Against Sarcasm

Or: unfinished thoughts.
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So apparently I have a reputation for being sarcastic. I have what, if I were an 11-year-old, would be called "a mouth on me." This is troubling.

The thing is that sarcasm renders a fellow unable to communicate. Well, certainly unable to communicate sincerely. "That's a nice dress" gets retorted with "Bug off, jerkface." Which, you know, if you really do go around being sarcastic about the way people dress you probably should be told to bug off.

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I've been looking for a real analysis of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel since I read it at the behest of my older brother a few years back. And boy it's hard to come by. Here's a survey of thoughts on the book. 

I gather that the political agendas of some academic departments are not served by GG&S. But the book is clearly (at least to me) written from a geographical viewpoint which discounts things like climate change and the possibility that different cultures might evolve differently even given the same resources. 

For me the big question has always been China. WTF China? Why were you guys all up on gunpowder, printing, and inventing pizza* a thousand years ago and then you came to a halt. Diamond spends very little time on this issue but the short version of his argument is that China became a single nation where Europe did not. So hierarchical decisions could be made by the Chinese government which would eradicate diversity of (say) exploration. The example he used was the... oh just read it.

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You know, if I didn't enjoy eating so much I'd lose weight.

*The "pizza" thing is, I believe, an urban myth.

ASCII Cat Day

Today is ASCII cat day.

    (\__/)
    (='.'=)

    Zzzzz  |\      _,,,--,,_        +-----------------------------+
           /,`.-'`'   ._  \-;;,_    | Why is there always a cat   |
          |,4-  ) )_   .;.(  `'-'   | on whatever you're editing? |
         '---''(_/._)-'(_\_) 

Here's my niece on Machu Picchu:

This needs to be an ASCII avatar but I can't find the ASCII version of it:

Painted Skin

OK. I'm digging this:
 
Painted Skin 2. It's actually coming out in US theaters on August 17. And if you live in New York, LA, or San Francisco you'll be allowed to see it.

I mean leastwise before it comes out on video.

Poof

So a thing I like about Pamplamoose is how the kick drum sounds like a real kick. Or at least on this song it does. I kind of appreciate that orchestral/band bass drum sound. The trick is of course to get that sort of sound to work without the entire mix sounding like mud.

To Be or Otherwise

Friends of mine moved to Portland Oregon recently. And I'll tell you the truth, it looks like heaven.
I've done quite a bit of thinking about why I'm in New York City. It's expensive. It's noisy. It's expensive. It's dirty. It's expensive.
And many of the people we work with are from all over the world: Birmingham UK, Birmingham AL, The Netherlands, Seattle, Los Angeles, Melbourne. As far as those people are concerned it just doesn't matter where we are. We could move to some pleasure palace outside of Sedona, AZ or Ashville, NC, or even Portland OR.
The biggest problem is finding actors in those places. And yes, I'm including Los Angeles. And other than LA, all those places are easier to shoot in -- people are actually happy to have you come and shoot in their bar or drug store, etc. -- but you have to import your actors.

Also we really do need to have people come into our office and do ADR and edit and suchlike. That is really helpful.
So every once in a while I do a long hard think about what we're doing and where we should be. And each time I come to the conclusion that we should be where we are doing what we do. There's a lot of things which would be easier to do in (say) Bedford Pennsylvania, but for us right now this is the place to be.
Via.

Foiled

I've been obsessed with Foyle's War. Or, possibly, "addicted".
I'm sort of lucky with my addictions in that rather than a downward spiral to hit bottom I just have to see every freakin' episode and then I'm fine. It's like if there were, say, six seasons of cocaine, and some set number of episodes of cocaine in each season. All I have to do is snort every episode of every season until I get to the end. And as long as they don't make new episodes of cocaine my analogy is completely absurd and I'm just going to stop.
The New York Times asks Is Algebra Necessary?
I have this bad feeling that the reason math is so daunting to most people is because of an internecine argument between theoretical and applied mathematicians. If you're a theoretical mathematician and this turns out to be true, you better calculate how much I'm going to smack you. Oh, you say that would be applied mathematics, don't you? You'll still get smacked.

Peregrin

Childhood friend (whose birthday is today) Ed McNamee has finished Peregrin the Aeronaut, a beautifully illustrated (by Delfino) book.

It's also a musical.

Mentant Patches

How to get "save as" back as a menu item in Apple's simply wonderful OS update (could you feel the sarcasm there? I can't tell.)

Cinefex is available for the iPad. Comically, I don't actually own an iPad but my parents each have one.
Scott Frizzle has some nice (and free!) plugins and scripts for AfterEffects. Like Quaker and Novaticular.

Kris Fremen writes a review on his blog of our movie Battle NY: Day 2.
He has an awesome name, like somebody out of Dune.
Anyway, his opinion of the picture is in almost direct opposition to mine. I mean it's like the 180degree polarity-swap of opinions. The parts he liked (the opening) are, to me, the weakest parts of the movie. I just hate the opening and if I could do it again I would probably just jump off a cliff. Yes, I dislike it that much.
The acting, however, I thought was very good. And I thought the big whirleydoomers worked great and looked very photoreal.
And oh. Look. He sub-heads his blog with "A mentant's ramblings" so... maybe the Dune reference was there all along.

