When my house flooded 149 days ago, a lot of things were damaged. The oak floors, for one, were completely wrecked, as the ground floor
electrical ring, the skirting boards, one internal wall, a few hundred books and small items, and a load of furniture. Since then we’ve lived in a few places – but mostly at the
“Chicory House” – while the insurance company has been working on repairing and replacing everything that we’ve lost.
This week, we got back the piano.
Professional piano movers make this job look easy. But having tried to move a piano before, it’s definitely not.
Our insurance policy is “new for old”, but we own a handful of pieces of furniture whether it’s impractical or impossible to replace them like-for-like and we’ve instead petitioned for
restoration. For example: our dining table is a bit of a family heirloom, a mahogany reading room desk formerly from the libraries of the University of Cambridge, adapted by Ruth‘s (carpenter) father into a dining table1.
Another example turns out to be our upright piano, which turns out to be a bit of a musical oddity: it’s got features, like it’s peculiar gravity-controlled overdampers that, among
other characteristics, are pretty distinct to the Edwardian or perhaps inter-war construction techniques that were in vogue at the time2.
Follow the line of the tide mark fromt he glasses cabinet to the piano and it’s clear that the body of the instrument sat full of water for some time. 😢
In any case: after a piano specialist wrote us a statement explaining that it simply wasn’t possible to “new-for-old” this because they don’t make them like this
any more, the insurance company signed-off on us sending it away to what I lovingly called a “piano hospital”, where she’s enjoyed a complete overhaul.
And now, at last, it’s back with us: we could have kept it in storage until we’re ready to move back “home” (there’s still a lot of repair work to be done!), but having it moved
twice is cheaper… plus it means we get it back sooner.
There was clearly a lot of TLC available at the “piano hospital”: it’s got a whole new set of strings, new felt, and even her internal metalwork has been polished to a shine.
Personally, I’ve found it an enormous psychological relief to have the piano back, because I’ve missed it!
And so for several years, most days, I’d play about 10 minutes of piano. Not much: just a little each day usually while my lunch warmed up. But slowly but surely I reached the point
that I could tolerate – or even enjoy! – hearing myself play4.
And then after the flood… I couldn’t. I’d get up from work to stretch my legs and my fingers would twitch in anticipation of fulfilling a routine that… I just didn’t get to, any more. I
tried playing the electric piano at the local library but its headphones were damaged and the action didn’t feel right and… it just wasn’t the same. I wanted our piano
back!
It feels a bit weird playing the piano between the bottom of the stairs and the front door, but space is short in the Chicory House so we make do with where we can put things.
And now I’ve got it. And it feels fantastic. It’s a little different – the sustain pedal’s response is a lot better, but more nuanced, and I’m not used to it yet, for example. But it’s
still a wonderful thing: like a family member coming home after a long period away.
Also: it feels like a small victory to have something back, following the flood, because the entire insurance/assessment/repair process continues to be so slow.
Our house may still be stuck with no floors and missing walls… but, five months later, the first things to be repaired are coming back to us.
Maybe soon we’ll have, I don’t know, a working kitchen or the plumbing re-connected. Here’s hoping!
Footnotes
1 The transformation of the reading room desk – which once sported integrated reading
lights – into a general-purpose table has been done so-effectively that you wouldn’t know to look at it that our largest piece of furniture had ever had another life… unless
you lift the secret panel in its centre foot, at which point you’d discover a BS 546 plug still wired-in to it!
2 Don’t ask me to enumerate the particular features or how we know: JTA, plus our piano tuner, did the research that ultimately underpinned the argument that you couldn’t possibly acquire a like-for-like
replacement for it. I just know how it feels and sounds.
4 I fully appreciate that I will never be as good a pianist as, say, the average 8-year
old who plays for their YouTube channel. I am fine with this. Like my blogging, my piano-playing is, first and foremost, for me and not for anybody else.
The Walkman is the Sony WM-EX521 from 2002, which is a pretty late model. It’s not one of the classics from the 80s, but I really
like the design, the case is made out of metal so it looks and feels really solid and with it being relatively young, I don’t expect too many problems. In fact, I had a suspicion
that the only thing that was wrong with it might be the belt. Tape drives have rubber belts in them which link the motor with the tape mechanism, and these wear out over time. They
can become loose or lose their elasticity, some break and some also try to turn themselves back into crude oil, which leaves a giant mess behind.
So when the Walkman arrived, I opened the back to see how it looked on the inside, which required putting it on a heat plate for a few minutes to soften the adhesive, and then I
could carefully insert a plastic tool between the frame and the back cover and start prying… nah, I’m kidding. This was made before all of that nonsense. You take out five screws
and you’re in. Which is how it should be.
