Notices by Strange Attractor (strangeattractor@refactorcamp.org), page 20

In French, to say "I'm getting out of a tough situation" we say "je me démerde" which roughly translates to "I'm unshitting myself" and I think that's beautiful

Today I had a really fun time at an open-mic music party at a friend's house.

There was a folk-rock duo, improvisations on Bach, middle-eastern orchestral music played on a lute-like instrument called an Oud with a woman singing in Egyptian Arabic... A ukelele player did a Weird Al song and half the room sang along with the chorus. I went last, playing the accordion, leading everybody in a call/response sea chanty and finished with the song from Legend of Zelda. Good times! #mastomusic

How electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos created new scales, by doing away with the assumption that there must be an octave:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuT6Y53LYH4&list=RDRuT6Y53LYH4&start_radio=1

You can hear these scales in "Beauty in the Beast":
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2j1gy2

if it sounds eerie and alien it's because these are notes your ears have literally never heard before. What if a painter could invent new colors?

Where else could we apply this idea of questioning what we assume to be the neutral background of our work?

#heyfeedfox

@vgr @bkam Don't know if you ever heard of EVE Online. It was/is a particularly lawless pvp game, and I once read an interesting theory by a player.

He said coalitions don't break from big defeats, because a big defeat can be spun into a galvanizing narrative. But if you make their lives boring, unpleasant, and confusing, in a thousand small ways, you can drive a wedge between the membership and the leadership, and people eventually just give up and leave.

I’d tell you a Fibonacci joke, but it’s probably as bad as the last two you’ve heard combined.

My company has worked on a lot of Department of Energy #SolarPower research projects in the past via the "Sunshot" grant program.

This year there were 3 research funding opportunities related to our work, so we spent a lot of time crafting proposals for each one. The DOE abruptly canceled the opportunities *after* everybody submitted proposals. Big waste of our time. Never seen anything so unprofessional from the DOE before.

Here's an article about what happened: https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/nixed-solar-grant-opportunity-cost-500-000-drawing-hill-scrutiny

@Elmkast @johnhenry tumblr fandoms were a friendly place for a lot of people who were women and/or LGBT and/or kinky to, like, safely explore their sexuality via creative works (fanart/fanfic), discover other people with similar interests, and build a community.

That's miles away from anything mainstream porn sites are interested in supporting.

Features of tumblr that made it good for this were easy image hosting, easy reblogging, tagging, and easy creation of multiple pseudonyms.

@Elmkast it is amazing how convenient a villain Facebook has turned into, a veritable get out of jail free card for other institutions re: their own failures

The difference between a grand narrative and a narrative is that the former is where surplus middle-class attention preferentially flows #heyfeedfox

@Elmkast Agree search has gotten worse from ~5-10 years ago. Also there's not even a visible link to advanced search anymore, you have to type or bookmark https://www.google.com/advanced_search

I wonder if wikipedia is following a similar trajectory as a trusted source?

I have 73 MB of tweets and 2.32 GB worth of images in my twitter download, holy crap. Anyone know of any good tools to work with the json file? I don't want to do any coding if I can help it, but would like to do crap like filter tweets by keyword and send to a csv or something

People think they have 20/20 hindsight. Actually most hindsight conclusions are just another theory that hasn't been tested against reality yet.

#heyfeedfox

'Open hardware and software to help communities measure and analyze pollution'

https://publiclab.org/

This is really cool.