An Immodest Proposal: iqCAPTCHA

One of my friend Alex’s hard and fast rules is: never talk to the Internet people. Don’t read blog comments, don’t reply to blog comments, don’t get in flamewars. It’s a rule I follow myself, by and large; I almost never read blog comments (Update: except here, of course) and never, ever, ever engage in debates within them. In my considered opinion, blog comments tend to be a home for trolls. Most people who comment on my blog posts or tweets do so either directly in Twitter or in Facebook, where most of my data gets cross-posted. And I’m fine with that; I’ve actually gotten comments from non-friends on Twitter to things I’ve said that genuinely made me rethink what I was saying.

One of the most unfortunate notions in our current society is the idea that every person’s voice deserves to be heard. By this I don’t mean that people don’t have the right to speak; I believe in absolute freedom of speech, even for those I most despise. But I don’t believe that anyone is innately entitled to an audience for their speech, or to have their speech carefully considered or taken seriously by society as a whole. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to earn that right, by saying something worth listening to.

I’ve found that nothing enrages a person more than having their opinion summarily dismissed. Hence the Tea Party, which is primarily comprised of people who feel as though their voices aren’t heard in the public forum. By and large this is true, but it’s also for good reason: judging by what they do say (and write on placards) when the cameras are on them, most of them seem to have much the same capacity for reasoned and critical thought that a ring-tailed lemur has for forming a really good metal band. We ignore them not because they’re poor or disenfranchised; we ignore them because they’re ignorant and stupid — and willfully so, in a country with some of the best access to educational tools on Earth — which, ironically, most Tea Partiers and similar right-wing libertarian types seem to want to get rid of entirely. I can only assume that this is because walking past a school or a library fills them with shame and self-loathing.

I don’t engage these people in debate either on the Internet or in real life. What’s the point? They don’t listen, they seem incapable of understanding a nuanced position, they simply want to be told that they’re right, and also that Barack Obama was actually born on a small moon orbiting Tau Ceti and that he’s merely laying the groundwork for an invasion of aliens who will invade our country and then sit on their lazy tentacles all day, doing nothing but soaking up our welfare dollars.

Why would I waste a minute of my time listening or even talking to these sad specimens of the American gene pool?

For this stance, I am occasionally asked that most American of questions: who are you to judge other people? My answer is: I’m a guy who paid enough attention in grade school to know the proper usage of homophones like “there”, “their” and “they’re” or “your” and “you’re”. I don’t believe the world is six thousand years old, because I get my cosmology from people who actually study the universe, not a collection of oral folk tales invented by nomadic goat herders in the days when bronze was still a daring and radical new invention. (I’ve also personally stood in a city that is demonstrably older than that, but don’t take my word for it.) I can not only spell “Afghanistan”, but I know where it’s located on a map of the Earth, and why it’s so goddamn difficult to fight any kind of war there. I’ve been lucky enough to live in one Islamic country and visit another, and gain some small understanding of the differences between that culture and my own — an understanding which is desperately necessary in our times.

Most of all, I’m someone who believes that no intellectual or ideological position is worth holding unless it can be sustained against criticism and debate, both internal and external; that if you cannot successfully defend your opinion on a topic, you probably shouldn’t have one; and that your only guarantee of admittance into the global forum of public conversation is your ability to be articulate, intelligent, coherent and convincing in the things you choose to say.

That’s who I am to judge.

Now, then: if you spend any time online, you’re probably aware of CAPTCHAs. The most useful one, in my opinion, is reCAPTCHA, which not only ensures that the user is human, but uses their innate language-recognition skills to help digitize books. CAPTCHAs are not infallible ways of preventing spam, but they’ve done a lot to lower the volume.

I’d like to propose something along similar lines, but in a different direction: a web service that inserts a different sort of CAPTCHA into a blog or news website, one that’s not aimed at blocking spam bots, but blocking cretins: an intellectual CAPTCHA. (I’m aware that I’m not the first person to come up with this idea, but I think the others who came before me were kidding. I’m not.)

I think the following mockups pretty well sum up my idea:

 

Such a tool would be perfectly accessible to visually-impaired Web users, utilizing audio cues for both the example sentence and the option words (which would be spelled out: “W-O-U-L-D apostrophe V-E”). It would simply present a barrier to anyone without basic literacy skills.

An argument could be made that this also presents a barrier to persons with reading difficulties such as dyslexia. My response is that finding the correct answer to these problems is really only a simple Google query away. Or you could include a link to this helpful visual aid within your iqCAPTCHA. In this way, an iqCAPTCHA could not only weed out undesirable commenters, it could serve as a valuable learning tool for those who feel the uncontrollable urge to post their deathless thoughts to a primarily text-based Internet without the benefit of basic literacy skills. And frankly, if they’re not willing to work for it, fuck ’em anyway.

I am absolutely, 100% serious about this. I think that it might serve as a very small way of rebalancing the signal-to-noise ratio of the “conversation” we’re all apparently having (even with people we wouldn’t actually piss on if they were on fire in real life). It would work similarly to reCAPTCHA, as a web service you would sign into and create an API key for. A WordPress plugin would be an absolute must, and optional adoption by Tumblr and Blogger and Facebook would go a long way towards significantly reducing the assheadedness of Internet discourse in an expedient fashion.

If you’re interested in such an idea, let me know in the comments below. (Which are currently only protected by a reCAPTCHA, so if you’re an idiot, you can still be included in this forum…for now.) If enough people are interested, I’ll do it and set up a PayPal donation box or something.