Anyway, I took the back off, stuck a battery in, pressed play and I could see that the motor was spinning, but the belt was loose and wasn’t moving. Suspicion confirmed, the belt
was bad. Thankfully it was just worn out and hadn’t disintegrated yet, so that’s an easy fix.
I ordered a new belt here, which arrived a few days later from Portugal, and replaced the old one. I also sprayed some contact cleaner into
the volume potentiometer while I was at it, because it sounded very noisy and scratchy. Here are some pictures, and you can see the old, worn out belt next to the new one. It’s
literally twice as long! No wonder it wasn’t working anymore.
…
This entire post is amazing. Every step Andreas takes, from selecting and buying an (old) Walkman, to repairing its belt, to using the (known) frequency of the first note of a song to
“tune” it by recalibrating the speed control potentiometer while playing into a guitar tuner app… feels like you’re being taken along on the journey with him.
I really enjoy Andreas’ writing style and posts, so I’ll be adding him to the blogroll. A delightful and serendipitous find (courtesy of Bubbles).
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging
people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was
particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit
“random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other
sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
My random article for the day was about Here & Now, the second album of Pop Shuvit, a Malaysian hip hop/nu
metal band most-active from around 2002 to 2011. I listened to the album; the title track’s pretty good, and I enjoyed Old Skool Rocka and Put ‘Em Up too.
I dig the album art. I think the one holding the skateboard is bassist ‘AJ’; which ties to the next part of my journey…
The band take their name from a skateboarding trick called a pop shove-it, presumably using the different spelling to aid their ability to protect their copyright on it.
And this is the point at which I briefly got lost in the depths of Wikipedia’s article about skateboarding. A pop shove-it, you see, is apparently a combination of
an ollie and a shove-it,
which still sounded like a foreign language to me, so I had to read up on both. Here’s what I learned:
An ollie is when you stomp down on the back of the board to make it jump, while sliding the front foot forward from the midpoint to keep it somewhat-level and stop it
flipping “over”. This results in the entire board jumping while remaining almost-horizontal, while the skater flies just above it.
A shove-it is when you rotate the board 180° laterally, so that the “back” end of the board becomes the “front” and vice-versa: so the board ends up landing and its
wheels roll the opposite direction they did at the start of the trick, but the board and skater carry on moving forwards. It’s done by giving the board a bit of a kick to start it
rotating and then landing on it with enough pressure to stop it rotating again.
That’s a terrible explanation. Here’s a terrible diagram from Wikipedia that probably doesn’t help either: (you’ll want to find a video if you really want to understand it, but
that goes beyond what’s available on Wikipedia, so I’m not sharing it as part of this blog series!)
I note that the creator of this diagram chose to spell the trick in the same way as the band name. Diagram courtesy of GoSkate.com, used under a Creative Commons license.
The pop shove-it was originally called the Ty hop, after its inventor Ty Page, a famous skateboard in the 1970s also
known by the name “Mr. Incredible”.
I could list some of the other fifty-plus moves he’s credited with inventing (like the pay hop, daffy or yeah right manual, and the toe-spin 360),
but it’d probably only be fun and interesting if I mixed-in a few fake ones I conceived of myself (like the nip trip, double pipe-tail, and the indo
180).
Skateboarding had been around since at least the 1950s and had exploded in popularity in the 1960s, but a major part of
the reason Ty was able to invent totally new tricks in the 1970s was the result of a two new innovations that took off at that time:
Polyurethane wheels, invented by Frank Nasworthy to supplant the use of hard steel wheels (commonly used by rollerskates at the time) or clay composite wheels.
Steel wheels were fast and smooth-running, but because they’re hard they provide little grip, which makes stunts harder to control. Clay composite wheels were softer and easier, but
wore out quickly, needing to be replaced after as little as seven hours of skating. Polyurethane gives a best-of-both worlds, giving a long-wearing but soft-enough-to-grip surface to
the wheel from a material that was rapidly becoming cheaper to manufacture.
The kicktail, invented (and patented) by Larry Stevenson, is the curved-up bit at the end of a board, so named because it originally only appeared at the back of a board
(although Larry cleverly obtained a separate later patent on double-kicktails: one at the front and one at the rear – the front one is sometimes called a
kicknose). A kicktail makes it much easier and safer to lift a board by stamping down on it, or else can make it possible to get more lift with a similar level of ease,
compared to a completely flat board.
Who knew there’s so much terminology in a skateboard‽ The wheel is attached to a truck which is attached to the deck of the board. Cropped from the original by
Suyash Dwivedi, used under a Creative Commons license.
Ty Page helped promote the kicktail as part of the Makaha Team, sponsored by Stevenson’s company MAKAHA Skateboards. And here’s where I jumped into a whole different rabbithole.
At this point in history – as skateboarding was just beginning to come into its own as a sport – there was an enormous intersection between surfboarders and skateboarders, many of whom
would surf when weather and tide conditions were right and skate when they weren’t.
