Taped Up Ears
I can't listen to music on tape anymore. It's muffled, distorted and lacking in dynamics. Even with surface noise removed and top-end partials extrapolated, it's still pretty rough. How I spent my teen years listening to cassettes I'm not sure - and how I spent them listening to cassette copies of vinyl I really don't know.
Now, when I make music, I feed the sounds through a device which combines a lowpass filter, amplitude compressor, and harmonic exciter - it reduces digital harshness, creating a warm, mellow, slightly fuzzy feel. In other words, it recreates the classic sound of...analog tape.
There's some songs I grew up with hearing them only on cassette, or MW radio. Now after twenty years I get to hear them on CD - or MP3 ripped from CD - and it's like...
You know when you get water in your ears after going swimming? And you spend the rest of the day walking around thinking you can hear perfectly, until suddenly there's a pop and all the muffledness you didn't even notice has gone? It's like that.
FAWM 2009: Lyrics 2
Tom Tom Club were a spin-off from Talking Heads. It came about because two of the members considered they were getting too precious in songwriting about the complex meanings of lyrics. Essentially they found they were having to write poetry when then wanted to write songs.
So they created a side project, where they could just let the words come easily and not worry about being deep.
Well, after spending today struggling with two half finished songs, I thought I should do a Tom Tom Club, and stop being quite so up myself, in the interests of actually getting something done.
And this is the result. Working title: Celebrity
Verse 1:
Picture yourself
---On a magazine
Picture it now
---On the silver screen
How does it feel
---You're at number one
Top of the charts
---Loved by everyone
Who's on your arm
---When the cameras flash
What do you wear
---At the latest bash
Glitter and glam
---Party premiere
Champaign on ice
---People stop and stare
Chorus 1:
Hello goodbye you're
Last weeks rising
Star, but now your
Off the radar
Hello goodbye you're
This weeks one to
Watch until you're
Not so hot
Verse 2:
Interview time
---Drunk on live TV
Cameo roles
---Straight to DVD
Scandal and sleaze
---Marriage on the rocks
Pictures inside
---Secret lover shock
Out of control
---Back in therapy
Take any deal
---Scientology
Picture yourself
---Can you walk away
Picture it now
---That was yesterday
Chorus 2:
Hello goodbye, you're
Last year's hot young
Thing, and now the
Phone ain't ringing
Hello goodbye you're
My new hottest
Tip till ratings
Start to dip
Head, Blow and Swallow
I know where all these headaches have been coming from.
The fan heater that's been blowing lovely hot air at me while it's freezing cold and snowing outside was emitting fumes, and poisoning me.
I'm not sure whether swallowing the 1000mg of ibuprofen it took to stop my temples throbbing constitutes a different poisoning.
So now I have a choice.
(1) Be especially nice to my parents so they'll let me borrow their non-toxic heater all the time.
(2) Get the old one back and keep a large box of co-codomols handy.
(3) Run around the room every few minutes to keep warm.
(4) Train the dogs to wrap themselves around me.
(5) Spend GBP20 on a new convection heater.
Cleaning Out My Closet
Last night I put all the software and drivers I'm likely to need on one USB memory stick, and went to bed. Today I needed the stick but couldn't find it. So I cleared away half of a year's worth of junk looking for it - before finding it in the place I'd first looked.
However, here's some of the things I found in the meantime:
* Two bottles of water - unopened
* Two packets of extra strong mints - half gone
* Three USB cables I've been looking for
* About a dozen blank DVDRs - which would have been useful last week
* Four pens
* About five pounds in loose copper change
* Two headache pills - useful, as I had a headache
* Two half packets of co-codamol - for extra headache relief
* Fourteen notebooks - half filled
* Six teabags - one of which became part of my breakfast
* One spoon - for stirring the tea
* About 100 DVDRs marked "Misc Porn".
* Three bottles of bodybuilding supplements - unopened
* Two boxes of eardrops - one empty
* One block of wood with no discernable function
* Two pingpong balls sawn in half
* Three pairs of miniature headphones
* One tub of dermatological cream - smells of petrol and brought my headache back
* Four hard disks - all under 6GB
* Two CD burners - nonfunctional
* One wristwatch - presumably the source of those mysterious bleeps every hour
FAWM 2009: Lyrics 1
Good way to start a project. Write the first song, then lose all your data and spend the first day fixing the laptop.
Anyway, here is the (reconstructed) first song:
After Words
Verse 1:
Silence on the end of the phone, I'm still
Waiting here, you
Said you really needed to talk tonight but
The words won't come out right
Breathing on the end of the line, i'm still
Listening here, you're
Starting to recover it now and then but
The tears come back again
Bridge:
Do you need to speak at all or
Just someone to hear?
Chorus:
Are we
After words, or be
-fore
If you've got something to say
What are you waiting for? Are we
After words, or be
-fore
If there's nothing more to say
What are you waiting for?
Verse 2:
Shouting on the end of the phone, I don't
Understand, I
Said you should become what you meant to be, but
The one you blame is me
Buzzing on the end of the line, I'm still
Standing here, I'm still
Standing here, I'm still
Standing here
Chorus
Oh yes, the list of fourteen titles. Not a helpful idea, ignore it.
FAWMication
The idea behind February Album Writing Month is to write and record fourteen songs in twenty eight days.
I don't imagine I've got a hope in hell of doing it, but I'm going to try.
The KLF, before they started work on their White Room album, wrote down the first ten song titles which came to mind...and then wrote the songs to the titles.
I'm thinking vaguely of doing something similar, with fourteen titles which I'll try to write around. With the little twist that each title is a pun. Here's the list.
Hooked on Sonics
Queen of Diva
Second Slumming
Freaks Bearing Gifts
Beautiful Sting
In the Realm of Defences
Oedipus Rocks
Pump up the Scam
Shock da House
Birth and Debt
Captain Beefcake
Slobfather
Weapon of Crass Distraction
The Beatless and the Stoned
And here's some that didn't make it.
History Defeats itself
Alice Threw the Looking Glass
Woman on the Surge of a Pervert Shakedown
Fool Britannia
Battery will Get You Everywhere
The Shite Album
Last Night a DJ Raved This Dive
So now, at 00:01 Sunday February the first, 2009, I start from nothing and see what I can do.
No One Told You It Was Gonna Be This Way
There's two kinds of friends. Those who tell you what you want to hear, and those who tell you what you need to know.
Oh, there's also those who just need you to listen to them telling you things, but friend isn't quite the word for them.
Which is odd, because most friends are like that.
Milky Milky
Reasons to drink tea without milk:
(1) Europeans do it, and they're sophisticated.
(2) Americans do it, and they're tough.
(3) Without milk to muddy the flavour, you can actually taste the difference between different types of tea.
(4) It's actually quite nice.
(5) With a kettle, a cup, a stack of teabags and an optional bottle of lemon juice, I can have a nice cup of tea at four in the morning, without having to creep downstairs and wake up the dogs getting milk from the fridge.
The other options are to get a fridge in the bedroom, or develop a taste for yoghurt in tea.
Picture the Cn
Night in with C.
Getting squiffy on rum, going soppy over little dogs, discussing everything from the development of superhero costumes in Marvel comics, to the soteriological ramifications of Pascal's Gambit.
Who needs a boyfriend when you've got a friend?
He also sent me two pictures collected in his travels around Europe. It seems my beneficient influence is being felt in unexpected quarters.
Soon, I shall rule...The World!
Fawmality
February Album Writing Month. Starts in three days.
So I have that long to get the laptop all sorted out, and get into the habit of carrying around a pad of paper to note those sudden inspirations that strike when you're in the middle of doing something else.
I once wrote three and a half songs in twelve hours - one of which was even worth keeping. The others were my embarrasing sole attempt at a love song, and a cheerful, bouncy ditty about absurd plots in porn films.
Boxes in Boxes
So, can I put Reason and Reaper into one portable installation? And do they work together? Yes.
Can I do the same with Firefox and Orbit Downloader? Oh yes.
Can I bundle Firefox, Orbit, Flash, Java, Quicktime Alternative, Real Alternative, Shockwave and Firefox's Windows Media Player Plugin? I can indeed, though some details need working out.
Now, Can I make a portable installation of a virtual machine - specifically, the one I use to make portable installations? Um, no. The makers seem to have fixed it so you can't.
