When I was little, whatever happened to be in the room would become part of my art, or part of my “play”, if there’s any difference. I didn’t go searching for things. For example, I once had this discarded black trench coat with a red lining, and also one of those big “Hoppity-Hop” balls… I hung the ball from the basement ceiling and draped the bottom half of the trench coat over it, threw a scarf around the neck, and presto, instant fat-bellied ghost. In my mind it was a scene from a movie waiting to be made. I was sad when that coat was taken down and discarded, presumably by one of my parents; I’d like to find it again and re-create that character. But the artist isn’t supposed to be looking for that old coat, it’s supposed to be seeing the next thing as it comes.

Frank Zappa had a phrase, “put the eyebrows on it”, which meant to put that extra bit of attitude on a musical performance. In a way, my phrase could have been, “put the eyes on it”, because I had a tendency to see the cartoon character in the ordinary object. Whatever I had, whatever I came across, somehow the raw magic was already in it, and I was going to use it in my next movie.

Now I find myself getting stuck, getting hung up, postponing the child-like behavior until I “get this thing taken care of” or “find this piece I need”. This isn’t always a bad thing; a few weekends ago, I decided a certain spot in a piece of music ought to have a timpani line followed by a gong hit. A few Google searches, and I found some high quality samples of both timpani and gongs (neither on the sites where I expected to find them, but on the greater Internet nonetheless), and they worked beautifully. For this kind of thing, I love being an adult.

In some other areas, though, I’m letting stuff slip by. I’m neglecting useful objects because I’m not seeing the eyes on them. I’m strongly considering going to a craft store, buying a whole bunch of eyes, and just sticking them on things. This is probably what might be classified as “weird”, having eyes on all of my stuff, everywhere in the room, looking at me… but it may be the only way to re-awaken that part of my mind.

Here’s a pretty screenshot:

This is the “bluesier” remake of “No Outside After All”, in progress. My inspiration for the remake is an old recording of Billie Holiday singing “Yesterdays”. (Before you give me too much credit for knowing the music of this era, be advised that ’twas Fritz The Cat what introduced me to this song.)

Anyway, “slow” was “too slow”, and the crux of my objective…

You know what, I don’t really care about telling you anything anymore. All I really care about is playing with words. “Crux of my objective”. What a deliciously non-utilitarian linguistic flourish. Indeed. Kiss my feet, peeps.

Anyway, the C.O.M.O. was to make it not quite so slow, so I sped the first half of it up by 10%. This was too much a speed-up for the second half, so I only went 5% there. The section between the vertical yellow lines is actually the whole song, so as you can see/deduce, it cross-segues into another song from there. Thus, there was some care involved in not destroying the segue.

I made copies of the tracks, did the speed adjustments, and then slid them to where the new tail-end fell exactly where the old tail-end was. Then, I got rid of the original tracks and kept only the sped-up copies. The new beginning starts about 8 seconds later than it originally did, which means (for those of you who have a difficult time drawing simple conclusions) the song is now 8 seconds shorter.

Hooray!

That’s what I appear to be doing.

Now I must poo.

A guy’s gotta poo what a guy’s gotta poo.

This is so much better, yes. Ahhhhh… now, what was I going to type about? Whatever I want to, so here we go.

I’ve been working in the archives, where I have years and years worth of recorded musical stuff that “only needs a little bit of love” as they say on the Peanuts.

OK, where was I…

Only needs a little bit of love, right.

So the little anemic Christmas tree of the day would be “(She’s a) Rag Doll”. I had already fixed up the second half to be both a.) better and b.) truer to the original. This isn’t a reversion, though; it brings back more of the Episodes version, but at least for the instrumental outro, simply speeding it up has given it the energy it was lacking, whereas my mid-90s “remake” of that section was kind of chaotic. That section was sort of supposed to feel like a cross between the Kinks’ “Lola” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”, and hopefully it succeeds at neither while still being what it was meant to be in its own right.

Working my way backwards from that, the quiet part at the beginning of the outro needed significant cleanup, primarily to do two things: 1.) to put in the ride cymbal pattern that I had painstakingly worked out, where each beat-four hit was preceded by one more sixteenth note than in the measure before it, until the entire space between beat two and beat four was filled by sixteenth notes, and 2.) to cover up the rhythmically awkward CZ-1 “organ” with a re-do of the same organ part, using a sampled hammond.