Random Ontologies, Entry 1.

I’ve been thinking about writing down some of my thoughts on philosophical/scientific things that interest me…or rather, the questions that I ask and the responses I’ve come up with to them. This is not meant to be any sort of formal essay or argument; merely a collection of ideas I’ve had. Feel free to think about them or ignore them as you choose.

The two most important questions I can think of are:

  • What is human consciousness?
  • Does human consciousness play any part in the way the universe works on a fundamental level?

Before you start thinking that I’ve succumbed to magical thinking, bear with me.

Humans are, insofar as we are aware, the only creatures in the universe capable of abstract thought — or, let me rephrase that, capable of thinking abstract thoughts, which is more precise. We are also the only creatures capable of making things up — of imagination and lying. This may seem obvious, but it’s not, because imagination and lying are things that don’t make sense from a purely physical standpoint.

It can be argued that there is a strong evolutionary value to imagination: if one can create inside of one’s head a small model of the world in which one can try out certain actions — what will happen if I try to jump into this river to chase this tasty deer, or what will happen if I were to jump off of this cliff — one can avoid a great deal of trouble and, therefore, ensure survival. It seems like an odd thing to have evolved, though — aside from humans, Nature always tends to favor external, physical survival traits rather than mental ones. But maybe it was imagination, first and foremost, that kept our frail species alive in a hostile world.

Here’s an experiment: right now, I want you to imagine an urban place you’ve never been — let’s say, in my case, Red Square in Moscow. Just imagine yourself standing in the middle of this place, looking at the buildings, the people around you, the sky. Can you do that?

Okay, good. I know you can, because almost all humans can. Hold on to that scene, in your mind, for a moment.

In computer graphics, you hear the term resolution used a lot. Resolution is the word we use to describe the number of pixels in an image or display, or how many pixels a sensor (such as a digital camera’s sensor) can take in at once. You hear the terms high-resolution and low-resolution used a lot; essentially, they refer to the ratio of number of pixels in a given area of a graphic input or output device. Hi-res images have higher ratios; for example, part of how we measure the quality of printer is in how many dots per inch (DPI) or pixels per inch (PPI) it can reproduce. Up until recently, printers were three to four times higher resolution than computer monitors (an average of 200-300 dpi for printers vs. 72-96 dpi for screens), which is why most people still prefer to read print off of paper rather than a screen: it’s sharper and more detailed on paper.

Resolution can also be used as a measurement of fidelity. A “lo-res” copy of an image is in fact a simplified approximation of that image. Take for example, these two images of the Mona Lisa.

Two versions of the Mona Lisa. Both are recognizable, but the image on the left is much lower-resolution. Even the image on the right is an approximation, though.

Both of these are relatively low-resolution reproductions of the Mona Lisa, one more obvious than the other, even though both are recognizable as Da Vinci’s famous painting. To  your perception, the image on the right looks more “realistic” — or higher resolution — but in fact both images are simply approximations.

There’s a famous story about Picasso at a dinner party, where a fellow guest asked him why he didn’t paint “realistic” art. Picasso asked the man if he had a picture of his wife in his wallet. The man did, and produced it. Picasso looked at it for a moment and remarked “She’s rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”

A wallet picture is an approximation of an actual person — a rather small and flat one. So are the images above small, flat approximations of the Mona Lisa. A perfect replica of the Mona Lisa would be a replica which reproduced the original painting down to the arrangement of the atoms in the molecules of paint on the canvas. Of course, at that level of precision — of resolution — the “replica” would be absolutely identical to the original. There would be no difference. Even the most exacting and skilled of art experts could not tell them apart.

(We’re not even going to get into the fact that the Mona Lisa itself is a simulation of some still-unknown woman –or perhaps a gender-bent portrait of the artist himself — a projection of a three-dimensional person projected onto a two-dimensional canvas.)

Let’s not use the word “replica” anymore, though. Let’s use the word “simulation”, which is defined as “the act of imitating the behavior of some situation or some process by means of something suitably analogous”. One example would be a flight simulator, which imitates the behavior of an airplane in flight. Many pilots train on flight simulators before they ever actually take a real plane into the sky, because no matter how realistic, how hi-resolution the simulator is, it ignores one aspect of flying a plane entirely: namely, it will not hurt or kill you and damage or destroy your aircraft if you fail to land properly.

But a simulation doesn’t have to necessarily be of an actual situation or process to be realistic. Video games are simulations of realities, simplified and abstracted and occasionally tweaked away from “real” reality whilst maintaining a certain internal consistency.

For example: Super Mario Bros. is a simulation of an Italian-American plumber wandering through a colorful world killing antagonists who try to harm him or impede his quest to find the Princess. It is not a realistic simulation. Mario is rather small, and flat, and were he mapped onto the real world he would consist of pixelated blocks and unnatural colors. Likewise, he is capable of utterly impossible feats, such as jumping several times his own height into the air from a standstill, gaining the ability to store and launch fireballs at will, and to instantly double his own height by eating a mushroom slightly larger than he is. He fights creatures that are physically impossible — flying turtles, animated mushrooms with angry human eyes, living bullets. Super Mario Bros. is not a high-resolution simulation at all.

