#garage
STACK OF RAKES, WELDING MASK
This is one of my primary tags. Mainly quotes from novels, links to music and zines, D.I.Y. stuff, hacking, junk you’d do in a garage. (However, keep in mind that many of my actual letters written to other blogs are in the hypertext tag - which is my primary tag.)
Back at it - scrapchat today (Sept 21st) at 6 PM Eastern with Talita of UH. Starting with the topic of Sunshine69 and moving outward from there. Talita is like one of my favorite people ever, so I am personally very excited about this.
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Finished my personal archive of the classic Flash website.
Looks like I first started working on this backup of thewoodcutter.com back in May of 2019. At the time, a lot of the Flash preservation projects out there were just starting out - like Flashpoint and Ruffle. I decided to take an hour this week and see if anything had improved and… was able to get Ruffle working pretty well right off.
I have no idea if The Woodcutter will appeal to anyone out there - I personally really found it fascinating. It made me feel like the Web wasn’t just going to be a recreation of mainstream art - but was an avenue for its own sensibilities. And it felt like so much of the Web would be doomed to be underground - which was a good thing in my mind. Hidden corners, cult classics, experimental shit.
In hindsight, I think The Woodcutter hints at the future - art games like Samorost (which was also at first an early Web Flash game), messy handmade meme faces, and cryptic websites like Superbad or Terminal 00.
I had also planned to revive the Bob Dylan ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ - which was down for a year or so - but it is back in business. Another possible target for my archive is Pharrell’s 24 Hours of Happy, which just isn’t quite functional any longer.
It’s interesting that The Woodcutter has disappeared from the Internet - while other contemporaries like Fly Guy have managed to find their way to Flash preservation sites across the Web.
Maybe it’s just not as well known. Hope you enjoy it!
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Net.art? Literature? Zine? No, an Internet onion.
This project only appears to have about two weeks left - but it’s a good time to check it out because there’s a lot there now. A lot of onion!
This is a webzine - concept by Laurel Schwultz, but made possible by a team - where new writing is added from contributors every day for five weeks. (Back for its second season, it appears: here’s a snapshot from last August.[1])
The onion works like so:
Just so you know, onions grow new layers from the inside-out. The oldest layers are on the outside, and the newest on the inside.
In true onion skin style, you can slightly make out the next entry in the background of the current entry you’re reading. You can also browse by contributor.
This new site includes the 2020 onion as well - the new season starts at layer twenty-three.
Part of what really pushed me to posting about this, though, is this amazing spreadsheet:
From a blog post where the stylesheets are laid out.
The internet onion is decaying by phases because it has to be, given the basic hand-coding HTML and CSS we are using. We could write a script, but we are lazy, and there won’t be that many more phases of decay than this, Laurel thinks to herself. (Although down the line, Laurel would like to also degrade the content itself and source code, but that will be in Late Decay.)
So this is like the full 90’s web reenactment here.
I hope this continues to be a staple of the Web. The bots can’t keep up with the handmade Web. It’s too small - they can’t even BE that small!
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No one had ever given him such an effusive, heartfelt handshake, never had anyone but intimate acquaintances stood so close to him, knee to knee, and as a math teacher Herman never did anything to encourage such impulses.
— p. 38, That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye
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‘A mascle is a voided lozenge—that is, a lozenge with a lozenge-shaped hole in the middle—and the rarer rustre is a lozenge containing a circular hole. A field covered in a pattern of lozenges is described as lozengy; a similar field of mascles is masculy.’
— Wikipedia article for Lozenge, “Heraldry”
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Track ripper extraordinaire of the imaginary video game kingdom.
It’s possible that you’re reading this thinking, “Okayyyy, uh Kicks? You can dig up rare TiddlyWikis and out-of-the-way neo-cities, but you’re just discovering SiIvaGunner??” Hey, I’m sorry! I don’t know who is reading this or what anyone knows or what’s IMPORTANT OKKKK!!
Let me start by saying that I’ve been asking around in kid circles - and it’s not unlikely that they know SiIvaGunner. HOWEVER. They don’t really know SiIvaGunner - they often have just heard the video game soundtrack “rips” - high quality rips - posted to the YouTube channel. And they uncritically accept them - videos such as “Horse Race (Extended Mix) - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” - as nothing more than high quality rips.
Of course, if you happen to continue down the SiIvaGunner storyline - which is easy to do, since a dozen new videos might appear each day - you can end up at videos like: “Main Theme (Anniversary Edition) - Wii Shop Channel” or “Title Theme & Ending - 7 GRAND DAD”. A “rip” can be a mashup, a remix, a medley, mixed-up sentences - stuff like that.
Of course, the channel has fought through several takedowns over the past six years - since it purports to be unironically infringing copyright and distributing unedited tracks.[1] (A cover story which plays into its “fake out” strategy.)
Anyway, SiIvaGunner isn’t a single person. There are about 300 active contributors - more than 900 people having contributed to the catalog.
So this is obviously a deep well to try to dive into with a massive Discord channel and wiki and network of YouTube and Twitter accounts, regular livestreams and ARG events. I think my favorite place to point people is the GilvaSunner Bandcamp page, which regularly releases new compilations assembled by the collective.
There is a wider “high quality rips” scene - like CrystalForce is a great example I recently stumbled into.
If you’re interested in more backstory, look for interviews with Chaze the Chat.
The wiki also says for “misleading content”. It’s a rough time for fiction. ↩︎
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Draw amazing emoji mosaics - by Shannon Lin
This fantastic art tool is going right into my href.cool Web/Participate collection! Made by Shannon Lin - equally fascinating website at hello-shannon.com - what a sensation to use the fill tool to pour lollipops and little external hard drive icons into circles and squiggle shapes. I’ve recently had some fun with MacPaint - and this stirs up all the same freewheeling spraycan feelings!
My poor rendition of Toulouse-Lautrec is
here
no here - for some reason the link isn’t working, might be
too big of an image.
Kind of a cool facet that the images show up differently on the different platforms.
@s_han_non_lin:
mobile support has been solved!! thanks @bwasti – the animated emojis are still coming … please do hold your breath n stay tuned
Links to canvases can get huge - but glad it’s all there in the query string. Keep a URL shortener close.
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html antics + mix. what’s not to love?
the molly drake tracks that bookend this are classy.
thanks for sayin hi
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You don’t have to like this bc I already do.
One thing I love about Meat Computer - every single song has the same “I like
this new generation of music” sample. 
But really - this is just the
same thing I am always posting - very slapshod, goofy and overlooked little
bits of whatever.
these fangs
r 4 u
onlydeath threats
@ my head
jus 4 bein me
super creatine
ya
fck my chrons diseasedrinking kratom
like it’s fucking lean
now im sleepin
in my mommas jeans
Of course, you can barely make any of this out, because the vocals are so perfectly rushed and faint in the far upper reach of falsetto octaves.
Soundcloud page is here. Another great track is ‘nowhere fast’.
I don’t know what covid has done to turn this all into a music blog… but I swear that there are a variety of interesting things coming up once I get my act together. Pray that these HTMLs will manifest themselves to us.
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Is this stunning human / computer musical collaboration really as unknown as it appears to be???
I am having a very hard time believing that these albums (by human Eryk Salvaggio and computer counterpart Francois Harddisk) have been overlooked. But it’s the same story week after week - who can find anything in the mess of the Internet anymore - with absolutely abyssmal search engines and recommendation engines getting in the way.[1]
Oh and I daresay - the above link is a very thorough, very juicy tracklist.doc of how the creative effort was seeded.
I asked Jukebox to produce new samples from libraries that created music in the style of Francois Hardy, but in the genre of Experimental Hip-Hop, which from what I can tell means a music model trained on Death Grips records. I took these generated pieces (which were maxed out at 1:20 seconds long), cut them up and reassembled them - the same way old records might be sampled for any other hip-hop record. This would form the basis of a handful of these tracks, though in some cases the generated samples were removed from the final product after serving as stems from which the rest of the song would be built.
But this goes even further beyond that! Lyrics are generated by tools such as GPT-2, then fed through a speech synthesizer to produce the singing. The “Oligarchic Ganglions” vid also has a neat bit of “deep fake” ancient history to it.[2]
This is also reminiscent of Robin Sloan’s recent Brian, the Angel of History EP. (Also very good imho!)