Back from that, is the fanfare section. I think of this as the “Bad News Bears” section, even though I could not for the life of me tell you what the theme music to “Bad News Bears” sounded like. It’s also reminiscent of the mellotron fanfare arrangement from Richard Wright’s “Summer ‘68″. Anyway, the trick with this one, which I did while I was still living at Cedar Commons with Christy, was to extend it by a bar in order to pitch the whole bit up a whole step and still land on the correct ending chord. I’m sure I spent a few weeks on that, knowing myself, though I can’t say for sure.

The fanfare section did not exist before the mid-90s version (or not as a part of this song, anyway); this was partly “orchestrated” on the keyboard-slash-workstation I was borrowing from Paul Gaspar, using Cakewalk on the old Zenith computer (no GUI, no mouse). I don’t remember the make or model of the keyboard, but it was a fairly large thing, and I used it extensively on Unfinished Business. Anyway, I had this section still split between a few tracks, unlike the Episodes stuff, so that gave me a little flexibility to reconstruct it. The reason I pitched it up a whole step in the first place was to accommodate a resurrection of the 3/4 part that had been dropped altogether in my mid-90s version.

It’s not that I was planning to drop it. I started work on this part, but the monitor on my computer gave out. Not being in a position to buy anything new, I committed what I had to tape by blindly using the shortcut keys for “rewind” and “play”. I had been in the middle of working on an extension to the 3/4 part that would have hopefully segued into the fanfare bit. The original end of the 3/4 part modulated briefly to A minor and had to go through another modulation to get it back to G. I was going to rework this to get to G minor instead, which the fanfare was originally in, but at that point I had cut my losses and scrapped the 3/4 part altogether. Now that I was going to bring it back, of course, I decided to shift the fanfare up to A minor, and add the extra bar to get it back to G. The fact that the pitch-shifted fanfare sounds clean and continuous is a small miracle, and doth please me.

So this weekend’s work was on the aforementioned 3/4 part. I’m using the mid-90s backing track, but trying to import some of Garrett’s vocal from both the GFI mix and a crude recording of a live show. Neither of these is isolated, but what I’ve done is “cut around it”, added delay to the last syllable of each phrase, and a swelling-up of backwards reverb at the beginning of each phrase. It’s not so much an illusion as a nice effect; we are in one universe, and then another universe “whooshes in and out” without losing the beat.

There was some decidedly whacky, spastic guitar playing all over my mid-90s version, which I made even whackier with electronic re-harmonization, etc…. but it seems that the more of that I cut out, the better I like it. It was interesting in its own right, but with everything else, it’s obnoxious, and it keeps fighting everything else for the spotlight. Hence, for now, the 3/4 part has no spaz-guitar. And I think it breathes better that way.

As it is now, the whole song can be mixed down and nothing is either missing or slated to be cut, as far as I know, although I should probably come at the verses and choruses with a fresh ear.

Sure, this is the “back end”, who cares, right? What matters is the theme that the reader sees, right?

Exactly WRONG.

We need high quality stimulus and high quality environments when we’re creating stuff. That means making things pretty not just on the outside, but on the inside too! I’ve been spoiled by the charcoal gray look of Tweetdeck, although I can’t exactly use that to blog. Anyway, these blogging environments should allow us to customize not just the pretty face on the outside, but also the back end where the blogger has to spend his time.

And this is not at all what I was going to write about just now.

The script has been removed from the footer, and from the index page.

The bookmark has been removed in my browser.

No more analytics.

I feel emotional about this, but that’s because I’m an emotional person, and I’m affected by pretty much everything.

I make no guarantee that I will continue to post here.

I make no guarantee that I will start any kind of new web presence to replace it.

I have absolutely no idea what I will decide to do.

In shared spaces like Facebook and Twitter, I have to constantly ride the brakes. I can talk about Keith stuff, but I have to limit that for the sake of social conventions. The social conventions here are to stay fairly “in the present”, stay fairly objective rather than subjective (facts over ideas), and run every topic through some kind of “will people understand this quickly?” test before posting. Some cheating is allowed, but to run wild with it is to risk alienating people.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing? In the least offensive way I can put this, if someone out there isn’t interested in what I want to talk about, then shouldn’t they kind of move along and leave me to find other people who are?

