I’m gonna brag a little and say I knew Katie Hasty when. She’s rolled with the Old Dirty Barristers and she’s good peeps. I had to share her latest video because it has stepped hard on all my buttons. My buttons might be a little cracked, so hard has she stepped.
This upbeat banger from Numbers and Letters is all about Kittens, Sex, Fail – the most popular search terms on the internet.
From their description:
This lyric video was designed to make use of the three of the most popular SEO-friendly terms: “kitten,” “sex” and “fail.” They are among the internet collective’s favorite things to search for. At times, they are interchangeable, full of meaning and without meaning. Congratulations, us.
This video was made possible through Creative Commons-licensed content and the contributions of Numbers And Letters fans. Cats cats cats
BTW – she does the right thing and cites her sources in the youtube page. GO KATIE! Buy the album when it comes out in APRIL.. WTF?
Dr. Mallin sent me this panorama from the top of Mount Grandeur in Utah. Now it’s up in the cloud gallery.
I’ve gotten some great submissions from friends – but many are too short! Please send me your highest resolution longest panoramas. Or don’t worry about it and send me whatevs. I’ll edit it to make it work if I can.
Here is what it looks like in the room. That’s Robin with River on his lap.
This is difficult to write. Lil’ Wookie Katz is dying of lung cancer. It is not going well, he’s a sweetheart but he’s gone from 15 pounds to 7.
He’s such a good boy that it’s hard to think about taking him to be put down. But that is coming soon. We didn’t do the right thing by Magic, and he died in pain. We aren’t going to leave Wooks to that.
He’s going to go soon. One of the special things about him is that he’s a charmer. Everyone who meets him falls for him.
The vets have been writing notes to each other about him in their medical reports about how sweet and handsome he is. They gather to watch him eat. I get it. This is a very good boy.
If you’ve been charmed by him and want to see him before he goes, please come by soon and bring your best cuddles. He loves you back, unconditionally.
I’m going to send this out to people and put him where he belongs.
My buddy N is dating one of the owner’s of Noorman’s Kil in Williamsburg, right in my old neighborhood.
Billy, there in the middle, he’s the one.
Ugh, this man hurt my head.
Can I just say how exciting it is to go down in the basement, past the keg fridge and into the room where they keep the secret treasures of old and rare whiskey? I settled in for some Noah’s Mill, but Jason on the right ended up drinking a Vintage 17 Bourbon that was the best thing we found that night. So damn sweet and smooth, like a preacher looking for a donation. There was also a really good peat smoked stout but by that point I couldn’t be bothered to remember things like names or my tab.
I expect N to shortly die of whisky poisoning. Her boy has around 300 kinds. That can’t end well.
Last night I went down to the art and security meetup at NYU’s ITP.
We saw three rad projects.
1. Heather Dewey-Hagborg collects hair and cigarette butts from subway, streets in Williamsburg. She goes to Genspace, a bio hacking space in downtown Brooklyn to perform PCR and gel electrophoresis, etc. Sends off to get these DNA sets sequenced for specific phenotypic traits. Stuff like mitochondrial maternal region indicators ( ethnicity), eye color, hair color, freckles, etc.
Then she runs code against these to generate 3D models of how they might look. Prints those out using a full color 3d printer.
Great discussion about implications and the private or public nature of DNA vs its uses. We compared to browser DNA identified by EFF, ways government should regulate both. Also, how little we generally know about our own DNA.
2. Glenn Wester is trying to create true heads up display for augmented reality. He points out that all current AR hardware uses screens that block your vision. You don’t look at really augmented, you look at a picture of reality that is augmented.
He wants something more like a fighter jet heads up display. This involves having a tiny oled project onto a 45 deg angled beam splitter mirror. Sort of like your basic haunted house ghost room effect, but mounted to your head.
Here is me wearing it.
It works and is really cool. We tried to figure out ways to hack it, like getting light off of your clothes or trying to read reflections on your eyes, but nothing so far. Very cool if still unfashionable. I wondered if you could combine a dimmed laser picoprojector and fiber to get a low res display with less bulk up top. Â Amazingly, all of this costs around a hundred bucks.
3. Jordan Seiler presented his work removing outdoor advertising from towns. Some of this is physical work, and some is using AR.
An augmented view of a How & Nosm mural
He was VERY excited about the presentation from 2. We talked about analogues between his work and Add-Art. We got into who has the right to determine what you look at ( this is part of what underlies the justification for some graffiti). That led into wondering how folks might use AR for nefarious purposes. I brought up the possibility of racists editing out the looks of other people in the same way that buildings are treated. Jeff Crouse’s underdeveloped Unlogo Project came up as well, but we had a devil of a time remembering the name of the project.
