Author: dave-o

Doing What You Have to Do (w/ props @roosroast)

There are three types of things you have to do in this life:

  1. Things you enjoy doing for entirely internally motivated reasons—those things that you simply find pleasurable or gratifying in and of themselves, without further social context.
  2. Things you enjoy doing because someone will give you money to do it.
  3. Things you enjoy doing because they please or help other humans whose opinion you give a shit about.

Note what is lacking here:

things you don’t enjoy doing

Everything that you do, you should be able to mentally reorient into one of the Three Things listed above. If there’s a thing you can’t do that with, then maybe you need to excise it from your life.[1][2]

In short: Do Good Things.[3]

Continue reading “Doing What You Have to Do (w/ props @roosroast)”

Meat vs. Machine

Nature can best a drone…

…and a dude with a rudimentary medieval weapon can best a drone…

..and then this super-genius has to fuck it all up: 

(Doesn’t help that the fucking thing sounds like a billion mosquitos all crying out for vengeance.)

Thanks, buddy; our fate as biological batteries for a reality-bending one world robo-overlord is basically sealed.

I Love This . . . [UPDATE!!!]

. . . but it literally goes 30 seconds too long.  Also, she really should be smoking an e-cigarette, right?

UPDATE: My lovely wife points out that, given the content of the smoker’s NDE, we are perhaps meant to understand that she has in fact been sent to Purgatory, Hell, or a non-Xtian vision of the afterlife(!!!)

Mind—blow!

Holy Shit! You Will Not Believe Weezer’s Creative Process

Artists: Even if you are lukewarm on Weezer, this interview with Rivers Cuomo (the band’s frontman) is so worth your time.  I’ve got more than a little experience with collaboration, creativity under duress, constrained writing techniques, and Oulipo-like methods, and yet I’ve never come across a process like this, which is at once ornately technical (spreadsheets, demo files, something akin to A/B testing) and is so meticulous in the interest of harnessing randomness and stripping context and formal planning out of the creative process.

Weezerians: To those who dig Weezer already, know this: The stories in their songs are not stories they wrote, but stories you wrote in response to the fragments they gathered and the formulae they use to collect and organize those fragments.

Public Service Announcement: Song Exploder is consistently awesome (for example, it introduced my 9yo to Iggy Pop and made him an instant fan).  So worth subscribing and supporting.

Seeing Sound: Couscous, Steel Cafe Tables, String Instruments, Math

Note that the different Chladni (say “clad-knee”) Figures he generates corresponds to different pitches (i..e, frequencies) and timbres (think “flavors of sound”), and that he does this by creating a node (which is technically any point in a wave where it crosses zero, and literally the places where a vibrating thing—like a guitar or cello string—is not moving).

All of which is neat, but mostly I just posted it because it looks hella sweeeeet!

360º Views from the Surface of Mars(!!!)

These are fun on your computer, and absolutely immersively astounding on your phone/tablet. The future is here, but unevenly distributed—with some portions dune-buggying around Mars, picking at rocks and wrecking up the joint.

Consider this your daily reminder that, in contrast to how things were when I was a kid, Mars is now populated—and it’s ruled by robots!

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover at Namib Dune (360 view) – YouTube

(props to Terence Hawkins for just messaging me about a typo; that cat writes good books)

Josh Burker’s Scratchbox Turntable

Josh Burker—an early reviewer of my latest DIY book, Junkyard Jam Band—didn’t just build a sweet-ass Scratchbox (although he did do that)

Josh went one better and adapted it to a hella rad turntable interface.

Oh.

My.

Daaaaaaaamn!

I love this sooooo much! Check it out:

Wanna build your own Scratchbox (or Scratchbox-inspired awesomeness)? Check out my full illustrated Scratchbox build instructions on the MAKE magazine website.

For a brief history of the credit card magstripe that makes this all possible, check out the first bit of this Planet Money podcast: Episode 695: Put A Chip On It : Planet Money : NPR:

(thx Josh!)