You know what? The above three paragraphs, by themselves, can stand alone as a post. But I didn’t hit “publish” because I was waiting for a few more paragraphs to come to me, and now it’s been a couple of weeks. A flaw in the medium, or a flaw in the me?

What do you know, what do you not know?

I’m keeping the old stuff. I’m not getting rid of it. There’s been this guilt with me for years that somehow my packrat impulse is the culprit that stifles my creative growth in the present. I don’t even know who told me to feel that way, or if I invented the guilt myself. But I’m keeping the old music, the old ideas, etc., because I like them for what they are. I’ve always liked most of the material itself, in some way or another, despite having grown past some aspects of it; if anything, it’s the container or the packaging of the catalog that I’ve never been happy with. And what I don’t know, and have struggled for years to figure out, is: what should that container be?

Idea: wrap every song into its own custom-created Flash file. It can be low on graphics; it can be a single still image or some text with the lyrics or interesting trivia about the song. Make it easy for people to play one at random, instead of having to choose based on unfamiliar titles. The point is, it’s something to experience in an immediate way while online. You can put music online already, but I still buy into the old cliché that people need something to look at, otherwise it’s like you’re asking them to do you a favor by listening. Time is money, chop chop.

What about the blogging thing? Blogging is love-hate. How to keep the love and lose the hate? Look at this post. It has to have a title on it. It’s like I’m “presenting” something to you, so I can’t feel free to just think out loud. This post has to “represent” me. Could I post here about what I did yesterday? Yesterday I found a site where some guy wrote an incredibly long and detailed analysis of the Beatles’ Revolution 9. Since the domain in the guy’s email address is up for sale, and the pages are hosted on Geocities, I thought there might be a good chance this intriguing thing would disappear, so I saved all the pages and carefully arranged them into a PDF file, going page by page to make sure none of his ASCII graphics were split between pages, and fixing a few spelling errors when I saw them.

But if I post about it in a BLOG POST, then it’s like this thing I did is supposed to be representational of WHO I AM. If someone asks, “who is Keith Handy?”, do I want the answer to be, “well, according to this site, he’s the guy who spent several hours compiling some other guy’s Beatles website into a PDF file”?

So what I want is some kind of a feed that’s a cross between Twitter and Blogging, or the full spectrum in-between. Somewhere where I feel like it’s OK to write a one-second comment on the weather, and equally OK to write a ten-paragraph rant about the creative spirit.

I also want to not feel like I have to write a nice “closing” each time I publish, like this sentence I’m struggling to force out right now.

Maybe it’s all, like, you know, some kind of “those who can, do, and those who can’t, blog about it” thing. And this blog has failed. And there are actual blogs about… well, there’s a blog actually called FAIL BLOG, and it’s a very successful blog. So it’s not a good example. But this blog is literally a failed blog.

It’s not that I couldn’t have done better, written more consistently, zeroed in on a topic, promoted it, etc… but there are people who are born to blog, and I’m only born to once in a while have a lot to say and need somewhere to say it.

This blog hasn’t really helped me to connect with anyone in any way. So I’m thinking about making it private. I wouldn’t change the settings, I’d still leave it open and accessible and searchable, but just declare that it’s “for me”, and stop even looking at the embarrassing Google Analytics reports. I could even stop allowing comments, but then I’d be tricking myself into thinking people were trying to leave comments, instead of actually getting myself to stop caring.

The rule would be, I’d only post here if I absolutely positively was not hoping or trying to start any kind of a two-way dialogue. If there’s even the tiniest hope in me that someone would maybe respond to something, then it should be posted elsewhere, possibly on one of the “social networking” sites where professional developers actually get paid to ensure that their site functions in a SOCIAL way. It’s not my job to make my own fucking website a “social” thing.

The problem is, I’m not sure there’s anything I ever do say or write that I’m not secretly hoping people won’t acknowledge in some way. I’m not comfortable with “zero comments”. But I have to become comfortable with it. I have to perform to the empty theater, just as I’ve had to draw on blank sheets of paper and put sound on virgin tape. I’ve chosen to walk the artist’s path, for real, and in the act of doing so, I face the abyss. I stop wriggling around and whining, and just say, “hello, abyss”, and listen to the sound of my own voice echoing, and meditate on it. If I have to go through all five fucking stages of mourning, I go through all five, and I don’t stop until I’ve completed them all, and made peace with them all.

Denial: Lots of people will eventually show up, just hang in there.

