Legends of the Sun Pig

We’re having an incredibly mild autumn right now. Today was forecast to be sunny and warm, 17-19°C, possibly a record temperature for November. We decided to go for a walk around Het Twiske to make the most of a fine day. Not a super-long walk, just a 15km loop.

This was also a chance for me to try out my “new camera” in good light conditions. I’m back to using the iPhone 4 that used to be Abi’s, then mine, then Alex’s. In the last year or so I’ve got used to having a decent if not great camera always with me, in the form of a Nexus 4. Although I wasn’t a fan of it initially, Dropbox’s automatic camera upload feature has become an integral part of my photo workflow:

• Take camera out of pocket
• Fire up camera from the phone lock screen
• Take picture
• When back in wifi range, sync pictures to Dropbox camera uploads folder
• When back on my Mac, sort pictures in camera uploads into named folders

The iPhone 4 is stuck on iOS 7. I can take pictures from the lock screen, but only with the built-in Camera app, which (in iOS 7) doesn’t allow you to separate focus and exposure. Last weekend at the Art of the Brick exhibition, in museum lighting conditions, that’s exactly what I needed, so I tried out VSCO Cam to see what it was like. It seems like a nice enough app, albeit very slow on the iPhone 4. But the fact that I can’t access it from the lock screen without punching in my PIN meant that taking photos took longer, and felt less spontaneous. Also, VSCO Cam saves photos to its own storage area, and doesn’t drop them into my Camera Roll automatically, which means that the Dropbox sync doesn’t happen automatically, which breaks the rest of my workflow. Overall: nice app, but doesn’t work for me.

The actual photos I got from the iPhone 4’s camera (see previous post) in the dark were okay, but not spectacular. I had been hoping that in better light, they would be as good as the Nexus 4. If they weren’t, then I might stop taking so many casual pictures, which would be disappointing. I could go back to the Nexus, but I’m explicitly trying to get away from Android. I could upgrade to a newer iPhone, but new phones are pricey, and I’m trying this experiment to see if I’m happy using an older model. So here are some of today’s results:

Maybe I should have taken the Nexus along to make comparison shots. Overall, I found the iPhone 4 shots to be fuzzy, and too dark where I wanted to capture detail. (That’s quite probably a result of not being able to separate focus and exposure, which I could fix if I were willing to use a different app – but see above.) Also, lots of the images were skewed towards blue, which I toned down in Acorn. (I’m still on the lookout for a nice, simple post-processing app for the Mac.)

Towards the end of the walk we came across a curious teepee-like shelter made of long stripped branches and spindly tree trunks. It’s about ten meters off of a side path, so it’s not even hidden. No idea who built it. It reminded me of the story of the North Pond Hermit that I read about recently:

His name, he revealed, was Christopher Thomas Knight. Born on December 7, 1965. He said he had no address, no vehicle, did not file a tax return, and did not receive mail. He said he lived in the woods.

“For how long?” wondered Perkins-Vance.

Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.

Knight stated that over all those years he slept only in a tent. He never lit a fire, for fear that smoke would give his camp away. He moved strictly at night. He said he didn’t know if his parents were alive or dead. He’d not made one phone call or driven in a car or spent any money. He had never in his life sent an e-mail or even seen the Internet.

Fiona and I went to see the Art of the Brick exhibition at Amsterdan Expo last Sunday. It’s the collection of LEGO art works by Nathan Sawaya. The pieces on display are a mixed bag. Some are genuinely notable, such as the headline “Yellow” (the yellow torso ripping open his own chest), while others are interesting only because they are made with LEGO. There’s a lot of inane and whimsical filler, too, but what the exhibition does really well is inspire. This is Sawaya’s stated goal: art was a creative outlet for him while he was working in a job that didn’t fulfil him. He wants to show every visitor that it doesn’t take expensive materials to make something beautiful or clever or fun. Anyone can do it, which is a great message.

Apart from liking The Ting Tings’s first album in its own right, I have always been amused by the fact that Jules De Martino played drums for obscure and long-forgotten band Babakoto in the eighties. Their one single, “Just To Get By” didn’t make much of a splash, but I loved it. I still have it on a cassette tape somewhere — from back in the days when “downloading” meant hoping you could press “record” quickly enough when it came on the radio. Gosh.

Anyway, I just kind of skipped over The Ting Tings’s second album. I remember reading some interviews in which they talked about why it had taken them four years to put it together, and seeing a few luke-warm reviews, and I never got around to listening to it at all. When I was booking tickets for upcoming gigs a month or two ago, I saw that they were playing Paradiso…and I ignored the date. My mind didn’t even register that a tour implied a new album.

