Monthly Archives: February 2005

Look at me! Look at me!

Sunday, February 13, 2005

So the notorious Brent Moffatt is back in the news with his most ill-advised stunt yet, getting a forehead tattoo of the GoldenPalace logo (mockup above). You can click above for their press release on the subject. As much as Brent deserves nothing but malice from me for the stunts he's pulled in trying to hurt BME and its members, I really hope this is a hoax and he doesn't go through with this. Since I know he reads this blog, I'll address this directly to him: Brent, don't do this. You will regret it. I know you desperately want attention and recognition, but this one is going to hurt you in the long run.

Along those lines, I saw the funniest headline and article I've ever seen about him… I assume it's an old parody, but it's got enough tidbits that whoever wrote it obviously knows him. Excerpt:


LOCAL MORON ACHIEVES RECORD, FAILS AT LIFE.

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - With speed-metal music on his headphones and a picture of his favorite food, carrot cake, beside him, a 34-year-old Canadian pinned down the world record for body piercing on Wednesday.

“I'm pretty happy. I would've liked to do 1,000, but now that I'm done, I realize 700 is a helluva lot. And right now it looks like I've been in a car accident … There's quite a lot of blood. Careful, I smell hepatitis!”

The previous world record-holder had 200 piercings, and was the subject of a popular song by the Tragically Hip, entitled “38 years old: never kissed a girl.” The song went on to reach #11 on the Canadian Billboard Top Ten.

“I'm more nervous about the (television) cameras than the friggin' piercing,” he said to a crowd of reporters.

“This is too weird: I'm not used to all this attention.”

When pressed, Moffatt said he meant to say that he is “not used to all this positive attention.” Negative attention, however, is something he is painfully all-too-familiar with.

“People crossing the street to avoid walking past you, nobody wanting to sit beside you on the bus, the stares when you go to the local convenience store to buy some milk and apply for work. Teenagers throwing things at you, like snowballs and bottles. Stuff like that, I'm used to by now.”

Once done, he left the needles in for more than five minutes. Taking them out, he said, hurt far more than putting them in. Moffatt compared the pain to “getting your junk slammed in the trunk of a car repeatedly,” something he wouldn't rule out for his next attempt at breaking a record.

Moffatt said he planned to celebrate his achievement with a long bath, a cigar and some panhandling. But would he do it again? “Sure, I'd do it again. After I forget about the pain.”

But seriously Brent, don't tattoo your face with the GoldenPalace logo. I say this out of genuine concern for you, not to try and steal your desperate grab at fame. You will regret it. I suppose with the $10,100 auction having closed it may be too late to back out now, but if you can get out, get out. And GoldenPalace, you should be ashamed of yourselves, taking advantage of and abusing an unstable and troubled individual like this. I know I shouldn't care about these people, but I just hate to see something as special as facial tattoing being used like this.

I make the same warning to all who are selling their foreheads or other blatantly public skin to advertisers. It's a deal with the devil that will not serve your lives positively in the long run. Even if you think you can just “tattoo over it” or get it removed in the future, the damage runs deeper than that, both in terms of physical scarring and spiritual scarring, and you will never truly recover and it will live with you until the end of your days.

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House, Cabo, Visitors

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Rachel took me to see the our house today, which unless the deal gets blown by gremlins should be done some time in March. It's kind of a run down place, but it's enormous with high ceilings, a gigantic yard, and once we've finished rebuilding it, there should be a roof deck that may be just high enough to have a nice view of the beach and ocean. It's very private, which is good, because I'm pretty much a recluse. The potential is incredible. Here's a terrible photo of the back yard.

Originally we'd considered a place in a new development up on the bluffs overlooking La Paz Bay, but this is a much better option I think. It's in the heart of the downtown, walking distance from everything, and while it is a walled compound (full of date, orange, pistacio, and banana trees), it's not a “gated community” or anything that cuts you off from the people around you, and I think part of the reward of living in a country and culture other than the one you were born into is living in it, rather than creating a bubble where you can observe it from a safe white shielded telescope room.

