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.
The View from B-SPAN, Episode One
I just finished posting this to the World Bank's internal blog system, but I'm going to reproduce it here. This is part of a new organizational marketing campaign that we're working on. I'm trying to take advantage of tools that the Bank doesn't normally use, as well as a casual, humorous tone. We hope that the combination will grab the attention of other staff, and maybe get it virally passed around as an example to other units.
Pay no attention to the "read more" line: the Bank's secure blogs automatically put all formatting and embedding behind a cut.
Click "Read More" to see the first episode of "The View from B-SPAN," including the worst preview image ever created.
Featured links for this post:
00:46 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 1 comment
What's the price on raising your consciousness? Worldchanging thinks it's about $40, including renewable energy credits for the impact of printing the book. If that sounds like a deal, then they've got the product for you--what they call a "User's Guide for the 21st Century." Pretty heavy rhetoric to fulfill, but for the most part it does succeed.
The first thing that you notice about Worldchanging is the cover. A big (600 or so pages) hardcover book in green and grey, it comes with a beautifully-designed cardboard slipcover. It's bright and attention-grabbing, if not terribly convenient. I assume they had a good reason for it. Inside, the book is divided into sections similar to the website, such as "Stuff," "Cities," and "Politics." Each section discusses the problems that we will face in the future, current solutions being attempted, and often attempts to create tie-in for personal action. The chapters are broken up into short, snappy entries, many less than three paragraphs long. It's not in-depth information so much as a jumping-off place, complete with URLs and book recommendations.
The basic idea is that even if you can't do anything about the problems facing mega-cities like Lagos, being aware of them (and being pointed toward reliable resources with short reviews, if you want to find out more) will help you live a more sustainable lifestyle. Solutions start with awareness, the thinking goes, and even a small amount of change in each person's life could make a big impact. In this way, Worldchanging has been compared to an information-age Whole Earth Catalog, which doesn't mean much to someone my age. I had to look it up.
I'd have to say it works, at least on some level. Reading Worldchanging, particularly the chapters on Stuff, Politics, and Business, got me thinking about what I throw away, what I buy, and how I live, if only in the most cursory fashion. Much the same as An Inconvenient Truth, the relentlessly upbeat tone of the book does make these problems seem approachable, even as they're sounding a drumbeat of doom.
A lot of people who pick up Worldchanging will already be attentive to these ideas, since it's not cheap enough for an impulse buy. They'll probably try to loan it out to others, something I'm sure the authors would appreciate. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure whether (or even how) to review this book for purchasing--but I'll definitely recommend it for borrowing, and those short on cash but long on IT should consider browsing Worldchanging.org, where much of the book's material originated. If you can afford to pay $40 for wider awareness, then that's great. If not, give it a shot for free, especially if you don't normally think of yourself as an environmentalist or a philanthropist.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 0 comments
Ocarina of Time is, according to Gamerankings, the greatest game of all time. It has a composite ranking of 97.9%. This is unbelievably overrated.
I'm trying to be fair to Ocarina. I recognize that it's an older title, that it was the first Zelda to move into 3D, and that countless people identify strongly with the title. I don't really expect to convince anyone else. But I'm really having to struggle to keep playing, something that didn't happen with the older 2D Zeldas, which I likewise didn't experience until much past their publication.
First of all, this is an ugly game. And I don't mean just in terms of the technical bits and pieces, since the N64 was home to the nastiest texture filtering functions ever written. Even ignoring the muddy textures that were common to consoles of the period, the art direction here varies wildly. The Great Fairies look like garish dominatrixes, for the love of all that is holy, and the Gorons are just annoying. This is even more frustrating when it's clear that a lot of work went into parts of the game, like the day/night cycle--it's irritating, largely pointless, and seems to exist just for the effect, but the shifting colors as the sun rises or sets are very pretty.
Second, the Z-targeting system doesn't work. It just doesn't, or at least not fast enough to be useful. I end up aiming at walls, random objects, or faraway enemies instead of where I actually want to strike. Putting double-duty on the trigger as a camera control was a mistake in Jet Grind Radio, and it was a mistake here. Sure, I can look where I want if I switch to first-person mode, but Link has a knack for being where I don't want him to be when I zoom in. Considering that the N64 had a d-pad that sat useless for this game, and the emulated Gamecube version simply toggles the map on and off, it's unbelievable that no-one thought to give full camera control to the player.
