You hear that, Mr Andersen?

E.T., Music, Nemo

Why do I have "Gloria" by Laura Branigan stuck in my head?

I think I can follow the chain -- first, it was someone talking about retro-gaming, and why Atari collapsed. The E.T. game was both a big element in, and symbolic of, their failure -- they pushed it through in 40 days in order to correspond to the release of the movie, and it was completely and utterly terrible. Five million of the six million copies were never sold, and they ended up having to crush them, bury them in a landfill, and cover them with concrete.

(Someone mentioned that they'd heard that they had to dig them up again recently, and replace all the guns with cellphones. >;)

There's more information over at Snopes; but that's not why the song is in my head. You see, when the song came out, I remember hearing the lines "I think they got you number; I think they got the alias that you been livin' under"... and somehow, "I think they got the alias" became "I think they got Elliot". Quite why it was obvious that this was a reference to the FBI-harrassed Elliot of E.T. isn't clear to me any more, but the link is obviously strong, since I found myself singing it in my head on the stairs.

I don't know why "on the stairs" is a place particularly prone to random music... okay, now I have Robin from the Muppets sing "Halfway up the Stairs" in my head now. Time for headphones, methinks. :)

***

As far as listening music at work goes, I've been trying to listen to whole albums, rather than random songs. I wrote a perl one-liner to pick random album directories, which works much better than having to decide -- most recently, I've ended up listening to:

Nathan Haines, Squire For Hire
Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (the live concert album)
Bic Runga, Get Some Sleep (single)
Various, Blue Note - Saturday Night
The Black Seeds, On the Sun
Chet Baker, 1959 Milano Sessions
Basement Jaxx, Rooty

plus some random stuff, like The Cranberries covering the Carpenters' "Close To You", Scribe's "The Crusader" and Shonen Knife's "Buttercup (I'm a Super Girl)". No-one has a copy of "Gloria" at work, curse the luck -- so it must join Men Without Hat's "Safety Dance" on the pile of old music that I want to track down at some point. :)

People in my room have talked about what music they can listen to while they work -- I can't have audiobooks, comedy or documentaries, but some people can't have anything with lyrics at all. I find lyrics that I haven't heard before can be distracting, but if I've heard the album a couple of times, it works just as well as instrumentals. Other than that, I might try to suit the music to what I'm doing -- something relatively laid back for data analysis, or drum'n'base for heavy coding; but in general, I'm not too particular. But I'll generally be listening to something if I'm trying to get some work done, if only because background conversations are as distracting to me as audiobooks (and there is a lot of background conversation in my room, much of it work related).

***

It's odd how quickly traditions and jargon can build up in an organization. For example, we have a mailing list specifically for off-topic blather; and as with any such list, you'll occasionally get people posting the same thing, or reposting something only days after it was last seen. Well, within Weta, that's known as a "Nemo" -- relating to the fact that a whole lot of people posted the picture on the right without checking whether anyone else had sent it first. Sometimes people respond to repeat posts with that picture, sometimes with other pictures with Nemo in them, and sometimes just with the word "Nemo". I guess it's just a matter of time before it becomes a backronym.

It's weird to think of a company as new as Weta having traditions... but I guess that kind of thing can develop pretty quickly, especially if it's a large group of people that are working long hours together. Things like the Compositing department's Cheese Award, and the I.T. Rogue Element of the Month trophy probably help, too.

Posted by svend at August 18, 2005 11:14 PM