"I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge.

I can hear the footsteps every night on the decks.

But I was there.

I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.

I was working on the organ sounds with much patience.

I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band.

I told him, "Don’t do it that way. You’ll never make a dime."

I was there.

I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.

I played it at CBGB’s.

Everybody thought I was crazy.

We all know.

I was there.

I was there.

I’ve never been wrong.

I used to work in the record store.

I had everything before anyone.

I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.

I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.

I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.

But I’m losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.

And they’re actually really, really nice.

I’m losing my edge.
"

L.C.D. Soundsystem, "Losing my edge"

received today in Flickrmail:

“Hi, I couldn’t find an e-mail address for you on your website, so this is the next-best thing.

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve finally unsubbed from your “work” RSS feed today, because I could no longer handle the overwhelming churn of snapshots and del.icio.us links that were drowning out your writing. Is there some place I could get a no-flickr and no-delicious feed out of your site?

Thanks!”

Oh well. Please yerselves.

From Onion AV Club interview with Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of Yars Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari 2600 – his theory on how Steven Spielberg is an Alien Mind Gangster :

"I had this theory that in the early ’80s, we were very close to contact from aliens and other planets and stuff like that. I felt that if the aliens were going to come down, if people were smart enough to visit Earth, then they were smart enough not to come down and say "Hi!" They would send a recon team, a sort of advance team to culturalize the planet, and prepare it to meet the aliens; not like in The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Spielberg had done a couple of movies like E.T. and Close Encounters, some of the first movies that had portrayed aliens as non-threatening people to us. Those movies became hugely successful. They were seen all over the planet, literally. So my theory was that Spielberg was the engineer of the advance team. His job was to make movies that showed aliens in a positive light.

O: Now he’s making War Of The Worlds. What does that do to your theory?

HSW: Maybe they didn’t follow through with their bonus check."

Found via Gonzalo’s Ludology.org

Observation/idea: I had to wait on a customer support line today for quite a while. I’m sure you’ve had to do this too at some point.

The company in question had selected some modern pop standards and AOR (Robbie Bloody Williams, Norah Bloody Jones, Dido Bloody Dido etc) to play while I waited, punctuated with cheery automated estimates of my wait time.

I’m sure they got sold a hold music package that was focus-grouped by some unfortunates and tailored to their brand image at quite a premium. It was nethertheless, obviously, supremely irritating. Not only to me, but because I work in a shared office, to my co-workers who caught the second-hand smog of musak through the speaker of my cellphone.

This lead me to think about designing musak.

I was trying to multitask during the dead-time of waiting on the line, which meant working at my computer keyboard while half-listening to the hold music  in case the customer-support person answered. Because they were playing pop music – it had to be held in focus to differentiate between the vocals of Williams et al, and the dulcet tones of the support guy. I had to listen all the time.

So first suggestion – use ambient music that makes for a clearer distinction between the wait mode, the announcements of how long you have to wait, and the voice of the person you’re waiting for – allowing me to multitask between the call on hold and my work that little bit more easily

Second suggestion – go further with this and create generative ambient music which would be unique and pleasant to listen to – and could also act as a preattentive aural information channel.

It could use rhythm and melody to keep you aware of you place in the queue, a recurring theme might build anticipation… an allegro con brio indicating you’re drawing near to the answer… a crescendo of attention building to the sweet moment your call gets answered.

Of course it’s an opportunity for sonic branding for the company also… getting their customers happily whistling their hold tune throughout the day…

A neologism springing from a colleagues slip of the tongue:

PIPOTHESIS : pronounced “pipe – O – thesis”

An idea or hypothesis that has been built from information directely received without feedback or reflection from another.

A portmanteau of pipe (as in unix pipe) and hypothesis.