Larry Stevenson was such an individual. On his way to his deployment in the Korean War, he stopped at Hawaii where he found a
particular beach to be excellent for surfing. That beach, which would eventually give its name to his company, was at the town of… Mākaha.
Gotta admit, Mākaha Beach Park looks pretty lush. Photo courtesy Nicolai Edgar Andersen, used under a Creative Commons license.
One thing I found interesting while reading about Mākaha is that it’s the home of Kāne’āki Heiau, Hawaii’s most-completely restored heiau. Heiau are temples of the indigenous religion of Native Hawaiians, a polytheistic and animistic belief structure itself seemingly related to earlier Māori practices brought over by Polynesian seafarers from 800 CE onwards.
According to tradition, heiau were built by menehune, mythological two-foot high dwarves who lived in the deep forests and
hidden valleys, far from humans, and came out at night to build structures and dig fish ponds. The concept is comparable to the European idea of brownies or hobgoblins, in particular the pre-Christian idea of these
spirits as being helpful to humans so long as they’re treated with respect.
Menehune with Fish by David Howard Hitchcock, 1933. Menehune were said to especially enjoy eating bananas and fish. Fun fact: the sparsely-populated Wainiha Valley was declared by census in 1500 to have a population of 65 menehune.
Pressure from Christian missionaries in Hawaii from 1820 onwards led to the neglect and destruction of most heiau, except for the most-remote of them. One such remote temple was the
standing stones on Necker Island (see: we got there eventually!).
Necker Island is named after Jacques Necker, France’s finance minister at the time that the first European explorer – Jean-François de Galaup – sighted the rock. We don’t know what ancient Hawaiian peoples called
it, but reverse-engineering Hawaiian chants passed down by oral tradition that include descriptions of islands
has led the Hawaiian Lexicon Committee to assign it the name Mokumanamana, which means “pinnacled island”.
Necker Island as photographed in 1969 by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
We also don’t know when Necker Island was last inhabited, but it seems that its poor thin soil is likely to have prevented permanent settlement. However, there’s evidence that its caves
were used for human habitation from time to time, and some have been used as tombs. Even landing on the island is difficult on account of its sheer stone cliffs around its edge (which
is part of the rim of what was once a volcanic cone).
Researchers recognise that the structures on Necker Island represent an earlier iteration of Hawaiian religion than other heiau and some use the Māori term marae to refer to them. Similar structures are found in New Zealand, for example.
But do you know what archaeologists found on Necker Island, amongst the standing stones? Menehune figurines, carved out of basalt, one and a half to two feet tall. Tales in the oral
traditions of the natives of the island of Kauaʻi describe Necker Island as the last refuge of the diminutive builders after they
were chased off the main island by the newly-arrived Polynesians.
Where are the stone figures right now? Well this one, and another one, are in the British Museum. Because of course they
are.
In the way that was long-traditional for European empires exploring the culturally-important sites of distant lands, many of the artefacts found on Necker Island aren’t there any more.
But the standing stones are still standing, and human remains that were removed and put into a museum have been returned and re-buried, at least.
So that’s Necker Island! Which I learned about because Wikipedia randomly chose me an article about an album by a Malaysian hip hop band, whose name derives from a skateboarding trick
that’s possible thanks to an invention by a man whose skateboarding company was named after a surf-friendly Hawaiian beach near a town that has ruins of a temple allegedly built my
mythological dwarves who are said to have lived there. It’s been quite a journey! I wonder where tomorrow’s will take me.
This post contains and links to (clearly-identified) AI-generated content. As remains the case, none of my writing on this blog was generated by AI.
Imagine my excitement to learn that Pagan Wander Lu just dropped a new EP, Built In Obsolescence. And then imagine my horror to discover that it’s actually produced by P-AI-gan
Wanderer Lu; an AI that’s been given PWL lyrics and some artistic direction.
Wot.
The album art’s clearly also AI-generated, and that’s… well… you know. At least this robot hand has got the correct number of fingers.
Nothingness is what silicon dreams
My younger child’s been getting into PWL in a big way lately. As a result of this, I ended up making time for a careful re-listen to a lot of the back catalogue. This in turn inspired
a blog post last year in which I mentioned that Checker Charlie‘s observations about humans
replacing their work with machine effort feels increasingly prophetic in the age of generative AI. That’s something I didn’t see in it when I first reviewed it 13 years prior.
I’ve played with AI-generated music a couple of times myself, of course,
mostly as an academic exercise. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that it’s hard to avoid bumping into it in the “real world”.
Early efforts at AI music were pretty unconvincing, always sounding a bit auto-tuney, frequently struggling to stress lines in the right places, and tripping over themselves when they
try to do anything even remotely more-interesting than a simple repeating melody atop a predictable chord sequence. But they’re getting… shall we say… “better”, and there have been
times nowadays when I’ve gotten some way through a track before realising that I’m listening to AI.
