October 2025 | Oliver Roick's Weblog

7PM — The story of Deltron 3030, a defining underground hip hop record, told by Deltron members Del tha Funky Homosapian, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala.

KID KOALA I remember when it first came out, it wasn’t like people just got it right away or anything.

DAN THE AUTOMATOR That’s just how it is, because you’re giving them something that they’re not used to. You’re in the music world, and you know everything has to be categorized. And once you do something that’s not categorized, it messes people up, it trips them up.

KID KOALA We finished that record, we did a ten city tour, I think, but we were all literally coming off of other tours, so we just stopped it at that. A few months later, Gorillaz came out and just super-nova-ed.

DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN When it first came out, wasn’t nobody tripping like that. Of course, I knew that ahead of time. Nobody’s going know when it first drops. You got to give it time for people to listen to it and figure out what it is. It was some years.

KID KOALA It took three, four years before it found its audience and then that audience just kept multiplying somehow. The record was being passed around to people. I guess it became a little bit of a cult classic in a sense. It was odd how excited people got when I would even mention Deltron, or that we were working on some new material.

The first time I heard about Deltron 3030 was on VIVA2, a more cultured, German-speaking MTV, and it didn’t stick. I rediscovered it years later and realised what I had missed. A truly groundbreaking hip hop record.It became a favourite amongst some of my friends, even those that wouldn’t normally listen to rap music much.

7AM — Use an RSS reader to escape the noise of the Web and experience it more like reading a newspaper, says Molly White.

While the general notion resonates, there is still a major difference between an RSS reader and a newspaper. A paper has a beginning and an end. You get one in the morning and that’s what is being published that day. Once you’ve read everything, you’re done for the day. A newspaper doesn’t update during the day. You can’t add anything during the day either.

Phil Gyford’s Guardian uses the Guardian API to generate a digital version of the Guardian’s print issue. It’s generated once a day. No pieces are added or removed until the following day. It’s enough to stay up to date, but slow enough so you’re don’t get buried under a constant barrage of news. I want a RSS reader that works the same way, one that updates only once a day that presents the yesterday’s posts in a clean and easy to navigate way.

Posts from October 2025

Reading the Web like a newspaper