Contrast that with a more recent game such as Red Dead Redemption, which got a lot of positive press last year. RDR is a far more realistic simulation than Super Mario Bros. in every sense — visually, sonically, and even in regards to the physics of the tiny universe it contains and the behavior of the non-player-characters. It is easier to suspend your disbelief when playing Red Dead Redemption, despite the fact that you are controlling an apparently normal human being’s behavior via a plastic thingy with buttons in your hand, sitting in your living room. You can lose yourself in its depiction of the American West, in all its glory and grandeur.

And yet, it is still, in comparison to the reality we inhabit, very small. And flat. And unrealistic in other ways — in our world, when someone gets shot with more than one bullet at once, they almost always die. And when they die, they’re dead forever; no save point.

The late Jean Baudrillard made the majority of his career as a postmodern philosopher and media critic off the notion of “hyperreality”, which he defined as “a simulation of reality without basis in fact”. Super Mario Bros. is a hyperreality: it simulates a world that does not, never did and never could exist. Of course, so does Red Dead Redemption: but the “hyper” part of its hyperreality is a little more subdued, a little less glaring.

Had Rockstar Games, maker of RDR, wanted to make a perfect simulation of the late 19th century American West, they would have replicated all of, say, Arizona down to the molecule, including the humans who inhabited it. These “simulated” people in this simulated world would, presumably, behave exactly like real people, because the processes that allowed them to exist would be at least as complex as those of “real” people in the “real” world.

Ignoring the practical impossibility of this for a moment, let’s say that Rockstar did somehow accomplish this superhuman feat. How would they store the game’s data, if it was a precise replica of Arizona circa 1875 or so? They’d be storing the position of every atom in that space — hell, every electron in every atom in that space. It would require at least as many actual electrons to describe the simulation as there were in the actual thing it was simulating. Like our Mona Lisa, the map would, in essence, become the territory.

Of course, Rockstar could compress the size of their simulation a bit by leaving out the bits that a player would never encounter, such as impassable mountain tops and the bottom of deep lakes, places a “player” could never experience. They could also reduce the amount of information stored — reuse the same grain of sand over and over again, rather than having each grain of sand be its own unique, discrete self. You could probably shave several thousand petabytes of data off in this way before even the most observant player began to notice.

But in doing so, your simulation would suffer a loss of resolution. The player might not know, but you’d know. And if you ran the simulation long enough, it would begin to behave in unrealistic ways. Soil erosion would work differently if every grain of sand were physically identical down to the atomic structure. After a year, or ten, or ten thousand, your simulation would not only not be identical to the real world it was simulating, it would be wildly different.

Which brings us back to our imaginary urban scene. I told you we’d come back to this.

Pull it up again in your mind. Picture the scene, imagine the sounds and scents around you. Look at the faces of the people in your scene. Notice what they’re wearing, how their eyes are shaped, how tall or short each one is.

What you are doing is creating a hyperreal simulation within your own head of a place you’ve never been. The picture of Red Square in my head is probably wildly inaccurate, as it’s mainly based on a few dozen 1980s Cold War-era movies. But though it might be imprecise in its level of resolution, it’s still at least as high-resolution as Red Dead Redemption‘s simulation of the Wild West, if not much more so. I can smell coal smoke in the air — I don’t know if Red Square really smells like coal smoke, but the places I’ve been that are similar in Turkey and Eastern Europe always did. I can picture the people — people I’ve never seen before, who don’t exist in real life. I can see the sky, clear blue even on a cold day. I can see the breath coming out of my own mouth as condensation, drifting and fading away.

The human brain is not a computer, but it shares one very important attribute with a computer: it is a real thing. It consists of atoms and electromagnetic patterns, which are — ultimately — the same thing when you get right down to it. And everything in it, everything it does, happens in the real world. What we call a “calculation” in a computer is the process of electrons flowing through silicon circuitry, bouncing this way and that through logic gates. The term “calculation” is an abstraction of a real process.

In the same way, what we call a “thought” is an actual, physical event within our brains. It’s some as-yet unknown combination of electrical and physical activity happening in the incredibly complex labyrinth within our skulls. We don’t understand it, but we understand that it is a real thing, a material object/event in a material world. Thoughts are not abstractions.

Let me repeat that, because it is absolutely vital.

Thoughts are not abstractions. Thoughts are things. Real things.

When you imagine Red Square or wherever you chose to imagine, that simulation of reality exists as a physical pattern of logic gates or electrons or whatever the case may be within your brain, the same way the world of Super Mario Bros exists as a series of instructions hard-coded onto a Nintendo RAM cartridge. It exists. It is real, the same way your notional Red Square or Alexanderplatz or Santa Monica Pier in your head is real; it takes up a finite number of electrons inside your head.

The electrons in your head aren’t a perfect miniature replica of Red Square, of course; if I were to hack the top of your skull off, I wouldn’t see a miniature Kremlin hiding in there, anymore than if you tore open a Super Mario Bros cartridge you’d see a perfect little Koopa Kingdom hiding inside the gray plastic. It’s an abstraction of a real place; your brain builds it from instructions and fills in the redundancies and the gaps the same way a Nintendo console takes the binary data encoded within that cartridge and builds a tiny Day-Glo world from it.

The most fascinating part of this, to me, is the fact that your brain has constructed a realistic model of a place that, if you were following my instructions, you’ve never been. Again, my Red Square may not be a precise simulation of the real Red Square, but it exists at a similar resolution, follows the same rules. I can walk, in my mind, into any corner of it and inspect it, look at the cracks in the cobblestones, see the grass struggling to grow there. I can replicate the color of the grass with the color picker in Adobe Photoshop and show it to you. If I were a better draftsman, I could draw you my Red Square, from any angle you liked. I have never been there, but in my head there’s a Red Square at least as believable as the real one.

