About
Three Star Smash
is an independent music journal written around town in Lawrence, Kansas. (Read how Pitchfork writers imagine the home of the Jayhawks.)
With a focus on hard rock, metal, and experimental music, its mission of indeterminate length is to perpetuate the exhilaration of discovering great new music every day. And, perhaps more entertainingly, to mock without mercy horrible new music, every day.
Currently, I, Luke Rounda, write 100% of the reviews and borderline funny (or, depending on your mindset, supremely upsetting) things you keep reading on the front page. Timewasters I enjoy include dark humor; films noir; early cyberpunk literature and culture; useful gadgets and technology like microwaves, lawnmowers and computers; and all things guitar related. Most often, though, I write.
My most infamous piece is perhaps Festival Among the Rocks, a short form space opera thinly disguised as “Asteroids fan fiction.” It netted me some notoriety as “the Asteroids guy” since its publication in 1999. I’m currently working the characters and backdrop into a full-fledged novel called Where the Stone Falls.
Technology/Geek Related
After much deliberation, I’ve decided that Gentoo is for ricers and wizards.
Three Star Smash is made entirely on a Dell laptop running Windows XP. I am open to using Linux more heavily in the future if it means never having to touch Windows Vista’s bloated, stillborn corpse.
I use Fedora Core 5 as a music/video server. Certain Windows applications, such as the indispensable foobar2000 music player/organizer, have no suitable replacement on any flavor of desktop Linux. However, I like to keep a curious eye open. Currently I’m toying with the idea of dual-booting Arch.
As it relates to music, file sharing technology should be the wave of the future for musicians. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have already made a political splash by releasing their albums for download. It remains to be seen whether other, less fortunate bands without the same kind of brand name recognition could manage the same feat, but it’s a slow process.
Physical CDs will only truly die out as a medium for music when every band sees fit to provide a lossless (preferably FLAC) copy of their records to a music-buying public with lightning fast broadband internet. Some day, right?
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