Music Fridays!

Happy freaking Friday everyone. A slightly different music Friday here. I just went ahead and posted a page with a bunch of recordings of my different bands. Some rehearsals, so be forgiving with those, some videos and some EPs. Just figured why not post some of this stuff instead of just sitting on it. Anyways, here’s a bunch of crap-o-la to listen too, lol!

Happy New Year!

Happy New year everyone! Spent some time in lovely Oceanside, Oregon to recharge a bit and had a lovely hike with friends in Forest Park yesterday. Here’s to 2024. Have some iPhone snaps. ;)

The Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft

Old piece I stumbled upon about how World of Warcraft used to mostly be ran by invisible bunnies that would be used to trigger events and aim turrets. But this is the take away quote that made me laugh.

“The WoW team’s tools have become more refined over time, so they don’t have to duct-tape rabbits to lasers as much anymore. “Sometimes,” McCathern said, “you don’t know designers need a kitchen until they’ve made ramen in a flower vase with an iron.”

Random Tumblr reblog because it refuses to die.

Rebloged from Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr.

“J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman are such a funny contrast to me, like

Rowling: Oh, and by the way, I put gay characters in my books.
People: Is there anything… showing that?
Rowling: No. Also trans women don’t deserve respect
People: wtf

Gaiman: Here are some immortals that transcend all human concepts of gender and attraction who use a variety of pronouns, and also some clearly canon human queers.
People: Are the immortals queer?
Gaiman: That is an entirely valid way to view them.
Other people: Ugh, pushing a modern woke agenda. It used to be-
Gaiman: Fuck you”

Tumblr is the platform that no corporation can kill. I have been going there for over a decade and never even made an account. It’s like the last vestige of something the internet was supposed to be.

The, "New Not Normals?"

The New Yorker asks, “The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era?” It’s a damn good question. Some outtakes.

“Online life has befuddled more than enlightened us. The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,”

…

“She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to.”

…

“The modern era, the long twentieth century, offered a kind of teleology of progress, a line on a chart going upward and to the right. Systems worked; certain logical frameworks—for markets, for politics, for labor—reasonably applied. “What if the gravitational center is just kind of lost?” Tooze asked. “There isn’t any longer that anchoring; we drift in a permanent state of being out of equilibrium.” Defining any kind of era implies that the era may at some point come to a close and make way for another coherent stretch of time. Tooze told me that he tries to resist that kind of “stability thinking.” Our current age is not dark; it may simply not be an age in the first place, because a linear, finite period of historical time may be an outmoded framework for our current reality—in which case, the scariest part would be that it doesn’t require a name at all. We just have to live through it”

Here's how to permanently wipe OneDrive folders from your PC if they keep recreating themselves

I don’t even know where to start on what a pain this damn windows box has been all week. Anyways, if one drive became sentient and installed itself and then WILL NOT remove the folders from you computer, I found a solution. This is a very big problem when you have to edit packages and environment variables for Houdini and other applications. Anyways, here’s the Fix.

“. Press the Windows key and type "Regedit" to search for the Registry Editor. Click it to open it up.

2. Copy/paste this string into the address bar at the top and hit enter: 

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

3. The fix is simple. Right-click on each entry in the Name column that has “OneDrive” and hit Modify. Delete "OneDrive\" from the address string and hit OK. Do this for any and all entries where OneDrive shows up. 

Wes Fenlon, you are a true god among us. This has been messing with so much crap on this system and nothing else would remove that damn folder….

New work in the wild: Nike and Specialized.

Have some work for Specialized appearing on the interwebs and a bunch of patch swaps and build-outs from AI files for Nike as well. It's always fun to find it out in the wilds.

On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"

Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new?

“Who is lying to us, Marc? You serve on the boards of trillion-dollar companies. A few of your peers own media companies. A few others have chosen to bankrupt media companies that write mean things about them. You have been celebrated for thirty years as the genius-inventors-of-the-future. If the public is turning against you, who ought to be held responsible for such a change in the public mood? “

“They promised that technology would solve our environmental problems. And there has, just recently, been some real progress in clean tech. But the trend lines are somewhere between bad and cataclysmic. We do not inhabit the future they insisted they were building. For Andreessen, in 2023, to declare that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology” is an act of willful self-deception. Just how long are we supposed to clap-and-wait while Andreessen’s investment portfolio tries to science the shit out of the climate crisis?

(That line in the manifesto also reads like an unintentional homage to Homer Simpson, btw. Marc Andreessen is worth something like $1.7 billion. He should hire an editor.):”

Really good read and well done reply to that manifesto.

Show on Friday the 13th

Howdy Portland peeps, anyone feel like seeing some American music, head on over to the Chill and Fill in North Portland for some live music tomorrow.

This is the story of Tim and How The Replacements Blew It.

“In 1985 The Replacements had the potential to become the next big thing. After four years of producing quality pop-coated hardcore, their major label debut Tim was supposed to be their next step, their leap into the mainstream. As stated in the album’s Rolling Stone review: “Tim... sounds as if it were made by the last real band in the world.””

The Replacements set up the template for alt country. Jeff Tweedy once famously said 'everything we do is based on the Replacements' before tearing into a rip-roaring version of 'Color Me Impressed'. Ryan Adams said he listened to nothing but 'Let It Be' while recording Whiskeytown's 'Strangers Almanac'. Uncle Tupelo toured with the band on the 'All Shook Down' tour. Lucero regularly covers 'If Only You Were Lonely' during their live shows.

Some R&D that died

Was working up some stuff with the ripple solver that missed the mark, but it’s kinda interesting. The tricky bit with water and glass is that it is defined by it’s reflections. Anyways, onward…

New Work in the Wild: Specialized Roubaix

Got some new work out there in the wild. Check it out ! Specialized Roubaix. I get to render out all sorts of different backgrounds for this stuff ;)