Anger: You used to follow me and now you don’t; you’ve betrayed me. Fuck you.

Bargaining: What do I need to do to make it more interesting and win your attention back?

Depression: Nobody is interested. Nobody cares.

Acceptance: How can I start over? What would be a more constructive use of this space?

It’s just a blog… it’s just a blog… it’s just a blog… it’s just a blog… it’s just a blog…

Without SoD, you may still get positive feedback on your work, all from people telling you that you “did a great job” and “have a lot of talent”… but never from anyone saying they were moved or affected.

SoD is audience-side, but there still needs to be an artist-side effort to facilitate the illusion for the audience. (This doesn’t necessarily mean making everything as realistic as possible; in fact, it can mean the exact opposite.)

So what responsibility does the artist have here? Here’s a tweet of mine from December:

I think most failure to enable an audience’s suspension of disbelief is not due to sloppy execution; it’s due to being too “safe”.

Safe: the guitarist who plays entirely with his fingers, and emotes nothing with his body or face. If you’re distant from your own music, then who the hell’s going to feel close to it? Safe: a recording engineer who worries more about the noise floor than the intensity or originality of the sound. Safe: the shoestring filmmaker who splurges on the best camera and lighting, but settles for passionless acting, as long as everyone gets their lines right. Safe: anyone who devotes most of his mental energy to the avoidance of mistakes. Safety is the enemy of imagination, and a lack of imagination on your own end means the SoD won’t happen won’t happen for anyone else either. If you want the audience to have an engrossing experience, you have to allow yourself to be engrossed in that experience first, which may look to some like temporary insanity.

This would seem to be an easy thing to explain to people, but sometimes it comes into conflict with deeply held values… as a result, it can fall on deaf ears. In this case you have to acknowledge that someone won’t be coming along on your journey, and just move on. Don’t let these relationships bleed you of your energy. You’ve got moving and affecting to do; get on with it.

My attention shifts to frustration. I have the urge to share this experience, but I’ve learned that most people in this world criticize and judge in a binary, pass-or-fail way, uncomfortable with any art teetering on the fence between ethereal and half-baked. I want to put some nod to “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” in my Facebook status, but then I remember how flat and two-dimensional it will look to anyone not absorbed in the song.

I realize I’m not actually alone, by virtue of the fact that this is a podcast (and a popular one). But then I also remember how futile it is to seek meaningful human contact in the podcaster’s comments; people tend to have either a capacity to fully lose themselves in music, or the ability to write coherently — rarely both.

I realize one of the things keeping this (or any) music alive today is the mythology surrounding it. Personally, my experience of it is full without laser shows, without Wizard of Oz synchronizations, without smoking pot or adding “Shine On” to my email signature. My journey into the music is no less engrossing for having a realistic, first-hand understanding of the mundane process that goes into polishing a crude idea into a song.

For those who don’t have that experience or understanding, perhaps the mythology fills that gap. Much as I rant against it, why should I? Why fight mythology? It’s as pointless as fighting bootlegging, and has about the same effect.

I can’t think of any immediate practical use for this wisdom, so rather than trying to hammer it into the wrong-shaped hole, I’ll just let it simmer on the back brain for now.

But, I also like to read things that are not at my level, and I will tell you why.

If something is at too low of a level — let’s say a book about the basics of using a computer — I find it fascinating to see how this information is communicated to people who don’t have that basic understanding. It’s interesting to be reminded of what knowledge I take for granted, and even think of it in a different way. And it’s also helpful to get some perspective on what goes on in the mind of a person who doesn’t understand computers, so that I might learn to communicate better with those people.

If something is at too high of a level, I still can get something out of it. Reading stuff that’s too advanced helps to plant terms in my head. It’s very much like planting seeds; if I see terms frequently enough, I get a sense of them being important somehow. And then when the time has finally come to learn the meaning of that term, there is that much more satisfaction to it, and probably more retention. Off the top of my head, I’m having trouble thinking of a current example of this, but for a past example: I’m sure I heard/read the phrase “object oriented” a zillion times before ever writing my first class. The more instances there were of me hearing/reading “object oriented” and not having a clue what it meant, the more neurons were primed to joyfully fire off once the lightbulb switched on. In other words, the more I “tortured myself” by exposing myself to the unfamiliar term, the more exciting it was to finally learn it.

