Scratching Post
The song of the week is a song from your cat (offline). (Related: Another song of the week from the weakerthans.)
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Centre
Sam, a friend, sent me some of his poetry last week. I particularly enjoy this poem:
The War Bride
I lay awake last night and dreamed of her
One heart still beating by the lonely Somme
She wears these scars to remember the battles
Only those she lost, never those she won.
Her hair is black like a murder of crows
A liquor of ravens or a paper of pins
Please wake her before her cover blows
And her squadron of heroes comes running in.
Her father has made her wash for him
Every night since her coming of age
His vision soaks her body and his eyes
Cut like a thousand obsidian blades
She sings him to his gentle sleep
Selects one blade from the length of her arm
She watches the water still and deep
And leaves his body on the banks of the Marne.
I love her pale skin against my arm
The thrust of her back and her desperate rage
Her Passchendaele cross, her echo of Christ
And her hundred thousand obsidian blades
My head on her shoulder like a murderer knows
A disorder of conscience, a concubine's guilt
I wake her, she rises soft and she goes
To the house her holy soldier built
Tea
I've caught a new thought virus; the fractal nature of consciousness [pdf] and aesthetics.
Click the thumbnail to view full image.
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The Ablest
I have decided that it is about time I learned how to moonwalk. This should take me a month or so to master.
Keygrip - "My goal with the Key Grip system is to collapse the process, equipment, and software [required for live broadcast] into a sleek enough package to allow for a 'one man show' to cover a live event on video."
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For the (aspiring) writers in the house, 3 online books by English and Applied Linguistics professor John Broderick:
Also found via wood s lot:
Found elsewhere (aka via djmose):
We love you: Free Hi-Res cards to print from youyesyou.
The fate of drums (Deeper Well)
"HardSID PCI is a great solution for listening C64 SID music, playing games and demos with the original sound and it is the most serious SID based MIDI synthesizer after the HardSID Quattro PCI."
The hardware synth chip from the Commie 64, on a PCI card.
Smooth:
Mario Brothers Flash (Part I)
Mario Brothers Flash (Part 2)
Where's part three?
behind her smiling eyes
Grey Tuesday quintupled my usual daily traffic (to 503 visitors). I've been in correspondence with both Bill Werde from the New York Times and Douglas Wolk from the Village Voice. (Werde on Grey Tuesday, from today's NYT.) Unlike many other greysites, I did not receive a cease-and-desist letter from EMI. That's the beauty of BitTorrent, for this site was only hosting a small (6kB) torrent file; a gateway into a temporary Torrent community dedicated to serving the Grey Album.
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*.* lead me to the following:
A quick quote from the US Declaration of Independence:
"[...] all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
as the sky tries on its uniform of turned off t.v. grey
Today is Grey Tuesday, a day of coordinated digital disobedience.
Some history:
I am a fan of both the Beatles' music and hip-hop, this album is astonishing juxtaposition of the two. This isn't a simple case of playing Jay-Z's lyrics over instrumental segments from the White album; the Beatles' masterpiece has been deftly sliced, diced and reworked almost beyond recognition. EMI (the copyright holder for the White Album) is not impressed with the handiwork of Mr. Danger Mouse. In fact, they have been issuing cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album. (Update: They have now begun sending cease and desist letters to websites participating in Grey Tuesday.)
From a press release by Downhill Battle, organizers of Grey Tuesday:
"It's clear that this work devalues neither of the originals. There is no legitimate artistic or economic reason to ban this record this is just arbitrary exertion of control," said Nicholas Reville, Downhill Battle co-founder. "The framers of the constitution created copyright to promote innovation and creativity. A handful of corporations have radically perverted that purpose for their own narrow self interest, and now the public is fighting back."
The reporters and news outlets that reviewed the Grey Album have obtained it illegally from filesharing networks. "If music reviewers have to break the law to hear new, innovative music, then something has gone wrong with the law," said [Downhill Battle's Rebecca] Laurie.
To download a copy of the Grey Album, install a bitTorrent client (Shareaza for example) and then download this torrent file (6kB). Next, double-click the torrent file to begin downloading the Grey Album.