Now, please, if you link to THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE - and, you can’t see it, but I am shamelessly begging you to do just that - do not link to my flimsy post here, but link straight to the original essay. No one should be an extra click removed from such a wonder.
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Every day is the same, every cat and dance is the same, this is the timeline.
Not another Garfield thing. Well - interesting to look back and watch this account (started at the turn of 2020) transform from a benign, sterile cartoon into a hellscape - literally without missing a beat. I think this transcends a mere meme by being an excellent chronology of the year.
Sweet tonal shifts from vid to vid. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s going on here. Part of it is the juxtaposition of Garfield’s bawdy revelling against the horrors - layoffs skyrocketing, strife in the streets, fire. Maybe it’s an “eat, drink and be merry” motif. But it feels like a propaganda satire, too. I don’t know. It’s also… earnest. (See the link in the profile.)
Would love to see these stitched together at the end of the year. This is an accurate journal, in a way.
Oh and same song, another take: Orkestra Obsolete plays on 1930s instruments. Well-suited to the theremin and harmonium.
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‘But as I stood, casting my net into the Waters of the Lower Staircase, an image rose up before me. I saw a black scribble against a grey Sky and a flicker of bright red; words drifted towards me - white words on a black background. At the same time, there was a sudden blare of noise and a metallic taste on my tongue.’
— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
(This book is pure vaporwave. A few monks, but mostly vaporwave.)
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Oh the way he kept playing the opening bars - I was laughing so hard I was crying. The interpersonal tension between the two of them was so intense - it was way beyond awkward - like when he shows up at the bar. It was so much better than simple awkward comedy because they were working through something so deep.
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Finally got around to this. Pretty fantastic! I’m grateful you pointed it out. Best use of dentures for sure.
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Trippy game’n’song evokes early Web - more at wearesuperorganism.com.
Not an incredibly deep game by any means - but I have to link to it. This is what you expect me to do. I’m just doing exactly what I’m supposed to.
Perhaps Superorganism’s website is even more of a callback - with spinning GIFs, a guestbook on the home page, and my favorite touch is that all of their vids have a Windows Media Player frame around them.
Of course, this website was not built entirely by the band, but was executed by Björn Flóki[1], who appears to be a very popular designer with musicians. So, in a way, it’s deceptive. This was funded to look like a Neocities website - it’s a simulacrum of the personal.
There is a recent trend to bang on this note in pop culture - like with the Captain Marvel website or the feature story on the Space Jam website in Rolling Stone. I can’t help but relish this turn, because these sites show that even mainstream artists feel the allure of leaving behind the rigidity of the corpypastas. Even during the height of blog abandonment, you had Bob Dylan’s tremendous interactive ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ multivid and Pharrell’s (now defunct) 24 Hours of Happy website, both in 2013.
The trouble is that most of these artsy sites are ultimately marketing stunts that reduce the Web to a little interactive trinket, rather than the unrivaled platform that you can find exhibited on websites like Glitch or Twine. Or, further out, in Beaker’s neighborhood. I don’t mean to say that these artists have some obligation to unlock the Web[2] - actually I’m saying quite the opposite, they have absolutely no reason to. To them, the Web is another stop on the tour.
I think it shows the surprising amount of novelty that is still under the surface of the Web which is yet to be plumbed.
While the game linked above was done by Matthew Govaere. ↩︎
Although it would be very interesting to see mainstream artists to mess around with the Indieweb or, again, PLEASE, for the Stranger Things cast to suddenly take up public Tiddlywikis. ↩︎
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“We’ve been forty years in the desert crafting ancient licks - what have you done?”
This may not be new to anyone who comes across this - some of these bands are quite popular - so this is more just turning the page corner down for myself. This blog post has taken me down a rabbithole of backstory on the Tishoumaren music genre - Tuareg music, North Africa. (This is dumb - but I’m a big fan of the two-player game Targi. Anyway - it brought Tuareg culture into view for me.)
Love the image of the band in the desert with their axes. Name of the group is Tinariwen - they appear to be pretty popular on YouTube at least. The blog post’s stories and tracks from Bombino are cool, too - didn’t know him either.
