Monthly Archives: April 2008

I’ve been waiting for this video to come out for a few days now. This talk is pretty amazing, required viewing for anyone interested in the accelerating evolution of culture or just 21st culture in general. He’s speaking of the concept of a “cognitive surplus”; essentially that when we are introduced to new technology that makes our lives easier, we are given a surplus of mental energy. This energy can be expended in useful ways or wasted, as in the case with Gin in the 19th century and Television in the 20th.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
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Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

Good stuff, if you have 15 minutes, give it a watch. You can also read the transcript here.

My eyes are tired of rolling. You can only roll them so much before it stops being subconscious and you start feeling the burn. It’s kind of a workout, not just for my eyes but for my exasperation.

Every time I read another Rev. Wright/William Ayers story my eyes are blasting their quads, my patience is pumping its pecs. Please people. They’re in great shape. I don’t need anymore. But yet the stories persist, and persist. And Hillary and the far right (not too much difference anymore, huh?) keeps making the case that anyone who has any ties to Obama is fair game for some linkin’. Ayers served on a board with Obama and contributed 200 dollars to his campaign. Yes and he’s some batshit insane commie revolutionary. That makes Obama a batshit insane commie revolutionary. See how the game works?

Well, reading this Andrew Sullivan post gave me an idea. I’m tired of rolling my eyes. Let’s play the game!

I support Obama. I’ve written much on this blog in support of his candidacy.

Therefore, Obama is responsible for my heavy use of hallucinogens in my teens, my belief in the abolishment of the prison system, my hatred of both The Clash and David Bowie, the fact that I didn’t vote in the 2000 election, my S&M-themed chamber music ensemble, and the time I peed on the side of the one of the Twin Towers a few months before 9/11 (I had to go!).

Obama is in favor of drug-legalization, wants serial killers to go free, is against corny british 70s music, promotes non-voting, practices kinky sex, and supports the desecration of a sacred national tragedy.

See how it works? Now you try! If enough of us list the sordid details of our personal beliefs and histories, then bullshit like Ayers won’t mean anything. It’s sort of like Lenny Bruce’s idea that repetition of a word makes it lose its power. In this case, repetition of an idea proves its inanity.

So join me! What else can we pin on Obama? Ever smelled your finger after picking your ear? You can tell me… You have? Do you support Obama? You do??

Ewwww… Obama likes the smell of earwax! Grody!!

Can there be any doubt that the current conservative love-fest for Hillary is a deliberate ploy to get the weaker candidate to take the nomination? When Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bob Cunningham, Sean Hannity and yes Bill Kristol all show their love for a Clinton you know something’s up.

But I do think I can speak for most of my fellow right-wingers when I say this: We once looked forward with unambivalent glee to the fall of the house of Clinton. Many of us still do. But we also see the liberal media failing to give Hillary Clinton the respect she deserves. So, since we conservatives believe in giving credit where credit is due, it falls to us to praise Hillary.

The fact is Hillary Clinton has turned out to be an impressive candidate. She has consistently defeated Barack Obama when her back was to the wall — first in New Hampshire, then in several big primaries on Super Tuesday, on March 4 in Ohio and Texas, and then last week in Pennsylvania, where she was outspent by almost 3 to 1, yet won handily.

Shame to the NY Times for hiring a mouthpiece for neocon propaganda. Icky. Are we really supposed to believe that these people somehow feel sympathy that Hillary has been unfairly disrespected by the media (which for the record I do not believe; hello? Rev. Wright??)? All these wingnuts did in the 90s was play the media against the Clintons. The odd thing is that Hillary’s main platform is that she wants to take on these ‘foes’, and now these are the very people supporting her nomination. It’s all very strange and messed up, no?

With GTA IV coming out today, I really hope Hillary goes apeshit about how video games will lead to the apocalypse or some shit, like she has in the past.

She says the series demeans women and contributes to a “silent epidemic” of sex and violence in the media that could harm children.

“They’re playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them. You know, that’s kind of hard to digest,” she said in a speech in 2005.

