Every hour.

Sometimes I avoid work by wondering what takes about 7 minutes there and back and has to be done every hour. By the time he’s locked his fine vehicle and made his way back up to his fine apartment, surely there’s only enough time for a quality cigarette and a snifter of brandy before it’s time to go get the car keys. Hell, can’t he use the phone?

Now you’ll be all eager to tell me something sensible like the man has to pick up the takings from a local bar every hour so that it’s safe from villains. So why not do what they do at most family restaurants and get a night safe? Maybe he has to put money back in the tills? It just seems too much trouble for something so banal.

More likely:

• He is the victim of a time loop and I am seeing the same journey every hour. That doesn’t explain Sundays, more on that in a moment.
• Every hour he has to type a code into an Apple 2 to stop an island from exploding. Hell, get the bouncer to do it.
• Has to turn over the C120 cassette that has the background music. Plausible.
• Extremely precisely timed domestic arguments.
• Something to do with MegaUpload.

I’m not opposed to this phenomena, because on Sundays something far worse happens. On that day Ferrari Neighbour (or somebody in his household – let blame not be ill assigned) takes out his favourite DVD: Bruce Springsteen Live Somewhere Or Other. And on the finest plasma display (I guess) and the highest quality surround speakers (I can hear) The Boss pumps his fist in the air for a multitude of proud Americans, bellowing all his hits and yelling DIDJA LIKE DAT? WUN TOO FREE FUH with 100 Percent Patriotic Fervor and a singalong.

Every. Fucking. Sunday. Loud. I mean PA loud.

WUN TOO FREE FUH!

I can’t be down on Ferrari Neighbour for playing the same piece of music over and over because most people seem to do that. On the other side of my house is The Bag Of Britons. You know the sort, come to Australia to get away from the dreary situation at home and then only ever talk to other Britons, usually about how Australia ‘just isn’t the same y’know?’

(Something which could easily be remedied y’know – two flights on BA every day back to mother country.)

The Bag have I think two CDs total in their collection, because there’s two possible programmes for each evening. God knows what they are called but I guess one is NOW THAT’S WOT I CALL MUSIC VOLUME 13 and the other is JIGGY BOOTY 18 INCHES. The former gets most of the play. I know it so well, having heard it some nights starting at 6pm and still rotating at about 3am. JIGGY BOOTY gets an airing when the wifey is off at the pub and has some bitchin’ gangsta action for the lads yo.

Some songs on WOT I CALL MUSIC are exceptionally deep and meaningful for the Bag and have to be played a few times until everyone tires of howling along including myself. These people are happy, they have good times, and they love music more than most people who chin scratch at sound art festivals so good on them. If it sounds like I am annoyed it’s only a little. I save that for Soggy The Sailor who seems to be having a ‘Enya at 3AM’ phase. Fuck him.

While I was writing this LinkedIn sent me FIVE MORE STUPID ARTICLES FOR THIS WEEK. Here’s the Chronic Of Higher ED with yet another whoa man the kids are using iPads article. Look, we’ve had quite a few of these thank you, and if anyone else claims that we have to move education onto FaceBook I’m going to double the bet and say NO let’s move onto SECOND LIFE. Remember when journalists treated Second Life like Twitter? I do. They pretend they don’t.

The cone of silence

Oh yeah and Apple released an AMAZING and MAGICAL APP that lets anyone make a textbook! It’s revolutionary! It is also a hack of the EPUB format, a simple case of embrace, expand and extinguish. Go and look at an ibook file on a PC. It’s just a zip, with modified EPUB components set up to add stuff that works on an iPad. Like all previous E.E.E. cases it does add quality; Microsoft’s changes to HTML added quality too …  similarly it locks you into the ecosystem of World #2 Multinational. And requires ‘upgrading’ to Lion which is otherwise a complete pain in the arse.

It sickens me that so many ‘technology writers’ haven’t stated the obvious: you could have already written a textbook that could be read on any device, could have done it for years running, nothing has changed. If you really really had to have movies and 3D spinning then there’s been Acrobat, which is really the whole point of this charade – to attack the success of Adobe Editi0ns in textbook distribution.

But I notice that these journalists seem to think words are sufficient in their own damn articles.

There goes the Ferrari again.

I think he deserves a refund.

I’m thinking that we are becoming rare, and we’re only middle aged.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/bridging-disability-and-music-for-a-busy-life-20111201-1o918.html

So, absolutely final?

