A little like this blog. Well-loved but mostly forgotten.
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Resolved: More Pictures, Less Whining
I wrote kind of a long post. It was about how great Flickr used to be, and lots other internet nostalgia — Consumating, Upcoming, stuff that just isn’t like it used to be. It made me sound like an old fogey. Feel like an old fogey. And really, all I wanted to say was that Upload all to-be-uploaded Flickr photos was on my 2012 New Year’s resolutions. I also included a half-apology about posting a New Year’s resolution in February. All in all, fairly self-passive-aggressive.
So instead I wrote this. It’s about how I think it will be good to just have all my photo backlog uploaded safe, public, and forever. How I can use my DSLR again without such a burden of responsibility. It’s about getting my life a little more sorted. And not being such a nostalgia freak, even when the territory get pretty darn nostalgic. Short and sweet.
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Wishlist 2011
Alright, yes, I know I’m a little late. I know that I’m so late that there’s probably no chance of getting something on this list because there’s not enough time to have it shipped from Siberia. But oh well. I’ll list them anyway, and if I get one thing listed I’ll be surprised and pleased. Just like a real Christmas!
General
I like small musical instruments, unusual hats (size x-large or large), interesting vinyl records from the 50s and 60s, any sort of animal artwork, toy dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures), and cool sunglasses.
Specific
Khomus (Jew’s Harp)
Why do I want one of these? They go ‘boing boing boyoyoy-wee-ooo-yoing’. I love tiny fun instruments in general. Awhile ago I got a Schylling brand Jew’s Harp and it didn’t work. At all. Sadface.
One made near the Altai mountains would be awesome. In the words of an ethnologist “the Altai region has perfected this ideophone as far as is humanly possible”. One from anywhere in Siberia would be ok, too. But location isn’t that important; just thought I’d mention.
A real cordless drill
Look at this one. It has a real battery, different speeds, you don’t need a chuck to tighten it, and there’s a neat little flashlight that comes on when you use it. This isn’t pictured, but it also clicks into place when it’s tightened enough.
Just like Pete Goldie’s.
Feather comforter, brown (or other non-white color), size: Queen
We’ve needed a new one for awhile. At this point, our ratty old comforter has more material outside than it does inside. We’ve determined that having bed linens in white is the fastest way to get them stained, which is why non-white.
Just a Microphone Stand
We do a radio show. Sometimes we record from home, but it’s really difficult because we don’t have one of these. Simpler would be better. Not too heavy. Just, you know, a mic stand.
An Orange Public M8 from Public Bicycles
Yeah, let’s be serious, I don’t really expect anyone to get me a $1000 bicycle. But my old bike is a P.O.S. and borrowing my mom’s Huffy is getting old.
I like the Mixte frame of this, and I appreciate the number of gears. I really appreciate that it’s advertised as “suitable for all cities, even for the hills of San Francisco.” And, of course… I love the color.
Not to say that if there were a similar one on sale in a different color that I’d be at all disappointed.
A Pair of Socks with Sharks on them that are Eating my Feet
Thanks Lauren!
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Glot Theme #4 “Glot-o-matic” Unshelved
Well, hm. This is sort of embarrassing. Did any of you read that post I made back in November, about my upcoming website redesign? I was so excited. So eager. So naïve.
So… it’s been awhile since then. Most elements of my design were actually implemented; others were forgotten as life went on (as it tends to). So I’ve decided that good enough is good enough — as usual. I seem to be growing more practical and less apologetic in my old age. At least as far as apologizing for personal web designs done in my free time as a hobby, skill-building exercise, and meditation on imperfectness.
Anyways. This is the New Stuff:
- GLOT letters at the top are dynamic div areas (pure pixels!), style-able with CSS
- author portrait with color-changing vertical stripes behind it
- post titles used the 04_19 font; now they use Grixel Extended
- tags attached to a post now have the same color and have a mini-tag next to them on hover
- “about me” spiel is revealed on portrait hover
- recent comments appear in the sidebar (in pixelated form)
- Tumblr quotes, delicious links, Last.fm songs in the sidebar
- my WeHeartIt images used as filler in the sidebar
- number of comments shown in a comment bubble
- posts outside of the default category (Wordglot) are now specially featured on the front page
- Flickr photos show up below the main column on the front page
- ditto for Twitter tweets, too
- Creative Commons license and contact link shown prominently in the footer
- post pages now have a more interesting mono-color scheme
- possibility to set a featured image as background for a post
- the “not found” page is really cool — try it!
And this is the Broken Stuff:
- spacing is off in lots of places
- colors can combine in near-unreadable contrast
- the tags page… is bad
- vigorous testing was not vigorous
- I haven’t even checked it in Internet Explorer. Really. That’s how much fuck IE.
- comments have no pictures and are a gray box
- no, seriously — there’s not even a place to comment at all yet
Comment below and let me know what you think!
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Folkstep-a-go-go
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I don’t understand Folkstep. I don’t think you do either — which is why it’s awesome!
Allow me to describe Folkstep as what happens when deeply-rooted traditional ethnic music styles get combined with a modern wobbly, bigass-bass dubstep sensibility.. If that sounds good to you, it sounded even better to me! So I combed through 28 pages of Soundcloud search results for ‘folkstep’ to find zebest tunes. We featured it during the first section of a Radio Unpronounceable show. That part proved to be, so I gather, the most popular portion. So give the people what they want… a mixtape!
- La Cherga – Rembetiko (Shazalakazoo remix)
- Analogik – Ali
- Bingoriot – Dub Circus
- Bigote – La Cumbia Etiope Addis Ababa
- Binary Cumbia Orchestra – Gigante
- Fleck & Fish Finger – Rude Profile
- Balkan Beat Box – Move it (Shazalakazoo Remix)
- Henry Louis – The Imagined Village – Cold Hailey Rainy Night (HL Folksteppa Mix)
- Binary Cumbia Orchestra – Ydyay
- Karaoke Tundra – Tebe Nema
- Shem – Only Human
- DJ Delay – ChChChachak
- Draxter feat. František Krištof Veselý – Já vodku rád pijem
- Havlicius – Kecskés
- Draxter – Fujara
- Shazalakazoo – Intifada
- Co-Captain – Den Flygande Bokrullen – Honga (Klezmerstep Remix)
- Cassicobra – Nanosanfona (Zabumbass rmx)
- Engine EarZ Experiment – Kaliyuga
- MiroSlave! – Taj Mahal (feat. Claes Blaes)
- Mashy P – Macadonian Wobble Remix
- Fussible (Nortec Collective) – The Clap (Tremor Mix)
- Village Kollektiv – Hardhoro
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Birthday/Christmas Wishlist 2010
- any shirt that looks like those pictured
- bow-ties, like real bow ties that you tie on, especially ones with patterns or polka-dots, are cool
- 2 terabyte hard drive for cheap received!
- a magical easily-obtainable driver’s license for wifefriend Lynae
- accordion (note: a very complicated choice that I’d really like to make myself… at some point in the future)
- this toy caveman is pretty awesome, and is all of $7 (for the thrifty present-giver)
Although… you know, as long as I’m mentioning it here, the toy manufacturer (Papo) makes a really great Plesiosaurus and Allosaurus, too. I have their Oviraptor and it’s top-notch. Consider it mentioned. - iPhone 4, for better or for worse, cf. “I must have the iPhone 4 […] I need the one with more gee-bees”
- iPhone-to-FM transmitter, car mount, case that can safely get run over by a car
- a new comforter — because apparently 5 years should have been considered a good run
- Better Internet – we’re considering a local Wireless ISP (WISP) named MonkeyBrains.net that requires an up-front investment for an antenna. We’re still deciding on this one, and it’s not glamorous, but an upgrade from 3M/b download to 30M/b for less per month is a heck of a win-win.
- The Secret Museum Of Mankind, Vol. 5 – you know how often I go for physical CD media, so this better be special. Indeed it is — I have the first 4 in the series, and they’re amazing, but for whatever reason this is missing from the Internet and thus my collection.Check out this 1939 track from South Africa, from the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa at the time, and the origin of the melody for “Lion Sleeps Tonight”:
[audio:Solomon Lindas Original Evening Birds – Mbube (South Africa).mp3]
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Upcoming GLOT-o-MATIC
Religiously, I tune and tweak. I intuit and poke. A new Glot design is in the works. I drew this a week ago:
There’s nothing wrong with it yet. It’s still in that wonderful stage where nothing is broken, per se, just not gotten-to yet. But why do it in the first place?
