I slacked off on writing notes for this one. It was well written and a really fast read.
This is a book about the beginnings of the intelligence service in the US. A man named Donovan was asked by Rosevelt to bootstrap this service because it didn’t exist. This service was named the OSS: Office of Strategic Services. Donovan, a lawyer, filled this with scholars from all fields. Including many fields that traditionally didn’t not do intelligence work. They were able to get information from unconventional sources: newspaper clippings, family photos, etc.
Apparently there was an intelligence service that was started during WW1, but was closed afterwards because “gentlemen do not read each others mail”. This allowed the attack of Pearl Harbor to be a complete surprise.
Building an intellengence service from the ground up allowed the US to employ different techniques. Using public information: phone books, newspapers, train schedules, etc. The information service was able to combine the information in ways that allowed them to derive valuable information for the military.
There was a lot written about misdirection: making fake airfields, flooding the enemy with fake information to obscure true plans.
There was also a chapter about sabotaging a factory. How it is much more effective to sabotage the right machine vs. trying to bomb a factory. Bombing a factory often leaves the machines unharmed or repairable.
There was a chapter about misinformation to obscure the Manhatten Project and how to frame the story after the war was complete in order to hide details on how the bomb was built and how information was controlled.
Finally, there was a chapter about how the OSS was wound down after the war and the CIA created to take its place.
We are introduced to Julia. She works in the fiction department fixing the fiction machines. She goes to the Two Minutes of Hate and is attracted to Winston. Towards the end of the hate, she notices a connection between Winston and O’Brien.
She leaves work early with the excuse of “women’s issues”. She bikes home through a prole neighborhood. She gets to her flat and prepares to fix a clogged toilet. While getting changed, she finds a note that says “I Love You”. This gets her very excited. She works hard to hide the note from the telescreen. When she starts to work on the toilet she discovers a miscarriaged baby.
The child was Vicky’s. Julia had taken Vicky under her wing. The father was a high up party member. He had given Vicky a pill to abort the baby. That night Vicky and Julia talk a bit. After Julia goes to bed the police come and take someone instead of Vicky for the sexcrime.
Julia’s parents were party members. Her dad was eventually executed for being cranky basically. Her and her mom went to place for exiles also known as “boots”. They were quite social and Julia remembers how plentiful things were. She grew up next to an airfield and had crushes on all the pilots. She eventually gets to fly in a plane and sees Big Brothers house.
Julia was able to get a set of ten nail clippers from a shop a valuable commodity. She heads into the prole part of town to barter. During this chapter a lot of low level corruption is described. A replaced bribe for an officer if Julia’s bag is searched. Even the acquisition of the toenail clippers needed a little extra bribe. One of the proles daughters is very beautiful and is being groomed to marry an Inner Party member. Finally, on the way out Julia finds Winston in the same area, peering into a shop.
The shop is called Weeks and the proles know something is sketchy there. They think it could be a brothel, or something worse. They do not trust Weeks the owner. Julia finally heads out but is mugged by a prole. She eventually gets away, with the help of some other proles. However, her wrist is injured. She can’t go to the hospital because most young women with injuries are charged with sexcrime. It turns out Vicky was the one who gave the note to Julia, right before she thought she was getting taken away for having a baby. Julia is kind of into it. We’re also introduced to Dr. Louis who discreetly takes care of problems like a sprained wrist or an unwanted baby.
O’Brien requests Julia to come to his house for a repair job. Julia convinces her boss Essie to go in her place. Julia is scared of Oberon.
Julia fantizes about Winston and touches herself at night. She also thinks about previous trysts she’s had. The thing she loves the most is the rebelliousness of it all. Each of the trysts exposed everyone’s dislike of the party and system. She eventually concocts a plan to pass Vicky’s note to Winston. It’s perfect because the note is not her handwriting, so if she’s caught there’s a chance she can deny it. But eventually Winston makes contact.
Julia and Winston meet in the countryside. Julia has to do all of the planning. She is much more experienced than him which nearly turns her off. She keeps almost slipping into mother mode which is a buzzkill. They fuck but Winston finishes too early. Maybe next time for Julia.
Essie goes missing. Julia wonders if it was meant to be her. Julia wonders if her interactions with Winston’s are known to Obteun. But they continue to meet up when they can. They have a lot of sex. Winston’s annoys Julia saying that party members can’t dream anymore. But what are they doing? Not dreaming? Also annoyed that the hope relies on the prole’s line. Winston has not really interacted with proles while Julia has much more experience. The chapter ends with a note from O’Brien asking her to visit.
She’s goes to O’Breins and is amazed at the wealth of the inner party. O’Brein knows everything about Julia. All of her past affairs. O’Brein wants Julia to be an inner party agent and bring in the “truthlovers“ who are enemies of the state.
The village where Julia grew up was a SAZ, semi autonomous zone. Eventually the party sent in folks to extract all of the resources and slowly kill the village. There was a man Gerber who ran things. Julia befriended him and she was able to get extra food. He took advantage of her quite a bit though. Eventually towards the end of the village, Julia’s mom sends her away before she would die of starvation. Julia outlives the village and was able to use these skills to survive as long as she has.
Part 2
Julia and Winston spend a lot of time at Week’s shop. Julia is a bit torn about her feelings but mostly sees Winston as doomed when he talks about rebellion. She tends to check out when he talks about that stuff. Julia also brings other men; Parsons and Ampleforth to the room with hopes of endearing them. Parsons sleeps with her quickly but says nothing illegal. Ampleforth doesn’t sleep with her but wants to preserve the poems that he has to modify for his job. Ampleforth also thinks that Syme escaped and was not vaporized.
