Will of the People

Emiliana Torrini's 「Dead Things」 is a song that captures disintegration into hikikomori and a retreat to memory very well - it's one of those "meaningful songs" to me. It also makes use of an unusual "musical instrument", making something we've all heard into a conceptual bridge.

It is awesome when people can joke around through music.

It would be interesting to try to write a comedy skit done entirely this way - no physical humour, no words.

It was a cheesy western story, and the Provolone Ranger had just ridden into town...

I jumped through all the hoops to get my ratings data back out of Amarok, and wrote some spiffy tools that others can use to do the same. Notes on that:( Read more... )

and some thoughts about rankings of music and external tools to help people think:( Read more... )

People on LJ and in my friendslist will get a link to the actual data files and more full results of analysis.

I finally got around to proofreading and updating two more philosophical essays:

• On the meaning of codification
• On the importance of inculturation

They're really more sketches than anything else.. I'm not entirely happy with them, but right now I'd like to put up lots of sketches giving a general shape before getting into specifics. I keep forgetting how much old stuff I've taken down for various reasons and the fact that I have barely anything up now despite having given various hundreds-of-pages philosophy "chapbooks" to people in the past. I think I can cover my current system of epistemology next - it's kind of distant from my larger interests in philosophy, but most systems of epistemology I've seen philosophers lay out are ugly to my eyes.

ThouShaltNot keeps growing on me - ( Read more... )

My overall satisfaction with FC11 is very high. I keep finding new little bits of polish and hardware-specific-figuring-out they added since FC10 - it's strange to actually be happy with Linux on a laptop. Maybe eventually we'll hit OSX-level hardware support and smoothness! We're quite a ways closer to that than we were back in the early 1990s when I first installed SLS Linux (via a large number of floppies) onto one of the family computers.

Musical adventures...( Read more... )

When music and politics interact:

• "Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy." -- Pablo Picasso

( Read more... )

Daydream: start with Japanese kana pairings, shift vowel representation to positions on a musical key, and consonants to choice of instrument (mario paint?), hide all but one bar in the key, imagine a continued dialogue as the swimmy motion of these consonants flowing upwards as we fall in time (better aesthetics than written word?)... idea of multiple thoughts at once, divergences, stddaydream.h, possible to align these things with musical coherence and flow of voices? Could a good musician arrange a random sequence of notes artfully into music given control only over tempo? Is this analogous to tetris?

Curiosity/Inspiration: Playing with different forms of musical expression, hearing and possibly playing music written in different time signatures.

Sharing of USB keys with neat music on them: mix with geocaching?

Cats having discovered most of the details of how humans use restrooms is much more irritating than them understanding all or none of the details. Cats are indeed clever beasts, perhaps too clever.

Coming home from coffeeshop, had a brief intense daydream/intuition of someone else being there, planning to pour some wine and snuggle on the couch.. *slump*

Little flash of ideas that popped into my head for my largely neglected sci-fi writing thing:( Read more... )

Sometimes I'm weirded out when I notice that some coffeeshop people have become adept at conversing without saying anything - I've had conversations now and then where I noticed that the person I was talking with shied away from saying anything, just took everything I said and restated it in other words (the effect can be subtle if done right) or made vague handwavy statements. Tempting: dig at them just as subtly to see if they're clueless, timid, know a bit but don't know a lot and are too proud to say so, or just have odd conversational habits.

Hooray for fiction, or is there too much of it?

Meh. bitter.

As I mentioned on a poll on the LJ side of my blog (maybe I should add poll support to pound?), I don't mind editing out parts of songs that I don't like, from surrounding bits to entire interludes. ( Read more... )

Yesterday's rain was glorious.

Amusing connection of ideas: Unix shell tab completion, hash buckets, English-unix vocabulary. My tab key on most of my keyboards is much more worn than almost any key (except possibly the space bar ( Read more... )"we like that typing is happening, and that we're in control, but we like it more when most of the typing is not being done by us"). It is left to the reader to think about how unix tab-completion can be connected productively to the idea of Markov chains.

Incidentally, sometime in the future, there will be pop-punk covers of most songs by Death Cab for Cutie, and it will be fantastic. In the closer future, there are nine days until their next album is out - they and Radiohead together form the core for what seems to be a circle of music with almost universal likability in people I know. I've always hoped Firewater and Plaid Tongued Devils would hit that status, but I think they're hurt by not being on a major record label.

