Girl Germs went all the way to Texas, and all we brought you was this lousy podcast. Wait, just kidding, it’s good—we swear!

Dana again made the trek to Austin this March, leaving Anna behind to suffer in the snow and cold (sorry, girl) in order to partake in the 25th annual South by Southwest music festival. There were celebrity sightings and there was BBQ. There were circus freaks and there was novelty candy. But most importantly, there was music. Lots of music.

In this episode of Girl Germs, you’ll hear Dana interview a plethora of Girl Germs artists: locals Is/Is, New Jersey rockers Screaming Females (who visited GG and performed an in-studio session for us back in our Radio K days), GG faves Puro Instinct and Portland singer/songwriter Shelley Short (who is in town at the Triple Rock Sunday, April 10), plus a very special appearance by October’s Honorary Lady. We then play some up-and-coming artists Dana saw at this year’s SXSW who we predict are going to be pretty big deals in the next year. Two out of five of them are Canadian—what the what?!

Hunx and his Punx- Lover’s Lane (Too Young to be in Love)
Shelley Short- Swimming (A Cave, A Canoo)
Is/Is- So Long (This Happening EP)
No Joy – Hawaii (Ghost Blonde)
Braids – Plath Heart (Native Speaker)
Colleen Green – Dance the Night Away (4 Loko 2 Kayla EP)
Wye Oak – Dog Eyes (Civilian)
Maggie Bjorklund – Intertwined (Coming Home)
Puro Instinct- Silky Eyes (Headbangers in Ecstasy)

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Be sure to follow/friend/swear allegiance to Girl Germs on Twitter and Facebook, and keep up on our happenings as well as girl-music news on our blog. We also would love your emails at girlgermsradio@fancypantsgangsters.com. If you like what we played, be sure to click on the links above. Help support the artists and Girl Germs!

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If you’ve listened to the last few shows, I’ve rambled on about Civilization 5 and how it is so fundamentally
different than previous versions. The random aside that it plays more like a board game than Civ 4′s very videogame approach has proved more and more true as I continue playing it. The new city-state mechanic adding countless new wrinkles to foreign affairs and the subtly massive changes in combat have made a game that feels new and old at the same time, like Mint Oreos. I’m not going to really give a review of the game; I’ve talked about (and will continue to talk about) it on the show, and Mike has posted his thoughts on the game as well. What I’m going to talk about is how my relationship with the game has changed in small but meaningful ways.

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So there has been a lot of hubbub today about the recent comments by THQ’s Cory Ledesma, stating that “when the game’s bought used [the developers] get cheated”. This was in response to THQ bundling a one-time code in new games enabling multiplayer access, preventing used game buyers from automatically getting access to online play. This is hardly a new contact, of course, since EA has done it several games over the past few years, most notably its sports titles and Mass Effect 2.

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For people outside of Minnesota, Duluth doesn’t mean a whole lot. If they’ve even heard of it, it might have been a dim memory of the game Rampage (yes, Lizzy, Ralph and George did grace the fair lake town all those years ago) or a passing reference in that Beginner’s Guide To Minnesota, Fargo. But for those of us in the Land Of 10,000 Lakes, Duluth has some very special meanings. I mean, for a culture who’s passtimes often include “going up North to the lake”, it’s hard to get more “The Lake” than Lake Superior. Not to mention that for some people, Duluth is the last
bastion of civilization before you hit Moose Country, formerly known as Canada. So for us, Duluth represents many different things. It combines the rustic charm of the Great North Woods, the youthful energy of a college town, the campy garishness of a tourist trap, and the cosmopolitan appearances of a great port city.

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A lot has been made of the recent (and not so recent) changes to Facebook privacy standards. New York Times has graphs depicting the incredibly byzantine privacy options. Influential tech podcaster Leo Laporte deleted his account because “you have two choices, quit Facebook or just assume everything on Facebook you do is out in the open and behave accordingly” (paraphrased by his show notes). Peter Rojas, the cofounder of tech blogs Engadget and Gizmodo, also deleted his account, saying on Twitter, “The issue is that users should have real control over what is shared, that’s all. FB keeps taking that away.” What confuses me about the whole backlash is that no one seems to be willing to say that a lot of Facebook users are too stupid and lazy to deserve the privacy they seem to crave.

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