At least PWL’s being honest about it and declaring at the outset that this is AI-generated art. There’s plenty of folks using AI to generate content online and not
declaring it, which is pretty awful1.
Anyway: in this EP the AI’s moderately well-concealed and listening casually to most of the tracks I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been told2.
Is there life enough in these chords?
So I listened to the EP. Three times.
The cover of Checker Charlie, I’m sad to admit, works. It’s got the feel of early-nineties pop, full of synths and saccharine, but instead of insipid lyrics about
love it benefits a lot from Andy’s lyrical prowess. It’s a bouncy bop that would be forgettable if it weren’t for the excellent story told by the words is, I suppose, what
I mean to say. And, of course, it’s the song that would have made me think about this. Anyway: I enjoyed it and would absolutely listen to it again, and I don’t know what
that says about me, about the song, or anything else.
Uncanny Valley doesn’t work as well. Musically, it feels like a new artist in 2012 drew inspiration from their dad’s new wave albums but wanted to make it sound more like Carly
Rae Jepsen was collabing with Daft Punk. And the result is kind-of…flat? Could I even say… soulless? It feels like it might have been the B-side of their cover
of Chemicals Like You, which rolls out next in the same vein. Twice was probably enough for these two.
Repetition 4 is among my favourite – let’s say top 15? – Pagan Wanderer Lu songs and the AI’s cover of it starts so strong. It finishes pretty strong too. The
voice it’s chosen shows only a hint of uncanny-valley-autotune and it wails plaintively. The most human-made bits – the lyrical themes of fighting for creativity against your own
struggles as a vulnerable and flawed human “machine” – remain solid. I really expected to love this one! But by the time we were half way through the song it felt… musically-repetitive.
You know when you get a pop cover of a classic song sometimes3 and you feel like the cover artist… missed the point somehow? That’s what this feels
like to me.
The repetitions of “we are all machines… for dancing” in the original felt meaningful and real; a human’s cathartic resignation to pleasure in the simple things we all enjoy, despite
the challenges of life… but the AI cover adds this kind of doo-woppy backing vocals that subtract, rather than adding to, the meaning. I’m not saying it ruins it –
it’s still a fun and bouncy version of a great song… but it’s one of those covers that leaves you longing for the original.
And then there’s the “unaligned version” of Uncanny Valley. I’m not sure if the introduced distortions in this version are AI-generated or not. They
don’t feel like the kinds of “creative” choices that any AI I’ve played with would make, so I suspect this represents a closer human intervention in the AI’s process:
humans imitating machines imitating humans, perhaps? Anyway: the change doesn’t add anything for me.
Had this been produced entirely by a human, I’d say that EP consists one one track I’d add to my everyday playlist (the cover of Checker Charlie), maybe one or two
tracks that I “wouldn’t necessarily skip” if they came up on a random shuffle while I wad driving… and the rest just feels too much like “bad cover” vibes.
And that’s as much of a review as I’m willing to give, for the reasons touched-upon below.
Building the engines of our own defeat
I continue to have several issues with the widespread use of generative AI, and in particular I have problems with it being used in the production of art. Those are partially
mitigated by it being used by an artist to remix their own work, and partially mitigated by the transparent declaration of the use of AI by the publisher both of which are
true in this case. But many issues (ethical, environmental, etc.) still remain.
Perhaps the biggest of which in this case is my concern that we’re using automation wrong.
As a child, I was optimistic about a future in which machines would take away the boring and repetitive work that humans do, leaving us free to pivot to experimental and experiential
roles: the joy of working hard in the quest of discovery and of creativity. But instead, the predominant popular use of generative AI is to replace exactly those
things, leaving humans only with an increasing amount of drudgery, review, and fact-checking. Where did we go wrong?
Don’t get me wrong: I love that Pagan Wanderer Lu has created this EP. Taking art that he’s created, whose concept touches on the concepts of AI… and feeding them into an
actual AI for reinterpretation is transformative. It’s worthy of discussion as a piece of art in its own right. And the result is… well, some of it’s good, and other
bits are okay.
What I don’t like is what it represents: the wider societal issue of the mainstream use of these technologies that have enormous unsolved problems.
So I guess… I appreciate the cognitive dissonance of enjoying a peice of music and disliking what it means?
Footnotes
1 Whether or not the side-effect of undisclosed AI-generated content “poisoning the well”
for future AI training is a good or bad thing remains an open question, in my mind, but it’s certainly a real phenomenon. You know how we salvage the wrecks of ships sunk before the atomic age because they’re untainted by man-made radioactivity, which makes them useful for special
purposes? It feels like the Internet before the explosion in generative AI may provide a similar cultural resource for future AI training, if you see what I mean.