I recently read, courtesy of a post by Mohammad Ali Abtahi, that BushJr gave public support to reformist parties in Iran, which is believed to have invoked the standard (and well-justified, imo) anger of the Iranian public against America in order to hurt the cause of reform politics in that countries. *cringe* ... but at the same time, it is an unfortunate situation when one cannot speak of change one (relatively speaking) approves of without one's approval hurting them. It is very unfortunate that the United States and Britain have not done much towards apology for their abuse of that nation.

Recently I realised that a lot of the musical motifs used by Debussy and Gershwin are the same, ( Read more... )

I've been playing a bit with "programming" notions for music - ( Read more... )

I wish I had an 8-track (in theory, I should be able to do this on a computer, but sound drivers generally suck too much to make this practical). Also, I'm happy to hear that the second album by the Persian-American group Niyaz will be released soon - I loved their first album but was worried that, like with a fair amount of good indie music I have, they wouldn't make it to a second album. I particularly like how they put Rumi to sound - I'm thinking about picking up some books to learn classic Persian so I can better link the basic flow of the words (sentence structure, at least) to the music.

Recently was disappointed that a job application was rejected. It's hard to apply for jobs where one doesn't live though.

Nana tea is quite excellent.

Day went largely as planned - swung by to take care of bird, work, Sakura for lunch (nice Makizushi), a walk around town (a fair number of other people were walking around too, disappointed to find that most places, apart from Jewish and Chinese/Japanese restaurants, were closed), swung by Pinskers to get some wine, eventually came home when I found that no coffeeshops are open. Weather is pleasant, warm enough to air out the apartment. On the way home, I saw one of those topless cars, heard music blaring from it. Initially I was put off by how obnoxious it was to play music so loud, and like the other people around, I was tempted to say something. Then I noticed that this wasn't obnoxious hip-hop or metal, rather it's Jazz. Good Jazz, played at appropriate volume levels (fairly low), is pleasant background music - loud enough that one could pay attention to it if one wants to but not so loud that one couldn't easily hold a conversation over it. Great Jazz is pleasant enough to merit one's full attention and is often worth playing loud enough to permit the variance in loudness in the component voices full expression. This was Great Jazz. On one level, I was still irritated that the music was quite that loud, and thought about shouting at the car, but ... it's difficult to do that when someone has good taste. Giving them one thumbs up and another thumbs down probably wouldn't be very clear :)

My Linux laptop is ill.. more rubbish like:( Read more... )and dropped keyboard/mouse events/resyncs of 1-3 seconds. From what I understand, the i8042 (keyboard/mouse controller) on the system is hosed - the problem seems to start if I'm using the mouse while the system has heavy CPU load (and doesn't go away when said load drops). I've had this problem intermittently for the whole time I've had this laptop though.. tried everything from tweaking the i8042 kernel parameters to playing with synaptics driver options in X. Sigh.

Newslike substances:( Read more... )

It recently occurred to me, in an IM conversation, that polka seems like the most out-of-place music I could imagine in a cyberpunk dystopian future. Somehow, the notion of this run-down but exquisitely wired bar (cyberpunk is a very urban fantasy), with the "Pennsylvania Polka" suddenly coming on on the speakers... it seems wonderful and hilarious and wrong (trifecta). I should write Neal Stephenson with the idea.

When I was a little kid, I started reading about great topics/debates in philosophy (yay libraries), and came across the idea of determinism versus free will. ( Read more... )

The other half: Today on the way back from dinner ( Read more... )

Onto a rather less pleasant topic, while searching for that music video, I stumbled across another video with the word "torn" in it - it appears to be tied to an American anti-semitic group (or maybe just that guy). ( Read more... )

It's funny (well, really, more tragic) to think of all the things in life we can see we might've wanted that we never get the chance to try to make. Friendships, relationships, jobs, sharing experience. I've been jealous of a few generations of CMUfolk - not for their education (I think I got a pretty good one even if the school-independent study ratio was rather different) but rather the social opportunities and the people. ( Read more... )I often think that if I had gone through these experiences with them, not being so personally worn out and sharing more experiences, perhaps I would've built closer friendships and enjoyed the social atmosphere more than I did my own undergraduate times at OSU. It's hard to really know, it's just easy to be sad about this because opportunities for much of anything don't seem to come up anymore, and I don't have the energy left to keep trying to make them myself very often. Life is almost full of non-events and invisibility..

Ahh well. Back to (hopefully) daydreams of pretty guitar/singing music, and maybe eventually some sleep.