The advantage of bundling Firefox with all those plugins, or bundling WinAmp with a load of audio and video codecs, is that I can transfer the whole bundle from one computer to another and it should work fine, without having to install a load of stuff on someone else's computer just so I can use one bit of software for a while.
The disadvantage...is that to update any part of the bundle, I have to make it again from scratch.
I'll have to sleep on that one.
Today's the Day
Remember how, a few weeks ago, I finally got through to the bureucrats to ask where my jobseeker's allowance had got to? And how the holdup had been a piece of especially pointless paperwork they (a) hadn't told me about and (b) hadn't sent me? And how they said with true sincerity that it had just been sent to me that very day?
Well now after two weeks I finally get through again, to ask them what's happened to this mysterious form that I filled out. And they tell me with true sincerity that everything has just been sorted out this very day. What a remarkable coincidence.
For Want of a Shoe
I want to record a song.
To do this, I need two programs - Reason and Reaper - to pass data between each other.
Reason is probably the best program around for making electronic music, but has the bizarre limitation that it can't record sound. However, it can integrate with other sequencers using a system called Rewire.
Reaper is an excellent little sequencer, which I want to use as Reason's sound recording device. It'll generate a sound file which I can load into Reason, which will apply all the necessary effects and mix it in with the music.
Now, almost all the software I have installed is portable, which is great in many ways, but there's one disadvantage - each portable program runs in its own bubble, which means it sometimes has difficulty communicating with other portable programs. For instance, links clicked in portable Thunderbird won't open portable Firefox to view them in.
But, I think I may have a solution - to create a new portable installation which includes both Reason and Reaper in the same bubble.
To make this installation, I have to set up a virtual machine.
To do this, I have to install the virtual-machine-creating software on my new laptop.
To do this, I have set up the partitions for the virtual-machine-creating software and the virtual machine itself to go on.
To do this I first have to clear off the data that I've temporarily backed up there from another computer.
To do this I have to burn it to DVD.
To do this I have to install DVD burning software.
To do this I have to transfer it from another computer.
To do this I have to find the USB memory stick to transfer it with.
And to do this I have to find the jacket the stick's in.
I can't find the jacket.
The Big Picture
"Now watch what you say, or they'll be calling you a Technical,
a practical, academical, pedagogical."
- Not quite Supertramp, The Logical Song
YouTube sound is shit.
It's 64kbps (so grainy), 22.05KHz (so muffled) and 1ch (so mono). In 2007 it was possible to encode your video to certain setting in FLV (Flash Video) format, and YouTube's conversion (or reconversion) into it's native FLV settings would be bypassed. The video quality was really rubbish, but the sound was at least stereo. It was a bug, and they "fixed" it.
Now if you upload high resolution files, you're given the option to encode to high resolution FLV, and sometimes the stereo signal stays stereo. And sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it plays stereo when played in Internet Explorer but not other browsers.
It gets weirder. When you upload a stereo file, it gets recoded and stored on one or another of YouTube's servers - it seems to be random which server is chosen. Now, some servers recode your audio to mono, while others actually recode it to stereo, but stream it as mono...unless you add "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=22" to the end of the URL.
Or maybe this "bug" has now been "fixed", because I've spent the afternoon experimenting with uploading different formats - FLV and DivX for video, PCM and MP3 for audio, and no matter what I do, the result is mono and crummy.
There's no good reason for YouTube to stick to this policy. Their settings are adequate for speech, but YouTube is used extensively for music. Settings of 128kbps 44.1KHz 2ch are routinely used by internet radio stations, so bandwidth just isn't the issue it was when YouTube started out. But sticking to it they are, like shit to your shoe.
Here's what I found while researching the above.
If you want to minimise the amount of video you have to upload with your audio, the smallest resolution that most video making/converting programs can handle is 8x8. However, the FLV standard seems to have a lower limit of 160x120. I haven't done extensive tests to find just how low a resolution YouTube can convert from, but it chokes on 8x8 and is fine with 160x120.
Amazingly though, the difference between a minute of 8x8 black screen and one at 160x120, coded to either FLV or DivX, is a few dozen kilobytes. So, don't worry about it. And if the technology obliges you to use a resolution high enough to put a logo on, I'd say put a logo on it.
This is assuming the video is encoded at one frame per second - though there's no great reason why the framerate can't go even lower. There's obviously no reason to deinterlace a black screen, and FLV is happy with a video bitrate of 1kbps. YouTube was happy with DivX at 125kbps, but not at 1.
Did you know you can schedule blogger posts? Just set the timestamp for a time/date in the future, and blogger will wait until that time to post them. I found this by accident - after spending half a day unsuccessfully searching for a simple way to schedule email sending.
So I think I'll try using it. Instead of blocking three or four topics into one post every two or three days, there'll be smaller posts more often, staggered over the same period.
This will:
(a) make me look more prolific and
(b) make me seem to be posting from my computer at times when I'm actually somewhere completely different. Or more likely, in front of a different computer.
In the meantime, this post marks the start of a new label: Technical.
Why Do I Have to Be Mr Pink?
Typical. I spend a few hours figuring out how to gerrymander blogger into hosting podcasts, and it turns out
(a) Google Video, which hosts Blogger Video, will cease accepting new uploads in a few months. This is because Google Video, like about fifty other google products, is being reduced with the workforce.
Sometimes the products are allowed to slowly die - often after they've been bought up with the original developers for millions of dollars. Sometimes they're abruptly discontinued, and sometimes as in this case they're just scaled down to something still useful but much less useful - a video search tool. A literal google for videos, in fact.
(b) OurMedia does it better anyway.
Today's culinary adventure: Sheep offal bulked with oats and stuffed into the sheep's stomach, traditionally served with mashed up turnips and swede.
Haggis with neeps and tatties.
Once a year, English supermarkets stock these items in anticipation of Burns Night, which marks the birth (or it might be the death, or something else, no one I've asked is sure) of Robert Burns - prolific Scottish author of poems, all of which seem to have turned into songs.
Every country seems to have it's own variation on "the less appetising bits of an animal mashed up and baked with whatever vegetables grow locally". We've got shepherd's pie, I'm told Canadians have cowboy pie, and I've eaten (but been unable to pronounce) some east european variations.
I've decided I rather like haggis. But it won't be available for another year.
There is a program called Driver Genius, which scans your computer for out-of-date drivers and downloads up-to-date replacements for them. Sound good? My advice is: Don't use it, ever.
I've tried it twice, and on both occasions the "new" drivers either didn't work at all, or seemed much earlier than the ones they replaced.
Just a small public service announcement.
Last week I bought a pink computer.
My old laptop had (almost literally) exploded, and mother had lent me hers for a little while, so I could continue reading wikipedia, playing mp3s and, well, searching for a bargain on a new laptop.
And I did indeed find a reasonable bargain, with 12.1" screen, 4GB RAM, 2GB cache, 2.26GHz dual core processor, N-type wireless compatibility, 250GB SATA drive, and other good things understood only by people who spend far too much time sitting at computers, reading about computers.
Plus, I could get it for twenty three pounds less...if I got the version in pink. And it was very pink. Pinker than a gay triangle, pinker than the girlband Pink, pinker than cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker - who isn't actually very pink at all.
Except after a week it still hasn't been built. So I phoned up and enquired. It seems the pink version - sorry, the pink version - had been discontinued. Without anyone telling the sales department or website maintainer - or indeed me.
Sigh. So I cancel the order, and set about choosing a new one. And what should I find but a nice black laptop with about the same specs...for a hundred and fifty pounds less!
So this is me, happily shacked up with a cool, dark, spiffy new boyf...computer. In the pink, indeed.
Whack/Job
"Error is the force that welds men together."
- Tolstoy, My Religion
"I have a medium-sized fire axe buried in my spinal column."
- Kryten, Red Dwarf
"How embarrassing. A house full of condiments and no food."
- Narrator, Fight Club
The jobcentre will rule on whether I'm british or not...sometime next week. Probably. After which one of three things will happen.
Possibility 1: They'll decide I do actually live here, as birth certificate, passport and their own records show, and I'll get the last eight weeks jobseeker's allowance all at once.
Possibility 2: They'll decide I don't live here after all, and should presumably therefore be deported to...um, wherever I was born. This poses a conundrum, because if it can't be proven I do live here, I'd have to be deported to wherever it can be proven I do live...but as soon as it was proven, I couldn't go there. Although I'm already there.
