Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Musical Sketchpad, Session One
Every now and then I'm going to start putting up these little samples of music, just a song or two, for criticism or just for my own satisfaction. They'll often be covers that I like particularly, or maybe an original in progress. This time, you're hearing a cover of the Black Keys' "10am Automatic," although it's not quite accurate because I can never remember the second verse. Two things to notice about this song:
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 1 comment
I'm not really a fan of the whole chiptunes genre, but this review and guide to the Wayfar NES midi cartridge is intriguing. For about a hundred bucks, it lets you run a $5 NES as if it were a synth module with five channels. That's pretty cheap, and it sounds good in a retro kind of way. In this day and age of cheap four-octave keyboards, you could probably have a portable synth setup for less than $500. Tempting.
But a few questions, really: Why isn't there an SNES version of this, with its superior FM chip? What would this be like with a wind controller? Does blowing on the cartridge count? And why can't I get an NES-on-a-chip that'll do the same thing for $25 or so?
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Something different for this month's Best of B-SPAN: I am very proud indeed to announce the newest advance from the World Bank's video archive, the Best of B-SPAN podcast series. The result of a lot of hard work here at the World Bank Institute, these biweekly podcasts will cover a different issue with each release. For example, the most recent edition concerns malnutrition and hunger. You'll notice that the infrastructure still needs a little work--we don't have a real database for broadcasts yet, and the audio isn't available except by RSS feed. We are still working on it, and hope to have the architecture fully implemented by the end of March.
Part of the unique positioning of B-SPAN is that we don't really serve the developing world. Instead, as far as we can tell, most of our client-base is in the universities and development organizations of Europe and the US. That doesn't make our work less important, but it is a very different role from the rest of the World Bank Institute, which aims to build capacity and knowledge in poor countries through learning programs. Podcasts are therefore well-suited to B-SPAN, but we're still trying to find ways to adapt it to the Bank's other work, assuming it can be. With this series, we're aiming to capitalize on B-SPAN's strengths, delivering accessible tours of development economics for laypeople. I've learned so much while working at this position, and this is one way I hope to share that knowledge with others.
I'm also very proud of these podcasts for personal reasons--I'm doing the voice-overs for them, as well as putting them together in Audacity from different bits of audio (one of those bits of audio is Voodoo Funk, which has become the intro music). Learning to build a presentable piece of audio has been a real education in how to run a DAW, like using volume envelopes. Discussions with my manager have been leading toward the purchase of a ProTools-based system for doing editing, not only for podcasting but also for the video and multimedia work of my division. It's all very exciting.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
I've updated my portfolio site, ThomasWilburn.net, so that it's not so outdated. It still needs some tweaks, but the site runs on a mix of modern HTML and Blosxom, so it's easier to add and rework it. I've added a lot of my Washington Asia Press work, as well as Guns, Gangs, and Greed. If I can figure out my rights situation with Northern Virginia Magazine, I'll be putting those pieces up as well. Note that all clippings are my submitted work, not the post-editing results.
12:51 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 1 comment
On the left, my new bass. On the right, what was almost my new bass. Not to scale.
The winner is a Line 6 Variax, which is one of their digital modeling basses. Line 6 has made a name for themselves by creating very good simulations of amplifiers (the Pod) and effects (my looper, the DL-4, is actually their emulation of a dozen delay pedals). The Variax is supposed to do the same thing for guitars, by picking up the sound from a piezoelectric pickup built into the bridge and processing it until it sounds like one of many vintage or inconvenient (upright or acoustic bass) instruments.
The loser is a Malden Motorbass, an exercise in stripped-down bass minimalism, which appeals to me. It's got just one single-coil pickup, which is all I ever use anyway, and one volume knob, because I leave the tone on the All-Star all the way up. I like the look of the Motorbass, too. What tipped the decision away from it was that first, it doesn't actually give me anything I don't already have, and second, it's built like a Precision bass, which means it's meant more for solid, simple rock basslines. I think I'd regret buying it after a week, because it doesn't really fit with where I want to go musically except in the minimalism.
The Variax is interesting, though, from a kind of cultural standpoint. After all, there's no more superstitious market than guitar players. By nature, most of them are wary of digital technology to begin with, so it was probably due to go down like a ton of bricks anyway. But even still, this is a piece of hardware that incorporates some extremely sophisticated electronics. Guitar players can even use software to completely customize the models, and on the Variax bass you can move the virtual pickup on single-pickup basses (like the Stingray or a P-Bass) back and forward on the model, which is pretty sophisticated. And yet, with all this technology, it's still being used to imitate a bunch of instruments averaging about thirty years old.
You can argue that there are both positive and negative aspects to this fact. The best part of modelling, either through Line 6 or through companies like Digitech, is that it gives players on a budget access to a wide variety of tones (with greater or lesser levels of realism). Most people don't have the money for a '71 Rickenbacker or a '69 Fender, so it's nice if they can sound that way for not a lot of cash. But on the other hand, this fetishization of the past can be one of the great blind spots of popular music. After all, when digital audio recording first showed up, engineers used it as nothing more than a limited version of tape. It was only when people left the restraints of that paradigm behind that digital audio really became more interesting, and more sophisticated production began to take off.
