31. Back on Last.fm
I.
I’m back on Last.fm, the website that’s been around for over 20 years and lets you keep track of all the music you’ve listened to. The service then turns all that into neat statistics and graphs. I used to do this religiously from 2008 to 2016. Then I stopped, no idea why.
It was as if I’d gone back in time when I saw my listening stats from that period. Although, Bob Dylan and Radiohead are my most-played artists of all time on Last.fm, and that must still be accurate. But Coldplay and Muse have completely slipped my mind over the years. And strangely enough, they’re both ranked above Oasis. Pearl Jam’s song Black was the one I listened to most during those years, but that turned out to be just a phase too.
Here are my top five albums (2008–2016) according to Last.fm:
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Paul McCartney - Good Evening New York City
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Jack White - Blunderbuss
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Bob Dylan - Modern Times
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Radiohead - OK Computer
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Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
Now I always listen to albums obsessively, but did I really listen to that McCartney live album 453 times? Apparently so. And that was probably in 2015, when I saw him at the Ziggo Dome. There are worse musical rabbit holes. And yet I haven’t played this album for years.
And Jack White’s Blunderbuss is also a surprise at number two. But I remember playing the album constantly whilst reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. When I hear this music now, I can picture myself sitting on a bus reading again.
In recent years, I’ve had to rely on Spotify’s annual playlists for listening figures. Nice, but nowhere near as comprehensive, and those lists certainly don’t stick around for long. Looking back, it’s a real shame that I haven’t recorded anything on Last.fm over the past few years. It’s baffling, really, because I use Goodreads to keep track of my books and Letterboxd for films. I love that sort of reference material.
So my account has been festively reopened this week. With an eight-year gap and therefore a blip in the all-time listening figures. I’m letting it go and listening to Black as is fitting.
II.
It’s already been such a fantastic year for gaming, with titles like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3. But apparently there was room for yet another little indie masterpiece called Cocoon. From the creators of Limbo and Inside.
You are an insect-like creature in an alien world. You can walk and there is a single action button. You naturally set off to explore, as the game tells you nothing. You eventually come across a glowing sphere. This turns out to be quite literally a globe that you can dive in and out of.
If you find multiple spheres, it becomes an Inception-like structure with puzzles that literally have multiple layers. Meanwhile, the spheres serve as power-ups to help you progress through the levels. An orange sphere makes invisible platforms visible and accessible, to name just one example.
The puzzles are fun and just tricky enough to get your brain working. They never become frustrating, which is a compliment in itself.
But the mysterious atmosphere of the worlds and the audio design make this game just as good. By the end of the game, you can come up with all sorts of metaphors for what the story might be. Really very good.
---III.
Meanwhile, it’s still Halloween month – or ‘Shocktober’, if you like – and I’m continuing to watch all sorts of horror films at my leisure. These were on the list last week.
House is a Japanese cult film from 1977. A group of women travel to a large house where one of their aunts lives. Soon, bizarre things start happening in that house. You’ll be taken aback by floating heads and a flesh-eating piano. And that’s just the start. This is the strangest film I’ve seen in ages, partly thanks to the creative editing, like a sort of flashy TikTok video avant la lettre. Not scary, but I enjoyed it.
***The Exorcist*** may be 50 years old, but it’s still as good as ever. This is one of the horror classics I’d never seen (I’m trying to catch up a bit this month). It’s about a girl who becomes possessed by the devil. Her mother, a successful actress accustomed to a world where everything is within her control, loses her grip. That sense of powerlessness is just part of what makes this film so terrifying. The scene in which the daughter crawls down the stairs like a spider whilst coughing up blood is another. And: what if you don’t believe and it turns out there is a God after all, or vice versa? I wasn’t quite on the ball when I thought I was watching ***Friday the 13th*** on Friday the 13th, when it was actually Saturday the 14th. The 1980 film is a classic camp slasher. A group of young people are in charge of a summer camp in the woods, where a few tragic murders have been committed in the past. Now it turns out the killer is still active, intent on decimating the new group of leaders. An entertaining film full of people making stupid decisions. With a unique killer and a delightfully twisted ending. ---PS.
This is cool: Bill Waterson is back with a new book. Waterson created the famous Calvin and Hobbes cartoons from 1985 to 1995, and then disappeared from the radar. He’s pretty much the J.D. Salinger of the comic world.
Now the 65-year-old artist is back. Together with cartoonist John Kascht, he has published a new story: The Mysteries. It’s about an ancient kingdom plagued by inexplicable problems. A king sends a group of knights on a quest, only for one of them to return years later.
I’m curious about the book. It’s not a comic, but it does feature full-page illustrations that look strange and dark. Waterson talks about the project himself in this video, in which you can also see him at work. His hands, that is, as he remains out of shot.
---The title of this video sounds like a hot take I don’t agree with, but apparently the videomaker doesn’t either. The message is that it’s unfair that so few people talk about The Flaming Lips (and their influence on the music world). In half an hour, you’ll whizz through the rich oeuvre of Wayne Coyne and his bandmates, who have constantly reinvented themselves. After watching it, I put on Embryonic, which remains my favourite album by the band (with that fantastic cover).
---I’m reading two books by two friends of the newsletter: The Hackers Who Changed the Netherlands by Maarten Reijnders, about the origins of internet provider XS4ALL. And 30 Years of Gaming History, a massive coffee-table book, written by Bastiaan Vroegop for gaming magazine Power Unlimited.
For anyone who, like me, remains hopelessly stuck on X, this is a handy browser extension. With Control Panel for Twitter, you can undo a number of changes made under Elon Musk’s reign. For example, you’ll see titles again for shared links.
The Libertines are releasing a new album for the first time in nine years. The first single Run Run Run already sounds as delightfully messy as you’d expect from these chaotic British rockers. Thank goodness.
He’s announced his retirement before, but this time he means business. Michael Caine has retired. The 90-year-old actor played his final role in the film The Great Escapist. “I’ve played leading roles and received brilliant reviews,” he says. “How can I top that?”
According to Caine, there are few roles left for him. “As a 90-year-old, there are no leading roles left for you; those are for young, handsome lads and girls. So I thought, I might as well stop now.”
---130 animators from eleven countries created a remake of the Frasier episode My Coffee with Niles. The episode has been chopped into 185 segments, each lasting around six to twelve seconds. The animation style varies widely, from hand-drawn sequences to stop-motion and puppet animation. Cool project.
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