imagine, rather than accepting the doubling of processing speed, we celebrated the halving of power consumption as progress.
that we understood "fast enough" and took great pride in optimized code.
where we knew what came before and remembered and carefully considered new propositions.
and we worked together.
luke abbott - brazil (2011)
boards of canada - dandelion (2002)
roy and the ravers - emotinium (2015)
[mp3] - 17:38
how to bind a book:
thanks burgess! [web]
april heatwave, pouring buckets of water on early shiitake in the night to help them overcome the dry dry air, and somehow the internet says snow in a couple days
didn't finish engineering school: switched to art after two years. then went to art grad school and did a lot of... engineering.
maybe this is why every few years (remember, thirteenth redesign of the grid) i panic after not being confident that the LEDs are on the right way and cannot for the life of me remember which side is anode or cathode and how that relates to the schematic diagram. it's like forgetting basic geometry (which i also do).
so, here, enshrined:
ANODE (+) -|>|- CATHODE (-)
go forth into the light, may you also employ millions of LEDs with great certainty
wholesaler rejected our application because our website "looks fake, like spam or a scam"
we're assuming this hilarious accusation was simply due to the (rather modern) monospaced font and stylistic lack of capitalization. we've since instituted Georgia and Capitalization at luckdragon.
perhaps media illiteracy will lead to deep suspicion of poetry typed on mechanical typewriters. i mean, it must be fake by the communication standards we've all lovingly embraced, standards imposed through corporate homogenization and the numbing education of professional creatives.
ursula le guin and todd barton - heron dance (1985)
james holden - inter-city 125 (2013)
enya - epona (1987)
[mp3] - 10:56
awash and drowning yet
quantifying and accumulating despite
what we learned the time before
"Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. 'There is no alternative' is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means 'Stop trying to think of an alternative.'"
"We mostly only close materials loops when it’s ‘economically viable’ to do so. By and large, what that means is that it takes less energy to recycle the material than it does to create it in the first place, which is true for aluminum, steel, and glass, but not for materials like plastics or concrete. But the promise of access to renewable energy is that it changes this equation, putting processes that are intrinsically energy-intensive, like recovering the carbon from plastics for reuse or desalinating seawater to make it potable, on the table. It doesn't matter how much energy a process needs if it is inexpensive, doesn’t limit the energy available to others for their use, and is non-polluting. There's a virtuous circle here too: the faster that renewable energy systems are up and running, and the closer we can get to achieving this potential, the more that we can apply that clean energy to repurposing the materials of our current technological systems to build out the physical infrastructures of our new ones. Not beating swords into plowshares, but recycling cars into electric trams. We live on a sun-drenched blue marble hanging in space, and for all that we persist in believing it's the other way around, that means we have access to finite resources of matter but unlimited energy. We can learn to act accordingly."
Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization, Deb Chachra (2022) [web]
...
i'm skeptical about recycling (this [book] is a good summary) but i realize part of "it's impossible" is based on the current/prevailing economic definition of "impossible." Deb's vision is not technoutopianism--- it's not the same as sociopathic fuckwit billionaires doing geoengineering for profit in the name of saving us all from their own past transgressions. i read this as the best version of solarpunk--- a combination of resourcefulness and cooperation.
know your woodchips: beginner woodcarver, expert carver, pole lathe, power lathe, dull chainsaw, sharp chainsaw, table saw, router, wood chipper, felling axe, beaver, squirrel, porcupine-- they are all different.
these here are from a spoon blank, cut rapidly by an expert, with an axe forged by another expert, friend of the first expert.
(i am none of the experts above).
free as in beer
free as in freedom
free as in mattress
free as in puppy
(not new but new to me)
aphrodite's child - aegian sea (1971)
jo johnson - orbit (2023)
deerhoof - giga dance (2004)
[mp3] - 14:07
snow melt underwater meadow
my dear friends, wait no longer. [behold!]
enya's carribean blue (1991) [wikipedia], the first few intro bars, looped for ten minutes.
if you find yourself disappointed upon arriving it's conclusion, i highly recommend downloading the file and using mplayer [1]. run from the command line you can use the left bracket key to slow it down. 0.83x really lands. but you'll still likely be sad when it ends.
[1] [wikipedia]. you can also use mpv with the --audio-pitch-correction=no option. or maybe i should just upload the slow version. [2]
[2] update: [ok here] via ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -af atempo=0.83 output.mp3
operating theatre - eighties rampwalk (fanning session) (1982)
múm - the land between solar systems (2002)
burial - forgive (2014)
[mp3] - 18:36
tape 230321 [mp3] - 1:41
again visiting the church in the video game looking for clues. repetitive seven eight SQ-80 organ through BBD (thanks ezra!)
about a decade ago, visiting alpine lakes in the high sierras. eight thousand foot elevation, snow melt runoff, still the coldest body of water i swam. and a profound encounter with mosquitos. when overwhelmed, running as fast as possible hoping they could not catch up. but they do eventually.
n-so - count to ten (2022)
björk - unravel (1997)
arthur russell - home away from home (1993)
[mp3] - 14:16
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
ross from friends - pale blue dot (2018)
floating points and marta salogni - intimate intensity (remix) (2021)
depeche mode - waiting for the night (1990)
[mp3] - 16:00
today's research subject ping-pong
"For the holiday weekend they're doing the top 200 songs. By request, I think. So it's the top 200. Depeche Mode had more songs in the top 200 than any other bands."
"What is this weekend about?"
"It's to remember the people who were killed in the war, isn't it?"
"Which war?"
"Any war. People who have..."
(interrupting) "I hope it's not to celebrate the War of Independence, come on!"
"All the wars."
"There were fights that would break out in food co-ops—they were called the “Twinkie wars.” People wanted the food co-op to carry the highly processed, no-doubt-bad-for-you foods that they could get in the supermarket, and the more PMC types did not want that."
saturday march 4 1pm EST on NTS 2 [web]
an assemblage of sounds, old and new and forgotten together.
thank you to beau beaumont for the invitation. NTS is a gem.
(archive and elaboration forthcoming)
cool maritime - temporal dryft (2022)
aki tsuyuko - solitary tiger (2019)
oneohtrix point never - chrome country (2013)
[mp3] - 19:28
reading old text, recognizing oneself but not remembering writing it
"i needed more hands, i made very specialized virtual hands. i did not make a virtual hand training facility or virtual hand factory or virtual hand playground."
hold that thought
for a billion years
(brilliantly improvised not by me at band practice this evening)
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co