betrayus

DC Establishment types got very huffy and offended when Moveon.org took out an ad calling Gen. Petraeus "Gen. Betray-Us" for "cooking the books" on the so-called Iraq surge strategy. Now he's out of his current job as intelligence meister for the high crime of getting some on the side. The man's greatest accomplishments were prolonging two wars that shouldn't have been fought in the first place, woo, what a hero.
(Moveon scrubbed the ad from its website after Pres. Obama put Betrayus in charge of the Afghanistan "surge" [i.e., escalation of violence]. The message seemed to be "yeah he was a book cooker but now he's our book cooker.")

"Eat Your Greens (Suite)"

"Eat Your Greens (Suite)" [mp3 removed -- music video version can be found here]

Spent several days working on this "classical" composition. The idea was to write something for four modular synth voices controlled in real time by polyphonic MIDI notes. The reality was that, once the basic quartet was worked out, the voices had to be individually recorded and tweaked and some effects added. It was done in three sections, and changes in one part sometimes necessitated changes in others. So it was work.

"Semi-Aleatoric"

"Semi-Aleatoric" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

A young man walks through midtown Manhattan, listening to a "glitch" loop on his personal stereo while cars and street musicians come and go in his audio cognition zone.

high tech color picker

JL emailed:

Kind of neat link about a color picker in an ipad app, and the research that went into emulating color mixing in software..
I like seeing their non-consumer-facing prototypes, the sort of thing professional designers derisively term "programmer art." Otherwise it's just another narrative of "devs getting it right," finally finding a use for this weird vector math from the 1930s.
A flat, mottled "watercolor" look is the end result. Haven't used the app. Maybe if you hold down your finger, it emulates paint seeping into flat off-white paper. One shot showcases the effect of scribbling a note to yourself in pencil, and then redoing the strokes in pen. It will probably take another year before they capture the voluptuous joy of watching ink dry.
The article itself is criticized in the comments: "You're comparing additive and substractive color models, intellectually dishonest."

I don't really get this article/practice/worldview at all.
I use a color picker and if the color looks crappy, I can put another color next to it and make it look uncrappy.
That's called being an artist.
The article assumes we all know and understand what beauty is and it's just a matter of getting the right software to attain color-mixing perfection.
I understand that a professional illustrator needs a certain uniformity and predictability to work across platforms -- that is miles from what a non-illustrator artist thinks about.
Bricolage, baby, bricolage.

This has been another installment of Ask Mr. Lo-Fi.