For these purposes, I shall suddenly remember that I was born in a sunny latin american country, just opposite a good ESL school.
Possibility 3: They'll produce a new sheaf of delaying forms to fill out, in which case they'll all die horribly. Partly for the sake of my own sanity, but mostly because they deserve it.
A lot of people go on the internet to look at other people having sex. Others do it to arrange having sex with each other. But more go on the internet to have sex with each other on the internet.
Or rather...to have sex with themselves while watching other people having sex with themselves. It used to be called "scoptophillia exhibitionism", but now it's called "camfun".
The main difference between C2C and 121 is, when you realise the person you're cybersexing with is someone you really don't want in your bedroom, nevermind your orifices, you still have cybersex with them.
So, here is Kapitano's top five ways to make cybersex unsexy. All guaranteed to kill the mood, and all from the kind of arsehole you shouldn't fuck.
(5) Pseudo-involvement. Pointing the webcam at your unmoving face and leaving it there for an hour, except for when you leave it pointed at an empty chair for another hour when you walk away without logging off.
(4) Repeated inflexibility. The man who knows exactly what he wants, won't settle for anything else, and requests it every minute for three hours. Things like "n e blond?", "want hairy pm me", "stockings?", and "older sub for young dom".
(3) Control freakery. Constantly hassling with instructions like "show your ass", "bounce your balls", "pump it", "get harder" and "get a toy i wanna see you with a toy a big black one".
(2) Impatience. Some seem to think the point of sex is to get it over with as quickly as possible - these are the ones who say "cum 4 me", "do it now", "i want cum whos abt 2 unload?", and "shoot it 4 me right now".
...and finally, my recently discovered biggest turnoff of them all...
(1) Abusive monomania. For instance, repeatedly typing such allcap philosophical gems as "AMERICAN COCKS RULE", "WE WON WAR 4 U EUROS U OWE US", and "US HAS BEST FUCKING I ONLY FUCK PURE AMERICANS WE FUCK WORLD YEAH". In case you doubt it, these are real examples.
The internet really is full of knobs.
Video Killed
One of the oddities of Blogger is, it will host video for you, but not audio. So you can vlog but not podcast. If you want Blogger to host audio, you have to give it a video track.
Of course it doesn't have to be much of a video track - you could use a slideshow of photos, a logo, or just a blank screen. But it's not very elegant to have a redundant non-video staring at you while your music, poetry or commentary plays. There should be some way to at least make the video window invisible, leaving just the playback bar - and there is.
When you upload your video to Blogger, it recodes what you send to flash format, and embeds a display window in your post. The HTML code looks something like this:
<object id="BLOG_video-41b6eee4fd64c73b" class="BLOG_video_class" contentid="41b6eee4fd64c73b" height="240" width="320"></object>
Unless you're pasting from the source code of another blog, in which case it'll look something like this:
<embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.blogger.com/img/videoplayer.swf?videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvp.video.google.com%2Fvideodownload%3Fversion%3D0%26secureurl%3DqAAAAOF-u9WtopylwZ9XHAqIS4Q8mMCKxx25CeJq8bZBiPr6Lw1nPt3Mzuy4dAHiTdzlJdTM7R5C4A8yULlJcCGk46syEW7Wkg_D7V8QgTWwr-HGf1tvwnESv5Uz2E9E7wL5Ce4fg3BdxWEVOmlQ1z-PDH480M4DbkLsn6npmDomUJiai-I7XKyv_b2OZ_QnsOVpAr_T0XVce-X10Sy6q7FESf6NIerYRfXjTmzBMH8TG0aC%26sigh%3D7BraJLEO2xG_ZgceHKNZLuRXVY0%26begin%3D0%26len%3D86400000%26docid%3D0&nogvlm=1&thumbnailUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer2%3Fapp%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D9c3e5d0d5c086378%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw320%26sigh%3DqlhWps1wzO-wxaMVRD9NQowWIKI&messagesUrl=video.google.com%2FFlashUiStrings.xlb%3Fframe%3Dflashstrings%26hl%3Den" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<a href="rtsp://rtsp-youtube.l.google.com/video.3gp?app=blogger&fmt=13&cid=9c3e5d0d5c086378" type="video/3gpp"><img width="320" height="266" alt="video" src="http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app=blogger&contentid=9c3e5d0d5c086378&offsetms=5000&itag=w320&sigh=qlhWps1wzO-wxaMVRD9NQowWIKI" class="BLOG_mobile_video_class" id="BLOG_mobile_video-9c3e5d0d5c086378"></a>
A bit daunting isn't it. This example is a fifteen second clip of a firework display, from the blog of David's Tangled Thoughts. Hi David, I hope you don't mind I've used code from your page as an example.
If you're pasting code like the latter, you can edit out everything from "<a href="rtsp" onwards, and everything from &nogvlm=1& until ""</embed>", leaving you with:
<embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.blogger.com/img/videoplayer.swf?videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvp.video.google.com%2Fvideodownload%3Fversion%3D0%26secureurl%3DqAAAAOF-u9WtopylwZ9XHAqIS4Q8mMCKxx25CeJq8bZBiPr6Lw1nPt3Mzuy4dAHiTdzlJdTM7R5C4A8yULlJcCGk46syEW7Wkg_D7V8QgTWwr-HGf1tvwnESv5Uz2E9E7wL5Ce4fg3BdxWEVOmlQ1z-PDH480M4DbkLsn6npmDomUJiai-I7XKyv_b2OZ_QnsOVpAr_T0XVce-X10Sy6q7FESf6NIerYRfXjTmzBMH8TG0aC%26sigh%3D7BraJLEO2xG_ZgceHKNZLuRXVY0%26begin%3D0%26len%3D86400000%26docid%3D0"</embed>
...and it'll work just fine. Either way, replace the "height" number with "27". That's it. Now your blank video won't display, and you're (kind of) podcasting from inside Blogger.
Here's my experiment in non-video, which is also an introduction to the drumkit I've been working on for the past week. Unfortunately, Blogger sound isn't great, and is only mono.
You might (just possibly) want to do this with YouTube videos. Here's the embed code for a video chosen almost at random.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/VSUX9byu6NY&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VSUX9byu6NY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
...and here's the video. It's a killer.
It turns out you need almost none of the code. This snippet is all you absolutely need, though the video won't be resized, and there'll be no fullscreen option:
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VSUX9byu6NY&hl=en&fs=1"></embed>
To crop out the video window, leaving only the tracking bar underneath, put the width and height parameters back in, with the height set to 25. Personally, I prefer a width of 320. The code now looks like this:
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VSUX9byu6NY&hl=en&fs=1" width="320" height="25"></embed>
...and the clip now looks like this:
The video is still there, and still being streamed. It's just not being displayed.
One small detail - the volume icon still works, and you can mute playback, but the vertical slider you use to adjust the volume is now cropped out of view. So in effect, there's no volume control.
You can perform similar surgery on MTVMusic.Com videos, turning this...
<embed src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:18123" width="320" height="271" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashVars="dist=http://www.mtvmusic.com" allowFullScreen="true" AllowScriptAccess="never"></embed> <div style="margin:0; text-align:center; width:320px;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:10px;"><a style="color:#000000;" href="http://www.mtvmusic.com/buggles">The Buggles</a> |<a style="color:#000000;" href="http://www.mtvmusic.com/">MTV Music</a></div>
...into this...
<embed src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:18123" width="320" height="25"></embed>
...which gives you this:
Unfortunately it won't work on Daily Motion embed codes - it crops out the tracking bar. LiveVideo fails a little differently, and changing the size parameters changes the size of the whole box, including the playback controls.
Safety Covers
"And you can not real move
and totally remove 'em
like an African imbecile."
- What I've been hearing for 25 years
"And you can act real rude
and totally removed
and I can act like an imbecile."
- What's actually being sung
If only there were some way to get that mild euphoria you get when a hangover fades...without the hangover first.
My cousin has a laptop. Being the kind of person he is, this means he has the computing power of the pentagon in a machine the size of a box of chocolates, costing the annual GDP of three small African countries. Slight exaggeration, but you get the picture.
