virtual boy

remember this crappy crap?



doesn't "virtual boy" sound so pedophilish?

but on the real, the arturia virtual synth vst's are off the chain. i've been having endless hours of pointless fun with this one (combined with a midi knob box, of course!):



in other news, this record is retarded good (i picked it out randomly at the store because it had hot 70s girls on the cover and mispelled words on the back):

clicky

i think boomkat recorded one of the tracks at the wrong (slow) speed.
i'll probably record it and upload it for dl if anyone shows even the slightest bit of interest.

Twin Peaks now streamable for free

aka, HOLEEE CRAPBALLS

http://www.cbs.com/classics/twin_peaks/

In other random news, I really really hope Wikipedia is wrong about Shia LaBeouf playing Yorick in the possible film adaptation of Y the Last Man. As far as suitable substitutes, I'm thinking Michael Cera if he lost the whole indie-darling bullshit floating around him now and just focused on being nerdy. And could grow a beard convincingly. But perhaps one of you has a better suggestion (I'm mostly looking at Ian).

It was going to happen eventually.

Rock out.


EDIT: They're really not kidding. Non-facetious instructions on how to build it here. Well, mostly non-facetious, in that it actually tells you how to build it and is not just a series of dick jokes.

Also, in relation to my last post, people continue to come up with compelling evidence that lots of public domain content is a Very Good Thing. I want Mr. Darcy to get buggered by a half-gnawed severed leg. Also, they're making a TV thing (miniseries, movie of the week, who fucking knows) out of that book in Australia.

Phone? Pffft. Effects Box!

I think I've just fallen in love.

This app for the iPhone is essentially a PD (PureData) patch player (like the Max Runtime app), with defined inputs of a mic, an accelerometer, and a touchscreen. This may be the thing that makes me actually decide to give PD a try, fully 3? 4? years after Jon Lamm told all of us it was the best shit since sliced bread. MAKEblog tutorial here. In that article, Mike mentions that the only way to get your patches onto the iThing (as the rjdj devs call the generic i*) is by jailbreaking and using ssh, but on the developer wiki someone has written a little webserver in Python that does the job nicely. The app seems to be hard-coded to only accept http downloads starting with the "rjdj://" protocol string, and only from the host rjdj.me, but you can get around that by using proxy settings on the device's wifi connection. Instructions here. (scroll near the bottom)

The patch I've been rocking nearly non-stop is called Eargasm. It sounds like the mic input is acting as the modulator to excite a vocoder, where the carrier is this lush pad that sounds like a major-7th chord (or interval). Top that off with dotted-eighth delay where the echoes alternate between the left and right channel and a highpass filter whose cutoff rises as you get further into the delay feedback. In other words: turn on the faucet or step into the wind, and you have instant acid flashback. Tap on some shit with a pencil or type on a keyboard, and you have instant dub plate backing track. I'll try to post links to some recordings of this stuff soon. (Oh yeah--the app records .wav files of live + processed input.)

Maybe this is somehow connected to the "space cake" guy.

the movie question

I have recently discovered the Netflix app for the Xbox 360, which is one of the first telemedia-based things in several years to make me go "ohhh sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit!". Since then I have gorged myself on (arguably) bad TV like 30 Rock and the American incarnation of The Office; I partially blame Faye for this. Wait, I take that back, but I *do* blame her for the near month-long Project Runway glut that occurred at some point this year. Also, I have watched Ghostbusters like 5 times, and half-watched about 8 documentaries about how fucked up the war in Iraq is and what a bigass dummy the President is / was / will continue to be.

Probably the movies that will stick with me the most out of any I've watched this year are Chan-wook Park's trilogy on revenge: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. Especially Oldboy. Brian, you especially must watch Oldboy. Now. It's so fucking disturbing, and you see the disturbing part coming, and you think you're ready for it, but you're not. In more concrete terms: the camera work has a nice hint of disjointy fracturedness to it, and the narrative arc of the films always feels tighter than Brooke's Calvins. It's not really an action movie, not really a thriller, not really a drama, not really a Sophocles retooling, but something in between all of those.



Honorable mention goes to A Certain Kind of Death, a documentary about what happens to people when they die with no next of kin. The best part of this one is there are no titles with "This is Jim Fucktard. Jim just died of cancer."..[blackout].."There's only one problem..."..[blackout]..."Jim has no living relatives or friends." That gets pretty heavy-handed in a documentary reeeeeeeally fucking fast (cf: all those Iraq documentaries), and is only a few short intellectual steps removed from the shit this video lampoons. A Certain Kind of Death just shows film of documents, people talking, scenes from the deceased's room, etc. to tell their version of a story -- no overt exposition. And there's no morality play encouraging you to go out and have tons of babies so This Doesn't Happen To You, which is also (somewhat) uncharacteristic for a documentary, in my experience. And welcome.

Fanz, I've been meaning to watch the Kenneth Anger collection for months now. Maybe I need to do some AMT or something to get me in the mood. Instead I'm (probably) wasting my time right now watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (the first animated series that came after the first two movies). Not nearly as good or weird as Lain (which I also watched this year) but explores a lot of similar issues with technomeat blur / [insert some other madeup lingual characterization of cyberpunk Jean Baudrillard things here].

Also worth checking out if you haven't: the Kieslowski "Three Colors" trilogy (which, like the revenge trilogy above, aren't *really* interrelated in the narrative Harry Potter sense, but more of a pairing of similar thematic explorations) , and The Double Life of Veronique, which is more digestible than the trilogy. I am betting that Kevin is also nursing a secret crush on Irene Jacob, or will soon be. Kieslowski is a Christian (I'm betting most of you will want to know that going in), but he doesn't beat you over the head with it or even really mention religion at all. Not in these movies anyway.