The Square Lake Vault

Well, it finally happened. There were hints that The Daily Illini's staff weren't competent enough to maintain archives of Dan Acton's brilliant comic strip Square Lake forever. First Dan's own site, squarelakecomics.com, forfeited to the whims of the German internet porn industry. And now the day has come when the images are slowly being stripped away from dailyillini.com's servers.

Fear not. By some stroke of divine fortune, I was inclined no more than two months ago to mirror the whole series on my own hard drive. Rest assured: as long as I am alive, Square Lake will never die. The soon-to-be-even-more-revamped Square Lake Vault is up and running. And just think: we came this close to losing them forever.

Milk man

New Deerhoof album, March 9

The Unicorns

Much continued Unicorns hysteria. After crashing the concert they tried to keep hidden from me last night, I've discovered today that I am at least eight songs shy of truly knowing everything about the band. First I discover two unreleased songs (Do the Knife Fight and Ebb Tide, Azure Sky) that are streamed (in very poor quality) from The Unicorns' abandoned website. After downloading and cracking Liatro SWF Decoder to extract what I hope to be higher-fidelity sources behind the Flash facade, I discover that the sources are, in fact, 24kbps mp3s. Still, I am somewhat comforted to have first-hand sources rather than Messer-recorded copies.

I head to SoulSeek to see if I can find better versions (SoulSeek being the place I initially discovered their pre-album demos), and I immediately turn up (in addition to a 128kbps Do the Knife Fight) two songs I'd never heard of (Big Kind Death and Let Me Sleep). Clearly the work of The Unicorns, I ask the owner of the files to expand on his acquisition of them. He tells me he's from a town neighboring the home of The Unicorns, and that the two mystery songs were either the work of Zzzz, a side-project of The Unicorns responsible for There Are No Answers and an early version of Sea Ghost, which I had already encountered...or of All Makes Parts & Collision, a side-project of Alden's (exclusively, I believe; as visitors to a very old Unicorns guestbook note, "Nick is sloppy"). Not only that, but Alden also works on a solo side-project that's pretty good. Finding this shit is hard enough on its own, let alone reconciling inconsistent bands, titles, and recording dates. How can I be obsessed with something that's such a pain in the ass?

Pokey, Lebowski, mushrooms, GYWO

Even if you love POKEY THE PENGUIN!! (and you do), you might (like many of its early adherents) have stopped paying attention to it. Well it's time you start again, as some guy has written a "book" (an exaggeration most likely, although its length and depth suggest that it may very well have been a graduate thesis) called The Pokey Principle that analyzes the genius of the comic in excruciating detail. The author discovered Pokey when a professor of his mentioned it (quite literally) as an example of an artistic "masterpiece," along with The White Album and Beck's catalogue.

This Lebowski-themed message board has its members writing Haikus from (nearly) exact quotes. My favorite: "Strong men also cry / Are you surprised at my tears? / Strong men also cry"

Whoever made this has done mushrooms many, many times. Try to count how many faces you see.

Also added a link to get your war on to the header. If you've never read it, you really should. Addictive.

SoulSeek

My raging enthusiasm for this peer-to-peer file-sharing program called SoulSeek resulted in a very long (and thankfully discarded) post in which I rattled off a dozen or so albums it has brought my way that I was never able to locate on WinMX's network. SoulSeek's users really do have everything you've ever heard of, and the program is brilliantly designed. Suffice it to say (I quote myself here), "DOWNLOAD SOULSEEK NOW IF YOU GIVE A DAMN ABOUT ANYTHING."

I kind of found this Radiohead-bashing rant funny...as a Radiohead fan, I'm not laughing at him, I'm laughing at me. But I still love Radiohead. This rant is part of a series of rants called Your Band Sucks, which is pretty consistently funny. The funniest part is that when I agree with the guy I feel justified, and when I disagree I feel autonomous.

Thanks to SoulSeek and some involved internet research, I've come to acquire somewhere close to everything The Unicorns have ever recorded. To follow my binary quest, click here and here and here and here. Adventures in SoulSeek and Google have also led to massive updates of my Deerhoof discography, the so near-completion of my collection, and a number of songs that are utterly irreconcilable with what I know about their history.

Happy New Year.