the language of despair

medley_anno

...was looking for a way to turn off those annoying "web push notification" requests Firefox keeps shoving in my face and encountered this sinkhole of the English language. If you truly "love" a website you can probably find a way to "engage" with it, without having your browser asking you if you want to be "pushed" by every website you visit.

Pushy, pushy.

Re: Discogs bootleg policy (update to an earlier post)

Last year I wrote about the record-collecting and trading database Discogs. At the time they were still allowing the sale of bootlegs but that changed not long after my post. A few people have contacted me after finding my writing in search engines to tell their Discogs tales of woe. Yesterday I updated the post to discuss the bootleg issue.

link rot central: IMDb reviews

IMDb hasn't been quite the same since Jeff Bezos bought it. But until recently you could link to specific comments; now you can't.
I have several posts linking to comments by Ted Goranson (tedg) that are dead links.
This post, A Tale of Two Film Critics, quotes some tedg language re: one of the Michael Bay Transformers movies. The only way to find the source now is to go to the movie page [Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)] on IMDb, sort comments by "prolific reviewer," scroll down, and pray. Now there's progress!
Goranson has made a couple of attempts to archive all his reviews on his own site. The current archive has no mentions of "Transformers" prior to 2010.

Calling the CRT doctor

The Jeff Bezos Post reports [poss. subscriber-only] on a company called Dotronix that services cathode ray tube (CRT) TV screens in the era of LCD/LED dominance (hat tip E.D.). Dotronix almost failed in the early 2000s but thrives now, by acting as a special consultant to all the museums that have pricy video art from the '60s to the '90s that they are trying to keep functional.

Occasionally the museums' contortions necessary to keep a work "authentic" veer into absurdity:

The throwback vibe is more obvious in [Gretchen] Bender’s 1986 work “Untitled (People With AIDS),” on loan from the Gretchen Bender Estate. The work is a 13-inch television with rabbit ears airing live TV. The screen bears the phrase “People With AIDS.” [Hirshhorn assistant director of exhibit technology Drew] Doucette and his team converted a high-definition signal from a digital antenna outside the museum to a standard-definition signal of a live broadcast that plays on the television. The rabbit ears are basically a prop.

The monitors used to display the art are only part of the conservation equation, Doucette said. As old technologies are left behind, conservators and exhibition specialists must grapple with preserving work in the most stable format, such as digital. Then, as is the case with the Hirshhorn show, they must connect it back to the retro displays. It’s like fitting a square peg in a round hole, and then a round peg in square hole, Doucette said.

From a sometime CRT user, a few observations:

1. My first CRT works came at the tail end of the monitors' availability in stores. (See, e.g., this used Toshiba 13-inch.)

2. The Bezos Post article talks about analog video content that's converted to digital media for preservation purposes and yet must still be ultimately played with analog hardware for that true '80s vibe. Arguably, the content and meaning of the work changed when it left the analog realm; once digitized, it became a Baudrillardian simulacrum. "Basically a prop" is the phrase used by BezosPo to describe the CRT arrangement. Let the artwork go, it's become an empty gesture. Discuss it in words.

3. Exhibiting animated GIFs in 2004-6, when they were presumed to be a dot-com relic, while displaying them on CRTs, which were another, different type of '90s relic, was confusing the issue as much as possible! In my case it wasn't a "statement" so much as a practical solution to showing "digital" work without having a gallerist call every other day to report some new issue with the computer. The DVD-CRT combo just sits there and loops (usually). Some work is impossible to historically contextualize -- you go with what you have.

4. Having said that, any current user of a CRT might have to scour eBay for a screen "ideal for retro gaming" just to keep a show up and running. Or, possibly, to email Dotronix.

internet cable dilemma

Recently had a last mile experience when Comcast stopped providing service to my building because they couldn't access their own utility pole!
Sometime in the dim past, copper TV cable service was installed in the back of my building; Comcast now uses the wires for TV and internet. My cable stretches across three fenced-in backyards to a pole located on property facing an adjacent street. Here's a diagram:

cable diagram

Last week a branch cracked off the Giant Dead Tree (about five stories high) behind Bldg B-2, breaking the cable that extends from the backyard of Bldg B-1 to my building, Bldg A-2. In order to repair the cable, the Comcast technician would have to get the permission of owners or tenants of Bldg B-1 to let him into their backyard so he could climb the pole there. He couldn't get access, so he says, so he gave up and went on to his next job.

Comcast's customer service said the only way I could get the connection restored was to try to convince the residents of Bldg B-1 to give them access to Comcast's pole -- to act as the company's real estate agent, in other words. As if! Comcast was behaving as if it still had a monopoly but FIOS recently came to our neighborhood (via a competitor provider) so I have an alternative to knocking on doors on their behalf.