But what annoys me most is how stubbornly obtuse Ocarina can be. I spent probably an hour wandering the Lost Woods at the start of the game, trying to figure out where the sword was located. The annoying girl with green hair said it was in the forest, after all. Turns out it's in the training area, which is part of the level Kokiri Forest, instead of the Lost Woods, which are apparently not a forest even though they are made up of badly-textured trees. I know, I know, it's my fault for not taking her completely literally, but that's set the tone for my experience so far: blundering along, playing the titular ocarina constantly, until I finally luck into the next step.
No, I haven't even gotten to the Water Temple yet.
06:39 x Thomas x /gaming/software/zelda x link x 1 comment
A couple of days before Christmas I got a call from Larry Hartke. Hartke is the man who owns and runs Hartke Amplifiers, which you may know better as "those bass amps with the aluminum speakers and the reputation for blowing up." Of course, he didn't just call me out of the blue. For the last few months, the back page ad for Bass Player (and probably other bassist magazines) has featured Larry and his cell phone number, and asked people to call. Then they updated the ad, and said that Larry wanted to hear people's music. I'm a sucker for futile promotion efforts, so I called and left a message.
Larry called back a couple of days later, and we had a brief chat. He asked what kind of gear I used, and what kind of music I play. I mentioned the web site for the pretentious solo project, for which I have been woefully unproductive this vacation, and asked how the response to the ads has been. Hartke said he gets between 50 and 60 calls a day. "I've missed a lot of playoff games," he said, but added that he'd heard from bassists all around the country. Have hearts and minds been changed? Probably not, but that sounds like a pretty good connection to the community--and now people know who to call if their amp has problems, until he changes his number.
He's also sending callers a free set of bass strings, so if yours are sounding a little dull, it probably wouldn't hurt to ring him up.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
Right, so the whole "arranging and recording three songs thing?" Didn't really feel like it last week. But I will be playing at the open mike tonight at Stacy's Coffee Shop in Falls Church, starting at around 7:30pm, if anyone's interested. And this Saturday, December 30, I'll be at Stacy's again to play backup band for my friend Gib Cima. Gib's kind of a singer-songwriter type, and he's quite a bit more "wholesome" than I am, but it's a free show. I believe that starts at around 7pm. If you're in the area, come on out and grab a coffee. If Gib runs out of material, I'll probably try to take over the stage, and in that eventuality Rock is guaranteed.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/performance/gigs/open_mikes x link x 0 comments
Shorter Firefly:
I'm only three episodes in again, and I certainly do plan on watching the rest, but look: we've seen these characters and plots before. The dialog's clever, I'll give it that, when they're not dropping badly-accented Mandarin into the conversation and killing my suspension of disbelief. But between said Mandarin, the forced western setting, and the echoes of Confederate sympathy, I just don't get the appeal here.
I guess I'm spoiled by Galactica, I never watched Buffy, and there was a dearth of good sci-fi on TV at the time. Those three would explain a lot. If this were on TV now, I might watch it. I'm just confused by the enthusiasm people have shown.
15:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/firefly x link x 1 comment
CD Review: Monarch, by Clatter
Clatter's first release, Blinded by Vision, was new territory for me. Combining melodic basslines with heavy distortion and powerful female vocals, it took former rhythm instruments and brought them forward. It's a solid album, with a few standout songs, so I had high hopes for Clatter's newest album, Monarch. For the most part, I'm not disappointed.
First, a note about the album's packaging: like Blinded by Vision, Monarch comes in a cardboard-and-plastic sleeve instead of a jewel case. Unlike that album, when you order it from Clatter directly, it comes with a few extras. The band has become increasingly green these last few years, and they've decided to not only advocate for global warming reform with their packaging materials, but they also include a monarch butterfly sanctuary kit, with information about the insects and seeds that will attract them on their migration patterns. It's a nice gesture.
But how's the music? For this release, Amy Humphrey (bass, vocals) has added a twelve-string bass to her toolkit, in addition to the ringing Rickenbacker that she had used before. You can really hear the drone strings in the bass sound, since they produce a much thicker, guitar-like distortion. In fact, this is a much more produced album in almost every way: there are added vocal harmonies by Humphrey, the occassional synth in the background, and speech samples integrated into the songs. It's not impossible to imagine that Clatter will play these live, since they've traditionally used a click track and sampler for backups. But at times the extra production does seem gratuitous, or even garish: "For Her" is a great Franz Ferdinand-like dance track, but it's marred by a clumsy dialog sketch dropped into the bridge.