However, what I’m really enjoying is the discovery of Super Onze de Gao, who run their desert lutes through distortion. Gah this party makes me so jealous:
A bunch of albums are here. The Takamba music doesn’t seem to have achieved the same level of Western notoriety as Tishoumaren, but who cares - don’t know why I even said that. Love this stuff. It’s definitely going in href.cool’s Tapes/Africa collection.
Totally different topic, but I only discovered this because I was wondering who Head Medicine was - happened to be on their Museum of International Comics. So that’s a link. Links links links. Blogspot.
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'Those of us who stood close by, who saw the watch’s finer details, reported: it had no hands. Just numbers in a circle, that’s all it was. And that’s what the harpist was checking, it seemed. He was confirming that there was no time, that the numbers arranged in a circle didn’t count for anything. Yes, he nodded, his lizard lips playing with the toothpick a little, yes, right on schedule. Nothing o’clock.
‘That’s what time it always is at the bend in the frozen river.’
— p. 14, “The Tormentors” by Nathan Grover, Thrice Fiction, No. 26
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Experience the adrenaline rush of downloading and installing it as many times as you like!
Holy hell - Nathalie Lawhead is at it again. Expanding her ‘Mackerelmedia’ joke from Electric Zine Maker into its own thing. Gotta say - it’s crazy the mileage this one gets out of potatoes and fish.
I’m simply obligated to link this - because it glimmers with the true affection and pity that any reader of this blog must have for the Whirled Whipped Web.
YOU TRAVEL DEEPER INTO THE DARKER PART OF THE FEED. AS YOU REACH FOR A PIECE OF INFORMATION THAT SEEMS TO LOOK PROMISING PART OF THE FEED THAT YOU ARE STANDING ON GIVES OUT.
YOU FALL FAR, PAST WHAT SEEMS TO BE DOZENS OF RSS ENTRIES DESCRIBING HOW FISH WENT MISSING. PORTIONS OF COMMUNITY COMMENTS BEMOANING THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF FISH, AND SOME SPECULATION AS TO WHERE THE FISH WENT…ALL ZOOM BY. YOU FINALLY HIT THE GROUND. THE FLOOR IS STABLE HERE, UNFORTUNATELY IT’S JUST AS DARK. YOU CAN BARELY SEE ANYTHING.
YOU DID LEARN A LOT FROM THE FALL: FISH WAS ONCE LOVED. ONE DAY FISH DISAPPEARED AND NOBODY KNOWS WHERE IT WENT. THERE ARE SPECULATIONS THAT YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO FIND FISH IF YOU LOOK IN THE RIGHT PLACES…TRACES OF WHERE FISH MAY HAVE GONE HOVER AHEAD, IN THE DARKEST PART OF THE FEED. IT’S FEARFULLY DARK THERE. IT SEEMS VERY UNSAFE.
There are also dozens of strange Apache error pages and HTML fake outs. I couldn’t help but feel that browsers have crippled Nathalie tho - what if she had the full palette of crazy popup windows and window resizing tricks of the past??
THE ‘GO BACK…’ LINK FALLS TO THE FLOOR. IT WILL SERVE AS A FINE MORSEL FOR THE VIRTUAL VERMIN. SUCH IS THE BITTER SWEET LIFECYCLE OF A WEBSITE.
Related: an actual Mackerel Media Digital
Marketing. 
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Glorious sticker art and pixel recreations of real estate listings - by Bianca Hockensmith.
Discovered this site today on the Fraidycat Funtime stream[1]. I was looking through special.fish and found Bianca. In a way, this sticker art (the ‘past.present.with.stickers’ collection) feels extremely covid-19 to me, because it’s like a layer removed from reality. Actually it reminds me of kids putting stickers on a glass door - or yeah kids also do it with sticky semitranslucent slime-type shapes - and so it transforms these outdoor images into indoor images. A pleasantly trapped sensation - do you know what I mean?
The meandering essays on pop culture and animal observations - they feel reminiscent of Unimaginable Heights, such as this one on ‘yellow shows’:
There are some TV Shows that I consider to be yellow shows. Yellow shows aren’t necessarily yellow in color but they are definitely yellow in feeling and spirit. For example, Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a yellow show. Actually most shows that star Melissa Joan Hart are yellow shows even though she really doesn’t seem like an overly yellow person.
