Satorientalist.

Man... I write a lot more than I post here. If you think I'm wordy now, realize this is me trying to work against that.

Today was a great day. My all-day photo class gave us a simple directive; go do street fashion. Different students were sent to different areas. Occasionally some students get an atypical assignment from the rest of the group. I was sort of one of those. Instead of a specific area I was instructed to shoot corners. Like, Charles Dutton corners? Haha... ha?

A small 90 degree angle was sketched for me.

I had gotten it into my head to shoot with a contemporary, powerful, fast point & shoot. Not mine, which is glacial. A friend lent me one. My friends are awesome.

So off I went. Haven't had a morning like that in a while.

Street shooting is like the Twitter of photography. Someone's there for an instant, mostly they grimace, and they're gone. I like the one's that pinch up more than the grimacers.

Problems: I'm still not close enough. The masters get right up in your grill. They don't fucking care. I need to get to that point.
You can't ask permission. I did, four times. Two said yes. One came out well. I like it. It's like a masthead for this kind of thing. The Sartorialist cover; some kind of credibility. Many of these, though, the keen could detect cowardice. I wouldn't argue with them.

Otherwise, nothing unusual. I have audio I'll play for you guys next week. It's short!

Oh, and I learned a fucking ton about fashion. Hats are fashionable. Problem solved!

That other thing.

Buzz summary:
Okay, in a little over two weeks I've made 62 posts to Buzz. That's over a quarter of my entire blog posting (208) over 2.5 years. So... what the hell is all that? Well, predictably, it's what would normally be sinking into the bog that is my bookmark file. Maybe a fraction could have made it into the blog in a good week, maybe none of it.
Now, instead, I can post just up to (and slightly beyond) the limit before it starts to feel like it's just torturing my contact list. If I didn't feel self conscious about it, I could see easily doubling the rate. This is dangerously easy, fun, and rewarding.
Now part of that inflation is that, in micro-blogging, I'm freed from a lot of constraints that I've worked in over the years that keep me from posting more regularly. Over time, it became so that I didn't really feel comfortable posting here without having a "strong" piece of text, at least a half dozen great found or original images, and one to five videos. And it's very easy for mediocre text to torpedo a post from ever appearing. It may not seem like it, based on word count, but I often hate my own writing. "God, I sound like a complete jerk," I think, after a majority of paragraphs or essays get canned.
What Buzz enables me to do is to post anything that comes along. A link, a video, an image, an animated gif (finally!), a quick snippet of text. I can dash a Buzz post off in 1-5 minutes. At most, 20. A typical, fully featured blog post takes 3-4 hours.

All the tech journalists and boring bloggers are trying to pin down exactly which services Buzz mirrors, and whether it does so more or less favorably. I tried to give a fuck about this. I really did. I made notes, even. But when DJOE & I attempted to discuss it, it just didn't feel that interesting. What it looks like, structurally... it's hard to see how it matters. It's all in how people work in it. Right now, in its complete infancy, while most people seem to be either completely ignoring it or just warily prodding at it, I found a tool that does exactly what I was craving to do. Something really fun that I'd kept myself from doing here; turning something into a complete, chaotic, carnivalesque toxic waste dump. Utterly ridiculous, almost profane (that's still reserved for here), and totally stupid.

As a diligent little McLuhanite disciple I should care much more about its form and characteristics. Maybe it's just how quiet it currently seems, and how isolated you can feel from inside.

The analogy that's formed in my head is that the blog is a remote mountain cabin. You can get there, but it's a pain, and it's mostly not worth it, unless you've made the trip a few times and have come to like the place.

Buzz is like setting up a card table on the sidewalk on an Avenue and just shuffling, pattering, bullshitting. Currently, though, no one's got a phone, and you can't step very far from your table. You have no idea who's at the table down the Avenue.


I've been wanting to write some grand Buzz summarization, but I don't think it will ever happen. I'm too wrapped up and sucked in to be objective or analytic. A content list is nearly impossible. (If I were to try, I'd say the best Youtube videos I've ever seen or reposted, the best low-res and ridiculous internet art I've found, a ton of interesting articles, essays, and audio links, a dash of highbrow on a mountain of near total stupefaction, low-pressure book & film discussion, and whatever else seems remotely possible or tolerable.)

The TLDR version: it's worth it to sign up for a Gmail account if for no other reason than to participate rather than observe. You can even be partially present, and feed the services you're already utilizing into it (like Reader, Twitter, status updates, blogging, Flickr) although I think your content won't be as good as natively produced content, which is maybe partly by design, and partly a by-product of the existing services (like Twitter) being such useless piles of garbage. Still... there's no reason why someone can't prove me wrong. (Actually, I can think of at least two people that already do.)