Here's something that's not an exaggeration. It has a one terabyte hard drive. 1TB. That's one thousand and twenty four gigabytes. 1.024 * 10^4 bytes. The equivalent of two hundred and thirty eight DVDs.
I just tried to calculate that in terms of listening time for CD quality mp3s. It came to about two thousand years.
Now, my cousin isn't dumb, but he doesn't know much about computers, so he's got the whole hard drive in one big partition. Which means when something goes wrong with the operating system or the master file table or the boot sector, the whole thing stops working and he loses all data. Unless someone like me or mother can do a few hundred pounds worth of specialist work for the promise of a cup of tea sometime, to fix it.
Yes, something has indeed gone wrong.
I like analogies so here's one. Someone who can just about boil an egg purchases the kitchen of the Ritz hotel to make one piece of cheese on toast. He does this by turning the enormous oven up full blast and throwing in unopened packets of bread and cheese, getting angry and baffled when the result is a black stinking mess.
Now imagine this is happening in every street in the country, with smaller versions in every second home. There is however a fairly small number of highly trained, highly paid professionals, whose job is to clean up the ovens and give lessons (always ignored) on basic kitchen operation. There is also a much larger number of highly self-trained amateurs who do most of the cleaning and teaching, in exchange for being summarily dismissed when they've finished and being ridiculed behind their backs.
Because the cheese-lovers think it's easier to fuck up and have someone else fix it than to learn to use a fucking toaster.
If my cousin proves capable of belatedly grasping that he has to learn how to use a computer just like any other tool, he'll be worth helping.
I took an online quiz to find out whether my brain's male or female. And apparently it's 25% female. But not to worry because the average woman is only 50% female. Which is...nice.
But if you think this is just a steaming pile of junk science and pseudo-statistics, think again! Because it also showed that I'm also useless with language, highly empathic, and very organised. How do they understand me so well?!
I didn't see President Obama's inaugural address, but I'm guessing it went roughly "Change...strong America...moving forward...unity...face challenges". Is that about right?
The morning news had Will Smith being elegiac about the dawn of a new age, presumably on the basis that he's (a) black, (b) famous and (c) got nothing to say. If there's a gay president next time maybe they'll interview David Hyde Pierce.
Now we'll just have to see how long it takes the world to realise (a) Obama can't reverse the recession, (b) he isn't really on the side of the people, and (c) he isn't going to do any of the nice things he promised, on the grounds that he didn't actually promise them.
egwrhetryjutk
Disclaimer: Isn't integrity wonderful. When I set up this here blog, I promised myself I wouldn't retroactively edit or delete posts to cast myself in a better light. What gets posted, stays. Case in point...Exhibit A below.
Gah.
I'm ver very drunk. Kind of wish I didn't like it so muchg. Dyspeptic update coming in a few hours. In the meantime,, love you all any want to suck all on your cocks. Each and every one, ti;ll you spunk up and go uuh! in mmy mouth and i own yiou.
Update: Evening babysitting, night getting drunk, morning hangover. Then back to reality, and moderate embarrassment. Same again soon.
Numb3rs
"Eins zwei drei vier funf sechs sieben acht
Uno due treis quattro
One two
Ichi ni san chi
Adjin, dva, tri
Li, Tva, Tri"
- Kraftwerk, Numbers
"We have the right to go where we wish, with as many as we wish."
- Eldred, Babylon 5
Friday
Today I did a "Habitual Residency" test for our beloved civil service. Here are some of the questions, together with answers that may or may not reflect what I actually wrote.
When did you first come to the UK?
In 1972. When I was born here.
Did you bring any belongings from outside the UK?
I left with a suitcase full of clothes, and came back with the same suitcase full of the same clothes.
Do you have any close relatives outside the UK?
You mean, why can't I go and sponge off some other country? Go fuck yourself.
How do you plan to support yourself?
I'm going to murder pointless bureaucrats like you and sell off your internal organs on ebay.
Why did you come to the UK?
It's my home you stupid twunt.
Is there anything else you want to tell us?
Remember how, when I signed on, I had to prove I officially existed by having a British passport? Go on - see if you can join the dots.
A year ago I spent fifty one days in another part of the EU, and now you've decided I need to prove I'm a "habitual resident" in a place I lived for thirty six years.
You seem to think I'm now a foreigner, and therefore need to beg for the privilege of staying in your illustrious country, so long as I promise not to spoil it with my fiendish foreign ways.
Mother is trying Ubuntu. And Windows 7.
I'm wondering whether any of the programs I use actually need XP. Maybe they'd all work in Windows 2000?
Saturday
I'm 37.
Have you ever noticed how, for a select few numerical ways to describe a person, we can just use the number and not the unit?
If I say "He's five-nine", I mean "He's five feet and nine inches tall". If I say "I'm 37", you know I'm talking about my age - as opposed to income, IQ score, or academic points.
Sometimes we use an indefinite article. I can say "She's a twelve" to mean "Her dress size is Twelve". "He's a seven" probably means "He wears size seven shoes". She's a double-D, her CD is a number one, and the song is a perfect ten.
I can't say "Bill's one hundred and forty" to describe how much he weighs - it's got to be "Bill's weighs one hundred and forty pounds". "She's a million" doesn't mean "She's a millionaire".
So it seems as far as the english language is concerned, age isn't something you have, or something you do - it's something you are. It defines you.
So it follows that today I suddenly became a different person. I'm thirty seven...going on seventeen...going on a hundred and seven.
I got a fleecy wool shirt, a book of childrens stories (?) from mother, a bottle of rum from, er, a married male friend, and...a special Infomaniac post!
A Row of Cabbages
I have:
* A ping-pong ball
* A scalpel (borrowed from father)
* A roll of sticky tape (borrowed from father)
* Some cotton wool
* A laptop (lent from mother)
* A pair of ear-enclosing headphones (lent from mother)
* Half an hour of pink noise
All the ingredients for a quiet night in. Or a wild night out. Or indeed both at the same time, depending on how things go.
The last time I tried something like this, it was an attempt to induce a synchronised gamma EEG state using panned white noise. What it actually generated was a panic attack, which I later learned is quite common.
Anyway, I'll let you know how my Ganzfeld experiment turned out.
Looking at my bank balance, I had a feeling it was somewhat lower than expected. In fact, about GBP400 lower. Now I know why.
The "Department of Works and Pensions", which pays living allowances to those like myself out of work, has developed a backlog. A six week backlog. Due to a lot of its former penpushers now being...out of work.
They have a special telephone number you can use to ask them to increase the priority of your case. It is permanently engaged.
However, by being bounced around various departments, you can (after twenty minutes of thirty seconds of JS Bach) get referred to the department that can tell you the other reason for the delay.
It's that they haven't yet sent me a vital form. The one where I confirm that, when I signed on three months ago, I wasn't still living in Bulgaria.
It seems they'd been paying me for a month before realising my presence in their office didn't constitute proof that I was in the country.
They assured me they had, by the sheerest coincidence, just that day sent me the form.
Harold Pinter, Eartha Kitt, Patrick McGoohan, Ricardo Montalban. Permanent fixtures of my muddled early life - suddenly not permanent after all.
It seems there are loads of horny young sex gods, all wanting to have sex with little old me. And the amazing thing is, they're all on BoysGo.Com. Some recent usernames and emails:
From hotprettyboy18: never been with a guy.. wanna try getting entered
From Jock27Cock: 27yr old jock here, hung and boned up
From MuscleJock24: big meat stud jock here
From hotAthlete21: let's hookup man boned
From TeenJockHung: up for some fun?
From SurferHung23: hung jock here u wanna play with it?
From studJock23: sup dude.. u up for some fun?
Nosing around for bargains on new laptops, I noticed a few things.
* The difference between 2.0GHz and 2.25GHz is about a hundred pounds.
* The difference between 667MHz memory and 800MHz is about ten pounds.
* The difference between a bright pink case and a cool black one is twenty three pounds. Identical specs - but one is macho matt black, and the other's a colour that makes Barbie look like a trucker.
So, price of manliness: GBP23, or USD33.
In the Meantime, Here is Some Music
Hello, I'm still here - kind of - but my net access over the last week has been patchy to say the least.
And today my laptop won't switch on. It's second hand, obsolete, shouldn't have lasted as long as it has - and therefore a bit like me.
News in brief:
* It's my birthday next saturday - yay! I'll be 37 - doh!