Yellow shows are all very mindless and watchable. They are upbeat, use non-funny humor, and are non-offensive.
The expression ‘non-funny humor’ is for keeps.
She goes on to explain how ‘yellow’ television could be generated by neural networks.
The hosts don’t always have to be human either. The host can be generated according to what the viewer finds the most soothing or most horrible. For example, I would choose a house cat to host a show like House Hunters. I could choose the location of the hunt which could be based on an actual place or an invented environment. If I want to look at homes near the fracking trash water in Denton, TX, hosted by Donna Dresch, I can submit that info into the program. Because the results would be so terrifying, I’m beginning to think that these wouldn’t necessarily be yellow shows. More like yellow with red stripes shows. Forget everything I’ve ever said.
This is amazing! I could have myself be the host as well as the guests. Me helping me build a condo in the Dakota plains. I would have to be patient with myself through that arduous fireplace selection phase. And Sherlock could show up and the character Deuces from the book Clone Codes.
There is also a page of Microsoft Excel art. She also offers to send an mp3 to anyone who emails her. Seems like a great way to stock up on free mp3s.
In a way, this site feels like an ad-hoc wiki. I like the concept. Throw HTML files in some frames and you can just begin to build a collection from there. (Although the frames are divs - you could do this whole site as a single page. I like that it is PHP, however - which stirs up fond feelings of the late 2000s.)
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Four day livestream after a cancelled Australian tour - just a sample of the best of making-the-best-of out there.
This artist has not been on my radar much, so you can thank AngleseaTwo for this rec. It’s pretty crazy to see so much of the doom and cynicism about the Internet come to a reversal during a time when we’re reliant on it so much. Of course, one can blame the Internet for the hysteria and stupidity as well, hey it’s all on here. But a livestream like this is a great thing to plug your ears into to get some good vibes. Turn off the damned politicians and flashing maps for a spell.
Also love that he takes calls.
Where I’m at the world pivoted extremely fast on Thursday. Now is an extremely good time to keep blogging and record your memories of the day-by-day. I’m digging into my neighborhood right now, but hope to be around a bit more to pass links and keep the lights on in our corner of the Web. I am in love with the crowd here - all you that I’ve had a chance to meet and hypertext with. Worried about you, of course. But I have no lack of confidence at the moment that you’ll come out of this stronger than before.
Along the lines of Marc’s livestream, I’ve noticed some other links to cancelled live tours/festivals that are importing on to the Web:
Social Distancing Festival: this is a directory of actors, dancers, artists of any kind who are doing upcoming livestreams along the lines of the above. I feel some disgust at having to drop the term ‘social distancing’ - ain’t nothing social about it - but it’s turning into a solid directory. Would like to see more niche styles do this.
#sunshinesongs on Instagram. High school kids are posting their home recordings of songs they got down for now-cancelled musical productions. I personally enjoy watching amateur musicals on YouTube, love this stuff.
/r/togetherathome, a subreddit collecting these kind of events.
I also think it’s interesting that Mo Willems is doing a daily doodle stream for kids, but I just think it fails because it doesn’t take calls. It would be cool for kids to hear from each other and get a chance to talk in all of this.
I’m using the homejazz sub on Indieweb.xyz to catalog what I can find.
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Seems the world has slept on this blog - which covers experimental shit, strange genres. Nice way to branch out.
When I first discovered this link, it seemed that the music became more and more unlistenable as I scrolled down the page. Now that I’ve had time to listen to CTEBCM further, there is actually quite a bit of tame music here that is just strangely genred. Such as ‘the loser’, a solo opera based on the wonderful Thomas Bernhard novel of the same name which feels reminiscent of the meandering ‘Shia LeBeouf’ storysong. Or the sometimes-metal, sometimes-harpsichord of Spine Reader’s ‘Recorded Instruments’.
But there’s ‘Experiments in Bluetooth Technology’ by Car Made of Glass. Call it music?
Can’t say how much of this will stick, but what a ballpit of music to jump into!
Also, hey, hold up - a few interesting vaporwave discoveries while you’re here:
死体’s public broadcasting: This is just my kind of thing. Like ancient transmissions crossing. The tape on DMT is really good too.
