My godson, Shane, is pretty good at technology — especially for a 2 year-old.
He’s very good, for example, at picking up my sister’s phone, finding my picture, and tapping it to call me. A typical call goes like this:
Me: Hello?
Shane: giggling
Me: Shane? Is that you?
Shane: Blah blah squeal BLAH!
Me: That’s really interesting. Well, let me tell you about my day…
Shane: maniacal laughterhangs up
On longer calls, he’ll babble on and on about stuff, and then my sister will pick up the phone to tell me how he’s been walking around the house and the yard, pointing at things and telling me about them. I guess he is really into this tree in their backyard, and he talks to me about it all the time. (If I’m being honest, from my end of the line he’s about as excited about the tree as he is about their cat, or his toy cars, or this Batman mask he likes to wear.)
So he’s recently learned how to use Skype to talk to me, and this weekend, he introduced me to a new game that he likes to play. I don’t think he named it, but I call it “Run Around The House With Uncle Wil On Mom’s iPad, Put Him On The Floor In The Hallway, Then Run Away Laughing.”
Witness:It’s a pretty fun game for him, and I’m not sure what the rules are, but I think he’s winning.
Also? It’s a little bit of a mindfuck that he’s growing up in a world where being able to see me on a thing he holds in his hands while we talk to each other is so normal and pedestrian, he can literally put it/me on the ground and RUN AWAY from it.
I’ve been around long enough to recognize malware when I see it, and I still take lots of precautions to ensure that something doesn’t sneak by (I use OpenDNS, Web of Trust, NoScript, and Ghostery, for example) but a few moments ago, I was almost tricked by a malware site, and if it could happen to me, it could happen to someone who is less paranoid.
So I present this as a warning, a reminder, and a public service.
I thought I was going to youtube.com/geekandsundry to see if our Tabletop gag reel had been posted, yet. When I hit return, I saw this:
I haven’t heard of Flash Player Pro, but it looked real, and maybe this was some new stupid thing that I was going to get mad about, with YouTube forcing me to download some new version of software that I didn’t already have.
So that should have been my first warning: YouTube is never going to make it harder for me to get to see the stuff I want to see, because that would make it harder for YouTube to show me ads.
But I’m still waking up, so I clicked “accept and install”, and saw this:
Ah-ha! Evil malware people use .exe files because it’s easier to infect Windows than it is to infect OS X, and I understand that it’s fairly common for people to tick off a box in Windows that allows pretty much anything to install itself. You know, for convenience.
Well, I clicked CANCEL, and tried to figure out how my browser had taken me to this site, and how it had even gotten past all of my defenses to load itself.
It turns out that I’d typed youtuve.com, not youtube.com, and the bad guys had done the rest.
So be careful out there, kids, because not everyone online is a good guy.
This weekend, my friends hosted a 1920s occult party. There were tarot readings, Ouija boards, and a seance. Everyone was encouraged to attend in appropriate attire, and we sipped absinthe while movies like The Golem and Fantomas were projected on the walls.
Anne and I got our clothes from Unique Vintage and Clockwork Couture. While we were getting dressed, Anne said, “I kind of love that I’m cosplaying with my husband,” and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
I had this idea to track down some 1920s music to play during the afternoon and evening, leading up to the party, so I started by looking on Amazon. I didn’t see anything that I liked, so I checked the Google Play store, and then iTunes. Again, I couldn’t find the original recordings that I was looking for, and as I was about to give up, a voice inside my head sort of kicked me behind the eyeballs and said, “Hey, stupid, music from the 1920s is in the public domain. Go look on the Internet Archive and I bet you’ll find more original recordings than you know what to do with.”
People, you should always listen to the voices in your head, because they know things. They know things that you don’t know. THEY KNOW THINGS THAT THE OTHERS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW AND GREAT CTHU–
Sorry. I got a little carried away, there.
So I went to the Internet Archive, and I found a treasure trove of incredible recordings.
Here are a few of them:
I grabbed them all, because that’s what you can legally and ethically do with the Internet Archive, and I made playlists that I shuffled through our Sonos to fill our house with the sounds of the Roaring Twenties. By the time we left for the party, I was ready to hop in a plane with Lucky Lindy and fly to New York to watch Murder’s Row in action.
So the party was fantastic, and everyone there looked incredible, but that’s not what I set out to write about this morning. What I wanted to write about was this thing I made, using free (as in speech and beer) tools, to create something where something wasn’t before.
Within one of the collections I downloaded, there was a jaunty little tune called JaDa.
I enjoyed it, and I had this idea to slow it down and completely transform it into something that sounds very, very different.
Longtime readers may remember that I freaking love the ambient music of the early 1990s. Well, I loaded JaDa into a free and open source audio editing program called Audacity, and I played around with some of audacity’s effects to turn this three minute jazz tune into nearly an hour of sinister dark ambient that was directly inspired by the occult party we attended. When I finished it, I was happy with what I’d made, and I wanted to share it with the world. So I put it on SoundCloud. While I was uploading it, I saw that I could add some sort of album art. Keeping with the theme of transforming existing public domain works, using open source tools, I went back to the Internet Archive, and found a page of a 1927 seed catalog that had some bright strawberries on it. I captured part of that image, loaded it into Gimp, and applied a bunch of filters to it, until I’d turned an image of luscious strawberries into something very different, that I thought matched the mood and tone of the audio I’d created.
I’ve talked a lot in the past about how I believe this is a really great time to be a creative person, because the tools we need to make things, as well as the ability to get those things out into the world, are never farther away than our keyboards. I hope this inspires some of you to Get Excited and Make Things.
I’ve written before about how useful I believe the bittorrent protocol is, and today I wanted to share something with you guys that you may not have known about (I’m pretty with it, as the kids say, and I didn’t even know about this until a couple of weeks ago): Bittorrent Bundles. The BT Bundles are all legal, official, and released by artists to promote and share their work with their audience. Instead of paying for server space and bandwidth, artists seed files, and let the bittorrent community do the rest.
Whenever someone tries to argue that torrents are just for piracy, I show them the BT Bundles, because it’s such an effective way for artists to promote themselves and share their creations with their audience.
Someone is impersonating me (or at least trying to mislead people into thinking he/she/it is me) on Instagram. This person is using my Twitter avatar, my bio, and generally causing a lot of confusion.
I tried to report the profile to Instagram, and Instagram told me that to complete the report, I would have to send a scan of my government-issued identification.
Fuck. That.
So: I can’t get the account taken down, but that’s not me on Instagram. Tell your friends. Or don’t. I’m not the boss of you.
It’s a pretty fun game for him, and I’m not sure what the rules are, but I think he’s winning.