Either way, I'm looking forward to using the Line 6 as a recording bass, since its power requirements may make it a bit cumbersome live. In those situations, I'll still have the All-Star. It's a bit more photogenic anyway. But if I were really going for looks, check out this modification that takes the Variax guts and puts them in a custom-made exotic wood body. If only I owned more machine tools, and a work room to put them in...
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
Thanks to the crew at the Escapist for the mug. I think you've really
overestimated my value as a trendsetter, though.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/media/online x link x 0 comments
The Happiness of the Katakuris
A day later, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of The Happiness of the Katakuris, a musical parody directed by Takashi Miike. I'm not an expert on Miike, who is uncommonly prolific (IMDB credits him with 50 films just in the last ten years). I've seen his Gozu, which seems to aim at being a less coherent David Lynch film, and Audition, easily one of the most surreal and horrifying stalker films ever made. The temptation is to try and generalize in order to sound sophisticated and cultured ("Well, Miike's use of static angles is both a tribute to Kurosawa and a symptom of Japan's post-war film culture"). I'm going to resist that as best I can, and instead just treat Happiness as a relatively straightforward text.
To its credit, the movie lends itself well to this analysis, because it doesn't really seem terribly deep. The plot concerns the fractured Katakuri family, which has moved to a remote boarding house in order to repair their bonds. Unfortunately, it's very remote and a promised highway has yet to materialize, so business is slow. When boarders do begin to trickle in, the family is horrified to discover that they keep dying overnight. While struggling to cover up the evidence, the Katakuris are confronted with escalating absurdities, leading up to a massive (but oddly localized) volcanic eruption.
Ostensibly, this all takes place as a parody of the musical genre, with random performance numbers interrupting at regular intervals. But in my mind, a successful parody usually includes a hint of whatever made its subject worth the effort, and Happiness seems too tongue in cheek to capture that spirit. Part of this is undermined by the constantly changing aesthetic of the film: it opens with (and sometimes reverts to) elaborate claymation sequences, and the song interludes vary wildly from music-video schlock to seemingly sincere efforts of ridiculous subjects to Broadway-esque excess. It's unfocused.
You could probably try to claim that Happiness of the Katakuris is weird because Americans lack the cultural context for the jokes, but frankly I doubt that's the case--in fact, I think it's usually a copout argument. The impression I get is of a director trying for simultaneous homage and mockery of classics like The Sound of Music, but losing interest halfway through, thus requiring injections of non-sequitor weirdness to rescue the project. Too often, that weirdness feels forced and flat. Maybe Miike just doesn't love musicals as much as he thought he did. Maybe he needed to spend more time with this one. It isn't a bad movie, and at 90-odd minutes, it's not a lot of time wasted if you don't like it. With that said, I simply don't think that the few inspired moments scattered throughout are enough to elevate a quirky but ultimately unenthusiastic film.
09:35 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/cult x link x 1 comment
The scifi/fantasy section at the nearby Borders bothers me. In fact, most bookstore SF sections bother me. But the L Street Borders is especially bad, for several reasons.
First, it's being squeezed gradually into a smaller area. The back shelves are gradually being taken over, like kudzu, by manga paperbacks. There are rows and rows of these things, ugly little white books with garish logos in place of titles on the spine. Looking at the manga books, whose consumers seem to be mostly 13-year old girls, I feel old. These are not something I am going to ever enjoy, or even likely understand, in my lifetime. Get off my porch, CLAMP! If I see you brats in my yard again, I'm calling your parents, see if I don't! Why a genre with such a young demographic has three shelves in DC's business district is a mystery to me. Maybe the proximity of GWU has something to do with it.
But even while other genres force scifi over, the books themselves are getting bigger. Trade paperbacks have become fashionable--and why not? I pay $7 to buy The Scar as a regular-sized novel, but $12 for it as a trade. The paper costs are probably lower, and they look thin and sophisticated on a shelf. The fact that it's harder to toss into a bag, or harder to read one-handed, those are not priorities for the printing industry.
Who is this Laurell K. Hamilton chick? I don't know, but I'm thinking I'm going to have to find out, if only because her books have a whole row all of a sudden. These are the novels with the monochromatic covers featuring disembodied female nudes--never a face, just a torso or a set of legs. The cover blurbs read "romantic thrills and erotic chills," which leads me to believe that these are some kind of Harlequin romance fused with World of Darkness fanfiction. The user pics on various Amazon pages for them show both the nudes and bland oil paintings of the generic horror type, so maybe they've shown up in force after a rebranding and fresh marketing push. I shouldn't complain, honestly. At least the books are fairly honest about their contents, and they're still more tasteful than the average dreadful fantasy cover. Sex has always been the awkward, fumbling Achilles Heel of speculative fiction.
