photo via lauren-p-m via Rising Tensions
June 2013
top 10 reasons why "top 10 reasons" fails as a rhetorical strategy
1. Your best reason is number 1 (or 10 if you do it Letterman-style)
2. After that you start straining for reasons
3. By 3 no one is smiling
4. Everyone got your point in number 1
5. Most people aren't clever enough writers to keep readers engaged through 10 reasons
6. You repeat yourself
7. You repeat yourself again
8. Now you only need two more reasons to pad this out to 10
9. Readers perk up for the home stretch
10. You're done -- no one read this far
Juan Cole, you're great, but please stop doing top 10s
"Limelite Tab One Remix" (Music Video)
Posted on Vimeo.
An embedded version is here.
"HD" or hi def should be on by default (see button on right side of controller).
The song, based on Reaktor patch, was previously posted. Video-wise, some more dump.fm and GIF captures, and the "squirrel ensemble" presented without wrapping (as in no line break).
"Drum Machine" 2006-2013
[Updated] Posted on Vimeo (blown up to 1280 x 720) and then decided to take it down and re-upload it here as a standard definition file: [126 MB .mp4]
The video was originally made and posted in '06 as a 160 X 112 pixel .mov file (since removed).
A DVD was screened the same year at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. The above version is an .mp4 of that DVD's source file.
"Drum Machine" expresses a musician's contempt for video (art television) through bad camera work, worse reproduction, and self-referential navel-gazing about the "means of production." That said, more pieces are in the works where the process of electronic music making is explored as a not-completely-honest demonstration.
[post edited 6/21/19]
fix for bad Firefox 22 display sizing call
The Mozilla Zine describes a problem that appeared yesterday with the update to Firefox version 22:
Firefox version 22 now uses the operating system's DPI [dots per inch] instead of Firefox using [its] own. This might result in larger text and graphics (might be blurry) in the UI [user interface] and the content especially if you use a DPI greater than the default of 96.
Not "might be blurry" -- since I use 125% display resolution on Windows, what I saw yesterday on Firefox was horrible -- pictures zoomed up and fuzzed out and text filling the browser window.
The link above offered a fix. Enter "about:config" in the Firefox address bar and "set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1 instead of -1." This restores the view to what it was before Version 22.
I assume this is only a Windows issue and will only affect people who have enlarged Windows text on high res monitors in Control Panel/Display. Enlarging the font size in Windows does not change the size of images (and certainly doesn't fuzz them out) but it does in Firefox - dramatically, due to its having incorporated obnoxious allover zoom in earlier versions.
I've been using Firefox because it's "open source" but the developers don't seem to get that fuzzy images are bad. This discussion of DPI and such was very rancorous but the critics seem to have been shouted down.