When I write posts like my previous one, the reactions tend to be along the lines of “I don’t understand a word of that”. And so it might help for me to try to tie my thoughts above to your experience reading this blog… which kind of centers around whatever creative breakthrough I’m having, or trying to have, at any given moment, and then occasionally goes way off topic so I can talk about my pets, or drop my two cents into the big political conversation.

I definitely don’t write in a way that I expect any reader to completely understand every word. That might seem off-putting, as if I don’t care whether you enjoy reading this or not, but that’s absolutely not the case here! I do try to write in a way that at least amuses you between the parts that make you scratch your head, and hopefully paints some more general overview of why I’m excited about what I’m doing. You might not understand what C++ code has to do with processing video images, but hopefully you can pick up on the feeling of freedom and liberation I get from building my own tools. You might not know what a sharp-ninth chord is, but hopefully you pick up on the idea that it’s a unique sound — and ultimately a unique feeling — that you can’t get from a straight major or minor chord. (Reading about a chord is one thing… but if you hear an unusual chord and like it, there’s no excuse for not finding out what it is so you can use it in your own songs!)

While I’m apparently very good at conveying how “complex” my interests are, I might be terrible at conveying how simple they also are, at least in my head — the point where an idea comes together and finally makes sense, and becomes useful and powerful. Complexity is just a middle stage in the development of a good idea:

So if it still appears complex, then from your standpoint, I’m just not done yet. But from my standpoint, I’ve carved out this little section of code where I can do much more powerful things with the images, with very few lines of code. (And besides, I’m the one that’s going to be using the darn thing.) So, the point of my last post was, hey, I just created this tool that will help to make future toolbuilding quicker and more powerful. And I’m excited about it, and want to share that excitement.

I am NOT evangelizing that this is the path for you. I happen to have been experimenting with C++ code for audio and image manipulation since the turn of the century, was drawn into it on an emotional level (”there’s power in this stuff, I’m determined to sort it all out”, etc.), and I’ve created an ever-expanding arsenal of building blocks over that time. If you jumped into it cold, without patience or motivation — especially motivation — you would be dead stuck. The point for you is to take it as inspiration for some way in which you can create some kind of thing, system, or procedure that you will be able to benefit from, in a way that makes sense to you.

I have no idea what that would be, but I hope you make that connection.

Here’s a home-brewed way to get some of those expensive looking “color aware” effects.

In addition to the original hue/saturation/brightness components, I create six new variables each for hue, saturation, and value (brightness), plus six “weight” values, each corresponding with one of the six colors of a preschooler’s rainbow, ROYGBV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue — fuck “indigo”, but if you wanted me to take it seriously as a color, you should have taught it to me sooner — and violet, even though we called it “purple”):

double h, hueR, hueO, hueY, hueG, hueB, hueV;
double s, satR, satO, satY, satG, satB, satV;
double v, valR, valO, valY, valG, valB, valV;
double wR, wO, wY, wG, wB, wV;

Then at each pixel, you set up the “weight” values depending on what it’s closest to:

wR = wO = wY = wG = wB = wV = 0.0;
if (h >= 0 && h < = 21 ){wO = h /21.0; wR = 1.0 - wO;}
if (h > 21 && h < = 42 ){wY = (h - 21.0 )/21.0; wO = 1.0 - wY;}
if (h > 42 && h < = 85 ){wG = (h - 42.0 )/43.0; wY = 1.0 - wG;}
if (h > 85 && h < = 170){wB = (h - 85.0 )/85.0; wG = 1.0 - wB;}
if (h > 170 && h < = 212){wV = (h - 170.0)/42.0; wB = 1.0 - wV;}
if (h > 212 && h < = 255){wR = (h - 212.0)/43.0; wV = 1.0 - wR;}


Notice that it’s not just selecting one color and going with that; if it’s halfway between red and orange, the red weight would be 0.5, the orange weight would be 0.5, and all the other weights would be zero. After this point in the code, you’re now free to experiment with each value separately. For example, if you want to kill all saturation for the yellow areas, and just turn them grayscale, you would code it this way:

satY = 0;

Similarly, if I want to pump the heck out of the blue areas, I put a line like this:

satB *= 2;

(That’s C++ for “multiply by two”.)