Yes it is. When you promise Gary Numan that you’re winding it down then you WIND IT DOWN.

And besides, right here is the dilemma writ large – the demand for PLAY ONLY YOUR MOST ANCIENT MUSIC. Scene: Belgium. Tom bangs two rocks together while Stewart plays on his bladder

Actually, being in art administrator mode I have whipped up a spreadsheet. Column One, name of track. Column Two, duration in metric minutes. Column Three, Cliffordicity – high, medium or low. High means that people around the age of 50 will bump their walking frames along with the beat. That’s Friday night. Column Four – video, good/medium/poor condition. Playing live with Gazza means that there’s quite a lot in good nick. Last Column – rehearsal. As in what was the last time anyone actually rehearsed this.

Looks like there’s about 2.5 hours of stuff in decent condition but a lot of that is recent, serious music which ain’t gonna get granny into pink leg warmers. I think Friday is worked out, Saturday is a bit more tricky not for lack of material but just how to make it a club set. Take Pour Chiens Moyens for example, it’s 7 minutes long. I’ve got a version from the Big Day Out of 2005 which has a bit of a beat to it but… well… maybe not.

Actually they want stuff so old that there simply isn’t the parts to do it. Let me put this in perspective. I was talking to Pauline recently about how somebody wants him to remake I Don’t Like It. He’s found some MIDI files and a Roland Sampler that was once used to make the track. The sampler turned on … but the hard drive didn’t at first … the display is scrambled… the mouse is a SCSI mouse… this thing is a quizzical artefact of great antiquity. He found some files that we THINK might work with Opcode Vision. Good luck with that.

OK so go fifteen years earlier. I am the king of backing shit up, but do you really think I can raise the dead? Take a track like Twenty Deadly Diseases. This exists as some vinyl which has the original recording which I have at various times tried to work out, except the whole track is so out of tune it sits between two real notes. I can make something that sounds a bit like it, but not really, then what? I remake it as an updated version and everybody frowns, as they did when I updated the other stuff. Let them frown at some of my stuff that’s only ten years old.

More hopeful – got a possible gig for 2013 (yes I know that seems a long way off but that’s how art goes these days) which involves what I do now rather than when half my current age. Can’t jinx it by talking too much but it could actually wrap up all the work on aerodrom and link into the cymaticsouth stuff I’ve been assembling in the background. The thought of wrapping all these loose ends into one project that will be properly exhibited is too good… surely that rogue planet will wipe us out first.

Schneiderton

This plug in sends a MIDI sequence according to your distance to Florian Schneider. When Florian is asleep it plays only black notes. Requires GPSnatch.

OldSchoolTie

This object provides secret handshake access to government contracts over OSC.

BennyVel

Plays the Benny Hill theme music at a tempo = velocity/128 * 500BPM. (requires sax sample).

jit.Primer

Captures video from a QT compatible camera several weeks ahead of now. (NB. I already have reports that the Windows version is capturing an alternate universe where people are screaming burning skulls. Just mute the audio for now).

ClthuFlxMm

Man shall not know of this.

Monolake

Every Monolake album with one finger, or Duolake albums with two fingers. Three fingers is too many.

BJMax

This Max4Live patch was adapted from a Reaktor patch that was previously a Synthedit patch that has two oscillators through a low pass filter. As used by Bjork on tour.

HipAss

High pitched squeal like a pig through multiple speakers. Worse when binaural.

DopVmit

Constant nauseating Doppler effect.

Wggywggysplkbinkclnkity

Instant post graduate sound performance. Will fool most academics/get PhD. Takes seconds to set up. NB you must still come up with your own pack of lies/paper.

SteveJobs

One more thing through a distortion.

—

I once peeked at Max4Live and ran away. A year or so later it’s on my hard drive. But I would be lying if I said I’d done anything worthwhile with it.

Most of the people making Max4Live patches are the same that made Reaktor patches. It takes a special mind to carve your own nails to hang a painting. Each time a new construction tool pops up they decamp en masse to build a better granular mousetrap. How on earth do they ever get around to music? If I call them Gnomes I mean it in a kindly Tolkien sense – the technologically advanced underground.

Making this image was an excellent way to avoid Jitter for at least 5 minutes.

