Tempted to do more soul squeezing tonight, but I got a lot of links cluttering up my browser so I will do that instead, and leave all that catharsis for another time.

Fun fact : A nuclear bomb almost wiped North Carolina off the map.

The year was 1961. Cold War level : intense. A B-52 bomber crashed in North Carolina. It was carrying two 4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs, each 260 time more powerful than the bomb that level Hiroshima.

One bomb landed safely with all four safety mechanisms having done exactly what they were supposed to do, namely prevented the bomb from detonating.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that in the other bomb, which landed around 12 miles from Goldsboro, North Carolina, three of the four safety mechanisms failed and the only thing that kept the Eastern Seaboard from disappearing in a nuclear fireball was a simple low-tech low-voltage switch.

Let that one roll around in your head for a while. If that little switch from the era of the vacuum tube had not done its job, millions would have died in the blast and millions more would have died from the secondary effects like the shockwave and the fallout.

Some of that fallout would likely have fallen on my home in the Maritimes.

Talk about a perfect starting off point for an alternate history tale. I can’t even begin to imagine how the world would have been changed if that little switch had failed. The consequences are just too profound to be calculated. It would have, no exaggeration, changed everything.

Thanks, little switch.

Next, we have a powerful piece of satire from an all-woman comedy group from India.

Warning, this is satire, but you probably won’t laugh.

If that was done by women in the USA or Europe, I would call it heavy-handed and overbearing, but India has a really bad rape problem.

Basically, they are where we were in the bad old days of the early 50s, where rape gangs roamed with impunity and the heavy institutional sexism meant law enforcement just did not listen to women or care if they got raped. They lazily assumed that any woman who got raped did something or other to deserve it, and women were hysterical anyhow, so she’s probably just making the whole thing up.

It’s hard to imagine, in the modern world, just how bad thing were for woman back then. But we can see it all happening again, live and in 3D, in places like India which are struggling to modernize.

It takes a very long and very brutal struggle to make your culture believe that women are people, and it is going to be a long time before the women of India have what every woman in the modern “top 2 billion” world takes for granted so deeply that she can’t even imagine things being otherwise.

Read your feminist histories, ladies, and you will realize that you are in the position to help do for women in places like India today what many strong, fearless, desperate women did for you before you were born.

To me, that is what modern feminism is all about.

A few short things now, like this absolutely killer anecdote related by rave-fave Stephen Fry :

Damned right it does! Take a real hearty, can-do, stiff-upper-lip, we-shall-fight-them-on-the-beaches spirit to go out for a bit of fun on one of the coldest nights of the year, yet alone the sort of fun that has to involve at least a minimum amount of genital exposure.

Presumably, their labours kept them warm until some jacked up cop had to make his quota by ruining it.

Then there’s this story, one I never ever get tired of, about Japanese cat islands.

Yes, there are two different Japanese islands (Japan has LOTS of islands) that feature a cat population far greater than their human populations, and these cats roam free in great numbers.

That looks like this :

I would love to take a nap with all these kitties.

I have got to go to one of these places some day. That looks so awesome. It reminds me of my childhood in a house full of cats.

Next, another example of Jimmy Fallon making it harder and harder for me to dislike him.

I mean, how can I argue with that? I love lip-sync! It’s such a wonderfully democratic art form. You don’t need to be able to sing or play an instrument, you just need to go out there and perform the hell out of the song just like you would if you were alone with nobody watching.

I was around for the lip-sync craze of the 80’s, and I loved it. There was a show on TV, I forget what it was called, but it was a network lip-sync show and it was ten tons of fun to watch. I love to see everyday people, just regular old nobodies, channel their inner performer and just put it out there with all their hearts.

So if this instigates a lip-sync revival, I will officially forgive Jimmy Fallon for being such an annoying, giggling, unprofessional, smarmy, Mike Myers wannabe jagoff when he was on SNL.

More or less.

Finally, of course, we have my little thang of the day.

Just another silly little slideshow. It turned out okay I guess.

