tom moody

This made no sense to me until I saw "facepalm" next to it. Then I laughed.

"Audrey (Royal Beats 2)" [3.3 MB .mp3]

Another iteration of this Vermona drum machine beat series I've been working on. The device has three drums that can be kicks or toms depending on the tuning and the attack/decay envelope. Here I tuned them to different pitches and used them to play reductive melodies. Why not just use a synth? These toms sound really good to me, and filtering them makes them even more sensuous.

The bass is a long, distorted note recorded earlier on one of the toms, then given different pitches after the fact, using a software "tune" plug in. And am continuing to explore compression plugins to punch up some of the sounds.

This could be longer than two minutes--am thinking of ways to add to it. Also thinking about making the tom "solo" in the middle a bit less random. [Update: Changed a few notes in the "solo" and reposted the song.]

From the annual TED conference (Technocrats Embrace the Dharma) comes "The Shirtless Dancing Guy" theory of leadership. In a video shown at the conference, a man dances a goofy dance by himself outdoors, then another man runs up and joins him, then a mob forms, all dancing the goofy dance.

Simplified, the shirtless dancing guy is a "lone nut" until someone follows him--it is the "first follower" that turns solo insanity into a mass movement. This isn't offered as a parable of the Third Reich but rather some kind of wisdom about building people-powered initiatives. MyDD, a center-left site, cites it with favor.

A counterexample might be the scene in Forrest Gump where Tom Hanks runs cross-country. Hanks' "first follower" asks "why are you running?" and joins him without getting a decent answer. More runners join. Three years Hanks suddenly stops, in the middle of Monument Valley, leaving a hundred runners stranded without a clue.

The shirtless guy in the TED video is dancing at a music festival. Presumably everyone came to dance and have fun and then go home, so "leadership" has a pretty low bar.

(edited for clarity, tone)

It's not Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto as some have suggested but rather Dame Margaret Rutherford playing Agatha Christie's Miss Marple:

Hard up for new material so here are recycled comments I've been making on Paddy Johnson's blog.

On the topic of yet another announcement of "artist-technologist pairings" at a major museum:

When discussing formulaic "XYZ art" on my old blog (for example, at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/41330/), the topic came up of "artist and technologist teams." In the thread I linked to spd said: "media art is rife with collaborative work (often it’s a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff)" and "while i’m actually a fan of people working together, it seems underacknowledged so far and i wonder if the collaborative process of new media privileges talking a project through over actually doing stuff." And I replied: "I…hadn’t thought about the issue of artist-tech person teams having any effect on content. It kind of makes sense–-they have to talk to each other and some simplified middle ground (and thus middle of the road) art emerges out of that dialogue."

(spd chimed in on the same thread to add some additional thoughts to his 2.5 year old statement.)

In response to Johnson's review of two Omer Fast films:

We can forgive [Fast's] emptiness and nihilism if it makes us laugh: Take a Deep Breath, at least, keeps the chuckles coming. In the midst of all the feints, false starts, gore, and revelations of artificiality Fast has cast himself as an over-intellectualizing bumbler a la Albert Brooks, agonizing about the script and acting choices while the per diem clock is running; trusting his cell phone to an actor he’s just fired; declaiming to the cops about the integrity of the film’s "tableaux vivants" (soon undercut by the revelation that he asked the actress to take her shirt off–-supposedly to make the blast from the suicide bomber "more authentic"). Several of the crew members also have laugh lines in the form of a stream of inappropriate and politically incorrect comments. From the press release, which painted the project as another earnest investigation of contested, semiotic reality, I wasn’t prepared for it to be such a yockfest, goofing non-stop on its own premises. The other film at Postmasters was pretty much a downer, however, as you describe.

Just wrote my first "rule," in code, and stuff, to block a URL that has been haunting me for weeks.
A company's enterprising web guy hotlinked one of the GIFs posted here, probably for a "loading" graphic.
The business is a semi-automated site where people can get low level jobs by applying online. Kind of a Craigslist for day laborers.
I changed the GIF address but my "stats" continued to be overwhelmed with links from the "online forms" people fill out when applying for cab driver and bookkeeper jobs.
A couple of weeks ago I emailed the company and asked what gives.
Someone at the executive/sales level replied and said the company's web technician had been informed and my URL was no longer in its code.
Then a couple of days ago the hits started again, thousands of them. (Some bloggers might say, "Cool, traffic!")
Probably a backup someone never erased.
So today I did some research into how to block an unwanted visitor. If anyone notices anything weird or inaccessible on the site please shoot me an email.

Update: So far my work has seen no tangible results. Will give it another 24 hour "stat cycle" before admitting failure.
Update 2: The traffic has slowed but appears to have nothing to do with my "fix." Need to quit thinking about this.

frames from lou's pseudo 3D page (hat tip roy stanfield)

Derrida's Wikipedia entry has a section called "Honorary degrees and attacks."

comment on YouTube home hardware synth-sequencer demo: "ah, the sound of hot masturbation"

Tea Partiers Yearn for Days of Republican Corruption, Fear

"CERN’s engineers decided this week to play it safe and operate the collider at only 3.5 trillion electron volts"

Don DeLillo does not use email but likes 24 Hour Psycho ("and likes"?)

i don't want a computer to be creative, i just want it to work

if the computer's future is tv set tops and a balkanized web then it doesn't really matter if Microsoft "missed" it

"'avatar' and 'the hurt locker,' two widescreen responses to the theme of war, are..." "oh, shut up"

petra cortright's is the best so far of vvork's recent "ab ex with virtual brushes" run

richard ford "the lay of the land": detailed-to-Borges-level observations of life on Jersey shore punctuated by hostile physical encounters

good sex in lit discussion notes

dreamed was making music w touchscreen gps utility that mashed up songs currently playing on us radio stations (by touching map locations)