Every imaginary place is real, in the sense that it exists in some abstracted form within the real world.

The lands of Middle-Earth began as a structure of synaptic connections in the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien; he put them down onto pressed, bleached sheets of wood pulp with ink and abstracted them in a different way. You read the words, and in your mind is your own Middle-Earth. It’s not precisely the Middle-Earth that Tolkien was thinking of, maybe; in your mind, Gandalf the Gray may look to you like Sir Ian McKellen, who played him in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of Tolkien’s books; as Gandalf first appeared in The Hobbit, published two years before McKellen was born, I suspect he didn’t look that way to Tolkien. To someone else who’s never seen the films, Gandalf may look in their minds like their grandfather, or Sean Connery, or no one real at all. And yet, if I showed you my internal vision of Gandalf and you showed me yours, we’d probably recognize them as the same person that Tolkien describes: “…an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which a white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots.We do this every Hallowe’en: your friend may look nothing like Ian McKellen or Sean Connery or your grandfather, but when he walks into the party in the blue hat and gray cloak and white beard, you know instantly that he’s Gandalf. He doesn’t have to explain himself; indeed, his costume is considered less effective if he does.

In other words, you and I would be able to recognize one man pretending to be another man who never existed. Because humans are capable of inventing people who don’t exist, and worlds for them to live in, and we are capable of replicating those worlds — those thoughts, those electrical patterns in our heads — to one another by converting them into patterns of sound (speech) or marks on a page (writing) or the selective exposure to light of celluloid (film). Tolkien is long dead, but in the same way that his DNA is literally still extant in his children and grandchildren, the patterns of electrical impulse in his long-decayed brain are still literally extant, in slightly modified form, in almost any bookstore you’d care to walk into in any city on the Earth.

The point of all of this is that humans can create worlds that are larger on the inside than the outside, like Doctor Who’s famed TARDIS; that our thoughts are literally part of the material world and can effect change within it; and that we can nest internally consistent realities within one another. Inside every book and every video game and every movie is a compressed reality, your brain is the tool that uncompresses it and fills in the blanks.

So what else can the human brain do within the framework of a rational, material universe?

Music For Writing Desks

I’m currently working on a nasty horror short story for my friend Jarret Keene’s upcoming anthology of Las Vegas horror stories. When I write, I listen to music; generally instrumental stuff. When I’m doing horror, I tend to listen to a lot of post-rock stuff like Mogwai (the track “Auto Rock” being a favorite), as well as hauntological electronic like Burial, and random film soundtracks, my favorite being Cliff Martinez’s score for Solaris and Clint Mansell’s Requiem For A Dream, as well as Lisa Gerrard and Peter Bourke’s lovely score for The Insider.

However, I find that I run into a problem: the music runs out or changes moods long before I want it to. It might take me three hours to write a scene, and unless I’m looping a single track or album again and again (which, in and of itself, is tiresome) I’m going to lose the feeling of the music long before I’m done writing.

Yesterday, I hit upon a novel solution: I fired up Ableton Live and used some of my techniques for generating algorithmic music to create an evolving, unending “soundtrack” to listen to while writing a scene. It took me about ten minutes to throw together an appropriate set of sounds, rhythms, loops and harmonies…and I left it running for the three hours it took to write the climactic scene of my short story. (When I popped over to it and closed it, it was running to something like 1300 measures.)

It worked perfectly! One long song, with enough variation not to sound like a loop, maintaining the creepy feeling I wanted while I wrote this horrible scene. (It involves a drugged Russian prostitute and a Lovecraftian beastie.) I think I’ll try it for all of my writing projects from here on out.

If you’re curious, here’s a 32-measure sample of the music.

[audio:http://zenarchery.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Shokushu-Goukan-excerpt.mp3|titles=Theme from “Shokushu Goukan” (excerpt)]

A Pitchfork Band Review: Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too

As anybody who’s ever heard a musical note knows, tiny Muenster, Texas (pop. 1566) has become the new indie hotbed. Muenster bands such as Punky Brewster Soundsystem and Lars And His Horse People were the bands to watch at SxSW this year, not to mention Helsinki’s IceeBalls Music Showcase and Rumpster Magazine’s Provo-based RumpFest. Raconteurs frontman Jack White has recently announced that he’s opening a vintage 8-track store and BBQ shack in downtown Muenster, just another example of the town’s growing cultural capital. And, of course, there’s Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too, who seem poised to become Muenster’s Next Big Thing.

CWLFT is the brainchild of nineteen year old Ryan Dylan Ryan and his eighteen year old sister Brionna Jennee Ryan. Beginning in 2008 as a Christian indie folk duo influenced by Devendra Banhart and Loggins & Messina, in just three short years their sound has matured, mixing elements of the Arcade Fire’s post-ironic dreariness and the lush electro sounds of El DeBarge with the neo-folk of Mumford & Sons and the undefinable quintessence of Fleet Foxes, whose name inspired one of the words in CWLFT’s own name.

“We started out doing worship music,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, who refuses to do any press unless his name is printed in full every time it’s mentioned, “but after a while I realized that I had my own, like, musical path to follow. Plus people kept calling me ‘Jesus queer’ and punching me in the kidney every time we did a show at the roller rink.”

After purchasing a 1989-vintage Roland CR-69 drum machine from a neighbor with special needs who had previously used the device to communicate with his elderly parents, Ryan Dylan Ryan recruited his sister Brionna Jennee Ryan on hurdy-gurdy, tenor banjo and backup vocals. “I’m not really sure what Brionna was doing musically before that,” Ryan Dylan Ryan says. “I know she sucked a guy’s dick behind the rec center this one time so she could afford to drive to Dallas and see Someone Loves You Boris Yeltsen, so I guess you could say she’s always had this musical obsession.”

Brionna Jennee Ryan (who credits her unique fashion sense to her incipient fetal alcohol syndrome) prefers to avoid the limelight — and, in fact, according to her brother, light altogether. “Yeah, she was born with this weird allergy to light,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “so she never comes out unless we’re playing a gig. I don’t actually even, like, know where she lives or anything. We rehearse in this old abandoned nuclear missile silo that these organic farmers are turning into a massive grow station, but we have to turn off the UV lights or Brionna will start projectile vomiting and stuff.” Ryan Dylan Ryan credits his sister’s delicate, sunny pop-perfect arrangements to the fact that she was born without a lower brain stem or tongue. “She’s so real, you know? She doesn’t like worry about all the bullshit like other people. She just sits in the dark with her hurdy-gurdy and her Brian Wilson records and just, like, makes art and stuff. And hoots.”

Despite being courted by Williamsburg indie darling label Swollen Coke Fork Records, Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too refuses to leave Muenster. “We’ve got our roots here,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan. “In Brionna’s case, that’s totally literal, by the way.” They chose to release their first album, I Heard Somebody Crying And Then I Realized It Was Me, through Internet channels only, though a limited edition — carved into an Edison wax cylinder and wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf — is available via mail order and through a special distribution deal with the Luby’s chain of affordable cafeterias, a move that Ryan Dylan Ryan describes as “thinking outside the Old Media box”.

The album — co-produced, like every other fucking indie rock album ever, by Steve Albini and Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo — is a curious mix of tender, heartfelt white people singing, reminiscent of Portland’s You Don’t Bring Your Mother and Bright Eyes, and dissonant electronica that one reviewer notoriously described as “sounding like Aphex Twin taking a violent shit at a truckstop in El Paso”.

“We slept in Albini’s studio while we were making the record,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan. “Only he didn’t know about it. He’s so funny — he’d walk around going ‘Why does my vocal booth smell like a sheep shit in it?’ and ‘Why doesn’t that albino whore have an indented nasal bridge like a normal human?'”

Critical success has come quickly for Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too, as well as a certain amount of underground fame. Ryan Dylan Ryan won’t discuss rumors that he’s currently in a relationship with Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, but statistics and the law of averages suggests that he probably is. Meanwhile, Brionna Jennee Ryan has been seen doing high profile DJ gigs at vegan collectives in northern Sweden during the long, sunless winter months, and is recording a collaboration with Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray to be entitled either Ah, Fuck, The Goddamn Weasels Are Tearing At Our Clits Again or simply Eeeeeeeaaaaauuuugh, which reportedly uses no instruments other than the sounds of Andersson and Ryan banging their skulls against moss-covered Icelandic cliff faces and weeping. “I’ve heard it,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “and it’s a totally challenging record. But it’s like, totally sunny and pop-perfect and danceable too.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream world keeps calling too. Recently director Noah Baumbach used the CWLFT song “Thundercats Ho” in his indie drama Melvin, His Trust Fund And His Bicycle, which also features tracks from Cut Fleet Cold Furnaces, You Don’t Bring Your Mother, Hey Look It’s Lisa Bonet From The Cosby Show and Beck. Another track from I Heard Somebody Crying And Then I Realized It Was Me was used in a television ad for Same Ol’ Hootenanny Moustache Wax. “I mean, I guess it probably looks like we’re selling out,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “but it’s hard to live without money. Plus somebody, I’m not gonna say who, but somebody in the band needed a tail removal operation, and they don’t do that for free in Texas.”

So what’s next for Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too? Ryan Dylan Ryan says the band’s just taking it easy and preparing to go into the studio to record their sophomore album, tentatively titled Fuck I Wish It Was 1988, which is rumored to be produced by the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler. “I called Win up one day,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “and asked him if he’d produce the album, and he said he would if he could fly down to Muenster and give me a Brazilian. I started laughing, but he was totally serious. I mean, dude, what would you do? It’s totally the guy from Arcade Fire? So he flew down and we went out in a cornfield and he gave me a wax. His wife filmed it with an 8mm film camera, but I haven’t seen it on, like, their website or anything yet, so maybe when they do a DVD or something.” The album is apparently a radical departure from the band’s current sound, featuring sunny, pop-perfect vocals over rootsy alt-country rather than shimmery alt-folk. “We’ve got one track, which I think is going to be called ‘Trapper Keeper Yay You’re So Rad’, and we’ve got like seven hundred and thirty vocal harmony tracks,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan. “Most of them are by Grizzly Bear, but I got my neighbor who sold me this drum machine one time to sing some of them, except he couldn’t remember the lyrics, so he just sang about Huey Long and the fascist takeover of Louisiana, but it’s like way more organic that way, you know?”

One thing’s for sure: Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too is the band to watch out for, for at least the next seven or eight minutes.

I Like This Band

I’ve written a tiny web app called “I Like This Band” that allows you to enter a band’s name in a search form and get a random list of 20 similar bands. Click on any band and you get bands similar to that band, or click on the “Google ’em” link to Google the band. Mouseover the band’s picture and you’ll see a truncated bio.