I feel like I am entering a dangerous but potentially very important phase of my artistic development. I am not happy with the sort of things I am producing, but I don’t yet have the right combination of energy, focus, and confidence to do better.

So I get the feeling that it is time for one of those painful but productive painful phases where I don’t like my own work and spend a lot of time brooding and seething and grumbling to myself before the pressure finally leads to a growth spurt.

It’s not fun, but it was just such a process that led to me to start making videos in the first place.

We will see where this one takes me.

I need to come up with stable names for the various types of post I do, so I can just called them “X Number Whatever” and skip having to think up a title each damned time.

And no, I cannot leave the posts without titles. WordPress allows that, but my muse does not.

My creativity can be very demanding sometimes.

Anyhow, here’s the usual video thing. Four videos, mine last, do wop do waaah.

First we have a video I saw once, was really impressed by it, then tried to explain it to Felicity, who teaches music theory for a living, and completed failed to get it across to her, and then found that I lacked the Google-fu to figure out how to find the damned thing online.

Seriously, what would the Google search for this be? Bobby McFerrin plays the crowd?>

Anyhow, here is Professor McFerrin rocking the room.

Are you not entertained? With genius level simplicity, he demonstrates the universality of music as a language of the human mind.

This semi-randomly assembled group of people was transformed into a living keyboard for McFerrin to hop around on. That by itself is a pretty neat trick, especially because he did it without explaining anything. He did it all with his voice and body language,.

But what I find really cool is that the audience followed a pentatonic scale perfectly without, I am assuming, the majority of them even knowing what that was.

I think what it truly demonstrates is that we all have a sense of interval. We might not know a thing about music, but we know how to make each note the same number of half-tones off from the previous one.

Next we have a rather neat little bit of nerdcore music, this one the sort of thing that would happen if Weird Al (hallowed be his name and works) was a hardcore particle physics and/or astrophysics (they are increasingly the same thing) devotee.

See, I learned my lesson with that thing about “complete” quantum data transfer in last week’s science post. If I don’t understand a story well enough to say anything about it, I will just put it out there to my readers, hoping those higher on the nerd food chain will explain it to me.

And I do not get 90 percent of what he is on about in that song. Any knowledge of string theory I have is so old that I still think superstrings are a thing. (But they aren’t any more…. right?).

So my brain doesn’t even understand branes, and I assume we are so past branes now it’s hilarious. I might as well be asking how fast modems are these days.

Still, I rather like the production values of the song and the video (making those animations where all the words fit together must be hard!), and I love Sock Puppet Einstein and his unique singing voice, so I figured I would share the video with you all.

But not on Friday. Fridays are for science I understand.

Next up, we have a rather well done skit about what it’s like to live in Vancouver.

Excellent stuff. Tightly paced, well edited, high density, and tons of good material.

I am kind of jealous, honestly. It’s exactly the kind of slick local comedy I want to do some day. I would love to have a show that was the Almost Live of the GVRD.

And yes, that includes the completely shameless whoring to the audience via local place names…. just like those idiots in SPUZZUM, am I right?

As to the accuracy of the observations of the skit, I dunno. I am so far from being plugged in to the local scene at all that I am almost plugged into a completely different scene.

But it all rings true to me. When the N magnet went on the lime-green sports car, I totally LOLed. And I love the line “And that’s hardly a joke!”.

Oh, and the bit about the bike lines is priceless because just the other day I was telling Joe about my experience with the ongoing war without honor or humanity between the bikers, the drivers, and the pedestrians in the editorial and letters columns of the free newspapers in Portland Oregon when I lived there.

Seriously. You want to see people from a very laid back and hippie-ish town lose their shit and go feral? Bring up the subject of bike lanes.

Bikers : “We are angry at you drivers because you keep almost killing us on the highway!”
Drivers : “Well we are mad at YOU because we keep almost killing you on the highway!”
Pedestrians : “They should close Downtown to all vehicles and make the whole thing a pedestrian mall!”
Bikers and Drivers : “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

And so forth and so on.

