You can’t wash the Internet’s mouth out with soap. Or, to switch metaphors, don’t mud-wrestle with a pig; you’ll both get dirty and the pig will enjoy it.
Running a service on the Internet that allows humans (or dogs) to post their own content sets you up for a thankless job. Foremost you need to avoid becoming a dumping ground for spam, and then you still have good old human nature to contend with: anonymous commenting brings out the worst.
A profanity filter is one small step towards sanitizing peoples’ cretinous tendencies. (I love how daintily people discuss these online.) However, these sometimes backfire hilariously when they gamely replace dangerously seamanlike words with more clinical alternatives.
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My mom gave my daughter a copy of Curious George and the Rocket, a board book describing the lovable monkey’s voyage into space and commemoration as the first monkey in space:
The plot runs a very close parallel to the story of Albert II, the real-life first monkey in space. Until about 4 pages before the end, that is.
So I made a sleeve that goes over those last pages. Think of it like an errata. Sorry, mom. I promise I won’t show it to Luciana.
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I mentioned earlier that I got hold of the list of all 107 million dot-com domain names. It’s a pretty fun corpus to crunch for hilarious accidents of fate.
Some unfortunate misparsings:
Try telling a friend to go to the U.S. Department of Transport website, www.dot.gov. It’s like “Who’s On First” for the new millenium.
My favourite subcategory is Accidental Hitlers. There aren’t many of these — mostly Turkish websites — but the best I was able to find is a typosquatter who registered “whitlerblackcomb.com” — in case someone is booking a Third Reich ski getaway?
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A friend once posited the existence of a shadowy organization responsible for perverting language into the malevolent and confusing thing that it is. Perhaps language was once pure and intuitive until this secret society, perceiving the power it could gain from creating ambiguity and confusion, acted to twist it. How else can one explain the S in “lisp”? The unnatural sound of the word “onomatopoeia”? The excessive length of “abbreviation”? The final sabotaging of Esperanto by linking it inextricably with William Shatner?
False friends — words that look or sound alike in two languages but don’t have the same meanings — are among these pernicious phenomena. For example, “host” in Czech famously means “guest” in English.
Finnish and English are about as dissimilar as two languages can get while still retaining a common character set. I took a dictionary of each language, found the words common to both, removed the loanwords (e.g. medical and musical terminology, generally Latin and Italian, respectively) and was left with a set of just 27 words:
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The dot-com zone file is the master list of .com domain names. It’s maintained by Verisign and available for the price of asking.
I’ve been a long-time visitor to Popeye Marine, apparently now known as Popeye’s Catalog Shop and historically called Popeye Sailor’s Exchange. It’s a sailor’s scrapyard, where unusual people go to paw through piles of unusual things. It’s been around for a very long time by Vancouver standards; I dimly remember going there as a pre-teen.
Unfortunately it’s temporarily closed for relocation and I’m not sure how or where it’ll pop up again.
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In December I played a Christmas gig with The Elixxxirs. This was going to be a fun night for me — I planned to start by hoisting a beer at noon with a hundred Santas or so, then arrive late and drunk at the bar where someone else would be providing a drum set which I would play unevenly. Then, my last responsibilities dispensed with, I would continue to drink until I was two beers past finished and could go home and sleep it off.
The universe conspired to make sure that didn’t happen. I couldn’t attend Santacon, the other band’s drum kit wasn’t available, and finally I was elected Designated Driver for the band. So I spent much of the evening driving, schlepping gear, and pretending not to hear my guitarist’s drunk and abrasive solutions to the world’s problems as we reeled across the city at 3am. (That’s you, Kevin.) There’s nothing quite like being sober in the company of drunks, especially when you’d much rather join them.
Part of this 3am jaunt across town involved crossing the Georgia Viaduct, which is a favourite spot for roadchecks. Sure enough, we were directed to the side lane by a row of uniformed police officers.
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Or, to put it another way, Yaw Views Nubs Die Hit.
Have you ever put your hands on the keyboard and started typing, then discovered that your fingers were sitting on the wrong keys? If you’re a touch typist, probably — and for a moment it feels like the CIA has taken over your hands.
I was wondering what words or phrases could be accidentally typed that way and still remain words, so I wrote a quick script to go through the dictionary looking for combinations.
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I’ve continued to tinker with automatic song generation since I posted Nickelmatic as I had a nagging sense that it was shooting fish in a barrel. The project I was intending to follow it suddenly started behaving frighteningly like Scott Walker when I was expecting Gordon Lightfoot — hey, you never know what direction these things are going to take — but it also led me in a new direction that has temporarily taken precedence.
I was trying to solve this problem: how can I take the endless and semi-comprehensible-at-best output from a Markov text generation algorithm, and filter it down to a subset that could plausibly serve as lyrics? I started working with syllables and emphasis, which quickly led me to the Festival speech synthesizer. This is capable of dictating audible speech from any piece of text, along with all the disambiguation that entails. (It can also sing — but more on that later.)
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An acquaintance who shall remain nameless has actually admitted to liking Nickelback. Now, I’ll concede that mocking this band has become a populist move and I’d rather ride a bike than take a bandwagon — but as this famous video shows there is something worth targeting here: manufactured, bland, cookie-cutter production masquerading as anything expressive. (I played that video for the acquaintance and they didn’t even notice what was going on — “yup, that’s Nickelback.”)
Enough has been said on that particular soapbox. But this got me thinking: since the music is basically invariant between songs, including riffs, drums, solos, and chord progressions, is it only the lyrics that differ? Why not automate the process completely?
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Welcome to the new Cassettepunk. I’ve reluctantly replaced an earlier version of it that was conceptually beautiful — it was written in C for the 6502 processor and ran using a Javascript-based Commodore 64 emulator, thus making it the only web site ever to believe that it’s a C64 — but was just too awkward. This is one of the few times I’ll make a concession to practicality.
In addition to hosting a virtual portfolio of my projects, this website will inherit some of the energies I’ve been putting into the Free Geek Vancouver Volunteer Blog. I’ve had a lot of fun running that and will do my best to continue contributing, but I’m no longer able to volunteer at Free Geek on a weekly basis (I have a 7-month old daughter who also has claim to my time). I wish the days were longer but short of some potentially catastrophic celestial engineering that is not possible. Nevertheless I hope to stop in at Free Geek frequently… not least when my daughter is volunteering age.
My recent experiences participating in the East Side Culture Crawl have made clear to me the importance of carving out a clear identity for myself and the Free Geek Volunteer Blog is fairly muddied with my own projects. This one will have the same obsessions but more focused.
I have several projects on the go — a mixture of vehicular, audio/visual, nerdy, funny, impractical and potentially illegal — often using unloved old technology — so please drop this website into your feed reader and watch for more updates in the near future.
Best regards,
Alec Smecher
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