* It's C's birthday today. So, happy b-day - or bidet - to C. Nice day out yesterday to celebrate.
* I know exactly what I want for my bidet. A new laptop. Though the slippers mother's knitting would still be nice.
* I've invented lemon-and-lime tea. I've heard vaguely of apple and raspberry teas, so can you make tea with orange juice?
* Why is it I never remember chocolate gives me a headache until it actually does?
See you...sometime soonish.
The Lost Blog
The last blog update, on the New Year party, was lost when I managed to drop the laptop on the floor. Then spent an hour taking it apart, trying to figure out where the hard drive was, before finding it had fallen out when I dropped it.
This is like having your brain fall out and roll under the bed when you sneeze - an indicator of suboptimal design.
Anyway, short version of the party:
* Drank too much vodka, ate too much fingerfood, talked a lot of politics.
* Why are most of the good people over fifty or under fifteen?
* I kissed a man and we liked it.
Taste of sixth glass of vodka.
I was so drunk, he didn't mind
Don't mean he's not straight tonight.
Here's a few more things I didn't get around to posting recently....
From shortly before Christmas:
Every few months I try to read Hegel, usually the Shorter Logic, and every time he turns my mind to porridge.
"Rosa Lichtenstein" (Hi there Rosa) argues at vast length that:
(1) Hegel's philosophy is rooted in ancient pseudo-paradoxes (eg. Zeno's Arrow, the Road of Heraclitus), linguistic confusion (the identity theory of predication), and cabalist mystical gibbering.
(2) Marx incorporated his version of Hegelianism into his Socialism - even though it's unnecessary for the movement, and irrelevant to the socioeconomic ideas.
(3) The subsequent marxist greats uncritically continued the error, and so have their followers.
(4) This is a major reason marxism specifically and the left in general have been so ineffective for the last 150 years.
Lichtenstein's ideas are not well received by other socialists, especially as she feels the need to insult those who disagree with her. But it has to be said, she calls on a deep reservoir of learning and close-reading of key texts, while her opponents in general do not.
For what it's worth, I think:
(1) The Dialectic of Nature is grossly under-theorised. Endlessly quoting the Theses on Feuerbach, ABC of Dialectics and a few passages from Lenin's Notebooks doesn't cut it.
(2) A sociological dialectic model with social "forces" and "contradictions" is immensely useful, but doesn't depend on a dialectic of physics.
(3) It's an exaggeration to say the left have achieved nothing for 150 years.
(4) Whatever the reasons for their lack of success, an incorrect ontology isn't high on the list.
In other words, I don't think the dialectic is important. But none of my comrades agree with me, so tonight I try again to read Hegel, in case they're right.
From shortly after Christmas:
A rather lovely day out with C, with eating, drinking, walking, browsing, bitching ... but mostly some very good companionship.
There's a piece of gay slang, not used much now - "Sister". When two gay men are best friends, understand each other's way of thinking, and do most the the things boyfriends do together, except sex, they're called sisters.
Kind of the opposite of a fuckbuddy - where sex is the only connection, and one (or indeed both) is often straight.
Probably Boxing Day:
An insomniac flick through Conservapedia's breaking news sections reveals some startling truths, hitherto covered up by the worldwide conspiracy of liberals.
Top Scholars Confirm Truth of Christianity. Translation: One christian academic has a list of other christian academics.
Ann Coulter: My Triumph Over Kwanzaa!. Translation: A columnist no one reads anymore says some rude things about a holiday no one's heard of. No one cares.
"President George W. Bush is being crucified in the public square in spite of his plain decency and goodness". Translation: Voting for Obama is literally identical with insanity. And planting bombs - but not dropping them.
Probably the 28th:
I'd make a great guttural voice-over artist, but only when I've got a cold. Then my voice starts channelling Orson Welles - just right for movie trailers and beer adverts.
So don't delay, book Kapitano's voice today, before I recover. If you don't mind the odd sniffle in the sales patter.
New Queer's Eve
"I will begin again, I will begin again
Oh and maybe the time is right
Oh maybe tonight"
- U2, New Year's Day
In three weeks I'll be thirty seven.
How I stopped being nineteen I'm not sure - it seems to have snuck up on me while I wasn't paying attention for five minutes. Which is unfortunate, because the intervening time is supposed to be best years of your life.
Anyway, thirty seven isn't that far from forty, and forty isn't a million miles from fifty, and fifty is just starting to be a bit old.
"Old" is when you drink to pass the afternoon pleasantly, instead of to get drunk and fall over after making an embarrassing pass at a married man in front of his wife. You eat because you're actually hungry, and carry a packet of indigestion tablets in your top pocket. And it's when you take drugs that mess with your head because they're prescribed by your doctor, instead of because they mess with your head.
It's also the time when the health of your body starts to matter, because you've only just realised you can't trade it in for another one when it falls apart - and you've noticed that it is falling apart.
So, Kapitano's New Queer resolutions:
1) Try to eat fairly sensibly. And do some exercise. This is the difference between being a Big Old Poof and a Fat Old Poof.
2) Stop prevaricating. About...well, everything. Reading, writing, music, research, calling up friends, that sort of thing.
3) ...and finish a few more things I do start.
4) Not spend every spare hour with a computer.
5) Bring down the oppressive governments of the world by organising the masses to socialist revolution and democratic self-rule, thus ending war, saving the environment, and beginning the first chapter of true human history. This one might take a bit of work.
First things first (though not necessarily in that order). New Year's Party - for getting drunk, embarrassing married men though they secretly quite like it, and falling over.
Have a good one.
Or two.
Message
A short story about expectations.
The first angels had appeared only weeks earlier.
Glowing humanoid forms, with indistinct outline and features, motionless and glowing a deep blue had materialised in twelve major population centres around the world.
Journalists interviewed witnesses, bloggers speculated, the sick begged for healing, the powerful tried to negotiate, the military tried to destroy. All to no effect.
The angels, as they'd become known, stood motionless and blurred, indestructible, unmoving and seemingly unaware.
But, over the ensuing days, the forms gradually become clearer and the faces more obviously human.
Religious leaders tried to claim the figures for themselves, and political groups did the same. Everyone wanted the visitors to confirm their particular hopes and fears, but the shining figures simply stood there, oblivious and unnoticing.
Then they started to make sounds. Their lips didn't move, but it sounded like they were trying to talk.
Mystics claimed to have predicted their arrival, and interpreted its meaning, varying from the end of the world in war to the dawn of a new age.
The angel's voices started to form recognisable words in the dominant languages of the cities where they'd arrived. Every few hours they "spoke" for several minutes, a few tantalising words, before going silent.
"...message...secret...tell..."
It had to be first contact with a higher being. Humanity was chosen, blessed, about to receive a glorious truth.
"...sad...night...alone...want...please..."
It was a call for help, or a call to action.
"...love...my friend...more beautiful...important...listen..."
It was a plea for unity, or a warning for unbelievers.
A month after the arrival, dignitaries and holders of power were clustered around each of the twelve, hoping to hear the first recognisable sentences from the figures, and hoping they could somehow turn it to their advantage.
The halos flickered in unison around the globe, a sign the angels were about to speak. There was an expectant silence, which stretched into minutes.
Then each of the twelve spoke, clearly and fully.
"This is an important message. Please listen.
Are you sad and lonely because you can't make girls fall for you? Do you feel worthless every night because you can't make them want you?
Well I've got the secret of love and I want to tell you. Yes, my friend, you.
With my help you'll soon be getting more beautiful girls than you'd ever thought possible!
With my infallible method, you'll never sleep alone! And that's a promise!
Send no money now..."
Crimbo Himbo Limbo
So that was christmas.
Getting drunk, eating too much, eating some more, waiting a bit, eating some more, sleeping, watching a crap christmas movie, drinking brandy, scoffing chocolates, watching the crap Dr Who christmas special, eating christmas dinner, having second helpings, having pudding, finishing off the chocolates with coffee, watching more crap christmas TV, more alcohol, sausage rolls, feeling crap...and bed.
Thank god we don't do that kind of thing more than...twenty or thirty times a year.
However, let us think of those who are alone at this time of year. Such as the bloke who txted to say he was bored and lonely, so was I free for a blowjob.
Yeah okay I was tempted. But already too full of, um, spicy sausage.
