I tried to login to eBay for the first time in years, without success; it didn’t recognize my username or e-mail. https://monitor.firefox.com/ doesn’t think I was part of an eBay password breach, but it did report I was a victim of the May 26, 2020 LiveJournal breach. (You should go to Firefox Monitor!) So I logged in to LiveJournal for the first time in years to reset my password, only to find a home page full of Russian articles (even when viewing the lang=EN site). After password reset I had to agree to new User Agreement, with the disclaimer “The English version is a translation and is provided solely for the convenience of reading the Agreement. In the event of any inconsistency between the Russian version and its translation, the Russian version of the Agreement shall prevail.”
How did I miss LJ getting taken over by Russians? “LiveJournal became so popular in Russia that at the end of 2007, Russian-based media company SUP bought it from Six Apart. The news was followed by a wave of outrage. SUP’s CEO was Alexander Mamut, a Russian banker with alleged ties to the Kremlin.”
Anyway, I made only my second LiveJournal post ever: “Putin is an autocratic brutal thug. Slava Ukraini!” I’m deliberately not linking, LJ doesn’t deserve the clicks. If I get mysteriously sick or disappear, you know why.
I forgot how great the B-52’s briefly were and what an excellent album Cosmic Thing is. Beyond the smash “Love Shack” (produced by Don Was) with Cindy Wilson’s immortal “Tin roof, rusted!” are several more great songs, including the eco-optimistic “Topaz” with Nile Rodgers playing as well as producing, “Roam” with more sensational vocals (Kate Pierson’s “Oh girRRl dancing down those dirty and dusSsty trails”), and this near-perfect pop song:
In the YouTube comments fans mention how it brings then to tears, apparently without knowing that the band wrote it in remembrance of guitarist Ricky Wilson (read the lovely “About” note on the Genius lyrics site), whose death from AIDS after Bouncing Off the Satellites forced the group into a three-year hiatus . It shows how music can communicate a mood beyond and below words. The words themselves are simple and direct, but the shifting tenses – “I was good, We’re gonna find something, We’ll dance in the garden, Let’s go” – replace mere nostalgic reverie with present sentiment.
Here’s the cover of Paul McCartney’s 2013 album New:
I saw it and immediately knew the cover’s designers were riffing on Dan Flavin‘s neon fluorescent tube sculptures. Dan Flavin was “an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.” He doesn’t own the idea of arranging neon tubes, and this is suggesting ‘N E W’ typography, and so has a different intent than Flavin’s austere minimalism. So Paul McCartney and the people who worked on the cover (“Logo and cover concept by Rebecca and Mike. Consultancy and design by YES. Cover image by Ben Ib“) don’t owe Dan Flavin anything.
Yet in the liner notes:
Cover: Inspired by Dan Flavin, with special thanks to Stephen Flavin.
It’s just basic respect. Let people know who directly inspired you, don’t pretend a thunderbolt of creativity struck you out of nowhere.
(The cover is actually not a photograph of a physical installation, instead Ben Ib rendered it; a Beatles blog has more details. Knowing that takes away the physicality of it; it does seem suspiciously over-saturated, whereas Dan Flavin sculptures suggest a more ghostly presence.)
Speaking of ghosts… Here’s the cover of Elvis Costello and The Roots’ album Wise Up Ghost, also from 2013:
The spread type and layout (by creative director Nicole Frantz and art director Coco Shinomiya) reminded me of some mid-20th Century graphics style, but I wasn’t sure what it is. In the liner notes:
The cover design of Wise Up Ghost is inspired by the design of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, which was conceived by poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In particular, we are making an homage to the cover of Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (Pocket Poets Series Number Four), published by Ferlinghetti in 1956. We’re grateful to City Lights for giving us the permission to use their design, and we encourage you to investigate the Pocket Poets Series, and the rest of the excellent catalog on offer from City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. www.citylights.com
Pure class.
Maybe these artists could afford do the right thing because they have the lawyers and financial heft to make an offer that the artist’s representative couldn’t refuse, so there was little risk of getting their artistic vision shot down. But I prefer to think they made contact, asked how the artist wanted to be credited, and worked it out.
Of course it helps to have physical media in which you can read the liner notes. If you bought the digital album or just stream it, you would never see the credit in the liner notes and would never learn whence the inspiration arose.