A series of videos by andrewarson on /r/vaporwave: CTRL+DEL, BUY STOCKS, INFINITE GROWTH, BUY ANYTHING BUY TODAY.
Passion of the Weiss: Just a great music blog. I’ve been following this for almost a year and I think this is href.cool material.
Sick & Panic: I’m all in on Macintosh Plus’ next wave.
Wish I had time to do everything in the world. But maybe it doesn’t matter. I’d still just spend all the time walking these same dank corners of the hypertext kingdom…
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Yes, I’m with you - the food fight vid really was the one for me. My sisters do a food fight every six years and this gave me ideas for the next one. Including playing “Yummy”. Last time it was only harpsichord music playing.
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A trail of poignancy by @vinhtruong3 winding around Japan, from Sweden to Iran.
Just a cool list that I saw by way of Toby Shorin. The mood here recalls Sibylle Baier’s “Colour Green”. Not sure the advantage to using Arena over a YouTube playlist. I was hoping for some commentary on the songs perhaps. I absolutely love the Andrei Petrov song here “Dance of Recallings”. It’s from a soundtrack and the film sounds great as well.[1]
Some of these songs are quite popular, but don’t think I’d heard any of them before. Expect harps and harpsichord. The rest of the Masahiko Satoh album is here. (Don’t know if I should be doing this - just trying to live up to the LEECHING side of things around here.)
See, this is another great example of what a directory can do. This is just a link list for tracks. But it pokes holes in my world and lets all this other stuff leak in that I was oblivious to.
Recalls to mind Rebecca Blood:
Even the man who turns first to the Sports section of the paper version of his hometown newspaper is exposed, however briefly, to the front news page; and an interesting headline in the Living section may catch his eye when he puts down the rest of the paper.
p. 12, The Weblog Handbook (2002)
Recommendation engines are likely too fixated on salience - how do they possibly widen their view and attempt to bring in material with such a low signal (in terms of broadcast strength) as to be indistinguishable from spam? Making playlists like this is the vital work we must continue to do.
Another quick quote, sorry to ramble.
As children get older, they yearn to understand what lies beyond the apparent; they want to know about what they can see in front of them but also what they cannot see.
— p. 6, “Children’s Need to Know”, Susan Engel
I think this description of curiosity nails it. The playlist of unknown videos is another version of seeing what I cannot see. I see people there that hadn’t existed ever before for me.[2]
I love Russian film from the 70’s and 80’s. Recently watched the miniseries for The Idiot from that era. Please feel free to recommend any. ↩︎
Sorry, I keep going. Look. I really appreciate Kurt Cobain for using his fame to spread around new knowledge of unknowns - like he was a big part of Os Mutantes becoming known in the U.S. - he did some hole-poking here and there. Unlike Paul Simon was very tight-lipped about his South African influences like Tau Ea Lesotho and Mahotella Queens. ↩︎
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Sick bar code and TV licks from @crab_feet
Wow, am I late to this party. Ei Wada has been making music since at least 1998, much of it on TV tubes and magnetic tape. And still posting mind-blowing bar code freeform on Twitter at @crab_feet in the now. (Like this one - wait till you see what the shirts are for…)
The handle comes from an early piece called ‘Crab Feet Man’. Some of my fave vids I’ve run across:
I love Ei Wada’s infectious and playful way. Please post any other sweet vids you find - searching ‘electronicos fantasticos’ and ‘open reel ensemble’ can reveal others.
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‘During a downpour that drummed on the roof, as the mosquitoes became such a nuisance that both had coated themselves in a thick layer of coconut oil and lit several coir fires, and when a certain hopelessness in the situation became apparent, Engelhardt had swept the white chess figures off the board with a surly wipe of the hand. Knight and rook had landed, like wooden grenades, in the sand beside a millipede, which, sorely disturbed in its consumption of the leaf that was its supper, crept off sullenly in the rain.’
— p. 134, Imperium by Christian Kracht
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These GIFs seem pretty haunted to me. Pretty much the opposite of ‘cinemagraphs’.
