Coming Soon...

It's been way too long. We didn't forget. at least I didn't. We're just really busy. Big news came for most of us, but I won't waste good news on a useless post. After being away for so long, what were we doing? The layout sucks (too dark- we need an overhaul). I know it seems like we started up and abandoned, but we just need more posts. Another time though. I gotta finish this Peck paper. Being a second semester senior isn't as fun as it sounds.

Don't hold your breath, but don't forget about us either. We're back.
TSO

A Brief Hiatus...

Hey Guys,

It's been a while since either me or The Crane have posted anything. I know you need to know about great stuff, but we both have a lot on our plates with college stuff coming up. You can expect the blog to be back up with new weekly posts sometime in January (that's not exact, and we might even have a couple before that). We're in the midst of hell, but when we finally get done, you can be sure we'll be back with some hot stuff.

Until Then, Wish Us Luck.

Sincerely,

TSO

Happy Birthday TSO

Today, Wednesday, July 29, is the birthday of The Supreme Society's found, TSO. Thor was born eighteen years ago, and has been my best friend for seven. He brought me into the blogging world with his idea for a fun blog that two friends could post about anything they liked, and it's been great so far. From me, The Supreme Society, and all our readers, Happy Birthday.

GOOD MUSIC II

My GOOD MUSIC installments will be done a little differently than those of TSO. I will mostly be writing reviews of albums, and occasionally singles, but I wont be providing you with a link to download them. Just know that only quality music will be posted here, and I highly recommend that you download the music by your own means.

LP by Discovery

LP is a stunning electro-pop collab between Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot and Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend, with a contribution from Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. The album has a powerful opening three tracks with "Orange Shirt," "Osaka Loop Line," and "Can You Discover?" and Discovery makes excellent use of tempo change to transfer between sections of the songs. The talent from Vampire Weekend is what drew me to this album. The melodies on the keyboard by Batmanglij are sweet and creative, and in my opinion, make most of the songs, and Koenig plus auto-tune equals some catchy electro tunes to make for a fun, innovative summer soundtrack. Track listing below, with asterisks indicating standout tracks.

LP

01. Orange Shirt*
02. Osaka Loop Line*
03. Can You Discover?*
04. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend [ft. Angel Deradoorian]
05. So Insane
06. Swing Tree
07. Carby [ft. Ezra Koenig]*
08. I Want You Back*
09. It's Not My Fault (It's My Fault)
10. Slang Tang

Enjoy,

The Crane

The Rubber Player

Nixon released two new colorways of their popular Rubber Player watch in the last month. The ancestor of the Rubber Player was simply called "The Player," when it was released a few years ago, but its popularity has made it one of Nixon's top selling timepieces, inspiring new versions like The Ceramic Player and The Rubber Player. On the fifteenth of March, April, May, and June Nixon released four different color ways of their new Rubber Player. These colors included green, blue, red, and yellow, but unfortunately they were extremely limited and can only be found on Ebay now. The two permanent colorways that this post is about are the new purple and black colorways.

The Rubber Player maintains the same look as The Player, but instead of being made of just metal, the watch is encased in rubber, giving it an attractive matte look and a soft, grippy feel. The watched have a real diamond at the six o'clock position, and the yellow and blue second hands are a nice touch. The watch is not only stylish, but also durable, with the ability to withstand upto 100 M underwater. Priced at $150, the Rubber Player is a reasonable and fun watch.

Given the choice between the two, I would probably choose the black, only because it would look ridiculous to wear a purple watch to any sort of formal event, but throwing sensibility and usefulness to the wind, I would choose the purple. Check it out at Nixon.

Peace,

The Crane

The Hype Machine

"Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up here."

The Hype Machine is a must-visit-daily website, if you want to keep on top of your music game. Every day new bands are emerging, and new music is being written. And we all know that deep down, being the first to find a band/artist and spread it around feels pretty legit. It makes you feel like you are somehow part of that band, even though you have literally nothing to do with them. So, you may be asking, "Crane, how can I be the first to hear the music?" The Hype Machine, my friends. People like TSO and me, run music blogs from all over the world. Allow them to sift through the massive amounts of music out there for you. The Hype Machine is an aggregate of all music blogs, posting the exact same posts as the blogs themselves in real time. Almost all the new posts have download links for the individual songs in the post.

Some cool features of the site are "popular," "radio," "most blogged artists," and their annual "zeitgeist." If you navigate over to the "popular" tab of The Hype Machine, it will show you songs from the last three days with the most favorites. It's a list of user-voted top music in the world, unbiased by big record labels. What I like to do is go to the popular tab every other day or so, and go through the top twenty-five songs for that day. With a simple add-on to Firefox, FlashGot, you can click the little play button next to songs on The Hype Machine, then click the FlashGot icon on your browser to download all the songs that you have streamed, even if you didn't listen through the whole song. The "radio" section includes a stream of popular and recent songs posted by blogs, and a weekly radio show run by the website featuring the hottest music. Most blogged artists is a simple feature on The Hype Machine's main page that is a list of that weeks top artists to give you a better idea of new bands to follow, without being muddled by new singles. At the end of every year, The Hype Machine produces their Zeitgeist, which means "spirit of the time." It's a list of the year's top albums, artists, and songs. Really helpful for catching up on good music after a busy year of school and whatnot.

If you're not one for downloading music in an extralegal fashion, you can always listen to the songs and artists directly off of The Hype Machine. They have a fantastic flash player at the bottom of their page that has a seamless method of playing music off the website while switching pages, much like Facebook chat.

One final thing I like about The Hype Machine is that it provides you with otherwise difficult to find remixes of tons of songs. Remixes can bring life back to a song that you may find boring after too many listens or make songs that don't fulfill their full potential great. Check this website out, I highly encourage it. The Hype Machine.

Continue having a great summer,

The Crane

Drexel University Computing Academy

*Just a heads up guys, this post is pretty long. Read only if you want to*

It's summertime. Suns out, guns out. You know the rules. Its a time to kick back and relax, and enjoy the vessel of joy that is summer vacation. While many of you take this time to get some well-deserved rest and relaxation, some of us have... a few inconvenient obligations.

In order to understand any good story, you need to understand the context. With that said, the beginning of this story starts out kind of like this...

Which functional retard shown above is George W. Bush?

It all started when Governor Rendell decided that Pennsylvania just didn't have any money. It wasn't really his fault - the nation was a little short on change. Cutbacks had to happen, and unfortunately, some of the more prestigious, academic investments had to be cut short as well. Thus, the Pennsylvania Governor School of Excellence was cut. 12 of the most highly ranked summer programs in the state disappeared. There were whispers, deep within the underground (read: internet) that some of the schools might stay. Drexel University, the host of the Governor School for Information, Society, and Technology, decided that they weren't letting a huge scouting opportunity pass them by, and of course, they dished out the money in order to keep it alive. Despite the fact that it's the same exact program, they couldn't keep the name because the state wasn't paying for it. Thus, DUCA was born.

The Drexel University Computing Academy is a " five-week, residential summer learning experience" that is "...an outgrowth of the Pennsylvania Governor's School for Information, Society, and Technology (PGSIST), which was hosted at Drexel from 1998 through 2008". Really? I wouldn't know because there are so many damn rules.

Pictured above: residential summer learning experience

I'd like to thank my parents for their support, my teachers for the awesome recommendations, and, of course, me. With good grades, I successfully condemned myself to five-weeks of minimum security prison. I mean, it isn't THAT bad, but it surely is much less fun that the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Summer Program. Basically, we have class for six hours a day, and after that we just kind of chill and work on these long term projects that DUCA has assigned us. On weekends we don't have classes, and instead have random little fun field trips. On the Fourth of July, we went to the Constitution Center (right), and last weekend, I saw Transformers 2 for the second time. Most of our time however is spent in the dorm, which ,thanks to years and years of college students, is in a horrible state of disrepair. We still manage though.

As far as the learning portion of the program, I can tell that there will definitely be a lot of stuff that I'm going to get from DUCA. Already, I've learned a bit about 2 significant programming languages (PHP and Python), and have learned how to do a plethora or other minor yet useful skills such as set up a server (that's the first thing I'm doing when I get home). The kids here are also definitely awesome. With 18 guys and 5 girls, it's a huge sausage fest, but we get along just fine. We haven't had a dance yet, and we better not have one either.

One of the big problems I have with this program are all the rules. There are so many. Lights Out at a certain time. No talking to people outside the program (What!? I can only talk to the other 22 kids in the program? That's it? No talking with any of the freshman during their orientation which just so happens to overlap 3/5 of our program?....BS). No cell phones outside of the dorms. And the infamous borders.

No cell phones? Really? According to the higher-ups, cell phones completely remove the ability to pay attention, and they found that students were not learning anything if they had their cell phones during class. Interesting. I could have sworn that cell phones do have some other feature aside from distracting that makes them somewhat useful...

Yes, ma'am, I understand your child is inside, and I'd call it in if I could...
Might I suggest a smoke signal? Oh wait, this isn't the time for fire jokes, is it?

And then there are borders. Before the beginning of the program, DUCA gave all its attendees a map and said 'Here's where you can and can't go'. That would be cool if the map made any sense at all. I can completely understand the horrible part of the city that's really close to us being out of bounds, but some things just don't make sense. A McDonald's? A movie theater? a supermarket? out of bounds, despite the fact that they're in perfectly fine parts of the city (right next to UPenn's campus). According to the higher-ups, the boundary is put up to protect us. And if we ever we're to 'accidentally' 'wander' out of bounds? And I quote, "We have DUCA lookouts who don't work for the program but will see you. They are there to keep you safe. If they see you out of bounds, you are in big trouble" (read: will be shot on-sight).

a DUCA "lookout" securing our "safety"
and keeping us out of "trouble".
Please note that his "safety" has a scope and silencer.

And finally, and this by far has been the best reason I've received in defense of the rules and regulations. Apparently, every year, Drexel has students at its summer programs that decide to "go rogue" (that's a quote), and don't follow any rules. Based on their description of "DUCA lookouts", I imagine that "rogues" look a bit like this.

That thing circled in red is not his hair,
but his DUCA lanyard with his old room key and ID.
Remnants of his former bondage. Now, he fights THE MAN.

All in all, DUCA definitely has some potential to get a lot better (aside from it's acronym, which honestly sounds like a verb that means to excrete something from your backend "I just took a huge DUCA,,,"). I'm only two weeks in, so those math wizards out there know that I have three weeks left. It also has a lot of room to get exponentially worse, so I guess we'll just see how things pan out. I guess it's about time to wrap this post up. We're actually in a class about databases. Kind of important, but I felt the need to keep you guys in the know.

See you all soon.
-TSO