Apart from Gnomes I don’t know why there’s a market for software construction sets. Over 11,000 people are registered for Max4Live of which .5% actually build anything. Like me the other 99.5% sluggards go dumpster diving. I can knock together a Jitter patch to solve a particular problem and I’m pretty good at Live these days but I am buggered if I see the point to building my own LFOs.

(The other branch of this crazy are game engines. There’s about one squillion game engines each with a tribe of people who are dragging and dropping a godsquiddlion lame platformers with stolen Mario sprites. Each time you open GameSalad it announces all the games that everyone has managed to start and never finish. I guess that’s the Internet, clouding all the dilettantes into a worldwide lack-of-movement.)

Something doesn’t add up and I guess that’s why Ableton have been giving M4L away for the whole of April.

I took advantage of the severe discount and added it to my Live rig where it sits confusingly muddled with ClyphX. The potential to feed all of North Korea with Sugar Frosties might be hidden in there but in the meanwhile there’s Pluggo. You remember Pluggo? Back when Cycling 74 allowed you to make VST effects from Max. The sales pitch for Pluggo was that you got a lot of them, kind of like those old 101 GAMES IN ONE cartridges that were all Mario in different colours. You get UGLY GRANULAR 1, UGLY GRANULAR 2 etc.

Galaxy of Granules 201

Given that it started in 2009 the M4L library has not burst asunder with activity. Some Gnomes have been busy: Zeal and Fabriziopoce have video plugins that look useful and perhaps can be encompassed by the mind of man. Generally the audio tools are less interesting and in most cases just things that Live should do anyway. Like LFOs. It’s not too different to FL Studio which includes Synthmaker; very few people have got anywhere with the damn thing.

I’ve decided to try move from FL Studio to Live because it will change the way that I go about writing music. FLS is too close to how I have always worked by plugging lots of cheap boxes together and twiddling – observe:

Terse Tapes 1981ish - click to big

My studio in 1981-2 is a set of dark boxes with cabling running about. It even had Gol on top of the tape recorder. I feel comfortable with this system – too comfortable, and stuck in 1990′s music making. Live is 2000′s style music making. I wonder what is 2010′s music making?

Stewart: I wanted to say re the new post that i think we’re actually in transition phase – away from doing it all on a computer, back to having a bunch of interconnected devices. Once they sort out midi comms between iOS apps and others .. OSC support replaces cv/gate cables? Something like that. I was at the pub earlier trying to explain to a guy why I’m starting to get interested in electronic music making again and I think that’s the essence of it anyway..

Sent from my iPad=

Click to make more spooky!

Lady Hehir was photographed while taking her wolfhound Tara for a walk in 1926. When she saw the photograph, Lady Hehir saw that Tara appeared to have the head of another dog on her rear end and …

Do I really need to go on?

(New Guinea 1964. Photos by my old man)

To hell with web culture.

There’s only two things really important about Something Awful and that’s when Zack Parsons writes insane multi-part science fiction and when ‘livestock’ writes about dogs. The rest of it is a pastime, and if you have pastimes then you are too young or have forgotten that death is hurtling towards you. Neither applies to me.

I should instead write about Soggy The Sailor who, having taken on the guise of his previous idol, has returned after a long absence (off sailing with Sinbad or Popeye?) and has a new CD that he plays at around 1am every day. This adds insult to injury – it’s a compilation of songs by Paddy Roberts who as a child I liked very much. He sings about the Old Ladies Stuck In The Lavatory – it’s sophisticated stuff. Now one Paddy Roberts song is funny. 75 minutes of them is tedious. The same 75 minutes repeated at 1am every day is pathological. I think Soggy considers himself an Irish balladeer. He’s also a hipster douche who thinks that old comedy records make great random party music. As I live up the road from *the* hipster douche pub (rows of bicycles lined up outside each with the obligatory little wicker carrying basket, playlist of ironic 70′s and 80′s hits, goofy facial hair and so on) I bet some considerable fish that Soggy is playing his wretched music after a night on the flannelette microbrew. Not cool.

I should write about the VJ set I am struggling to create in the hours after making CDs in the hours after study that come after the hours of the day job. The original Over Barbara Island set was performed in 2006. The set was a disaster (was supposed to be outside with Tiki lamps – was inside in horrible white echoing room because of rain) but the music is pretty much my favourite of the late Sevs recordings. When asked to do a benefit set for Rainforest Rescue, Barbara was the obvious choice. The promoter has asked for a more up tempo set and so it seems time to add a few new tracks. Barbara was supposed to be exotica – cocktail music, slightly cheesy and slightly spooky and it did that well. Return to Barbara Island picks up on some of the ideas gridlocked in the Aerodrom project: aircraft graveyards, cargo cults, jungle. And monkeys, as this is my particular interest in the charity.