Maybe this is Web 3.0. Filtered content, and a gradual shift into a realm where not sharing your constant stream of treasures is almost treasonously selfish.

That sounds pretty great.

The downside, of course, like anything internet related, is that when you get your content filtered, and the quality skyrockets... it's really easy to get dangerously addicted.

Dang.

Small steps.

[By me. Aww.]

I've added what I hope are three very small and neutrally worded sections to the top of the sidebar. This is such a minuscule occurrence that it feels silly even mentioning it, but in fact each of them are connections to efforts that are more personally significant than they may seem.

Anyways.

Until I get a portfolio site squared away (2010?), this blog will be forced to serve the function; an utterly chimerical and flawed vessel. In the meantime, if you're here to see my work, this will at least give you a fighting chance of finding it.

Next.
The podcast. Its hiatus was actually not. We continued to make them, and even double the pace, strange as that seems. What transpired was a long and uninteresting back-end issue, which is mostly fixed. The archives are almost completely recovered, and the most recent are almost entirely present. But since none of them had previously been available or publicized, what it would resemble to someone other than myself is just seven new episodes. Streaming or downloadable. (The mp3s have a treat for returning listeners that have begun using cover-flow in iTunes, or possess a modern-enough iPod to display artwork.)

The podcast, if you haven't listened to it before, is mostly music, and some talk, except when that ratio flips, which is infrequent. I've been doing it for, what, four years now? So it's pretty far from how terrible it used to be (thankfully those archives were never digitized, and only partially exist on cassettes), but not yet as great as I'd still like it to be. I'd like to think we get closer with every show, but as with anything ongoing the struggle will never vanish completely.

I play good music. It's not a genre specific show, so it's difficult to summarize. But if I were going to make a stab, I'd say it's a show bred of a deep love for WFMU, Wire Magazine, the Kim's that no longer exists on St. Marks Place, atypical hip-hop, Mutant Sounds and the entire sharity movement (a movement I feel is almost spiritual in its levels of thankless and dangerous rightness), Ubu, tape and bootleg culture, and excruciatingly pleasurable pop.

An update.

It's been just four days, and the internet has changed fairly drastically for me.

It's that goddamn new thing from Google that I'm sure you don't want to hear more about. Ironic, considering I had in the last post revealed that e-mail had essentially broken down for me, format/usability-wise. And it still has, I suppose.

But I got sucked in, big time. Take a look, if you like. You can see my real name, if that holds some appeal for you.

They now know everything.

I've been pretty anguished over whether to attempt to scrub my last name from the internet. Or at least from Google. My mother has Gmail. And I've never told her that I've written about a book-load's worth of bullshit on the internet, including posting a fair amount of porn.

Now if you're actually here, and not just cruising in momentarily from an image search (for porn), you know that that's not exactly what I do. Maybe. Maybe you grant me that allowance. "A man can look at erotic imagery and still have a soul worth protecting," you've said. That's very generous of you. I appreciate it.

But porn may be why this blog continues to exist. Somehow, for whatever reason, I don't want it on my Google profile. And I don't want to scrub my name. My name's already out there, a few times, very insubstantially. But it is out there, and to hunt it down halfway and try to stamp it out seems silly. Lots of people have surrendered. I suppose I'm another.

But I still need a place to be lascivious, gauche, and rude on the internet.

So. If it's quiet here, it may mean I'm there. But here isn't done yet.

Thank you.

A 96 minute PBS documentary on our shiny modern minds (I'll ruin it for you; we're fucking bonkers and a little broken.)

Yeah. Yeah. No, I just got it. Yeah. She's fine. Okay, listen, I was in the middle of Sally's Spa, though, so... you know... I've gotta go.



I love the idea of Patrick Stewart standing in a queue somewhere pecking at his iPhone, identical in behavior to those around him, reading Shakespeare. Quietly, to himself, but perfectly enunciated; "Marvelous. The Internet. What wonders!"

Digital_Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier
Watch this movie! Please.

I always feel like a leper for my position on technology. In case you didn't know; I don't use e-mail, the phone, and Facebook. I do have a problem with blog addiction (my own most certainly included), game addiction, and general motivational issues. Access to the Internet exacerbates this. I get alarmed only by my difficulty in sitting down at a PC without being able to not open a web browser. A bit of self-esteem issues, some anxiety, occasionally, but I fail to see any reason to connect any of those to technological environments.