Aaaand lastly, we have my lil ol vid right here.

I am not very happy with it, but the basic idea has merit and I may try it again with political news instead of wacky little things next time.

I really rambled on in the middle “anger” act, and I was trying to be all bullet-point pithy comedy, a few high density rounds into a target then move on, and I failed at that.

Next time, I will try to focus better.

Also have another piece of music in the works, of course. This time, I decided to forego the use of loops and only use single instruments to make my tunes.

I mean, it’s still sample-based, but I am using single instruments instead of all the premade loops I have, and it feels good. Loops are great for making music quickly, but in order to get that speed you sacrifice a lot of control and nuance, and I am tired of having the loops dictate the music.

So this time, it is straight composing, no shortcuts. So far, I have a rather cheerful beat going with a funky bassline and a drum beat to match.

It’s all a little twee right now, but that’s just a matter of finding the right instruments.

Wish me luck.

Whole whack of videos to share with you nice people tonight, concluding, as always, with my own.

First we have this totally kickass feel-good inspirational video :

What I love so much about that video is that it is a story of relentless optimism and ingenuity. Everything Richie wanted to do as a child was greeted with the answer “yes, you can do it. Now let’s figure out how. ”

That is such an inspiring combination of the ideal and the pragmatic that I can’t help loving it. We need more people in this world with that same attitude.

Problems CAN be solved. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you they cannot. They are sad people with limited minds who would prefer to think of something as impossible over facing the possible change to their world-view if it’s NOT.

I want all the young, bright, idealistic designers and inventors in the world to see this video and see what happens if you completely dedicate yourself to solving problems.

And what happens when you are willing to imagine a seemingly impossible outcome and then cut your own path in order to get to it.

Anything is possible when intellect, knowledge, vision, and determination get together.

Next we have this. Pay attention to the center top of the screen during the first part of this vid to see a clue as to what is happening.

Oh, and fullscreen is best.

Holy SHIT! Did you see the size of that boulder? When I first saw this video in animated GIF form, I was so surprised by the landslide that I actually ducked.

You know, just in case rocks and debris came shooting out of my monitor to hit me.

Truly, the age of the dashboard camera is upon us, and with it scores of extraordinary videos taken on what for the driver was just another ordinary day.

This is what happens when people can document their lives like never before. We can all share our once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and thus enrich one another as a whole.

Imagine what it will be like when we all have Google Glass on all the time!

But enough of the wholesome world of the triumph of the human spirit and cool videos of natural disasters, and delve into the realms of horror available only to the deviant monsters who make Cracked lists.

These are, honest to god, the most disturbing ads in the history of television.

Like this one, which seems to have sprouted directly from the nightmares of David Cronenberg’s children.

Trust me, if I ever have a nightmare like that, it won’t be coffee I reach for, it will be a loaded pistol.

Or then there’s this big dose of 70’s drug inspired clusterfudge.

It’s like they got the message that the groovy thing was to make stuff that looked and felt like an acid trip) seriously, the 70’s WAS drugs…everything was stoned), but they missed the part where it’s supposed to be a GOOD trip, not a “do not take the brown acid, it is bad” trip.

I am sure that sometime soon, I will be startled out of deep sleep by a voice whispering “Dacron Polyester”.

And speaking of whispering, this is, I kid you not, the most terrifying ad I have seen in my forty years of living on Earth.

So of course, it’s for a child’s toy.

In 1965, the most popular doll in the world was Chatty Cathy.

This was…. a competitor.

Holy crap that’s scary. I am seriously terrified by that doll. That is so disturbing that it would make a killer ad for a 70’s evil doll horror film.

Hard to believe there is anyone who did not realize how creepy a whisper can be, but apparently at one point, there was enough of them to not only make this ad, but to put it on actual television, presumably deliberately where innocent little children would see it.

