mtadkins

• I was massively into “Exile in Guyville” back in 1993 (sigh), & in fact I’m sure that I still have a battered & grimy CD — plastic case splintered & cracked from living in various cars & being moved around the country for 25 years — still buried in a box in my closet. There’s a new anniversary set out & I just took a break from weeks of binging on other nerdy podcasts to listen to this awesome new episode of the music-nerd show Song Exploder, which features a breakdown of “Divorce Song”.
• Aside from the deep dive back into the mid-90s, I’ve been bouncing back & forth between the new Jon Hopkins LP & the new album from Glitch Mob, which is pretty fun (even if it doesn’t have anything as glorious as “Between Two Points”  )
• I love reading David Foster Wallace, but assuredly he was an imperfect person & often a jerk, especially toward women.
• I had never heard of “The Oakland-Palestine Solidarity Mural”, but it’s only an hour away & now I’d like to check it out when next in Oakland.
• Growing up in a family that tilted toward Midwestern, evangelical Christianity, I’m familiar with the weird obsession with Israel & the ‘end times” talk of Revelation, Apocalypse, etc. The fact that evangelicals can allow this current treatment of Palestinian people, trapped in a modern day , state-sized, US-enabled concentration camp… & still call themselves “Christian” makes it clear how far from that ideal they’ve fallen.
• Other countries, the United States included (hey, we do have shrinking freedom of choice, support torture , & are developing an ever-expanding surveillance system after all…) will undoubtedly follow China’s “social credit” system, maybe we should avoid those companies that play along **cough** Apple ** cough** ….

My Top 20 XX songs (from great to awesome):

Its maybe unfair to include “Intro”, since its an undeniably hooky & badass instrumental piece, shorter than any other on the list. But #1 it is.

And obvs this is an “at this moment” kind of list. The top 5 are pretty static, but the rest shift around based on mood. As for “Stars”… I’ve yet to be near a sound system that can make it ‘too loud’ for me. #TurnItUp

The xx, live in San Francisco. April 2017 (Matt waving from the front row…)

Its Comic-Con time again here in Silicon Valley this weekend, & since it was my son’s most wonderfully favorite day evar! last year, we’ve already got our two day passes & are prepping for crowds & cosplay & celebrities. And lines. Always the lines.

The Flash meets The Boy

Last year, the boy had 2 goals — #1 being to meet Adam Savage & nerd out about his dream of being a future Mythbuster. That was all he talked about for weeks… that is until it was announced that Grant Gustin would be there. As a massive fan of The Flash tv show, getting an autograph from the “Scarlet Speedster” (heh) became his priority, & after several hours in a line & a couple hundred dollars later (I did get a “thanks Dad!” at least) he seemed like the happiest kid in the building.

A chipper, if tired, Adam West @ 2017 SVCC

We wandered the halls on Saturday & Sunday trying to catch Adam out in the open (& I did suspect he was inside that Totoro costume… #TrueFan), but never quite made it.

But all was not lost: We played games, bought comics, felt guilty for not finishing my R2D2 build (yet!) like these other guys, met the one & only Adam West, I got teary-eyed talking to the genuinely wonderful Caroll Spinney (Big Bird! Omg! Don’t mind me… just… remembering… my childhood… *sniffles*) , & we just had a grand old time among the artists, fans, & pop culture.

Then we found out late Sunday that Adam was meeting fans down near his “Cosplay Cave & Repair” area (a great service to those sweating out the crowds in costume btw). We trooped down & joined a very…very…long line that snaked around 2 corners. Everyone there was genuinely excited to show Adam bits of their costume or to just say “hi” & squeee at him.

After a hour or so we were getting closer to the door, & finally the unthinkable happened: it was getting late, the convention was wrapping up, & they had to let Adam leave. The line was cut off just one spot in front of the boy…

To his credit, he blinked back his disappointment, pretended he wasn’t *crushed*, & talked up what a great time he had all weekend, despite this little bit of bad luck. Its tough to watch your kids feeling letdown, obviously.

