music – The Roohr Way

November 2024 Web Links

udm14.com

Turn Off google’s annoying AI summary by forcing web mode search. How long will it work for? Who knows. But it works this month.

The Corruption of Open Source (techwontsave.us)

More on the WordPress affair and the Open Source AI definition affair. Excellent coverage and a lively guest. I’m waiting for the dust to settle before I upgrade!

iron mountain atomic storage (computer.rip)

In interesting write up on the history of ubiquitous data storage company Iron Mountain.

Jazz Cups (99percentinvisible.org)

Somehow I’m missed this the first time around. Designer of the ubiquitous Jazz print got some recognition. Interesting to know it’s originally a charcoal sketch that was then colored on a computer.

MG Ultra (bandcamp.com)

Machine Girl’s most coherent (but still very punk) offering to date. The crazy breakdowns (like the end of track 12) are much appreciated.

The End Of EDH (commandersherald.com)

When I got back into MTG in college in 2013, one of the exciting new features was the EDH format. It was much more casual, closer to the kitchen table tomfoolery that kept me entertained back in the my first run (~2002-~2005.) We didn’t all run Sol ring.

It’s interesting to see what the format has become since then. The bans seem good, but I suppose the writing was on the wall when Wizards decided to print those cards in the first place.

Designing a few cards for EDH was neat; people were using commander precons. But the coolest thing was how it made you reconsider the types of cards that never saw play in constructed before. Overcosted things that fit into weird archetypes. Jank old legends like from actual _Legends_, amd trying to make them work. I get the sense that commander has become more like other constructed formats, with people making tuned decks using good cards.

I don’t know if I should care, I do not play a whole lot anymore and new cards aren’t really printed with me in mind. But it’s interesting to see the last gasp of a truly community driven hack of Magic as it’s absorbed into Wizards.

Pollyanna’s Corpse (interruptkey.com)

Delicious page design, but a chilling investigation. The idea that we’re all building our own digital tombs only for them to be refurbished as spam instruments is a sobering one. I suppose it’s a consequence of two factors: nothing can resist entropy forever, and on the internet the form entropy takes, the heat death, is turning into spam. Spam and bots are the gray nothing of the dead web.

August 2024 Web Links

Sorry for the shorter link list this time.

Dubsnatch (DarknetDiaries.com)

Darknet Diaries is often carried by its host’s boundless enthusiasm about cybers ecurity, but this episode features one of the strangest moments: the host insisting that there’s a pattern of featuring dolphin noises in Dubstep music. When the guest doesn’t play ball and politely tries to beg off the conversation, the host keeps pressing-he’s apparently a huge fan of dolphins. If you’re old enough to remember the heyday of Brostep, you might get a kick out of the artists referenced in this episode.

Battletanx Covers (youtube.com)

Had battletanx on the mind (it’s a perennial fascination) and wanted to see if anyone had done any decent covers. Turns out the answer is an emphatic yes!

Reckoning (infrequently.org)

This is a good discussion of the failed promises of JavaScript Single Page Apps (SPAs), complete with real case studies where SPAs have sabotaged public services.

But I do think he’s missed something critical that was always hammered home at my first job when I learned about SPAs, back when we were building them out of jquerey: server conpute costs money. Client side compute is free. To you. This could be an appropriate attitude for a commercial outfit, but not one providing a public service.

The Dying Computer Museum (textfiles.com)

Another article about the LCM’s demise. This is textfiles at his best here, highly recommend giving it a read.

Blogosphere (mikegrindle.com)

Reading this article gave me some sort of warm-fuzzies and the desire to link to it, so here goes.

abortretry.fail

This substack author seems to be gunning for https://www.filfre.net/‘s spot, but for hardware instead of software.

A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (loriemerson.net)

This was pitched as a brief history of barbed wire communication. I of course assumed it would be about the way barbed wire sends a clear message to anyone planning to get to the other side of it, but it turned out to be stranger and more wonderful-a story about using barbed wire feces to carry telephony. A neat find for any fans of guerilla telephony.

July 2024 Web Links

It was a crazy month for news, but this ain’t it.

Hobby pages are finally up (blog.eamonnmr.com)

Took me a while. I spend too much time documenting stuff on discord and not enough in places I can link. So here’s a bit of a remedy: photos of painted miniatures, organized by force.

