Oh Hey There

"The robots asked the Munich Machine to go into a vocal booth and speak about his life. In the studio..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:21:06 -0600

“The robots asked the Munich Machine to go into a vocal booth and speak about his life. In the studio were multiple microphones of various vintages from the 60s to today. When Moroder asked the engineer why they had so many mics, he replied that the mic they would use would depend on what decade of his life he was speaking about. When Moroder asked if anyone would know the difference, the engineer replied ‘They will know.’”

- From URB’s report about electronic pioneer Giorgio Moroder’s recent studio stint with Daft Punk. (via pitchfork)

In our Real Word Listening task, the toddler is presented with...

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:18:00 -0600

In our Real Word Listening task, the toddler is presented with four images and an audio prompt of “see/find the _____”. Our eye-tracker records where the kiddo looks on the screen. One of the images is the named object, one is semantically related word (e.g., another animal or tool if the target is an animal or a tool), one starts with the same sound as the target, and one is just an unrelated word.

Before we had just crunched the numbers and calculated the odds that the child looks at the correct image over time, but I wanted a closer look at what the toddler was doing during a trial, so I made script to draw the location and path of their gaze over time. In this trial, after hearing “horse”, the subject fixates on the sheep for half a second and makes two big saccades over towards the horse and fixates on that image.

And that’s the science I’ve been up to, crunching numbers on eye-tracking tasks with toddlers.

knowyourmeme: Pleeeeeebs. KYMdb - I Know That Feel Bro

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:51:33 -0600

knowyourmeme:

Pleeeeeebs.

KYMdb - I Know That Feel Bro

thedandyunderworld: Taking place in England the owners of the...

Fri, 25 May 2012 06:52:01 -0600

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

thedandyunderworld:

Taking place in England the owners of the yard slowly kept adding sections to the contraption so when the squirrel learned one section and got the nuts, they’d add another section. It took over 2 weeks to get to the final product you see in the video.

animals rule

basically the best song ever

Fri, 25 May 2012 06:46:37 -0600

basically the best song ever

Photo

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:31:12 -0600

"The good news: Twitter lets you block a person’s retweets while still following their original..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:31:09 -0600

“The good news: Twitter lets you block a person’s retweets while still following their original tweets. When you’re looking at someone’s Twitter page, click the gray menu-box in the upper-right corner with the silhouette icon, and select “Turn off Retweets”.”

- http://www.splatf.com/2012/05/retweeting/

This is the most useful thing I have learned all day.
(via tomewing)

"Or actually, “Paul and Linda.” This was another one of Paul’s chief Ram-related..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:30:25 -0600

“Or actually, “Paul and Linda.” This was another one of Paul’s chief Ram-related offenses: He not only invited his new photographer bride into the recording studio, he included her name on the record’s spine. Ram is the only album in recorded history credited to the artist duo “Paul and Linda McCartney,” and in the sense that Linda’s enthusiastically warbling vocals appear on almost every song, it’s entirely accurate. Some read Paul’s decision as the ultimate insult to his former partner: I’ve got a new collaborator now! Her name is Linda, and she never makes me feel stupid. In the album’s freewheeling spirit, however, the decision scans more like guilelessness and innocence. The songs don’t feel collaborative so much as cooperative: little schoolhouse plays that required every hand on deck to get off the ground. Paul had the most talent, so naturally he was up front, but he wanted everyone behind him, banging pots, hollering, whistling— whatever it is you did, make sure you’re back there doing it with gusto.”

- Paul McCartney / Linda McCartney: Ram | Album Reviews | Pitchfork

me in my underponce

Wed, 23 May 2012 20:23:00 -0600

me in my underponce

i saw this and had to copycat it

Wed, 23 May 2012 19:57:35 -0600

i saw this and had to copycat it

up-schist-creek: ^ This.

Wed, 23 May 2012 19:34:51 -0600

up-schist-creek:

^ This.

"The perception that most people have of mental illness comes from a lot of things. There is of..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 18:57:28 -0600

“

The perception that most people have of mental illness comes from a lot of things.

There is of course the fact that mental illness isn’t a tangible as a physical one. Sure, after a while, you start neglecting yourself, you don’t shower, brush your teeth, you might eat too much or too little, you might even harm yourself. But for the most part, nobody can really “see” your illness, other than maybe you looking depressed.

Additionally, you have the romanticization of mental illness in entertainment and media. “Oh, ‘Girl Interrupted’ is such a great film about a strong woman dealing with her problems”, “Oh, those colorful characters in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ were just so fun”. People see a mental illness as a character trait. Something that adds to who someone is, but it doesn’t add anything, it subtracts all the things that make you feel human. This leads to a lot of people diagnosing themselves with an illness to explain their actual character traits, which tends to minimize the suffering of people with an actual mental illness. “Oh, well we all get depressed. You just need to think positive and do something fun! Go have an adventure”. The problem with this line of thinking, is that it assumes that a mental illness is a temporary condition, and not a persistent set of symptoms that manifest on a regular basis. Being depressed is not having depression. Being depressed is having a cold. Having depression is having an auto-immune deficiency.

While I can not speak for all mental illnesses, I can speak about depression and PTSD. Both of which I have suffered from for the better part of 2 decades, and both of which make my life incredibly difficult.

Depression is a mental and social cancer. It seeps into your life, it infects you. It takes you over. All the things you enjoy, the things that make you happy, they become meaningless. Imagine one day you woke up, and your favorite meal in the whole world, tasted like shit. Now imagine that’s what you feel your life is like. Oh, you might get a reprieve once in a while, but it’s like cancer going into remission. You know it’ll be back, and you worry about if you’re going to survive it this time.

