“1. Do not obey in advance. 2. Defend institutions. 3. Beware the one-party state. 4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. 5. Remember professional ethics.”

I, too, would love to sail across the sea for years and not come back until this country is ready to be rebuilt. I find that very relatable.

Another year, another Shaky Knees playlist! Light on text this week cause I'll be at the festival, but you can follow along at home, all of these songs are all-timers. I've been itching to give you guys "Seventeen" and "Pressure to Party" back-to-back for months.

A wyrm itself is a sort of wingless, limbless dragon of yore, so this is as good a time as any to confess where I got the Earwyrms name. I regret to inform everyone that I guess I'm just a huge nerd. My critics don't have to dig much further than my history with Coheed & Cambria.

The sea is very big, and also the scariest thing in the world. If I were to speak into it, I would spew nothing but bubbles, and I'd have to come up for air after accomplishing nothing, which is a bit like tweeting.

We know that vanity stems from deep insecurity: no brag comes untethered from something to prove, some perceived injustice it's trying to conceal. If you're truly comfortable with your status, it remains unremarkable.

My own personal exercise preference is running. It's the only arena of my life where I can set goals and actually achieve them, week-in and week-out, without failure.

*sunrise over sodden beams across the bar floor, splinters stir with foraging rodents*. *kicks aside twisted mic stand, wipes broken reading glasses on blood-stained khakis*.

By personality alone, I'd probably be a Stark, as basic as it sounds: my reticence, my gloomy tendencies, and my preference for cold. Physically, I feel more like a Tully—an auburn-headed boy from a land of rivers—but maybe we'll get to that in later weeks.

2009: the last good year, or the first bad one? Less depends on the events of the past, and more on how young you are when they happen.

We narrowly avoided this being the single worst playlist I've ever put together, just by how crazy pop music had become in 1999. Maybe Y2K had us losing more of a grip than we thought; whatever the reason, it was a year that a lot of the lamest songs of all time were released.

*tornado siren in distance* *clears throat into mic, takes reading glasses out of sweat-soaked khakis*

For a long time I've wanted to send out a playlist of my very favorite songs, unrestricted by any theme except that of self-indulgence. It will help lay some ground-work for the point-of-view I can never fully remove from a project of curation such as this, and I can't think of a better time than now.

I'm the last person you'd expect to be eulogizing a robot, but the rover's story has made me reflect. It was art and science combined: photography and engineering, architecture and electronics, choreography and computing.

Let me bring you back to 1989: the number, another summer, sound of a funky drummer. Ten years after "Rapper's Delight," hip hop was in full-roaring-force ramping up to the Golden Age of the 1990's, and one of the biggest works of art that year was Spike Lee's incendiary Do the Right Thing.

A surprising amount of iconic albums came out in 1979, and it's hard to say anything about them that they couldn't absolutely say for themselves. It was the year of London Calling and The Wall and Unknown Pleasures—yep, everyone's favorite t-shirt design is now forty years old. In fact, Hot Topic's entire aesthetic might be traced back to 1979.

Today I'm here with another Earwyrms Essential, and this time it's the Snow Playlist, the one you put on if you're ever stuck having to walk home in a flurry.

This year was a fulcrum point in American turmoil, and it feels like all 21st century malaise can somehow be traced back to 1969. If the early part of the century saw the spreading of existentialism and nihilism, the events of 1969 nailed them into our collective consciousness.

While some things invariably have stayed the same—"Auld Lang Syne" is still the greatest song ever bestowed upon us by the muses, be they alien or otherwise—a lot of things will have to change if we're going to shape the utopia we've all loftily agreed to achieve by the end of December.

I'm over the moon seeing how many of us participated in the Year in Review playlist last week. It's my favorite part of the year, and it always becomes the soundtrack to the last few weeks of December for me.