Well, it’s exquisite process of brain-development and creative excercise and human development. I set out to learn things sometimes, then I learn them. This time it was CSS3 and HTML5 and some Javascript. Hopefully, maybe, possibly, that pays off some day.
Very little is started, but one interesting thing I’m adding is more pictures. Below is an image from my WeHeartIt feed, which will automatically be displayed in the sidebar (just like this!) :
Nifty, huh? Back to work.
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Insert Title
You know how I salute people sometimes? I do it because it’s as an easy, well-understood respect gesture. It’s simple and effective. I’ve been doing it for years, ever since my ill-fated job as a door-to-door salesman in Australia. Well, Australia is different from either Bulgaria or Serbia where people are rather distrustful of the military. So when I was there this September my saluting trick didn’t work so well, but I kept doing it. Out of habit.
But I have other bad habits. One of them is putting a lot of work into an interesting creative project for a month and then forgetting about it. But that’s more of a personality flaw and not the message I’m here to get across.
Similar to my habit of saluting even when I know it’s stupid, I call people sir and ma’am. Why? Because it’s formal and therefore I can subvert it. See, cause I don’t have a real job in business or customer service, or something. So it’s ironic when I say it informally… right? Unfortunately, it’s also stupid.
Which is why when I was working the door at Bad Movie Night on Sunday and used ma’am, I was informed by an annoyed and emphatic miss that it should only be used for married women. Sorry, miss, and semantic distinction acknowledged. So with the next chance I get to fix it I did — by using “sir” instead. This also happened to be rather stupid because the next person was female, which, you know, I knew. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well either. Neither, I think, did my haphazard explanation of the problematic semantics behind “miss” and “ma’am.” Although happy to correct the error, I think next time I need to focus more on the apologizing and less on the confusing grammar. If the lady in question ever finds herself reading this, here it is more eloquently: I’m sorry to have klutzed my way into gender confusion; I can see how I might present myself like a clueless schmuck, and maybe I am, but either way I hope it won’t upset you in future. Sorry for the megillah and also for the Yiddish.
I could just change my habit to avoid gender-based titles entirely, and that’s what I’m considering. Seems perfectly sensible, all things considered. I just need something more fun than “the party of the second part.”
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An Inferior God
Story interpreted from a dream in three parts. Recovered/copied from where I originally wrote it, a wiki maintained for my own creative writing.
Suppose a technologically advanced alien civilization does somehow accidentally interferes in the development of another culture. They are forced by circumstance to rescue it from annihilation — a rogue individual sets himself up as a world dictator, or some such disaster, a disaster which could in fact be their fault. The damage is done and the worst happens: the aliens (or their agents) begin to be worshipped as gods. The culture’s development shifts focus to them instead of keeping any semblance of forward momentum. The mentality of a cargo cult sets in.
Then the only moral thing for those aliens to do would be breaking the culture of its dependency; the only way to do that is to further interfere. Very methodically they must instill the idea that god has limited resources, that [a] god isn’t omnipotent. To do so such that seems it’s been this way all along. Offerings to the gods might come in the form of donated energy. CCTV cameras are the way to watch over worshippers and guard holy places. The central idea is for the “contaminated” culture to indulge its obsession and work through it, to raise its collective self-esteem by doing as much for the gods as the gods have shown they can do for themselves. Outwardly it may appear as an oppressive and subjugated society, but the ultimate goal internally is to subvert the entire artificial structure.
The deals with a few things: how oppressive societies contain the seeds of their own destruction, but also how [human] nature inherently desires order, explanation, even its own subjugation. It also deals with the pace of enlightenment, in that the artificial boundaries are only crossed when an individual chooses to cross them. It contains the hope that, even with senseless repression, some good may come of it.
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Getting Married
Hear ye hear ye,
let it be know that Robert John La Londe-Berg is officially changing his name to Orin Robertjohn Zebest, that he is getting married to Lynae Ariadne Zebest, and that it’s happening tomorrow. It’s an ocassion which requires marking and here it is marked. Many readers will be coming, many will not, yet it’s worth thanking each and every one of you. Thanks, and wish me best for the future. It’s been a long time coming.