tom moody

modification of yaherd phone art

"B4 and 4fter" [2.9 MB .mp3]

A slightly melancholy nursery tune. MIDI notes playing 3 hardware oscillators* tuned to make a chord - with LFO tremelo on 2 of the oscillators' VCA control voltages. Some obscure Hammond B-3 licks (taken out of context) on the fade.

*1 Doepfer triangle (low note) and 2 Gamma Wave Source

exploring the boundaries of the phone as artistic medium

apologies to tetsuo

Let the Right One In, 2008, Sweden, subtitled
TOTAL SPOILERS - don't read w/o seeing

Let the Right One In is a perfect loop that spins out more even metafiction than the main story contains.
Several mysteries of the clumsy Father, surrogate Father, or captor seen in the first half are explained in the second.
The Father, we learn, is the boy at the end of the next cycle of serving as keeper/guardian for the ageless vampire girl.
What strikes us initially as the Father's slow-witted ineptitude is in fact burn-out and grief after a lifetime of murdering for her and covering up her crimes. He still loves her, because she once seduced him just as convincingly and decisively as she does the Boy in this film. Yet he longs for death, wants to get caught, and disfigures himself horribly when he sees he is about to be replaced, inevitably, by a younger guardian.
All of this will happen to the Boy, as it happened to unknown other boys before. We are seeing the beginning and the end of his life.
One critic complained about the violence of the revenge in the swimming pool at the end -- was it just a cheap thrill for the audience? Perhaps, but the pleasure is hollowed-out by the scenes of the Boy weeping afterwards. Also the extremity of the event further explains the Boy's willingness to give the girl decades of servitude -- he owes her big time. Prior to this we saw him vacillating over her murders, even losing his taste for his serial killer clipping collection. After this incident, he's hooked for life.
I pondered the gender-bending of the vampire Girl. It explains how/why she offers "guy advice" to the Boy about defending himself from bullies. She asks the Boy to "be me" but also wants to be him.
We see hints of how the power dynamic of this very alike couple will play out over years of the Boy's servitude. The girl bosses the Father around and occasionally offers him a stroke on the cheek. The Boy, feeling his oats after shellacking his first bully, plays games with the girl's weakness of not being able to enter a room uninvited. She must give him a bloody demonstration of where such games will lead.
Most the reviews I skimmed talked about the coming of age/romance aspects of the story but not its exposition of the roots of a lifetime co-dependent relationship.

cf. Laloux's Time Masters (1982) - surprise ending involving origins of "old man" character.

Have been looking at the Phone Arts blog and decided to start a battle of the band(width)s with some "MSPaint Phone Art." This is the new Windows 7 MSPaint which allows you to (i) draw a phone outline, (ii) draw with a crayon, (iii) draw with a magic marker, (iv) paint with semi-transparent wash, etc. (The above was made on a PC.)

Phone Arts' mission statement has changed since I first wrote about them. Now it says they are "experimenting using only the mobile phone as the medium to create unique compositions" and that they "explore the boundaries of the phone to create graphic illustrations and designs." Previously it said their aim was to "create something on a mobile device with the intended purpose of designing graphic arts that are spontaneous and reactionary."

I quibbled about the word reactionary (it could mean conservative as well as "reacting to each other") but the rest of the statement was fine before. "Graphic arts" is better than "graphic illustrations and designs." Both illustration and design are usually done for a purpose and for a client, whereas these one-off compositions are made for no other purpose than to exist on your phone (or be downloaded for enjoyment, delectation, etc). Also, I see no "exploring the boundaries of the phone" going on there. Instead a handful of "factory setting" techniques are used over and over--various flat brush shapes, sprays, "3D" brushes, some CAD-like rendering, and remixing existing photos and designs. No one is throwing the phone off a building, painting underwater, or opening up the back of the phone and wiring it to respond to household appliances.

modification of a GIF by Jeffrey Henderson (shorter, larger)

Missed some of the questions on the twitter feed for last night's streaming video talk at Art Micro-Patronage. Sorry I didn't get to talk more about Glass Popcorn but it was great to hear from his fan base. One non-Glass query was:

U draw very similar blob like shapes on CCDS can u talk about these shapes

H.P. Lovecraft (who in real life was disgusted by sea food) wrote often about jellyfish creatures from dimensions with "wrong geometries" breaking through into our world. As it turned out, it wasn't fiction. I find these monsters are less scary at night and in old cemeteries than when erected in public plazas in daylight by government officials.

