July 2008 Archives
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Strange Things Happening Every Day
July 30, 2008 | Posted by SoGlitchy at 6:54 PM
I'm not much of a God-fearing man, but that doesn't stop this from being a favorite song of mine. The simple yet ineffable truth of the title is (to appropriate a John Lennon quote) bigger than Jesus.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 6:54 PM | Link | Comments (0)
Wallpaper: "Have to"
July 22, 2008 | Posted by SoGlitchy at 2:04 AM
Ahem. Presented with all due apologies to Veer and the fine artists who keep me going back there. This began life as a wallpaper of theirs that proclaims, "You have to disconnect to reconnect," which sounds like an Oblique Strategy, except lame. (You're required to sign up for an account to download wallpapers from them, but of course that's free.)
At any rate, I believe I found the hidden message in it.
Note: This is only in 1440x900 size (png pr jpg) instead of the usual range of sizes. I'm not going to go all-out for a goof. :)
Posted by SoGlitchy at 2:04 AM | Link | Comments (2)
The Dark Knight was shot in my adopted home, Chicago, but so was the last Batman film, if you take the literal definition of "shot." Where Batman Begins took place in a CG world that had tiny bits of the real Chicago mixed in with it, The Dark Knight very much exists in Chicago. Chicago's buildings, streets, and even basic infrastructure are all over it. Not that anyone not fairly intimate with the city would ever notice, because the city is not treated like that at all -- the movie is not crammed with recognizable landmarks and cultural shout-outs, the way most movies shot in Chicago tend to be (The Fugitive is a good example). It doesn't pander to Chicago's famous puffy pride, and cannot even announce that it is Chicago, because of course it's Gotham. But because of this subtlety, rather than in spite of it, the movie ends up making the city look better than any movie ever has. The locations and shots are never about the individual places, but about the feel of the city, the dark canyons, brick alleys, ubiquitous commuter train tracks, and most of all the unique and pervasive mixture of architectural styles. The Art Deco lives next door to the Modern; Louis Sullivan and Mies Van der Rohe borrow sugar and visual real estate from each other; everything from the literal inception of the steel skyscraper to the unfinished Trump Tower coexist -- and not just in one place, everywhere you look. The city's architecture is visionary in its anachronisms, and because of that all the more comfortable in its visions.
I noticed in particular one man's office -- maybe you'll notice it in the movie, but probably not -- located in a building I once worked in, on the northeast corner of Michigan and Wacker. And I had to dig up an old picture I took from that building. So very... Gotham-y.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 4:58 AM | Link | Comments (0)
Ponytail - Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel)
July 9, 2008 | Posted by SoGlitchy at 10:01 AM
I knew this record was something special the first time I heard it, but the more I listen to it, the more it's... whoa. Hot new audio love affair. Don'tcha love those? I picked this track because it's the longest, not for any better reason. The whole record is amazing.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 10:01 AM | Link | Comments (0)
Call it dubstep, call it what you will, but young Alan Myson of Brighton, England, has made a helluva long-playing record here; shaking, stuttering, and brooding in roughly equal measure. I can't get it off my iPod.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 5:01 AM | Link | Comments (0)
Low Motion Disco - Things Are Gonna Get Easier (Woolfy's Forgiveness Mix)
July 9, 2008 | Posted by SoGlitchy at 3:59 AM
I don't know much about this Swiss duo (I don't think anyone does -- they're famous for not giving interviews), but I know they always put a nice spit-shine on a downtempo track. This is nice stuff. Goes down smooth.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 3:59 AM | Link | Comments (0)
Another of my little hobbies is redesigning the theme of my desktop PC, which is running a flavor of Ubuntu. Switching to a GNU/Linux operating system has been a huge eye opener for me on the customization front. While Mac offers a few great tools for tweaking things like icons and the dock, and Windows has a lot of options and plugins, nothing offers the hands-on constructive frustration of Linux. You can change the look and feel of anything, quite literally, and usually without breaking anything too mission-critical in the process. It has its problems and limitations (say "X-server" to any Linux geek, and you'll get a saturnine nod), but on the whole, the fun to be had playing with it far outweighs the bad times.
The theme I'm calling StudioJade (so named because it's based on a few UbuntuStudio theme elements, and of course because it's a jade-ish color) began life as a Winamp skin, was discovered by me as a skin for Audacious, and I've been kicking it around, abandoning and coming back to it, ever since. I've taken pains to try to avoid the pitfalls of dark or inverse-colored themes, like magical disappearing text, or areas with too much or too little contrast. It has been revised within an inch of its little green life, but I have based all of my revisions and improvements on what I have discovered by doing what I do with my machine (web browsing, word processing, web development, graphics, and music editing). Maybe it goes without saying, but your mileage may vary.
Also, different screens will do different fancy and terrible things with color, and laptop screens are notoriously bad with dark colored-themes, in part because of the nature of LCD displays themselves, and in part because of how often people look at their laptop screen from an oblique angle or in bright light. This theme may still work for your laptop, but that's not what I had in mind. Like almost every designer I know, I spend a lot of time up at all hours of the night, sitting in a darkened room, staring intently at a monitor for hours at a time. Too much white is hard on the eyeballs after a while, and too much contrast is almost worse -- you can't look at straight-up white-on-black any longer or more comfortably. So there is a need to mellow things, turn the lights down on everything, and let your retinas know that it's all going to be ok.
First a note: this theme will work fine on any variant of Gnome Ubuntu (the "regular" version, if you will), but if you want your window titlebars to look like the ones you see in the screenshots, you'll need the UbuntuStudio theme, which you can get from the universe repository without the software suite or kernel by typing
The theme also comes with a much more groovy bootsplash screen and a better set of sounds than the default Ubuntu installation. (Take it from one who has learned the hard way, though: don't try to install the whole UbuntuStudio package unless you have a pretty serious machine. A slower PC will choke on it in no small way.) So, without further adieu.
As you can see, the "Jade" package includes the GTK-2.0 basic theme, which is really most of the hoopla, and a set of icons, which are basically the UbuntuStudio icons with different folders. Both of these can be installed through the usual channels: System > Preferences > Appearance > Theme tab. (Remember, install the whole tar.gz archive package. Dont untar it first.) There are some wallpapers, which you can do whatever you feel like with. And the "Complete package" also includes a gdm login screen theme, which can be installed with the Login manager (System > Administration > Login window).
Enjoy, and there's more on the way soon.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 7:06 AM | Link | Comments (0)