I was pleased to learn that the Python Imaging Library (PIL) has a modernized fork called Pillow. From the Pillow site:

The fork authors’ goal is to foster active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via Travis CI
• Publicized development activity on GitHub
• Regular releases to the Python Package Index

This is great news for me, because there are several projects (this site included) that use PIL, and I have been worried about its future. In addition to the infrequent PIL releases, the lack of Python 3 support in PIL was starting to be a real drag...and it was the main thing that kept some of us on Python 2.7.

So yeah, it's nice to have a path forward...time to embrace the fork and move on. I will miss the PIL acronym.

Somebody is being either clever or naive -- spotted this at the checkout line:

"Childs Play" -- not a kids movie.

Such a simple and effective (yet time consuming) way to make a mask of a face out of rawhide. Soooo creepy!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Skin-Mask

(source)

This video doesn't do it justice...but I was shocked to see this terrifying child in a kabuki mask staring in the window earlier:

Spoiler: It's not actually a child...it's a mop.

The Church of Robotron has been working hard to find the mutant savior and to train members of the last human family. We had an opening on Wednesday, and my friend Zach edited together this fantastic video:

Here's a test video I shot of oscule's much improved jacob's ladder...it's terrifying:

If you have not yet been tested, please join us on First Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 at Diode Gallery for indoctrination, testing, anti-robot training, propaganda distribution, and some good old-fashioned street devival.

• More pictures/video from me.
• Pictures from Mike
• Pictures from Zach

My absolute favorite album in an unspeakable number of years is (no secret), Xiu Xiu's "Angel Guts: Red Classroom". From the first time I heard this record I fell in love with it...and that interest and that respect has only grown since its release. I come back and listen to it a LOT, and it's failing to tire out. I'm not reviewing it here, but it's tortuously odd, wonderfully crafted, and painfully depressing / soul-searching twist of violence and sexual storytelling...with great balance of synth+drum+melody vs. subtle-yet-effective dissonant/atonal/noise experimentations.

The [official] videos in support of the album are top notch. Brilliant and fitting and supporting works.

The purpose of this post is to consolidate the tracklisting of the supporting videos. I haven't seen this consolidated list anywhere else, so I thought I'd put it together. Please be forewarned, there is some very extreme content mixed in here that should be considered NSFW and certainly not for children.

Tracklisting:

1. Angel Guts:
2. Archie's Fades
3. Stupid in the Dark
4. Lawrence Liquors #1, Lawrence Liquors #2
5. Black Dick
6. New Life Immigration
7. EL Naco
8. Adult Friends (no video, yet?)
9. The Silver Platter
10. Bitter Melon
11. A Knife in the Sun
12. Cinthya's Unisex
13. Botanica de Los Angeles
14. :Red Classroom

edit 9/20/2014: Added Cijnthya's Unisex official video

So Open Source Bridge was a month ago, and I had been so bogged down and frazzled thinking about an planning for toorcamp 2014 that I didn't have a chance to collect my thoughts/bookmarks. Until now.

So yeah, this is a series of thoughts random, poorly organized thoughts and bookmarked tabs from the conference. In no particular order...

• Aaron Parecki gave a great talk on OAuth and "IndieAuth" and what it means to an open and free web. There's this thing called web sign in, and they have a wiki on how to set it up. I want to get this going on noisybox.net. There are a bunch of important reasons why this is mostly rad, but it can also allow you to do powerful things like using 3rd party tools...like...
• Quill. Post content to your own website, securely, using a 3rd party tool. Shows the power of these open interchange technologies, and formats...like...
• Micropub. An API spec for doing time-based content posting (blogging, microblogging) with 3rd party tools, but to your own site, in a way that you are fully in control of. It's kinda deep and complicated and gnar, but it's damn sure the best thing I've seen in this direction...
• Mesh technologies, especially after certain leaks, are hotter than ever. They still don't live up to their expectations/misunderstandings yet, but have real potential for grassroots and emergency response situations. The Mesh Potato seems like a fun device for experimentation, if not already antiquated.
• Not only are tons of nerds using Python for data analysis and visualization, but there are mature OSS product suites that help with this stuff. Also data dorks often use iPython notebook to facilitate sharing and exchange of bad-assery. Reminds me of a cool mashup of sketchpad.cc and etherpad and pastebin, but Python.
• The Internet Archive is still kicking ass. They could stand to be more redundant (DR) though. No seriously. They also have detailed APIs (change the "details" in any item url to "metadata" for an example), an s3 compatible API, an rich suite of open source cli tools for interacting with their APIs. They also run openlibrary.org, an amazing lending library for digital book content.
• I learned a little about Camlistore, which is a complex personal storage system. I think the goal is to provide a framework into which you can store and index the stuff you create online (blogs, tweets, photos, recipes, fanfic? all the things?) and have it be robust and searchable and have many other advanced things. I'm having a hard time trying to grok how it might fit into my own personal storage needs, but I sure do get the sentiment. It also reminded me about Tahoe-LAFS and the interesting things that can be done with that.

I'm sure I've only captured a fraction of what I found fun/interesting/inspiring! Until next year...

In observance of World Listening Day 2014 (July 18th), I guided a lunchtime soundwalk around parts of downtown Portland, OR. I decided to organize only at the last minute, and there were 5 of us who showed up for the nearly hour long sound walk.

We started with short discussion about active listening and purposeful sound observation and some of the philosophy/ideas behind it. We walked and listened for about 20 minutes, then had a short chat about what we had noticed so far and what we thought was interesting in the act of observing. We continued on for another 35 minutes or so and completed a wide loop. The small group of participants seemed to have a really good time (and it turned out to be some decent exercise too).

I recorded the walk on my binaural in-ear microphones with a Zoom H2. The raw recording is available on archive.org: Portland, OR World Listening Day Soundwalk.

Embedded here:

See you next year for World Listening Day!

I know what I'm doing when the next economic downturn slices our faces in half! I'm going to the pawn shop with all of my Hargadons!

For historical record: First observed yesterday morning, around Broadway and 3rd (??). This is not a common morning route for me, but the sign was there and appeared fairly new. I considered going back last night to pick it up but decided to give it a day or more to cook(?). Tonight it's mine mine mine mine mine mine mine...

I want the g-voice number response team to be moar responsive, though I respect that my calls are hopefully just noise in the matrix. From the support perspective, we should be OUTRAGED that it's this difficult to get actual cash money for your actual Banksy (original artwork). Actually.

Please call the above sales line and let them know how upset you are that you can't actually sell your actually original Banksy.

RIP H.R. Giger.

A true goth and cyberpunk LEGEND.

You have changed the world forever and you will be missed.