Other than that it's Carnivale here this week, so all kinds of classic fair rides like haunted houses are setting up along the malecon, and fleets of RVs and caravans are parked on the outskirts of town. I think they're owned by tourists rather than carnies but I'm not sure.

In the morning I'm headed to Cabo for Valentine's Day, so I'll take photos on the bus ride there (which is the ride you'd take if you're flying into SJD for ). Then on Tuesday we'll meet up with Saira and her husband Michael, who are probably moving down here as well (Michael is an award winning chef that will be helping run Rachel's restaurant — which should be open by BMEfest if you'd like to come and eat there). We'll also be meeting up with Clive, who can't stay away from anywhere with a tropical ocean.

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I am Richard MacDuff, musicologist

Saturday, February 12, 2005

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I feel it is worth mentioning the “Global Consciousness Project“, a terrible piece of pseudo-science that's fooling an increasing number of legitimate news agencies into reporting it as “the machine that can see into the future” and other such malarky. If this is really hooked into the global mind, I'm pretty sure we all just got collectively stupider, and Princeton U should be ashamed… And I say that as a guy that's got his belief in the global mind tattooed on his forehead! Yeah, I feel a disturbance in the [one dimensional, low resolution binary] force.

They think that their random number generators produced anomylous results during Princess Diana's funeral and propose that the “emotional energy” of a billion people watching it altered some quantum field… You know what? It's a lot more likely that turning a billion televisions on did it than some kind of collective angst.

One of the nice things about the time when I was locked up in the Clarke Institute mental ward, being tested for, among other things, being a hermaphrodite — the dumbass doctors there thought nipple piercing indicated some kind of genetic trans*ism — was that they allowed me to bring in my computer. It was an immense iron-clad Acer 386 beast that I'd inherited from my father.

One of my interests at the time was computer generated music (as in where the computer actually writes the music). I was reminded of it recently by this music based on the genome of the fruitfly, as well as this atrocious music based on “global consciousness as channeled by random number generators” (both found via boing boing). Both attempt to take numeric input and represent it as music, and to be blunt, sound like a mix of random notes and a speech by R2-D2. Maybe I'm a simpleton, but it's not music in anything but the academic sense of the word and certainly does not convince me that there's some underlying pattern that has been brought to light by converting it to a stream of notes.

I wrote my own music software while locked up in the Clarke for three main reasons. First, it was a good way to pass the time. As much fun as it is to sit around with nutty friends and listen to their stories about how alien commandos smashed through their wall and kidnapped them, or how they were brought by angels to this hospital from their last one, it gets boring after a while. Second, I despise “secret knowledge”, especially under an academic veil, and I wanted to show that computer generated music could sound like something other than random numbers. I hate it when people are needlessly elite.

Most importantly, I'd been inspired by Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in which the character Richard MacDuff, a young programmer, writes a piece of software called Anthem which translates stock market data and other number-streams into music in order to make it more accessible. My software had a far less marketable name (“Dilaudid Glide”) and early versions of it are still floating around on the net and I occasionally fantasize about releasing version four (which is live performance oriented), on which I have a paper sketchbook book full of notes but no actual code.

It worked just like I imagined MacDuff's software would have to — by taking streams of numbers, quantizing them so they made harmonic sense, overlaying and synchronizing them as needed, and then outputting a MIDI file. Below are three files that were created by the software, written in late 1993.

  • “First” - This was literally the first song the program ever generated. This was before I'd even written a MIDI output routine, so it spit out sheet music which I then manually entered into Cubase and saved. This was later remixed for the IAM music CD
  • “The Happy Elves” - Another early piece, named as such because I imagined this might be the sort of music that happy elves would play. I wrote terrible lyrics for this even, which I hoped to have sung by a speech synthesizer, but never managed to make that work.
  • “Sad Piano” - Sorry the names are so uncreative. Another early piece.

They songs are really nauseating, but they're intended as a mathematical proof of concept, not as art or music. In simple terms the goal was to show that computers could take random numbers and output them as something that would pass a Musical Turing Test — compositions that people would more likely believe was composed by a talentless human than a “talented computer”.