Don’t know that I’ve seen many GIFs using collage, paint and such in this way. (Also, I guess they are part of this mini-site—at cargo.site, which is a very interesting directory of artists. I’m finding some good things there!)
Anna also has a channel of short films on YouTube. Discovered her on Warren Ellis’ list of feeds (the “Blog Diet”.)
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The lost Tim Hill and Joel Cohen commentary track at last.
This year there has been some renewed interest in the Garfield films, as that link went around again, the one that reveals how Bill Murray became involved: because he thought the director was one of the Coen Bros. Of course, the story is far from over, especially now that I’ve discovered that this unreleased audio commentary from the sequel was uploaded to the Internet Archive one year ago!
You can place this next to Wizard People, Dear Reader in your private collection.
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Vaporwave legend @vektroid digs the football theme crates for synth tracks.
Ten years ago, a link like this would be ripping up the link and music blogs - and perhaps the blog blogs, too!! Vektroid has dropped this playlist, named I DON’T SUPPORT THE NFL BUT DAMN THESE ARE SOME HOT FOOTBALL JAMS: A MIXTAPE. Indeed, have to say - the jams are quite hot.
Hard to not mention Shufflin’ Crew here. I still have my 7".
While searching around for more info on NFL jams, I also stumbled across this strange album: ADHD NFL BLITZ. This reminds me of Picky Picnic or some kind of kid’s cassette. See also: フロフットホールリーク フリッツ.
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‘Two months after Sir John and I were married we travelled to Cambridge to seek a cure for Sir John’s melancholie from Dr Richard Blackswan, a very famose Physician. We took with us a little cristall flask that had some of Sir John’s water in it. Dr Blackswann went into a little closet behind a curtain of blacke velvet and prayed upon his knees. The Angell Raphael then appearing in the closet (as commonly happens when ever this doctor prays) peer’d into Sir John’s urine. Dr Blackswann told us that the Angell Raphael knew straightway from the colour of it (reddish as if there waz bloude in it) that the cause of Sir John’s extreame Want of Spirits was a lack of Learned Conversation.’
— p. 41, The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke
(And, yeah, I am pumped for Piranesi.)
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Devine Lu Linvega’s completed series on the b&w dithered world.
I’ve been seeing a lot of monochrome lately—like what’s at peterburr.org, the killer layout at SILO or the coming World of Horror—so, as a shout to all that high-contrast dither, I commend to you the tales of Neauismetica. This is more than your normal ‘inktober’ project. I’ve linked to the XXIIVV directory before—it’s an incredible hypertext project, connecting artifacts like the Lietal language and the conceptualization of time as Horaire.[1]
Perhaps you’ve seen Rekka & Devine’s work before in games like Hiversaires and Oquonie. This crew has done more for black and white than anyone on Earth.
Oh and I would be remiss to not also point out Sphygmus’ XXIIVV page which is a kind of casual tour—and a definitive tally of the productivity time trackers encountered! Somehow XXIIVV seems at the crossroads between austere, machine-like efficiency and stark punk creativity. I’m an outsider, so this is just an impression.
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On the leeching front: vaporwave act ‘haircuts for men’ released a bunch of random CD-Rs that people have been gathering here: drive.google.com. It’s nice that Saint Pepsi is back, too.
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Taking of an antimisanthropic pill that ends all pilltaking.
Basically, you listen to enough Neil C that you start to actually like and appreciate Smash Mouth. The significance of System of a Down also becomes quite apparent to you. You realize that, somehow, you possibly like everything (e.g. everyone) in some fashion.
Once in this intense pro-human mindset, it becomes very hard to take other ‘pills’ which only promise make you feel superior to other people—which would ultimately threaten your enjoyment of Smash Mouth.
Thus, the pills are smashed.
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Found cassette clips as a podcast.
Along the lines of WFMU’s Audio Kitchen—and definitely belonging in href.cool’s Tapes/Field collection, this podcast collects a myriad of found audio samples from cassettes and some personal recordings—such as his friend Danny’s voicemails from his dad or random people reading their grocery lists.
Found this on The Listener newsletter. A great example of human curation and recommendation. Follows the same kind of format as Warp Door—some light metadata and a paragraph review. If I were to give one recommendation to fighting the corpypastas, it’s this: start a newsletter or a blog where you do this. Just leave paragraph reviews of interesting obscure things you come across. Great way to abdicate from mainstream culture and corps of all kind.