And as this was a simpler and more innocent time, people had fewer defenses against the sort of thing back then. Pity the poor little girl who runs to their Mommy because a superficially normal and harmless doll ad scared the bejebus out of them and now they want to burn every doll they have.

Oh, if you are wondering what ad was top of my nightmare fuel charts before this, it’s this one.

And again, it is intended for children.

Suddenly, the Teletubbies seem quite normal and restrained by comparison. The world of children is terrifying.

We need something sane and wholesome to cleanse our mental palates of all that ill-conceived accidental horror. I know…. let’s watch one of my videos full of dick jokes and the like!

Trust me, this will seem like a Norman Rockwell painting of a teddy bear picnic by comparison.

To answer the question that literally none of you have been asking, the bits of sweet sweet music I have been using for the intros and outtros lately are not, alas, my own compositions.

Maybe someday…. but not yet.

Instead, they are some samples I, um, borrowed from a site that preserved these samples from the ancient days of a device called the Mellotron.

The Mellotron hails from 1963, and it worked on a very simple, clever idea.

You take the keys of a keyboard and hook them up to a set of tape players that are all set to play at different speeds. Put the same bit of tape into all the tape recorders, and you have a very primitive version of a sampling keyboard, and have the sound of a whole orchestra at your fingertips.

Sure, it was a lot of work, but it was the best you could do before the age of Moog brought us all into the wonderful era of FM synthesis.

The people behind this particular set of Mellotron samples were studio technicians, and hence had lots and lots of musician friends who could come in and play something short but amazing for them.

The samples are absolutely gorgeous, these people clearly were no mere techs, they had a very keen ear for what makes music beautiful, and the face that you can totally tell that they were on tape at one point only adds to the appeal for me.

I have been trying to make music with those samples, but it’s very hard to work with samples that rich.

And now you know!

Feeling kinda bleh today.

Good day to just throw some links at y’all whilst I diarize.

Like check out this extremely clever bit.

I love this kind of meta-comedy. For one, the skit starts with an excellent bit of misdirection. You have no idea what the joke will be because you accept subtitles as a natural thing when talking to brown people, so you don’t even consciously notice them.

So to then have them become central to the bit is brilliant. And then to have a character get mad because he is subtitled and feel it is an insult to the quality of his English is doubly brilliant.

All in all a genius bit.

So yeah, today I have been feeling crappy. But then again, it’s the afternoon. I always feel like crap in the afternoons. And today, I have to do both parts of my day’s labours in the afternoon because tonight I will be going to the monthly BCSFA meeting.

At least, that’s what I should do. I honestly do not feel like it. I am tempted to just skip it and stay in and rest and stuff so I can be bright and perky when I hang out with the gang watching videos tonight. I just do not feel like pulling myself together to go out and be social today. I want to fall apart instead, like I usually do when I feel down. Just melt into a puddle of squishy good like I am Odo in his bucket, and regenerate.

Later, when I have my strength back, I can pull myself together and form a coherent shape and stick with it for a while. But right now, I just feel so dissolute and dissolved that just having it together enough to type these words to you wonderful people makes me feel like I am balancing a nail on my nose.

But I think I will go. I will go specifically because it will be difficult to do so. I am sick and fucking tired of the path of least resistance. I need to start building some strength of character. Put some muscles on my wimpy will and straight out this spineless soul of mine.

Sure, remaining formless maximizes options and minimizes commitment. If your resting state is shapelessness, then you can always take on whatever shape is needed at the time and can never, ever, be caught in the wrong shape at the wrong time, which somehow seems like the worst thing in the world.

Like if that happened, part of me will screech “See! You should have stayed formless, you idiot! Then you could have taken the shape you need instead of being stuck in the wrong one!”.

But maybe true adaptability means being able to handle things whatever shape you’re in.

And the thing about having formlessness as your default state is that it means that to actually take a useful shape requires energy, and maintaining that shape requires a constant input of energy. And that means you have this drain on you all the time you have to keep your shit together, and that limits how long you can do it and how stable any given shape can be.