But there's a whole series of these. There's a series of StarDoc books. Eric Flint and David Drake write their military scifi series. Everywhere you look, there's a half a shelf being used for potboilers and their sequels. Again, from a marketing point of view, this makes sense. Sequels have established characters and reliable settings. They create repeat buyers. They can be written quickly at a suitable but not excessive level of quality. From a marketing view, spam makes a lot of sense, too. I hate series, or trilogies, or whatever you want to call them. Endings are sublime. Don't stretch it out.
I've never been completely comfortable browsing the science fiction stacks anyway--call it the literary equivalent of a puritan upbringing. So maybe I'm not the best person to be discussing its trends and shifts. I do find it interesting to watch the drama played out on the shelves, as they move and change over time. It's a whole different world from the used bookstores that I usually frequent.
07:15 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/brick_and_mortar x link x 1 comment
Xenu commands you to show him the money!
This Rolling Stone article on Scientology has been making the skeptical rounds in the past couple days, and it is very interesting. (Those Scientologists! So nutty! So wacky! So litigious!) But this part alerted my snark detector, in a paragraph discussing the "operating thetan" category of ubermensch:
That's right: Tom Cruise can control time and space with the powers of his mind. Reportedly he'll gain the ability to act when he reaches the next level.
There's also an RPG joke just waiting to happen here, but I'll leave that up to you.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 0 comments
The product of many hundreds of years' worth of evolution since George Washington's tree-killing ass went in the dirt, the obvious answer.
--from Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis. Happy President's Day.
20:13 x Thomas x /fiction/writing/quote x link x 1 comment
The always cheerful Amy and Joe from Clatter sent out a note on their mailing list to remind me that they're playing the New Amsterdam Bar on the University of Tennessee campus this Saturday, starting at 8pm. Not only will Clatter be playing, but the two-bass band Toupe will also be appearing for the first time in the US. It's a whole evening of great bass-based rock. I don't think I can make it, but if you are anywhere near the area I highly recommend that you check it out.
14:35 x Thomas x /music/artists/clatter x link x 1 comment
Memo to Faceless Corporation: UPS Edition
Dear UPS,
Imagine the surprise when I walked into one of your DC locations tonight and was told that packing materials for my bass would cost me $45.
Forty-five dollars.
It has, granted, been a while since I worked in shipping. Perhaps there have been revolutions in technology that have necessitated such a high cost. Maybe the cardboard box ("very sturdy," your elderly salesperson told me) is made out of the toughened carcasses of broken dreams, and reinforced with high-grade black widow spider silk. It is possible that the styrofoam beads used to cushion packages are hand-crafted by tiny, precious leprechauns. There is a slight chance that the plastic bubbles you would sell me are actually the skins of endangered sea serpents, previously thought extinct, but revived through some kind of UPS/Jurassic Park experiment gone horribly awry, and the exorbitant price tag results from not only the difficulty of the operation, but also the insurance on lab assistants that they occasionally consume. It's a rough job, lab assistant to outlaw science, yet a sacrifice I'm glad someone else is making. Nevertheless.
Forty-five dollars? Has the world gone mad?
Love,
Thomas
00:00 x Thomas x /random/letters x link x 0 comments
Federal Holiday Notes: Another Productive Day with Customer Service
So Cort will take a look at and repair my bass for the dead notes on the neck, and I just have to ship it out to them, which is about $10. That's worth a shot, I think. If anyone else plans on dealing with them in the future, it's a lot easier to talk to them on the phone than to try and correspond by e-mail.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
Federal Holiday Notice: This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's mid-February. Time to find out where those W-2 forms went.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 0 comments
On second thought, I simply don't think that this post was well written--and as a working freelancer, it's probably not a good idea to write about editorial relationships unless I feel like I can communicate what I'm trying to say clearly. I think it came off in a negative light, and that's not really how I meant it. I have no complaints about any of my employers at this time, and I wouldn't want them to think that I do.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
02:11 x Thomas x /journalism/writing x link x 1 comment
Josh Ellis writes:
Or to put it another way: if you don't want to get sued for sampling, learn to play an instrument.
Or to put it another way: Idris Muhammad plays drums. Timbaland plays Idris Muhammad playing drums. This is not the same thing. The two actions do not require the same level of skill or talent.
Or to put it even another way: when did the curators replace the artists as the stars of the show?
I don't have a problem with the concept of a remix, or of a mashup. I'm sure at times it can be very clever, taking two songs with contrasting or complimenting messages and combining them. Everyone needs a hobby.
My problem with mashups is the way that copyleft advocates like the EFF trumpet them as great art just because they break existing copyright laws. Their illegal status elevates them far beyond the amount of attention they could possibly deserve. Let's be honest: it's novelty music created from the labor of others. Is that really the best example that intellectual freedom has to offer? Is that really an art form that we should spend a lot of time defending?