We started watching Katla, an intriguing Icelandic show about mysterious goings-on near a volcano. But it’s ponderous SLUDGE. A few momentous things happen in a tiny community, but the damn people never meet up to review what’s happening and tell each other what they know, because then the series would be over in 4 hours tops. Instead it’s an 8 episode sloooow walk where little happens in each episode. Why? Why are moving pictures today either a 2-3 hour movie or 8+ episodes that form a 5-7 hour slog? We gave up on “Katla”; I cheated and read a summary to find out what happens, which admits episode 3 “grinds the pacing to a complete halt.”
The director’s cut on the DVD was briefly the apex of a certain kind of moving picture story-telling. Freed from the need to whittle the experience down to allow several screenings a day in a movie theater, the movie could run as long as it needed to. Some were self-indulgent, but often the storytelling could breathe over 160, 200, 240 minutes. Now it seems every show has to be a series of 8 or 10 episodes usually of about 45 minutes. Why not 2, 3, 5, 6 or 7? Why pad story arcs with fluff, and abandon tight editing of episodes to fit into this 360+ minute slog? The only exception that comes to mind is “Black Mirror”, with series of 3, 3, 1 (the Christmas special), 6, 6, 1 (the crazy interactive Bandersnatch episode), and 3 episodes.
At least “Katla” has slightly varying episode lengths of 42 to 47 minutes, but they would be even better as 20 to 50 minutes. There’s no reason each episode of a streaming show has to be the same length. Make the best episode you can, and let it end whenever.
Pre-history
British TV used to allow TV shows to go on as long as they needed to. There were 6-show series and TV shows that were only 40 minutes long. If you look at the superlative “Prime Suspect,” each series was usually 3½ hours but season 4 was 5 hours. American TV was always yoked to the 30-minute or 60-minute timeslot (though recent shows are actually only 19 minutes long, the rest is commercials) and typically a massive undigestible 20+ episode season. Briefly mini-series like “Roots” broke the mold, and now I think some reality shows have short runs.
Edits as remixes
Another approach would be to allow and encourage radically different edits. I want to experience the ideas about AI in “Westworld” and “Person of Interest,” but I have little interest in the former’s ultra-violence and the latter’s predictable martial arts fights and boring police corruption plotlines. I’m not alone, so why not offer multiple edits of each streaming series?
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a reasonably good biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch doing his reliably impressive legible acting. You don’t see someone acting, you read his interior state.
Near the end there’s an amazing video sequence of lines that blur in and out of geometric shapes and recognizable cats. I took some photos of it:
photos of some of the frames of Steve Pavlovsky’s analog art in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
helping create a visionary, trip-like sequence and video feedback / glitch textures to be used throughout the film
He’s credited as Analog Video Artist on the film. I didn’t realize the “feedback / glitch textures” were analog video, I thought they were more CGI. An article about its computer graphics highlights some of the mixing.
Interactive linked credits NOW!
It was ridiculously hard to find out who made this sequence. The credits for movies just go on and on; is this great work credited under VFX, special effects, art direction, or something else? Ever since DVDs, I have wanted interactive credits in which you can click on any name and the movie will jump to the best scene of that actor, or the scene with the best work by that person, be it set design, computer animation, costume, makeup, sound effect, or in this case the amazing video sequence. Amazon Prime Video’s excellent X-ray feature tells you who’s in a scene and often the music playing, but it’s no solution for the endless useless non-interactive credits.
Geek notes: making that animation
Because TV’s don’t have a [Print Screen] button, I stood in front of the TV and took pictures of the movie. Elsewhere I wrote up the gory details of cropping and straightening the TV screen in 10 photos, then turning them into the animated GIF above.
TVs today are computers with a display. Any computer can take a screenshot of its display, there’s even a [PrtSc] key on most PC keyboards to “Print Screen”. My LG TV can take a screenshot of its own screen and has a USB port, but you can’t transfer the screenshots out, probably because of Hollywood copyright BS. So I have to take phone photos of its screen.
Recently I took a bunch of these to capture the feel of the fantastic analog video sequence that Steve Pavlovsky created for The Electrical Life of Louis Wain movie for another blog post.
De-warping photos
“computer: zoom in on TV screen”
It should be simple: select the four corners of the TV screen in the photo and say “This plane in 3D space should be a 2D rectangle facing the viewer; Make It So” The free and generally excellent GIMP image editor has a dozen tools to transform an image including Tools > Image Transform > 3D Transform that sounds like it could work that way, but I couldn’t figure it out. Here’s the closest I found. I’m using the Flatpak of the development version of GIMP 3.0, which is pretty stable and getting close to release!
