The Brunch Table

Speaking of which, when I was in Vancouver the other day I happened to walk by the original steam clock precisely at noon:

Circa 1977, go figure.

Marlies found the most remarkable item on YouTube today. At first I thought it was another fan translation…but it turned out to be something much more ambitious:

(direct link)

“Metronome“, by Daniel Cockburn.

I’d like to share two puzzling things that I found today. One is a political cartoon from Britain. The other is a video-game strategy diagram from Japan.

I just got my first ever royalty check today. Seven hundred bucks dropped out of the sky. Now I know what makes the Mickey Mouse copyright lobby so mean–they get free money in the mail. Or else by wire transfer. I assume the meanness, as with most things, scales nonlinearly with the size of the check.

I received an inspirational email forward today. I don’t think it’s inspirational the way the forwarder intended, exactly, but it picked my spirits up nonetheless.

> 6. The tears happen.

Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person who is with us our entire life, is ourselves. (Jane says,” I disagree. If we have received Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, He is with us always. He has promised, I will never leave you nor forsake you.”)

Out of the great roiling mass of names through whose hands this bit of treacle passed, Jane decided to add her own editorial comment. I’m not being patronizing here–Jane has broken the new rules, after all, considering that this text, if it isn’t already under copyright, could easily be claimed as such if the anonymous author had the lawyers.

Before 1998, Jane could cite the 1886 Berne Convention in her defense. Initiated by Victor Hugo (!), the conference laid the foundation for international copyright law and included rudimentary protections for fair use. But in the post-1998 Mickeymouse era, looks like Jane’s a rebel….

I’m going to enter the Everyman non-professional photo contest (you should too!), but I’m having trouble picking two to submit. If you wouldn’t mind looking through a few of my favorites and commenting on the ones you like best, I’d be much obliged.

“What is the connection between knitting, computer programming, board games, and candy? All desirable yet highly mathematical, algorithmic, and structured. How can these soft, shiny, entertaining and sweet systems also be encrypted, intangible, programmed, tension-creating objects?”

Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie meets Pac-Man.

Even though I got this from Boing Boing, I enjoyed it so much I had to share.

The New York Times has pronounced the net art movement (strictly speaking, works that’re available only online, preferably exhibited in a gallery on a late-model Apple product) over.

I sure hope they’re wrong…I mean, even the article admits it’s primarily due to economic concerns, the across-the-board cuts in public and private arts funding brought by the dep recession. After all, we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we can do with colons, forward- and backslashes, brackets, parentheses, randomly-mixed upper- and lower-case letters, numbers that sort of look like letters, “cartoon cursing” punctuation….

The story of that famous Che photo, and of Alberto Korda, the photographer who took it.

Ironically, Korda’s desire to protect Che’s image by not claiming ownership of it led to its wide availability. Since Korda’s death in 2001, the image has continued to be used for varying purposes - and how he would have felt about a Che bikini, for instance, will never be known.

“There’s this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you’d really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually. Also, it’s not interesting.”

–Ira Glass, on postmodernism.

“I put McLuhan in the same category as Andy Warhol, who was described in a recent magazine article as a ‘honkie bullshitter.’” –Cecil Rhodes

If you’ve ever been interested in the MAX visual programming environment (aka “another interesting strategy for teaching programming to artist types”)…well, I just found out that the original creator, Miller Puckette, has been encouraging the development of free MAX clones for some time now, under the name PD.

At this point, PD has even evolved free equivalents for MAX’s add-on packages, MSP (for audio) and Jitter (for video)…PD’s versions are called IEM and GEM, respectively. The only problem is, all the different bits of PD are split up and scattered across the web, and some of them you have to compile yourself…which kinda defeats the purpose of teaching programming to artist types, as we don’t tend to start out with compilers.

Long story short–finally, here’s a complete Windows distribution of PD 0.36. We have Hans-Cristophe Steiner to thank for it. To me, PD feels a bit clunkier than MAX, but I haven’t got a Macintosh, nor $450 to spare, so this’ll be great to start practicing with….