2013 June❮❮prevnext❯❯

My May, one second at a time:
May was a pretty lackluster month for me for new music. So few songs that rather than collate into genres I'm putting them in rough chronological order (based on the original versions, even when it's a cover.)

I would have hade 3 or 4 more, but I didn't get the gumption for hunting down some international songs.

No 4-stars, and as always exclamation marks point out better than average videos.

• Ode To Joy (Beethoven) After playing a lot of the video game "Peggle" I wanted a version of Ode to Joy w/ Chorus (what they use as an end of level reward.)
• !I Want Candy (Razed In Black Remix) (Bow Wow Wow) Felisdemens, one of the people I keep doing these "musics I found" updates for, played me this when we met up for dinner last month.
• Edge of Seventeen (Lindsay Lohan) Yeah, it's probably sacrilege to go for this instead of the Stevie Nicks version, but I like modern-polish covers with glossy female vocals.
• Rockit (Single Version) (Herbie Hancock) Shortest version I could find of this breakdance-era song you didn't realize you knew. (Mentioned in "Off to Be the Wizard", a great book that deserves the love "Ready Player One" has slavered all over it.)
• !!None of Your Business (Salt-n-Pepa) Solid sex-positive 90s hiphop.
• !Mambo No. 5 (Lou Bega) A song I kind of liked from a time when I wasn't buying singles... fun. The rest of his album gets really repetitive, though.
• The Rooster (OutKast) Nice retro riff ... it's similar to the one I used in my Atari game, which was also used by Britney Spear's "Circus"
• !Open Your Eyes (Snow Patrol) One of the final "The Office" episodes had this romantic song. I admit when I hear the opening I'm always a little bummed when it turns out not to be Blacked Eye Peas' I Got A Feeling
• !I Feed You My Love (Margaret Berger) Ever since Satellite I keep one ear open for catchy songs from the Eurovision contest. (This recap video was handy.)
• !!Hell Broke Luce (Tom Waits) Rough Antiwar song. The word "Luce" in the title is so weirdly evocative, though I couldn't find anything that it meant.
• !!Radioactive (Imagine Dragons) Fun, BIG song, cool video.

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Yankees had a 111-year old fan in the stadium! Red Sox help pay tribute by winning 1-11.

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Blender of LoveNow with FB likes...

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Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/specials/starbucks_vs_dunkin_donuts/ Starbucks v. Dunkies; I'm always interested in the cultural implications of the divide, when both are available.

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Techies, anyone know a great html5-ish library for displaying graphs written in DOT, GML, TGF, etc? Mostly straight forward node/edge stuff.

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This is why I like AAA titles: insane and over-the-top vehicle, weapon, and super-human empowerment fantasies in an environment that feels real-ish.

(2019 update not sure what the original video actually was but that might be close)

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Just startled at how good Windows 8 isn't... opening a PDF in a desktop mode browser fires up a Metro app "Reader" with no visible way to exit-- 1990 era alt-f4 or 2012 era move mouse to upper left hand corner are the secret magic cookie to know. (esc key doesn't work either) Oh and ctrl-P to print, that's more arcane knowledge. Stuff I know well but it's annoying my Aunt has so much to track.... and I don't know why the HP printer scan button churns, then decides USB isn't connected (it is) so Windows Fax and Scan is a functional if mid-90s looking trip to "what's a PDF I just know graphic files" land.

Gah. I kind of want to like Windows, have it as a reasonable consumer-friendly bastion against OSX monoculture, but no. It is a flat colored pile of failure.
A form of digital signage new to me, on NJ Transit-- dig the font! Kim Jong-il's Sushi Chef. Man, that would be a weird job.

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having kids is basically saying 'I want someone else to have to feel like an idiot for a long time and then die, too'

What do I look like sneezing?
I find the end of life decisions of Chester Minitz Jr and Joan Nimitz very admirable and brave.

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Amazing article on some intriguing interpretations of the long term economic climate. Life of compelled leisure might be kind of sort of ok, but getting their is going to be painful. It seems like there would be potential for all kinds of art and beauty, but there's reasonable suspicion that the unwashed masses aren't up for it.

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That article linked to other thoughtful articles on Higher Education as a Bubble and the concept of Peak Capitalism. Hopefully I'm not too pollyanna in liking articles that say big disruptive changes are going to be happening, but it's not the gloom and doom for everyone some other pundits always are banging on about.

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Actually, a fiction major was probably the best EVER preparation for marketing.

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I was trying to quantify what seemed off about the masses Zoosk shows me, like vs OKCupid, and I realized: none of them are in glasses. It's like Zoosk doesn't know me at all.
6 or 7 weeks in to my CCAE drawing class, and I'm finally drawing something that looks human-ish....instructor thought this was the best one he'd seen from me...

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'Is easier to empty your pockets when your pants are on.' -Uninspiring Buddha, if pants had been invented then. #zentrousers

Quite a whittling talent!

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Amniotic fluid... is that like Coconut Water?

There's a set of behind the scenes movie photos making the round-- my favorite is still that header they use of Brigitte Helm in Metropolis but Frankenstein having tea and a smoke is awesome:

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Sometimes I wish "playback at 1.5x or 2x speed" was standard for all video, especially keynote presentations and TED-like talks. Another Alien Bill by my co-conspirator James Harvey. Not sure I've ever seen the guy in pants, but at least it sets him apart from that damn Monsters Inc guy.

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PROTIP: if you're trying out the upgrade to iOS7, take screenshots of your homescreens, because icon ordering might not be preserved.
This is an animated GIF scene from a rap battle parody -- the video was a kind of clever parody, pointing out how subjective the "winner" of a battle is, it's all about the belief your entourage has in you...

Love that guy looking like he's losing his mind, and the clever splicing of the video...

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I realized my life would be so much better if there was an easy way of embedding a browser (to make a UI) and maybe a tomcat-ish server as a standalone Java app. Any thoughts? Amazing rainbow over JP:

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How do you spell non sequitur? With an orange.

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You know the web dev rule 'don't mix logic+content'? Now think coding: is OOP like html w tables & inline styles? (oop=func+data mixed!)

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Racefail in Game of Thrones, specifically the white liberal woman as the saving and humanizing force for all the browns peoples.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ On my dev blog, quick thoughts on iOS7's "Today" view and what "slide to unlock" should mean.

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The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

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http://www.yelp.com/biz/ups-customer-center-south-boston -- I think Geek Squad using these guys to send back my fixed camera is a form of punishment. I haven't noticed many Yelp scores that low. 'Happy Birthday' is the public domain... I'd kind of miss the fake-y songs shows and restaurants put in its place "Happy happy birthday / You know we're all excited / We'd like to sing the real song / But we think it's copyrighted"

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I enjoyed this for the splitscreen fun. And the beards.

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I think people who love Backbone.js think more in nouns, and I think in verbs. It's a profund philosophical interactions vs essence divide.

How embarrassingly essential happiness is.

Yesterday I was dabbling in two different art media... drawing (where the expected model didn't show, so we had a very stocky guy come in as a late replacement) and Processing, where I made Pinworms -- a not very interesting interactive toy.

Man, it was so much tougher to draw this guy than the model last week but I kind of like how my last one came out-- I worry it's a little too cartoonish however.

click for fullsize

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It has been making the rounds but this "across the decades" cover of Get Lucky (a song I like more in theory than in practice) is terrific:

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Clicking around looking (fruitlessly) for end of Bruins game-- it's kind of hard to believe that the show "Hogans Heroes" happened. Interactive Panorama of yesterday's rainbow

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The sudden realization that Hodor might be a Pokemon.

Battlebots: an Oral History... was just thinking about that show... Had a small life lesson from my car last night.

I came out from a friend's and found the back hatch hadn't closed properly, the light was on in the back and the red light on the dash. (I had had a bike the rear of it for a while, and was driving around with the back mostly but not quite closed, but that had been earlier in the day.)

Luckily my battery was fine, and the hatch FELT closed after I tried slamming, and I wasn't getting as much wind noise on the way home, so I was ok with figuring out in the comfort of my own driveway.

Get home, get out my phone's flashlight, look for a sensor (since maybe it was closed, just not reading as closed), but figure it's all built into the latch itself. Fiddle with that, manage to lock the latch while the hatch was open which was kind of dumb, can't shut it, undo it, curse, slam it again, it feels shut and I can turn off the interior lights but the red light is still on, make some mental plans to bring in the car to a great garage I know in Cambridge the next day and realize it was the side door that had been not-quite-closed the whole time, the hatch was fine.

Sigh.

On the one hand having a single warning light for every door in the car is suboptimal, but there's a lesson here in not assuming what you know about any given problem.

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No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.

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There is just one thing--and I'm not it.

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Same model as previously (the gal, not the caveman dude from last time)
I think I had this image on a folder for elementary school... so evocative back then!
Final session of my first drawing class. Did my model have Buddha nature?
Spent a nice Saturday afternoon and evening with EB and his family. We went to the beach in Rockport...

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Shout out to my peeps who occasionally choke on their own secretions like they've never inhabited a human body before

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Just watched Scarface for the first time. Keep thinking if only I had darker, richer eyebrows, I have the scar to totally rock that look. I just made a an Alien Bill Gallery: "the many faces and one eye of alien bill".

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Don't Laugh, But A Single Artist Just Totally Outshined An Army Of Government Planners -- the artist in question is the one who taught the Basic Drawing class I just finished!

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'If you're going to bring THAT up' never ends with 'then I'm going to tell you I love you.'

The Success of Udemy -- Having worked 3 years on an online learning site, I gotta say, I don't think I understand how everything works.

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VOTED

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My Alien Bill Gallery inspired Madam Luna to ask for another commission...
she'd been watching Giant-themed Anime, may have been an influence...

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Sex, Gender, and Toilets. Study on the signage.

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As I get older, I don't enjoy the same things I once enjoyed.
But I enjoy new and different things!
...
I just don't enjoy them as much as I used to enjoy the things I no longer enjoy.

Long-ish, thoughtful piece on The Obesity Era; the fact that it's increasing even in animals fed lab diets is greatly disturbing to me.

It's temping, then, to think every attempt at weight management is hopeless. Which is a little true, but not 100% true, and I think I'm able to have some success in the fight. Still it's humbling to know that simple "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie" thinking is dead wrong.

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alewife bike cage under watchful eye of cardboard cop, new to the squad

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DOMA gets the smack down!
Remember folks, you saw it here (In OUR DAMN GREAT COMMONWEALTH) first...

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We sent DOMA and Prop 8 off to a farm where they can play with other outdated, fear-driven legislation. It is the worst farm.

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Whoa, back on the obesity thing: Holy crap, what if it's the CO2 counts?

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Wow. Texas Legislature CHANGES TIMESTAMPS and tries to rewrite the history of the Wendy's heroic filibuster...
sentiment at kendall sq T

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While TV and computer screens have moved from 4:3 to 16:9, the 1:1 square crop is going to be more important in amateur photography and video, in part because it's more natural and comfortable to hold a phone upright when taking photos and especially video, and because portrait-mode video looks a bit daft.

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Novice programmers swear when they get stuck. Expert programmers swear every fucking second.

New art class! And very different -- it almost felt like an open studio, except the instructor did a quick demo, and I kind of followed her lead, and I'm using a very different form of charcoal. I'm pleased with the results, so much so that I'm worried I'm missing some of the point of the other style. (Though it very likely made these attempts much better.)





jamaica pond
click for fullsize

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Oh, christ. RT @neiltyson: Just an FYI: The year 1980 is as far in today's past as 1947 was to 1980.

2013 June❮❮prevnext❯❯