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A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar

You can listen to the entire new Dashboard Confessional album on mtv.com. (The album isn’t actually being released until next week.) It’s sad, in a way, to see someone who is one of the biggest indie rock heroes being endorsed/distributed by the biggest pop media outlet there is. But Chris is an amazing musician, and he’ll reach a huge audience and achieve lots of monetary success this way, and for that I’m certainly glad.

Of course, the emo/indie "scene kids" will throw their hissy-fits and call Chris a sellout because he’s successful, and because they’re bitter that they have to share him with other people now. That mentality is so childish and ridiculous, it’s barely worth addressing... but then again, so is the very act of achieving personal identity by being part of a "scene."

The new album is good. Really good. The stylistic progression from The Drowning EP, through the 2 full-length releases, and then the Summers’ Kiss and So Impossible EPs, is clear. The scenesters will deny that, because they’re upset that he didn’t make another album that’s just like The Places, just like they were upset that The Get Up Kids didn’t make another album identical to Something to Write Home About.

But those people don’t matter. The music matters. A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar is good music.

Posted by Anthony on Aug 8, 2003 | 8 replies
Filed under: General

Comments:

01. Aug 10, 2003 at 6:08am by andy:

so now you have your mozilla crusade icons on your site all the time... while mozilla is nice and all, it loads slower than IE, isn’t configured to handle lots of mimes by default (like m3u playlists which just come up as text until you screw around with it) it uses nearly twice the memory IE does (firebird even uses more), and just sits there using 15mb of memory if it’s in that tray mode. while it’s a non-m$ alternative i still don’t buy into it just because of the standards thing, whereas tabs are nice that’s about the only thing it has going for it in my case.

02. Aug 10, 2003 at 6:10am by andy:

by the way i know that’s way offtopic but you didn’t have a normal post about it =P

03. Aug 10, 2003 at 1:35pm by Anthony:

> by the way i know that’s way offtopic but you
> didn’t have a normal post about it =P

So why didn’t you make a new post about it then??

But anyway... man, MS has really hoodwinked a lot of people in a lot of ways. More than half of the code that comprises IE is built into the Windows Explorer code. (Ever notice how a My Computer window just magically turns into an IE window if you type a URL into it? It’s the same application.) IE uses just as much memory, if not more, than Mozilla, but it’s always in use. It appears to have a smaller memory footprint because it’s spread amongst multiple processes.

And as far as being slower... that was my only complaint when I first switched to Mozilla. But it’s only a little slower, and after using it for a couple weeks, it feels just as fast -- you honestly don’t notice it. And I think that tiny performance hit is well worth it for standards compliance, a tabbed interface, and automatic (correctly functioning) blockage of pop-ups -- not to mention being an actual standalone application, that doesn’t have the ability to bring the OS GUI down when it crashes, as IE has frustratingly done to me so many times.

And being free (both in terms of source and cost) is important. The next version of IE (v7) will only be available with a purchased copy of the Windows OS. That is just dirty.

Not sure what to say about the mime-type problem; the audio/mpegurl type has always been recognized by my Mozilla. Maybe it’s a Firebird bug or something? (I’ve never used that.)

04. Aug 10, 2003 at 4:37pm by Stevetime:

First of all, allow me to make an assumption... I am going to assume you both are using either XP or 2000 as your windows OS. Now, if speed is such a concern (especially to andy considering the ~3 second/day speed hit mozilla costs makes the entire program not worth using), then you shouldn’t even be using NT in the first place. Let me tell you about 9x Lite. If you install 98 lite or ME lite in sleek mode, it means you will basically be using 98 or ME, but with the windows 95 explorer as your shell. Furthermore, you can actually uninstall Internet Explorer and proceed to make Mozilla your default (and only) browser. I have done this, and I can guarantee you... there is NO speed hit, at all. I would even be tempted to believe that Mozilla loads a little faster than IE (and definitely faster than IE does on my computer running XP, which happens to have two processors and three times as much RAM as my ME lite box)... but the whole system just feels so much faster; it’s hard to notice any speed differences in the first place because they’re so negligible when you barely notice load time in the (other, real) first place. Now you’re probably getting ready to reply and say "maybe, but XP is so much more stable, etc." I, however, will tell you that my MElite guy crashes literally about a fourth as much as my XP/2000AS guy, and I honestly believe that the lack of IE will add to that by a magnitude of about 3 (I haven’t been using it long enough to make a real judgement.)

In other news, where have you been A? Do you use a different aim name nowadays? I finally got nathan to take some real pictures of my wooden guy, I wanted to show you them.

05. Aug 10, 2003 at 5:55pm by andy:

yeah i use win2k, i don’t like XP in the first place. i actually tried using 98 lite a while ago, i could never get it to work right with all my audio applications (i record bands and have a small pc-based studio). otherwise though, it is fast. i have been using mozilla for a few days now and i do like it, i don’t really notice the difference once it’s open. maybe the mime type thing is just with firebird, i’ll have to see. bleh.

06. Aug 10, 2003 at 6:36pm by Anthony:

Roar! You sent in Stevetime!!

See, I knew you loved Mozilla, Andy.

Ok, so now that we’ve established the fact that Mozilla is the only browser that possesses Real Ultimate Power, we need to get our non-techie friends to use it. Not simply because it’s neat, or because it’s better... but because there needs to be a significant number of average Joes using non-IE browsers, and web developers need to know that such people exist. Otherwise there is a very real possibility that sometime soon, you will be forced to use MS Windows in order to view some of the web content that you want to.

And it’s not because MS is forcing developers to write proprietary webpages. It’s because most web developers write badly broken code, and only test their pages in IE. IE doesn’t enforce standards whatsoever; it renders badly broken code in a way that looks "ok" to the developer. The result is that the developer doesn’t know/care that his code is broken, because his page "works" in IE. So you end up with a webpage that won’t work in any browser except for IE. (And as a side-effect, you end up with developers who don’t know the first thing about web design.)

Whether MS planned for this to happen, I have no idea, though I tend to doubt it. But we’re stuck with it either way, and one of the few things we can do is advocate the use of standards-compliant browsers.

Oh, and I’ve been around, but hiding. I’ve been rewriting a lot of the perl that powers my website, in order to make it portable. (When I first designed all these scripts, I didn’t plan on wanting/needing to use them on websites that I design for other people, nor on other people wanting to use them. In hindsight, that was really dumb.) So far, the login, blogger, and dnsupdate scripts are finished; the mailinglist and visitorlog scripts are in progress.

But yeah, you should send in those photos. I’m still looking for a small AT case (actually I need 2 of ’em). I never got around to building one. There’s so little free time lately.

07. Aug 10, 2003 at 10:20pm by Anthony:

And no, I don’t have a new screenname, I’ve just been avoiding AIM so that I have time to get this stuff done.

08. Aug 12, 2003 at 3:53pm by andy:

also, moz firebird has the cool "open this folder of bookmarks in tabs" function, that’s what made it attractive to me in the first place =D

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