Then you deal with the people who try to sympathize with you, but if they don’t have it, they don’t really know. So they try to cheer you up, but it doesn’t work. So they get tired of seeing you waste away, and they stop calling. Because, who wants to be around a Debbie Downer? They’re worried that you’ll infect them with your sadness. Your work declines, because when you can be bothered to get out of bed and show up, you can’t focus. Your performance sucks, and you know it. It’s like you have no energy for anything. Your boss notices this, and because they don’t think you’re actually depressed, because “You seemed fine a week ago, you need to leave your personal problems at home”, you lose your job. So you get more depressed, because now not only are you depressed, you’re alone. You feel like a disappointment. You feel like you’ve failed yourself, your friends, your family, and that everyone would be better off without you.

So here you are, sitting in your room. Every thought is a muddled mess of how much you hate yourself. You haven’t showered, or brushed your teeth in days. You get up to go to the bathroom, but since you’ve stopped eating, you don’t even do that anymore. Your bills are piling up, but you haven’t been able to hold a steady job in years. You have no friends, and even if you do, they don’t want to be around you, because you’re depressing. Because you’ve got no job, you’ve probably got no health insurance to get help. But it’s not like it matters, because you’ve been on so many meds that did absolutely nothing to help, you start to wonder if the meds made you worse, if it’s really just “all in your head”. Because you’ve got no friends, you’ve got no support network. Pretty soon, you’re going to end up on the streets, because you’ve got no job, no one to stay with, and no one to help.

And then, you get a reprieve. Your depression goes into remission, even if for an hour. So when people see you not being visibly depressed, it reinforces their idea that it’s something you can just “get over”. But you still feel it in the back of your skull. Those cancerous cells multiplying, waiting to turn into a tumor, waiting to spread through every facet of your life.

”

- Ironiclastname on Reddit (via shooby)

"European and North American soldiers who have mutilated enemy corpses appear to have drawn racial..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 18:36:28 -0600

“European and North American soldiers who have mutilated enemy corpses appear to have drawn racial distinctions of this sort between close and distant enemies. They ‘fought’ their close enemies, and bodies remained untouched after death, but they ‘hunted’ their distant enemies and such bodies became the trophies that demonstrate masculine skill.”

- Soldiers who desecrate the dead see themselves as hunters

elsi: via mental floss

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:04:29 -0600

elsi:

via mental floss

Photo

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:33:52 -0600

Audio

Wed, 23 May 2012 06:53:41 -0600

moshita: Sphenoid Bone free-standing, 1808 William Rush what a...

Tue, 22 May 2012 17:14:39 -0600

moshita:

Sphenoid Bone free-standing, 1808

William Rush

what a weirdo bone

who decided it was World Goth Day today? was it this cat?

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:31:47 -0600

who decided it was World Goth Day today? was it this cat?

"A common mnemonic is “An orphan has no past; a widow has no future” or “An orphan..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:55:02 -0600

“A common mnemonic is “An orphan has no past; a widow has no future” or “An orphan is left behind, whereas a widow must go on alone”.”

- Widows and orphans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dare!

Mon, 21 May 2012 19:12:57 -0600

rocketsandrayguns:

tomewing:

postpunk:

tomewing:

I’ve been listening to the Human League’s Dare recently - it just got a nice reissue for its 30th anniversary (a year late!) w/other League Imperial Phase tracks on.

The League is such a great pop story, and Dare is a great pop LP, partly because it’s the collision of two very potent ideas of pop which have resonated ever since but rarely sparked off one another so well.

The first idea is the original League idea - of pop as something boffin-ish, DIY, something you tinker with and build like you’d build an electronics kit. A ZX80 take on pop. Proficient, expert but also non-“musical” (as mainstream musicality was defined in ‘78), building songs out of found objects and concepts. High point: “The Black Hit Of Space”, one of the great songs by anyone ever.

The second idea is the reboot League idea - the logical jump from DIY to “anybody can make pop”, synthesiser democracy, the absurd (but intuitively right) idea that the ideal pop will be made by the singer, the lighting guy and two women they met in a disco.

What these have in common is a concept of de-professionalising pop to make it more interesting. What’s great about Dare is how they rub against one another - a song abt Judge Dredd, abstract stuff like “Darkness” & the very odd “Seconds”, unabashed rushy pop like “Fascination” and “Love Action”.

It’s also an illustration of a general idea about tech. New technology is more interesting than old technology, usually. But new technology is MOST interesting when it gets into the hands of people who aren’t “technologists”. Dare forces the issue for pop.

Yeah it’s deprofessionalized in content, execution and ambition, but sonically they had a wizard like Martin Rushent behind the scenes (willing/able to make 2000+ edits on the Dare! remix album). Maybe a little more synth meritocracy than pure synth democracy? See Geeta Dayal’s write up on the Martin Rushent’s interview in Totally Wired, where she talks about the meticulous editing and splicing he performed on the remixes.

Stellavista brought me up on this too, and yes, massive credit to Rushent (especially on Love And Dancing, which should really be packaged w/the remix album). But - at the risk of sounding very precious! - I was using words like “idea” and “story” on purpose: behind the scenes things are rarely quite as neat but the ideas the League presented of themselves and the way they made pop were/are intoxicating.

Ugh. You just can’t write about Pop ideas without someone piping up with rockist comments about the musician/producer/technician who did the real work.

Having said that, I’ve heard the dire pre-Rushent Dare! demos…

Heh, a year ago I would have breathlessly auto-reblogged the original post onto postpunk, but then Martin Rushent died and I learned that he existed (and that synth-pop records had producers). Dare’s legacy is firmly for being a Human League record.