2 And assuming I wasn’t already familiar with the artist, who doesn’t usually
sound like an auto-tuned female singer.
3 I don’t have a specific example so I hope this is a universal experience!
Coming across from Finstock via R’n’R #9 (we’re absolutely doing this series in the wrong order!), the geokid, geopup and I made a poor choice by hugging the tree line rather than
cutting out of the field and coming up the road: it was super muddy in the field at the points at which the footpath runs nearest to this cache, and we struggled to get through a
particularly large puddle.
We initially made an effort to get “behind” the bush but eventually discovered we didn’t need to: the cache (whose nature we’d eventually managed to guess from the name) was accessible
– with a bit of a stretch – from near the roadside.
And, in accordance with the theme, we’ve got a verse for you:
🎶 I used to wonder what caching could be,
🎶 Until you all shared this series with me.
🎶 Big adventure, tons of fun.
🎶 A beautiful cache; now it’s signed and done!
This is a blog post about things that make me nostalgic for other things that, objectively, aren’t very similar…
When I hear Dawnbreaker, I feel like I’m nine years old…
…and I’ve been allowed to play OutRun on the arcade cabinet at West View
Leisure Centre. My swimming lesson has finished, and normally I should go directly home.
On those rare occasions I could get away1
with a quick pause in the lobby for a game, I’d gravitate towards the Wonderboy machine. But there was something about the tactile
controls of OutRun‘s steering wheel and pedals that gave it a physicality that the “joystick and two buttons” systems couldn’t replicate.
The other thing about OutRun was that it always felt… fast. Like, eye-wateringly fast. This was part of what gave it such appeal2.
OutRun‘s main theme, Magical Sound Shower, doesn’t actually sound much like Dawnbreaker. But
both tracks somehow feel like… “driving music”?
But somehow when I’m driving or cycling and it this song comes on, I’m instantly transported back to those occasionally-permitted childhood games of OutRun4.
When I start a new Ruby project, I feel like I’m eleven years old…
It’s not quite a HELLO WORLD, but it’s pretty-similar.
At first I assumed that the tedious bits and the administrative overhead (linking, compiling, syntactical surprises, arcane naming conventions…) was just what “real”, “grown-up”
programming was supposed to feel like. But Ruby helped remind me that programming can be fun for its own sake. Not just because of the problems you’re solving or the product
you’re creating, but just for the love of programming.
The experience of starting a new Ruby project feels just like booting up my Amstrad CPC and being able to joyfully write code that will just work.
I still learn new programming languages because, well, I love doing so. But I’m yet to find one that makes me want
to write poetry in it in the way that Ruby does.
When I hear In Yer Face, I feel like I’m thirteen years old…
…and I’m painting Advanced HeroQuest miniatures6 in the attic at my dad’s house.
I’ve cobbled together a stereo system of my very own, mostly from other people’s castoffs, and set it up in “The Den”, our recently-converted attic7,
and my friends and I would make and trade mixtapes with one another. One tape began with 808 State’s In Yer Face8,
and it was often the tape that I would put on when I’d sit down to paint.
Advanced HeroQuest came with some fabulously ornate secondary components, like the doors that were hinged so their their open/closed state could be toggled, and I spent
way too long painting almost the entirety of my base set.
In a world before CD audio took off, “shuffle” wasn’t a thing, and we’d often listen to all of the tracks on a medium in sequence9.
That was doubly true for tapes, where rewinding and fast-forwarding took time and seeking for a particular track was challenging compared to e.g. vinyl. Any given song would loop around
a lot if I couldn’t be bothered to change tapes, instead just flipping again and again10.
But somehow it’s whenever I hear In Yer Face11
that I’m transported right back to that time, in a reverie so corporeal that I can almost smell the paint thinner.
When I see a personal Web page, I (still) feel like I’m fifteen years old…
…and the Web is on the cusp of becoming the hot “killer application” for the Internet. I’ve been lucky enough to be “online” for a few years by now12,
and basic ISP-provided hosting would very soon be competing with cheap, free, and ad-supported services like Geocities to be “the
place” to keep your homepage.
Nowadays, even with a hugely-expanded toolbox, virtually every corporate homepage fundamentally looks the same:
Logo in the top left
Search and login in the top right, if applicable
A cookie/privacy notice covering everything until you work out the right incantation to make it go away without surrendering your firstborn child
A “hero banner“
Some “below the fold” content that most people skip over
A fat footer with several columns of links, to ensure that all the keywords are there so that people never have to see this page and the search engine will drop
them off at relevant child page and not one of their competitors
Finally, a line of icons representing various centralised social networks: at least one is out-of-date, either because (a) it’s been renamed, (b) it’s changed its
branding, or (c) nobody with any moral fortitude uses that network any more14
But before the corporate Web became the default, personal home pages brought a level of personality that for a while I worried was forever dead.
