pareidolia

No No No

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have a new album com­ing out. Accord­ing to this, appar­ently it’s all about syn­the­siz­ers and danc­ing. I haven’t even tried to lis­ten to their leaked tracks — I have absolutely no interest.

I used to like this band. Turns out I was duped.

I said it before and I’ll say it again — any music that encour­ages danc­ing is music that I never want to lis­ten to.

Review of Pitchfork’s Review of The Sophtware Slump

Here are a few points that I feel I need to declare before I start.

1. I love Grandaddy, and The Soft­ware Slump in particular.

2. I gen­er­ally hate Pitchfork.

I was look­ing up this album on Wikipedia, hop­ing that there was some­thing new and inter­est­ing about this album that I could learn. There wasn’t. But I did click on the link to the Pitch­fork review. What a mis­take that was.

It’s been almost 10 years since this album was released. When eval­u­at­ing a work of art, know­ing when it was made helps you deter­mine the con­text. But, and this is appar­ently very impor­tant, the album was released some­time in early 1999. So much of the review is spent talk­ing about how this might be an early con­tender for “album of the year.”

I don’t under­stand why crit­ics fix­ate on these arbi­trary year-​​to-​​year dis­tinc­tions. Espe­cially in a review. And espe­cially in a review that is avail­able on the inter­net 10 years after it was first written.

Peo­ple talk an awful lot lately about how online jour­nal­ism (blog­ging) is killing print jour­nal­ism. Every time I read some­thing on Pitch­fork, it makes me sad because even smelly old Rolling Stone is bet­ter than this garbage. And it’s never the albums they choose to review or their rat­ings or any­thing like that — it’s entirely their tone that both­ers me. See this old post.

Still, I guess 8.5/10 ain’t half bad. I give this review, how­ever, a 1.475 out of 10.

Sadness

My mother died recently.

It wasn’t sud­den. My fam­ily knew for a long time that this was going to hap­pen. She’s been sick for too long and I’m glad her suf­fer­ing is over.

Of course, I wish it hadn’t hap­pened in the first place, but it wasn’t really any­thing she did to cause it. It’s not like she drank her­self to death or died sky­div­ing. It was like can­cer, but it wasn’t can­cer. I still don’t know what caused it, I think it’s quite pos­si­ble that no one does. It’s just one of those things that happens.

I think that my mother’s emo­tional state was greatly affected by this dis­ease. The first occur­rence of the brain tumor was before my par­ents got divorced. 1987, I think. I know when she had brain surgery my dad was still around.

But they got divorced in 1989. Again, the details are fuzzy, but I think she had no more brain surg­eries until some­time in the early 90’s. I know she was really sad about the divorce. But any­one that knew my fam­ily could eas­ily see that it was for the best. My dad is kind of a dick.

She got a job and worked to sup­port me. I can’t even imag­ine doing some­thing like this, con­sid­er­ing she was a stay-​​at-​​home-​​mom and her mar­riage of 20+ years was now over.

Some­time around this time she got rear-​​ended by a drunk dri­ver, her car flipped over, and they had to pry her out with the jaws of life. Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t remem­ber if this was before or after the divorce. She had more brain surg­eries. I moved out, and she had more brain surg­eries. She stopped work­ing and started get­ting social secu­rity money. And then more brain surg­eries – Into the dou­ble dig­its. They cut her skull open 10 times, at least.

I think she prob­a­bly felt like the unluck­i­est per­son in the world. We never really talked about this. I know she resented what hap­pened with my dad. I know she didn’t under­stand why she had all these brain tumors. I know she was really upset about the car accident.

I think she felt that suf­fer­ing was what she did.

I went back to michi­gan when my mom died. I looked at a lot of her things — old pho­tos, news­pa­per clip­pings, etc. I saw a poem she had saved. I don’t remem­ber the poem exactly, but it was basi­cally about an ado­les­cent girl who feels like she isn’t pretty and doesn’t have much to offer the world. It was very sad. My mother had saved it in a box of keep­sakes, and wrote next to the poem “me.” I don’t know when she did this. It looked old, but not too old. I imag­ine that she did it in high school, before she was mar­ried to my dad.

I didn’t really know too much about my mother’s child­hood — just that she was artis­tic and that her older sis­ter often had to drag her out of bed in the morn­ings when they went to school.

Now, look­ing back on all these things, I am forced to con­clude that I am much more like my mother than I ever real­ized. For the most part, I tried very hard to not be like my mother — but I guess that’s how it always goes. I’m sad about most things. I feel like bad things hap­pen to me more fre­quently than any­body else I know. I feel unlucky in love.

I don’t think any­one could say that my mother lived an amaz­ing life. We were really poor, she was sick, she didn’t have any roman­tic rela­tion­ships that I know of since the early 90’s. Her father died in 1995. I have a very real desire to do bet­ter than that.

I know that my mother did the best she could — and, for the most part, I believe that her cir­cum­stances, that is, the things in her life that were out of her con­trol, were truly unfor­tu­nate. So far, none of the really bad things that hap­pened to her have hap­pened to me.

But I can’t help but think that her atti­tude might have some­thing to do with her sad­ness. And, since I’ve just recently noticed that am pretty much just as sad as my mother was, I am wor­ried that I will end up the same way. I don’t want that. I don’t want to die at 60, unable to clean myself and basi­cally alone. I want to have an inter­est­ing career. I want to find love. I want to be happy.

So I have decided to try to change some things about myself. I want to stop think­ing that bad things always hap­pen to me. I want to make good things hap­pen. I want to be less pes­simistic. She suf­fered. But maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe I don’t have to.

I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s worth a shot. This rejec­tion of the qual­i­ties I inher­ited from her isn’t meant to dis­honor her. I think if she knew that I was happy, it would have made her happy, at least for a lit­tle while.

I don’t think she would have wanted me to be sad. I would not wish sad­ness on any­body, and I don’t think she would, either. So I don’t think she would dis­ap­prove. I hope she would be happy that I’m try­ing to make things better.

I miss her.

Chicagoist Redesign Critique

I tried to post some of these com­ments on the forums, but their instal­la­tion of Move­able Type seems to be run­ning like frozen but­ter since the upgrade. So I’ll write it here instead.

Chicago­ist imple­mented a new design recently. Chicago­ist is part of a net­work of sites cen­tered around cities, Lon­don­ist, SFist, etc. Com­men­tary about what’s going on in the city. The redesign affects every site in the net­work, so these com­ments should apply to any of the other –ist sites as well.

Let me start off by say­ing that I like it over­all. But I still have some problems.

1. It’s too nar­row. The old design, and I’m bas­ing this on my mem­o­ries, seemed wider. It’s a fixed width design — I mea­sured the width of the con­tent of the site and it’s approx­i­mately 850 pix­els wide. I have no idea if there is any objec­tive rea­son to make a web­site 850 pixels.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, I design web­sites to be 960 pix­els wide. This width is based on the view­able area of a browser when the win­dow is max­i­mized on a 1024 x 768 mon­i­tor. There is research to sup­port that this is the res­o­lu­tion most peo­ple have their com­puter set to. Here’s a good one. I’m sure there is more out there.

So, unless there’s some­thing I don’t know, there’s no real rea­son the site should be this nar­row. Per­haps there’s some pur­pose that the orig­i­nal designer had, but with­out know­ing it, I assume he/​she is just stupid.

The new site has a bor­der around the entire thing. This con­tributes to the boxed-​​in effect. The old design, how­ever wide it was, had no def­i­nite edges. It’s pos­si­ble that the bor­der is part of what’s mak­ing it seem so narrow.

2. Move­able Type. It’s a dying pro­gram. No one should use it any­more. And fur­ther­more, this imple­men­ta­tion is really really slow. Per­haps they need a new server. But if it’s Move­able Type’s fault, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m pretty sure that Kot­tke also uses MT, and his site isn’t unbear­ably slow.

3. Mis­cel­la­neous things. It’s pos­si­ble these are bugs, so they may be fixed soon. But they still need to be mentioned.

a. Near the bot­tom of the page, the “Next” and “Pre­vi­ous” nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments — when I hover my mouse over these but­tons, as well as the “1 2 3..” but­tons, it becomes an opaque brown box. This doesn’t seem like it was intended, and if it is, there’s no rea­son that I shouldn’t see what I might want to click on.

b. Search Results — The space between each of the match­ing arti­cles seemed really nar­row. Too nar­row to be intentional.

c. Mis­cel­la­neous other prob­lems — On this page, the page title is really really big. So big that it pushes all the tags out of the box and they’re cut off. It’s pos­si­ble this is just a Safari thing. I’m not going to bother check­ing it in other browsers, because that’s the job of the web designer. Also, at the bot­tom of every page, the “stats” link seems too close to the footer text. Also, who puts pub­lic links to stats any­more? That’s so 1997.

That’s about it. I was read­ing through the com­ments on their redesign announce­ment page, and so many peo­ple com­plain­ing about the changes as a whole. When­ever a redesign occurs, in any medium, peo­ple tend to com­plain quite loudly. Logos, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, web­sites. Peo­ple are com­i­cally afraid of change. I’ve seen it before, time and time again, so I feel it’s pretty safe to dis­re­gard what these peo­ple are saying.