In a lot of ways, that lack of subtlety is Monarch's biggest weakness. "House of Trouble," for example, rails against global warming skeptics and the Bush administration, and it doesn't hesitate to drive its point home. There's also a cover of Rush's "Limelight" that's surprisingly well-executed considering the difference in instrumentation. Humphrey's voice seems stronger this time around, but she's still not a singer with a great emotional range. Joe Hayes' drumming, however, continues to fill the space behind the bass without being obnoxious--say what you like about the choice of instrumentation, these two can lock into a tight groove together.
All in all, Monarch is a good album, but I'm not sure there are any standouts that I'm going to enjoy as much as Blinded by Vision. Its best songs, "House of Trouble," "For Her," and "Somewhere Inside" are more consistent, but there's less experimentation (there's nothing quite as distinctive as the auto-wah bassline of "Center Line," for example). I hesitate to call this a sophomore slump, but I'm definitely looking forward to what Clatter will do next. In the meantime, listen to the samples and see if it's to your taste--for non-bassists and more conventional listeners, Monarch might well be a better fit.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/clatter x link x 0 comments
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
You may know Max Brooks, author of World War Z, from his previous book, The Zombie Survival Guide. That was a softcover novelty similar to the Worst Case series of books. It showed that Brooks had watched a lot of zombie movies. World War Z, in contrast, demonstrates that he understands what made the best of those movies great.
The central conceit of the book is that it doesn't present a straightforward narrative, but instead collects interviews with survivors of an undead uprising from the near future, under the guise of a "UN Special Report." The interviews detail an outbreak that begins in China and spreads rapidly, overtaking the globe before the remnants of civilization adapt and begin to regain control. There's a lot of talk about how the zombies require a different kind of war and a ruthless outlook--but the best part of Brooks' plot device is that it lets him put a very human face on the survivors--how they fought among themselves, who was saved, and what was sacrificed. Those have always been the real draw of zombie fiction, and Brooks details them deftly.
There are a number of references to recent events, including a "brushfire war" that drains American resources, but they're not too distracting, and in some cases (like the military's myopic focus on technology over effective tactics) the futurism feels a little too accurate. It's probably not a good idea to read World War Z as a metaphor or a disaster prevention guide, but it does provoke thought about our response to emergencies, and provide a pretty good Apokalyptica read in the process.
11:41 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/brooks x link x 1 comment
What I Did Will Do On My Winter Vacation
I love to-do lists, and the lists love me.
11:40 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 1 comment
I've been to New York City a few times before, while I was in college. But visiting with Belle is different, because she packs our vacations full. Now, of course, it's all a blur. Good thing there are digital photographs, to preserve all my most embarrassing facial expressions!
Belle is a Sanrio fanatic. Total Hello Kitty overload. And ever since they closed the Potomac Mills store, I think she's been a bit in withdrawal. She claims that she was underwhelmed by the New York Sanrio Outlet, but I think she's just trying to make me feel better about it.
I, on the other hand, was definitely underwhelmed by the Nintendo World store in Times Square. Of course, I don't know what I was expecting: free Gamecubes at the door? Lots of white plastic and blue lights.
I think I'm scarier than the allosaurus, personally. But here's a funny story: neither of us had ever been to the Natural History museum before, and we started with the animals from Asia. We were looking at some kind of Indonesian deer when Belle turned to me and said something about how "lifelike" they were.
Well of course they're lifelike, I said. They used to be alive.
"What? No," said Belle. "You're pulling my leg."
Apparently she'd never really spent any time with taxidermy. We should all be so lucky. I think I like it better her way, though: I imagine teams of highly-trained artists carefully sculpting a life-scale model of incredibly banal wildlife, implanting each hair by hand.
I just liked this phone.
Before heading off to catch Almodovar's Volver (great flick, be sure to see it when it gets a wider release), we stopped off at this dessert restaurant, which we passed on our way to Lombardi's famous pizza. It's called Rice to Riches, and they only sell delicious rice pudding.
A lot of design went into it, obviously. You can't see them from this angle, but there were these elaborate Flash animations running on screens above the pudding bar, and all of the signs are a little sardonic. My favorite slogan hung over the bar was "Eat all you want--you're already fat." But this sign located outside was also a nice touch:
Shallow observation: New York is very different from DC or where I grew up in Lexington, KY. It always strikes me as three or four different cities that just happen to coexist over top of each other. There's the hipster New York where you can buy cupcakes at 11pm and then go eat at Moby's vegan restaurant. There's the grounded neighborhoods around the airport in Queens. And then there's the surreal sections of Manhattan like Times Square, where the city isn't just a hyperactive commercial parody of itself, but has actually become a parody of the parody of New York commercialism. The fact that all of these are only a few miles from each other is pretty amazing, as is the fact that they haven't declared war on each other yet.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/america/usa x link x 0 comments
Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru
17:50 x Thomas x /music/business/promotion x link x 1 comment
"That's a cute song, Sam. I don't recognize it."
"It's from one of my favorite musicals, Max. It's about a quaint French circus that comes to town and is immediately cannibalized by the local mole men."
--Sam and Max, Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple
Belle and I are taking some time off to run up and debase New York City this weekend. Then I'm going to lounge around at home with Wallace and my bass until practically January, because I haven't used any of my vacation time for a year and a half and I need to recharge.
I'm expecting the activity pattern here will be four or five days of nothing, followed by embarrassing levels of productivity as I procrastinate writing songs and applying for jobs.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 0 comments
Review: It's All Gone Pete Tong
Maybe It's All Gone Pete Tong is funnier if you're a DJ, but I doubt it. This isn't a Spinal Tap, where many of the jokes become funnier if you've experienced the soap opera of rock band membership. And Pete Tong isn't without humor, but it seemed to me to be unsure of itself: is it a mockumentary, a cautionary tale, or a satire of club culture?
The center of the movie, Frankie Wilde, is a hotshot DJ spinning in clubs on Ibiza when years of drug abuse and loud music take their toll. The increasingly-deaf Wilde tries to hide his inability to hear as long as possible, but since he's producing an album (horribly) and still trying to match beats (badly), it's not much of a defense. "Generally, the field of music, other than the obvious example, has been dominated by people who can hear" says one interviewee. Eventually, Frankie loses his little remaining hearing in a monitoring accident, his wife leaves him, and he locks himself up in a soundproof room to try to recover. When he emerges a year later, it's with a new sense of purpose. He finds a lip-reading teacher, learns to DJ by feeling the bass through subwoofers, and ditches his addictions.
Part of the problem is that this plotline is really very trite--a standard recovery story--and the filmmakers aren't capable of finding a solid approach for it. Sometimes they shoot interviews (including plenty of cameos from real DJs like Paul van Dyk) and hand-held shots, documentary-style. But that approach is intercut with elements from a more traditional screwball comedy: one running gag has Wilde's cocaine habit represented by a man in a giant, filthy rat costume, who forces his face into huge piles of the drug. The inconsistent shift between those extremes means that the wilder jokes are too dry, and the dry humor too overcooked.
Which is not to say that this isn't a funny movie. There are moments, like the interview line above, or a scene where Wilde's agent tries to get his attention by yelling and hammering on a glass door, only to be thwarted by Frankie's deafness. And the last half-hour handles the issue of hearing loss with surprising sweetness and sensitivity--for a film that also includes an obviously illegitimate biracial son as an unspoken joke.
The art of old-school DJing is all about matching the rhythms, tempos, and sounds of records in order to fade from one to another. With digital music came a number of new techniques, like beat-slicing, time-stretching, and sampling, but even tools like Ableton Live still prominently feature an A-B crossfade function. But for It's All Gone Pete Tong, there's no smooth transition between its disparate sides. It's got a nice beat in there somewhere, but you can't dance to it.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/cult x link x 0 comments
Infamous, crazed comic artist Rob Liefeld writes The Godyssey, a story of Jesus and his mad gong-fu skills against the Greek pantheon.
Suddenly Atwood's Penelopiad looks a lot more respectable.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/religion/books x link x 0 comments
The news that the motion-sensitive Wii controller can be used with a Bluetooth-enabled PC is both intriguing and puzzling. It's intriguing because the Wii remote is relatively cheap, considering its capabilities, and probably very durable.