Theory
Select the TV screen as a polygon, delete everything else in the image.
Use a “Corrective (Backward)” Projection transform, settings its four corners to the corners of the remaining selection.
the GIMP Perspective image transform in action
Steps
Open the image
In the Layers dialog (press Ctrl+L), right-click the image’s layer and choose Add Alpha Channel. Otherwise, when you clear (delete) part of the picture, it fills with the current background color.
From the toolbox, choose the Free Select Tool (F) and click the four corners of the TV screen to start a polygonal selection, then click the starting point to close it and get the “marching ants” selection perimeter.
You want to delete everything but the TV screen, so Select > Invert (Ctrl+I) and press Del to clear the selection to the checkerboard. Then Select > Invert (Ctrl+I) again to return the selection to the TV screen.
To square up the TV… I didn’t try every transform tool let alone plug-ins, but Tools > Image Transform > Perspective came close.
Choosing this should make a rectangle with diamonds at its corners appear. “All” you have to do is drag these four corners to the corners of the TV screen which are the corners of both the image and the current selection, but you have to get the options right. In the Perspective tool’s options (Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Tool Options if you don’t see them):
Transform layer is OK, the selection is the entire layer
Direction must be Corrective (backwards), otherwise you’ll be squishing down the picture even more
leave Interpolation as default Cubic
Clipping I left the default Crop to result
I checked Show image preview and set Image opacity to 50% to give a hint of what was going on,
I set Guides to Rule of thirds to show a few lines
I don’t know about the other options.
Now click and drag the three diamond handles that need to move to touch the corresponding corner of the TV screen/the remaining selection. I couldn’t figure out how to make the diamond handle snap to the corner of the selection; maybe I should have turned the selection into a path because snapping to nodes in a path seems to work.
Click Transform in the floating coordinates window (or press Shift+Enter) to, as Super Mario Galaxy has it, TRANSFOOOOOOOORM.
The transformed pixels are left as GIMP’s ^%$#@! “Floating Selection”. Every time I use the GIMP I have to search “How do I get rid of GIMP’s ^%$#@! Floating selection”; I wound up right-clicking on it in Layers and choosing Anchor Layer
This all seemed to work! It ought to correct for camera distortion (bulging sides) and 3D shortening, but it’s close enough. I left the image selection options to anti-alias and feather edges, which probably doesn’t make sense when trying to make a hard-edged animation of the image on the TV screen.
Animating the TV images
Theory
I lucked out, DuckDuckGo found a good tutorial for this. The trick is File > Open as Layers… which opens each image in a separate layer. (The bottom-most layer will be the first frame of the animation.) Then use Filters > Animation > Optimise (for GIF), Filters > Animation > Playback, then File > Export As… GIF and set animation parameters.
Steps
Only using GIMP once a month, I never learn a good workflow for batch operations on multiple images/layers. To speed up the straightening before the animation, in Layers dialog I selected every layer and chose Add Alpha Channel. Then I made a course polygonal Free Select as described above to roughly cut out the TV screens, since I moved slightly between each photo. I probably should have adjusted the layer’s opacity so I could see all layers at once. Then I hid all layers, selected and made visible each layer in turn, deleted more of that layer’s image to leave just the TV screen, and did the Perspective transformation.
After all this, we have a bunch of images at different places on the canvas. (I blame the smartphone operator for swaying like a drunken martial arts master between each photo). There’s an Image > Align Visible Layers… command, but that didn’t put all the layers in the same spot, probably because I forgot to invert a selection or complete the “crop” to the TV screen on one layer. So:
In the Layers dialog make all layers visible and select them all, then Image > Crop to Content. You should have a small canvas tightly enclosing a messy stack of TV pictures.
Now choose Image > Align Visible Layers…. and… nothing happens, because each layer is bigger than its contents. I forgot to choose Layer > Crop to Content on each layer. And you can’t select all layers at once and do this. So select and make visible each layer in turn, choose Layer > Crop to Content, and now try Image > Align Visible Layers. You want the Horizontal and Vertical styles to be Collect (otherwise nothing happens!?), and align to top left.
The images are all nicely on top of each other, but they’re all slightly different sizes. Arggh. By selecting all in the Layers dialog, setting their Opacity temporarily to 50%, then making visible different ones in turn, I found one TV screen image was much taller than the others. So I selected it alone, and used Tools > Transform Tools > Scale to drag its bottom and right edges to make it closer in size to the others.