My crit­i­cisms are all things that I think are errors in design. I don’t really care about things like the head­lines being in a non-​​bold font. That seems like it was inten­tional. The things that I men­tioned could be fixed eas­ily. My crit­i­cisms are con­struc­tive. This redesign isn’t really chang­ing much. The logo is the same. The color is the same. They still use Arial for their main body font. These peo­ple need to shut up.

Doppelganger (song)

I’ve been work­ing on writ­ing a song, it’s called Dop­pel­ganger. So far, all I’ve recorded is the basic chord pro­gres­sion and a “solo” which is a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the melody from the chorus. 

doppelganger-solo.mp3

More later, hopefully.

A Dialogue

One: I have been dras­ti­cally underused.

Two: You have, indeed. Tell me again, whose pur­pose is it that you wish to serve?

One: My own.

Two: I see. So you haven’t been uti­lized to your fullest?

One: Not at all.

Two: Well, then. I assume this makes you unhappy.

One: Quite.

Two: What do you intend to do about it?

One: Noth­ing. I’ve tried some things and noth­ing seems to work.

Two: Like what?

One: I tried sell­ing myself on the street. No one was buying.

Two: I’m sorry.

One: That’s quite alright. Next I tried pur­chas­ing my services.

Two: For yourself?

One: Yes. You can see straight away what sort of bind that left me in.

Two: Indeed. I once tried to buy a hot dog from myself and it ended in tears.

One: After that I went on a soul-​​searching quest. 

(pause)

Two: And?

One: I found noth­ing out.

Two: Rats.

One: Tell me about it. I started ask­ing my friends for advice–

Two: You have friends? I was unaware.

One: A few, yes. They mostly ignored me, I think they were too busy watch­ing foot­ball or something.

Two: Yes, I’m famil­iar with the game.

One: Well, not me, I thought I was merely being obtuse.

Two: No, not at all. It’s a game of skill between two teams, involv­ing a ball and these metal -

One: Spare me. I was just using it as an exam­ple of some­thing that is meaningless.

Two: Not mean­ing­less at all. In some cir­cles you can get quite a lot of money for per­form­ing well at this game or pre­dict­ing who will.

One: I care not! I’m con­cerned with mat­ters of truth and beauty, not money!

Two: Well, if you can’t find beauty in foot­ball then I guess you’re “shit out of luck.”

One: How droll.

Two: Yes.

One: Any­way, my friends were no help.

Two: What did they say?

One: One of my friends told me to get a job.

(laugh­ter)

One: So you can imag­ine how I took that.

Two: Quite.

One: Another friend told me to volunteer.

Two: Oh? I’ve heard that can be quite rewarding.

One: Yes, well, I couldn’t help but make fun of the poor unforunate souls sent to me for help.

Two: Who sent them?

One: This guy. He think’s he’s so great.

Two: Which guy? If he runs a char­ity he prob­a­bly is great.

One: He’s not great. He likes watch­ing his wife get tied up and vio­lated by other men.

Two: Oh dear. That’s not pleas­ant at all.

One: So you see, I’ve looked every­where and I can’t help but feel that my pur­pose in life has been some­how lost.

Two: Well, maybe your pur­pose in life is merely to search?

One: How boring.

Two: Yes, quite.

(pause)

One: So do you want to go to the Titty Bar?

Two: I thought you’d never ask.

Button Fly

But­ton Fly pants are the worst idea ever.

Big Stupid Glasses

I’ve noticed an annoy­ing fash­ion trend. Really big sunglasses.

Where did this come from? Was it one per­son that made it pop­u­lar — some sort of celebrity?

I would like to believe that it’s some sort of social pathol­ogy, that, metaphor­i­cally speak­ing, makes peo­ple want to hold their vomit out in the open so the entire world can see it.

Best Kid Part II

The Karate Kid Part II is my favorite movie. 

It is cer­tainly not a great movie. But I love it anyway.

I’m watch­ing it now, prob­a­bly 20 years after I last saw it. I had it on VHS when I was younger and prob­a­bly watched it 200 times. I still remem­ber every note of the sound­track. It beings up many strong feel­ings. I’m sure I’m just being sen­ti­men­tal. But what­ever. I still love it.

I lived in Japan for a year, dur­ing my “junior year abroad.” Or what­ever. I strongly believe that this movie was what made me inter­ested in Japan in the first place. For that, I owe it a large debt. If you can owe movies debts, that is.

Just for the record

Graphic design is not:

1. Using graphic fil­ters to make psuedo-​​3D effects. Drop shad­ows and gra­di­ents are not hot shit.

That is all.