Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 12

@bea yeah probably. I know that d3 isn't *just* for data visualization but coming from the world of matplotlib (where you can get pretty far just by calling the right function with your dataframe or whatever) it seems singularly unsuitable for that task to someone who's just starting out

wow, I really don't like d3js :( :( :( I mean it's all very well-engineered and internally consistent and solves known problems in scalable ways but every time I try to use it I'm just like "I have to do what now to draw a scatter plot"

@brook @enkiv2 might as well throw that one on there too tbh

@brennen that's a good question. I'm not sure either!

@enkiv2 "cursed ontologies / forbidden orthographies" would look great on a business card

another option would be to place the blame for being made to appear foolish on Trump himself, something like "GOP voters are fed up with being made to look like fools by this administration. Trump is taking advantage of their good will and humiliating them in front of the world and they're not going to take it for one more second."

if I were the DNC or whoever my messaging right now to trump supporters would be to always refer to him in the past tense; something like "it's a shame that Trump turned out to be so corrupt, but it's not surprising that so many smart GOP voters figured the whole thing out."

I've been thinking for a while—and have done no research to find out if other people think the same thing, which they might, sorry—that any anti-Trump rhetoric from people invested in electoral politics in the next however many years needs to include a face-saving escape hatch—a way for Trump supporters to wean themselves off of him that doesn't involve looking foolish. (or, unfortunately/regrettably, ever showing penitence, which they're unlikely to ever do)

"[P]eople don’t like to be made to look ridiculous. [...] But Trump himself makes it the case that there are really only two options. Either Trump is the greatest US President... or else he is, at best, totally ridiculous. [...] As a result, there is no way to conceptualize the red-blue divide except as a red pill-blue pill divide... The reason Trump talks constant lies is, in part, to ensure the debate frame can only be: which side is constantly lying?" http://crookedtimber.org/2018/06/13/epistemic-sunk-costs-and-the-extraordinary-populist-delusions-of-crowds/

@mkb i really dislike the visual paradigm of max/msp and pd, i just immediately get frustrated when i'm trying to make changes or add new complexity :(

sonic pi isn't quite as versatile as the other tools i mentioned but it has the tremendous benefits of a batteries-included approach and using a mainstream non-iconoclastic programming language (ruby) with like real data structures and stuff that work in intuitive ways for my particular programmer brain

I have tried to be friends with max/msp, pd, chuck, supercollider, even csound etc over the years but sonic pi is the first livecoding/algorithmic music environment I've used that actually feels good to me—like I feel like I could quickly and intuitively get stuff done with it http://sonic-pi.net/ (learning about it right now in a session at itp camp https://itp.nyu.edu/camp2018/)

I finished playing Mass Effect Andromeda the other day and I dunno. the game is flawed in a number of ways but the characters and story started to click for me and I ended up liking the game a lot. (the art direction and world-building are intensely mediocre but ME has never been especially imaginative/deliberate in those areas imo) andromeda feels like a suitable coda to the events of the main series and I'm looking forward to playing through a second time at some point

yesssss new low album https://pitchfork.com/news/low-announce-new-album-double-negative-share-3-songs-listen/

@SuzanEraslan i did not see that exhibition but wish i had! i've been surprised lately by how eager people are to paper over the shitbagness of artists from that area but also how easily you can scratch the surface and see the shitbagness displayed before you in its full awfulness :( i am trying to be more conscientious about how i present artists like this to my students because it's important to learn from the past but not worth idolizing these people in any way

of all the shitbags of the belle epoque avant-garde, marinetti is the one i most wish was less of a shitbag. i want to believe that the ideas and principles of futurism aren't just destined to lead you to writing poems extolling the virtues of fascist military leaders or whatever

imo any discussion about the invention of word vectors should include marinetti's use of arithmetic symbols in his poetry (cited here in drucker's _the visible word_)