The painting tutorial I learned the most from (YouTube.com)

This came up during a discussion of how to dealt with shakey hands while painting. I described a trick I learned a long time ago that reduces brush jitter. This is probably the painting tutorial that I’ve learned the most from. Watched it early in my wargaming career. Funny thing is, I’m just getting around to thinking about unloading my STAW ships. Ah well.

Pitchfork skewers a recent album (pitchfork.com)

Absolutely gruesome.

If Perry was willing to cop the built-in bad press of making a song about women’s lib with an alleged abuser, shouldn’t the song at least be a banger? Instead, it’s unfathomably tepid, irritating at best. In the immortal words of Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, uttered moments before she died: “Katy Perry, please stop.”

The Face Of Connecticut (70.91.221.154)

Yep, bare IP address. I won’t spoil my future review of it by explaining this one. It’s a forty year old geology book but it touches my heart in a unique way.

Bionicle’s original story guy set the record straight (alastairswinnerton.com)

Just though this was interesting. This guy’s contributions seem to sometimes eclipsed by Farshtey and Faber.

My very first Ubuntu bug (bugs.launchpad.net)

I’ve been using Ubuntu off and on since the aughts (I’m pretty sure my first install was Hardy Heron back in ’08) but I don’t believe I’ve ever had occasion to file a bug report before. I was trying to get Sheepshaver running on a fresh OS install, and discovered to my dismay that the padsp binary has disappeared. If anyone knows where it went or where I can find it, leave a comment!

https://predawka.bandcamp.com/album/erynias

erynias (predawka.bandcamp.com)

Excellent melodic Drill’n’Bass record from an artist you probably haven’t heard of before. I sure hadn’t. Reminds me of Fine Primitive Sounds a bit. Great sound design, great melodies, and the timing is impeccable, with no element overstaying its welcome.

Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown (onehundredpages.wordpress.com)

Bit mean, but very funny.

Study Reveals location of starfish’s head (news.stanford.edu)

I was wondering recently if we’d made any progress on Starfish development, and was not disappointed.

May 2024 Web Links

News Related Wikipedia Drama (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia talk pages are always an interesting place, but this one is a pretty interesting discussion, because it gets at the heart of Wikipedia’s role in our evolving Truth landscape.

AI Is Breaking Google (Better Offline Podcast)

A conversation about the ludicrous ‘AI summary’ feature that google debuted recently. The juiciest bit of gossip is that the SEO community has been playing with the feature for a year prior to release and thought for sure that Google wouldn’t release it in that form because it was so busted… and they just up and did it!

Intro contains a cogent explanation of why Google’s latest move is so bad for the web and web users. If anyone has an alternate search engine they’re planning on launching, best to strike while the iron is hot!

The Batsh*t [sic] Software Aphex Twin Used (YouTube / The Flashbulb)

The Flashbulb (yes, that The Flashbulb, the guy who gave us Please Don’t Remember and The Bridgeport Run) talks about software Aphex Twin used. You probably already knew about Supercollider, Trackers, and Metasynth, but I’d only heard passing reference to CDP, for example. I wish he’d gone into a bit more depth about Supercollider and shown off exactly what sort of things you can do with it.

One thing that I found really interesting was the insight into one of my favorites; RDJ album. Tracker outputting MIDI triggering a hardware sampler, because trackers of the day couldn’t handle samples as nice as you hear on RDJ album. I suppose that suggests that HAB was using samples inside the tracker for drums and outboard synth for the melodies? At the very least it’s always sounded like someone manually playing with the cutoff in the first part of Arched Maid Via RDJ, it sounds great and it’s an effect I’ve often tried to emulate.

I’m surprised The Flashbulb considers Bucephalus Bouncing Ball the all time best. I mean it’s a great track and I love how the sweet melody sneaks in after the harsh metallic noises of the intro, then are just as quickly washed out by more crazy noodling. But the best Aphex Twin track at any given time tends to either be from his latest album or second to latest album. I’d put Rushup | Bank 12, Xmas, or Collapse up against anything from what he called RDJ’s ‘peak era’ (Windowlicker, RDJ, etc.) If anything, what the SoundCloud release shows is that the reason the Analord era sounds so different is that RDJ now feels happy (or financially motivated) to actually release (or at least DJ) more of what he makes rather than holding a ton of it back as he did during earlier eras.

A pretty good thread on The Orange Site about GraphQL

Sums up my feelings about how our attempt to implement GraphQL went back when we tried it out at SmarterTravel.

I thought we had passed the era of Peak Zoom Calls (YouTube / Detroit Free Press)

But here we are.