Update: In a post today on CDM, editor and digital music guru Peter Kirn links to an article in Keyboard that he wrote regarding the recent (late 2004) court ruling on digital sampling. It's a complicated case, but I'm inclined to agree with the court myself: get a license, or re-record it. As I noted in comments, it's easier for some people (read: major label artists) to get that license than for others. It doesn't help that until recently many musicians didn't own their work, and they still often don't own all of it.
It still seems odd to me that intellectual property advocates are the ones arguing that it should be easier for other people to sample my work.
18:51 x Thomas x /music/business x link x 1 comment
Do these really count as "gigs?"
Probably not.
It's late notice, I know, but I'll be playing Dremo's open mike tonight. They give me four songs, which is more than usual. I like to think that it's one per string. I will probably still be using the All-Star, since the new bass has a problem playing A, which is kind of an important note. We will soon find out just how good Cort's customer service really is.
But in the meantime, Dr. Dremo's in Arlington at 9:30. I'll be playing early, so I can go home and sleep.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/performance/gigs/open_mikes x link x 0 comments
"Hello?"
"Hi, may I speak to Thomas Williams?"
"Thomas Wilburn?"
"Williams."
"Wilburn?"
"May I speak to--yes, I'm sorry, Thomas Wilburn."
"You may. That's me."
"Great. Thomas, you were referred to us for an employment opportunity, is this a good time to talk to you about that?"
"...Well, I'm already employed, actually. What's the job?"
"It's for _______ Financial Services."
"Okay, thank you, no, I'm working for the World Bank and I'm really very happy there."
"So you're not even interested in part time?"
"No, I'm afraid not."
(pause)
"I'm sorry, did you say financial services?"
"Yes, ___________ Financial Services."
(pause)
"Do you mind if I ask who referred you to me?"
"Well... Thomas, are you familiar with how headhunting and these services work?"
"In this case, no, not particularly. That's why I'm curious."
"Oh. Well, it's a system of referrals and networking, basically."
(pause)
"See, that's odd, because I don't really have any financial skills at all, really."
"Do you have management skills?"
"No, not really."
"Do you have any experience training other people?"
"No. I'm a writer."
"A writer."
"Yes. I write things for a living."
"Oh."
(terribly confused pause)
"Anyway, I already have a job, so I'm not interested. Thank you though. Goodbye."
How bizarre.
16:51 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
About a year ago, I was hanging out with my friend Tomoko in her campus apartment after work. A young man with an unrequited crush on her had also stopped by, and in order to ignore him she asked me about my love life. Specifically, what about this girl I'd mentioned the last time we'd talked? How was that going?
Great! I said. She's very sweet, very cute. You know, she's got the kind of smile, when she's really happy, that the whole room just lights up.
Aw, said Tomoko. And I was a little surprised, to be honest, because I hadn't meant it in a sappy or a metaphorical way. I really thought that everything got a little brighter for that grin. For a minute or so I considered buying a light meter so I could prove it. See! I would say. 15 lumens, easy! I don't need electricity to read at night, I'll just tell her a really funny joke, because my girlfriend is that cute. And of course, she still is.
Happy Valentine's Day, Belle. Thanks for being the light of my life.
14:49 x Thomas x /random/personal/events/holidays x link x 1 comment
My Continuing Musical Education
Turns out that I like the New Pornographers. Huh. Who knew?
In other news, I've seen Radiohead's live stuff, albeit a really old performance. It was good, but I'm confused. They can Rock live. So why is it that when they record, they decide to sound like... well, Radiohead?
Pandora's referred a few good bands to me. Kasabian is basically the catchy little love child of Franz Ferdinand and Clinic--I bought their CD at the used shop the other day. Bracket made a fun little punk song named "Yoko Oh-no." Panic! At the Disco swung in on my Richard Cheese station, and they've got a penchant for long titles like "There's A Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven't Thought Of It Yet." I think I heard them mentioned on DC101 the other day. And of course, the All Girl Summer Fun Band wrote "Video Game Heart," which I remember being less great than the title, but still better than most of what I hear on the radio.
Especially since it seems like all I ever hear anymore is Dave Grohl. Yeah, you've got a confession to make, buddy--and it's spelled "payola."
10:24 x Thomas x /music/capsule x link x 1 comment
Dick Cheney shot a man just to watch him die.
Hunting accident? Or initial tests for unlimited executive powers during "wartime?" We report, you decide... but I'm staying out of the woods near DC from now on, if you know what I mean.
15:15 x Thomas x /politics/national/executive x link x 1 comment
Been sitting on this a while, and today seemed like a good day for it. Three cheers for saved drafts.
I was talking to a coworker the other about World Bank headquarters as we walked back from a meeting. It's notoriously difficult to find your way around the Main Complex building, even though in theory it's a simple donut shape. This is partly due to the way that it incorporated two older buildings into the unified structure when it was rebuilt in 1989 (you can read an archive note on the construction here and see the history of previous Bank buildings here). As a result, there are several floors in the South-West corner of the building that don't connect to the rest of the building except by elevators and stairs. When they do connect, sometimes the floors are ramped because of different building levels and other complications. The central corridors of each side of the building have also been mangled at the connections, which can make even well-matched levels tricky to navigate. I'm making it sound worse than it really is, probably. The Main Complex building, for all of its flaws, is a striking piece of architecture, with a huge glass atrium in the middle that always impresses first-time visitors--I hear the tour is very nice.