Sorry if you asked a question during my streaming talk tonight on the Art Micropatronage website and I ignored you. I only saw a handful of questions that came in. The AMP folks believe it's because "twitter doesn't show tweets when the hashtag is the same as the username" so if you had @AMPatronage and #AMPatronage in the same tweet nothing showed up in the #AMPatronage search results I was refreshing. Bummer.

Below are questions and comments that came in, many of which I didn't see. I will answer, uh, some of them in an upcoming post.

what about 4D?

Tom do you see yourself in glass popcorn? do you have a little glass in you?

tom talk about dump.fm

U draw very similar blob like shapes on CCDS can u talk about these shapes

would u be happie or sad if glasspopcorn made a song called "Im Tom Moody"

"immediate medium" my new band name

*how well can pixel art be translated into 'real life' art objects? what changes when its removed from its original medium?

Can u talk about dump as a place where art blossoms amongst filth

**Do you play games?

**Do u think ur work really has that much in common with 8 bit sprites?

you gat Skype?

Talk about glasspopcorn please Im lonely

wut about web video

Wanna video chat?

Is pixel art the new minimalism?

How Do U feel about "Glass Popcorn" this question is optional.

Who is the best dumper?

Hi Tom moody what is ur favorite hip hop song u heard in 2011?

*Can you expand on your 1st reason a little bit? What do you mean access the medium on its most basic?

*Can you talk about the altar format of your piece and how you view the altar format in general ?

MSPaint 4evar

*Answered (or at least addressed) during the talk.
**Discussed without seeing the question.

Update: A few shouts were omitted from the above list--I saw them, thanks for the kind words.

Back in '09 we complained about Comcast's service "Domain Helper," which redirects requests for non-existent URLs to a Yahoo search page. The company has now ceased using Domain Helper because it's incompatible with the DNSSEC internet page-naming security specifications, which it just implemented. Their statement:

When we launched the Domain Helper service, we also set in motion its eventual shutdown due to our plans to launch DNSSEC. Domain Helper has been turned off since DNS response modification tactics, including DNS redirect services, are technically incompatible with DNSSEC and/or create conditions that can be indistinguishable from malicious modifications of DNS traffic (including DNS cache poisoning attacks). Since we want to ensure our customers have the most secure Internet experience, and that if they detect any DNSSEC breakage or error messages that they know to be concerned (rather than not knowing if the breakage/error was "official" and caused by our redirect service or "unofficial" and caused by an attacker), our priority has been placed on DNSSEC deployment -- now automatically protecting our customers...

Translation: (i) "We'll treat you like idiots until it's no longer in our interests to do so" and (ii) "I meant to do that."
TechDirt reads this as an unintended admission that the anti-piracy schemes of the SOPA and PIPA bills won't work:

Comcast (an official SOPA/PIPA supporter) has rolled out DNSSEC, urged others to roll out DNSSEC and turned off its own DNS redirect system, stating clearly that DNS redirect is incompatible with DNSSEC, if you want to keep people secure. In the end, this certainly appears to suggest that Comcast is admitting that it cannot comply with SOPA/PIPA, even as the very same company is advocating for those laws.

(Because SOPA/PIPA envision a system for redirecting traffic away from allegedly offending websites).

In March of 2010, Facebook was being described as having 400 million users.

By July of 2010 that year the number had increased to 500 million, according one expert named Mark Zuckerberg.

By July of 2011 the LA Times was reporting that the company had 600 million active monthly users. (Source: Facebook)

These are some nice round numbers!

Today, six months after the last count, an infographic appears claiming the number is now 800 million users! "One in ten humans on the planet" now use Facebook, we're told.

Everyone loves a good story. Also, the price of housing only goes up.