Album Recommendation: Americana

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As cringe worthy as it may be nowadays, I still have fond memories of listening to “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)”, and needless to say the music video made all twelve year old immature kids like me laugh. These days I can’t even listen to the song, that “uh huh, uh huh” part drives me up the wall. However, the song itself holds a special place in my heart as it did get me begging my parents to buy the album Americana which I listened to endlessly and why I’m making the record my next recommendation.

Many Offspring fans, mostly those who were fans from the band’s earlier albums, agree that the group has moved towards a more pop punk sound after this album. There are disagreements as to when this shift began though. Some say Americana was their last non pop album, some it was Ixnay on the Hombre, some say it was Smash. But most agree Conspiracy of One almost entirely sounded pop. My personal opinion is that America was the first step towards a pop sound, but it was not entirely all there.The singles released seemed to be the ones tailored towards mainstream radio play, such as “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) and “Why Don’t you get a Job?”. And while they certainly caught my ear and exposed me to the group, these songs did not end up being my favourites on the album.

I can’t even rank my favourite tracks on this album. But I think “Have You Ever”, “Staring at the Sun”, “Walla Walla”, “The End of the Line”, “No Brakes, “Americana”, and “Pay the Man” all tie at number one. That’s more than half the album though. None of them resemble the pop sounding tracks on this album, and that’s a big reason why I love them. They’re definitely more pure punk than the other half of the album, which has always been one of my favourite genres. Over twenty-one years later and I still have these songs in my regular rotation of music so it goes without saying this album is a big staple of my music collection.

While some fans say the Offspring sold out after this album, I think this album was their first sell out. The album did exceptionally well for them, and proved that their pop like sounds hit higher on their charts than their punk tracks. In hitting that success with the singles released on Americana, they followed the formula with their next album and the next ultimately becoming less punk and more pop rock. I’m still going to recommend it, even though it started a shift in the Offspring away from my preference, I still love half of this album.Both for those hard hitting tracks, and for the late nights listening to the album from start to finish when I could still bear listening to “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)”.

Data is Beautiful: My Simpsons shitposting over it’s second year

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I can’t believe that February 2nd has passed and it has now been 2 full years of making Simpsons shitposts. Because I’ve got so many ideas bouncing around in my head, and MS paint is a god send, I found that most of this blog has now been overtaken by them. For that I am truly sorry. Last year I made a graph of what my Reddit net upvotes looked like out of curiosity, and did a bit of a write up on the subject of making them for one year. I’m not going to regurgitate that post but rather continue from there so I recommend reading that first post here if you’re interested on any sort of backstory.

Much over the course of the second year of making Simpsons Shitposts has remained the same though, I still have not found any sort of formula for what works or what does not, which I again consider a good thing. I suppose the key change is I’ve spread to a new platform for posting them. I tried to see how I could post them on Instagram, but I was unable to find a satisfactory method and gave up. I revisited the idea by going with the slideshow method which seems to work. I’ve gained a bit of a following after a fair bit of likes. I’ve even seen some of the biggest Instagram Simpsons Shitposting accounts take some of my originals (probably ones from Reddit that got quite high upvotes though) and repost them of their accounts. Ultimately I don’t really care if they do, but I wish they would give me credit. Oh well.

Looking at the graph below, we have to take into account that since the first graph, the number of subscribers has nearly doubled, from about 34,000 to 59,000 which is a major factor for the higher average for year two (+55% from year 1).

In addition to the graph, here are some fun statistics. Ok they may not be fun but here they are anyways. I wanted to practice in Adobe Illustrator and make some fancy info graphic about them but I got lazy. It’s now already 9 days after February 2nd and I don’t want to delay it anymore so here’s the simple table.

So does this trend mean this entire blog will slowly become nothing but Simpsons Shitposts? Not really, I plan to expand into Futurama shitposts too. Ok maybe not. But this blog will not become just Simpsons shit, in fact quite the opposite. I’ve found that making such frequent shitposts has hindered progress of my other creative projects I’d like to put together. I plan to put the brakes on the shitposts, well not entirely, but I will pump them a bit. I’ll continue to work on them from time to time, but I plan to focus more on other stuff so you may see less of them in the coming year. If you’re a fan of them I’m sorry, if you hate them you probably don’t read this blog. Either way sorry.