antimeria

“Pretty sure I could fuck up any dinosaur the size of a chicken or smaller.”

martin — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:46:09 +0000

Steve Albini did an AMA last week. As you’d expect, it’s tremendous and enlightening.

On the record industry:

There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.

On voicemail:

I detest voice mail. Answer your goddamn phone or don’t have a phone. We have an answering machine at the studio for when everybody’s gone, but otherwise I answer the phone and I expect other people to. I detest the whole system of using the phone to manage/frustrate callers with menus and voice mail and all that. It’s a cop-out and it sucks and if you do that to people you’re an asshole. Answer your phone.

His political views:

As a realist, I tend to vote against the most destructive candidate, which generally means the Republican, in any election. I refuse to vote for a candidate with no chance of winning unless the election is a cinch. For judicial retention elections my wife compiles a cheat sheet of recommendations from various groups with whom we sympathize on womens’ issues, prison reform, GLBT issues and corruption.

My political perspective is progressive. I believe a society with a conscience should actively try to incorporate, liberate and support as many of its people as possible, and the story of our country is a lurching, faltering progress toward that ideal. Gradually, eventually, our side always wins. Slavery ended, women are no longer property and can vote, children no longer work in mines (although we still send them to prison), institutionalized racism is dying, we got out of Vietnam, being Queer is no longer criminal… It can take decades, and there are obviously still fish to fry, but the moral, generous and forgiving nature of mankind expresses itself piecemeal as the stones in the right-wing reactionary wall, sexism, racism, class identity, greed, exclusivity, violence and revenge all erode over time.

The progressive positions are all eventually adopted not because we’ve overpowered our opposition, but because the positions themselves resonate with the American identity; we want everybody to have a fighting chance at happiness and to live a fulfilling life of his own choosing. Whenever the right wing scores a victory on an issue, it is (in the words of the poet John Houlihan) a small, temporary victory won by small, temporary men. The right wing seizes territory during its season of power, which is ceded back to civilization and then some when its season ends.

Basically I think selfishness and revenge are the ugliest human impulses and I root for anyone who helps quiet them.

Anarchism is interesting intellectually and engenders some interesting discussion but that’s about it. Libertarianism, pfft. Me-me-me bullshit for selfish little pricks who have a child’s conception of property and liberty. Communism has a humane underpinning but basically can’t be implemented in groups larger than maybe a hundred.

Whenever I hear somebody bitching about taxes I want to punch him in the mouth. “It’s MY money!” Shut up, no it isn’t. It’s money, and it’s a fluid resource (or should be) just like air. It isn’t YOUR air just because you’re breathing it some of the time. Fucking children.

I find the notion and reality of a for-profit corporate prison system absolutely horrifying.

Other tidbits:

“France has a ridiculous 95dB sound limit in performance spaces.”
Asked for five words on the Pixies: “Five words? That’s going to”
“Shellac will play in Chicago in August.”
The inspirations for Songs About Fucking were “Songs and fucking.”
“[O]nce you get into baseball other team sports just look like variations on a theme. Dogs fighting over a rag doll.”

The AVC rounded up some more gems, including the title quote, his PT Cruiser and his “Normal John Travolta sized” dick. HT: Ed.

Linkwad.

martin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:33:32 +0000

Back again. Let’s get it:

A three-part primer on tagging, via @BoingBoing.
Keyboards affect how you think.
Politics destroys empathy. In case you didn’t already know that.

Wood shop.

martin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:46:50 +0000

If these Bushmills barrel-stave sunglasses weren’t too small for my giant head¹, I would buy all 100 pairs.

If you have the cash, get them at Bodega. Via Esquire, with an assist from Caroline.

Also, they’re $225. ↩

Krazy Kat.

martin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:51:53 +0000

Okay, so your cat’s toxoplasma gondii might be causing your schizophrenia…

If [Jaroslav] Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
…
Schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.
…
In a 2011 study of 20 European countries, the national suicide rate among women increased in direct proportion to the prevalence of the latent Toxo infection in each nation’s female population.

… but probably not…

Indoor cats pose no threat, he says, because they don’t carry the parasite. As for outdoor cats, they shed the parasite for only three weeks of their life, typically when they’re young and have just begun hunting. During that brief period, Flegr simply recommends taking care to keep kitchen counters and tables wiped clean.

However, it is another potential reason to be terrified of your own mind. And your cat.

Linkwad.

martin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:52:55 +0000

Honeymoon photos coming soon! Promise.

I don’t know if I buy the “Internet is killing serendipity” argument, but this essay makes the case as well as any I’ve read.
The history of the reeeeemiiiiiix.
Just FYI: “Everyone else is just as bad” isn’t really a good defense, Internet commentariat.
Obviously, the answer to “Why do we need SOPA?” is, “We don’t.”
Pitchfork’s impact and history. For you lazy-ass TL;DR types: “A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art.”

This seems appropriate.

martin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:24:32 +0000

See you in a few weeks. Photos will be posted intermittently on the tweet machine.

No future (part 2).

martin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:14:36 +0000

At the risk of being hyperbolic¹, you should listen to this Titus Andronicus track while reading this Cory Doctorow essay:

As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we’ve spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.
…
We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

I think most people will remain blissfully² ignorant of this problem–every time Apple releases a new iOS device, people clamor to be allowed into their walled garden, and the piracy, copyright and patent wars³ rate similarly low on people’s priority lists. Which is an extremely long, link-heavy way of saying: “I am very pessimistic.”

But only a little. ↩
And often willfully. ↩
Patents for concepts are especially bad news, as Yglesias lays out in the last two posts. ↩

Linkwad.

martin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:56:35 +0000

Jonah Weiner’s Louis CK interview and profile.
This eye-controlled computer is excellent, but undoubtedly already patented.
For Baltimore job creation, filmmaking > racing. For the record, fixing potholes > racing. PS: the Brew is now on Kickstarter.
Skip past the Tebow part for some actual knowledge on fourth down calls, momentum, and challenges.

A rebuttal.

martin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:04:42 +0000

Via Caroline and Andrew Sullivan.

Rebranding Minnesota’s lakes.

martin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:31:16 +0000

One a day, up to 10k. Some of them, like Camp four lake’s, are very clever:

Via Ryan North’s tumblr.

antimeria

“Pretty sure I could fuck up any dinosaur the size of a chicken or smaller.”

More potentially-related posts:

Linkwad.

More potentially-related posts:

Wood shop.

More potentially-related posts:

Krazy Kat.

More potentially-related posts:

Linkwad.

More potentially-related posts:

This seems appropriate.

More potentially-related posts:

No future (part 2).

More potentially-related posts:

Linkwad.

More potentially-related posts:

A rebuttal.

More potentially-related posts:

Rebranding Minnesota’s lakes.

More potentially-related posts: