I therefore see no reason to suspect that Empire protocol dictating that trash be ejected into space would not apply equally to all Empire spacecraft, including the Death Star.

—On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor.

BUG: Government occasionally shuts down

An open issue on the Whitehouse’s Github repo:

I noticed a bug over the past week or so and it seems reproducible: Go to U.S. Government. U.S. Government is shut down. Expected results: Government should be working. I’m unable to debug or propose a fix since there’s not an open, transparent stack trace. Conflicting error messages are being thrown as well. Hope you can resolve this soon. It would seem that the U.S. Government would value 100% uptime in order to be a reliable and trustworthy source for the rest of the world. Thanks! Love this proje…

Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson perform Steve Reich’s minimal piece ‘Clapping Music’. And how.

'generic' is an idea about presets that is mostly cultural. its a problematic differentiator because it presupposes that there is a 'real'. when i remove the difference between real and generic i can approach music production in a materials-oriented way, manipulating the affects themselves, instead of being used by them, to reinforce their stereotypes, histories, etc. this doesn't disqualify 'real' sounds, in fact it gives them a chance to morph which is crucial for me. its about flattening all those differences. midi is just a way to deal w/ digital events in time, so its kind of interesting that its thought of as a 'texture'.

—Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, answers a question during his Reddit AMA about his compositional transition from using “vintage, analog synths” to “using progressively less ‘cool’ sounds, to the point where you’re often using just generic midi presets.”

Confronting my own inability to not be irritated by those keyboard stabs, I began to wonder if the prison of taste isn’t an immune disorder of its own, a kind of psychic allergy by which we limit our capacity to imaginatively inhabit other locations in social space.

—Drew Daniel of Matmos reviews the new Cher LP, uncovering his own politics and biases.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

—Italo Calvino, quoted in Frank Chimero’s reflections on what he learned from XOXO Fest

"its not about how fast you can go; how quickly you can get things done. It’s about chiselin’ on that old cheeseblock"

Picked this LP up from Hurley after his moving show at Great American Music Hall last night.