If you are not comfortable using bitTorrent, you can check here for a list of websites which are also hosting the album.
It should be noted that DJ Danger Mouse isn't the only producer to have re-spun Jay-Z's Black Album a capellas. Discover the other remixes here.
(Related: A short stungeye post on samples/sampling.)
Irony vs Empath
"Good, better, best;
Never let it rest
Until the good is better
And the better best."
She had time for me.
Only she had time for me.
She only had time for me.
She had only time for me.
She had time only for me.
She had time for only me.
She had time for me only.
Never take language for granted.
end
Today's Special:
Soupish? - Click to pause/unpause - Press any key to add soup particles
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"The Grey Album is an art project/experiment that uses the full vocal content of Jay-Z's Black Album recorded over new beats and production made using the Beatles White Album as the sole source material."
"Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans [...] EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album."
Check back here next Tuesday.
"[A]n international journal of theory, technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as theorisations of major 'event-scenes' in the mediascape".
(There is also a digital library for the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, ctheory books and multimedia.)
Some ctheory finds: The Turntable, Motion Perception in Movies and Painting, Time And The Cinematic Image by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky, who sits on the editorial board.)
Experimentation. Familiarization. It's all a nature walk.
The following 'sketches' are all explorations of the Processing language. Source code is provided for all of the applets.
The first sketch is a new take on personal horoscopes: Part Rorschach inkblot, part I Ching, part space invaders.
Click applet to pause/unpause the triptych-stream. Your future can be found within your interpretation of the paused invaders:
Space Invader Triptych
Now imagine those invaders as the characters of an alien language:
Alien Eye Chart - Click for randomly generated Eye Charts.
Trigonometry visualized, the beauty of SIN and COS:
The beauty of Trig - Click to start/pause - Press any key to flip spin modes
Invaders in a Strange Land - Click to start/pause - Press any key to flip spin modes
The last two were adapted from the example source for 3d rotation. The results are rather hypnotizing:
Click to view The Spinners.
Click to view The Spinners at a higher resolution.
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Ordered Chaos Revisited
After spending an hour zooming ("The 'Invisible' videos zoom in on matter and show you what is actually there, although invisible to the naked eye.") I knew what had to be done. I spent the last two days learning a new programming language called Processing. It's like Flash for programmers, (a simplified java syntax with a powerful graphics API.) During this time I wrote a small Mandelbrot exploration program.
The following applets require that your brower supports java.
Click to view Mandelbrot exploration applet. (Source code available.)
Click anywhere on the fractal plane to double the magnification. Zoom out by holding down any key and clicking the fractal. (The view centres on the clicked position for both in/out zooms.) 15 zooms are possible before floating point rounding errors erode the image. (Is that 65536X magnification?) The maximum number of Mandelbrot iterations is increased by 15 for each level of zoom, (improving the Mandelbrot resolution).
With the Flash apps from the last post, the pixel resolutions were poor, (4x4 pixel to 10x10 pixel representations for each fractal test point.) The pixel resolution of the processing applets is 1x1. The number of calculations being performed compared to the Flash generators has increased by many fold. To improve the rendering time I coded a recursive rectangle approximation engine.
Click to view Mandelbrot exploration applet in approximation debug mode. (Source code available.)
In debug mode you can see that the applet calculates the image as a gradient of bounded rectangles. I was able to exploit an interesting property of the Mandelbrot set, it is simply connected. This means that if any solid shape can be drawn on the set, where the shade/colour is identical for all the boundary points, this shape can be filled in with said shade/colour. The approximation engine divides the screen into four quadrants, a test is performed to determine if the quadrants can be filled in. Each quadrant that cannot be filled is further divided unto four quadrants of it's own. And the process repeats. (Division stopping only when a quadrant is filled or has reached a size of 2 pixels or less in either width or depth.)
This save us the trouble of calculating the escape velocity for every single pixel.
Related: fractal-like images of plants from the cabbage family.
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Some Flash and Processing links:
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