Additionally, I “limit” the red saturation, so that it stays the same up to a point, but doesn’t go any higher; so that skin still looks the same, but bright red ribbons are muted:

if (satR > 96.0) satR = 96;

This example only plays with saturation. I could also mess around with brightness, contrast, etc. in the same way. After this designated “fun sandbox” section is the code that puts together the final values, using the “weight” values:

h = wR*hueR + wO*hueO + wY*hueY + wG*hueG + wB*hueB + wV*hueV;
s = wR*satR + wO*satO + wY*satY + wG*satG + wB*satB + wV*satV;
v = wR*valR + wO*valO + wY*valY + wG*valG + wB*valB + wV*valV;
setpixel(x, y, h, s, v);

I’m not sure exactly how this stacks up against the “color spacing” technology the big companies charge lots of money for, since like I said, it’s based on a Crayola-level color awareness. That considered though, it’s free in both senses of the word… free as in no expensive software to pay for, and free as in freedom to experiment on any of those 18 values with all kinds of math and logic before reducing them back to the original three components.

Much thanks to Darel Rex Finley, since I’m now using his HSP Color Model code to switch the images back and forth between RGB mode and HSP mode. “P” in this case is “perceived brightness”, and more psychovisually accurate than standard “V” or “L” values, but serves the same purpose. Check out his clear and well-illustrated HSP page for an explanation of the difference.

The experts would probably suggest that I break my blogger’s block by shooting for ephemeral, disposable, and monk-like, and not trying to make each post a timeless work of art. I’d still like to have an amusing picture for every post — because reading is more enjoyable when there’s a pretty picture to lure you in — but that’s seriously a pain in the ass to do consistently. I could outline the extra steps here, but then I’d be subjecting you to the same torture.

So, after writing the previous paragraph, I put my jacket on, got in my car, and drove 1.8 miles out and back in icy, windy, finger-shattering weather, to pick up a latte. See? This is exactly what I’m talkin’ about, peoples. I can’t even write a danged blog post without interrupting it for something “important” — like a latte.

I suppose when you’re spending more and more time doing something that falls outside your previously defined identity, there’ll be some mental re-integration work to do. Right now, it’s about all the free hours eaten up by improv rehearsals. It’s all positive, but it does force me to ask questions like, “will I actually accomplish the other stuff I started?”

And the answer to that is, yes, that’s actually part of the reason I got involved in the first place.

Granted, the site only gets a dozen hits or day, mostly from people looking for images to steal — but I’m sure that post was seen by at least one or two republicans. I’m sure you had ample opportunity to give me at least one rational reason to take you seriously. I told you I was undecided. I told you I’m not a member of any political party. I told you I was truly open minded, and truly listening.

I’m sure if you never saw my post, you at least came across one or two other non-republicans with a similar question or plea, essentially, “please give me some kind of counterpoint to the ideals I’m being presented with from the democratic side, so that I can weigh it and think about it objectively”. I’m sure that with all the people in the world, this question has come up somewhere, and at least one of you out there somewhere could have answered it in some form.

Instead, all we got from you was a paper bag that you had taken a shit in and set to fire, saying, “here, you stupid liberal”.

Point made, if all you ever had in the first place was shit. “Obama hates whites. No, wait, he hates God. He hates the military and America and our freedom, and wants us to lose. He’s a terrorist. Er, sorry, a socialist. A Muslim? An Arab? My bad, he’s a baby killer. He’s launching a war on coal! Wait, what are we going with this week? Whatever he is, I ain’t paying taxes to him and he represents the downfall of this great country (in which I hate the majority of citizens, especially if they’re different than me, and am out riding a tank to defend them and ought to be appreciated for it, only I wouldn’t articulate it that well because I failed third-grade English)!” Small wonder we can barely remember your candidate’s name, as you haven’t actually found anything to say about him.

I understand the basic premise of conservatism: small government, low taxes. I’ve been through my Ayn Rand phase, and would be respectful of that position, if that’s what your position actually was. Unfortunately, you spew on and on about “pork” and “earmarks” while pouring billions into blowing up an area of the middle east that never threatened us. Unfortunately you don’t see the hypocrisy of worrying about welfare recipients collecting a few hundred bucks for supposedly being lazy and doing nothing, while CEOs, upper management, and shareholders collect millions for simply having a high and often un-earned position, or being lucky enough to have started the game with more chips on the table. (If you think most of those guys are “creating value”, you have a pretty rosy view of corporate America.) Then you accept bribes from those same big-wigs, to stifle technologies that would threaten jobs in obsolete 20th century industries… you mean a coal tycoon might have to take an entry level position in wind or solar? Gee, what was that you were saying earlier about “bootstraps”?

