my to-read list is getting really long. i WILL finish blood meridian tonight, if i have to stay up til 2am, dammit. i’m pretty over psycho cowboys roaming the desert at this point, even though it got much better in the second half.

i’m so practically done moving now too. last night i didn’t move, clean, pack, unpack, set up, or shop for anything. i just played video games and watched tv and read a little bit, which was totally excellent. now i can get back to my serious relaxing regimen and maybe *gasp!* have time to do some real exercise again someday.

i’ll attempt to keep this from being too sappy or sentimental, but tomorrow is also the two-year mark from what jessica and i diplomatically decided was our anniversary — well past the first kiss and months of grey area in between, but the calendar day on which we went on our first one-on-one, pre-planned date. also the point, on my part at least, of the mental decision to start being a couple, not just a couple of people who flirted a lot at parties, danced together, drank together, and left said parties together. the point at which it solidified that, ‘you know, i really do like this person a lot. this could really work out great’.

now it’s been literally YEARS of it ‘really working out great’. we’re roommates for god’s sake, which is also working out great, as well as officially becoming the longest relationship either of us have ever been in, and STILL GOING STRONG, BITCHES.

sorry to get all ‘o’doyle rules’ there but we are pretty much rocking it. like i said, trying not to be too sappy.

Goodbye old apartment! You gave us some great times and i'll remember you fondly, as glad as i am to be done with you and moving on to the next chapter…sniff…

after trying all day after a tip from thrillist which led to their servers being maxed out most of the morning and afternoon, i was finally able to go to the website that would allow me to validate the seemingly high price we are paying for this new apartment. you see, a place like this is not only nice on the inside, but has a walkscore of 92 out of 100.

take that, friends with nicer and/or larger apartments way out in culver city or playa del rey! i can buy a tuxedo, go to a pilates class, eat indian food, see a movie, go to a concert, get a coffee, take my (hypothetical) kids to school and a park, or get drunk easily all in under a mile from my place. and maybe some fine sunny saturday, i will do just that. try it out and let me know how you compare so i can gloat.

enough about the move. almost done with that. let’s focus on some earth-crushing crazy robot music explosiveness.

DAFT PUNK LIVE WAS UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE, AGAIN.

coachella was great, possibly better overall because it was so out-of-nowhere amazing. this was right up there though, it went on longer, we weren’t as exhausted going in from a whole day of desert heat, and weren’t ready to drop dead.

and most importantly, they upped the light show a notch in the encore, as seen above and in this youtube video below, where they lit themselves up and brought back ‘one more time’ again to the wildest applause and joyous crowd reaction i’ve seen possibly ever. you’ve seriously got to check this out. at about the minus-5:30 mark red lights travel around the setup, into the pyramid they’re standing in, and they go off with some super-cool tron-style radness:

holy god. so good.

nothing much to report, finishing the move-out and making progress on the move-in is taking up lots and lots of time. i wish i could have taken the whole week off; so far every day this week i’ve been working til 6, heading home to put in several hours of work on hauling stuff, putting away stuff, or going out to shop for needed stuff, then eating a late dinner, watching a little TV and going to sleep. we’re close though. real close. i think sunday is D-for-Done-Day.

anyway, since my moving stories are boring even me, here are some cool nerdy things i stumbled across today you may be interested in, or perhaps find as boring as moving stories:

largehearted boy dug up an old mountain goats interview that’s probably one of the best i’ve ever read, from a heavy metal zine site back in 2000. makes me really want to go out and finally pick up the coroner’s gambit.

fox chicago has a few video clips (check the tiny sidebar for the images to click) from the filming of the next batman. there’s no sound and it’s from a ways away, but you can see the batmobile, and most importantly heath ledger dressed up as the joker. i’m pretty hopeful… i think they have the look down pretty good (i mean, have you seen the close-up shot of his face?… creepy awesome!), so if heath can really nail way a crazy-ass joker talks and acts, i think this’ll be even better than the first one.

i’ve been hooked on podcasts for months now; i’ve pretty much stopped listening to the radio entirely since a few years back when i got a car stereo with an auxillary jack to hook up the ipod. music is great and all, but with a serious lack of great new albums i want to listen to over and over, i’ve managed to fill almost my entire week’s worth of commutes with podcast listening. the favorites that kicked it off were my introduction and rapid falling-in-love with this american life, finding out there was an audio version of the classic savage love, and yes, i’ll admit it, a few video game news/discussion ones as well.