It was only when I saw the new album Super Critical featured in iTunes (while I was buying Taylor Swift’s 1989) that it caught my attention. I’ve been listening to Super Critical and their second album Sounds from Nowheresville on Spotify for the last couple of days and they’re really quite good. Not storming chart hits, but there are some excellent tracks on there. Super Critical is short and sweet, with lots of funky Nile Rodgers-style guitar licks and updated disco beats. Sounds from Nowheresville is more complex and varied: punky on “Guggenheim”, low-key synth-powered “One By One”, flat-out rocking out on “Give It Back”.

So I’ve just booked my ticket to see them at Paradiso on Sunday 16th November. Should be good.

Area 11 have a new EP out next week, and are on tour in the UK in November. Unfortunately my travel doesn’t quite mesh up, and I’ll miss their dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Next time, maybe.

Echopraxia didn’t really work for me. I found the main character (Daniel Brüks) the least sympathetic of a bland cast. The novel is packed full of fascinating scientific ideas, but they came across as either too fleeting or overly didactic. In fact, the clearest presentation of the ideas came in the appendix at the end, which is richly footnoted and contains enough links for a solid year of further reading.

On the plane to Edinburgh this week I watched Killing Them Softly, which was tried to be earnest in its black humour, but only succeeded in being bleak and needlessly gory. The parallels between the underworld economy and the 2008 financial collapse are laid on thick and unsubtly. Two and a half stars, ish? My perception may have been coloured by the fact that I watched almost all of it while the plane was stuck on the tarmac for an hour waiting for an exit slot, after having already been delayed by an hour and a half because of thunder storms. At least it wasn’t cancelled.

Wednesday evening was a curry at Omar Khayyam’s and a drink at Thomson’s with Woody. Wasn’t feeling too great on Thursday; stayed in and binged on the first half of season 1 of Continuum on Netflix. I finished watching the rest of the season today, and it’s pretty decent. Not enormously original, but entertaining. The ten episodes risked falling into a repetitive pattern in the middle, but towards the end it kept raising more questions and introducing new elements that kept the tension high. Liked it.

Listening: Settle by Disclosure is hitting my EDM sweet spot right now. “Latch” is a radio favourite here in NL, but I’m not tired of it yet. The closing track, “Help Me Lose My Mind” features a shimmering tambourine that sounds like the ghost of a pneumatic drill just outside my window. If I’m deep in concentration, it really does occasionally make me look up and wonder why there are roadworks at midnight. Good work delivering on that title.

Ryan Gantz – Getting Out of the Woods: A Primer on Not Being a Music Hater (via waxy.org)

I like music. All different types of music. There are so many kinds! You should feel free to listen to whatever music speaks to you. I do.

But the hard thing about music (and all types of art) is that speak can mean something different for every genre, artist, and album. The emotional, tonal, and verbal vocabulary of heavy metal is almost nothing like the vocabulary of jazz. The intention and cultural contexts differ. The listening experience goals for fans of hip-hop may be at odds with what a classical music-lover wants out of a great symphony.

And that means that it often requires intellectual/emotional openness and very close listening (or, like, dancing) to understand what a piece of music is getting at, what language it’s speaking, what feelings it wants to evoke—even who its target audience might be—before we can fairly judge what’s successful or unsuccessful about it.

That may all seem obvious. But as a consequence of these basic language differences, it’s really easy to criticize or dismiss work that falls outside a musical dialect we’re comfortable with, or the role music currently plays in our lives.

Zeynep Tufekci – What’s Wrong with Twitter’s Latest Experiment with Broadcasting Favorites:

Twitter claims this change showing favorites to others generates more engagement, and people sometimes click on the “favorited” tweet they have been shown.

I believe that but who cares?

The problem with this course of action is not that it doesn’t generate engagement, but that it violates the social expectation of the favoriter, who did not intend to broadcast this act, and steps over the social signal function of favorite, which for many has come to mean: “I’ve seen this [and appreciate it] but am choosing NOT to broadcast this to everyone but only conveying it to you.” It has other uses as well, (in fact, a researcher found 25 functions) but Twitter’s favorite is widely used by many as the opposite of Twitter’s broadcast, the retweet, as an individualized and quiet signal as the “notification” tab will show it to the user whose tweet was favorited, but will not broadcast it to all followers.

On the subject of signals, what do Medium’s teeny-tiny author bylines say about their attitude to the importance of “content creators”?