lazy YT-jaying: The Trip

Comments Off on lazy YT-jaying: The Trip

According to the liner notes for Pebbles Vol 3, Kim Fowley wrote "The Trip," a mocku-psych 45 rpm record performed by LA disc jockey "Godfrey."
Here is the "rare long version": [deleted by YouTube -- oh well -- lots of copies of the "short version" are available]

it's that time, babe / it's time to take a trip /
gonna leave this place / and all the rat race
everything's so pretty / miles from any city /
just you and i / and the big blue sky etc

We 21st Century humans like to think our culture moves at Wi-Fi-Hi speed but this is a parody of psychedelia while it was happening (1966). That's a pretty tight discursive loop.

"Posse on Greenwich (2017 Mix)"

Comments Off on "Posse on Greenwich (2017 Mix)"

"Posse on Greenwich (2017 Mix)" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Some drum and bass type beats I made years ago with Native Instruments' short-lived Intakt plugin were used here, along with some newer "library" DnB beats. The synths used were Zyn-Fusion, formerly ZynAddSubFX (software) and Doepfer A-111-5 (hardware).
After my last post on Tracktion-on-Linux, the company revamped its T7 DAW and it's now called Waveform. The main change is adding a mixer (needed) but unfortunately some stuff broke that was working OK in T7, such as track automation and clip effects. I've submitted a support ticket. In the meantime, this short tune was done using Waveform in its current state of mixed functionality.

livejournal update

Comments Off on livejournal update

Science fiction author Charles Stross has a private Livejournal site he uses for testing fiction -- or did:

I started out on Livejournal because, back in the day, it inherited a bunch of folks from SFFNet when SFFNet curled up and sort-of died; SFFNet in turn inherited the users of the Delphi SF forum from bulletin board days. It's all about the people, as usual, and Livejournal for many years was a social network hub for SF/F fans and authors. But Livejournal gradually lost out to Facebook in the anglophone world, just like MySpace. Unlike MySpace, LJ survived by becoming the social network of choice in Russia: a few years ago LJ was sold to a Russian company, and has gradually become a 90% Russophone social site with a weird bag of western SF fans still lurking in the moldering wreckage of what was once a thriving social networking system. There were periodic upsets because any major Russian political event would seemingly draw distributed denial of service attacks; a lot of people left, either decamping to Facebook, or to smaller specialized social hubs—the founders of Livejournal released their software under an open source license, and some folks are successfully running small-scale LJ servers with their own distinct communities.

I probably stuck with LJ for too long, because back in the day I paid for a perpetual premium account—unlimited access and no ads: the urge to get one's money's worth out of something you've paid for is hard to resist. But the rot has finally gone too far. This Tuesday Livejournal pushed out a revision to their terms of service that emphasize the service runs under Russian law, and specifically requires compliance with Russian law on minors -- which makes any discussion of "sexual deviancy" (aka LGBT issues) illegal or at least a violation of the ToS.

So I'm currently migrating my entire Livejournal presence to Dreamwidth, a service set up by some of LJ's original founders that focuses on providing a Livejournal-like set of services for creative types (and, significantly, is not subject to Russian law because it's not based in Russia).

Curious what effect this "Russian law" will have on Thomas Disch's LJ (still extant since he died but in memorial status). Possibly Stross is being alarmist and just looking for a reason to bail -- I haven't done any research to confirm his legal interpretation.

half the world is cracking up in laughter

Comments Off on half the world is cracking up in laughter

Noam Chomsky on kremlingate (via Michael Krieger):

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Noam Chomsky, I’d like to ask you about something that’s been in the news a lot lately. Obviously, all the cable channels, that’s all they talk about these days, is the whole situation of Russia’s supposed intervention in American elections. For a country that’s intervened in so many governments and so many elections around the world, that’s kind of a strange topic. But I know you’ve referred to this as a joke. Could you give us your view on what’s happening and why there’s so much emphasis on this particular issue?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s a pretty remarkable fact that—first of all, it is a joke. Half the world is cracking up in laughter. The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world.

So why are the Democrats focusing on this? In fact, why are they focusing so much attention on the one element of Trump’s programs which is fairly reasonable, the one ray of light in this gloom: trying to reduce tensions with Russia? That’s—the tensions on the Russian border are extremely serious. They could escalate to a major terminal war. Efforts to try to reduce them should be welcomed... (emphasis added)