Happy House

Took a last look at the house today. I'll be putting in an offer tomorrow. I felt a little sick yesterday when I first saw it and decided that despite all the problems this house has, and it has many, I -do- want it. Today, after seeing it the second time, I was sure. I want it. It's good. It's the right house. Riding home on the subway, an old Siouxie and the Banshees song played in my head: Happy House.

This is the happy house...we're happy here
In the happy house...oh it's such fun
We've come to play in the happy house
And waste a day in the happy house
It never rains
We've come to scream in the happy house
We're in a dream in the happy house
We're all quite sane
This is the happy house...we're happy here
There's room for you if you say "I do"
But don't say no or you'll have to go
We've done no wrong with our blinkers on
It's safe and calm if you sing along
This is the happy house...we're happy here in the happy house
To forget ourselves...and pretend all's well
There is no hell.

Three live versions of the song (via http://www.untiedundone.com/)

Paradiso, Amsterdam, 7.17.81
McAlister Auditorium, New Orleans, 6.24.86
Riviera Theatre, Chicago, 5.24.86

I didn't get to see the performance in Amsterdam at the time, even though I was into this kind of stuff back then.

Still more

We're still not done yet.

Table of Contents

Falco makes a brief remark about two people "who self-importantly proclaim their supposed expertise". Hockney made a similar remark (about the same people?), saying that: "I gave up on them a long time ago."

zeitgeist

Remember my post from yesterday? We're not done yet. There's more. The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Computer People Reopen Art History Dispute

Cubism

The Globe and Mail has an article about a technique that was developped at the University of Bath, U.K. to render images in a Cubist manner. "By using photos taken from different points of view, the program picks out and renders as blocks the key parts of the image. It then shuffles these blocks and randomly distorts them. And then, just like that, another cubist “masterpiece” is complete and ready for digital printing." the Globe writes. Well, well. Cubist painters worldwide should fear for their jobs apparently.

Collomosse's page is actually quite interesting. Cubist Style NPR from Photographs and Video, but cubism his work is not. It's interesting that one would choose cubism, one of the first attempts to depersonsonalize art, with an emphasis on "knowing" the subjectmatter, rather than "seeing" it. The cut-and-paste technique he uses is reminiscent of synthetic cubism, whereas the multiple perspectives are more prevalent in analytic cubism that (until about 1913) preceded it. Analytic cubism took primitive shapes, synthetic cubism took fragment of objects and assembled them into shapes. There are many similarities, but this kind of machine cubism is very different; nobody except perhaps the most ignorant viewer could possible be fooled by it. Pigeons perhaps?

Collomosse kind enough to point to Cubism for Computer Graphics Glasner has some interesting ideas about unusual cameras that I could use immediately.

Before I forget

I saw this at Siggraph.

Excellence Prize FRANK | MEDIA ARTS PLAZA

Siggraph

I'm on my way. See you in L.A. SIGGRAPH 2004

A slow learner

I sometimes can't imagine why it took me so long to figure out how to do something. For example, our blogs have been spammed heavily. Spammers would post links to their (mostly porn) sites to improve their pagerank in Google. You'd never see it of course because we diligently keep cleaning up the comments. Banning IP addresses didn't work anymore, and closing the enties for comments seemed a bith harsh. Requiring users to log in, as explained here, is not an atractive option. Six Log: Comment Spam
I realized that we were loosing the battle when I was getting more than 10 comments per entry at an alarming rate of something like one every 5 seconds. That did it for me. I was going to stop these miscreants. Fortunatly, there is MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin

I should have done this ages ago. Read the Comment Spam Manifesto

This is a fight against the spammers we're going to win.

Update: even the porn sites themselves are unhappy with the comment spammers. Wired News: CyberQuest Disavows Porn Blogs