Month: December 2010

I realize there are no women on this list and I feel even worse about that

December 17, 2010 /

Here are some MCs I really like, more or less in order of rising admiration:

  • Snoop
  • Gift of Gab
  • Big Pun
  • All the guys in Jurassic 5
  • MC Frontalot
  • Q-Tip
  • MF DOOM
  • Dre
  • Big Boi
  • MCA
  • Aesop Rock

But here are my favorite MCs:

  • Eminem

Which, I mean, dammit. He is a bad person! He is a product of the same old system wherein white musicians from a black art form are cast in a near-messianic light! I want to have better taste than that, but I don’t. I came to this realization while listening to Recovery, an album composed almost entirely of the same self-excoriation and fury that marked “The Way I Am,” a song I am still not over. Except now he’s doing the whole thing in double-time. No one should be able to move their mouth that fast.

The only person who both raps and rivals Eminem for the #1 spot in my heart is Andre 3000, but despite his skills, it’s almost difficult to think of him as an MC. Big Boi is an excellent rapper, but Andre’s just so much more than that. When I want to listen to a rap album, I might put on Speakerboxxx or Lucious Leftfoot, but not The Love Below or Stankonia: they’re too musical, too much a part of the pop/rap/hip-hop slipstream. Even if you do include him, though, three of my top four are still white, which basically makes me as bad a person as Marshall Mathers. No wonder I identify.

I am a lot better at Javascript than I was a few months ago

December 1, 2010 /

I am, under normal circumstances, a very reliable exhibit of the human behavior pattern that goes “my stupid system sort of works so I will never change it.” But there are times–rare ones–when my desperation to avoid writing fiction actually overcomes my desperation to avoid writing code. Tonight, after three years of counting words for Anacrusis with a hacky PHP script I wrote in 2007, I finally reached one such point.

This is the word counter I’m going to use from here on out. Unlike the old script, which I was reluctant to publicize because it involved processing user-submitted text on the server side, this is all Javascript and it updates in real time. You can also click the little tab at the bottom if you want to see what the hell it thinks it’s doing.