Where magic happens

Thanks to Pascal for the best and funniest truth of the day.

Strange Love, Karen O, Frankenweenie

I like this song, it has an odd quality, I'm not sure what it reminds me of.
Oh, she sings for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs! That's a big part of it. Her voice seems almost out of control, but isn't, a bit like Bjork's.

I also liked Frankenweenie. I think it really helped that unlike A Nightmare Before Xmas or Corpse Bride, it was not a musical. I think a musical with puppets is a silly idea. Stopping the story to have the characters sing on stage is a little strange, but can work. Doing the same on film, where you can put in a song anyhow you like, is a lot stranger. But doing it with puppets, who don't sing, is just one step of oddity too much!     :-)

Smartphone prices

Hi guys,
Can anybody tell me why a smartphone costs $500, while a 7-inch tablet with the same capabilities costs $200? I find it difficult to believe that building in the voice-capability is that costly...
(Granted, $200 tablets are selling at cost, but then they are also over four times bigger.)
Is it just the usual that so long as the public are used to a certain price area for a product, they'll keep charging that price, or is there more to it?

Dave Sim's religion

Dave Sim interview. (Recent, and very long.)

Dave Sim, as most serious comics- and counterculture fans will know, is the writer and artist of the phenomenal Cerebus comic, which was self-published and was one story which took 24 years to do, all issues arriving more or less on schedule. And it was even really good! Except in the parts when it was unreadable, like in many late issues which were taken over by long, tiny-type, highly unorthodox religious speculations (or rather assertions, he never gave any indication of ever being uncertain, sort of like L. Ron Hubbard), occasionally only broken by admittedly well-done illustrations. Hardly a "comic" in those parts, at least.

He wasn't kidding either, despite his religion (which he seemingly acquired unexpectedly in the middle of it all) apparently (I confess I simply could not read all that... stuff) being a mix of the three major religions, with tons of his own stuff thrown in, like a male and a female god, the female one being seen as "the Void", and apparently generally the source of all bad. He got religion hard. From this interview:

I wouldn't advocate the use of LSD or other drugs by anyone.  But, at this point, I wouldn't advocate masturbation, cigarettes, fats, sugars, popular music, most fiction, dancing, movies, card-playing...very little besides reading Scripture aloud, working 12 hours a day six days a week, fasting nine days out of ten, eating very little when you're done fasting, exercise...you see where I'm going with this? :)

[...]

For me, it's forty years of bad decisions and -- to this point -- sixteen years of repentance.  SERIOUS repentance.  Don't apologize for it.  STOP DOING IT and apologize to God for how long you did it.  22 years of fornication and 16 years of repentance.  Six more years and I'm even.  Theoretically.

Makes the Puritans look like Saturday in the Playboy Mansion.
Also, one might almost say "of course", part of his complex creed is the big importance of "Zero Contact With Computers!" I'm not sure why, but it seems to fit with his deploring anything which is pleasurable. The exception re computers is a bit of help and the library computer so he can earn a bit of money on Kickstarter and digital versions of his work. 

I like Dave, and I think his work is... unique in the very best way. But I really doubt we could be friends these days. How can a lazy hedonist with a girlie web site be friends with somebody who thinks pretty much everything is a sin, even listeting to pop music, masturbating, or eating more than once every two weeks? I can't imagine a single subject we would clash over within three minutes tops. (He also seems to have parted with many past close friends and collaborators, like Gerhard, who did the amazingly detailed backgrounds in Cerebus.)

And I sort of feel like it's a pity, he really had (have?) a wonderful sense of humor, is highly intelligent, and made a fantastic comic. (Now he makes comics too, but stuff which probably 15 people in the world will be interested in.) 

I've sent him donations a couple times, on principles of love and admiration. (He knows me, I had letters in his letter column a few times back in the day.) The second time was today, the first time he was nice enough to send me a couple of sketches in the mail, even though that had not been promised.

Clickable. Cover of High Society, fantastic art by Gerhard (and Sim).

BTW, I am now reading the wonderful High Society story line in digital form through the iPad Comix app. It's good, I think I'm enjoying it more than back in the day on paper. It was cheap paper by necessity, and the contrast was not as good as on the iPad's Retina display. And until we get the super-iPad, you can turn it on the side, and view half a page at a time, and have it also be larger and clearer than in the paper comic. 

Lossless digital zoom?

Wow iPhone lens case.

This gang says they have a case with iPhone lenses which “rival the performance of a 200mm camera”. 

I never heard of such a thing as a "200mm camera", must be too advanced for me. 

(Seriously, I’m confused, are they referring the focal length of the lens, or the physical size of the camera, or… ?)

… Oh, they also claim to have the first digital zoom which is lossless. That should get global headlines! So far we've always heard that it's impossible to create details in a picture if it wasn't captured by the camera in the first place. If they have solved this, it's a scientific quantum leap of magnitude! 

(Of course I don't believe they have that, it's probably regular upsampling like you get in Photoshop, the app simply add pixels based on the average of neighboring pixels. It prevents huge pixels, but it adds no detail, it just makes blur.) 

