tom moody

Consumption of Metals Chart

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Clear, detailed, sobering chart from New Scientist shows how many years' supply is left of various minerals (zinc, copper, germanium, etc) if:

--the world consumes these materials at the current rate and

--if the world consumes them at half the current US consumption rate.

Also considered is how much each metal is currently recycled.

It's fair to say several will be mined out in our lifetimes. Any science fiction writer worth his or her sodium chloride can imagine that our future economy will be based on the barter value of various used-up metals, and the rise of feudal systems based not on land but hoarded recyclables in the hands of technologically endowed elites.

"Iceworld Two"

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"Iceworld Two" [mp3 removed]

The deep bass throb on this will likely be lost on computer speakers. The bass is a drum loop run through the Mutator analog filter.
The synths are FM4 (the strumming strings-like part, recorded separately and pasted in with a short prayer), Absynth for the "keyboard," and the wispy drumming at the end is an 808 loop with some delay.

Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard

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Sean Penn to play Larry Fine in Farrelly Brothers Three Stooges movie. This interminable Onion AV Club thread makes that blood-curdling announcement somewhat palatable, with frequent typing of "multiple face slaps," "nyuk nyuk nyuk" and the requisite "Spread out!" Boys, boys.

Moe: So you think you can make flapjacks, eh?
Larry: I don't think. I know.
Moe: I don't think you know either.

and

It's one thing to be the full blown idiot Curly was and bring the constant wrath of Moe down upon you, but it's one step further to defend that idiocy...and thereby challenge the leadership of Moe. If that doesn't deserve multiple slaps across the face and a little hair yanking, I don't know what does.

"B4 the Blue"

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"B4 the Blue" [mp3 removed]

After several years of using Cubase SE (the student, or "lite" version) I recently moved to Cubase Essential 4 as my main digital audio work area--also a lite version but with added features such as being able to add effects to audio without first rendering it and the ability to use controller curves for multiple parameters in softsynths (obviating the dreaded "midi learn"). "B4 the Blue" uses several of these features. It's not that radically different from what I've been doing but required a whole lot less steps. I do think having multiple settings changing simultaneously by using overlapping curves will affect my sound quite a bit.

There is a reverbed piano part at about :40 that I'm really happy with--it makes me think of some kind of modal, McCoy Tyner thing but my background is only listening to jazz piano, not playing it. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to keep pushing further and further into music: discovering things that are already inside.

my j.g. ballard library

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jg ballard library

...such as it is. The RE/SEARCH book by Vale and Juno on the bottom of the stack is top-notch, if you can track down a copy. Interviews, reviews, excerpts, illustrated with infra-red filtered photos of bleak industrial and desert landscapes.

Those enjoying the antics of the Dharma Initiative on Lost might get a kick out of Rushing to Paradise, a politically incorrect fable of what happens when a fanatic liberal activist suddenly has infinite funding for research on a Pacific island (hint: she becomes another Pol Pot). If you've never read Ballard I swear by Concrete Island, The Crystal World, High-Rise, and his breakthrough autobiography Empire of the Sun (sentimentalized by Steven Spielberg, what a surprise).

Rest in peace, Jim. Another guy the gatekeeper literati didn't know what to make of, adored by artists, filmmakers, etc.

Update: Not that Ballard necessarily wanted past the gate. As Simon Reynolds notes in a Salon obit: "There's an impulse among some Ballard fans, especially those who are 'proper' literati themselves, to elevate Ballard and argue that his work transcends the ghetto of genre fiction. Although Ballard occasionally expressed frustration with SF's pulpy aura, and later in his career wrote novels that fell outside its parameters, he generally was content to situate himself in the genre and loudly championed its potential. 'I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature,' he once declared, '... all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.'"