Three Things Which Should Exist

1. Court jester for a court of law: The best way to lighten up the legal process. An opening defense statement is accompanied by a lively jig on the lute. The joker juggles colorful balls in the face of a sobbing murder witness. Objections are followed by puns and punchlines until, eventually, the judge slams his gavel down and yells, "Order! Get that clown out of here!"

2. Formal football: An American favorite adapted for the upper class viewer. The familiar grass field is surrounded by candlelit dinners. Grunts from sweaty linebackers accompany chatter about investments. Live chamber music is punctuated with the clash of helmets and heavy flesh, followed in turn by polite golf claps.

3. Noah's Ark Combo: Inspired by the turducken, this legendary meal of biblical proportions is designed for the biggest eaters on the planet. One of each kind of animal is stuffed inside one another, like a colossal matryoska doll -- recursively, deliciously.

My copy of Norrland arrived! This is a game by one of my favorite game designers, Cactus (aka Jonatan Söderström). I payed for one of the ten physical copies on auction to help him continue to make games.

In Norrland, you go on a hunting trip and do all sorts of "backwoods" things: kill stuff, drink beer, row a boat, sleep and have nightmares, take a shitzo, even hump some bears. It's more vulgar and satirical than his previous games, but still seizure-inducing and otherwise in character.

The disc also came with a bunch of unreleased games he's made, plus some other goodies, such as... a personalized coffee filter!

http://www.cactusquid.com/

Renoise is one of my favorite music composition programs. One interesting feature it has is the ability to load any file as if it were a raw, headerless audio file. I like loading non-audio files like images, text, and executables, trying out different assumed sample rates and bit depths. This can generate some weird sound sources.

Here is a short tune I made in 2007 which uses a BMP image loaded as the main instrument.

Today's theme is how to eat properly.

Recently I helped my good friend Igliashon Jones, aka City of the Asleep, prepare his newest album for its release. While double-checking the titles, I was reminded of how annoying and ambiguous the rules of title capitalization can be. For example, the word "throughout" is a preposition, but a longer one than most; to me it doesn't look right lower-case, nor does it capitalized. There are many other cases where what is correct is difficult to remember or conflicts with what looks good -- for a detail freak like me, this is a problem.

Some other languages with letter case, such as French, dodge the issue pretty well by sticking to sentence case for titles. For example, the title "Les barricades mystérieuses" is be correct: only the first word is capitalized. Proper nouns (and basically any word you would capitalize in a sentence) of course keep their normal behavior.

In the past I used this sentence-style capitalization in a 1t1d project, where the titles were meant to appear more like accompanying phrases than official titles. The look appeals to me, and the rules are pleasantly clear. I'd like to explore this style for titles in my next release. If its charm endures, I may convert permanently.

When I was a kid I loved to take things apart, like the family car or our Betamax player. These days I don't work with hardware much, so when I needed to modify a pair of tiny portable amplifiers for my performance in Dax Tran-Caffee's mobile street puppet show "The Museum Proper" in May, it was a refreshing experience.

While taking something apart is fun, my childhood reminds me that doing so can render the object useless. So, although the goal was simple, it was made much less scary by my friend Roger Young, who shared his very useful advice and equipment with me. Many thanks, Roger!

The problem I had is that my tiny portable Supro amps, in their factory state, are always turned on when an instrument cable is plugged in. Since I was going to be using them for several consecutive hours, I didn't want to drain the batteries more than necessary, and repeatedly unplugging and plugging in the cables would be cumbersome. The best solution I could come up with in my limited time was to interrupt the power flow with an on/off switch. Then the cables could stay plugged in -- which was handy because I'd be walking around strapped into a cigarette box the whole time -- and power could be saved by using the accessible switches.

Check out the photos below for my rough documentation of the process. Completion was quite satisfying, and reminded me why I loved electronics so much as a kid. If I ever get the time, I'd like to do more with hardware, like build a tone generator.

By the way, The Museum Proper was a freaky awesome show with scary cardboard puppets, and loads of fun to participate in. Here's the official website, where you can find pictures of the puppets and links to some performance footage:

http://www.museumproper.com/