So far as I can tell, an idiomatic translation of Сплин's "Выхода Нет" (Splean's "No Escape") does not exist on the internet. I thought that at one point I took the time to hash one together and blogged it, but grep says no, and no lyrics sites seem to have it in English. As it's one of my favourite songs, see below:( Read more... )

Note that my Russian is by no means good enough to understand the whole song while listening. This is cobbled together from various translations. Accuracy is not guaranteed, and if you know Russian well and want to take a stab, see here for the lyrics in Russian.

Partly inspired by this, partly inspired by having been interested in hearing reworkings/covers of Oingo Boingo music from various sources (the first relevant because when music was ported to a different platform, it was often redone to take advantage of the better/different sound on the new platform), I've had a learning experience (obvious in retrospect, like many of the best learning experiences) -- given a reference piece of music, different people who are really into it will still hear it differently, latching onto different relations between the notes (on various levels) as significant. Remakes, intentionally or not, tweak these relations based on what the reworker found significant, which is sometimes surprising to people who found other aspects essential. For musical people, this can be particularly jarring - when I'm listening to familiar music I like, I often hear additional voices that arn't there -- elaborations and extrapolations that fit into "spaces" in the song that are added on, usually without any conscious effort, as the songs play in my head over the months/years/etc. Keeping all these straight becomes next to impossible, and it's amusing to think about the difference in perspectives possible on whether this type of understanding leads to better or worse understanding of the original song (perhaps like some of the old debates on meaning in art -- art as communication versus art as memetic content creation versus ...)

Presently rereading Machiavelli's Discourses. Quote/Summary from the editor/translator's intro (Barnard Crick):( Read more... )

I've been struggling with my information-packrat tendencies recently - I used to never discard an mp3/ogg because I had the "gotta catch 'em all" mentality - what if someone might mention wanting to hear a song that I had deleted? Making progress - I've deleted a lot of music that I don't like hearing recently, and have been going through all the NES8 cartrage audiodumps.. discarding nostalgia feels weird. The upside is that it puts more of a spotlight on those files I keep...

Speaking of that, some of the tunes really have odd emotional triggers that they swing on like bars in a Jungle Gym... (itself a strange word - I wonder where it came from and if it's still commonly used). A tune from Marble Madness exhibits a lovable craziness that I no longer really have it in me to enjoy, and a tune from the space level in Ducktales speaks of a combined hope and security, saying something like "You'll be taken care of" .. invokes bitterness now.

I've been thinking about behaviour on MMO games recently, in particular the expectation that accomplishment within the game( Read more... )

A quote I meant to share sometime back but forgot:

( Read more... )

This time of year, the sun doesn't seem to bother showing up for very long anymore. Recent discovery: brown sugar in white tea. Interesting taste.

I've been thinking recently about a list of the most clever ideas I've been exposed to in math ( Read more... )

So far this is turning out to be a rather lonely weekend.

The notion that we're near the end of the era where music labels make a difference (or exist as they do now) is spreading. Question: How will this affect the types of music available. Discussed in person, Eric suggested that the concentration of interest in the top 100 (and similar) of the music industry would be less pronounced, which is probably true. How will this change the actual quality/quantity of music, genres, and musicians? That some musicians are already foregoing labels and only selling their music directly on iTunes (or Amazon, or their website) means that the "democratisation" (as much as market-based decisionmaking can be called a democracy - it's really something distinct) of music is already underway. Will anything important be lost? I've also occasionally heard from postmodernists that we're at the end of genres in music as everything borrows from everything else. Is that true? I think it might relate to this as well, as another form of order fades. How much structure is inherent in either system?

Was amused to hear that Pittsburgh's Mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, was reelected. I see this as a mildly good thing, partly because his last name reminds me of the old DnD setting "Ravenloft", and partly because the person who ran against him had ties to the BushJr administration. Anyone with ties to that group (with the exception of Colin Powell, whom I believe to be a person of integrity) is automatically suspect by my measures. I really don't know much about Pittsburgh's city politics - there are only a few issues I care about..( Read more... )

Sooner or later, most Wikis that arn't part of a dominant culture that provides guidance on the matter have this discussion on self-governance. There's a lot of lessons that can be learned from the different way these things are worked out. I always am saddened to see sites that start out with a purpose eventually lose sight of that purpose (arguments like "But what harm does it do?" are generally the start of a long, ugly path..), but that fortunately doesn't always happen.

Is it just me, or does the whistle-like intro/background to ThouShaltNot's song "We Could Have Flown Like Pollen" feel like it was designed to complement perfectly the background to Do As Infinity's song "Raven"? Whenever the first song shows up, I feel compelled to listen to the second.