2 Have you played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds? The first time I played it I was overwhelmed by the speed and colours of the
game: it’s such a high-octane visual feast. Well that’s what OutRun felt like to those of us who, in the 1980s, were used to much-simpler and slower arcade games.
3 Also, how cool is it that Metrik has a blog, in this day and age? Max props.
4 Did you hear, by the way, that there’s talk of a movie adaptation of OutRun, which could turn out to be the worst
videogame-to-movie concept that I’ll ever definitely-watch.
5 In very-approximate order: C, Assembly, Pascal, HTML, Perl, Visual Basic (does that even
count as a “grown-up” language?), Java, Delphi, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, ASP (classic, pre-.NET), CSS, Lisp, C#, Ruby, Python (though I didn’t get on with it so well), Go, Elixir… plus
many others I’m sure!
6 Or possibly they were Warhammer Quest miniatures by this point; probably this memory spans one, and also the other, blended together.
7 Eventually my dad and I gave up on using the partially-boarded loft to intermittently
build a model railway layout, mostly using second-hand/trade-in parts from “Trains & Transport”, which was exactly the nerdy kind of model shop you’re imagining right now: underlit
and occupied by a parade of shuffling neckbeards, between whom young-me would squeeze to see if the mix-and-match bin had any good condition HO-gauge flexitrack. We converted the
attic and it became “The Den”, a secondary space principally for my use. This was, in the most part, a concession for my vacating of a large bedroom and instead switching to the
smallest-imaginable bedroom in the house (barely big enough to hold a single bed!), which in turn enabled my baby sister to have a bedroom of her own.
8 My copy of In Yer Face was possibly recorded from the radio by my friend ScGary, who always had a tape deck set up with his finger primed close to the record key when the singles chart came on.
9 I soon learned to recognise “my” copy of tracks by their particular cut-in and -out
points, static and noise – some of which, amazingly, survived into the MP3 era – and of course the tracks that came before or after them, and
there are still pieces of music where, when I hear them, I “expect” them to be followed by something that they used to some mixtape I listened to a lot 30+ years
ago!
10 How amazing a user interface affordance was it that playing one side of an audio
cassette was mechanically-equivalent to (slowly) rewinding the other side? Contrast other tape formats, like VHS, which were one-sided and so while rewinding there was
literally nothing else your player could be doing. A “full” audio cassette was a marvellous thing, and I especially loved the serendipity where a recognisable “gap” on one
side of the tape might approximately line-up with one on the other side, meaning that you could, say, flip the tape after the opening intro to one song and know that you’d be
pretty-much at the start of a different one, on the other side. Does any other medium have anything quite analogous to that?
11 Which is pretty rare, unless I choose to put it on… although I did overhear it
“organically” last summer: it was coming out of a Bluetooth speaker in a narrowboat moored in the Oxford Canal near Cropredy, where I was using the towpath to return from a long walk to nearby Northamptonshire where I’d been searching for a geocache. This was a particularly surprising
place to overhear such a song, given that many of the boats moored here probably belonged to attendees of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, at which – being a folk music festival – one
might not expect to see significant overlap of musical taste with “Madchester”-era acid house music!
12 My first online experiences were on BBS systems, of which my very first was on a
mid-80s PC1512 using a 2800-baud acoustic coupler! I got onto the Internet at a point in the early 90s at which the Web
existed… but hadn’t yet demonstrated that it would eventually come to usurp the services that existed before it: so I got to use Usenet, Gopher, Telnet and IRC before I saw
my first Web browser (it was Cello, but I switched to Netscape Navigator soon after it was released).
13 On the rare occasion I close my browser, these days, it re-opens with whatever
hundred or so tabs I was last using right back where I left them. Gosh, I’m a slob for tabs.
14 Or, if it’s a Twitter icon: all three of these.
15 Of course, they’re harder to find. SEO-manipulating behemoths dominate the search
results while social networks push their “apps” and walled gardens to try to keep us off the bigger, wider Web… and the more you cut both our of your online life, the calmer and
happier you’ll be.
Over the Christmas break I dug out my old HTC Vive VR gear, which I got way back in the Spring of 2016. Graphics card technology having come a long
way1,
it was now relatively simple to set up a fully-working “holodeck” in our living room with only a slight risk to the baubles on the Christmas tree.
For our younger child, this was his first experience of “roomscale VR”, which I maintain is the most magical thing about this specific kind of augmented
reality. Six degrees of freedom for your head and each of your hands provides the critical level of immersion, for me.
And you know what: this ten-year-old hardware of mine still holds up and is still awesome!2
The kids and I have spent a few days dipping in and out of classics like theBlu, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Raw Data,
and (in my case3)
Half-Life: Alyx.
It doesn’t feel too heavy, but this first edition Vive sure is a big beast, isn’t it?