Something like this makes me think that in 15 years, when the backlash is in full effect, my lifestyle might make some kind of perverse sense. I'll have become entirely like an alien from another era. I imagine it will feel lonely. Hopefully the older generation will be equally spiteful and unwilling to accede.

If I were a professor I don't think I would be able to handle laptops in class. It would be hard, and a few of the kids would hate me.

But the phones would be worse. No phones, ever. No beeping or vibrating, ever. No texting, ever. No exceptions outside of death, bedbugs, or eviction.

This is a great film. Well-executed and deeply engrossing, pertinent, and terrifying.

Quite a few words on games, and not a few intriguing video stills.

[Image credit: Leonardo Vocino. I need my portfolio on indexhibit!]



Been playing quite a few games recently. I always do this; in that I go weeks without playing anything, and then I obsessively play so many in such a short period of time that it becomes difficult to make sense of later.

Little Rocket is a small, innocent, somewhat simple Flash game by Alex Miller in which you pilot a tiny rocket ship around a fair sized circular universe. Planets exhibit mild gravitation, and while it isn't a stressful environment, it can be a bit tricky to land your ship safely. Mostly you'll spend the 10-15 minutes it takes to play it floating around, crashing, hurtling beyond the boundaries of the playing field, and solving fairly simple puzzles, none of which are particularly frustrating. As I got closer to collecting the last star (of 16 pink stars that you're attempting to collect) I became concerned that the last one or two would prove elusive, difficult to solve, or just generally frustrating, and was pleasantly surprised when none of that ended up being an issue at all. Perhaps too childish, unexciting, or innocent for some percentage of self-described gamers, I prefer to view this as a pleasant casual game that isn't sickly sweet or obnoxiously cute.

On the same site is a much simpler game called Avoid. Mostly, it plays like a very polished prototype, and may not hold your interest very long (although it would potentially be good for a younger player), but I wanted to mention it because one of the occasional stage designs has you using the arrows keys to avoid a barrage of expanding circles approaching you from a single direction. Since they're expanding, it naturally leads to an interesting dynamic in which you're hugging the field edge from which they're coming, due to the fact that they're easier to dodge smaller than once they've puffed up into something huge by the time they reach the opposite side of the field. I couldn't help but think, "How clever." It's a natural way to push and pull an interesting dynamic, using just a minor tweak of an existing "mechanic," but in the moment, it felt fairly unique. Like how you would imagine the sensation of piloting a canoe down a river, avoiding rocks. Quick decisions, but with deep control of what feels like a profound, natural strategic instinct. Part of me couldn't help wondering if it couldn't be effectively harnessed as an interesting dynamic in a two-dimensional shooter, or shmup. (Think Galaga-esque, and then imagine that there must be thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of these types of games.) Then I felt guilty; was I such a crass capitalist that upon discovering something interesting and pleasant I immediately set upon cannibalizing it and growing dissatisfied? Then I had two thoughts that alleviated my (bizarre) bought of guilt. 1. One of the things that makes shmups so pleasantly enduring is that people, after 30 fucking years, continue to think of interesting things to do with them. [Hell is Other People, by George Buckenham, with a nice description as well. Although Firefox does enjoy crashing, for me, more than loading, but I always overdo the tabs.] 2. I try not to view it as a bad thing; recognizing when something is approaching something significant, but not quite recognizing what's working and what isn't.

Lastly, I would be terribly remiss in not mentioning that all of these websites are pretty amazingly designed. The most elegant way I been presented with a Flash gaming experience (other than offering a downloadable; still preferable) is a simple page, devoid of ads, that does what it's supposed to without insisting on showing you too much information or making the mistake of opening itself to user comments.

I've managed to remain mostly positive so far, so I suppose I'll cut myself off on that one.

Hmm. What might give us back that warm feeling? Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack is a fair but not brilliant Canabalt clone (in which, the last time I played, I think I got to around 13,000') that is a nice example of how Flash game sites push people away. Why play it? The music. Give it five minutes. Music only.



Not bad, right?





I've always felt a deep admiration for the characteristics of crows. Nice to know others admire them as much (actually far more) than I do.



Information overload? Filter failure. (Accurately conveys why I find myself so repelled by social networking.)






[Image credit: noonat. The characters are named Bruiser and Crusher, presumably, in this amazing piece of pixel-art; shorthand for either a creative exercise, or an ingenious ruse designed to torment his fans. Make another game as great as Queens, please.]