Sat Jan 03 2015 12:54:22 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
This is great. If you're interested in active listening, field recordings, soundscapes, or amibent sound/music, this is a pretty good primer and talks about the origins of the term "acoustic ecology" as a movement.
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.
Sun Sep 28 2014 23:29:44 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
tags: instructable creepy mask face
Such a simple and effective (yet time consuming) way to make a mask of a face out of rawhide. Soooo creepy!
Fri Sep 26 2014 22:58:45 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
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.
Fri Sep 26 2014 22:42:31 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
tags: portland pdx cor robotron 2084 churchofrobotron dorkbot dorkbotpdx diode diodegallery
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.
Tue Jul 29 2014 01:03:28 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
tags: xiuxiu music videos nsfw angelguts angelgutsredclassroom redclassroom
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:
edit 9/20/2014: Added Cijnthya's Unisex official video
Mon Jul 21 2014 22:47:05 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
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...
I'm sure I've only captured a fraction of what I found fun/interesting/inspiring! Until next year...
Sat Jul 19 2014 21:12:20 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
tags: sound audio listening worldlisteningday fieldrecording recording
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!