I have too many social networking commitments out there. But they’re finding their place. Sadly, this particular little armpit of my interests isn’t really getting much attention, but I never really intended it to be that way anyway.

Let’s see: Here I randomly post things, that have little to do with me or what I do, but sometimes happen to be. There are known knowns, and unknown unknown knowns… etc

Then there’s my Tumblr. Which seems like an unnecessary blog meets twitter thing, but I like it because I just have to click an applet to post things. No copy + paste for Twitter. That works.

Next, my Kontainer. This is mostly semi-personal, in-motion type of content that I’ll just post randomly. Pictures/videos from places. Jesus could I be any more nondescript about it? Yea it’s a cool idea though, and I hope to do more of it. It’ll basically be all the video stuff I don’t want to dirty my precious YouTube channel with, since it’s so goddamned cherished.

Of course: my Twitter. Even more random. But connecting the world through opinions, articles and redundant posts from the other sites you already follow me on. THAT YOU ALREADY FOLLOW ME ON.

YouTube.

The Play Zappa YouTube Project (still a zygote)

My ever present Facebook page. This you need to ‘liiiike’, as I’m pretty consistent over there. I haven’t really made an effort to funnel people there yet, but… it exists. And it’s basically the hairy drain that aggregates all the rest of this. OK, not really. Just my music/creative mutation stuff. But don’t friend my personal FB page, I hate ignoring requests and feel a touch douchey but I keep that to just people I know now within a personal or professional capacity. “It’s not you, it’s me…“

Reverb nation: here. I will keep this updated. Along with SoundCloud… which is not updated at present. I, of course, have an atrophied Myspace page, but you know what? I’m not ready to let go. It’s just not updated.

Whew. Feels good to get that off my chest.

In other news, the good sir Mr. Chris Stambaugh has informed me that my bridge has came in:

Very good. Progress is earned through painfully persistant patience.

What else… yes. I haven’t done an 8-Bit remix in a while. I fear that I’ll begin to start bleeding subscribers soon. No, not yet. I have ATTN #5 about 67% there. Along with a few others. They’ll start dropping once I begin uploading bass videos again. Or not. We’ll see.

Oh sweet Netflix. What wondrously depressing documentary on how the US is fucking the world do you have for my viewing pleasure this evening? The Age of Stupid? Very good.

Bye.

Wow. This is bizarre. Who'd have thought an array of old hard drives serving as a speaker could so closely imitate the unique sound of Thom Yorke's voice? And personally i've never quite understood people who find the sound of a dot matrix printer grating, i t … Read More

via What Turtle Blood Tastes Like

photo © 2010 Steve Jurvetson | more info (via: Wylio)

So at 2 PM today, NASA is supposed to announce some major finding related to Astrobiology. Pretty neat. Arsenic-based life, as I’ve gathered: http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

Should be interesting. It’s strangely humorous to see news-worthy events like this go under the immediate radar. Infotainment first; information … usually later. After DWTS.

Elsewhere in the above article, it mentions “the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth” – no shit sherlock. I reckon we don’t have the cutting edge in technology either. It’s this oddly fundamentalist geocentrism that drives me crazy (no dig at the above quoted author, specifically). I just can’t stand listening to people argue against the idea of UFOs/ETVs/extraterrestrials with the logic of linear space travel. “Well – this is all we know about physics and technology, so it’s PROBABLY likely that other civilizations would face the same constraints with respect to space travel”.. but I digress…

I hope I can see this conference. We don’t have cable… just the limp old internet. Maybe there will be a live feed…

Fresh from the NASA online press release from November 29th:

NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec.

2  WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov.

Participants are: -

• Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
• Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
• Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
• Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
• James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

Media representatives may attend the conference or ask questions by phone or from participating NASA locations. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon Dec. 2.

For NASA TV streaming video and downlink information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about NASA astrobiology activities, visit:
http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

I cannot fucking stand what news media has become. Infotainment is too kind of a word. It’s an absolute joke; a paltry, watered-down, sweetened mix of daily excrement that pulls for ratings and advertisers.  I mean – don’t get me wrong – this is how it’s been for.. EVER.. but it just seems like it’s getting worse with the constant availability of media online.

Entertainment news should NEVER appear with real news. And by real, I mean the ‘lite’ version of real news. Things like death tolls and economic reports should NEVER grace the same headlines with fucking Miley Cyrus. Or Miley fucking Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. A fucking teeny bopper who happens to be fucking other people now that her vagina has seen some road time. And this is news-worthy? CNN [and others] print this along with a ‘mass grave of tourists in Mexico’? How disgusting. Absolutely laughable. Why the fuck do we need  to know about Portia de Rossi? Who the fuck is that? CNN should just invert what’s left of their journalistic scrotum and feature the Situation as a correspondent. You can only go down from here.

I hate what mainstream journalism has become. It’s a grotesque stump of the principles it’s supposed to embody. The best I’ve seen among the heap of shit is Rachel Maddow. Within the mainstream, but outside of ‘straight news’, is of course – the Daily Show. How sad is it that a “comedy show” produces the best presidential interview this side of Cronkite?