After all that, I was finally ready to see the animation, with Filters > Animation > Playback… It still wobbled around, but close enough. So Image > Scale Image… to 1280 wide (twice this blog’s column width), then Filters > Animation > Optimize (for GIF).
Then File > Export As… louis_wain_pavlovsky_animation.gif, check As animation, set the animation speed, click [Export], and… it doesn’t work, no file is created. I ended up reopening the multi-layer image in the current GIMP version 2.10 and exporting from that (and it worked!) Then I couldn’t reproduce the bug. It turns out export as animated GIF fails in this 3.0 pre-release if you have multiple layers selected; I filed a bug.
The Export GIF dialog lets you set the “Delay between frames where unspecified”, but I couldn’t remember if I had specified this delay or not; anyway, the animation was way too fast. So I used the free command-line tool ImageMagick to slow down the animation to 40/100ths of a second between frames: convert -delay 40x100 too_fast.gif a_bit_slower.gif
my bad capture of Steve Pavlovsky’s analog art in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
In his solid interview with Sting and his long-time guitarist Dominic Cooper, Rick Beato asked “If you were able to meet one musician, go back in time and hear one musician play…” and both immediately answered Bach. So I checked the dude out. Spoiler: they’re not talking about C.P.E. Bach or PDQ Bach, it’s Johann Sebastian Bach.
His lyrics are seriously weeeeak, but damn his instrumentals are non-stop riffing. In this rocker “Violin Concerto In A Minor, BWV 1041: III. Allegro Assai In A Minor” (his song titles suck too) the lead violinist freaks out, then plays one note 72 times! Take that, Chris Difford of Squeeze, who runs out of steam after playing the same note 34 times in “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell).”
Nile Rodgers is auctioning a bunch of guitars. I don’t think he’s selling his famous white Fender Stratocaster “the Hitmaker,” which I couldn’t afford anyway. It reminded me that I meant to blog about David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd’s) record-breaking guitar auction.
Obviously “The Black Strat” he played on their hit albums and on tour was going to go for $$$$$$$, and it did, for $3.975M!! But even utter non-entities like an Ovation 12-string acoustic bought from the factory along with several other models, that he never composed on, never recorded, never played on tour, estimated to sell for $1,500 tops, sold for $93,750, 60 times its estimate! You can buy the same guitar from a nobody for $750, tell friends it sat in a cupboard in David Gilmour’s home, and donate the $93,000 you saved to your own charity of choice. There are enough wealthy geezer fans who want a conversation piece on the wall for prices to be ridiculous. Meanwhile there are local guitar makers who will make a beautiful handmade thing to your own specifications for 1/10th the cost.
the iconic instrument of a great musician
an instrument a great musician left in a cupboard
“Something owned by a famous person of whom I’m a fan” doesn’t appeal much. I’d be as happy with a signed Scritti Politti record sleeve of the greatest B-side ever.
Interesting but not valuable
The prices attained by these Ovation guitars are crazy, but they’re decent interesting instruments in their own right. I even owned one. I blogged about them in The rise and fall of Ovation.
I blogged about the crazy auction prices that guitars owned by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour attained, particular those he’d never even used. The example I gave was a Ovation 12-string acoustic bought from the factory along with several other models, that he never composed on, never recorded, never played on tour, estimated to sell for $1,500 tops, sold for $93,750, 60 times its estimate!
That’s not to say that Ovations aren’t interesting guitars.
Reinventing the back and sides of the guitar
tough as nails on the back and sides
Back when I fantasized about having musical talent beyond rote skill, I bought an Ovation Folklore. I had damaged my classical guitar, so a guitar with nigh indestructible fiberglass back and sides appealed, and the sound projection of the resulting bowl shape was extraordinary. In the 1960s and 1970s this space-age reinvention (literally, founder Charles Kaman worked in aerospace and developed helicopters) was very popular. Glen Campbell made Ovation guitars famous, then Ovation over-expanded into oddball electric guitars, supplying them to the TV show “The Partridge Family.” The show made teen heartthrob David Cassidy famous, and destroyed any street cred that Ovation had.
Ovation later rethought the front of the guitar, coming up with the gorgeous Adamas with sound holes in the upper bout, instead of a gaping hole under the strings that requires lots of bracing to avoid the guitar self-destructing. The wonderfully talented Adrian Legg played one. But tastes have shifted back to authenticity and “naturalness,” plus as I understand it guitar makers have figured out how to get as much projection from conventional all-wood guitars, and Ovation is a shadow of its former self. A nice history.