There's a "Blog Year Roundup" meme, which involves listing the first sentence from the first post of each month. So here's mine:
January:
"Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible."
February:
Okay, more or less back on line.
March:
My grandmother washed her clothes in a large tub.
April:
I have an apartment.
May:
Happy Mayday.
June:
There's two reasons to neglect your blog.
July:
"Teacher, you eat your beans."
August:
Wednesday was great, Thursday was awful.
September:
I'm not going to go blind after all.
October:
It's been one of those weeks where nothing comes easily.
November:
4500 words, and still no plot.
December:
I am once again officially unemployed.
Yep, a pretty good summary of the year.
So I hereby tag everyone who reads this to do one of their own!
Big Bad Bird
"Poets do not write to be understood."
"A great deal more is known than has been proved."
"I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem."
- Richard Feynmann
There are people who need to be myths.
They spend a great deal of time and energy creating stories and ideas about themselves, all to make them admirable in the eyes of others. These are the people with a deep need to be admired, respected, deferred to, adored, even worshipped. It's a need that's never satisfied, and needs a constant supply of new disciples.
If they're smart they'll always pretend to be modest about their virtue - because modesty is seen as another virtue, and because it looks more plausible if they're seen ostentatiously refusing to blow their own trumpet, so long as it's implied they'd be justified in doing so.
Most such people fool no one. Everyone can see they're a fake, and they get treated with quiet contempt, before being brushed aside and forgotten.
But there's a few who actually are admirable, for quite genuine reasons, but need more admiration. The priest who actually is patient and kind, but needs his flock to constantly comment on how saintly he is. The scientist who's brilliant, but wants to read in the newspapers about how they're a towering figure even among geniuses. The leader who needs not just to be obeyed by to be loved, and the philosopher with three good ideas who thinks they've changed everything.
I've met maybe half a dozen such people - princes who need to be seen as emperors - and it took months for the penny to drop about the paradoxical way in which they were frauds.
I just can't help wondering how many of the world's most admired historical figures were like that. Because in my experience, they're very dangerous people.
I've got a turkey.
We don't usually bother with one at christmas but a friend inherited two but she's a vegetarian so...anyway, it's about fourteen inches across, and according to the instructions it'll take two days to defrost and six to eight hours to cook.
So I know what I'll be eating in February.
On the news today, a beauty salon has, in the spirit of the reformed Scrooge, given free haircuts and makeovers to homeless people - for one day only.
A manicured manicurist explained to the bubbly interviewer how it's important to help the homeless, and how helping them not look homeless improves their self-esteem.
A customer with filthy clothes but impeccable hair agreed, albeit through gritted teeth.
Chasing up the story, I couldn't find much, but it's probably part of this Wenceslassian effort.
But it looks like someone else had the idea first.
When I've occasionally toyed with the idea of becoming a petit-bourgeois entrepreneur, I've thought of employing only homeless people, much like Michael Moore claimed to employ only black people. Though predictably enough, there's actually tax laws against it.
Some people tell me I think about gay sex all the time. But I'm pure as the pope...compared to the pope.
The entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic world should find a new hobby.
Preface to A History of Longhaul Spaceflight Psychotechnology
A non-christmassy short story.
"A History of Longhaul Spaceflight Psychotechnology", by Vanz Cunningham
Preface, by Katarin Rybczinski
The first discovered problem of longterm space flight was also the last to be solved. Travellers go mad.
The press call it Space Madness, the military call it Extension Fatigue, psychologists call it Prisoner Stress or Tin Can Syndrome. There are as many names as failed cures, and as many explanations as expeditions that "Autoterminated" when the crew shut down.
Of course they didn't always just shut down. A few became delusional first, and in some sensational cases killed each other and/or themselves. But most of the time they become gradually listless and depressed, until they stopped feeding themselves and stopped responding.
Initially we thought it might be from the boredom, so we gave them endless diverting tasks, games and challenges to occupy their brains and their time. It worked for months, even years, but the artificial tasks were completed more and more perfunctorily, and eventually ignored.
Then we thought it might be from loneliness, so we put fifty gregarious types together on one ship. They formed friendships and alliances, politics and factions - even a religion - and we published joyful papers on how we'd solved the problem. Then we noticed they were shutting down too, and we still didn't understand why.
We thought we could solve the problem by using young children as astronauts. The thinking - quite plausible at the time - was that adults only can't cope with space because it's not the life they grew up with.
I was one of those who sponsored and implemented the plan, and I watched my proteges cut out their surgically implanted feeding tubes with makeshift knives and no anaesthetic. Maybe one day I'll be able to forgive myself, but I doubt it.
Cryosleep was the among the first solutions to be tried, and it appeared to work - right up to the moment the test subjects were revived. The problem seemed to be that, although almost all brain functions had been slowed right down, the autonomic functions could only be taken down so far.
The mind isn't just the prefrontal cortex - it's the whole brain, and the whole body, and indeed the whole past life of the person. By cryoslowing the travellers, we essentially fractured the "person" into several noninteracting parts, which couldn't function without each other.
Many gave up and declared space travel was impossible, saying we should concentrate on solving the earth's problems instead of wasting resources and life on exporting them to other planets. However others still thought a modified cryosleep may still be the answer.
A brain in a "hot cryo" state can be fed sensory cues from which it can construct a fantasy life, offering all the textures and varied surprises of reality.
This is not virtual reality, nor is it the same as REM sleep, and this is not hallucination. We did briefly try placing subjects in indefinitely extended REM sleep, but found continious dreaming for more than thirty six hours was impossible, though we're still not sure why. Nonstop drug induced hallucination and permanent VR were obviously not viable.
However, the sensations inducible in hot cryogenic storage have a detailed and "real" quality absent from ordinary dreaming, and the parameters of the narrative are much more tightly controlled, consistent and believable, kept that way by the computer - or "dream machine" as the media christened it.
Essentially, under the computer's constant guidance, the traveller lives a full virtual life, not limited to rearranged components of their former real life. They are given a whole city to explore, even a whole world, with a neverending stream of complex but soluble problems. There is even the appearance, but not the reality, of danger and grief, without which lives become initially pleasant but quickly stale.
We discovered this last the hard way, by immersing earthbound test subjects into their individual notions of a blissful existence. In only days they all exited the simulations in panic, unable to endure what had become the most banal of hells.
In tests of the more "gritty" scenarios, subjects responded well to spending a year in their alternate lives while their bodies were maintained mechanically - even preferring their slightly novelistic fake families and friends to their real ones.
There were however two remaining problems. One year in "altlife" was stimulating, five years was probably bearable, but the dozen or more centuries that might be needed for a complete journey to a distant planet - that was a different matter.
The first problem was that, no matter how stimulating the artificial challenges provided by the computer, eventually their very artificiality made them uninteresting. The second was that, while someone could in principle have their interest and their body maintained for two or three thousand years, by the end they will have developed a mental state indistinguishable from space madness. It seems people just can't cope with that much living.
The solution to the first problem was controversial but successful - and developed by the author of this work. If people get bored with entirely realistic but fake challenges, make them think the challenges are real. Suppress the knowledge that altlife isn't life, and subjects won't get bored - at least, not so easily.
The second solution is to have several altlifes lived in a row, each of forty to eighty years. After each, memory of it is made inaccessible (but not erased) and a new life begins. While it is theoretically possible to begin at birth each time and progress to old age, in practice the subject is best reborn as a young adult each time.
In the pages that follow, my colleague Dr Cunningham will take you through this history in much more detail than I could manage, and I suspect with much greater flair. He and I are both proud to have dedicated our (real) lives to this problem, and to have made interstellar colonisation a possibility, as well as a necessity.
Katarin Rybczinski
Berlin C, 2243
GaAhhAhh
I'm really, reaLLY pissed.
Happy christmas to everyone. Especially Donna and Simon who's got me moving their houses, especially my other comrades who turned my drunken ramblings into real politics, and thanks to P, who wouldn't let me kiss him, for all the right reasons.
Goodnight everyone, and maybe someone can explain where I got this big red bruise on my forehead.
1000: Beyond Reality
This is a film I made in 2001.
It's a twenty three minute spoof documentary on alien abduction, ex-gay therapy cults, the paranormal, conspiracy theories and all such lovely sillyness. Including an equally silly advert break.