In addition to perplexing wrong turns and open galleries, the Bank's headquarters also boasts lots of "secret" passages that Bank staff eventually learn to navigate. Rooms connect to other rooms and other floors in surprising ways. I always remember going to the basement cafeteria with a term employee. We returned through a non-descript door behind the coffee stand that somehow led out of a blank panel in the atrium. I hadn't even known there was a door in that wall, much less a useful shortcut. Less exciting are the underground tunnels from building to building, but they're a lifesaver when the cold DC winds start playing up and I need a soda from the MC Building beverage stand. And officially you couldn't even get to my old office without an elevator--but you could go to the second floor, open a door marked "Interpretation Booths," and use that to get to the stairs. One of the great ironies of working here is all the signs admonishing us to save energy by taking the stairs--but there is no stair access from the ground floor. They all lead to emergency exits.
To solve the problem of getting where you need to be, the Bank has now introduced a system called BankQuest, that finds rooms in the Main Complex and other buildings for you. It's got some bugs to work out, but at least it will present a floor plan. It'll tell you where you're going--but it won't tell you how to get there. And that's my favorite part.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 0 comments
Why People Believe Weird Things
The publisher of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, wrote what is considered a fairly definite book with that title about delusions like Holocaust denial, UFO abductions, and creationism, among others. My biggest problem with the book is that it never answered the title question in any real detail--it was primarily composed of Skeptic magazine columns, adapted for print. That was great for someone like me who doesn't necessarily want to subscribe to Skeptic, but I wanted more. Shermer has offered a slightly better hypothesis here in his Scientific American feature. Anne's Anti-Quackery and Science Blog breaks Shermer's conclusions down into plainer language:
So for those lacking a fundamental comprehension of how science works, pseudoscience becomes hard to resist, no matter how smart you are.
Students should be taught how to think, not what to think.
Very true! I'm reminded of a post at Skeptico, one of my favorite blogs, that touched on the bizarre theories of Masura Emoto. Mr. Emoto (I refuse to actually call him "Dr.") is a profoundly disturbed Japanese man who believes that water contains a form of spiritual consciousness and can react to the world around it. Emoto tests these theories by putting water in jars and playing heavy metal at some, classical at others. The classical water formed soothing crystals, while the heavy metal water formed jagged "angry" crystals. Emoto also taped words to the jars, and found that "love" and "thank you" produced more attractive displays than (and I quote) "You make me sick. I will kill you."
I hope that you've reacted to that paragraph with a grin and a rueful shake of your head--oh, what a wacko! You'd have to be crazy to believe something like that! Or do you? This isn't the first time that I've heard of Mr. Emoto (wait, he thinks water has feelings and he's named "Emoto?" Oh, sweet irony). Although he didn't know the name, a former editor of mine talked about "a Japanese scientist" who had discovered these amazing properties of H2O while we were discussing religion and cults. I'm not going to claim that this editor friend of mine (we'll call him Ed) was a grounded thinker*, but he was clearly a sharp guy. Despite that intelligence, while hitting me with lines about spiritual worlds beyond, mystical Eastern medicine, and (of course) psychic water, Ed let slip the real stunner.
"Science is just another belief," he said. "It can't prove these things. You have to experience them for yourself."
That really was the crux of the argument, just as Shermer indicates. Although I tried to make it clear to Ed that science isn't the facts, it's the process by which we found those acts, he just couldn't understand. To him, science was simply another set of perceptual laws, and laws were up for debate. He couldn't apply the critical reasoning of science to his own beliefs, because (like many people) he didn't realize that's what science was.
But is that all? I agree with Anne that we need to teach the method, not the facts, in order to create better critical thinkers. Shermer is also correct that intelligent people often use confirmation bias to uphold their stupid beliefs intelligently, rather than to challenge them. Yet honestly, at some level, shouldn't a person confronted with Scientology, or Emoto's water crystals, or any other number of weird philosophies be able to step back and say "hang on, does this make any sense?" I hate to use the phrase, but shouldn't common sense step in?
In his book, Shermer notes by way of explanation the tremendous human ability to find patterns. I think that's a step closer, but all of these different theories are just sidestepping around the basic fault--for some reason, people want to believe weird things. I think that's why I could never convince my editor of the virtues of the scientific method--his worldview was a story that somehow fulfilled him on a level rational thought couldn't reach. Maybe it's a messiah complex, or maybe it's a deep human desire for narrative. I don't really know why people have this need for a self-delusion, and worse, I don't know any way to deal with it. But we do need to learn to deal with it, because living in a democracy and a free society it is crucially important that our populace become well-reasoned and informed.
Any ideas?
13:49 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 1 comment
Composing with Electroplankton, Part Four: The mic jack hack
There are several Electroplankton that can use the microphone for input. Nanocarp responds to claps and note patterns. Volvoice warps a short recording through a variety of filters. And Rec-Rec, which is rapidly becoming my favorite, actually acts as a four-track tape loop with variable speed, all fed from the microphone input.
However, if you're really interested in using Rec-Rec musically, you won't want to use the built-in microphone. It's too noisy, too weak, and positioning the console for use and recording simultaneously is much too difficult. Instead, you need to access the front headset jack that Nintendo has thoughtfully built into the DS.
Now, as far as I am aware there are no adapters for the headset jack available in the US as of this time. The only commercial possibility I've found (which might be vaporware) is here, but would require you to mail-order it from England just to cut it apart. Even so, don't set that possibility aside just yet.
Your other option, until headsets become available domestically (my guess: possibly soon, with Nintendogs out, but more likely at the end of the year when Animal Crossing and Mario Kart hit), is to make your own adapter. This is not hard, especially if you know how to solder, but you do need to be careful. Both the onboard mic and the headset jack share a circuit, so if you short one you will also short the other, and then you won't be able to use any microphone input.
So in order to run my bass into the DS, I just bought a standard 1/4" jack and some wire. I soldered mine together, but that's just because I'll take any excuse to break out a soldering iron--those who don't want the hassle can use a crimp-style connector, or possibly just buy a guitar cable and cut one end off. That's the easy part. The hard part is finding a way to make the connection with the contacts inside the DS mic port that A) won't touch the wires together, creating a temporary short that transmits no sound, and B) will make reliable contact, possibly staying put even if the DS is bumped or carried around. My first attempt at a solution was to buy a set of motherboard jumpers, which looked to be about the right size to hold the ends of the wires. Unfortunately, the port is just slightly too narrow.
Reading comprehension test: under no circumstances should you try the bare-minimum approach shown in Figure 2, which is just the wires looped over and jammed into the mic socket. The reason for this is that the contacts for the socket are very, very delicate. Really, they're just thin metal leaves. If you bend these contacts too far with brute physical force, you will short the entire microphone bus, and no audio input will be possible at all, although everything else will still run fine. This is, of course, exactly the mistake I made. In order to fix the short, you'll need to have one of Nintendo's crazy three-pointed screwdrivers (available from Lik-Sang), and even then the port may be flush with the motherboard in a sealed assembly--I can't tell from pictures of the internals. Since I don't own the screwdriver and at that point didn't want to risk any more damage, I took the DS to an EB Games and traded it in for a new one. Clearly, this requires not just a tolerance for blatant dishonesty (or as I prefer to say, contempt for The Man), but it'll also run you some cash for the trade-in value. Either way, it's not a satisfactory outcome.
The whole debacle makes me unlikely to try such a connection again right away, but if I were to do so I would stress using materials that will give easily, and won't force the contacts. You might try using thin stranded wire, but keeping the hot and ground separated will be difficult. Another option is a set of metal leaf contacts similar to the DS's own connection, but you'll still need something to hold the wires. That's why I stated above that you might not want to immediately dismiss the idea of importing Big Ben's headset if possible, as linked above, and tear it apart for your audio connection. It solves both problems with a homemade adapter: the contacts are safe, and the integrated earphone connection keeps the whole assembly firmly attached.
The worst part of it all is that I had a lot of fun using the microphone input before I realized the problem I'd caused. The DS either has a very hot preamp or expects very low-powered input (more likely) because my passive single-coil bass was almost overdriving Electroplankton, and my pickups aren't that loud. You might have to put a volume pedal at the end of the signal chain to bring it down, particularly if you're using effects like chorus or distortion. Once the volume is at the right level, the signal is fairly clear, although it's hardly going to be hi-fi. A more sophisticated adapter (or someone with a better soldering technique) might get better returns.
If you have better luck accessing the microphone, or you know of a better way to put this together, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. As we'll see when I finish putting together my Rec-Rec article, the ability to record directly into the DS is probably key to Electroplankton's most powerful tool.
08:52 x Thomas x /gaming/society/art x link x 1 comment
Since a few of you will hopefully click on the highway sign OF DOOM and reach the current index, here are a few of the posts that I'm personally proud of from the last year (what John Rogers calls "Index-Fu"):
Also, please take the time to check out my pretentious solo project, a one-man looping rock band in the DC area.
23:37 x Thomas x /gaming/society/art x link x 1 comment
I've reached my saturation point for gaming lately. I just can't take it. Not the hobby itself, although I'm certainly too busy to play much. I just can't stand to write about it.
When I was in college, at one point I planned on being a programmer. I'd done some fun work with Windows CE, adapting color programs to four-bit greyscale video buffers--not a magnificent accomplishment, but a neat little trick. I'd done some small hacks with PalmOS, too, which was fun. But gradually it started to feel very hollow. The program was only interesting if you knew the technical bits, which meant that I explained myself to a lot of people who didn't really care. And at the end of the day, coding didn't give me anything solid. This is just a personal thing, but I needed something to hold, something I could hand to someone else, in order to feel like I'd actually done some work. Without an artifact, what did I have to actually show for all that time spent?
