George Martin “forgot about” the guitar solo. Sounds nice, and it’s cool to have the audio from the mixer synced to the video and see the other Beatle do it live.

via

I will no longer accept delivery of anything from Canada Post. I opt out. I just called to remove myself from their database. Here is the transcript of my call:

System: “For service in English, press 1.”
me: 1
System: “For residential inquiries, press 1.”
me: 1
System: “Welcome to Canada Post Customer Service. Goodbye.”

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THIS AIN’T OVER

It’s estimated (Black Rock City Corp is secretive) that the lottery had 70,000 credit cards requesting 1.7 tickets (total of 120,000 requests for 40,000 tickets = 1 in 3 odds). The highest ever recorded yearly jump in ticket demand was 15%, so at most there is a real demand for 62,000 total tickets. 3,000 tickets were sold in the presale and 10,000 remain to be sold, leaving a real demand for 49,000 tickets. Not all those 49,000 potential attendees had the financial ability to purchase a ticket at this time, so it’s assumed that many people entered the lottery with multiple cards and are now holding surplus tickets.

Surplus tickets will be redistributed in one of three ways:

• The official Secure Ticket Exchange Program
• Craigslist, eBay and StubHub
• Local community transactions

Since physical tickets aren’t distributed until July, there is a significant risk to buying tickets unofficially online. The official exchange program will only redistribute tickets at face value, but many Burners believe that is the only ethical price. I suspect most Burners will redistribute their tickets in their local community.

Unfortunately, applications for theme camps, art installations, mutant vehicles, fire conclave troops, regional effigies and other projects are due before many of the tickets will be redistributed. Most people who submit proposals for projects are connected to their local Burner communities, so they will have no problem getting tickets in the long run. The question is: will uncertainly about tickets cause these projects to lose momentum? Certainly I’ll have trouble continuing my personal planning and local contributions with full enthusiasm. (I hadn’t really thought about this when I first endorsed the lottery.)

Although I still think a lottery is the best general solution to excess demand for an economically-diverse event, the participation aspect of Burning Man suggests a different approach: have leaders of projects and regional contacts hand out tickets. It distributes and scales the selection on merit currently done for low income and art grant tickets. This is not necessarily more biased against virgins than any other way of distributing tickets and would skew attendees in a mostly good way.

Today was “payday” — really my business’ outstanding invoices got resolved — so “my business” — actually, they ARE for my business because I can use them on games — got some new equipment:

That’s me playing the nanoPAD2, which is a cheapo Korg pad controller*, and the X-Session Pro, which is an M-Audio DJ mixing board. I, or “we” maybe, was/were going to get an APC40, which is something similar and slathered in blinkenlights and much more costly, but the Akai factory was destroyed in the Thai tsunami and no one in Canada has been able to buy new Akai stuff since before XMas. Or so, at least, the kind hipster at Moog Audio informed me.

I used the pads to trigger all the instruments, and tweaked various parameters like snare snappiness and the frequencies of the noise floor during the drop with the mixer.

* like Araabmuzik uses

I’ve written before about Canada Post. Well, silly me, I trusted them again.

I’ve been stymied on a video project for a while and one of my friends agreed to help me finish it. I needed to send him 100 gigs of footage, so I cleared off one of my terabyte drives and packed it up. My studio is equidistant from a UPS store and a Canada Post outlet. I picked the wrong one.

I paid for insurance. I paid for guaranteed delivery. I was promised it would arrive last Thursday — and I double-checked this because I’m under time pressure. Today, Tuesday, it arrived… AT MY HOUSE IN TORONTO. They gave themselves a five day extension and then did it wrong anyway: CLUSTERFAIL.

This is a truly monstrous waste of taxpayer dollars. I would probably be even more upset if I paid taxes.

Naomi Klein claimed, in The Shock Doctrine, that the Right’s modus operandi is to wait for disasters and then use them as causi belli (forgive my probably-wrong Latin pluralization) to execute their agenda. Well, here’s a freebie: our economy is SHRINKING — there aren’t enough resources to go around — let’s stop delivering post in, say, the GTA. Just for a week.

I predict that people won’t notice, let alone care. If they do, either, just restart it.

But imagine: a whole week of not killing trees for paper-based spam, not having our identities and belongings stolen, and having packages delivered TO THEIR RECIPIENTS (I can’t stress this point enough — it’s really the whole key to “delivery”, as a concept, and I’m willing to pay extra for it)… Oh, what a magical land of joy our fair city might become.

And once that experiment is successful we could roll it out to the whole nation:

Seriously, though: I would rather Harper just keep the entire postal budget for himself. The money would do me just as much good, but he’d retire from politics. Maybe he could split it with Ford.

[UPDATE: THEY BILLED US EXTRA TO TAKE DELIVERY AT THE WRONG LOCATION.]

More new techniques: all the instruments play in their own dominant frequency range, the kick is unprocessed but I changed from the simulated 808 to the simulated 909, added snare rolls and crash cymbals, and played with some new software instruments & effects (Sound Toys).

This is structured as the lead-up to a notional first drop. I don’t like the lead, but it’s mostly there to counterpoint the bass. Snares need work. The lead pans wide, so if you’re not on headphones it’s mud.

A 909, correctly compressed, with just a touch of EQ, is the business. — The Dance Music Manual

Project Opal is underway. Team Z: go!

A new film from Bobcat. I think he’s awesome, and getting better (via Dutchman, without his endorsement):

Republican presidential heaving always gives me a similar sense of epic bleakness.

Here is a test of a bunch of different new techniques, particularly band-filtering instrument tracks. The bass is sharply attenuated above 1khz, while the piano lead has the same done, below 1khz. This carves out a sense of space in the mix and helps it gel — neither sound interferes with the other. The structure is the simplest, most straightforward I could think of at the time that would get me to 64 bars. A maj / F# min, 140 bpm.

Here is the same with heavy sim-vinyl distortion:

Thanks to Dutchman.

Burning Man: the most diverse group of white people you will ever meet. – Blu

The official Burning Man blog (which is written by a volunteer) ran an interesting post about the lack of ethnic diversity among Burners. In the post and comments a number of reasons to explain the lack of ethnic minorities were put forward:

• Going to Burning Man requires a cultural sense of physical and economic security that ethnic minorities have only gained in the last generation. Economic security comes not just from personal income, but from multi-generational wealth, networking and a social safety net.
• Minority culture tends to be more sexually conservative.
• Minorities are more family and community focused, while Burning Man is heavily individualistic. Alternately, only white people need to go to Burning Man to find community.
• Minority culture grew from the civil rights movement while white counter culture grew from an individualistic movement.
• Minorities don’t like camping: “the last time [my Japanese family] went camping, it was an internment camp“
• All the cultural appropriation makes them uncomfortable.
• “Being colorful for a week in the desert might not have the same appeal for those who feel like they are outside of the mainstream all the time.“

Although one comment argued that if you control for income and education, there is no ethnic disparity. Given that none of the census reports after 2008 have been made public, it’s difficult to have an informed discussion about this.

I think it requires a level of immersion within the capitalist system that enables one to afford the luxury of attending as well as a degree of personal consumer excess high enough that one looks forward to an escape from that excess. Maybe it also requires a bit of blindness to the waste involved in a celebration that rejects attachment to worldly possessions by burning them to the ground. That said, I already have my tickets, airline reservations and RV reserved. I suspect that people of color attend in proportion to the percentage of them that have achieved this level of hypocrisy. – Paul Williams