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@kicks That’s a lovely passage. Hadn’t ever thought of benevolent vs. ferocious irony, but now I can’t stop thinking about it. Thank you for sharing.
I definitely like both kinds of irony—and perhaps there are both kinds of sincerity, too, of course. I like the quote and the whole book wrapped around it.
Your description of your cat today is fantastic. I’ve dealt with a lot of emotional pain in recent years (due to the deaths of many family members and children in my life) and nothing helps more than physical closeness like this—a ‘hug’ or holding the hand of the 86-year-old woman who lives across from me. But also laughter—if someone can make me laugh, it will reset everything. Having a ‘first responder’ who is light-hearted is great. I’m grateful that simple things can do good work confronting dark, heavy terrors.
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‘I like a kind of irony I call benevolent, compassionate, like what we find, for example, in the best of Cervantes. I don’t like ferocious irony but rather the kind that vacillates between disappointment and hope. Okay?’
— p. 5, Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas
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A vaporwave OS-for-pretendsies tears up Product Hunt—what does it mean??
I’m probably not introducing you to this link—because it’s been around the block for the last week. However, it’s a bull’s-eye for me—it lands in almost every collection I keep—from OS façades (such as whimsy.space and eeerik.com) to endless home video playlists (such as astronaut.io and defaultfile.name).
Yeah, but this isn’t an obscure site like so many of those. It launched on (remove glasses, rub eyes with fists) Product Hunt (this is v2, the first launched in 2014.), a watering hole for e-mail newsletter and blockchain startups. There seems to be no troll in the statement on the ‘about’ popup:
Want to collaborate or build something like Poolside FM for your company? We’re probably down to make that happen.
Reach out with your wildest dreams.
This idea of companies jumping on the bandwagon to fill the Internet with absurd anachronistic Windows 95 desktops is truly a grand vision—I’ll toast to that.
The reaction of publications covering Poolside FM is what I’m really enjoying. On It’s Nice That—a design magazine—Lucy Bourton writes:
There are of course, considering this is a project of pure fun and joy, a few smile-inducing tweaks in the website’s design too with a unique colour palette (customisable backgrounds are a must-try), martini glasses instead of close buttons and an ASCII art boot screen. It even involves its growing community with a guestbook for users to comment on and a shop with merchandise too.
It even has a ‘guestbook’! For the users!
From The Verge:
Bell’s site even incorporates a guestbook on its site, like old-school webpages, which creates a feeling of community.
Has everyone gone back to 1985? This is getting infectious!
Poolside.FM has about 32,000 followers on Instagram, and Bell says that the site has 4,000 monthly listeners. He wants to grow that number this year and continue building up the community. Part of that is welcoming new listeners, but he also wants to encourage other artists and musicians to submit their tracks. It’s a collaborative process.
I only hope that one day we’ll have the technology for you out there—my own unique clan of snakeskin-clad hypertexting sunbathers—to load up Kicks Condor’s Russian Sci-Fi and Iranian Cinema Blog.avi straight from Poolside FM! See you then.
See also: foreignrap, somehow related.
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‘He often invited her parents to stay, as though by studying them he might decipher the mystery of their daughter. They would come to the island, where the ancestral home still remained, and would stay for weeks at a time. Never had he met people of such extraordinary blandness, such featurelessness: however much he exhausted himself with trying to stimulate them, they were as unresponsive as a pair of armchairs. In the end he became very fond of them, as one can become fond of armchairs…’
— p. 20, Outline by Rachel Cusk
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Seems artistically (even rationally) sound to me. It’s like an “editor” type software with a thin veneer over a massive infestation of easter eggs. Everyone that I’ve shown this to has marvelled. The bland UI of Google Docs or Adobe Photoshop has nothing on this.
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glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.
jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.
maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.
hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.
yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.
surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).
fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.
constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy
indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.
nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.
true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.
chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.
neil c. "some..."
the world or cate le bon you pick.
all my other links are now at href.cool.
Reply:
Love that album soooo much. It’s a classic! Looking forward to everything else you do.