I must emphasize emphasize that none of those are intended to show off my (admittedly limited) ability as a musician, since they are 100% computer composed pieces based on sequences of random numbers. No remixing or alteration of the music has taken place. Personally I think they sound a million times more “real” than the output generated by the two projects I mentioned earlier, and I hope show that it's easy to trick your mind into thinking there is actual “thought” hidden away in random sequencies. I emphasize: these are just random numbers that have been quantized*.

* Quantize: “to restrict the number of possible values so that certain variables can assume only certain discrete magnitudes that are integral multiples of a common” — or “rounding” values slightly up or down to fit inside a harmonic system.

That said… I feel it is important to note that my work on this subject is simplistic and derivative and relatively devoid of anything particular valuable other than a 15-second “oh, that's kind of neat”… But at least I have no shame admitting that. If you are interested in this subject, I consider David Cope's work on the subject definitive and inspiring, as is the work done by Francois Pachet on The Continuator.

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Wheeeee!

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Those of you who were at last year's Rhode Island Suscon (click here for information on this year's event, which takes place from April 1st to 3rd — great event, great people) will get a kick out of these photos from my friend Alienx down in beautiful Natal, Brasil.


“Se você quiser transformar o mundo, você deve começar perto transforma-se.”

Sorry if I've mangled the Portuguese! I've tried to turn his quote back into its source language. For the love of fun and games, I really hope these picures are what I think they are — a giant suspension-powered amusement park ride.
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Charity Solutions and the Rapture

Saturday, February 12, 2005

So once again — they seem to do it constantly — one of my favorite sites, antiwar.com, is running a fundraiser. I think they do it four times a year but it might actually be more often. Their goal this time, and for the past few times is $50,000 (thus claiming a dubious annual operating cost of $200,000). Now, it's a great cause and a valuable resource, but it really pisses me off when sites lie about what their needs are. Do I think the people involved deserve a high salary? You bet I do, and I have no problem chipping in for that. But I don't want to be lied to about it.

They keep making statements like “if we don't get $10k more by Monday, we're going to have to go offline” and so on. For over ten years I have run one of the highest traffic sites on the Internet. In 1995, BME was ranked the 24th most popular site on the Internet of all subjects (these days the Net is bigger and we're sitting at around #900 as of last time I checked). Over that time period I've paid (and had donated) a small fortune in bandwidth and hosting costs. I've been slashdotted and farked a few times and it has virtually no effect on BME's usage. So I know a little about the costs of running a site with heavy usage and what the peripheral issues are..

Antiwar.com claims to have an average daily readership of just over 60,000. Let's pretend that each of those users downloads 100k of data a day (and that's highly unlikely). That's a total of six gig of transfer daily (for comparison, I anticipate that by mid-summer, BME's servers will be transferring that much every ten seconds) — and less than two hundred gig a month, which including all peripheral expenses should put them into roughly the $10k a year cost for hosting. Like I said, I'm a big fan of the site, but I feel like they're screwing people a little bit when they're constantly pulling stunts like that.


Have a beer with me, it'll help dull the pain

Seeing people help out with the women's clinic that Rachel is working with here in La Paz is really heart warming (if you don't know what I'm talking about, click here). In a period of two days, readers have covered several months of operating expenses already, and it's got me thinking about how to make charitable giving more effective, and less swamped by parasites.

For those of you who have donated, know that the only money that doesn't go directly to the women's clinic is the money that PayPal takes for itself, which is unavoidable. In general if you donate money to a centralized charity, 2%-10% percent is lost in processing fees and bank services right off the top. After that, 20%-75% is lost in bureaucracy and operating expenses, with some charity executives collecting multi-million dollar salaries. A percentage of what's left over goes to the people the charity is supporting and the remainder goes into investments and other holdings. That is, little of the money makes it to the people who need it, and who you're trying to give it to.

Anyway, I was thinking that someone needs to create a blog that catalogs and links to all these little clinics and services around the world that accept direct donations, thereby avoiding paying for bureaucracy… Even better would be an automated service that lets you search for charities of different types around the world, and perhaps even evenly distribute small donations among multiple groups. If this were set up I believe it would increase the effectiveness of charity by a margin of 200%, and if everyone in the world dedicated perhaps two percent of their income — just two percent (to put that into context, that would be $180,000,000,000 from America alone) — we could literally transform the world into a paradise where everyone lives a rich, fulfilling, and happy life. For two percent of our incomes.

