Category Archives: Music

A favorite poem, a favorite punk song

DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
— Wilfred Owen

You’ve got to die
got to die
got die for your government
die for country
that’s shit.
— Anti-flag, 1996

Itunes for FLAC

I’ve been looking for a decent manager for my lossless CD rips for a while now. For all its faults, I like using apps like iTunes for listening to my music: between the playlists, easy searching, and all that good stuff, it got really hard to go back to manually managing folders and dealing with winamp (or whatever). What I wanted was iTunes for FLAC for XP.

I found two:
aTunes
Songbird

Both provide the kind of slick, library-building interface you want out of your interface. I’ve been using Songbird a lot more (it’s the hipster default interface), and some of it’s taking some getting used to (like the tabs) but it’s really quite slick. And I haven’t figured out how to do some things (like delete files from within the app, or use the app to organize all the files for drop-and-forget ease).

But strictly speaking in terms of finding a decent proxy for iTunes functionality for my FLAC files, they’re doing great. I’ll try and update this when I’ve logged more time with them.

For now, hopefully the search cloud picks this up and it’s some help to future generations typing “itunes alternative flac xp” into Google (or whatever).