It's puzzling because once I got it hooked up, I have no idea what I'd do with it.
Frankly, the Wii likely makes a poor mouse. We've got the Gyration Air Mouse at work, and we usually end up using it like a regular mouse on the table. On a system where the interface can be designed for shaky hands (i.e. large buttons, forgiving dead zone, circular menus), it's probably much easier to use, but computer interfaces have gradually become more and more precise, with small OS widgets and lots of data onscreen. It also looks to me like it requires the sensor bar to handle yaw measurements and pointing with any degree of accuracy (although let's not be conventional--turning the controller to its NES-style orientation solves that problem, and would certainly be more usable for the Half-life 2 video that's floating around).
So I've been trying to figure out what I would do with something that could measure force in three dimensions, but not position or relative orientation. Knowing my obsessions, I've been trying to relate it to gestural control in music without having to write a really complicated wrapper for it. I'm not coming up with much. Any ideas?
09:25 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/control x link x 1 comment
MySpace is Terrible: Now With the Guy from Napster Edition
Today MySpace rolled out their digital distribution system. To the relief of basically everyone on earth, they decided to outsource the actual technology to somone else instead of rolling it themselves. SNOCAP, the company that will handle the transactions and downloads, is run by Shawn Fanning, who created Napster.
I haven't signed up, because I actually like giving music away for free. But the terms don't look brutal--there's a $.10 or 15% broker fee (whichever is bigger), a $.45 wholesale fee (probably to keep songs from undercutting iTunes and other music services), and a $30 yearly charge for unsigned artists (waived the first year of membership). If you sold 1000 songs at $1 a piece ($.40 of which would land in your pocket), you'd make enough money to pay the yearly fees.
On the other hand, that requires you to sell 1000 songs just to break even. I know we're supposed to believe that online downloads are the wave of the future, but I'm not sure that people are really "discovering" bands through MySpace as much as the media wants us to believe. My suspicion is that most bands still get most of their exposure through gigs, and can make more money by selling CDs for $5 or $10 a piece. Small bands that can get away with homemade CD-R could make a lot more money in a hurry. You'd be surprised how good a CD-R and a cheap label can look with a little care. Even going with a discount duplicator like DiskFaktory might only cost $1-4 per CD. It takes many fewer CDs than songs to make a profit.
Digital distribution doesn't just change how companies sell music, or how we buy it. Online, per-song purchases are also altering how we think about music. Bassist Max Valentino commented in the Lowdown forum that album sequencing might be turning into a thing of the past, since people will probably just buy the songs they want and listen to them in shuffle mode. To this day, I hate listening to Nine Inch Nails on shuffle. More importantly, we've complained for years about the amount of filler on music albums, but ignore the songs we might not have enjoyed at first, but grew to love.
I don't know. I feel bad for buying CDs, in a way: all those plastic disks eventually end up in a landfill. But once you get past the techno-lust, I think conscientious listeners need to sit down and ask themselves how they can best support the artists that they enjoy. Maybe we need a completely new mechanism.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/business/distribution x link x 0 comments
I dig this Apokalyptica idea--it seems like a holiday for the rest of us. Here are my contributions to the celebration:
14:54 x Thomas x /culture/internet x link x 1 comment
The theory behind John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience is that neo-conservatism has its roots in the phenomenon of Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Working from the studies of Robert Altemeyer and a handful of other social scientists, Dean states these authoritarians have taken control of the Republican party, and use appeals to social dominance in order to maintain power.
As I think I've said before, Conservatives without Conscience doesn't do a very good job of selling the research into authoritarianism to someone who's unaware of the social science that backs it up. This is partially because the author does rely so heavily on Altemeyer--my guess is that the book was written quite quickly, and so Dean only occassionally ventures out into other sources, like Adorno and Duckitt. You can get a slightly wider viewpoint from futurist Sara Robinson in her "Cracks in the Wall" posts at Orcinus (parts one, two, and three). She's also written a series of articles on talking to authoritarian followers that she calls "Tunnels and Bridges."