Nothing too exciting, but cool for people like me who just want to find bands that are similar to other bands without having to navigate a bunch of random bullshit to do it.

An Open Letter to Rep. Shelley Berkley

Dear Representative Berkley,

My name is Joshua Ellis. I’m a writer and web developer from Las Vegas. You may or may not know who I am — I was a opinion columnist for many years for the Las Vegas CityLife and I’m also somewhat well-known for co-authoring a series of articles about the homeless people living in the storm drains under Las Vegas.

I’m writing you because I understand that the current budget proposal submitted by the Republican factions in Congress which completely removes the $430 million budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) network of television channels.

Representative Berkley, I sincerely hope you agree with me that this is a deeply disturbing and ludicrous proposal. The value of NPR and PBS in both childhood and adult education is immeasurable; I imagine that like me and my wife and my five-year-old sister, your children grew up learning about the world via the irreplaceable magic of TV series like Sesame Street and The Electric Company; and perhaps your family, like mine, enjoy and benefit from programs like Nova and the late Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, as well as radio programs like This American Life and All Things Considered.

NPR and PBS serve an important role in American media: by being funded by the people — unlike commercial media outlets — they are not subject to the whims of advertisers or subscribers. (While it is true that corporations and other commercial outlets often sponsor NPR and PBS programming, it is my understanding that they have no editorial say over that programming.) By removing public funding, CPB will become simply another television network like ABC or CBS, controlled by the people who hold the purse strings…or, even worse, it will simply be commercially unviable and cease programming altogether. That, I believe, would be a terribly tragedy for the American people.

Fiscal conservatives often quote President Coolidge’s statement that the business of government is business. I disagree. The government of the United States is not a widget factory or a retail outlet, despite every attempt by PACs and SIGs to the contrary. The business of the government is to serve the needs of the citizens — all of the citizens, not merely the ones who write the biggest checks.

I’m sure you’ll agree with me, Representative Berkley, that it is not your job to turn a profit. You are not some shabby little accountant. Your job is to do what’s best for the people of your district and, in a broader sense, the American people in general. Part of that, I believe, is recognizing that there are certain things that the federal government puts money into with no expectation of a monetary return on investment. When it comes to public media, the return on investment can be measured by looking at the face of every man, woman and child whose world is expanded by the programming therein.

When children watch commercial programming, they learn that the most important thing in the world is to buy whatever toy the network is hawking during this particular half-hour, that it’s important to pay lip-service to individuality, but that it’s more important to conform. They are taught to be nothing more than good consumers.

When children watch Sesame Street and other public media programming, they learn to count, to use their language, to think critically, to share with others, to value peace and comfort, that people who look and speak differently than they do are friends, not enemies. They learn that the world is a huge and amazing place, and they learn that they are capable of doing whatever they dream of in that world.

In that sense, our investment in public media is really an investment in our future; in building a future America that is not full of bright, capable, curious, pro-active citizens.

It is, in other words, priceless.

And so I hope, Representative Berkeley that you will vote against the cutting of public media funding from this new budget. (Not to mention the cutting of library and educational funding, of course, but I don’t feel that’s even worth discussing; any representative of the people who believes in reducing library funding is a dangerous scoundrel.)

By doing so, you will display that you possess much farther vision than many of your peers; you will be making an investment that will pay off millions of times over in the long term of America’s future. And you will be, as the theme to The Electric Company used to say when I was a kid, helping to bring the power to the people who desperately need it.

Thank you for your time.

All my best,Joshua Ellis

A Musical Manifesto (Of Sorts)

I’m in the very early stages of recording a second LP under my pseudonym, Red State Soundsystem. (I’m also recording an acoustic EP of some of the tracks from my first LP, Ghosts In A Burning City, as well as some new tracks, primarily on guitar and piano.) So I’m thinking a lot about music these days.

I don’t want to make a “pop” record, except in the most broad sense. I am bored with pop music. I’m bored with shiny, happy, sun-kissed music, with Brian Wilson fetishism, with ELO close harmonies and layers of major key Mellotron. I’m bored with beardo indie pop. I’m bored with Prozac music, blissed out “happy” music that actually has no passion behind it. I’m sick of danceability, of 8-bit synths, of the almost hysterical infantilism of most modern rock and roll.

I grew up in the 1980s. I love much of the music of the 1980s. I have absolutely no fucking desire whatsoever to attempt to replicate it as closely as possible, down to spending thousands of dollars buying really shitty “vintage” digital synthesizers that are easily and precisely replicable on any device with more complexity than a ten year old Nokia candybar cell phone. (Trust me on this; you can exactly replicate a TR-808 drum machine or Yamaha DX-7 synth in software now. There’s no magic in them, no secret ingredients, not even the random variation of a 1970s analog synth.)

I want to make music for unhappy people. I want to make music for sexually frustrated people. I want to make music for losers, geeks, freaks, drunks, addicts, burnouts. I want to make music that people will sit in the dark and listen to and burn incense and smoke cigarettes, and I want the music I make to maybe stop them from hurting quite so much. I want to make rough music. I want to make glitchy music. I want to mix the sounds of electronic music, which I love, with the emotional intensity of rock and roll. I want to make music for adults with adult emotions, ambiguous and not always beautiful. I want to make music that drones, that has beats, that makes you want to go out and fuck or kill or die or live. I want to make music that pretty people hear and get aneurysms and fall down dead on the street. I don’t want to be experimental, because making atonal horrible noise isn’t experimental. A lot of people already tried the experiments and produced a lot of pompous, shitty records.