I’m moderately excited by the upcoming Steam Frame with its skinny headset, balanced weight, high-bandwidth
wireless connectivity, foveated streaming, and built-in PC for basic gaming… but what’s with those controllers? Using AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable one feels like a
step backwards, and the lack of a thumb “trackpad” seems a little limiting too. I’ll be waiting to see the reviews, thanks.
When I looked back at my blog to double-check that my Vive really is a decade old, I was reminded that I got it in the same month at Three
Rings‘ 2016 hackathon, then called “DevCamp”, near Tintern4.
This amused me, because I’m returning to Tintern this year, too, although on family holiday rather than Three Rings business. Maybe I’ll visit on a third occasion in
another decade’s time, following another round of VR gaming?
Footnotes
1 The then-high-end graphics card I used to use to drive this rig got replaced
many years ago… and then that replacement card in turn got replaced recently, at which point it became a hand-me-down for our media centre PC in the living room.
2 I’ve had the Vive hooked-up in the office since our house move in 2020, but there’s rarely been space for roomscale play there: just an occasional bit of Elite: Dangerous at my desk…
which is still a good application of VR, but not remotely the same thing as being able to stand up and move around!
3 I figure Alyx be a little scary/intense for the kids, but I could be
wrong. I think the biggest demonstration of how immersive the game can be in VR is the moment when you see how somebody can watch it played on the big screen and be fine but as soon
as they’re in the headset and a combine zombie has you pinned-down in a railway carriage and it’s suddenly way too much!
4 Where, while doing a little geocaching, I messed-up a bonus cache’s coordinate
calculation, realised my mistake, brute-forced the possible answers, narrowed it down to two… and then picked the wrong one and fell off a cliff.
I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.
I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.
“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”
…
I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.
I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the
Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular
Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…
Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to
19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!
Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.
I may have raved about other concept albums in the meantime (this one, for example…), but The Signal and the Noise still makes my top 101. I’ve listened to it twice this week, and I still love it.
But I probably love it differently than I used to.
Spy Numbers / One Time Pad remains my favourite pair of tracks on the album, as it always was: like so much of Andy’s music it tells a story that feels almost
like it belongs to a parallel universe… but that’s still relatable and compelling and delightful. And a fun little bop, too.
But In Potential, which I initially declared “a little weaker than the rest” of the album, has grown on me immensely over the course of the last decade. It presents an
optimistic, humanistic conclusion to the album that I look forward to every time. After John Frum Will Return and Checker Charlie open the album in a way that
warns us, almost prophetically, about the dangers of narrow target-lock thinking and AI dependence2, In Potential provides a beautiful and hopeful introspective
about humanity and encourages an attitude of… just being gentle and forgiving with ourselves, I guess.
So yeah, the whole thing remains fantastic. And better yet: Andy announced about six weeks ago that all of his
music is now available under a free/pay-what-you-like model, so if you missed it the first time around, now’s your opportunity to play catch-up!3
Anyway: Acai turns out to be not only a kickass Clone Hero player, but he’s also a fun and charismatic commentator to take along for the ride.
Incidentally, it was fun to see that the same level of attention to detail has been paid to the on-screen lyrics for Clone Hero as were to the subtitles on the video version of the album. For example, they’ll sometimes imply that the next line is what
you’re expecting it to be, based on a familiarity with the song, only to bait-and-switch it out for the actual lyrics at the last second. Genius.
Do I need a “spoiler warning” here? Part of what made the album wonderful for me was coming in blind and not understanding that, somehow, it was both a mashup
collection and a concept album. I’d seriously recommend listening to it yourself and making your own mind up first, before you read my or anybody else’s interpretation of
the themes of the piece.
But assuming that you already listened to it, or that you’re ignoring my suggestion, here’s sophie’s review:
… what?
I am floored. Absolutely flummoxed. This is the first album in a minute to leave me completely speechless. Trying to express how incredible what the fuck I just listened to was is
more than difficult, but I suppose I can try because this album is unbelievably underrated and deserves a million times the attention it’s currently getting. There are really two
main pillars holding this up (don’t overthink that analogy, no, a building with two pillars wouldn’t hold up but that doesn’t matter shut up), those being the execution and the
concept. On a purely technical level, this album is unbelievable. These mashups are so well-achieved, so smooth and believable and un-clunky. The execution of the record is to such
a high standard it almost tricks you, like the best mashup albums do, into believing the pieces of song were always meant to be in this iteration. Purely from a how-does-it-sound
perspective, Musical Transients is remarkable.
