David Perry predicts that the video games of the future will blur the lines between reality and fantasy. In his talk, he presents two great montages: one shows the evolution of video game graphics from ridiculously simplistic to almost indistinguishable from film (it’s hard to believe we’ve come so far in only a few decades); the other is a self-described video game addict’s ideas on how the medium has affected us, and how it might affect us in the future, for good or ill.
SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
Browsing SpiralTruth blog archives for October, 2008.
iPosture is a new device that can tell you when you’re slouching. As I type this, I’m displaying horrible posture, making the $75 price tag seem like a steal, if it would truly kick me of my bad habits.
I’ve been intrigued by the concept of biofeedback devices for a few years now. Disciplines like Zen Buddhism use the same principles to cure us of our psychological hangups – the idea being that if we were truly aware of what was going on, we’d automatically correct it. But anytime you try to make yourself more aware of something for any length of time, you’ll realize how hard it actually is. Our awareness is usually pretty undisciplined and will soon drift off onto more exciting things, leaving whatever it was we were trying to obvserve to the mercy of our subconscious. We need all the help we can get, and the notion of a small electronic device that would be focused entirely on something we wanted to fix – in this case, our posture – is an interesting solution.
Right now, this gadget has its limitations, the main one being that it only makes its measurements on one point of the body, resulting in an inability to notice some forms of bad posture. That said, it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Tags: iPosture, biofeedback
Some might say that Keith Olbermann is being a bit harsh in this video. Those people would be wrong. I was in absolute disbelief this weekend over comments like this:
Our opponent though, is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country?
This comment refers to William C. Ayers, who was a radical in the sixties and part of the Weather Underground. He has long since been cleared of any charges to do with what the Weather Underground was involved in, and went on to participate in various charity groups, one of which Obama also took part in.
Enjoy. May the McCain/Palin campaign go down in glorious flames.
The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
~ Hunter S. Thompson
A friend of mine sent me this link, and I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it. I get a real kick out of reading biographies about people we now see as artistic geniuses because they deflate a rather shallow myth, genius as the divine blessing, and replace it with a much more nuanced myth, genius as both gift and curse, at war with everything including itself, in constant doubt. When someone gets on a real roll, of course, he has to play it up. “I was just sitting there one day, and it clicked! It just clicked, man! And I knew what I had to do!” I call bullshit. Are there those moments? Of course. But they’ll come and go many times in everyone’s life. If we knew how exactly a genius capitalizes on these moments, or if he could somehow explain it, we’d all be astounding each other. But those astonishments are rare. Because genius likes to destroy itself and doubt itself, and at times, it’s just plain lazy. This example… it’s completely unpolished. There’s stumbling over words, beat switch-overs that don’t quite match up most of the time, and there’s some slightly dry subject matter. But I listened to the whole rambling mess, and there were moments where… (more…)
Elizabeth May just about won my vote (and may still) with this statement:
We believe, as in the recent theories of Richard Florida, that there is such a thing as a creative class. And the creative class leads to investment, leads to greater economic activity, leads to community health.
It isn’t just that she shares my taste in sociological reading. The Green Party’s entire platform, on everything from the economy to the environment to foreign policy, rewards and protects creativity, which is often undervalued by the powers that be.
We’re becoming a culture of managers in North America, but to be good and effective, managers have to manage something. Every society needs a sustainable level of production to support the managerial class. Florida’s book looks at the emerging creative class, which represents a refreshing middle ground between a factory worker and a manager.
The classic structure has been that the factory worker works his way up into various levels of management. The emerging creative class adds another option for movement, one where instead of moving up or down on a ladder, you tend to move laterally. Creative jobs are generally more fun and higher paying than assembly line work, but unlike management, they involve creating something, which ensures that our economy is fueled by real production. And, as the managerial class adjusts to handle this new style of worker, I think we’re getting better managers.
Check out Popular Mechanics: Types of Skills Everyone Should Know to brush up on some of the things we forget about in the day to day. The most interesting stuff to me is on vehicle repair. I remember my uncle telling me about how you can check codes on your car while he was helping me install my own brake pads for the first time.
Especially to my fellow artists: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, talked a lot about how artistic types sometimes avoid figuring out how things work. A classic scene was where the narrator fixed his artist friend’s bike with a piece of aluminum from a coke can, much to the horror of the friend. His point was that if you take the time to think about these things, they’re not really a big mystery, and that once you understand something, you can be creative in solving a problem associated with it.
Us artists tend to concentrate on what we see as “beautiful”, and normally don’t think of day-to-day mechanical devices (like cars, or bikes, or computers) in that sense. If you can appreciate the beauty of human ingenuity, that’s the first step to a little more independence, and a little more cash in your pocket to spend on your passions. Yes, it takes time away from focusing on your art, but if art is based on your life’s experiences, won’t adding a few more practical skills only improve it?
Installing my own brake pads probably saved me $200-300, and it really wasn’t that complicated. So next time you’re going to “bring it in”, whatever “it” is, ask around a bit and keep the same open mind you have in your artistic exploits… you might find someone only too willing to show you a new skill – and get some new material to write/paint/talk/whatever about in the process.
