so, I have been reading some stuff tonight about the death of dance (as in music that would be classified as such, not the movements). I know that most people don't care, but I think that it is pretty interesting that all these people grew up, or whateve. Gutterbreakz links to a few arguements and has some comments of his own...

The thing about technologically-driven music is that, during those certain 'white heat' phases, it develops and mutates at such a ferocious rate that sometimes you feel that the original ideas didn't get a chance to be fully explored, as with Darkside Jungle. I spent nearly fifteen years telling anyone who would listen that the synthpop/futurist* period circa 1978-82 was ripe for fresh exploration...
Yet when the revival actually began, I was horrified by the majority of it.

As for myself, I am mostly interested with what the hell is happening in two places...
Gangzta/krunk/hip-hop is dead and come back to life as a flesh eating zombie and whatever the fuck "eskimo" is (Grime/dubstep/NUSKOOL-UKG). I like to think of whatever hiphop has mutated into is the most bizzare stuff to dance to. It is strange to see people dancing to tongue slap rythyms (snoop dogg - drop it like its hot).

Eskimo it turns out, is not in fact music made for dancing to while wearing those silly eskimo looking jackets (although they can certainly dance to it), it is a track by a guy named Wiley (although according to some sources, it may be somebody elses track). I think that one of the things that I like most about all this grime stuff is what is written about it, but that may be because I don't have the inside perspective on the scene.

I guess the best way to deal with it is just to start dropping some of these tracks the next time I am allowed to dj, and see how people deal with it. I think that it may just be too wierd.

also, I was going to share some acid house that I have been writing, but I think I am just going to share the eskimo track instead.

This is a comic that will eventually end up in zero quality control issue two. I just want to remind everyone that submissions are still open (even though I am about half way done scanning what I have now, so you know, whatever). The format is going to be half of an 8.5 x 11 page so you know just drop them on me. The more the better...

René Magritte's
La condition humaine


linked from: National Gallery of Art

I found this interesting article on the design constraints of social software. Right from the beginning it is fun...

When we hear the word "software," most of us think of things like Word, Powerpoint, or Photoshop, tools for individual users. These tools treat the computer as a box, a self-contained environment in which the user does things. Much of the current literature and practice of software design -- feature requirements, UI design, usability testing -- targets the individual user, functioning in isolation.

And yet, when we poll users about what they actually do with their computers, some form of social interaction always tops the list -- conversation, collaboration, playing games, and so on. The practice of software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions, while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space.

It goes on to describe and suggest social software art projects...

Jonah Brucker-Cohen's Bumplist stands out as an experiment in experimenting the social aspect of mailing lists. Bumplist, whose motto is "an email community for the determined", is a mailing list for 6 people, which anyone can join. When the 7th user joins, the first is bumped and, if they want to be back on, must re-join, bumping the second user, ad infinitum. (As of this writing, Bumplist is at 87,414 subscribes and 81,796 re-subscribes.) Bumplist's goal is more polemic than practical; Brucker-Cohen describes it as a re-examination of the culture and rules of mailing lists. However, it is a vivid illustration of the ways simple changes to well-understood software can produce radically different social effects.

You could easily imagine many such experiments. What would it take, for example, to design a mailing list that was flame-retardant? Once you stop regarding all users as isolated actors, a number of possibilities appear. You could institute induced lag, where, once a user contributed 5 posts in the space of an hour, a cumulative 10 minute delay would be added to each subsequent post. Every post would be delivered eventually, but it would retard the rapid-reply nature of flame wars, introducing a cooling off period for the most vociferous participants.

This seems like a very interesting field of new media art, what I would like to see is projects that are slightly less text centered and take advantage of vocal buildups of social networks.

via the best software essays of 2004

Tonight my mission is to write some system specs for a online collaborative comics writing system. I have been told that the right way to do it is in the Universal Modeling Language, but after looking at the front page for a second, I think that project is bigger than tonight (although I find it interesting that you can write business models in UML). Tonight I am going to downgrade to just taking some notes...

first, however, I have two announcements.
1) Google ad words are gone... Apparently google is evil. In addition to that, the main goal of that little venture, to see specifics about the view logs, was not as successful as I thought it would be.
2) Welcome to another friend, Eli. I think that he will be writing nice essays and helping the content of this site increase, and possibly make it a nice destination for links and that type of junx. Slightly related, my name is Jonathan Brodsky, and I will be working to make the site reflect that.

WTF SYSTEM NOTES FOLLOW
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A system to allow collaboration in the WTF style (pioneered by myself and Josh Atlas in the Carnegie Mellon University Newspaper, the Tartan [haha, that site is the result of a comic {not written by myself, Josh Atlas, or and of the contributors to this site}]). The WTF style is for creator A to draw a panel, then for creator B to provide the captions for that panel, and draw the next. This occurs until the comic is complete, either based on a predetermined panel number, or based on the paper size / number of drawings.
An online system would allow for users to decide who they were going to work with and how long the completed comic would be (if in fact it was going to be completed at all). Average users would have thresholds for comics that would be displayed on them, based on completion percentage, contributing artists, and personal preference.
The Basis of the system would be a page that showed the last completed panel of the comics that you were working on. Once you wrote a caption for it, you would have the opportunity to draw the next panel. Only once that panel was complete and submitted would it stay in the system.

This system would allow comics artists to find others with styles, tastes, or humor, as well as improve their weak points in the comic writing duality. Of course you probably already knew that, because there are about 3 people that read this, and I write comics with all of them (except you elijah, but we can fix that).