It features a number of friends who said and did some very dumb things on camera, for no more payment than seeing themselves do it on TV. One provided some splendidly pointless "Brass Eye" type graphics, and I learned far too much about compositing, chromakey theory and woodwork in production.
It also features me doing some peculiar voices. Perhaps thankfully, there was no time to film the segment showing me as a lascivious theoretical physicist with a speech synthesiser.
The studio/display space was a ten foot cube, painted bright blue inside and out. On opening night, I was also dressed and painted bright blue, much to the WTF-ness of certain drunk and/or stoned patrons.
You'll probably miss some of the jokes as they wizz by - don't worry. One lecturer said it was "deep", another a "headfuck". It's also the only artwork I've ever sold - two copies for a pound each.
Look out for the subtitles.
Oh yes, and I got an MA degree for making it. Which just goes to show...something.
My thanks to:
* John Snape and Davina Chippendale - for helping me build the studio.
* Tim Evans - for being Maradona Boggs
* Denny Kittay - for being Ikea Caelocanth
* Slava Guskov - for being Supertramp Logicalsong
* Joe Ho - for being Han Ton Dekon
* Victoria Webber - for being the "Shooz" girl
* Linda Pickering - for being the "Chocolat" girl
* Stephen Plummer - for being Shaynussy O'Joyce, and for the animated graphics
* My friends of Stop The War for being the P.E.A.C.E organisation.
I hope you enjoy your trip "Beyond Reality".
Ooh Baby
Saturday:
Today a blond girl told me her trousers had got all wet in the rain...so she'd better take them off. And could I help her please.
She rode me like a horse all around the floor, whooping and slapping me when I got tired, then she insisted on sucking my finger, cuddling and giggling.
Then her mother came home and joined in.
You guessed I was babysitting, didn't you. In the first sentence.
There was some actual sex with an adult male, you'll be pleased to hear, later on.
I'm not sure what it means when, as you're being extensively fellated, you find you've spent the last minute pondering the nature/nurture debate as regards the "skill" model of general intelligence.
Not his fault at all. I was just...mentally elsewhere.
Sunday:
The plan was to have a relaxing day, housesitting with C while my parents were in London for a big classical concert, watching trashy sci-fi, consuming endless cups of tea and chocolate biscuits, going soppy over the dogs, and generally feeling that life can be good.
Most of which, amazingly, did happen. But with the crucial element of C missing - thanks to his family being either CIA-like in their deniable deviousness, or CIA-like in their incredible ineptitude.
Still, we should still manage a part of christmas together.
Losing weight over christmas - not really a goer is it. With four-and-counting christmas-and-new-year meet-and-eat get-togethers coming up, my diet may just be in jeopardy.
There's one tomorrow that should ensure I have plenty to read - mine host is just finishing a novel. I'm the poof reader.
No that isn't a typo :-).
Coming soon: Post 1000!
Dream Voyage
"We appear to have lost our sex appeal, Captain."
- Tuvok, Star Trek: Voyager.
Thursday:
Last night I dreamed my father was a violently abusive parent, threatening to castrate me if I didn't obey him.
But instead of running away or smashing something heavy over his head, we went on a cosy family holiday where I was desperate to make him love me.
Most odd, and not like me at all. Anyone would think I'd been reading Freud and eating cheese before bed.
Then I dozed off again, and dreamed I was a new member of the starship Voyager, where Tom Paris and Harry Kim were having lots of sex.
Back to normality then. Much more me.
When I woke up, my father was trying to repaint a room in his usual, um, thorough and unhurried way. And Voyager was about to start on TV.
Friday:
Spent most of the day taking apart a hi-fi system. No, not your usual GBP50 affair, the cheap cube of black plastic with flashing lights, mysterious buttons and graphic equaliser to make it look space-age.
This one cost GBP50K. Fifty thousand english pounds.
Each unit has its own stackable table, made of teak, tinted glass and chrome. It's the size of a large wardrobe on its side and each module made almost entirely of brushed metal.
It's got metre's and metres of cables so reinforced you could use them to tie down a family of rhinos. It's got sockets I've never even heard of, and speakers as tall as me.
It includes twelve separately powered pre-amps - for what conceivable purpose I've no idea - plus two astonishingly delicate turntables, and a CD player that looks like it's built to house radioactive waste.
There's no flashing lights, a total of six buttons, and the graphic equaliser is a separate unit, half the size and twice the weight of a tower PC.
And it's a big name brand: Namely Naim.
Oh yes, and it was my task to disassemble it for transport. Without an instruction manual. Got about a third of it done in five hours.
More tomorrow.
I've had a brilliant business idea.
Whenever you call up a call centre, you get put on hold for several minutes/hours/days, with either Handel's Water Music or Vivaldi's Four Seasons on infinite loop.
It's annoying, and makes you want to throttle the person who may or may not eventually take you call.
Now, there's also loads of bands out there who're so desperate to be heard they'll do pay-to-play gigs. You see where this is going?
The band provide me with their demo CD, which for a small charge I rip and insert "The next track is XXX by YYY." and "You just heard YYY playing XXX. Hear more on their myspace page."
The company with the call centre pay me a small fee for that month's song list, which gets played on shuffle to waiting customers.
Bands get exposure, customers no longer hate the company quite so much, and I retire to the Mediterranean. Where I'm waited on by Greek slave boys until my mysterious disappearance at the hands of Mossad and/or the CIA.
Almost as good a business model as this poor deluded fellow.
Hurdy Gurdy
More Swedish synthpop: A Blue Ocean Dream
I do seem to like Swedish music.
And Swedish politics too.
Here are some search terms by which surfers found my blog recently. Illustrated - or not - with visual aids.
* Girls showing tits for money
(I do have some more appropriate images, but I thought a picture of John Wayne would be more...manly. Besides, this is a family blog. Anyone who's "family" can read it.)
* Mr Oogie Boogie
* erasing the past
* time travel
* cpgb (Communist Party of Great Britain)
(I may have over-represented their numbers here.)
* dragosea din te esperanto
* im just a poor boy duo
(Alternative caption: Malfunction! Malfunction!)
* beyond money
* bein pensant
There might have been more, but for computer problems.
Bleep
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't."
Six months ago I invented something in a dream. Quite literally.
I was dreaming about problems with filesharing on home servers - which gives you some idea just how interesting my dreams are. And I thought...
"There has to be something easier than spending days setting up a server, breaking large files into chunks small enough to avoid timeouts, and queueing them manually. Like maybe a program which reads requests for files sent by email, then splits the files as needed, and sends them off to the requester's inbox, staggering the sends so as not to overload it. And a similar program monitoring the reciever's email, sending confirms and putting the files back together automatically as received."
I woke up, spent a day working on the details, then decided (a) it would take time and skills I don't really have to develop and (b) its use would be marginal anyway.
But maybe it wasn't such a dumb idea after all. Because someone else has already developed it. It's called Peer2Mail.
My theory of songs continues to develop. I can't seem to manage all-encompassing obsession these days, which I rather miss. There was a time - two decades ago, I admit - when I'd stay up all night and spend most of the day reading and thinking about something esoteric, for weeks at a time, not caring that everyone thought I was weird.
I still don't care they think I'm weird - in fact I rather like it. But the attention span's gone. Or the obsession. I want my obsession back.
Anyway, I was wrong about syllable stress. So long as you only sing monosyllables, it's a simple matter to fit your sung version of your spoken sentence intonation to the weak and strong beats of the music.
I think there's at least eight ways to sing "One more kiss dear" over four beats.
But once you start using polysyllables...it gets a whole lot more complicated - with three (or possibly four) levels of syllable stress which have to fit, not only with the weak-strong pattern of the semibreve, but the weaker weak-strong pattern of the minim too.
To put it another way: There's only two ways to sing "Happy Birthday Mister President" without mangling your intonation. And no one wants their intonation mangled.
This week's guilty musical pleasure: Chinese Theatre.
A Swedish female synthpop duo - so not chinese or theatrical. Somewhere between Erasure and Ladytron.
Ever-so-slightly cheesey retro electroclash (retroclash?) you can admit to liking on your blog, but not in real life.
Half my brain says I should get Twitter.
The other half says I should spend some time away from computers.
The third half says I'm not so good at maths.
Let Me Count the Ways
Saturday was meant to be a day for travelling up to London, being political in the street, then discussing more politics in a big hall, then somehow getting home and dissecting the day's politics in a pub.
Instead, it was a day for sleeping through two alarm clocks and missing the coach.
There was a choice of evening entertainment. Either spend an hour in the cold outside receiving enthusiastic but inexpert oral sex...or two hours in a warm pub. With a different kind of oral pleasure.
Guess which I had? Yes. I must be getting old.
Working on my Song Theory - and after the latest revision, I've calculated there are eighteen different ways to phrase "I Love You", in 4/4 time.
Not counting those that have the same pattern but half (double, quarter etc.) the speed, those which differ only in note lengths but not note start position, and those which are theoretically possible but leave absurdly long gaps between words.
And I'm just talking about phrasing and rhythm - not melody. Details if/when I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change my mind the next day.
Speaking of minds, have you ever thought about how misleading the term "mental illness" is?
It's a metaphor, obviously. Measles is an illness, so mental illness is...like measles of the mind. Scrofula of the soul. A cold in the nose of the unconscious.
No, it doesn't make any sense at all, when you think about it. Whatever "Mental
But then, it's not really like a demon using you as a sock puppet either. The right metaphor doesn't seem to exist yet.
I once had an argument with a gaggle of trainee nuns...over whether a mind could be produced "within" a brain with no body attached. They insisted that there would be thoughts, even though there would be nothing to have thoughts about.
Back in the land of sanity...Mother is knitting me some shoes.
Well, slippers actually. And jackets for everyone. And hats. So I know exactly what I'm getting for christmas.
Sing Our Own Song
"Sitting in a classroom doesn't make you a student, any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car."
- Me, apparently
I am one step closer to becoming my hero, Dr Gregory House.
Having somehow managed to fall upstairs and gained some bruises in surprising parts of the left foot, I'm walking around with the help of a stick.
I'm just waiting for someone to ask me what happened, so I can tell them my Hallux has turned purple. But I'm using my long knobbly pole as a third leg.
Politics on Saturday. Anti-Climate Change demo in London, and a conference on "what have socialists been doing wrong for the last three decades, and what should we be doing now?".
That's not the official title, but it's what we'll be discussing.
For the past few weeks, I've been trying to invent a "Song Theory". I don't mean a theory of "How to Write Songs", I mean a theory of the purely musical aspects of songs - as opposed to imagery in lyrics, fashions of subject matter, choice of instrumental backing etc.
Put it another way. Some songs are catchy, some less so, some aren't. What, at the level of tonality and rhythm, makes the difference?
When we say a song sounds like a nursery rhyme, or has an "Irish" feel to it, or makes us think of the sixties...what are we actually talking about?
What is it in the rhythmic and tonal structure of a song by The Temptations that makes it different from a song by Duran Duran?
I'm on my third such theory - the previous two having come crashing to the ground when (a) I tried to apply them or (b) I heard something on the radio that instantly disproved them. But here's some general remarks. Skip if music theory baffles you.
* Most songs are pentatonic. Specifically, their "comfort zone" is the tonic, medial, subdominant, dominant and leading note below of the key used. If you're singing in A-Minor, your "home" notes are G, A, C, D and E. If you stray outside these notes, you'll almost certainly stay pentatonic, but in adjacent octaves.
* If your time signature revolves around 2, 4, 8 or 16, there is a pattern of "Strong-Weak-Strong-Weak" in the beats. More than that, there's the same pattern in breves, minims, crotches and quavers. If your time signature involves 3, 6, or 12 (or uses triplets) the pattern is "Strong-Very Weak-Weak". There is therefore a fractal pattern to stress.
* The immensely complex four level stress pattern of English sentence intonation is flattened into a two level system when singing.
* Time boundaries between lines, phrases and verses may be sharply defined, by phrasing boundaries are not. If each bar is divided into sixteen ticks, then for any given bar, the final two ticks of the previous bar and the first tick of the subsequent bar can be part of that bar, as well as part of their own, for purposes of phrasing.
In principle, it should be possible to write a computer program that could generate a song - minus the lyrics - that (say) Jimmy Somerville could have written...but didn't. In other words, I'm talking about codifying style.
Hurry up Hari
I have a new bedside book. It's the Bagavad Gita.
A street evangelist gave it to me. Not the kind of evangelist who stands in the street and preaches at the top of his voice - the kind who approaches shoppers with a clipboard and asks them loaded questions.
We spoke for twenty minutes, but here's the short version:
Evangelist: Are you happy in your spiritual life?
Kapitano: Which religion are you selling?
Evangelist: We're not part of any religion. We follow the teachings of Prabhupada.
Kapitano: So you're Hare Krishnas.
Evangelist: Yes. We want to bring about a spiritual awakening of all mankind, one person at a time.
Kapitano: So you want to change the social, economic and political structure of the world by abstracting large numbers of individuals away from it. But how can you change human consciousness without first changing the the material conditions in which it develops?
Evangelist: Once our numbers reach a critical mass, society will change.
Kapitano: But won't societal and economic pressures prevent sufficient numbers becoming enlightened?
Evangelist: People come to enlightenment in small stages. With each stage, the society around them changes, permitting progression to the next stage. Even if a person stalls at one stage, they'll still be happier.
Kapitano: So what distinguishes Hare Krishna from Scientologists, Christians, Jevohis Witnesses and all the other groups making the same promise?
Evangelist: I should speak to other people. Enjoy the book.
I asked if there was a Krishna analysis of the recent events in Mombai, the recession or drug addiction - of course there wasn't, because HC is all about personal happiness and isn't concerned with real issues or money.
The young fellow came close to losing his cool when I admitted I had no cash with me for the purely voluntary donation.
Perhaps I should have mentioned the use of HC as a front for drug smuggling.
A day out with C. It was bitingly cold outside, so we browsed a series of warm shops and drank tea in their cafes.
Sometimes it's nice to cheer up a depressed friend - to be an ear for listening and a shoulder to cry on. But it's also much nicer to find your friend isn't depressed - in fact he's manically sparkling and full of life and wit.
And is going to spend the weekend in Paris, about which I'm not remotely jealous, oh no.
Why didn't I get into LastFM sooner? It's udderly brilliant - better than Pandora is/was. In two days I've been introduced to a hundred new bands, and loved just about all.
Now I just need to become a millionaire to hear them all above 128kbps.
What's this called?
You spend a day sorting through hundreds of data backup CDRs and DVDRs, copying the still-useful files to hard drive for later reburning, and throwing away the out-of-date and duplicated discs, in what started as an attempt to find one single file. After which, you conclude that you've (a) got hundreds of gigabytes of barely catalogued stuff, and (b) lost the one file you were looking for. But at least you you tidied up a bit
And then you notice a large cardboard box that's been sitting unnoticed, at the bottom of a stack with four others. It's been there for over a year, it's quietly slipped out of your memory since you stopped tripping over it...and it's labeled "Misc Discs". It's also very full.
Nevermind - on the plus side, I think I know what to do for my thousandth post.
Barrowboy
I am once again officially unemployed. Or "looking for work" as the bureaucrats say. The whole process took only two hours of waiting and five minutes of box ticking.
They provided one job to apply for - administrator for a military college with no history or description...except a central office in Cardiff.
Yes, that's right. It's Torchwood.
I went to a party last night, got drunk with a nice gay boy, and went home cheesy.
Okay, it was one of those frightfully polite finger buffets and socialisation opportunities for the local community. How local? The inhabitants of one street.
It was so polite no one wanted to be seen to eat too much of the mountain of food provided. So I did the decent thing and ate it. And everyone was too polite to tell me I was being a pig.
I may be in spitting distance of forty, but I was the second youngest there. The youngest...I see you're there ahead of me. He was there with his boyfriend - and the three of us talked computers in a corner, drinking the red wine that may (or may not) have been intended as a raffle prize.
The whole thing ended at ten thirty, when the over seventies, saying it was way past their bedtime, left to sleep, unsteadily full of wine. Leaving behind half a dozen unopened packets of extremely strong buffet cheese.
And that's why all my next week's meals will feature gorgonzola.
I must develop some secrets so I can post them on PostSecret. That's the easy bit - the hard bit will be in not linking to them from here. Which would kind of miss the whole point.
Besides, I'd also have to become unhappy, as opposed to just exasperated.
This is post number 992. I should think up something a bit special for 1000.
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