Whereas with some investment in permanent structure and strength, you will have a shape even when you have no energy. Sure, you might be a little less adaptable, and it definitely means deciding on a shape and committing to it, which is very very hard for liquid types like myself.

So many possibilities… how can you possibly pick one? I saw one of those “find your passion and follow it” speeches recently via TED, and it all sounds very good and is no doubt true. I do feel like I have hidden behind excuses and cowardice for a long time. I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of, and amazing talents and abilities, so in theory there is nothing stopping me from just going out into the world to stake my claim and leave my mark on the world.

Nothing except abject terror, that is. The excuses and lies and self-delusions might be holding me back, but they are also my shelter from a world I feel to be cold and hard and unfeeling precisely because I have protected myself from it so effectively for so long.

I am a very old caterpillar.

Chief amongst these excuses, and the bigger one that I can’t seem to imagine how to overcome, is that issue of selection and commitment.

I have so many talents, so many interests, so many passions…. I can never choose. Having to choose one and commit to it truly feel like Sophie’s Choice to me, and like Sophia’s Choice, not choosing is easier, and involves less guilt, but leads to a far worse result.

And I’m all about outcomes. Aren’t I?

So I must dream into being some form of compromise that keeps my options as open as possible while also letting me actually go out there and actively explore some of them, and accept that said exploration will necessarily involve the possibility of some options being chosen and some discarded.

Time to man up and become a firmer, stronger species of goo.

Oh, and today’s vid is another piece of music.

I feel kinda bleh about that, too. I get the feeling that I will have to keep hammering away at the music thang for a while before I can make stuff that actually satisfies me.

Oh, and speaking as I was many words ago of TED, I found an amazing website via a TEDx talk by its creator.

It’s called DuoLingo, and it offers you high quality language training absolutely free. And not only that, by just using the website to learn to speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, you are also helping to translate Web pages from English into those languages.

So I am totally going to be using it to learn French. I started at the beginning, even though I do remember some of the French I learned over twelve damned years of taking it in school, because I figure I need to learn it all again if I am going to develop any sort of fluency.

And man, is it a pain in the ass dealing with gendered language again. Argh.

Oh well. Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Another talker, but with on screen text to spice it up.

Plus some truly sweet and juicy samples from my sample collection.

Oooh! Friday the 13th in 2013! The triskaidekaphobics must be freaking out today, poor souls.

Luckily, I am not now nor have I ever been superstitious.

After al, it’s bad luck!

Here I am, back again with the science goodies. This week, have stuff from the world of brain science (natch), hydro-exploration, nanotech, quantum teleportation, and testicles.

We will start out with a story that is only sort of, kinda, maybe about science, but it is so cool that I just have to share it anyhow and damn the format.

An enormous aquifer has been discovered in Kenya!

How big? Enough to meet all of Kenya’s water needs for seventy freaking years.

And that’s just what it has in it now. Scientists say that this aquifer is replenished by distant mountains, so it should never run dry as long as it’s managed properly.

Which brings me to my little message for Kenya. Meet me at Camera Three.

Kenya, we don’t know each other very well, and so it’s not really my place to say this, but I feel it needs to be said by someone anyhow.

DO NOT FUCK THIS UP. I am serious. I know it’s hard to get your shit together when you have millions of starving people and not enough of anything, but do not flake on this.

This could make Africa a way better place to be. The impact of a find like this could be massive. It could rewrite the entire face of your part of Africa.

So don’t blow it!

Next, some news that I feel I need to share with despite a certain issue.

Japanese scientists have succeeded in doing the first complete quantum information transfer!

I feel compelled to share this because it sounds extremely important.

The issue with sharing it is that I do not understand nearly anything in that article. I grasp quantum data transfer (or ‘quantum teleportation’ as the press insists on misnaming it) and I think I understand how that could be used computationally for, as far as we can tell, literally instantaneous date transfer (welcome to Cloud 2.0, where getting it off a website is faster than from your own computer).

But I grok not the talk of transport efficiency and measuring after and whatnot.