Tags: maintenance, car, DIY, artists
I was on a camping trip a few years back with some friends. One of them painted in her spare time. We were looking at this tree in front of us, and she was telling me that painting a tree like that would frustrate her because there would always be at least one branch that looked out of place. Being in one of my more philosophical moods, I thought aloud, “You know, that might be the path to genius – that one branch that you just can’t get right.” Here’s my reasoning… That branch that’s out of place is out of place because of something very unique to the painter. Her brain somehow sees it differently, and the harder she tries to take herself out of the scene and represent what’s actually there, the more apparent her affect is. It’s sort of like the Observer Effect in physics. I think some of the best art is created when someone notices that Observer Effect and, instead of trying to escape it, tries to really understand it, to embrace it. They turn the apparent flaw into a unique ability. No one else can describe the scene or paint that picture quite like they can. And certainly, in my own experience, my favorite bits of writing or musical composition have always resulted after a long period of trying to improve upon a flaw, where I finally give up trying to fix it, and in a moment of defiance I just do what comes naturally. So, for those of you out there who are stuck in a rut in terms of trying to improve your art, ask yourselves if it’s really a rut. It’s great to push the boundaries, but if something is being incredibly resistant to being pushed, maybe it deserves a closer look. Or, to quote one of my favorite philosophers:
The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.
I just can’t stay away from this guy! On Tuesday, he claimed moral superiority on gays and anyone who’s had an abortion, and after a little digging, it turns out that he assaulted his own mother! Sort of reminds me of Lot in the Bible. You remember Lot, right? The guy who was apparently the only one worth saving before God firebombed the biblical city of Sodom? During his rescue, Lot offered his daughters up to be raped, and afterwards, he fathered children with them up in the mountains. I suppose David Popescu is well on his way to living up to the Old Testament definition of a holy man. It’s just rather fortunate that most of us have moved on from the days of Abraham.
Check out Zina Saunders’ page for some hilarious drawings of Sarah Palin riding dinosaurs! Here’s my favorite
Thanks to my friend Greg for the link!
I remember seeing the video for Club Thing and thinking, “Oh, this guy’s an R&B artist.” It was shades of Justin Timberlake. A pretty cool song, but nothing more amazing about it than that. Then I did a little research and found that he was doing all of that with an acoustic guitar and a few pedals, including a loop pedal (which I then had to run out and buy!)
Here’s a link to the music video.
And here’s what it actually looks like when he performs it live:
I saw Yoav back in May and he’s as good live as on this video. It’s like the guy’s a machine. I’ve seen people look like real asses with a loop pedal. You’ve got to be really precise. I also like the lyrics to this one. It combines the darkness and edginess of the club scene with more traditional singer/guitarist songwriting (a genre which, along with rock, has lost a lot of its true edge lately in my humble opinion).
Thanks to John for pointing me to this particular video!
Amy Tan does a great talk on creativity. Creative people are the way they are for different reasons, but I empathize particularly with Tan’s approach, where the creative process is a way of resolving ambiguities that we notice in ourselves and in the universe around us.
These are amazing times for an indie musician. We can now have what would have been million dollar recording studios two or three decades ago for a few thousand dollars. New Macs are coming right out of the box with applications like Garage Band, and there are even a few open source recording packages for the PC user with a tight budget. Musicians of any caliber and any means are so empowered to explore their creativity in the twenty first century. You used to have to woo a record exec to hear how you’d sound with a little bit of production. Now, nothing can stand in your way. Except for lack of knowledge, that is. I learned some of this stuff really slowly. There’s a lot of information out there, but most of it is at a level that’s way too high when you’re just starting to learn. Yes, once you know the basic principles, the language people use starts to make more sense, but I think it’s sad that there aren’t more beginner level resources out there. So, here we go… my advice on two ways to break out of that “basement sound” scenario. WARNING: Once you master these, things will only get more difficult because you’ll now notice a bunch of other things that the pros are doing that you don’t hear in your own recordings. Like any art or science, the journey is an endless one, so make sure you enjoy it more than the imagined destination. 1. Use compression! You’ll probably see the biggest gain in quality here with vocals and drums. Here’s the basic problem scenario… the drums or vocals are too high, so you turn them down… then a little later in the song, they seem too low, so you turn them up. That’s an extreme. Maybe things just don’t seem to sit well in the mix. You wish you could ride the fader (manually raise and lower the volume level) for each track in a way that would keep things loud enough without jumping out. Well, in a nutshell, that’s compression. The basics of most compressors are as follows: * A threshold level: How loud do you want the signal to be before I start working on it? * A compression ratio: How much do you want me to squash a signal that gets over the threshold? * An attack time: How quickly do you want me to get there? * A release time: How quickly do you want me to let go once I’ve done my thing? Yes, there’s a lot more to it than that, and I’m not telling anywhere near the whole story. But knowing the above is enough to get you on your way. You can look up tons of “recommended” levels and ratios, but in the end, just trust your ears and some common sense. Does the volume jump very quickly in your source track? Then you’ll want a shorter attack time if your goal is to keep it sitting well in the mix. Don’t set the threshold so that the compressor is active all the time. You want some variation in volume to make things sound alive, and you don’t want to make background noise as loud as the actual instrument. 