But having spent a few months thinking and reading about the rise of fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity in American politics, especially as part of the rural-urban gap, Dean didn't have to do much to convince me. Even just in the past year, a number of bizarre (at least to city-bound liberals to myself) stories about fundamentalism have popped up, particularly as election pressures became more intense:
A common thread of all these movements is their emphasis on submission: the children submit to the parents, the woman submits to the patriarch, the family submits to the church, and ultimately all submit to God. This "submissive" relationship is not just about power, although that is certainly a significant part of its appeal (I note, for example, that in youth evangelical movements the primary function seems to be giving privilege to men without forcing them to give up their... less responsible habits). These are basically movements that are intensely interested in heirarchy: both knowing your own place, and keeping others in theirs.
This explains, frankly, quite a lot.
Take one of the standard objections to evolution by fundamentalists: if Darwin is correct, they say, then we're no better than the animals. To many secular urbanites, this argument might sound genuinely puzzling. It doesn't take a vegan to recognize that yes, human beings have many things in common with animals. A person only has to look at a chimpanzee or a gorilla to see the many similarities. But to someone whose psychological makeup is geared toward negotiating a rigid power structure, the difference between humans and animals is not just an academic question. It's part of a defined relationship where one is dominant and the other is food. Muddling that heirarchy is not just a challenge to the supremacy of humans, but it unseats the fundamentalist's self-positioning. Who are we if we're not plainly better than apes? Although the youngest Karamazov's cries of "without God, all is permitted" are philosophically dubious, they still resonate, and it's not because they speak to atheism. It's because they speak to loneliness: without God to anchor a moral spectrum, all kinds of troubling grey areas begin to appear, and we basically have to solve them for ourselves.
The authoritarian angle also ties into theories I have about why conservative humor isn't funny, but they're probably a bit insulting.
Gay marriage, feminism, progressive taxation (leading to a more mobile class system)--perhaps the arguments over these issues are not really about rights after all. Maybe they're really about eliminating ambiguity. For people like Dean, religious extremists may have hijacked the party, but it seems to me like such reticence is really a part of any ideology calling itself "conservative." Eventually, authoritarians had to take the leadership at their word.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/religion/evangelical x link x 0 comments
Someone listing themselves as "jonny" and leaving bogus gmail accounts has started dropping redirect scripts into my comment threads. Right now it just opens Google, but it could have been used to launch malicious code for all I know. I added a line to Pollxn that destroys script tags, and searched for the relevant comments, so it should be safe now.
Anyone else seen this kind of behavior pop up?
The scripts are hosted at usuc.us, which is listed as belonging to a James Sullivan living in Colorado Springs. He runs designcolorado.com--don't visit, it's a porn gateway. Looks pretty seedy to me. And now I'm paranoid about leaving security holes in Pollxn's code. I hate being paranoid.
So I did what everyone should do when a spammer is dumb enough to leave their tracks out in the open, and I called him. A woman answered the phone, said he's out of town until Thursday. I'll try again then, and ask him why he's trying to obstruct my content and mess with my server. I'm sure the answers will be enlightening.
03:24 x Thomas x /meta/blosxom x link x 1 comment
Federal Holiday Fiction: President's Day
William McKinley, shot by an anarchist in 1901, is widely thought to have died eight days later from his infected wounds. Lies, all of it. McKinley's shooter, who bore the unlikely name of Leon F. Czolgosz, was in actuality a struggling actor and pioneering performance artist hired by the president himself. Three years later, Czolgosz was himself struck dead by a mysterious disease while traveling in Europe under the alias Frederick G. Whittaker.
McKinley had grown weary of the authority of office. His wife suffered from epilepsy, and a cure was not forthcoming. With his death falsified and a small fortune in stolen White House silver at his side, the former president set out for the unexplored depths of Zaire, where he hoped to find exotic herbs that might remove his wife's affliction, or at least lessen her symptoms.
McKinley's travels led him far and wide. He spent most of his time pretending to be a circus performer, although when drunk he would often put on an eyepatch and call himself "the Pirate President." Among other acts of vandalism and conspiracy, McKinley is believed to have planted the explosives that would later cause the Tunguska explosion, and wrote the bulk of "Ernest Hemingway"'s output (the rest was penned by a young Calvin Coolidge).
Although crypto-historians have not been able to completely trace McKinley's footsteps, they generally agree that his travels came to an end, ironically, when he was shot in a border dispute by badly lost Dutch merchants in Cambodia. His last words are reported to have been "Not in the face!"
