general

Spotted on YouTube: the above animated GIF. This was mildly significant because although Google allows user-posted GIFs in its G+ social media environment (where the layout makes them look terrible and/or trivial) its own designers use the HTML5, CSS/scripted form of animation for, say, those strutting Thanksgiving turkeys and exploding July 4 fireworks on the main search page. Google Images allows you to search by the GIF filetype but not for animated GIFs. We had a big fight about this last year, where I pointed out the obvious (why not just use a GIF on the front page) and caught hell from the anklebiters.

Not saying that Google doesn't use GIFs elsewhere in its products but this one stuck out enough for someone to notice it and send a screenshot.

The above "dancing Psy" GIF looks different on YouTube and isn't easy to save. That green YT logo is hidden by CSS and the dancing figure appears next to the statistic announcing the video's billion-plus views. To save it you have to use your browser's "inspect element" feature and look for the URL.

hat tips dadayumn, qil, friendster

Annette Ekin has an article on animated-GIFs-as-art-form worth checking out (said with extreme bias since Ryder Ripps and I were interviewed).

A point from the article:

Moody sees the "recent explosion" of GIFs going from the "underground" to catching on in popular culture and mainstream media, in outlets like NBC, as the function of a "historical accident." Because almost every browser can read GIFs, and the much-touted HTML5 web takeover is yet to happen, GIFs "are a universal medium by default." “This explosion was definitely not in the computer companies' usual planned obsolescence script," Moody says. The current browser readability, he says, is "like a gift given to people who are making stuff."

GIFs never really went away or went underground but a bare couple of years ago a Google exec was interviewed saying "I can't remember the last time I saw an animated GIF." His company prefers the kind of CSS-based animations you find on their main search page but you wouldn't have all the looping Seinfeld moments you see now if people hadn't had a more hands-on way of saving and passing around animations.

On Disquiet Marc Weidenbaum has a post on Miami glitch musician Richard Devine's demo for an iPad electronic music app, or suite of apps. Devine really gets around -- besides his music he has an active career designing patches and demo-ing instruments for the top synth marketers. His Vimeo archive presents a fascinating techno-cornucopia of up-to-date gear, software, and sounds. In the comments to the Disquiet post, colab noted Devine's elevated "presence" resulting from working on many fronts and I chimed in:

Agreed about Devine’s patch-making and demo-ing being “a really interesting way to have created a presence out there.” Marc’s “clothes horse” is a funny way to put it and not really mean or inaccurate. With, for example, a Reaktor patch, you have the person who made the instrument (e.g., Sinebeats by Programchild/Studiotonne) and 8 presets by Devine with his name in them and an unmistakable “Devine sensibility” in the sound. If there is any possibility for creativity left, you have the hapless user who bought Reaktor and is trying to make music with it, ha ha.

But ultimately can't imagine wanting to make songs on a tablet:

As for making music on a touchscreen interface it seems like jumping aboard Apple’s "get’em hooked into buying our hardware" master-plan of spherical trust monopolistic insidiousness and tapping glass is about as much fun as fondling a ventriloquist’s dummy but I realize these will not be universally appreciated sentiments.

The MAC vs PC argument may be dated and dumb but whether Apple needs to be a one-stop shop for all your creative needs still seems worth questioning. You can make music on anything but if "the pros" are still using desktops with keyboards and two screens then it's only dumb consumers who are getting snookered into learning touchscreen. Thus, Richard Devine, who has any instrument at his disposal, descends from the clouds to show us plebes how we can use this sleek hardware we bought because everyone else bought one.

Update: Minor edits.

Yves Smith considered the social cost of mass-marketed arms (and questioned the efficacy of armed militias in the US police state). Mark Ames* considers a counter-intuitive political cost of these Rambo fantasies:

Because it's now so deeply ingrained that owning guns is a form of radical subversive politics, the people who still engage in real politics have the pick of the litter. That first became really clear in the depths of the 2008-9 collapse, when a lot of people who thought of themselves as radicals and anarchists made a lot of feckless noise about how they were arming and preparing for the collapse and revolution. They could’ve gone out and organized something and maybe built a politics of people power or even a politics of what they call revolution, a politics that actually changed things. But instead, they locked themselves in their homes and apartments with their guns and fancied themselves political revolutionaries just waiting to be swept up. But no one came. No one bothered or cared. And really, why would any plutocrat or evil government agency bother with the suckers, all harmlessly atomized and isolated and thoroughly neutralized by the false sense of political empowerment that their guns gave them, while you do the real work of plundering budgets, bribing politicians and writing laws even more in your favor?

*Update: I de-linked Ames' essay after his publisher, NSFW Corporation, put all their content behind a paywall. The old bait and switcheroo.

Yves Smith:

The other arguments made [against gun control] are defense against crimes and to combat the power of the state. The latter can be dismissed pretty easily; we already HAVE a police state. What exactly have our heavily armed gun enthusiasts done about it? Now that New York City has the seventh largest army in the world, states and cities are looking at buying drones, and state of the art crowd control technology includes sound weapons and friction-reducing liquids (so if you try moving you can’t get your footing), the time for well armed militias to defend our liberties has come and gone.

Part of a larger discussion about treating the "externalities" of guns. Your sacred American right to make a profit doesn't mean you get to just walk away from 20 dead kids.