I want to make a record, not a collection of singles for YouTube. I want to make videos, but I want them to be interesting, otherwise there’s no point.

Fuck Brian Wilson. Fuck Jeff Lynne. Fuck the Arcade Fire. My music is influenced by: William Gibson, Lorca, Clive Barker, T.S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Tricky, Garth Ennis, Hunter Thompson, Neil Gaiman, Van Morrison, The National, Grant Morrison, China Mieville, Dave McKean, Nick Drake, Sant’Elia, Bowie, Harlan Ellison, Nick Cave, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen. My music is influenced by all the horrible nights I spent drunk hurting myself and all the terrible things I’ve done and all the redemption I’ve managed to scrape together. My music is influenced by every pack of cigarettes I’ve smoked and every tab of acid I’ve chewed on and all the good sex and bad sex I’ve had and every shit bar I’ve ever been in and every beautiful salon and not at all by wonderful white suburbia. I don’t give a fuck about the lives of suburbanites unless they go mad.

I can’t sing. I don’t care anymore. I sing the way I sing. I write better songs than people who sing better than I do. My music isn’t complex. It doesn’t have the kind of chord changes that other musicians get excited by. I don’t care. I’ll write songs with two notes.

Lyrics matter. If you don’t think so, you’re doing it wrong.

I want to write songs that make people want to sell everything they own and get on a plane and disappear into the world, born again under wilder skies. I want people to fuck to my music. I want people to want my songs played on a boombox at their graveside. I want to make people happy. I want to make people think

I don’t need to rock harder than anybody else. I’m a pussy. I write gloomy mid-tempo music. That’s fine. I make gloomy mid-tempo music as hard as I fucking can. It’s not made to drop in the club to help morons find other morons to fuck. I want smart people fucking to my music.

I don’t care if anyone else likes my music anymore, or buys it. If you don’t like it, it’s not for you. Maybe in a hundred years, somebody will dig it. Maybe you dig it now. If you do, I’m glad. Really glad.

I will never be on the cover of a glossy magazine. Prom queens will never want to meet me because my music speaks to them. Nobody will ever ask me to do a celebrity remix. Nobody will ever put my music over the closing credits of a blockbuster movie. That’s fine. I don’t care.

Every song I record, every record I make, is a paper boat with a candle in it, set onto a wine-dark sea and sent off into the world. I don’t know where they will end up. I hope interesting and crazy and maybe useful places. But it doesn’t matter, in the end. All that matters is that I make them and set them free, until the day I die.

Anything else would be pathetic.

That’s the last time you put a blade in me, you hear?

I’m really intrigued by the Switch, a multitool that you can add or remove components from yourself.

The circular hole/pivot point reminds me of my own pocket knife, the Gerber Remix, which I carry with me constantly.

The Remix is a skeletonized…well, remix of the older Gerber Chameleon, of which I owned two before I got this one.

When you use this knife, you slip your index finger through the hole that the blade opens around. This has two benefits: 1) it’s nearly impossible for your hand to slip off the knife handle and onto the blade, sparing you the possibility of stitches and a hospital trip, and 2) allowing you to hold the knife and your hand in a far more natural position while cutting. (If you’re the paranoid urban prowler type like me, it has a third benefit: if you have to pull it in a fight, it’s basically also impossible for anyone to take it away from you.)

It seems like such an obvious, valuable design…and yet I’ve never seen another knife that uses the open pivot point this way. It looks as though the Switch might, but I can’t really tell from those concept pictures. (It looks as though the body of the tool might be too wide to comfortably put your finger through.)

Imagine how much safer all knives would be if they had this simple feature! I mean, it would work for fixed-blade knives and even for kitchen and utility knives.

This, to me, is what clever design is all about.

Cooking miscellany

So I’ve got a smoked black bean soup on the stove cooking right now, and I thought I’d drop some of my totally anecdotal cooking science on you.

I’m an improvisational cook; I tend to make recipes based on what I have in the kitchen, rather than buying ingredients to make specific dishes. Because of this, I tend to keep my pantry stocked with certain items which end up getting used in lots of different things. To wit:

Tomato puree and tomato paste. This is essential. Tomatoes are the base in almost every non-Chinese or Japanese dish I make. I know lots of cooks are snobs about their tomatoes (“I buy twenty pounds of tomatoes and boil them into sauce over a 48 hour period!”) but you and I live in the real world, or at least I do, and I can’t afford to buy fucking organic tomatoes in bulk and let them cook down like I’m some kind of goddamn Sicilian materfamilias.

Buy big cans and lots of them, they’re cheap. I never buy less than four 24 oz. cans of tomato puree when I go to the store and I almost always use them up by the time I go back. The paste is good for thickening soups and sauces and for more robust dishes.

Black beans. Almost as versatile as tomatoes. I use them in lieu of meat in everything from chili to Mediterranean dishes. Plus you can mix them with bread crumbs and egg and make veggie burger patties.

Balsamic vinegar. Balsamic vinegar is the Auto-Tune of cooking. It can make almost anything taste not entirely shitty. Red wine vinegar is fine too, if you don’t mind looking like a big pussy.

Olive oil. I use olive oil almost exclusively except for deep-frying, where it’s not financially feasible. If you’re really stuck for a dish, boil some pasta and throw some olive oil and balsamic vinegar over it with a few veggies.

Garlic. Garlic is non-negotiable. Everything has fucking garlic in it.