But I'm a damn dirty ape hippy, don't listen to me.

War, inequality, and gross poverty is much better.

* * *

It's both funny and scary that while right now I'm asking people in the US to help out other parts of the world, but I fear that in fifty years — if we get that far — it could really easily be the other way around… and because the US is not really engendering “goodwill” toward it around the world, it may well be a lot harder sell. From a purely selfish point of view, think about the implications — the people you help today may help you tomorrow.

I'm not talking about “help” with strings attached. I'm talking about making the world a better place because it's the right thing to do for all of us, independent of ideologies, and certainly independent of what some highly paid corporate “representative of God” demands.


Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the LORD cometh, for it is nigh at hand;
A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.
A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run.
Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.
- Joel 2:1-5, KJV

I growing increasingly worried about how the US is becoming a repressive theocracy — the photo above is from a military rally held at a Baptist church in America (you can click it for the whole story). Churches in America being filled with automatic weaponry and being used by the military to recruit new soldiers in God's Army is deeply disturbing. I'll again quote President Bush (click the picture for a short WMV clip I made in 2003 of one of his military rallies, or click here for other formats and old videos):


“I want to thank Chaplain Stone; I appreciate your words of prayer for our men and women in uniform. People across this country are praying. We pray that God will bless and receive each of the fallen, and we thank God that Liberty found such brave defenders. The Liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. May God Bless America.”

I realize that there's in theory “separation” of church and state, but with churches doing the recruiting and the President declaring them God's Army and announcing at rallies that as they die God will take them straight into the arms of fifty virgins in their heavenly harem (or am I getting jihadists mixed up? — they all seem the same after a while), it's getting a little uncomfortable. Add to that the fact that evolution is now required in only 8% of US schools, and the “intelligent design” malarkey is being forced into US schools as science, I genuine worry about the future of America (and with hundreds of American nukes currently in place across Europe, the future of the world).


Before their face the people shall be much pained: all faces shall gather blackness.
They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb the wall like men of war; and they shall march every one on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks:
Neither shall one thrust another; they shall walk every one in his path: and when they fall upon the sword, they shall not be wounded.
They shall run to and fro in the city; they shall run upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the windows like a thief.
The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining:
And the LORD shall utter his voice before his army: for his camp is very great: for he is strong that executeth his word: for the day of the LORD is great and very terrible; and who can abide it?
- Joel 2:6-11, KJV

Add to that more and more evidence that the current ruling cabal was well informed on the “al Qaeda” attacks before they happened, and that the US military are actively hunting and killing journalists, including Western journalists (according to CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan), we're moving into a very scary phase of world history. Not that I don't have a dozen other groups that may well have me killed for a variety of reasons, but saying these things publicly puts me at risk, and you for having read it. Don't assume your Internet use isn't being recorded.

Why oh why did the US have to pick an apocalyptic death-cult faith like evangelical Christianity. I far prefer the bleak but accepting view the Norse have. I am fairly certain that this current freak weather we are experiencing may be the transition into fimbulwinter. Every night I look up into the sky, wondering if it will be the eve the stars disappear.

Or maybe I just enjoy writing about it because I played too much Dungeons and Dragons during the formative period of my life?
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Ed Cushman (Losing a Hand)

Friday, February 11, 2005

I just got mail from my old friend Ed Cushman, a genuinely inspiring (and very funny) man who many of you have met in person. He's also the author of the wonderful Losing a Hand which I hope to publish a second edition of later this year. Anyway, he's running a blog of his travels (warning: it's got a sound effect) that some of you may enjoy. Click the picture below to jump to it now:

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Kart pulling shirt idea…

Friday, February 11, 2005

After supper today I drew a rough for a silly little shirt idea based on a photo that Spineshank sent in a while back… I was thinking about it for either a contributor shirt or a shirt for BMEshop (I've also got a cool new one in the queue from Jason). What do you think?

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