I thought I would provide a pointer to my favourite yet remix of my favourite piece of music used in a video game - Neil Benjamin's Far Away Memories, a cover of To Far Away Times, from Chrono Trigger. (click on the download tab on that link to download). If you like the tune, it's possible to find a number of great variations on it with a bit of effort - particularly enjoyable is a version with lyrics, sung half in Japanese, half English (from another ocremix project). The process of adapting music for that medium (or vice versa) seems like it would be really interesting - I'm sure that translating songs from one language to another must be difficult, but to actually need to simplify the music itself (or to attempt to go the other way and extrapolate/improvise it to the complexity of normal music) is something else entirely. ... I suppose this might not be a concern anymore with video games often coming on media that have the space to store compressed PCM audio...

And on the topic of games, when I've had time I've been enjoying playing Final Fantasy V for the gameboy. I tried playing it in the distant past using an N16 ROM, but my Japanese wasn't (and isn't) good enough to make it easy to play untranslated. Its basic game engine feels very similar to Final Fantasy IV, even if some of the story elements made their way strongly into FFVI (which had a really great engine that, AFAIK, never was used again in an RPG). I can see why the game never made it to the United States during the initial run of the series - it's more complex than the other FF games, and the Japanese videogame industry (probably based on good market research) generally made games simpler and easier when porting them for American audiences, also meaning a lot of RPGs never made it over here. Apparently the number of Americans (then?) that like a good, complex game is too small a part of our gaming demographic. Those few people who did like complexity enough were, amusingly, often the right people to leave out (non-Japanese おたく, as it were), because they let themselves in by patching ROMs with homebrew translations and attempting to read Japanese (I did a bit of each).

I'm amused and happy to finally recognise a song I used to love when I was younger - the version of "Zombie Jamboree" I remembered was by Rockapella (and not Harry Belafonte, who incidentally is another one of those socially active musicians who's done a lot worth respecting but is also a bit crazy). A lot of Rockapella's other music is also really fun, and they did covers of a really wide variety of songs. I've always loved "Mr Sandman" in all the forms I've heard it over the years, and theirs is pretty spiffy. Also, according to Weird Al's mailbag, Don McLean (who wrote "American Pie")'s kids sing Weird Al's parody enough around the house that McLean sometimes has trouble keeping his lyrics straight while performing it in concert - amusing (especially to me, given my "endearing" habit of singing the Weird Al lyrics over McLean's version whenever I hear it). I just heard Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise" for the first time, and had no idea that Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" was a cover before. I'm not sure, between those two versions, which I think is better. Sometime I need to find my Walter/Wendy Carlos CDs - that genre-bending music is pretty distinct and interesting (either that, or I haven't heard of some musicians I should've and my readers should aim to help me remedy my ignorance).

I'm not actually that proud of the paper I wrote for my Hitchcock class - this was one of those cases where I wanted to write a lot more than there was room for, and the style of what I was trying to say would've better been supported by moderately deep analysis of several seperate parts of the film rather than deep analysis of a few (which I didn't do, but maybe should've) or shallow analysis of several (which I did). In geeral, when I have to cut things for size, I prefer to handwave a bit rather than chop ideas - it feels to me like less possibility for creativity is usually lost because expanding things that are present enough is a reliable, almost-rote process, while excluding ideas entirely to well cover those I choose feels like choosing to forget some cleverness. Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way though - when I'm not given the assignment I like, I need to avoid turning what I hand in into some form of philosophical protest..

I'm still frustrated at the low frequency of people I'm interested in being interested back, my cowardice in trying to start up friendships/social relations, and the presence of stupid hopes for relationships with people who are either unavailable or otherwise not suitable. I sometimes wonder if non-jewish-centric shadchanim would be a very good idea for the secular movement or not, although at least locally I don't have any ties to that movement per se. Maybe I should actually go to one of the meetings I hear about to stir things up. All these ideas of moving, wanderlust, loneliness (interesting article BTW, although I am *not* implying anything about myself with it), and changing nature of some of my friendships are leading to a kind of paralysis in my thoughts of my future...

News:( Read more... )

Something that strikes me as odd while watching all these old movies is that people in the past were much better dressed than today. I wonder how true that actually was - I had a conversation with Kavita on impressions people of other countries get of the United States from Hollywood, later to repeat in a different form at the Zets gathering, and I wouldn't be surprised if get similarly inaccurate impressions of the past from films of the era.. but then perhaps people really did dress more nicely in public in the past (e.g. wearing a tie to the park).