2. EQ (almost) everything. Yes, there are some cases where the track is just perfect as is, but most of the time even a track that sounds great on its own needs a little EQ to sit well. Do your recordings sound muddy? This is a classic sign of not using EQ properly. Again, there are lots of recommended settings for EQ, but a basic principle that will get you a long way without tons of memorization is this: the muddiness is there because different instruments are competing for the same frequency bands. They mask each other out. If you cut a frequency, say, on the bass guitar, and then cut a different frequency on the kick drum, you are creating areas in the sound for these instruments to stand out without competing. The reason I mention the bass and kick drum is that these are two instruments that tend to occupy the same (lower to mid) frequencies. Play around with it a bit and you’ll find your own favorites, which may or may not match very closely with pro favorites. Anywhere you feel “there’s not room in this mix for these two” is probably a good area to use this principle. Past that, I think EQ is very much a question of taste. Should this instrument have more of this particular frequency level? If yes, boost it. If it should have less, cut it. But thinking in terms of making pockets for competing instruments to stand out in, your recordings will be light years ahead of where they were. That’s it for now. Let me know if this helped you any and I’ll look into adding more of the tricks I’ve learned so far. Good luck!
At times, I have thought that Michael Moore has done more to hurt the left than help it. I tend to agree with him on most issues, but the way he presents them can be, well, less than tactful. And he’s been known to play a little dirty with the facts, like his right wing counterparts. Perhaps it’s just his refusal to cut anyone any slack. And a bit of it has to do with making a career out of being a pain in the ass. When something becomes very profitable, you begin to wonder about the pureness of the motives. As if any of us had completely pure motives.
I almost skipped over reading his cheering over the defeat of the 700 billion dollar bailout plan. Like a lot of people, I got reeled in with the scare tactics and stopped thinking. It seemed like the only thing that could be done. Everyone seemed to be for it, even though they didn’t like it. It just had to be done, right? If there were other ways to get out of this mess, they would have thought of them, right?
So today, I got another of Mike’s emails from the list I had signed up to years ago (back when I didn’t find him annoying). And imagine my surprise to find myself agreeing with pretty much everything, including Mike’s typical snideness. In at least this situation, it seems to be warranted.
One of my favorite parts from his letter:
If they truly need the $700 billion they say they need, well, here is an easy way they can raise it:
a) Every couple who makes over a million dollars a year and every single taxpayer who makes over $500,000 a year will pay a 10% surcharge tax for five years. (It’s the Senator Sanders plan. He’s like Colonel Sanders, only he’s out to fry the right chickens.) That means the rich will still be paying less income tax than when Carter was president. This will raise a total of $300 billion.
b) Like nearly every other democracy, charge a 0.25% tax on every stock transaction. This will raise more than $200 billion in a year.
c) Because every stockholder is a patriotic American, stockholders will forgo receiving a dividend check for one quarter and instead this money will go the treasury to help pay for the bailout.
d) 25% of major U.S. corporations currently pay NO federal income tax. Federal corporate tax revenues currently amount to 1.7% of the GDP compared to 5% in the 1950s. If we raise the corporate income tax back to the level of the 1950s, that gives us an extra $500 billion.
Now this sounds pretty damn fair to me. It solves the “crisis”, it avoids burdening the average tax payer, and it draws its funding from the people who were likely benefiting the most from the crazy market conditions that got the U.S. into this mess and are therefore the most responsible for it. Way to go, Mike! I may have to keep reading your emails. You’re loud and belligerent, and I don’t always agree with you, but I have to eat a bit of crow and admit once again that you’re a hell of a lot smarter than most of the folks running your country.
Read the whole thing here.
Here’s a link to an article that illustrates one of my major problems with religious freedoms.
Get a load of the following garbage from one of Canada’s own darling fundamentalists, David Popescu:
“God would hurt” those who had an abortion.
and
I think homosexuals should be executed
I honestly don’t know what can be done about it, but it annoys the hell out of me that you get people like this (who would cry bloody murder if anyone ever tried to discriminate against them on the basis of their religion) playing the “freedom of speech/religion card”. It’s because we’re so tolerant that these guys are free to be so intolerant.
Idiot.
Check out Jed Lewison’s post about John McCain urging the Bush administration to simply skip the Congressional approval on the infamous bailout bill. Not sure what I think about the bill itself, as there are a lot of interesting questions being raised now as to how necessary it actually is, but it’s definitely scary for a presidential candidate to be advocating the skipping of processes designed to protect ordinary people. This bailout would only be as good as the controls put on it to avoid more irresponsibility on Wall Street with tax payers’ money, so to skip this process is in my mind pretty foolhardy, no matter how important the bailout may seem.