holy rollers

Remember when we had the chance to organise and launch a meaningful and effective protest against tyrants and eroding liberties? I do—because that was four blessed months ago. There were concerted efforts in the States to block efforts of the tele-communications industry to eviscerate internet-neutrality and we could rally against overt and covert discrimination but now (and both under the aegis of ‘freedom’) and surely by design there’s little time to mobilise.
Dear Leader is to capitalise of the fervour of his base of supporters to undo a raft of civil rights and a half century of progress in America—that was once a model, however imperfect, for the world to aspire to—and, informed by his viceroy’s convictions and unpopular experiment, is to deliver via Imperial Decree Executive Order that would allow companies to take exception with their customers and employees should their lifestyle—or reproductive choices—present a personal ethical challenge. Religion ought not to be hijacked for such ends, and don’t dare conflate it with Sharia law and those roving bands that check for compliance under threat of severe punishment, because in the eyes of Dear Leader Islam is an ideology and not a matter of faith and therefore not deserving of the protection of the law.

gadheim, gadfly oder the centre cannot hold

Though among the first to acknowledge that things fall apart and that Brexit was a step backwards for everyone, residents of a tiny Franconian farming village in the county of Würzburg are overwhelmed and excited by all the attention that their native Gadheim (DE) is getting, since once the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union is finalised, they will become the geodetic centre of the EU.  This bittersweet title was taken from a suburb sixty kilometres to the northwest called Westerngrund that captured the centre (due to the way geography of the EU) from 2013 onward when Croatia joined the now twenty-seven nation bloc. Hopefully, when Gadheim relinquishes its claim, it will be over expansion and not over another member’s departure.

travelling matte

Via Kottke, we are acquainted with the artistry, which while far from being overlooked was strictly relegated to the background, of the painters who created the matte panels for the Star Wars trilogy and other franchises in an age before computer generated landscapes and digital photo-realistic manipulation. Of course, the technique does not begin with the 1970s space opera but quite a few wide-angle, panning and establishing shots executed with precision allowed audiences to remain in the fantasies being portrayed and stand alone as iconic, virtual sets.

pitchforks

Dangerous Minds introduces us to the genre and its primogenitor of “Disaster Capitalism” with a profile of Los Angeles-based artist Alex Schaefer, who channels his talent into images of mostly local bank branches engulfed in flames. Because of the police-state that America has embraced, charged with protecting the system that has created and sustains the huge underclass of the 99.99%, Schaefer’s works have garnered the unwelcome publicity of the Department of Homeland Security—accusing him of casing joints for robbery or arson. I am sure that many of us could keep the artist occupied for years with commissions of our friendly neighbourhood financial institutions.

i am pretending not to see them, instead i pour the milk

Boing Boing reports that after more than two decades the Frauenhofer Institute will not seek to renew its licensing programme for the revolutionary but now ubiquitous and in some senses obsolete audio format mp3.
It’s worth taking a look back at the origin story of the one-time industry standard whose encoding relied on “psychoacoustics” to achieve more compact sound files by stripping those background noises that didn’t directly contribute to the listener’s experience. Because the human ear is not so attuned to detecting changes in repetitious sound, engineers sampled a track of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner to calibrate the compression, the approximation of the soundscape and make sure that they weren’t sacrificing too much of the recording quality with their algorithm.