Used the Octatrack to midi-trigger and record the Sidstation synth (pulled out of mothballs) for some gritty and grumbly 80s computer game-type sounds. The only thing not Sid here is a piano line based on a slightly distorted Rhodes sample.

Around here we're not as judgmental about content as Weinstein comes off sounding in his post, despite what certain YIBIs (young internet based idiots) think. But Weinstein's view of the multifaceted, polymorphously perverse Tumblr world as the domain of twisted "Uncle Ernies" gives us a foretaste of what will be the consensus establishment view, once people who've just heard about Tumblr start looking under the covers.

Facebook zealots of the hipster persuasion don't like to talk about that company's contractors in developing countries monitoring every post for bad words and subversive ideas. Possibly because, up until now, the zealots had Tumblr as a place where pre-Facebook-style transgressive net content thrived. David Karp just effectively said, f*ck your freedom, I'm getting paid today.

So, how many months will elapse before erotic Tumblrs start getting flagged by offshore hall proctors?

[edited for tone]

The original .png file of the above was posted on Computers Club Drawing Society.
Initially it was on a spare, light blue background but then I decided it needed something like the surface of Venus.
Seeing Rick Silva's "En Plein Air" show at Transfer Gallery and the large-format 3D landscapes on his blog inspired me to enlarge the above to 800 x 800. Am generally not a bicubic smoothing fan and am still weighing whether the scale boost adds anything.

hat tips ryz and sakalak and apologies to mircea eliade

Believer: By not being on Facebook you are missing out on the richness of The Social Graph [Divine Grace].
Atheist: Zuckerberg is not a benevolent God, he is a gnostic demon who has snared you in a false, simulated world of "rich social connection."
Believer: I respect that you have not Joined Us, I really do [look on face says "you are certifiably fucking insane not to be on Facebook in 2013"].
Atheist: My blog is driving traffic to my twitter and it would be no different if I were on Facebook.
Believer: You built your blog audience when that was still doable and now you're grandfathered in to traffic via RSS, past exposure and links, etc. No creative person could do that today. You HAVE to join a social media enclave or you're dead.
Atheist: Have you tried it - just posting on your own site and letting people find you through search engines, "word of mouth," etc?
Believer: No, but [look on face says "you are certifiably fucking insane not to be on Facebook in 2013"].

An essential and successful element of [idiot billionaire Pete Peterson's] strategy [of cutting Social Security] is to create an environment where it is widely if not universally believed that there is no alternative to his vision. In this view, it’s "not realistic" to believe the country can afford the same programs it once did. Those who are prepared to be "adults" will look at these "hard truths" without flinching and recognize that it is time to take citizens-have-to-do-with-less medicine.

The conceit is that those with "courage" will see past narrow, partisan concerns and embrace an ideal: a bipartisan consensus that has the strength to demand "shared sacrifice" from a childish and selfish populace.

A review of the proceedings of the [Peterson-sponsored] Fiscal Summits of the last three years makes agonizingly clear that most of the journalists who conducted interviews or moderated panel discussions both reflected and amplified the Peterson worldview — entirely unselfconsciously, it would seem.

So, for example, Lesley Stahl, the CBS 60 Minutes reporter, was fully a part of the Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson deficit-cutting team during her interview with both men: "You are going to have to raise taxes and cut things, big things, put restrictions on Social Security. Everybody knows that."

Virtually none of the reporters thought to ask about or suggest an alternative path, such as preserving Social Security benefits and bolstering the system’s reserve by raising the cap of wages subject to Social Security taxes (currently annual wages above approximately $110,000 are not subject to any Social Security tax).

Pretzel found his old Rio player digging through boxes after a move and "cammed" it. He was surprised to remember it had a parallel cable that attached to the computer, for transferring these new mp3 things to and from the player. He found a website from the late '90s showing how to keep your transfer software up to date after the whole world moved on.

Not nearly as old but just as archaic is this Samsung mp3 player that I was half-seriously thinking about using as a retail package for my entire musical production (about 200 songs in late 2006). A friend joked that it would be like the dedicated U2 iPod. Nowadays if you search for "Samsung mp3 player" they are selling something that looks like a phone, with a display screen instead of this large speaker grille (and no folding design). Presumably this is because speaker technology has improved and little phones now make big booms. Also because everything needs to look like a phone.

Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmeg, 56+10 Broken Kindle Screens
C. J. Cherryh, Deliverer
Doris Piserchia, Doomtime, Earth in Twilight, The Dimensioneers, Earthchild, The Spinner, Spaceling
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide, The Dragons of Babel
A.A. Attanasio, The Dragon and the Unicorn
Jack Womack, Heathern, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Terraplane
Charles Fort, Lo!
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, Ripley Underground, Ripley's Game
Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

imaginary self-portrait - based almost entirely on Michael Manning's "An Imagined Portrait of Tom Moody as A Young Painter in The 80s," posted on Computers Club Drawing Society.
Manning nailed the zeitgeist-shifting moment, ha ha (the buckyballs showed up about '92, which was still the '80s) but couldn't have known his subject was male model handsome, in a blue-green kind of way. So I tweaked his work.