It’s not a matter of finding resonances, more of avoiding the common ones that have grown up around shows like Lost, which doesn’t interest me but will come to mind for most of the audience. It gets harder to exhibit a personal view when every possible preoccupation has been monetised at some point. You either wallow in it (hello Lady Gaga) which is cowardly, or strive for difference. I am not sure I can make that difference this deadline, I’ll certainly try. Erred a bit far in in using black box recordings which created intensity but was morally bankrupt and obvious. Now all have been replaced with hand made replicas of mysterious radio chatter. Also leaning a little on Prelinger but not in a lazy ass way (hello People Like Us). I think it’ll be OK.

I should write about Comics. I know very little about comics, apart from RAW back in the 80′s. Comics were art for a few years =everybody was into RAW (MAUS, Jack Survives etc). Now I find comics from the very early 90′s that I actually want to know more about. This shit looks like maybe there’s something there that will finally cause a WTF moment – which is a bit rare these days.

Comics?

Sean says:

“Hi Tom,

Funny about the comic thing, I was a comics geek in middle school, then lost interest in nearly all of it by high school, except for the Doom Patrol. So your blog took me back to the good old days circa
’90-’92, re-reading those things dozens of times over, finding some weird new thing every time, whilst fluctuating in and out of Severed Heads and early PiL obsessions. Almost makes me look back fondly on being a weird high schooler, but not really.
Best thing Morrison ever did, before he got into that snobbish-heroes-makes-for-cool-comics schtick. I don’t know how well they hold up over time – I seem to recall the early issues were a bit emo for my taste, but he hit his stride by the time they find themselves fighting the men from nowhere, those alien catholics and protestants, et al. The Flex Mentallo origin issue is a gem, especially for those of us familiar with old 60s comics with those Charles Atlas you-don’t-have-to-be-a-skinny-loser-anymore ads. Good times.

Cheers,

Sean

I think that’s bullshit.

In developing a time line for my new game design class at Kunst Kamp I started by following the mainstream opinion. Start in 1975, then place Scott Adams, Zork etc. etc. and sure enough there’s a nasty gap at the point first person shooters became plausible, roughly the time the first PlayStation goes on sale. OK, sure, shooters started to pick up narrative structures with Half Life as the accepted exemplar.

But then I started to place games I thought were notable. They might not have sold, they might be flawed, but they had something that made me pay attenti0n. Myst for sure 1993. Bad Mojo 1996. Sanitarium 1998. Bad Day On The Midway 1995. Zork Nemesis 1996. Gadget 1994, The Dark Eye 1995 – I’ll even include The 7th Guest from 1992 … although it’s not a favourite. If you are a game historian you can keep piling them on – but already it’s pretty clear: if you are looking at the game and not the sales, this was a great period for adventures.

Adventure games in the 90′s were mean. Bad Mojo had you survive as a cockroach, in Sanitarium there’s one point you need to dig up a child’s corpse to win at Hide and Seek, even 7th Guest starts with a bludgeon murder and has a virus killing children via spooky dolls. The best thing that happened to adventure games was that LucasArts got the hell away from it and did nothing but Star Wars for the next decade. OK they did Grim Fandango 1998. I will let them live.

Examine the difference between Return To Zork and Zork Nemesis. One of these has a decapitation followed by an impalement. 1993 to 96 … even at Activision things got gruesome and fast.*

Adventure games started to look pretty sweet. If by sweet you mean evil.

This still from Bad Mojo (you can click on it) uses the kind of 3D that the best game engines can only do in hardware now – depth of field, soft shadows, refraction. Hey, I didn’t care if it moved, I was busy trying to figure out how to survive. And look what 3D was like at the time:

Be still my beating heart.

First Person Shooters were mindless. These days we’re spoiled by games like Bioshock which have a plot. You can complain about the plot – but at least it’s not another frigging space marine trapped behind crates while creatures from hell blah blah. (Actually DOOM 3 was still like that). The whole time you were running around a thousand metal corridors looking for a red pass to get through some lame airlock you could have been shifting souls at a funfair to get into the fat lady’s tent! You can see the point.