Sigh. GTA doesn’t encourage people to murder prostitutes any more than real life does. The actual controversy with GTA is that it affords you realistic choices. Yes, you can murder prostitutes. Or, you can drive around in a Ferrari. Or, you can fly a jetpack around the desert. Or, you can drive a tank around and kill hundreds of people. Ok, well maybe not realistic choices, but more than Contra or Halo.

The fact that Clinton, Lieberman, and others think so little of the populace that they believe we could be somehow ensnared into a life of violence by an electronic toy (which is essentially all GTA, in its exalted glory, really is) shows the elitism and authoritarianism at their core. GTA is nothing like real life, not one person thinks it is. It’s a motherfucking badass video game series that should be appreciated for the work of art that it is. GTA IV is seriously making me wish I never forsook my video games systems in the pursuit of other electronic endeavors.

(See also: Study find no link between video games and violence)

Well lookie here! A Facebook app that actually does something useful. Register to vote on Facebook! That’s definitely much more useful than vampire-bites or zombies or whatever dumb crap people be sending me.

Wow. Not shrooms!

Dude. From the Game Informer review of Grand Theft Auto 4:

I now know how film critics felt after screening “The Godfather.” It’s been days since Grand Theft Auto IV’s credits rolled, yet I can’t seem to construct a coherent thought without my mind wandering off into a daydream about the game. I just want to drop everything in my life so I can play it again. Experience it again. Live it again…Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t just raise the bar for the storied franchise; it completely changes the landscape of gaming.

Must. Play. Video. Game.

Try to ignore the background music.

So, I’m currently mastering a track which, if you have any experience, you know can be an insane adventure. I’ve been mastering my own tracks for a couple years, but I’m only now attempting to learn how it actually works (got me a book an’ everythin’!). I recently downloaded a demo of Izotope Ozone which after 30 minutes already has my track louder and sounding better than after like a day of Mastering in my DAW, Ableton (yeah, I know… why would you ever master in Live…).

The thing is, mastering is way more technical than composing, arranging and general mixing. I’m scrubbing the rust off of the part of my brain that was at one time engaged for learning science (not that I was ever very good at it, mind you). But man, some of this shit flies higher over my head than Lindsay Lohan in a space shuttle.

While reading about the analog-modeling equalizer in Ozone, I came across the term phase artifacts. Guh? Ok, so the term artifacts in audio tends to refer to unwanted distortions or clippings that result from applying effects or maxing your signal. But phase? Phase in music and audio can refer to about 10 different things.

So I do a google search on phase artifacts. For fun, here are the top five reults:

Correction for interferometric synthetic aperture radar atmospheric phase artifacts using time series of zenith wet delay observations from a GPS network

Mitigation of tropospheric InSAR Phase artifacts through differential multisquint processing

Missing first points and phase artifact mutually entangled in FT NMR data—noniterative solution

Removal of phase artifacts from fMRI data using a Stockwell transform filter improves brain activity detection.

Although shade-off and halo patterns occur as a natural result of the phase contrast optical system, they are often referred to as phase artifacts or image distortions. In all forms of positive phase contrast, bright phase halos usually surround the boundaries between large specimen features and the medium.

I’m out of my league here people.

Seriously though, apparently none of these have to do with audio. I guess I’ll tool around and eventually realize that it’s some basic sonic concept given a fancy name. Music tech geeks are all about giving fancy names to things to make themselves feel more important.

Here a couple definitions while I’m at it:

DAW – Digital Audio Workstation = program for audio. That’s it. Calling Garageband or Logic or Protools a DAW is like calling Microsoft Word a Digital Word-Processing Workstation. Why not call iTunes a Digital Audio Listening-Station.

Processing = Doin’ stuff. Ya know, like digging lint out of your belly button is technically a process. I love when laptop musicians talk about “processing” audio:
“I’m applying some realtime processing to an incoming audio signal routed live into my DAW”
Translation: I just dropped reverb on my vocals.

Ok, well back to mastering. Oops, I mean um, applying a sonic revolution to my digital audio artifice.