I'm looking at jackets. The Clique Ladies jacket. There's these embroiderable windbreakers. I also dig the notion of lapel pins, or maybe just get some patches and get them sewn onto whatever we want.

Flutes, Switches, Rock Quartets

Do you like to get into fights with flute players? Flute players are a surly, mean, vicious bunch who will straight up knock you out for lookin' at them funny. But if you want to get into a bar brawl with them, tell 'em that it doesn't matter whether they have a full silver, 24-carat gold, or even just a silver-coated flute.
Wipe the blood off your bar stool and come on down for the fun.
I've found exactly one sound library in the world which purports to having a bowed tailpiece sound. One. It's the Symphonic Strings library by Sonivox. It's a thousand bucks. I'm not going to pay a thousand bucks.
What I want is a good violinist to come in and record some sound effects for thirty minutes. Sigh.
Railhammer guitar pickups. I'm perfectly happy with my pickups as they are, I just thought these were interesting.

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At the rehearsal studio the other night I played a Mesa-Boogie head with a whole bunch of channels. The channels couldn't switch though because there wasn't a footswitch. So for most of the night I just  used the "hot" setting but with the gain turned down.
And then I discovered that if I set my bridge pickup to be louder than the neck pickup I could switch between a more overdriven sound and a cleaner sound just by switching the pickup switch on my Les Paul.
Now. I realize that most guitar players would have figured that one out about 25 years earlier than I did. But I'm not like most guitar players. I'm much, much worse.
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Noteflight is the program I use most of the time I write something out for Tyrannosaurus Mouse. Although I've mostly given up on writing stuff out for TMouse because nobody really wants to read it. Writing out music for a rock band might have its merits but the problem is that our notation system just isn't that great for a rock quartet (and even worse for a rock trio). So I mostly use the program to make "notes" for myself so I remember what I wrote.
Steering away from getting a high-end notation program like Sibelius or suchly, there's MuseScore -- open-source and free. I don't really know that I need something more sophisticated than Noteflight though as I'm primarily just making what we used to call "lead-sheets" (are they still called that? Were they ever called that?)
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Robots, Clocks, Socks, and Filters

Fast and Furious... but with robots. OMG I want to make this movie so bad...
The big, big news for me is that I got this new clock.

Beautiful, ain't it?

I know you're jealous. You wish you could buy a clock like this for eight bucks too.
In further exciting news, I wish I had softer socks. Swiftwick socks maybe? I honestly cannot figure out their product line to save my life. The fact that they have multiple types of socks and I can't differentiate between them has made it so I didn't buy any.
Has the amount of spam in your spam filter gone nuts today? It has for me.

Goings On in the Machine

I have no good way of determining where we are in post-production. The thing is that we can have 8 out of 10 acts almost locked, but until they're actually locked we can't really see how close we are. We have to be finished in three weeks with Prometheus Trap so it's really quite exciting.

Now that we have our new logo I have to figure out what to do with it. Ha! No really. Here's the black-and-white version of the logo.

And this is a color version of it.
I don't understand Adobe Illustrator, the format, or even the open-source versions of Illustrator. I just don't get it.
We also want to get jackets. Much discussion has gone into what kind of jacket to get. To tell the truth, I've been so freakin' hot for so long now that I can't fathom it being cool enough to wear a jacket. Maybe come Autumn it'll be cool enough to think about it.
I'm rendering out some visual effects as "quickies" or, at least, not quite as "finished" as they ought to be. The advantage to this is that we're able to edit them in and then figure out what they need to do in order to be better. Better is better.
And I have to score the movie too. I'm er... working on that. I wish I just happened to be a virtuoso violin player.

Bowed Tailpiece

Of the many things I have to do this month, feel free to include scoring our new movie Prometheus Trap. Basically the sound we're going for here is Penderecki c.1962.
One of the sounds I'm looking for is the sound of a violin's tailpiece being bowed.

As far as I can tell, exactly one sound library has any "bowed tailpiece" sounds and that's the Sonivox String Collection. But that's a thousand dollars. And actually it just has cello and bass bowed tailpiece sounds although that's probably OK.
The other option I thought of was to get a cheap student violin and bow the bridge myself. Problem is I'm not a violin player and I bet the resonance on a student violin actually does suck to a degree which makes every sound (including "effects" sounds) from the violin just sorta stink.
There's another library called "Violence" (get it?) which has a bunch of violin effects but I don't know if that will do for me what I desire.

Roscoe Sees Self

Roscoe is one of two cats staying in my apartment for a couple days. I believe Roscoe has already done a sweep of things up in high places and made sure they're earthquake-proof by smacking everything not locked down onto the floor.

Notice convenient bell-ringer on back of animal.

Roscoe decided to stare into the mirror. He's sitting on the "Pandora's box".

Roscomatique

Here I am with a cat named Roscoe. Moments before Roscoe had been placidly in my arms. Just as the picture was snapped, Roscoe decided to be everywhere. This is me avoiding the pointy parts of the otherwise very soft and loving little kitty.