Real ‘Hybrid Arts’ – look I don’t care much for Thomas Dolby or William Burroughs but I swear to god they were a lot better choices for music and narration on The Dark Eye than who the hell that was that did that horrible MIDI music that went with the DOOM series. Hang on, let me look that up.

“The id Software development team originally wanted me to do nothing but metal songs for DOOM. I did not think that this type of music would be appropriate throughout the game, but I roughed out several original songs and also created MIDI sequences of some cover material.”

Bobby Prince, I take that back – under the circumstances I guess you did your best. This is your best.

The Point Is – that the indie adventure game scene has grown out of this period and games such as Samorost are not really throwbacks to the late 80′s as implied, but a flow on from a design period that hasn’t been properly recognized by people outside of the ‘brass lantern’ set. The history has been distorted to fit into a simple rise and fall storyline. That’s something that needs to be redressed.

I’ll put that on my list of things to do.

http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/

* Thank you thank you I’m here all week.

COMMENTS:

I’d just like to comment on first person shooters….  i think you’ve missed the point – or devalued the point so much that you haven’t mentioned it.

yes, it’s true, they’re mindless, but that’s not to say they weren’t (aren’t?) extremely powerful.  Doom 1, 2, Quake and Descent were a massive thing for me in a shortish period sometime around 1995, as a young electrical engineering student (very soon to be subscribed to cliffords list and devour sevcom), when the early 16 bit sound cards were available to someone of my means, and were quickly hooked up to powerful, bassy home built hifi speakers for full effect, and Fasttrack2 and granulab started raising my awareness to making strange electronic sounds on my computer…

at around this time, there were a few of us who sought late-access computer labs with PCs capable of running these games on a network.   these games, networked were incredible!  we would play for way too long, until we started having tunnel vision and forgot how to walk properly, and then i would sometimes find myself dreaming these games all night, like an adrenalised automaton.

aside from that, the non-networked games – doom 2 i particularly remember, could keep you on edge as you ascended levels and encountered new monsters….

in short, these games were very powerful (in a new way) as highly-immersive, sensational audiovisual environments, – doing one thing very well – keeping the player on edge, reacting as quickly as possible, and adrenalised.

two other things
- for music, nobody listened to the midi tracks – you would load your own CD and play that instead.
- another part of the immersive aspect was the control options – doom 2 or quake (and very much descent) were one of the first games i played with a mouse – you would use keyboard for fire, run, backwards etc, and the trick with the mouse was to invert the mouse action, use it only for look-direction – and pretend you held the head of the avatar so that mouse-forward would look down, etc…

these games were very powerful.
having not played many games since, i would understand if their legacy is strong.

at the same time, i appreciate the literary aspects of many more interesting games available now, but i don’t have time to play them.  while i was also quite a reader, these first-person shooters provided quite a different role – a physically immersive escape, and a real thrill, unlike anything achieved in games to that point.

thanks for listening!
Nick

It means Cubase.

To be more precise it means getting all the good bits from Cubase and shoving them into Tools. Which is not a bad thing for the end user. But let’s be systematic.

First, be assured that all the really arse bits of Tools are still there. Bouncing from track to track, mixing down in real time, RTAS, DAE … you’re not going to escape it that easy. ‘Suck it down’ as the bad guys in Duke Nukem 3D used to say. Underlying the shiny new exterior is the old business of copying stereo into mono files and matching data rate. You cannot mix up sound sources like Vegas – when Digi claim ‘mixed sources’ they only mean AIF and WAV, huge bloody woo. However stereo tracks are now counted as a single track so you can have up to 96 voices.

Suck It Down

Shiny New Exterior means it looks like Cubase, a little less black than Logic. This actually does make working more pleasant. There’s a Quick Start dialogue with templates which is rather Cakewalk and not that helpful if you’re not doing the same job that much. Could be good for sausage factories.

The Universe View sits up top and shows you a zoomed out map of your complete session. Move around a little box to pan through your time line, then wonder why the hell there is no zoom on it like you get in Ableton Live and Audition. So close Digi, yet so far.

You can see your waveforms rectified, I know you will excited by that. But tear yourself away and look here for we now have automation lanes that go with each track so you can see volume, panning, effects automation all at the same time. Grown men weep, women swoon. Why has this taken so long?

