1. Take A Heart The Sorrows

   First you take a heart
   Then you break a heart
   But before you do,
   You make him fall for you

2. Don’t Be Fooled Heavenly

   Have you ever wanted to have a fight for the one you love?
   Want someone to shout at, instead of to shout a, shout a, shout about.
   Have you ever needed somebody to shake you up?
   Have you ever wanted to see, how much he’d bleed,
   If you kicked him in the teeth?

3. Sugar April March
   chickfactor interview

4. I Was Meant For the Stage The Decemberists
   overcompensating episode

5. Oh Yeah Stereo Total

   “Oh Yeah” is a fast instrumental-Rock’a'Billy-airplane-taking-off-jetter. The organ melody of San Reimo made it an absolute classic. Looking at the world through a high pitched tape-delay.

6. Born to be Bad The Runaways

   I called my mother from Hollywood the other day
   And I said “Mom, I just called to tell ya I joined a rock and roll band
   And I won’t be coming home no more”

7. Gossip Folks [f/ Ludacris] Missy Elliott

   Musi ques
   I sews on bews
   I pues a twos on que zat
   Pue zoo
   My kizzer
   Pous zigga ay zee

8. An Endless Supply The Thermals

   every call you never made
   every call you waited for and never came
   every ancient sound that’s passed to your ears
   in an endless supply of ones and zeroes

The process itself was pretty simple. I went with the Xecuter-3 chip, which I guess is the latest-and-greatest, but really, they all seem to do the same thing. The hardest part of the whole deal was finding a Torx-20 and a Torx-10 screwdriver with which to open up the box. While I was in there, I also installed a quieter, larger fan and a quieter, larger hard drive.

One of the nice features of the new modchips is that you can upgrade their firmware over the web. The modchip arrived with a stub BIOS that allowed me to load a real one via my web browser (I ended up having to use Safari, as Firefox and IE both crapped out in different, maddening ways).

What can I do with my new, modified XBox? Well, I can copy games to the hard drive and play them directly from there, instead of the (slower, noisy) disc. Using the XBox Media Center, I can watch movies and listen to music stored on my home network’s server. In theory, I’m also able to download ripped games from the internet and play them, but this seems to only be possible if you’re 13 and wear saggy jeans.

The Guardian publishes a great essay on the virtue of idleness. So, so great. My favorite extract:

When the sickly velvet-coated dandy Robert Louis Stevenson fell ill in 1873, aged 23, the diagnosis was “nervous exhaustion with a threatening of phthisis” and the prescription was a winter on the Riviera, “in complete freedom from anxiety or worry”. Once upon a time, we knew how to be ill. Now we have lost the art.

(via Crooked Timber)