So I spent February writing and recording an album from scratch. It’s done and available for listening downloading:
I’ve also written up a bit about the challenges of pretending to be a whole rock band as a solo musician, in a blog post over on the music site titled The Lonely Iterator.
I’ve just launched a long-overdue new site dedicated specifically to archiving and blogging about my musical output:
I’ve collected several hundred songs and recordings of same from the last fifteen years or so in one place, organized for easy browsing and quick listening via embedded mp3 players. It’s a work in process as I continue to do writeups about individual songs and collections, and I’ll be making music-oriented blog entries over there as well.
I’m getting on the first of many planes tonight, flying around the country for the next 30 days and meeting up with a whole pile of Metafilter members in more than a dozen different cities.
I’ve set up a site to track it all: Meeting Metafilter. I’ll be posting text, pictures, and even some audio and video as I can manage it.
So there it is: I’m going to spend a month flying around on Jetblue and visiting an unreasonably large number of my fellow Metafilter members.
Thanks to Jetblue’s stuntish (and sold-out-early) All-You-Can-Jet promotion, I’ll be spending the month from September 8th through October 8th flying around the continental United Stated, hitting a new city just about every other day and partying my ass off with mefites.
It’s an aggressive schedule; I’ve never done anything quite like this before. I’m excited and a little terrified, and I think it’ll be a hell of a lot of fun.
My city-by-city itinerary looks like this:
NYC
Boston
Portland, ME
Randolph, VT
New Orleans
Philly
Baltimore
DC
Raleigh/Durham
Las Vegas
LA
San Francisco
Salt Lake City
Chicago
Denver
I plan on documenting the trip heavily as I go, and I’ll be documenting the run-up to the 8th as well as I figure out how, exactly, I’m going to pull this thing off.
So I’ve been getting back into Flash after having fiddled with it a very little bit a couple years ago, and my first real attempt at building something respectable is done:
FLEE!, a simple implementation of a classic computer game called “Robots”. Abstract polygonal graphics! Minimalist trappings! Combinatoric background music (129 possible soundtrack loops)! Go give it a shot!
I’m trying to do things right this time around and actually learn the language from the ground up amidst my instant-gratification fiddling about (see above). I’m impressed so far by how much more robust Actionscript 3 is than AS2 was. So far it’s a lot of fun, and it’s nice to have an excuse to do some programming other than one-off perl scripts.
Quick man-that’s-a-lot-of-cats update:
Look At This Cat just got it’s three-hundredth cat, which is a lot of cats.
Cats continue to be great.
Because cats are great and you should look at them, I spent the last day building this new website:
It’s a website where you can look at cats. Which you should do, because these cats really bear a good looking-at.
Or, if you have a cat that is worth looking at and a camera, you could submit that cat so that other people can look at it.
Cats!
From the frenzied mind and hands of bandmate and engine-of-creativity Hiram comes a stop-motion film about heartbreak, nude beaches, and tiny plastic dinosaurs.
He did a really good job with it. It’s not a recording I had any hand in creating, but he borrowed my tripod so technically I helped.
The song is from a new Harvey Girls album of stuff Hiram and Melissa had been working on for a while. The album is called Nutate, and some folks are doing some remixes of songs from it, too.
I’ve just finished up the initial version of a new project:
Garkov — Garfield + Markov chains.
It’s a probability driven strip generator that builds Markov tables from transcripts of existing strips and then synthesizes and renders novel text as a new strip. The results are sometimes pretty apt and sometimes deeply weird, and I’m pretty happy with it so far.
Examples: Speak – The suspense – Crazy about you
Right now it’s working from about 500 transcribed strips — just a fraction of the 10,000 that have been published by Jim Davis over the last thirty years — and is using nine different background strips. Both of those numbers will likely grow as I have the chance to do more transcribing and strip-preperation.
In principle, this can be applied just as well to other comic strips. In practice, the code should make it reasonably easy to do so as well, so I hope to at least test another strip sometime in the not too distant future.
[Update 6/9/08 - response to Garkov has been pretty great, enough so that I ended rewriting the db code underneath it on Saturday after a bunch of traffic crushed the will out of my original rinky-dink Perl DBM solution.
Also, I update the link up there to actually go to the site. Sheesh. Sorry about that.]
New project: blogging, with my wife, every single episode of The X-Files, start to finish.
Check it out: Mulder’s Big Adventure.
Recaps and commentary and obsessive thematic observations. Because, let’s be honest, you like the X-Files. Or perhaps you dislike the X-Files. The point is you’ve seen the X-Files, and you have an opinion about it, and it’s time to relive some of those unspecified positive or negative feelings.
Plus we have these cute little icons. Seriously, go there now.