Double click on some MIDI to open the new MIDI editor, and you will not be too surprised. This kind of thing has been available in Cubase and Logic since Ug banged two rocks together – the editor is good, certainly better than the feeble offering in Live. The scoring feature likewise will please people that can play piano with two fingers at once. If you have used this in other software you’ll know the deal, no more no less.

Some instruments are supplied in RTAS format to reduce your hatred of that stupid format. Boom is a drum machine Roland style. DB33 is one of those electric organs people stopped using in 1950 something, but somehow always end up in free plug in packs. Mini Grand is a pretty damn good sampled piano. Structure free is half a ROMpler and Vacuum is a decent analogue synthesiser, without being exceptional (filter doesn’t feedback damnit). Xpand2 is another competing ROMpler… not sure what the story is there.

You get some more effects than in v7. But not Cosmonaut Voice, a real shame for fans of this legendary crap effect, who will just have to speak through toilet rolls instead. The industry standard DVerb now gets a little touch of chorus, which will hide the metallic cheap stomp box quality of this highly regarded effect.

Executive summary: if you use Pro Tools you really should get the upgrade, because they’ve got the photocopier out big time. Even Cubase owners might want this for the audio editing, plus you get to use some, er, very familiar MIDI tools. You could go for Nuendo but this is lot less expensive. Still room for Live and FL Studio in the soundscape, although they’ll probably be embraced and extinguished in the next upgrade.

If you used to use Pro Tools but got sick to death of their closed formats, real time processing and the damn DAE, this isn’t going to entice you back. The fundamental faults of Pro Tools archaic inner workings are still there. Digi isn’t about to hand over the keys to the engine room yet. But then, look what happened to Quark and the Soviet Union.

Growing up, we’d have people show up on the doorstep looking for my dad that had to be ‘encouraged’ to get the hell out. One awful day a woman rang to say she’d bought an apartment overlooking the family’s house and she was watching me. I don’t know how but it seemed to be fixed rather quickly.

My own phone calls could be amusing after the fact. The guy from Seattle that pretended to be a member of Pearl Jam and wanted to give me ‘the key to the city’. Best line: “I’m looking at a photo of my mother shaking hands with Sammy Davis Jnr.” Not so amusing was the guy in British Columbia that insisted that I was sleeping with him (by remote control? UFO?). But as modest fame became much more modest the phone calls stopped. I still don’t answer the phone ever. I feel sorry for people who actually have real fame, I understand why they go insane.

In the early days of email there were fewer people online. It was a given that the other person would be just some harmless dweeb and most mailing lists and chats would be just nerd rage mixed with computer babble. Most lunatics would send snail mail and you could just laugh it off. My old ***@next.com.au address would get some spam but I could just delete that. In that time I started a series of discussion forums, Twister 2 to 5, of which Twister 3 lasted a very long time. It was good at the start, not at the end. Various twists and turns never really fixed it up. That’s OK, culture changes. The Internet is the street now.

And email changes too. My public email address now has three layers of filter over it. All sevcom addresses refuse mail the first time it is sent and only on the second attempt – that catches most spam. Then comes Avast anti virus which lets off a siren for every suspicious mail – it can blast away for some time each morning. Then comes the black list – all the tedious attempts to play mind games, all the schizophrenic young men and alcoholic harpies and false friends start pouring into the Delete folder. Usually that leaves only a few messages I want to see.

That mode of communication is not working. I know a few people who have given up email, but they are big people that have staff that suffer it for them. The wife just looks at my mail and runs screaming. I can’t escape the noise but I am going to take steps to separate public from private – a new need-to-know email address for a start.

When people continue to talk of online community they seem to me like ‘game theorists’ who never play games. Plenty of ideas, no actual experience. Online community is like running a church hall, all Christian patience and thin soup. Tomorrow I go to a conference and I am sure there will be a talk of ‘online community’. Better you than me …

More positive note: It’s impressive to see how Something Awful has managed to run forums for so many people for so long, when they’re pretty much random dweebs. A mixture of small payment, probations and bans. It works. I’m jealous. I could never even get to the small payment.

More postive note: Right now I’m building a bunch of virtual ‘radios’ that play weird little ‘broadcasts’, mostly for fun, but also nostalgic for the (manufactured memory) of broadcast. I used to like listening to the shortwave radio to hear the strange sounds and speeches from very far away. It is enough just to hear something make a curious sound, without having to build a society out of it.