Outside of ‘mainstream’, there is then the Young Turks. Cenk Uygur is the most reasonable man in America, and it shows. This motherfucker keeps it real, tells you like it is and acknowledges any and all bias he has towards a story. But he sticks to the facts, whichever way they lean and – goddamn – it’s refreshing. No wonder he’s potentially looking at his own show on MSNBC.

Finally, there’s Wikileaks. This is the final bastion for real journalism. Raw, untempered, ugly fuckin information on some shit the blissful would rather stay ignorant of. Bullet holes in an Iraqi 7-year olds head? No, those were drill holes from a torture session. This and thousands of other instances of atrocities and war crimes. Yet we have to stomach the disgusting inclusion of Miley fucking Cyrus in “real” news. Fuck you, mainstream media. I know all the cool kids like Palin & Co. talk a storm of smack on ‘the media’, but holy goddamn if it isn’t for all the wrong reasons.

But Wikileaks – you can tell they’re doing something right when they’re under such scrutiny and intimidation. I get it – it’s an ugly fucking truth, and it’s no wonder that the military doesn’t gleefully release the daily reports of the murder of innocent civilians, and the systematic torture of Iraqi’s by their corrupt police force. But we deserve to know the truth, as long as we’re footing the bill. Where are the fiscal and ‘moral’ conservatives in light of this quagmire to the tune of how many hundreds of billions of dollars and American lives lost (nevermind the hundreds of thousands of civilians – but that number holds a fraction of the value to them)? Oh right, they’re waving their fucking flags and wallowing in their childish nationalism.

Rant is coming to an end. We need Wikileaks to keep these motherfucker’s feet to the fire. This is the last stand for journalism, and I’m absolutely terrified to see what potential truths they unleash next. After reading through some of the horrific details from our current war, and seeing some excellent documentaries on the hidden atrocities – I don’t know how much longer I can stomach paying taxes in this country. I’m paying for this shit – and so are you. We’re contributing to the machine, and while I don’t think it helps to just abandon this great American experiment – we sure as hell are not obligated to keep paying for this war.

““From Poland With Love” follows two characters, Ivar and Julita as they search Poland to find the most fascinating, exciting and underexposed aspects of the country. Over seven episodes, our protagonists travel the country on a mission to track down the best bands, artists, directors, places, people, parties and of course the best bars Poland has to offer. Along the way, they learn about everything from the Polish solidarity movement that hastened the fall of the USSR to goth raves, Polish punk, real wodka and Julita’s gran’s secret recipe for pickled herring.

See the rest at VBS.TV: From Poland with Love – Full Length – From Poland With Love | VBS.TV “

I’m writing as I’m watching… thoughts in motion…

Hmm… yet another “user-friendly” instrument farted out by NI. OK, so it’s a sort of a vocoder…? Yet another vocoder… sounds mildly functional. You could use this in the Reaktor player, but the real bonus would be in looking under the hood in Reaktor itself…

I dig vocoders, but there are so many out there… to really make it sound good, you (read: I) need a lot of knob-twiddling to make it sound good. You want something done right, yea?l

I’m guessing they’re pricing this around $79 – $99.

OK – the arpeggiator could add some interesting parallel processing. Always nice to get some audio –> synth action going on after the fact. But it sounds about as reliable is the tracking is capable of …

Man. They’re really dragging their heels with respect to Reaktor development… Procrastinators!

Directed by NINJA & Rob Malpage

Edited Saki Bergh

Elements of the art work in video based on the work of Roger Ballen

: : : : :

Sick track. Absolutely what I would expect from Die Antwoord post-viral success. It gets even more interesting when you get into the backstory behind this video, and Wanga’s verse:

Xeni Jardin clarifies for us:

So, the story behind this video and song (or part of the story — there’s so much going on!) is that Wanga felt that he was being coerced into a form of ritual circumcision by his community. It’s sort of taken for granted within his ethnic group that you must do this, so much so that if you are a young man and you do not participate, you are ostracized, as the band explained to me.
The thinking, and this is communicated very directly to the young men, is that if you don’t participate, you’re gay. You’re effeminate. You’re not a real man. You never mature from being a boy to being a man.
He struggled with all of this in real life: with what it meant for his personal and cultural identity. And he came to a point where he was like, you know what? Fuck you all. The fact that I won’t consent to having my penis sliced with an unsterilized knife, out in the bush, and risk infection or worse– that doesn’t mean “I’m gay,” as you say. I reject this tradition. If that’s what being a man is, fuck it, I don’t want to be a man. I’ll be an “evil boy for life,” even if it means I am ostracized from my community.
You might have chosen different lyrics, but dude, it’s not our story or our culture or our world experience at all.
It’s his.

Here’s my 8-bit arrangement of the Gregory Brothers’ latest songification. Enjoy!

From Shobaleader One. I’m not really feeling it, but I appreciate the new direction.

Here’s the Q & A with Squarepusher about Shobleader One: (from Warp.net)