Here’s Adrian playing “Cajun Interlude” off Guitars and Other Cathedrals on his Ovation Adamas.
Hydrogen, the clean fuel of the future (as long as you ignore the problems of making it cleanly, distributing it, and storing it, and its inevitably worse efficiency than electrifying all the things) keeps getting hyped by people who choose not to know better. The latest credulous nonsense is YouTuber “Undecided with Matt Ferrell” thoughtlessly parroting the claims of Plasma Kinetics in Energy Storage Breakthrough – Solid Hydrogen Explained. This company has a poor computer rendering of a cartridge containing a tape that can absorb lots of hydrogen and then release the hydrogen when it’s unspooled past a laser. It’s like LaserVision meets 8-track cartridges (two failed media formats, kids).
Here’s my comment (this link may work to view it in context on YouTube, where the timestamps should jump to the right part of the video).
What an utter garbage dumpster fire of a video. The nonsense starts in the first seconds with “Being clean and abundant, green hydrogen…” Green hydrogen is almost non-existent! “As of 2020, the most common source for global hydrogen production was methane via steam-reforming [i.e. dirty unnatural gas with massive CO2 emissions], with renewable electrolysis only accounting for 0.3 percent” [source]. That’s why fossil fuel companies and their shills promote new uses for hydrogen, because it means DECADES of increased demand for their dirty product. We definitely need to switch the 70 Mt of dirty hydrogen that industry already uses annually to green hydrogen, but that will take 400 GW of electrolyzers if they run 24 hours a day, requiring 1 Terawatt of dedicated renewables and storage.
You mention the grim reality of today’s high-carbon hydrogen production at 6:55, suggesting that “Plasma Kinetics zero-carbon capture could have a massive environmental benefit.” But there’s no connection. The only way to get a stream of hydrogen for their film cartridges to absorb is… to make hydrogen. 3:54 “The device could extract metric tons per day of 99.99% pure hydrogen directly from smokestacks” is, haha, a nonsensical smokescreen. There’s minimal hydrogen in what comes out of a smokestack, but there’s a crapton of CO2 in it.
Hydrogen storage is a challenge and worth addressing for air and land transportation and long-duration energy storage. But Matt Ferrell, you utterly failed to do any kind of critical reporting on this “breakthrough.” At a bare minimum, you should have contacted manufactures of hydrogen storage equipment – tanks, pressure vessels, compressors – and asked for their take, instead of parroting the company’s highly optimistic claims. And they aren’t that impressive. 9:03 “by loading their containers on a single ship, they can safely move 20,000 tons of hydrogen”. Oh wow, cool! But Kawasaki has built the Suiso Frontier H2 transport ship that it claims carries 1,250 m^3 of liquid hydrogen. That’s… 87,000 tonnes, four times more. Anyone who thinks shipping hundreds of thousands of 8-track cartridges will be cheaper than filling a liquid hydrogen tanker is a fool.
The obvious problem with this is power density. Look at the stupidity of the animation at 9:00. There’s one open tray containing 4 cartridges among 120 more trays. Presumably some robotic tape loader crams the 8-track into the 8-track player that shines light on it. (Does this sound cheaper than a large pressurized container? but anyway…) But how much hydrogen per second, and thus power does the player produce? Matt Ferrell, nowhere does your awful video give a figure for this. The idea that unspooling a thin tape can produce gobs of hydrogen strains credulity. I suspect to power a truck you’ll need dozens of the players feeding hydrogen into its fuel cell.
And here’s the next problem, the economics of it. The claimed cost reductions for H2 storage undoubtedly hinge on reusing the tape and cartridge 150 times, amortizing the high cost of the cartridges and the tape player. Well, we’ll see! But even accepting that projection, how much does it cost to send the cartridges back to Plasma Kinetics for a top-up? How much will this elaborate robotic videocassette rewinding factory-cum-green hydrogen facility cost per kg of hydrogen going out the door?
If I get mysteriously sick or disappear, you know why.
as well as producing, “
), and this near-perfect pop song:
. It shows how music can communicate a mood beyond and below words. The words themselves are simple and direct, but the shifting tenses – “I was good, We’re gonna find something, We’ll dance in the garden, Let’s go” – replace mere nostalgic reverie with present sentiment.