An excerpt from The Secret Histories of the Presidency by Jack Shackenaw, page 27.
02:17 x Thomas x /fiction/micro x link x 1 comment
The Cort Curbow requires some degree of explanation just for the name. It was designed by the late Greg Curbow, a luthier well-known for extended range basses. Curbow doesn't manufacture this bass, however--they pass that on to Cort, maker of lots of odd low-end instruments. The Cort Curbow is also interesting in that it's not made of wood. It's actually built from luthite, a kind of synthetic foam that's supposed to sound like wood while being much lighter. The bass certainly looks futuristic enough.
Here's the problem, and it's a killer: the Cort Curbow has serious dead spots. Dead spots occur when the materials and construction of an instrument resonate with the strings, so that the vibration energy is dampened. The effect is basically that the note fades almost immediately. Almost all basses have dead notes somewhere, some worse than others. Fender-style basses are usually dead between the 7th and 9th frets on the G string.
The Cort has dead spots on either side of A# all up and down the neck. That means within a few frets of the 13th on the A string, the 15th on the G string, and the 8th and 20th on the D string. In fact, I'm not sure that they're dead spots in the traditional sense at all, because they move when the strings are tuned up or down. It's more that the whole bass resonates at multiples of 440Hz.
Is that such a problem? After all, the Cort Curbow is a cheap bass, and incredible sustain is perhaps more than we could expect. But dead notes to this extent also cause problems for someone like me who plays chords or double stops on a regular basis. Play a B chord up on the neck, and the B's decay, leaving only the fifth playing (in this case, F#). The problem is made worse with distortion, so that my fuzz chords lose important notes, and sometimes turn into different chords altogether. Clearly, I can't just work around this, never playing an A chord. That's a fundamental flaw in the instrument.
If I got a bass with this problem once, I would (and did) write it up to a manufacturing error. But this is the second Cort Curbow that I've ordered. Perhaps it was silly to try again, but the first instrument came from an online retailer and might have been faulty. For the second time, I ordered directly from Curbow, the luthier. For a price premium over the online shops, Curbow sets the Cort-manufactured bass up in their own shop. I wrote to them, mentioned the dead spot problem, and asked them to check before they shipped the new bass out. Getting a second bass with the exact same problem, down to the location of the dead spots, implies that this isn't a manufacturing problem--and indeed, the bass itself is very well-constructed. I'm guessing it's actually a design issue, probably centered in the luthite material that Curbow doesn't usually employ.
Whatever the explanation, it's not a usable instrument. I hate to say that. I really wanted to like the Cort, but all those extra frets don't do any good if they can't be used to play several notes from each octave. Return policy permitting, I'm sending it back to Curbow this weekend.
UPDATE: Curbow doesn't issue refunds. They're in discussions with Cort, but I'm not filled with confidence that this will end well. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to alter this bass so that it won't resonate at these frequencies? I'm considering replacing the body with re-routed parts from an Epi SG or a cheap Ibanez.
13:37 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 1 comment
it has to start somewhere
it has to start somehow
what better place than here?
what better time than now?
13:02 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 1 comment
We've been conducting interviews at work for the last couple days, finding candidates to join B-SPAN for when the current coordinator and I move on. It's my first time on this side of the table--previously, I've been the interviewee, but not the interviewer. I'm amazed by how much I've learned about applying for a job just by watching other people do it.
When I left college, I never went through the class on how to do an interview or how to write a cover letter. I always just went in and tried to behave professionally. I think part of the problem was that I presented myself as a generalist--quick learner with a variety of technical skills and good writing ability--and nobody was looking for that. B-SPAN was a lucky break, and ironically now I'm evaluating people for what amounts to a very general and flexible position, while I'll be leaving for much narrower terms of reference.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/staff x link x 0 comments
For my own future reference: David Byrne recommends A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, in which an ensemble cast of children between the ages of 8 and 12 tell the story of L. Ron Hubbard and his incoherent space religion.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/religion/satire x link x 0 comments
In a throwaway line from the introduction to his piece on tempo maps in Cubase SX, Sound on Sound columnist Mark Wherry asks:
This is a very good question. Another good question, depending on the answer to the first, would be to ask if 120 bpm (or divisions thereof) has become a unconscious tempo for many musicians precisely because we've heard so much music at that speed since the rise of digital sequencers.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
Roland, the parent corporation of Boss pedals, has announced a loop pedal the size of a regular compact pedal for release this fall. It's a tempting package, and if I didn't already own a looper that I like very much, I'd probably want to pick it up. It has a mind-boggling amount of loop time (16 minutes) with non-volatile memory and an aux jack to store backing tracks or samples. There's an undo function, tap tempo, and built-in drum patterns. I really like that it's switched on by the output jack instead of the input, so that it doesn't have to be a part of a signal chain. Plus, Musician's Friend has it priced at $180, which makes it the cheapest and smallest looper that I'm aware of.
