Tag Archives: Video

Seven Mercy Seats

Music, Video,

[Electric chairs.] Digital ID: 814385. New York Public Library

The Mercy Seat is a changeable beast. The song is very simple. A man is waiting to die in the electric chair, he is not afraid, he says he is innocent. He is executed and goes to his reward. The song is complex. The man may or may not be innocent, he is unreliable and crazy, he is not unafraid. He calls on the mercy seat that God sits on and is not heard.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play this song at every concert, changing the performance and the lyrics. Sometimes it curls up sweet and sad and slow.

Sometimes it roars like a lion and shakes the earth.

I like it loud like that. I feel the madness and bombast – it blows me away every time. One day I went on a mercy seat binge, listened to tons of versions and covers on youtube.

Johnny Cash made it his own. When Johnny Cash sang your song, it became his song.

The covers flowed and changed like the versions the Bad Seeds played live. Some were intimate and pushed against the base of your gut.

This Dresden Dolls cover is like a hammer banging onto a hammer banging onto a skull. Those DRUMS are so huge!

Shouldn’t ALL drum solos just be part of the song?

I found out there is a gospel song of the same name by an artist named Vicki Yohe. I love this version of it – the passion, the build, the weird guy clapping in the background! It really starts kicking at 3:10…

It has that same structure – the slow build and the giant pounding crescendo. They both deal with the Mercy Seat and I’d love to hear a mashup that builds them off of each other, trading despair and hope. Hell, let’s see what happens when we play them right over each other. IF I knew anyone who made mashups I’d totally log time helping or pay them to create this. Then I would listen to it until my ears fell off.

YouTube Doubler

Or maybe not. Not every bright idea works.

Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and the Humble Bundle

Pals, Video, ,

This is an awesome time to be alive. Everything keeps changing. I remember when it was common knowledge that you had to cripple the movies and games you sold to keep people from copying them.

These days, that old myth is falling apart and people are realizing that alot of that was a pricing issue. Louis C.K. took a chance on his fans and sold them 100% DRM free comedy at $5 a pop.  His fans made him a million in 12 days, because he is genuine and treated them like people.

The Humble Indie Bundle was a crazy idea that you could offer fans 100% uncrippled games for windows, mac and linux – and let the fans pay whatever they want. They also let fans decide where the money goes – to the developers or to a charity!  They stomped it, raising buckets of cash for the developers / the Child’s Play charity,  and have gone on to release many more of these, now including Android versions as well.  Sadly, Apple’s rules prevent the team from offering iPhone games.

Now Azis Ansari is offering the same deal Louis CK offered: Stream or download a 100% DRM free HD video of Aziz Ansari’s latest comedy set – for just $5.

Project Idea: Render Images with Dice Rasterization

Animation, Get.rich.quick, Hacks, Video, , , ,

This great video by Fujiya & Miyagi inspired me:

Why not write a Processing sketch that will take an image and render it in dice? It might be fairly easy:
Divide the image into square sections.
Calculate the average brightness of that square – like I did in my engraving sketch. 1
That average brightness should fall in one of six or 12 levels of brightness.
Choose a die face that matches that brightness level.
Paste that image into the image.
Done!

What could you do with that? You could produce a print. You could use it as a guide for actually laying out the dice and putting them in a frame – or using them to print letterpress style.

When you get into the physical dice, laying them out gets tedious. The next big step would be to have an arduino system 2 that picks up dice and places them for you.

You could offer physical pieces for sale.

  1. Click on the picture. The farther right you click, the lower the brightness cutoff. The higher you click, the finer the line detail.   (back)
  2. Arduino controller code is based on Processing   (back)

What I’ve been reading in February

Books, Reviews, , , , , ,

February has been a banner month for reading. A bumper crop of beaming books brought me a bounty of smiles.
I started out with autism and ended with the midwest.
First I read One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar, a biography of the best poker and gin player ever. My boss recommended it to me, and I really enjoyed it. Much of the highlights of the story were part of his pitch of the book to me, though. Stuey was almost certainly Aspergerian. He was also almost certainly a savant. He was definitely an addict, and his glory was dulled by his inability to discipline his desires. Like many who come by millions too easily, his story doesn’t end happy. I might have appreciated this story more if I played poker. If you do, you owe it to the game to read about the best ever.

I then followed up with two books by an autistic savant, Daniel Tammet. He won the weirdness lottery, as he is an autistic, synesthesic, gay, savant. I do not remember if he is also left handed. I had thought of autism as just a mild form of brain damage until I ran into two persuasive videos:
1. Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain

2. In My Language, by Amanda Baggs, also the subject of a good article on the emerging autistic rights movement in Wired.

I was wrong and my current view is that many autistics are wired differently and conduct logic, thought, emotion etc in self-consistent ways that don’t match with mine. This is very exciting, getting to know about alien psychology and cognition.

Born On A Blue Day, Tammet’s autobiography, is very nice, but is blown away by the awesomeness of Embracing the Wide Sky. This second book covers a huge realm of cognitive theory, neuroscience, and amazing things that happen in our headmeats. It is never dry, always personal and shockingly clear. I think that this is probably the best first book on the inside of your head that someone can read. It only lacks for practical applications of the knowledge the way a Mind Hackss or Tricks of the Mind provides.

When I was in Utah my pals Mike, Britt, and Brian all recommended the books of Jon Krakauer and the first one to arrive from the library was Under the Banner of Heaven. Truly excellent. It’s the story of the Mormon’s, murder, and ‘merica. It’s a stomper that flips from the genesis of Mormonism to the story of a murder intimately connected. Jon starts with the murder and weaves back to the foundation story of the Mormon’s, which is, unbelievably, crazier than the South Park Mormon story. From there, he makes a great case that the corruption and abuse is embedded right into the history of the Mormons. Don’t miss the horror of the Mountain Meadows massacre and the shameful stories of “Plural Marriage”. Of course, now I can’t even start watching “Big Love.” I hear its great, but the whole time I’d be thinking about what I read in this book, and how it would really work: Men marrying their stepdaughters and using their children to form medieval alliances.

If I had to pick one book that you should read, I would pick Embracing the Wide Sky. You’ll walk away with a profound appreciation for humanity, a sense of hope for the future, and the urge to get some cool things done. The fastest and most enjoyable read was Under the Banner of Heaven.

I am a strange, sordid loop

Books, Video, , , , , ,

I am reading Douglas Hofstadter’s amazing and brain churning I Am a Strange Loop, so I’m noticing loops and recursion everywhere.

This dog machine loop is fascinating, I think it is a way for tennis balls to become soaked in saliva. Maybe it is a way to generate dog orgone? Perhaps it is a dog liberation device, a way for you to have a more equitable relationship with your dog. If you had an automatic feeding machine and this ball thrower, would your relationship with your dog be less of a servant-master relationship?

I like music videos with loops. My friend Rafal just recommended to me that I check out Swedish Band “The Sounds” and of course they have a loopy video. I’m a bigger fan of their “Song with a Mission“, but their video of “Tony the Beat” loops in and around itself.