psy GIF liberated from the master's page design, enlarged and/or frame-reduced
the enlargement on the left is Seacrestcheadle's and the one on the right is qil's (with frames removed to bring down the filesize)
December 2012
"Xylodrome (Devine Sinebeats Mix)," "Xylodrome (3 Module Mix)"
"Xylodrome (Devine Sinebeats Mix)" [mp3 removed]
After writing about Richard Devine I recorded a couple of his presets for Reaktor's Sinebeats instrument.
Sinebeats has four channels of electro sounds playing simultaneously but you can selectively mute and unmute channels. That's what I did here on a single patch. Then added a melodic sample-based intro and ending, sandwiching the beats. Very little of this is real time -- had to cut up the Devine beats one bar at at time and suture them together to make the rhythm.
"Xylodrome (3 Module Mix)" [mp3 removed]
Done entirely on the modular synth. One sample module playing beats (a stripped-down hi-hat run from the Devine recordings); another sampler plays a chunk of the earlier-posted "Xylodrome" riff, mixing wet and dry filtering; and the "soprano" part is done on a wavetable module. As you can hear, changing the sample rate changes the pitch but also the speed of the sample (i.e., no timestretching normalization). This gives the impression of trying to have a rave with frequent brownouts.
the o-o-o-ld reader
Sometimes people are reactionaries because they're stuck in their ways and hate change.
Other times it's because "new and improved" means change for the sake of change, or, you're about to give up something.
With that preamble here's The Old Reader, which the creators say mimics features of Google Reader (RSS feed reader) before Google changed it to integrate with their attempt at Facebook, Google Plus.
Not an endorsement, haven't tried it (The Old Bloglines works fine around here) but offered to say merely that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is not the same as Ronald Reagan-esque, Morning-in-America retro-vision.
google vs GIF follow-up
Spotted on YouTube: the above animated GIF. This was mildly significant because although Google allows user-posted GIFs in its G+ social media environment (where the layout makes them look terrible and/or trivial) its own designers use the HTML5, CSS/scripted form of animation for, say, those strutting Thanksgiving turkeys and exploding July 4 fireworks on the main search page. Google Images allows you to search by the GIF filetype but not for animated GIFs. We had a big fight about this last year, where I pointed out the obvious (why not just use a GIF on the front page) and caught hell from the anklebiters.
Not saying that Google doesn't use GIFs elsewhere in its products but this one stuck out enough for someone to notice it and send a screenshot.
The above "dancing Psy" GIF looks different on YouTube and isn't easy to save. That green YT logo is hidden by CSS and the dancing figure appears next to the statistic announcing the video's billion-plus views. To save it you have to use your browser's "inspect element" feature and look for the URL.
hat tips dadayumn, qil, friendster