Run on a bike

Adam Engst showed me this, the Elliptigo. It seems like a really cool and excellent invention. The motion is very much like running, but without the impact.

This guy once ran 350 miles, 82 hours non-stop! Holy mofo.

A girl and her cat

[Thanks to TCGirl]

Little Girl and Tomcat. 

Quality and "there-ness"

New post on my tech blog about bags and quality and "there-ness".

"Facebook Home: Is That a Feature or a Threat?”

Facebook Home: Is That a Feature or a Threat?, article.

Not just that. It’s a threat of apocalyptic proportions.     :-S (That's a don't-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry emoticon.)

When will we get Twitter laptops, where all you can do is use Twitter? When will you ever *really* need more than 140 characters anyway? And imagine how lean and fast the OS and interface could be!

The good news is you can use the extra space in your skull to store an extra kidney.

Facebook Home explained.
Home is a "family of apps" that essentially push Facebook content front and center on your Android phone.
I guess sorta like your Kindle tablet is all Amazon content all the time.

Putting friends first isn't a bad concept for the smartphone experience. But Facebook thinks that friends = Facebook and Facebook = friends. If this were ever true, it isn't now." -- Jesse Brown, columnist

From the first article:
...particular concerns with Home's "chat heads", a feature that cannot be turned off. It sounds like the recurrent theme from Scifi -- the computer that's so powerful and intelligent, it denies you the ability to turn it off. [...]
The concern is not about giving up a little bit of absolute privacy in order to connect with people. Rather, the concern is that users are blissfully unaware of the motives behind penetrations into their lives to the point where the act has become a dangerous violation, an accumulation of knowledge that controls and debases the "customer." Remember, if the service is free, you are the product.

For me, the scary thing is that Facebook Home assumes that all your friends are on Facebook, and all want to use Facebook to communicate and interact. And the really scary thing is that millions of people will probably just swallow that raw. And if it's successful, the effect is "use facebook or get ghettoized".
Already without "Home", people tell me that they *have* to use Facebook, or simply loose contact with some of their friends and family!

No bacteria on TV no mo'

That is one TV screen which is thoroughly anti-septisized! (Source)
I'm guessing this lad has a future as a powerful TV critic. He knows what he *doesn't* like, and is willing to do something about it, and a lost remote ain't gonna stop him.

A question of Time and Resolution

Pascal wrote to me:

Mentioned the Garden of Earthly Delights (below) to my Mom yesterday.

She said "What's the point?"

I think she's a bit old-fashioned about everything internetty and "virtual"... 

I explained that not everyone can take the plane to travel all the way to a museum to see this in equivalent quality. She still wasn't convinced.

A writer wrote about this around maybe 1997, Dave Sim who made the Cerebus comic. He said he couldn’t see the point of viewing art on a small bad monitor ("postage-stamp-sized", the standard derogatory). I told him it was just a matter of time, and resolution (in two definitions). 

I think Dave still doesn’t even have a computer, he never seemed at all interested, so he may not know this (and probably doesn't care), but viewing color art on a good 27-inch monitor beats the hell out of viewing his comics, which for economic forces are smaller, and have no color. (I'm talking about visually here. Artistically, his works beats most everything.)

Anybody who cares about getting art to people, and has seen a big and good monitor, has a quite limited horizon if they can’t see the blessing of the net.

I’ll bet many of these people have reproduction posters of art on their walls. And I’ll bet the color is far from as good as a good scan on a good monitor (in part simple because it's lit). 

In fact I didn’t even realize it, even though I’d been an advocate for many years, even written an article about art on screens in 1999. When I first got a 30-inch monitor, my viewpoint on photos and art totally changed, the monitor was suddenly a viewing gallery as well as a work studio. This was a surprise for me, I just got the bigger one for productivity reasons, the aesthetics gain was a bonus. 

We are only in the infancy of this, of course. In due course, cheap, flat, flexible, colorful, pin-sharp monitors will be everywhere. They may even get so cheap they are virtually disposable. One may for example have all the walls papered with screen material, and one can distribute one's current favorite art in the sizes and places of the moment, or have the collection rotate. (Or of course one may choose virtual picture windows on some of them.) Or less may do it. 

I'll bet some museums will make services available, some free some not, of their current exhibition, so you can have it on your own wall. This could be good business for them, since it would cost them very little, but they could stream to many more people than they physically have space for. And of course it won't be limited, like physical museums, to the current exhibition. Museums can finally start making money on the large collections they have in dead space in the basements. 

Bye Iain

Aw, goddammit!!
Just about a day after I wrote about how few really substantial authors I know and how hard it is to find new ones, the very one I used as my prime example announces he is dying and has stopped writing.

Iain, if you reincarnate, I hope it'll be in something like the Culture. I may join you.

Thanks, man, I can't count the hours of joy you've given me.

===

If you haven't read Iain Banks, you've missed out. Check my earlier mentions of him (scroll down for several posts).