Look, republicans, I could have been a great mouthpiece for you. Many of my independent friends could have helped you too. See, ideas matter. Words matter. If you have anything worth saying, I encourage you to let me know. Tonight we saw that a positive campaign can win against a negative campaign. That you don’t have to be dirty. That you don’t have to dumb yourself down. That you don’t have to rouse people up to “boo” your opponent. That you can win by inspiring real hope in people, and focusing on what’s possible, not on what we should be “afraid” of.

I do, however, appreciate the flaming paper bag of shit you’ve provided us with over the past several months, in the form of YouTube comments, FOX news reports, and the Neanderthal-like, half-grunting, half-chanting sound you make at rallies. It’s a glowing reminder that it doesn’t always pay to be an asshole.

…not sure what, though. Anyways, happy ghostie day, peeps!

What that means is writing stuff like this:

Translating it into stuff like this:

And compiling and running it to make effects like this:

Which you can see animated (in crappy quality) here:

This is not the “complete” effect, just the stage of development that it’s at.

The pseudocode in the top picture was written in a restaurant, and it wound up being one of those rare occasions where the waitress actually asked what I was doing. I did my best to explain it in human terms without dumbing it down to the point of condescension.

Just below that is the code resulting from that handwritten idea, in this case a combined blur/sharpen filter, which happens to be my first-ever recursive function. What that means is, when the function “happens”, it spawns a copy of itself, which also spawns a copy of itself, and so on. As you might guess, this would lead to some kind of crash, if it didn’t have some built-in way of eventually stopping itself — which, I suppose, is part of the thrill of writing it. Honest to golly, though, I went this route because it was the best solution for a problem, not for the sake of flirting with danger.

Most of what you’re seeing are other effects: a median filter, an auto-outlining effect, and a partial desaturation.

And that’s a good thing.

I do promise to get the long versions of my updates up here sometime soon. In the meantime, if you want the short versions.. I don’t have enough friends on Twitter (hint, hint). If you have an account, I’d love for you to head over there and start “following” me, and I’ll certainly “follow” you back.

More soon…

Today, the passing of Floyd founder and keyboardist Richard Wright took me by surprise. I simultaneously received emails from my friend Garrett and my sister Heather, plus an instant message from another friend Paul. I guess I’ve failed to keep secret how big a role the music of Pink Floyd has played in my life (as it has for many others), and I feel a strange gratitude for being remembered when news like this hits.

To me, Wright seemed to be at his most prolific during an awkward phase of Floyd’s career, starting with his contribution to the ill-fated early singles, as Syd was being phased out. Not only did these ditties tank commercially, but in all likelihood the band could never have pulled them off live, and probably had no desire to try. Yet there’s something endearing about songs like Paintbox and the later (but single-like) Summer ‘68, in their earnest aspiration to be “hip”. Just by virtue of featuring Rick on lead vocals, they were already a step towards the smoother, warmer Floyd sound that we’re more familiar with today, albeit with some stylistic fluff that would start to get trimmed back as the four members — briefly, anyway — came into closer agreement about their artistic vision.

In the grand scheme of things, while none of the four individuals grabbed the spotlight to be “rock stars” — leaving that to the cover art and light shows — Rick Wright grabbed it even less. You could kind-of-sort-of call him the George Harrison of the band, although analogies like that break down quickly under scrutiny. Some writers of obituaries will inevitably overstate his contribution to the band, as well as the band’s contribution to music, and that’s to be expected. All I know is, in the Pink Floyd music that made the biggest dent in my impressionable teenage ears and mind (and drove my family up the wall, no pun intended) — particularly Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here — his playing was an indispensable part of the sound, and the magic.

R.I.P., Rick, and thank you.

Edit 10/4/08: Here is a better obituary, care of my friend Vic in Ohio.

Download audio file (48.mp3)

Well, maybe it’s “stock creepy” instead of “brilliant creepy”, but that’s what I came up with in a few hours yesterday. Personally, I think I’ll need a quick dose of therapy after listening to it the requisite 500 times. Anyway, if not this film, I’m sure it can be recycled somewhere.

* “Free” is just a joke, and in no way constitutes a release into the public domain or any other such tomfoolery. But you’re free to listen to it and re-connect with your inner sociopath.