well, my new infatuation came through an introduction via this american life of a show called radiolab. they used an excerpt from a show on morality and how we make moral decisions based on subconcious calculations in our brains, and it was really interesting. so i went to their site and subscribed and listened to the whole show it was taken from, and it was outstanding. now i’m catching up on some back catalog episodes and they’re all really really great. it’s a mix of science, philosophy and humor as they pick apart big questions from a scientific, historical, and anecdotal standpoint, and the hosts are extremely affable and enjoyable to listen to. honestly, these are the kinds of things the internet was made to be bringing us, and i am loving it. if you’re a commuter with an ipod, i definitely recommend checking it out.

exciting: having everything work out okay after four hours of figuring out wiring, and getting directv HD + DVR hookups in the new place.

tragic: the newer, upgraded DVR boxes from directv don’t have Tivo functionality, so i can still record all my shows and all that, but the menus are way less user friendly, and most depressing of all, there are no more ‘bloop bloop’ sounds when you select or fast forward things. NOOOOOOOOO!

weird: shopping for pots, pans, and silverware. to paraphrase fight club, how do i know which cutlery set defines me as a person? i mean, i’m fairly sure they don’t make full flatware sets with batman logos stamped into the stainless steel…

at home today — and by home i mean our nice shiny NEW home, hooray! — waiting for the directv guy to do his thing and set us up. he’s using little gizmos that make strange beeping noises to figure out which wires go where between our apartment and the roof, and i’m just crossing my fingers that in a few hours we have a TV set up and ready to rock.

the move is going well. other than being nervous as hell driving the massive u-haul truck, and our mail-box keys not working and needing to be replaced, there haven’t been any major hitches yet. after all day saturday and sunday, and a few solid hours of help moving big stuff from my awesome buddies, i think i’m about 90% done. unless you count the deep-cleaning of the old place before we fully vacate, another fun few hours of work i’m not really looking forward to. at this point i’m totally sore, exhausted, and dirty. it’s been a long couple days.

it’ll all be soooo worth it though after a bit more work, and i can’t wait for it to be over. then i’ll have a spiffy new place where my girlfriend and i can just kick back on our new couch, put our feet up on our new coffee table, and enjoy basking in the aura of freshness. aaaaaahh.

i’m starting to think a move as small a distance as the one i’m undertaking is almost worse than a long one. when you have to move a long way, you pack every single possession into containers, move it all at once, and you’re moved. done.

but since i’m just moving down the street, i didn’t get a bunch of boxes. i’m not moving all at once, because i can do lots of quick trips. but that means the week leading up to moving, i’m sitting around my apartment getting anxious and not being able to really do much, because there’s not much packing to be done.

the bookshelves and desk are cleared, and those will get moved this weekend. then all the things cleared off of them sitting around this apartment, will get carted over and reloaded onto the shelves in that apartment. then a few carloads of closet stuff. all the electronics freshly removed from the entertainment center get hauled down and reconnected. it’s so piece-meal i just want to get started right away so i can see empty space in my current place and feel like i’ve done something.

of course it all starts with the big-ass painfully large check i get to drop off saturday morning in exchange for the keys to the castle before the fun can really begin. and none of it will really be ‘fun’ until my girlfriend comes back from her business trip next week to start being my new roommate, which was the point of all this in the first place.

only one day of waiting to go!

oh, right, i meant to tell everyone who reads this that if you weren’t around saturday night, you missed the single best live music performance i’ve seen in my life.

not necessarily the most fun show (um, daft punk at coachella), or most exciting in an energetic small venue awesomeness kind of thing (braid reunion was pretty excellent), and definitely not the most personal or intimate (mountain goats at spaceland, or pomona college); but in terms of highest quality, swimming in beautiful musical giddiness, i’ve never seen and heard anything on the level of the decemberists at the hollywood bowl this weekend.

sweet jesus, if ever there was a pop band whose songs deserve the benefit of a full LA philharmonic backing, this is one of them. the grandness this little band of theatre/literature/folk nerds specializes in was turned up to overwhelming, and i swear i couldn’t stop grinning the entire time — no matter the number of wine bottles we had emptied prior. i mean, they played the motherfucking TAIN, their 18-minute song that was released as it’s own EP for god’s sake. it was a glorious musical spectacle (which i totally called ahead of time to jessica, by the way. i mean, if ever you were to play that song live, wouldn’t this be the time?). my only complaint was that it only went on for 12 songs when i could have easily sat through twice that.

god, i wish more people could have been there to see it with me, but there is a consolation prize. and i do say consolation, because as grateful as i am to have found it, no bootleg recording could do the show justice. what i’m really hoping is that they recorded this show, or record shows on their supposed upcoming tour also backed by orchestras, for a nice crisp-sounding DVD release in the future. until then, to tide us all over, at least there is a very decent digital recording of the whole show, downloadable for free thanks to some true internet saint.

if you don’t care enough to download the whole show, at least enjoy a clip of it with the new pay day song a couple days early: odalisque live at the bowl.