So enjoy the story. I am positive that it is important as hell.

Just don’t ask me to explain it to you any time soon.

Next up, we have an article that asks “Are there things which science can never, ever know?”

Nope! Next question please.

Next we have a story from the plasmoid-hot world of nanotech about the invention of the world’s thinnest glass.

What I loved about the story is that this discovery was made by accident. The researchers were trying to find something else and stumbled upon the super-thin glass in the process.

That’s how I know that nanotech is the new plastics : people make awesome discoveries by accident on their way to making other awesome discoveries.

Oh, and I have to do this or I won’t be able to sleep at night. Read this direct quote from the article while I go and fetch a rolled-up newspaper.

Just two atoms in thickness, making it literally two-dimensional,

*BAP!* No! No no no! Naughty science writer! That does NOT make it literally two dimensional! It still has all three spatial dimensions, you untutored ninny! Granted, they are all tiny, but they are all still there and I know this because no matter how thin, it’s still fucking MATTER.

Now go in your corner and think about what you’ve done before I have to get out your crate.

Next up : brain science! Of course. We love our brain science here at the FSW.

Two stories of brains and science this week. First, some research indicates psilocybin, the stuff that puts the “magic” in “magic mushrooms”, maybe be useful in treating PTSD and depression.

Mice given a dose of psilocybin after being trained to fear a certain sound via operant conditioning recovered from that induced phobia far faster than the control group. Intriguing.

(And I know this isn’t relevant, but isn’t the idea of mice tripping balls on ‘shrooms adorable? Little mice laying on their backs, lazily pedaling their little mice legs because they think they are running in a running wheel the size of a planet… )

There’s also indications that the psilocybin induced the growth of new brains cells in the mice.

Now if I may doff my anti-transcendentalist hat, both the new brain cell growth and the rapid recovery from the phobia could be explained if the psilocybin killed a bunch of brain cells first.

Dying brain cells provide really amazing acid trips, and it’s easy to forget traumatic events when the brain cells with the memories are just not there any more, man.

On the other hand, if it’s more brain cells you want, you could just take a nap.

Sleep doesn’t boost the number of actual neurons, of course. Once you hit age 25, you pretty much have all the brain you will ever have.

But it does double the number of oligodendrocytes, otherwise known as the cells that manufacture myelin, in the brain while you sleep.

Myelin is the fatty coating that your body uses as the insulator for the electrical wiring that is your nervous system. Without myelin, your whole nervous system would short out.

Still, I am not sure having more of it makes much of a difference. It strikes me as the sort of thing where there is only “enough” and “not enough”.

Finally, saved for the end not because it’s important but because it’s funny, we have this story of an anthropological study that claims that men with smaller testicles are more likely to be involved in early childcare than their big-balled brethren.

So ladies, if you want a guy who will be great with the kids, look for a man with tiny balls. That is so intuitive that it’s hilarious. And a little suspicious.

That’s all for this week, folks. I will be back in seven days time with more awesome science.

I’m getting tired of coming up with names for these things.

Can you tell?

Links, mine at end, yadda yadda.

First up, two videos about the same subject that dropped into my browser completely separate from one another.

There’s this clever little skit :

(warning : EXTREMELY NSFW dialogue!!! Earphones, people!)

Very nice, did not see that punchline coming at all. It’s so rare to see a skit that relies so much on structure these days. Most people are not up to writing and producing that kind of thing. It takes a lot more skill and control than just getting together with your friends and doing goofy shit.

Even decent skitcom tends to hedge its bets with gags before the punchline of the skit… and all too often, after the punchline too. How sad.

But these people laid down a well-timed, well-planned, well-executed skit that is not funny until the end, but builds brilliantly to its, shall we say, climax.

And I love some of the little details. Putting a book on the beach guy’s crotch was genius, makes it seem way pornier without actually showing anything.

And speaking of Beach Guy, it was also brilliant to include that guy’s parents. Friends might approve. Even lovers or significant others might understand, in time.