But I wasn’t upset, and I didn’t mind him missing his “hero”.  Not at all. For real.

The difference here, & what made the line that afternoon so long & so slow… was that Adam Savage was actually meeting the fans. There wasn’t an advance setup or announced photo op. We didn’t prepay $50 or $100 to get an signed 8×10 or an extra $100 to spend 10 seconds next to him & have a photo snapped like one of the other celebrity assembly lines.

No, he was talking to people, admiring their handiwork, encouraging their hobby (& their love), & being a genuinely kind & present human. I wouldn’t trade any of that just so my kid could get his moment. And I think he also realized it would have been wrong to want it any other way.

Adam Savage

It was an overall great experience: to feel that communion with other fans & the joy of sharing what you collectively love, but missing Adam Savage, even just barely, made us appreciate what he was doing, & after a long weekend of bristling against the more commercialized & marketed aspects of fandom I appreciated him all the more for it.

~ Matt

As I commuted to work this morning, I listened to some melancholy songs that I haven’t heard for a little while. As I absentmindedly sang along to “The Guide To The Short Wave Radio” & felt all of the things, traffic stopped & I looked over to my left…

…& saw a small, light brown fox lope through the short grass until he blended into the cover & I lost sight of him…vanished as abruptly as he had appeared. And then we cars went along our way.

…So kiss me in the night
Dismantle my whole life
Trade private kisses in a public place
With a secret smile upon our face

Come kiss me in the night
Take tender liberties
I love you for the flaws
And the inconsistencies

And someone else will come
To make you cry and laugh
The world will stumble on
With me and my wounded heart

I miss you when I sleep
I miss you when I sing
A fool it was who said
That true love conquers everything…
~ (ballboy, “The Guide To The Short Wave Radio”

~ Matt

(“Yūgen (幽玄) is a Japanese word pertaining to a profound awareness of the universe. It evokes feelings that are inexplicably deep and too mysterious for words.” [more] )

I’m a sucker for procrastination by way of jumping down the rabbit-holes of new curiosities (‘How’s that novel coming along, Matt?’, whispers my better self…) — & lately I’ve been sort of obsessed with the concept of AGI (“Artificial General Intelligence“), which is slightly more broad than the specific kinds of AI that populates our apps & internet searches.

The entire concept of translating human communication from linguistic concepts & human interpersonal quirks into maths & graphs & code *really* ticks some nerd boxes in my brain, & if we bumped into each other at a party right now I’d no doubt ramble on trying to explain why I find NLP (Natural Language Processing) & “word vectors“, for example, to be fascinating ways to consider the relationships between words, language, & in turn, our thoughts.

While foraging for context & more information (always moar!) I started skipping through the interwebs & landed on the DATA SKEPTIC podcast, & was taken with an episode called “The Ghost in the MP3“, which is our real topic today… how the sounds we hear can be converted to numbers & code, then translated back again depending on the situation.

That ep (from all the way back in April 2015) features an interview with Ryan Maguire, who created a project in which he rescued all of the data “lost” when the mp3 compression algorithm compu-magically reduces the size of a music file to make it more iPod-friendly. (Or Zune-friendly, if that’s how you roll.)

You can’t compete with vinyl, man…

[Short explanation for the non-technical: Bits of wavelength & frequency are removed when converting audio to the more ‘portable” mp3 format. It’s a lesser version of the sound vs the “lossless” files that have higher fidelity to the original recording, but hopefully in ways that your brain doesn’t notice. . ]

Since you’re likely listening to these on shoddy earbud headphones anyway…does it matter? That’s one of the topics Ryan address in the project, where he created a sort of isolated ghost file from only that excised audio data, so you hear exactly what you’ve been missing. There’s some nice background on what range of sounds we humans can hear, & how your senses (or lack thereof) affect your perceptions.

Follow that link about & give it a listen. And don’t be scared away by the math & programming jargon that pops up, you can get the idea without understanding any of it. ..

~ Matt

Linked: Ryan Maguire @ http://theghostinthemp3.com