And sign of the times: I didn’t immediately check Twitter. And when I did look at Twitter no accounts I follow mentioned it, but several Fediverse accounts have.
Note: I’ve unfollowed many Twitter accounts since the last major quake.
I wore my old wetsuit today. It’s had more wear and tear than the one I got in January. But the zipper works better. It’s the same model, but the new one has this comedic attribute: in a big wave, or even a strong wave, the zipper tends to open from my neck down to my left leg like I was a character in Magic Mike. Luckily pretty soon I won’t have to wear a wetsuit in the water.
I bought the Downcast app on April 28, 2013 and ALWW has been in my subscription list since then. Like the rest in my list I refresh dutifully regularly. I always have hope. When a fresh episode showed up 9 years after the last one, frankly, I didn’t believe it. But it did. You ought to listen to A Life Well Wasted. I did.
October 18, 2016 6:30 – 9:30 PM
Visual Arts Facility, Performance Space
The UC San Diego Visual Arts Department, Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and Black Studies Project at UCSD are pleased to present a lecture by Greg Tate.
Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate’s influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate’s resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.
It bums me out a great deal that I didn’t take notes on this. I did post some things.
I can’t find that ink in the 2016 notebooks I have.
Bad archivist!
I did tweet though:
Though I did tweet:
UCSD Visiting Speaker Series: Greg Tate. (@ Performance Space in CA) https://t.co/LnyAG0u0E5
— Clarke Center for Human Imagination (@imagineUCSD) October 19, 2016
Tate got me turned onto things I’d not really considered before. Parliament Funkadelic for example. And Space is the Place by Sun Ra. And the fact that he name checked the then new #blacklivesmatter — “roaring sound in cyberspace” & the fact that he namechecked both William Gibson and William Burroughs put him squarely up my alley.
10 days ago a bird Kelly noticed a bird started hanging out on our balcony. Wednesday last @hellokellykuhl noticed it was a pair and they were building a nest in a disused pot and they’ve kept at it. Yesterday and overnight one of the pair was nesting continuously. This morning, Easter, here’s 2 mourning dove eggs. New life, indeed. Happy Easter!
Going to the beach as often as I do, I have subscriptions for both Magic Seaweed and Surfline. Looks like they’re going to combine.
How to get started with Surfline.
Magicseaweed has been a part of the Surfline family for over five years and now we’re coming together under the Surfline brand umbrella.
Learn more
What’s in it for you?
As magicseaweed moves over to Surfline, our tech and team are coming with us, so you can be confident that forecasts will still be spot-on. Plus, you’ll get all the features Surfline has pioneered over the past four decades.
You’ll have access to both platforms until we complete the changeover in the coming months.
Don’t worry, we won’t charge you for two memberships. Your remaining MSW subscription time will be added to your existing Surfline Premium account.
Your Surfline Premium membership will continue to auto-renew, after you use up your added subscription time. See below for more details.*
I make this bold statement following a read of Exploring Personal Websites. I of course have had a personal website since 1996 which is an astounding 27 years, so I’m biased.
I continue to feel queasy about how folks use Instagram handles to sign their art. I have a sense that these will age like MySpace profile handles and AOL Keywords, but who can say?
SDSU Backdoor—a venue that no longer exists—is where I first saw this band 35 years ago. I bought that ticket at Tower Records on Sports Arena Blvd. I bought tickets for last night’s show show 3 years ago. COVID delayed it again and again and again. It was worth the wait. They Might Be Giants. A favorite.
Nice bodysurfing session if a bit choppy. Plus I got to see a handful of the Velella Velella (aka By-the-Wind-Sailors). The biology of these things is amazing. They are each a “colony” that feeds on plankton. They live in all the planet’s oceans but I’ve never seen or heard of them before. It’s a treat to get to see a few up close.
A good rideable wave rolls in and starts to fold over and breaks gradually. The boys I went to high school with would draw an iconic perfect tubular wave curling over and breaking just like that forever. People who ride waves chase such waves. Today the waves were warped as though seen through a funhouse mirror. They started then stopped and then started again. Required improvisation to have fun with. And I did.
Take blogging itself. People don’t have blogs anymore, now they have email newsletters. People used to read blogs in their RSS Readers, and you would visit the website to leave a comment — or write your own blog post in reply, which would show up as a trackback link on the original. The “blogosphere” was truly a marvel of the distributed web; and, not coincidentally, it was run mostly on open source software.
Admittedly, some folks still blog. We even do it on the indieweb. I think the blogosphere still exists, it’s just that a giant megalopolis was developed around it.
I say often that computers are terrible. Nontechnical people seldom take me seriously. But people in tech, like Galloway do:
A growing vein of the tech community (Venture Catastrophists) deploy weapons of mass distraction and fear to wallpaper over an inconvenient truth: The menace unleashed on America the past two decades isn’t psychotic homeless people or a crime wave, but a tech community whose products depress our teens, polarize our public and render our discourse more coarse … making it less likely we come together and address issues including homelessness and crime. Our failure to regulate this sector, as we have done with every other sector, is stupid.
During one ride today I lost one of my handplanes. That ride was like going down a long steep snowy hillside on my back. Incredible speed. Thrilling. I got the handplane back at the ehd. A surfer brought it to shore. She said “I thought it would be easy to bring it in but it about killed me.” I thanked her.
New Bot Day! Welcome Roll Bot, a robot toy for toddlers 1-1/2+ years old. It’s an activity toy with no backstory by Canadian company Madison Joseph Battat Limited. I think it’s c.1985 but might be off.
New Bot Day! GC-09 Metal Robo 55 DynaRobo is a chogokin die-cast metal toy from 1983. This lovely and very special piece was a Christmas gift from Kelly. You will note I have a backlog on bots since moving in December. More bots ahoy!
I’m still working on some code to create an image (my ARTLUNG signature) on an ancient (40 year old) operating system emulator. TI Extended BASIC from the TI-99/4a computer. It’s a machine with less memory than your average jpeg.
I did remember it was pretty tedious. But rewarding! Well, the other day I was inspired to create a chunk of code (a bit of primitive jQuery, SCSS and HTML) that allows you to create that crazy hex code:
But what about the other code, what code went around it? Well, now I know. Here’s the resulting final image.
And what does the source code look like?
It’s in BASIC, and it’s all about printing characters to the string at individual cursor positions. To do that, one has to use ASCII codes. 32 is and always was the space character, so we don’t use that.
To determine how to customize those characters, I wrote some PHP code to read a source image I created of my ARTLUNG logo sized to the specifications of a TI-99: 32 columns wide, 24 columns high. So to create graphics one can only ever do a graphic that’s those numbers times 8 – every character is an 8×8 pixel square. So, 256 by 192 pixels. For reference the first iPhone 16 years ago was 480 by 320 pixels. And a current Android Pixel screen is 2400 by 1080 pixels. In some ways that 1981 screen is not so different.
It’s very strange when a programming task like this becomes a sort of compulsion to get out of my system. Solving challenging problems, even seemingly trivial ones is so rewarding.
Weekend mornings are sometimes eventful! Some great corners to ride. Once again @lifeguardsofsandiego always awesome hooking me up with the hot hot water and fine foot wrapping. Stingray encounter # 5 in the last 2 years i think. First time at OB.