But you know damned well that your dear sainted parents never figured on you becoming a porn star.

Thank goodness it’s HBO!

Sadly, though, the world of explicit sex on HBO is apparently not nearly as wonderful as it sounds, at least according to these ladies.

Seriously, HBO? No dongs? All that crazy assed sex I have heard about in Game of Thrones, and nobody has seen the actual peen? You are blocking the cock? You think it’s cleaner without the wiener?

You guys just lost major cool points with me.

Look, I am not looking for porn. There’s plenty of porn on the Internet, if you hadn’t heard. You name it, it’s out there. Anything you can imagine and a lot of things you’d rather not.

I just want there to be places to go that are free of the public neurosis of erotophobia and can therefore let their writers run free and tell whatever sort of story they want.

And I thought that was you, HBO. But now I hear that you share the public’s fear of what half the population of the world had between their legs?

And make no mistake about it, to the censors and the squeamish people they protect, the penis is the filthiest, more horrible thing in the world. And do you know why?

Because this is still a male-dominated society and for completely fucked inside out homophobic reasons, every straight man has to evince massive disgust for all penises that are not their own in order to prove they aren’t gay. Because doing the exact opposite of what a gay guy would do has to be super-not-gay, right?

Don’t give in to this madness, HBO. Let the dongs fly. If that makes legions of straight male nerds squirm in their seat and make puking sounds, so be it.

It just means they are in need of desensitization.

Next vidya is of Costa Rica, also know as Liberal Paradise, and their ultra-genius solution to the problem of having too many stray dogs in the pound.

Caso: Territorio de Zaguates from GARNIER BBDO on Vimeo.

And when I say genius, I mean it. A simple and low-cost exercise in rebranding, and suddenly every mutt in the world is actually its own exclusive microbreed.

They took a very negative word that lumped together all dogs which do not happen to be racially pure^[arf] (as though that’s a good thing) and turned it instead into a mark of exclusivity and uniqueness which raises the value of the animal from “trash” to “treasure” in people’s eyes.

And the dogs don’t care. They just want homes!

And I sincerely hope that all those people breeding hopelessly inbred and diseased “purebred” animals that will lead lives of pain and disability just to satisfy someone’s fetish for genetic purity see this video, see that these people are attacking the very concept of a purebred dog, and get really good and mad about it.

Oh sure, you can have your purebred Cavalier King Charles Spaniel…. if you want to have the same dog as dozens if not hundreds of other people.

My dog, on the other hand, is a one-off original and truly expresses my vastly superior wealth and status.

Take that, you goddamn dog Nazis!

Oh god… it just occurred to me. This can only lead to one place : Designer dogs.

Oh well, enjoy it while it lasts, doggies.

And lastly, of course, my little ol vidya of the day.

It’s another piece of music, but I did what I could to spice up the visuals this time.

See? You can either just listen to the music, and not miss anything of substance, or watch the video, and get some colorful (and how) visuals to tickle your eyeballs.

I am fairly happy with how the piece turned out. It’s really two songs with a bridge between them, but I am happy with both of them and glad I am progressive as a composer.

The second part, the Grind movement, took the longest to compose because I just could not seem to find the right instrument to use for the melody.

I only solved that problem by writing the melody with a simple synth sound first, and only then going to find the right instrument for it.

Same with the Pluck Movement too, sorta. You should have heard my first version of that, it was ghastly. Sounded like something a ghost bartender would play in a saloon in Hell.

But it got the melody down, and when I came back to it later, I was able to find a much nicer sounding instrument. Add a little echo, and voila.

This music stuff is fun!

I seem to have come across a number of somewhat Furry themed things lately, so I figured it was time to best my browser (why does being online feel like war lately?) and share them with you.

First, we have this marvelous collection of animated GIFs that feature foxes doing what they do best, namely being completely adorable.

Here are my faves :

There’s this all time classic.

Take that…. snow!

