Fox News: All Crazy (or Dead) Blondes, All the Time!

Ol' Gibby (and not Hayes) apparently thinks that since the unwashed want bread and circuses, then give them same. Cuz nobody cares about the war, after all.

I was scanning the cable news channels the other night - the day ANS died - and it was wall to wall bald-ass Britney and the homeless corpse of Anna Nicole. It's like Consumption Junction but on TV! (And no, I will not link to CJ. Find it yerself.) Not jest Fox, but CNN and CNBC and CNN Headline and everybody. I think even ol' Pat Robertson was in on the act over at CBN, praying to raise Anna Nicole Smith from the dead so she could defend us from bald-ass Britney's unchecked aggression. And, like Anderson Cooper, all I could think was Aren't we at war? Isn't there a genocide in Darfur or something?

Yes we are, and yes there is.

Breaking News: Galileo and Copernicus revealed as frauds!

The Earth is the center of the Universe, and apparently doesn't spin. Relativity is bogus, too. This site is a monument to someone's epic delusion. Enjoy.

You know, I'd pay money to see the Fixed Earth folks debate these guys.

the "official" Ryan Taylor

I stumbled across the above linked site (go ahead, click on it - you know you want to) this morning whilst engaged in some coffee-fueled self-googling. I'm not sure how I should feel about it. In my mind, I am the official Ryan Taylor, and this site gives us very little - actually, no information about who this pretender is. What if [s]he's a pimp or a crackhead? A wingnut Republican? A Southeast Asian organ thief? In the absence of information, the mind reels with the most depraved of possibilities.

Increasingly, our identities are established and maintained far from our physical selves. Our legal personhood has more to do with a complex mesh of linked accounts, hosted images, linked files, phone records, transaction logs, and security camera snapshots than with anything we do or say in Meatspace on a given day. Bank of America doesn't know or care that I helped somebody with a design project yesterday; Equifax has no record of the handful of quarters I gave to a homeless man on the exit ramp near my house. The random person that reviewed one of my songs on GarageBand last week has no idea that I have a daughter.

I wonder if we aren't learning to see ourselves as the mediated web of tracings, see also entries and MX records that represents us to the world at large. I think that's why people get so hooked on MySpace and Flickr and Facebook - I'm sure there's a whole new sociological discipline focusing on just this phenomenon that's been building since the dawn of networked computing. From The Well and the earliest bulletin boards right up through to Second Life and any number of online gaming clans, people with the means and the know-how have been outsourcing their identities so that they can observe and interact with themselves in the second person, and allow others to do the same on a global scale.

Like so many others, I've created an alter ego that exists almost exclusively online as a musician, artist, and occasional commentator. If I do a search for "tay0," the first two hits are my MySpace and GarageBand sites (this blog is a few hits down the list). If I do a search for "Ryan Taylor," however, I get this other person, this "official" Ryan Taylor. Who's not me. Online, where it matters, I guess tay0 is me.

Pleased to meet me.



The intersection of carbon-based Me and bit-based Me, taken while this post was in progress.

new track up at GarageBand

Posted a new track up at GarageBand - it's actually one I've been working on for some time, and recently I finally got a handle on balancing the minimal, ambient groove with some electric piano and some arrangement adjustments. It's a really chilled-out track, very slow and low to the ground, called "Four Forty-Two."

The bass is Moog Voyager, the other synth bits are Roland JP-8000, the electric piano is one of the Rhodes models on the Nord Electro, and the beats were all programmed in Reason and then edited in Pro Tools.

The image is a detail of a large rebar sphere by artist Thomas Prochnow, on view at Mason Murer Fine Art in Atlanta.

Audacious editing with Audacity

If you play with audio and you haven't discovered Audacity yet, click on the link right now and go get it. It's one of those "How is this still free!?!" kind of apps. And it is still free. I record in Pro Tools and I still use this little freebie to do simple mastering for online distro, including file cleanup, EQ and mp3 conversion. When I need to do excerpt edits, I can chop the file and add fades in no time. Works great on Mac and PC, and to my ears the mp3 converter sounds way better than iTunes' built-in tool (I only use AAC when converting in iTunes).

I've been posting frequently on garageband.com, and all those files were created in Audacity.

AICPL: Microsoft does it again

Anybody who reads this (i.e. "no one") will know that I ditched Vista RC2 a while back and went back to XP on my gaming / testing box because it was flashy crapulence pretty much. The post linked above is from a poor soul who actually purchased Vista Premium Buckweat Ale Edition and has yet to able to install it because MS's online key generation system dispenses bogus keys! How awesome is that? This from the same so-called company that sells a high-dollar music player that doesn't work wih their own preexisting online music store (and attendant DRM scheme).