But the second pillar, the one that really shook me to my core, is the concept. Don’t read past this point if you don’t want it to get spoiled. Essentially, the narrator of Musical
Transients is a person who realizes he is a she. It’s a trans self-realization project, and one handled with an unbelievable amount of telling care. The mashups are placed together
in a very purposeful manner to express this story chronologically, and the result is a pretty incomparable arc and deeply involving experience. Despite not a single note being
original, you really feel the person behind the screen making it, their story. And despite the subject matter often being focused on the confusion and depression a trans person
might feel, Musical Transients feels more like a towering celebration of trans identity and existence than a depressive meditation on trans suffering. It’s a remarkable feat of
storytelling and mashup production that just works on so many different levels. To me, it has to be among the most impeccably crafted, achingly beautiful albums of the year.
Yes. Yes, this.
I absolutely agree with sophie that there are two things which would individually make this an amazing album, but taken together they elevate the work to something even
greater.
The first aspect of its greatness is the technical execution of the album. Effortless transitions1 backed by clever use of pitch and tempo shifts, wonderfully-executed breakspoints between lines,
within lines, even within words, and such carefully-engineered extraction of the parts of each of the component pieces that it’s hard to believe that
Psynwav doesn’t secretly have access to the studio master recordings of many of them2.
But the second is the story the album tells. Can you tell a story entirely through a musical mashup of other people’s words? You absolutely can, and Musical Transients
might be the single strongest example.
I was perhaps in the third or fourth track, on my first listen-through, when I started asking myself… “Wait a minute? Is this the story of a trans person’s journey of
self-discovery, identity, and coming out?” And at first I thought that I might be reading more into it than was actually there. And then it took until the tremendous,
triumphant final track before I realised “Oh shit, that’s exactly what it’s about. How is it even possible to convey that message in an album like this?”
It’s possible I’d have “got it” sooner had my first listen-through had been to the the “music video version” of the album,
which features visual clues both subtle3
and less-subtle, like… well, the colours in this blinds-transition.
This is a concept album unlike any other that I’ve ever heard. It tells a heartwarming story of trans identity and of victory in the face of adversity. You’re taken along with the
protagonist’s journey, discovering and learning as you go, with occasional hints as the the underlying meaning gradually becoming more and more central to the message. It’s as if you,
the listener, are invited along to experience the same curiosity, confusion, and compromise as the past-version of the protagonist, finding meaning as you go along, before “getting it”
and being able to celebrate in her happiness.
I wish I’d watched the music video version first. Maybe I should be recommending that to people.
And it does all of this using a surprising and entertaining medium that’s so wonderfully-executed that it can be enjoyed even without the obvious4
message that underpins it.
Okay, maybe now I can be done gushing about this album. Maybe.
2 Seriously: how do you isolate the vocals from the chorus of We Will Rock
You while cleanly discarding the guitar sounds? They’re at almost-exactly the same pitch!
3 A subtle visual affordance in the music video might the VHS lines that indicate when
we’re being told “backstory”, which unceremoniously disappear for the glorious conclusion, right after Eminem gets cut off, saying “My name is…”.
4 Yes, obvious. No, seriously; I’m not reaching here. Trans identity is a clear
and unambiguous theme, somehow, without any lyrics explicitly talking about that topic being written; just the careful re-use of the words of other. Just go listen to it and you’ll
see!
This is the age we’re shifting into: an era in which post-truth politics and deepfake proliferation means that when something looks “a bit off”, we assume (a) it’s AI-generated, and (b)
that this represents a deliberate attempt to mislead. (That’s probably a good defence strategy nowadays in general, but this time around it’s… more-complicated…)
…
So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?
The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:
Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse
…
I put them side-by-side below. Try going full-screen and pause at any point to see the difference. The Instagram footage is noticeably better throughout, though some of the audience
clips still have issues.
…
The Internet’s gone a bit wild over the YouTube video of Will Smith with a crowd. And if you look at it, you can see why:
it looks very much like it’s AI-generated. And there’d be motive: I mean, we’ve already seen examples where politicians have been accused (falsely, by Trump, obviously) of using AI to exaggerate the size of their crowds, so
it feels believable that a musician’s media team might do the same, right?
But yeah: it turns out that isn’t what happened here. Smith’s team did use AI, but only to make sign-holding fans from other concerts on the same tour appear
to all be in the same place. But the reason the video “looks AI-generated” is because… YouTube fucked about with it!
It turns out that YouTube have been secretly experimenting with upscaling
shorts, using AI to add detail to blurry elements. You can very clearly see the effect in the video above, which puts the Instagram and YouTube versions of the video side-by-side (of
course, if YouTube decide to retroactively upscale this video then the entire demonstration will be broken anyway, but for now it works!). There are many
points where a face in the background is out-of-focus in the Instagram version, but you can see in the YouTube version it’s been brought into focus by adding details. And
some of those details look a bit… uncanny valley.
Every single bit of this story – YouTube’s secret experiments on creator videos, AI “enhancement” which actually makes things objectively worse, and the immediate knee-jerk reaction of
an understandably jaded and hypersceptical Internet to the result – just helps cement that we truly do live in the stupidest timeline.
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