What you are seeing is the quite cunning but somewhat lacking in dignity way foxes hunt in the winter. They know there is plenty of prey living in tunnels under the snow, so they stand very very still and let their excellent hearing lock in on the sounds of their next meal under the snow, and then dive into the snow hoping to come up with a mouthful of snack.

And then there’s this situation that could have been scripted by Disney himself : foxes on a trampoline.

Suddenly, POUNCE POWER BOOST!

It’s nice to know that some things are universal to all species, and that one of those things is the inherent awesomeness of a trampoline.

And lastly, there is this extraordinary image.

Turns out turning into a meatloaf is not just a cat thing.

Foxes are cute even when they got no legs!

Or rather, when they do an impression of a car that has had all its wheels stolen. They do that by tucking their legs up under themselves and hunkering down so that their fur completely covers them.

Must be might cozy in the winter. But at home, it just looks like your fox got jacked.

Next, we have a book that combines two things I never would have thought I would find together : anthro animals and the study of logic.

It’s called “An Illustrated Book Of Bad Arguments”, and while the art style is quite brutally ugly, I still really enjoyed reading it.

I took a Practical Logic course in university, and loved every minute of it. Finally, proof that other people cared about that sort of thing and that I was not just a lone voice of reason crying in the wilderness of bewildered ignorance!

And while I trust my own intuition as a guide to logical analysis more than I trust formal terms someone else thought up, I really enjoyed having categories and labels for things I had only intuited before.

The book does a very good job of explaining the classic fallacies, although I must say that sometimes the illustrations don’t illustrate the point very well.

And if there is one thing the Internet needs, it’s help with logic. People misapply the terms for the classic fallacies willy-nilly, and therefore anything that might help bring clarity to online discussions instead of having them subside in a fog of confusion and half-understood ideas is quite welcome.

Some of us, when we discuss things, are actually looking to learn from others’ perspectives and maybe even struggle towards the truth.

The rest of you can go yell at each other on television.

The next animal in our little zoo is this heavily furry-themed music video.

WARNING : This has no happy ending. It is, in fact, quite dark and disturbing. At no point does a hero rise to save our poor protagonist. It ends very badly for him.

Just so you know.

Nevertheless, I think it’s pretty damned cool. They used the anthro animals to support a metaphorical treatment of what it is like to be a hated outcast in any society, and I think it really works.

And it was brilliant to make our protagonist a zebra, who is therefore both black AND white. That makes the message more universal than if it had been a creature we could more easily pigeonhole (so to speak).

The actual song that this is the video for is nothing terribly special. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it just sounds like a lot of other things.

But I like the video, which cannot have been cheap to make. So many scenes, so many costumes, so many sets and props, so many extras…. all that adds up to serious cash.

To me, of course, it was all worth it. I love this rise of furry imagery in popular culture. It’s such a rich vein of visual language and potent metaphors that really reach deep into our hearts.

It’s not just about fucking any more!™

Finally, we have my thing for today, which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with anthro animals, furry, or even music this time.

It’s a talker.

Bur at least I added little bits of snarky text to keep things from becoming totally visually boring. It was very tempting to just put it up there after the primary edit plus adding the intro and outro. But I have done that too much lately and it makes for an inferior product.

As fascinating and compelling as I find myself, I know that I need to put more into a video than just me sitting there talking. That’s a video you listen to, not watch.

And in a perfect world, my talker videos would be jam packed with illustrations, info-bits, and other herbs and spices to make them more of a total audio-visual experience, like what we expect from television and movies. But I don’t have that kind of energy, at least, not yet.

I totally undersand why Internet superstars like Yahtzee or CGPGrey don’t put out videos every day like I do. Sure, the talking part is not all that hard. It’s the finding or generating enough pictures to fill up all that time that drives you crazy.

Compared to that, the talking about something interesting part is a breeze.

In a truly perfect world, I would be able to just hire someone to find all those pictures for me and only have to do the easy bit that I am totally good at.

But that’s the dream of all Talent, don’t you think?

Seeya tomorrow people.