamentally changed the experience of listening to music as well. People can listen to music at just about any time by using streaming services on their phones. I’ve found that people play music at anytime just because they can. To a lot of people, a quick shuffle of their library is vastly prefered over silence. When people do this, there is no intention behind their music listening, the album or genre isn’t even an afterthought. Their only intention when streaming music is to fill the void of silence. The popularity of this mindless habit has made listening to music on a streaming service an extremely passive experience.

The growing passivity of music listening on streaming services has lead to popular music sounding more passive as well. The world’s most popular genre, Hip Hop, has two increasingly popular subgenres called“mumble rap” and “trap”. With both genres, the listener can fully understand and enjoy the song even while it is passively playing in the background. Additionally, the most popular artist on Spotify in 2016 was Drake, who is known for his spacious and breezy style of hip hop. The way that people listen to music led to a change in sound of the music that became popular. Just like Marshall Mcluhan said, the form of the message determined how that message was perceived. A passive experience led people to perceive music as a passive medium, and then the market successfully fulfilled the demand.

Personally, passivity is not what I enjoy in my music; I enjoy music that actively engages me both sonically and lyrically. Precisely for this reason, the musical medium that I prefer is my record player. Vinyl makes passively listening to music very difficult, because, unlike music streaming, listening to music on vinyl is an active process. I have to search through my collection for a specific album that I want to hear, enjoy the large album art, pull the record out of it’s sleeves, and then finally place it on the turntable. Even after the record’s begun, the experience is still active, because halfway through the album I have to flip the record over to it’s b-side.

Sometimes, I can’t figure out if I bought the record because I love the music, or if the experience of listening to it on vinyl is why I’v come to love it. Vinyl records brought intention to my music listening experience, which is something that I never imagined that I’d enjoy. Having a record setup makes the listening experience, just that, an experience. In a world where everything is immediately accessible we tend to forget to have intention behind our media consumption. Don’t turn something on just to fill the room with sound, only play music when you want to hear music. If the medium is the message, then us consumers need to take a step back and actually think about how we are consuming.

 

 

Written By Taylor Kalsey, after many rewrites, in Isla Vista CA

 

 

OUTLINE

1- medium is the message 2-spotify as the medium, extremely passive experience leads to passive music 3- why i love vinyl, in an internet age where everything is passive, vinyl needs intention behind it, organizing, buying, to putting the wax on the table. It helps make my music matter more to me.

INSPIRATION

Featured Image is a boombox by fantastic man Tom Sachs

 

Mini Metro: Minimalist Mayhem

Mini metro will make sure you never complain about your local public transit again. Through your constant In game failures, you will truly appreciate the many difficulties of being a transit designer. Everything starts simple, a small town with only a few districts. All you have to do is connect each one together. The town’s growth unpredictably outpaces you little by little until through pure necessity you’ve designed a map that looks like a Pollock painting.The minimalist art style begs the player to attempt making the prettiest looking map, but as I’ve learned from my hours of playtime, style and function have a nearly impossible time of coexisting in the world of public transit.

Like a reverse game of jenga, the more lines and stations you put together, the less stable it all seems, until finally…everyone in the game-endingly overcrowded station yells “JENGA” as your tower finally topples to the ground, crumbling from its own weight.
Mini Metro isn’t simulating real life metro design, but it really makes you understand why those real life metro maps look so fucked up.(show metro map picture here)Transit designers have to account for the unpredictable, anyone must be able to go anywhere, including places that don’t exist yet. As the designer in Mini Metro, you must keep all train-lines impossibly flexible, so no matter where and how your city grows, your design can always adjust maintain balancing a thousand plates at once. Well, at least that’s how I’ve been playing it.

Article written by Taylor Kalsey, too late at night, after playing you know what.

The True Progression in Darkest Dungeon

 

In Role Playing Games, leveling up is meant to simulate your characters improvement through experience (hence the term “XP”). It makes sense that if your character kills a lot of dragons, they become better at killing dragons. To simulate your hero getting better at killing dragons, RPGs increase every stat every level making the characters better in every way. This system feels like a natural progression for the first few levels, but by the end of the game the constant incremental stat bonuses culminate in your lowly farm boy possessing godlike strength, health, resistances, etc. If I play tennis for the same amount of time that your average RPG hero slays monsters, I do not transform into Serena Williams.

In games like XCOM, your characters do not become the alien-murdering equivalent of Serena Williams either, but they still become unnaturally better at fighting when leveling up a few times. XCOM wants you to get attached to your squad, because you’ve seen them transform from a weak, generic recruit to a blue haired badass who can snipe alien’s heads off without breaking a sweat.

Darkest Dungeon uses RPG expectations to its advantage. It knows you want your characters to become badasses, but does not allow that to take place. Partly, this is because the game is punishingly difficult and it took me more than 8 hours to keep one crusader alive long enough to level up. I then took him into a level 1 dungeon, thinking I had a level 2 badass on my hands who could easily carry the party to the quest’s completion. He died. He didn’t cut every enemy down in one slice like I’d expected and I was angry at him for his lack of improvement.

I checked the Darkest Dungeon wikipedia page to help explain my failure and I found out that leveling up doesn’t improve every stat like I’d expected. Instead, characters in Darkest Dungeon only increase their resistances when they level up. This realization made me think more about my characters; if their traits weren’t going to improve through experience, then I have be more selective about choosing which ones I recruit. Some characters are naturally better than others, and to ensure success, you must throw out the lesser ones. In Darkest Dungeon, not everyone is born a hero, and they may be destined to fail if they don’t innately possess the right set of abilities and capabilities. The characters themselves don’t matter. They are only able to handle the higher level dungeons is through having a higher tolerance for what comes their way. They do not become ultimate fighting machines by killing monsters, instead they just gain the experience to be able to withstand the forces oppressing them. Experience doesn’t create talent, it only improves your ability to manage the problems that life throws at you.

Since your characters start weak and don’t gain talent, you tend to dislike your characters, who are useless when put to their own devices. All they do is slowly go insane from stress and/or hinder the quest because the tapeworm they have makes them eat double the food that anyone else does and now you’re out of rations. The characters will always suck, so the true progression of Darkest Dungeon is money. To support your adventurers, you throw money and valuables at the town’s various support systems, which provide the adventurers with stress relief, items, and new weapons and armor. The jester doesn’t do enough damage, so I’ll buy him a new and improved sickle, or the highwayman has become zoophobic so now I’ll pay for his treatment in the sanitarium. It costs money to allow your adventures to partake in these various activities and it costs valuable items in order to upgrade these buildings. It takes a dozen character deaths to amass enough funds to even get far enough to significantly upgrade a building. The people themselves aren’t important.

In Darkest Dungeon, neither your actions nor your talent make you a hero, only money does.