Douglas Rushkoff on why he is quitting Facebook. (CNN)
Am making note of these high-profile walkouts even though Rushkoff's reasons seem aimed mostly at other celebrity authors.
Tracking Farcecrack disillusionment is kind of a hobby now.
February 2013
"Thx for the Add (Subtraction Mix)"
"Thx for the Add (Subtraction Mix)" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]
A melange of Reaktor motifs, some used previously, some not: Nanowave, Sinebeats, Rhythmaker. "Performed" in Reaktor, recorded, cut into .wav files a few bars in length and then "orchestrated" in Cubase.
duck duck go
Google must be snickering in the back office these days about their famous "do no evil" pledge. Besides all the consumer spying, er tracking, they do and rolling over for law enforcement, they're getting aggressive about combining and Zuckerizing their various subsidiaries to make you a sitting "unitary identity" duck.
(On my pseudonymous YouTube account they are harrassing me bloody murder with popups to give them my all-important real name. The first name starts with F and the last with U; I tried to delete my account last night and discovered the "Close" button isn't connected to anything.)
Speaking of ducks, am going to try using DuckDuckGo as an alternative search engine for a while. It comes recommended and boasts "no tracking." Will let you know after a few weeks if this is an alternative to the three-company web.
blacklight
Doritowitch recently-modeled blacklight over shiered TM atom (muddy bicubic-resized version)
crisp, full-sized version
Update: the part of the image described as shiered is from gifmelter. I proposed calling it quantumGIFshifter but only half in jest.
privacy via obscurity on Tumblr
Adam Rifkin (techcrunch) tells us some things we already know about Tumblr:
ONE
Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.
But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.
TWO
For [entertaining memes and porn] the fact that Tumblr offers full animated gif support is crucial as a differentiator from the static environs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Pinterest. Ten seconds of reaction shot — or sex act — make a big difference in expressive power. Also, gifs are far easier to view on mobile devices than video, and so far the big content owners have made little effort to stamp them out via DMCA. [assuming the mobile device supports GIFs --tm]
THREE
Tumblr is not replacing Facebook; it’s merely siphoning off some authentic liking and sharing, especially among young Americans. Facebook needs to exist because it’s holding down the Mom, siblings, and lame friends part of a person’s social life — the “public-private” life, if you will. As long as Mom sees you on Facebook occasionally, she isn’t going to think to look for you on another site… which paradoxically frees young users to act out on a stage that seems more private to them despite being on the open web.
"Mom, siblings, and lame friends" -- not Glitch artists, not social media artists. Please note.
Rifkin does conclude -- ominously -- that the still-not-monetizable Tumblr is working on its own "Graph," so enjoy your obscurity while you can.
And let's also note the glaring contradiction in Rifkin's statement that "people quit blogging because they can’t find and develop an audience" and Tumblr's growth occurring because "a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience."