tom moody – Page 228

Instayuck

6/14/2016 by tom moody Comments Off

A couple of this blog's hobbies are tracking (i) the deliquescence of language* into grey goo and (ii) the demise of the open internet. The post below, from the Instagram Developer blog satisfies both interests! The main point, shrouded in hype about improvements, is that Instagram is terminating RSS feeds for its content. Shoot me an email if I'm wrong. Particularly juicy examples of English "crapification" (Yves Smith's term) are in boldface.

When we launched our first Instagram API in 2011, we were a very small team and knew we wouldn’t be able to build all the features our community might want. Today we are announcing several platform changes to improve people’s control over their content and set up a more sustainable environment built around authentic experiences on the platform.

Simplified platform policy

We’ve updated our Platform Policy to explicitly list the use cases we will support moving forward. These include apps and services that:

--Help individuals share their own content with 3rd party apps, such as apps that let you print your photos and import an Instagram photo as a profile picture.
--Help brands and advertisers understand and manage their audience, develop their content strategy, and get digital rights to media. Established apps in this space may apply for our newly announced Instagram Partner Program.
--Help broadcasters and publishers discover content, get digital rights to media, and share media using web embeds.

You can read the full terms here [link removed].

New review process and sandbox

We will begin reviewing new and existing apps before granting full API access starting December 3, 2015. Existing apps have until June 1, 2016 to submit and be approved.

We are also launching Sandbox Mode, which will let you privately build and test your apps using Instagram’s APIs as your app is being reviewed.

More control for the community

We’ve heard from the community that it can be unclear where their content is being shared and viewed [this means RSS readers, I think --tm], so today we are deprecating the /users/self/feed and /media/popular API endpoints for new apps. Existing apps will have until the end of the review period before access to the endpoints is terminated.

Our goal is to provide a focused set of terms and processes that give clarity to the use cases we will support going forward. While this may require changes from many of you, we believe these changes will help maintain control for the community and provide a clear roadmap for developers.

*See, e.g., list of banal phrases from reader m.po, with many additions since it last appeared; see also Jules Laplace's documentation of the horrors of Google and Googlespeak.

swallow this ... or society will fall apart

6/13/2016 by tom moody Comments Off

Stop Me Before I Vote Again has a couple of posts noting authoritarian language used by Team Hillary. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich admonishes Sanders supporters:

[Y]our conscience should know that a decision not to vote for Hillary, should she become the Democratic nominee, is a de facto decision to help Donald Trump...

[M]y morsels of advice may be hard to swallow...

But swallow it you must -- not just for the good of the Democratic Party, but for the good of the nation. [emphasis added by TM]

And Markos Moulitsas, who has been bossing Daily Kos readers around for years, lays down the law for 2016:

I will no longer tolerate malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee...

Constructive criticism from the Left is allowed. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? ... In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter...

Saying you won’t vote, or will vote for Trump, or will vote for Jill Stein (or another Third Party) is not allowed...

If you are going to be pessimistic, you better support it... Rank, unsupported pessimism is anathema to our data-driven, reality based culture.

If you are a Clinton supporter, spiking the football in the face of Sanders supporters isn’t a productive way to move us forward. After March 15… such spiking [is] bannable. [emphasis added by TM]

to protect Clinton...

6/10/2016 by tom moody Comments Off

Lambert Strether sums up the Clinton "win" on Naked Capitalism:

Clinton’s presumptive nomination comes with a number of key policy decisions that liberals must own “going forwards,” as we say:

1. Corruption. To protect Clinton, liberals have adopted the majority doctrine in Citizens United: Only a quid pro quo is proof of corruption.

2. Transparency. To protect Clinton, liberals maintain that high government officials can, at will, privatize their communications to shield them from FOIA.

3. Militarism. To protect Clinton, liberals minimize her AUMF vote, ignore Libya, ignore Honduras, ignore Ukraine, and treat unwavering support for [US nuclear-armed mideast ally] as an unqualified good.

4. Health. To protect Clinton, liberals reject Medicare for All.

5. Working Class. To protect Clinton, liberals deny that there is or can be a working class electorate. The electorate is only to be viewed through the prism of identity politics. Two category errors follow: The “white working class” is deemed to be racist, by definition, and the non-white working class is erased. Consequently, it’s impossible to think through the universal effects of the FIRE sector on the working class, [and] its differential effects on particular working class identities. This is not an accident.

For "liberals" one could substitute "Democrats."

quick cultural roundup

6/8/20166/17/2016 by tom moody Comments Off

Books

Jeff VanderMeer, "Southern Reach" trilogy. VanderMeer wrote an intro to a Thomas Ligotti book where he discussed "working through Lovecraft," implying that big boy writers like Ligotti and VanderMeer had done that. VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" books, especially the first two, grab the reader but these are no "Colour Out of Space" because they substitute indecisiveness for ambiguous atmosphere. Is VanderMeer's version of Tarkovsky's "The Zone" evil, or not? With Lovecraft you know what you are dealing with even if the particulars aren't clear. Pardon the cynicism, but you don't get a three book contract with Farrar Straus and Giroux if you believe what lies below is darkness.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, F. Paul Wilson. As an antidote to VanderMeer's "highbrowing" of horror tropes, check out these two authors. Lindqvist wrote Let the Right One In and became that rare writer allowed to script his own property for the film version. The book is good, as is his Handling the Undead. F. Paul Wilson wrote The Keep and dislikes Michael Mann's movie version (one might disagree). Wilson has two series going, "pure" horror stories and a rollicking run of horror-adventure stories featuring the character Repairman Jack. In 2012, the two sets of books came together in an apocalyptic finale titled Nightworld. Both arcs are recommended -- FPW injects Lovecraftian ambiguity by having humanity's "Ally" be as indifferent to our fates as the beasties boiling up out of pits in the earth.

Movies

Monte Hellman films. Hellman lensed The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind back-to-back in the Utah desert, in his Corman days (mid-1960s). Jack Nicholson acts in both and wrote the Whirlwind script. Both are masterful films, though Shooting is marred by a confused ending (Wikipedia and Danny Peary's Cult Movies disagree on what happened at the end). This is the bleakest, most beautiful country you will see, populated by hard people doing hard tasks for no apparent reason. Two Lane Blacktop's themes of alienation were well in place in these "lost" films. Even earlier in his Corman period, Hellman handled second-unit chores for Creature from the Haunted Sea, a wild and crazy time capsule starring Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne as a ridiculous secret agent. Hellman's contributions include a gorgeously-shot sequence where the gun moll sings a "lounge"-type song on the deck of a yacht, with the sea heaving dreamily all around her, and incongruously slips the movie's title into the lyrics.

"GVCO"

6/4/20161/12/2017 by tom moody Comments Off

"GVCO" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Using the Doepfer A-155 to make a "graphic VCO" - essentially a sequence of LFO signals played at audio rate to make a custom waveform.
I also played the steps at a slower speed to make tunes. The result was then treated with some voltage controlled effects and massaged in Ableton. Then drums and some softsynth riffs were added.