Nowadays, when I do some bit of coding, it's easier to get a sense of substance from it, largely because I grew out of some of my techno-fetishism. I stopped being interested in the computer as a computer, and began looking at it as a way to scratch unrelated itches. I don't have to explain to someone why DrumPad is interesting. You don't have to be a gamer to like the idea. You can just play the drums. It's stupid, but it's fun.
When I was ranting about game journalism about a month back, I noted that we often make the mistake of trying to call gaming a "culture," which really overvalues it greatly. But as part of that overvaluation, it lets us excuse the obsessive activity that we devote to it. It lets us feel like the games, and therefore our writing, is "solid," an object worth possessing. I'm not sure that's really true. It really has less to do with the games themselves--they still have interesting societal aspects to them, as created artifacts--and more to do with how we relate to them. I don't want to deal with these things as isolated systems any more. And when we take them out of isolation, situate them in the real world, the narrative becomes repetitive and trite. Games cause violence, they have no diversity in race or gender, they lack decent storytelling, over and over again we run on the treadmill. Blizzard's anti-gay policies have been the only interesting event on the game horizon lately, and that's only because we haven't beat the hobby's general homophobia to death yet. Give it time.
Long story short: I don't have anything to add, right now, and it's not going to have any effect if I do. At some point this'll probably change (my contribution, that is, not my influence--I have no illusions). If I think I can say something that no-one else can say about games, I'll say it. But right now I just look at my other hobbies and feel like there's so much more there, there. It's strange to think that something I was so interested in only six months ago could seem so bland now.
14:51 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
I'm putting the Hohner bass up for sale. It's a good instrument, could be a great instrument, but it's not my style. By tomorrow I should have the NoVA freelance bass, although I'll have to get up early to pick it up from FedEx in Springfield.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
More Longneck than Deep Throat
It's probably pointless to try this, but worth a shot: NoVA Mag wants me to do a piece on DUI in Virginia. Apparently (I don't drink, so this kind of thing just passes me by) Virginia has implemented increasingly stiff penalties for driving drunk, so if you get caught it's no laughing matter. If anyone has been arrested for DUI and would like to talk about it, or if one of your friends has and doesn't mind speaking with a journalist, I'd like to know. Your name does not have to go on the record, and the article is intended to be sympathetic--we're not going to use your quotes to shame or embarrass you. We're interested in how you were treated by the police, the penalties you had to pay, what the mandatory class was like, that kind of thing. If you can help, send an e-mail to news@thomaswilburn.net. Thanks!
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/investigation/sources x link x 0 comments
Perhaps you want to get started looping, but you don't have the instrumental skill to work with keys or bass or whatever. You might want to be inspired by the unbelievable Kid Beyond, seen in this MusicThing post, who loops using only his voice and a laptop. Let's say that you also lack the money to buy Ableton Live, the software he's using for that loop. Live is an intriguing and versatile piece of software, but it's $400 and it has a lot of functions that a looper doesn't necessarily need.
Enter Jesusonic, which I've written about before but hadn't really experimented with until last weekend. Coded by WinAmp creator Justin Frankel, Jesusonic is a free digital effects program that runs in real-time on a PC. It is fantastically powerful, able to do chorus, pitch shift, noise gates, and really anything else that you can program into it. The drawback, of course, is that you have to program the effects yourself--although Jesusonic comes with a few basic guitar effects, anything more elaborate has to be written in an intimidating DSP script.
But the good news is that Jesusonic comes out of the box (so to speak) with a pair of loop samplers--one that triggers automatically when you start playing, and another that uses an interface like my own hardware, the Line 6 DL4. In fact, the Jesusonic DL4 clone even includes a couple of features that the real DL4 lacks, like variable speed playback (with pitch shift) and play-while-bypassed (which could be used to build multiple loops). The only missing feature is an immediate Stop button, but that shouldn't be hard to add or work around using the bypass function.
So if you're interested in experimenting with loops on the extreme cheap, this is a great way to do it. The program is pretty user-unfriendly, so here's a quick tutorial. When you first open it up, you'll need to choose an input/output device. For best performance, you need to choose an ASIO driver, which is available for many soundcards but usually doesn't come pre-installed. ASIO is a standard that was created by the synth company Steinberg, and it allows your computer to read and write audio with very low latency, so there's no appreciable delay between the input and the output. Older cards, like the Soundblaster Audigy, might run $60 total and have ASIO drivers, which is still cheaper than a DL4.
Once you've picked your I/O function, hit Okay to load the main program functions. Press A to add an effect to the signal chain, and find the looper (it should be in loopsamplers, named "loopsampler-m2"). The number keys serve as switches, which Jesusonic calls "triggers." By default, 1 activates Record/Overdub, 2 switches to Play mode, and 3 arms the Play Once mode. Between those three, you have all the tools needed to create your own looping music, either long experimental pieces or the kind of shorter pop material that I create.