On the other hand, like all Boss compact pedals it doesn't lend itself well to complex hands-free operation. The single footswitch will apparently handle record, play, and overdub functions, plus undo (hold the switch) and stop (double-tap). Overloading a switch with that many functions makes timing far too complicated, especially for players that really integrate the looper into their songwriting: Undo is useful for inserting and removing chord layers, for example. Play Once (or "One-shot," as Roland calls it) automates ending a loop, taking some of the timing burden off the operator, but here it's been moved onto a separate playback mode of its own and requires turning the selection knob by hand to activate. The RC-2 accepts two extra footswitches via an extension jack, but it looks to me like those are only used for Stop and Tap Tempo. The more that I use the Line 6 looper's four-switch layout (Record/Overdub, Play/Stop, Play Once, Speed/Reverse), the more I appreciate it. And although the footprint for the Line 6 DL-4 is much larger than a Boss pedal, it's capable of going battery-powered for a surprisingly long time with a set of C-cells. Generally speaking, a 9-volt can't handle the drain from a loop processor for very long, so I'm guessing Boss's entry will really require a wall-adapter.
Bottom-line, it looks like it'll be a great entry-level pedal, but is probably more oriented to musicians with backing tracks or already-determined arrangements. That's kind of a theme for Boss's loopers, as far as I can tell--they lend themselves better to solo performers fleshing out their orchestration, as opposed to jam- or purely loop-oriented songwriters.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/looping x link x 0 comments
The best way to describe Guitar Hero II, if you've played the first game, is to say that everything's better except the songs.
I've beaten the game on Hard, which is right at my sweet spot for Guitar Hero--on Medium I play notes when I'm not supposed to, and Expert is so hardcore that you'd really be better off learning to play the instrument itself. Hard is close enough that I can enjoy the illusion of actually playing along without too much stress. And Harmonix has done a good job of addressing the little frustrations of the first game, with easier hammer-ons and pull-offs (they were originally unrealistically difficult) and a much-needed practice mode. The addition of encores is a cute touch, and the game itself looks better.
So if it weren't for the songlist, the GH2 experience would be a lot higher. But you get the feeling that all the really inspired choices were picked up for the original, and now you're sorting through the leftovers. There are moments of genius, especially "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight," "Sweet Child O' Mine," and "Jessica." On the other hand, "Killing in the Name" is a monstrosity, and "Institutionalized" a disaster. It's a much more uneven playlist. The other song criticism is the production--sometimes the other parts of the band are very soft and difficult to hear--although that could be my sub-discount TV at fault.
None of this stops Guitar Hero II from being one of the best games of the year practically by default. You still can't go wrong with this game, especially as party entertainment or for aspiring musicians. I can tell that I'll definitely keep playing through it just for the experience, as I did with its addictive predecessor. If I had to choose this game or the original, it'd be a tough call--beginners might want to start with GH2 for the responsiveness and training options, and graduate to the original when they really want to bring the Rock. And the sooner Harmonix decides to use this improved engine for more selective themed or genre song packs, possibly including songs from the first game, the better.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/software/guitar_hero x link x 0 comments
Delurking Friday: All Keyed Up
People who get really well acquainted with their computers ("How you dooin'?") can get crazy about the keyboard. Every now and then someone decides to redesign it. Placement of the Ctrl, Alt, Windows, and Apple keys are a big controversy. Me, I hate the Insert key. Sometimes I overreach when I backspace, hit Insert by mistake, and all over a sudden I'm overwriting my document at 100wpm. I've started disabling it in Office applications with a macro.
If you could change one thing about the keyboard, what would it be?
11:12 x Thomas x /random/tech x link x 1 comment
