Right about now, over there in the Netherlands, a princess of that country is getting a surprise birthday party thrown for her by the other various Crown Heads of European countries. As part of the festivities, my sister’s dance company will be performing, with my sister in a big role. Yay! This is a bit of a comeback for sisty, who has been down with injuries for a while and has been soldiering through physical rehab with the kind of will that my only sister and a few fictional action heroes can pull out. So here’s hoping her knee is doing okay. After the performance the dance company is to mingle with the Crown Heads, who reportedly number into the low hundreds.

(note that I have withheld this blog post until evening Netherlands time so as not to ruin the surprise.)

Read the wikipedia article on the Fast Tracker synthetic music sequencer/composer and consider:

1. People composed music by hand in hexidecimal.
2. People developed their own intricate and sophisticated software for doing so. In DOS.
3. When DOS became just too obsolete to be usable on contemporary machines, multiple projects arose to recreate the functionality and interface of the old software for newer operating systems.
4. Other people persisted in using the old software by using DOS emulators.
5. There are such things as DOS emulators, in active development to increase efficiency and speed. Because people need them and want to make them.
6. Other people who didn’t want to use emulators, made themselves computers to run obsolete operating systems so they could run their obsolete (if that is the right word) music sequencers.
7. Those people built and maintained those computers out of obsolete hardware, because their obsolete operating systems and software didn’t support new hardware. So they could run hand-built software to hand-write synth music in hexidecimal.
8. They’re still at it.

You can download and play with stuff too if you like. Lots of people want you to. Here’s some software to play some files from this composer. Watch the numbers flow up the screen. Listen to the lush 8-track arcade-game burbling the numbers make. Ponder, who are these people? Why did I ever think I was weird? Should I maybe aspire to be more weird?

(If you enjoy thinking about that, you might also want to watch Jason Scott’s movie and look at his files.)

Your talk show is weak, but you’re still kinda cool. Henry, how do you explain the difference?

(full disclosure: during last exam season I got a hold of like 2 gigabytes of Rollins’ old spoken word material and it kept my fighting spirit alive through the slog, hence I can never again be an unbiased observer of Him or his Work.)

Hey look, it’s my relationship to my society:

Reason magazine, which I’ve finally realized is about libertarianism, has a great article up about the introduction of an alternative-energy corporate pavilion to Burning Man. The author of the article clearly isn’t a drive-by commentator on the Burning Man thing (he’s previously written a book about the event), and has an interesting perspective and reasonable things to say. Which is nice. I like Reason magazine because it confirms my suspicion that not all self-identifying capitalists are shrill 2-dimensional blowhards. Which is a nice. There’s an awful lot of capitalists out there, and it’s nice to like people.

Generation Dobler

In the end I don’t think I’m quite aligned with the author’s perspective. He finishes off with this:

“I doubt I’ll be spending much time in their pavilion of green technologies this year, but an important message can be found in what they are doing: that the free play of creative action, even in a corporate market context, can be interesting and important, create win-win situations, and be engines of innovative and exciting new ways to act, to accomplish, and to live. Anyone lucky enough to live in America in the 21st century knows this in their bones, even if they are loathe to admit it out loud.”

I made this comment:

There’s a couple of ways to read that closing paragraph.

either 1) that a corporate market context creates exciting new ways to act and accomplish, or

2) that “the free play of creative action” (including but not limited to corporate markets) *can* (but not necessarily has or will) create exciting new ways to act.

The first one I absolutely don’t feel in my bones. Not even a little bit. Actually, I feel kind of the opposite down there.

The second is obviously true, but kind of trivial for bone-feelings. Yes, of course the free play of creative action has the capacity to create exciting new ways to act. It’s just that corporate markets consistently manage to bollocks that potential up and make something unpleasant and even somehow dehumanizing out of it.

And I would have assumed that anyone lucky enough to live in America in the 21st century knows that in their bones, even if they are loathe to admit it out loud. But maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe I am.

Hah! This if fun: The Prejudice Map

Canada faired well. If there’s one thing we excel at, it’s making other people feel warm and fuzzy about us as a general concept. My favourite was Russia. According to the Prejudice Map (e.g., according to Google, e.g. according to the internet), Russians are know for “brutality, passion, being tough negotiators and soulfullness”. Quite a mix.

Like I saw on a tshirt the other day, stereotyping saves time. And this saves you time when stereotyping.

This topic of indie-yuppiedom has got me thinking about “being cool” again. Coolness is one of the enduring paradoxes. I think it’s fair to say that anyone who wants to be cool isn’t, but that leaves an awfully slim field of cool people, certainly a lot fewer than are acknowledged as being cool. Not that being cool and being acknowledged as cool are the same thing. But wait, don’t you have to be acknowledged as cool to be cool, as it is a social definition? Kind of like being a hacker (with that reference, I demonstrate the extent of my own uncoolness).

Yes, very confusing. And all these indie-yuppies, if that is what they are, provide fair examples of the dangers of this confusion.

I present, for what it’s worth, my own role model of truly cool:

Elwy Yost.

Completely un-selfconscious (at least on any scale by which you could measure the self-consciousness of the hordes who claim the title of coolness), joyous in his chosen arena, well versed in it (but not so he could show off, only so he could enjoy and share), posessing of a kicking name, successful by his own measure, with his own satisfaction in his own style, Elwy Yost is to my mind, unimpeachably cool.

Somebody tell him.