Beef and chicken broth. Unless you’re vegan, in which case you shouldn’t ever listen to my cooking advice ever.

A package of chicken breasts. Fresh are nice, but again, we live in the real world; I buy the Wal-Mart bags, three pounds of boneless skinless chicken breasts for about $7, and thaw ’em a couple of hours before I use ’em. I have razor-sharp cooking knives, so I can chop them even if they’re still mostly frozen…which comes in handy if you’re making something where you want to cube your chicken or slice it into actual strips instead of mushy creepy-looking tendrils.

Basil, oregano, parsley. My holy trinity. The wife is allergic to thyme so I don’t use it, but I make up for it a lot with fresh rosemary from the bush out front of our house.

Cumin. Cumin is a big ingredient in both Spanish/Mexican/Tex-Mex-style dishes and in Indian food. I go through more cumin than any other spice.

I also tend to use a lot of onions and mushrooms in my cooking, but that’s a personal choice.

Cooking isn’t about slavishly following recipes: it’s about getting a feel for what tastes good with what. I don’t give a shit about cultural accuracy in my cooking: I’ll mix up anything that tastes rad together. Call it “fusion” if you like. For example, I once made a really awesome jambalaya using Louisiana hot links and frozen chunks of mango that I dredged in salt and pepper (after getting the idea from an MIA lyric). Fucking awesome.

If you know how to make a basic soffritto/mirepoix, the basic mother sauces, and how to properly cook meat to keep it moist (hint: fast and hot), you’re set. Everything from there is just riffing on combinations of flavor and texture. I like combinations of sweet and umami or savory, personally, and I like my food rich and spicy. So I keep several kinds of salt; not the flavored sea salt shit yuppies buy from Bed, Bath & Beyond, but celery salt and seasoned salt and plain ol’ sea salt for crunchy texture. I have Crystal and Srirachi and Cholula hot sauce at the ready.

Note: this is mostly for stove cooking. I can’t bake worth a shit. I’m horrible at it. But I can walk into your kitchen and make something awesome out of whatever you happen to have.

I fail a lot and make weird shit; the other night I tried to make a Burgundy sauce for veggie burgers and ended up with a sort of hideous wine gravy that was completely inedible, mainly by adding too much flour to the mix. But there’s no such thing as failure in cooking…merely lessons to be learned.

Now, if I can just figure out what the fuck to do with tofu….

Money. Goddamnit.

Just wrote a long letter to a family friend asking for advice on raising a small bit of money to keep me afloat until I can finish Stikki.me. Now it’s 3 am and I’m sitting here, spooked, and hoping the power company will let me make payments before shutting off the lights.

I’ve thought about going the Kickstarter/IndieGoGo route again the way I did with Dbasr, but I feel weird about it. I haven’t abandoned Dbasr, not by a long shot, but it was just too much work for me to do by myself without having enough money to pay the bills. All the code is sitting there waiting to get picked up again. I started playing with Stikki as a way to earn money to work on Dbasr, and that’s still very much the plan. But I’m afraid people just think I took the money and did nothing with it — which is, of course, not true. I’ve busted my ass on Dbasr, the way I’ve busted ass on Stikki. I am grateful for the support I got. It just wasn’t enough to devote myself full-time to finishing that project yet.

I feel really guilty about that, actually. But you can ask my wife  — there were times I worked on Dbasr for literally twenty-four hours straight without sleep, and I do almost the same with Stikki. But I’m not a trust fund kid and I don’t have any financial reserves. When the bills come due, I have to stop working on these things and find paying work, and it’s hard to balance paying and personal work, especially when you’re just married. When I was 21 I probably could have just done an eight hour gig and then holed up and written code until I passed out, but I can’t do that now. I barely sleep as it is; I usually go to bed around four or five am and wake up around ten thirty. And I think Rosalie enjoys it when I occasionally pop my head up and actually interact with her and acknowledge her existence, instead of simply staring at the laptop and muttering darkly about APIs and MVC framework. She also enjoys it when I take showers and shave instead of rolling out of bed and onto the computer.

(In fact, I think the combination of poor hygiene, the stream of swearing about apparent gibberish like “JOIN queries” and “consumer keys” and the straggly beard makes me resemble nothing so much as a random crazy street person, except I have a laptop instead of a shopping cart. Which is no good for Rosalie’s nerves, I know.)

I just keep hoping if I work and work and work I’ll get Stikki finished and money will start coming in. But the last two weeks have fucked me. I couldn’t work, thanks to first the anxiety attacks and then the Xanax zombiedom from trying to chemically defuse the anxiety attacks. I don’t have any money left. I’ve been eyeing my guitars, trying to figure out if I could pawn them for enough to pay the power bills. (Short answer: no. They’re not exactly high-end musical instruments.) I need to work on the two paying projects I’ve got right now basically for sixteen hours a day until the end of the month to barely cover our rent. Which also does my anxiety problem no good, nor does it particularly please my wife.

The worst thing about all of this is that I am absolutely, utterly convinced that I can make Stikki profitable enough to be happy. I’ve done the math, and unless I am staggeringly stupid I can earn enough from advertising to pay the bills within just a couple of months. I can see the Promised Land, where you don’t sit up at three am worrying about bills. I just can’t reach it.

Feel free to ignore this, by the way, and if I sound like I’m whining, well, yeah, I probably am. I’m just tired, and I need help and I don’t know where to find it or even how to ask.

I’m going to go to bed and try to finish the last Harry Potter novel now.