When I get a chance, I'm going to try to learn the basics of Jesusonic effects programming to add two important functions: Stop and Multiply. The latter is a great feature that I think was first found on the Gibson/Oberheim Echoplex, widely considered one of the best loopers available. With Multiply, a musician can double a loop's length, meaning that you can create long base loops without having to record many duplicate measures. Instead, the looper copies your work for you. The Echoplex, it goes without saying, is an expensive piece of equipment--at least a cool grand. You can run this looper on very cheap hardware (I've used a 366MHz Celeron laptop with about 300MB of RAM), including using a dance pad and ControlMK as a foot controller.
Total cost? I don't know, maybe $200 if you had to buy the computer, and less than $50 if you already had some old hardware lying around. It's not as easy, portable, or hi-fi as a real DL4 or Echoplex... but it's a lot cheaper. I keep saying that it's not hard to do what I do. With a little ingenuity (and maybe some crazy beatbox skills), it's not very expensive either.
11:43 x Thomas x /music/tools/looping x link x 1 comment
Man, this hit close to home.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/writing x link x 0 comments
It's been a while since I've put up any new food reviews. If you're looking for a place to eat in the Golden Triangle, you might check out Eric Eats Lunch, where he's taking notes on his eating experiences and linking them to pushpins in a Google map. It's a great idea. Thanks, Eric!
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/golden_triangle x link x 0 comments
Boing Boing references an essay by Pam Noles about the lack of race in science fiction and fantasy.
I think Noles has a real point, but she (perhaps intentionally) avoids one of the implications of pulp-derived literature like SF. While there isn't, generally speaking, a lot of variety in human race in the genre, aliens/monsters/metahumans often stand in for other ethnicities. They undergo discrimination, taboos against miscegenation, racial stereotyping.
That doesn't excuse the lack of non-White people, in my opinion. In fact, it worsens the situation. When authors use that kind of metaphor to examine real-life racial tensions, it also carries the message that there's something non-human--or less than human--about anyone who's not a Caucasian. The common use of stereotypical attributes to define aliens and monsters (like Tolkien's noble elves and hateful orcs) only worsens the problem--I'm sure other people have noticed that the violent, brutish, sexually aggressive Klingons of Star Trek fame were also darker-skinned, practically parodies of Black stereotypes. Eventually, if I remember correctly, even the show's writers noticed. But by that point they were hamstrung by 30 years of backstory.
There's a lot of room in science fiction to explore these kinds of contemporary issues, which is why it can be so frustrating to read "post-human" books which dismiss and jump past our reference frame. It's unfortunate that the tropes of the genre have made it so easy to explore them badly.
23:41 x Thomas x /fiction/writing/analysis x link x 1 comment
I don't know if anyone is a fan of the band Bad Brains, but someone claiming to be Darryl Jenifer (the bassist) has been posting on The Lowdown lately.
So far, he's really contributed nothing useful at all, and may have used more commas than actual letters (I think he's getting them confused with the space bar). Oh, and his first post to the forum (under his psuedonym, jonnie u) was about Darryl Jenifer, saying that "this cat plays the illest metal ,the deepest dub and the funkiest slaps , the dudes from wash.d.c - dont sleep stay tuned for more underground knowledge from jonnie u" and "THIS DUDE IS THE HENDRIX OF MODERN BASS." You know, the kind of modesty that looked really good once everyone figured out who he claimed to be.
I'm not the sort, personally, who thinks that musicians and celebrities should just shut up and perform. If you've got a bully pulpit, then preach by all means. But stuff like this also reminds me that you can be a skilled artist and still be an idiot. It would do us all good to remember that, I think, both in terms of our own self-image and our culture of celebrity.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/badbrains x link x 0 comments
Just some quick notes about basses that I've thought were interesting lately:
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
Last looping-related material today: Owen Pallett live performing a song called "This Modern Love." Pallett is also known in his solo work as Final Fantasy, because he's a huge dork. This makes searching for his music just about impossible. But in this live video, you can see him playing around with the loop, not too different from what I do, and messing with the audience, which I really should try. He has a drummer, which I have to admit would be nice at times--note how it allows him more leeway with dynamics while maintaining the basic loop, something I can't do as easily.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/pallett x link x 0 comments
Wow. The moment I get all excited about a free looper and building an Echoplex, I run into Mobius, which is a full-featured Echoplex emulation, also supporting ASIO. I will be downloading this and playing with it. The feature set, including its implementation of Multiply, looks really sweet. It doesn't include Undo yet, which is unfortunate.
Why don't I use these PC-based tools personally? For one thing, because it's a pain hooking a laptop up at a show. I like the bulletproof nature of standalone effects like the DL4. I never have to worry about CPU spikes or driver conflicts on the pedal looper. Also, I like being bound to a highly-restrictive toolkit, just for the challenge.
On the other hand, if I were starting over today--or if I decided to work in a different context, perhaps with other musicians--it would be really tempting to break out the laptop instead of my pedals.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/looping x link x 0 comments