During preparations for the week of hate, Julia’s period is light and her body aches. She goes to the reproductive center (artsem) and is immediately enrolled in a program called “Big Future” which is hard to get into. She knows she got in because of her work with Ob and Weeks. Big Future is a program that uses Big Brothers sperm. She eventually sleeps with Ampleforth, but he freaks out hard. Ob invites Winston to his house. Winston thinks this is his intro to the revolution.
Winston and Julia go to Ob place. There as Ob tells Winston everything he wants to hear. Winston is so enthralled that he does not notice Ob using the phrase: “We are the dead”. Julia sees parallels in her meeting with Ob. Saying all the things that she wants to hear as well. She is more distrusting of Ob than before. As she leaves, she notices an empty ornate room with a piano and the lights fully on. Noticing the waste of it all.
Julia is confirmed pregnant. She of course has lived feelings about this. She decides to go the Weeks, but makes a pit stop at the prole lady house to try and get more happy pills. She fails and is told not to come back. Once she reaches weeks, she is told that all three men will be arrested. Smith will be last. She takes pty of Ampleforth and gives him her remaining pills so he can kill himself.
Winston and Julia are arrested, Julia realizes she is not safe. Julia is taken to be tortured. She eventually makes it to a room with a woman named Diana who is an inner party member that used to do interrogations. She tells Julia that she’s in there for no reason of her doing but larger fights between records and fiction. She tells Julia about the purpose of room 101, and gives her advise on how to survive it. (Draw it out, because time is limited in that room for Julia).
Part 3 (ish)
Julia endures a crazy amount of torture which somehow will “not harm the baby”. Eventually, they let up on her and she recovers a little bit. Then they take her to Room 101. When she arrives she sees Winston there. Ob is there torturing him and eventually brings out the rat cage which goes over Winston’s head. At this moment he betrays Julia and escapes further torture. Julia is brought in and Ob puts the rat cage on her. Her biggest fear is being mutalilated. She remembers the advice given to outlast her time slot and she comes up with a plan. She bites her own tounge which cause one of the rats to come and eat her tounge. When the rat enters her mouth, she bites down and kills it. This causes the other rat to start eating the dead rat and she outlasts her time slot with just a bloody tounge.
Shortly after this she is released and she spends her days as an unperson. Taking long walks around the city. She comes to realize she hates Big Brother, the opposite of Winston.
Eventually she encounters roadblocks that didn’t exist before. She manages to get beyond them with her Big Future sash. After this she eventually escapes and finds that the Free Men of England are about to take over. They encounter very little resistance from the Party’s army. The army is mostly made up of malnourished young boys. They have taken the Crystal Palace and are partying.
She eventually sees Big Brother who is a decrepit old man. She hates and pities him at the same time. Eventually she leaves and returns for “processing” by the free men. They ask her the same questions that O’Brein had asked her and Winston when he pretended to be part of the Brotherhood. The king is dead, long live the king!
I heard about Julia which is 1984 from the perspective of Julia, the other main character in 1984. I decided I wanted to re-read 1984 before reading Julia so I could appriciate it more. I last read 1984 when I was in late elementary or early middle school. So I definitely didn’t remember details, but did remember the general gist of things at least. I wrote the below on my phone at varying levels of detail. Something to improve with these book reports.
Part 1
Introduced to Winston, the main character and the country of Oceania. Oceania is a tightly controlled country run by Big Brother and ‘The Party’. There are three castes of people:
Inner Party: The rich and powerful
Outer Party: The common folks that are still bound by the whims of the Inner Party
Proles: The poor and uneducated folks, they operate outside of the party
Thoughts are controlled by rewriting history, limiting language, and brutal enforcement of arbitrary laws. He purchases a diary and begins to write in it which is an act of Thoughtcrime. He becomes infatuated with a woman Julia. He goes to a prole bar hoping to learn about the times before the party but fails. He returns to the shop where he bought the diary and discovers the woman is also in the same prole neighborhood. He freaks out because he thinks she’s followed him.
Part 2
Julia passes Winston a note saying “I love you”. They arrange to meet in the countryside on Sunday. They meet up, she’s met up and slept with lots of folks. Winston loves the fact that she’s done this a lot before. Julia talks about how sex needs to be controlled by the party to keep everyone fearful and full of energy. They eventually meet up in a room that Winston rented above the shop he bought the diary at. She brings coffee and sugar that are stolen from the Inner Party.
A man that Winston thinks is a rebel finds a way to give Winston’s his address. This man’s name is O’Brien, he’s an inner party member. Winston thinks he is starting to connect with other folks that oppose the party. He also feels like he is closer to death.
Winston dreams of his mother and sister. They had nothing, but Winston always demanded more. One day he storms off and when he returns they are gone. This makes Winston think of being human and how letting the party change how he feels would be the ultimate failure.
Winston spends more time with Julia. He’s a bit disappointed that she isn’t as intellectual about her rebellion. But sometimes she’s has insights he doesn’t have. The talk about how the party can make you say anything but they can’t change how you feel. Winston is fond of saying ‘we are the dead’ because he knows he will be caught eventually.
Winston gets “the book” from O’Brien. The book explains how the continual war is needed to dispose of excess production. If that production were not destroyed, everyone would have wealth and it would destroy the hierarchy that the powerful folks enjoy. It also explains that all three countries function the same.
After reading more of THE BOOK, Winston and Julia start singing “we are the dead” and then he hears the thought police saying “you are the dead”! It turns out the shopkeeper was the thought police and there was a telescreen in the secret room the whole time. Winston knows how things are done, but not why.
Part 3
Winston is in the Ministry of Love. The conditions are terrible. He see a couple of folks he knows. Even Parsins who was a die hard party supporter. He was saying “Diwn with Big Brither” in his sleep and was turned in by his daughter. O’Brien also comes in, but not as a prisoner.
O’Brien interrogated Winston quite a bit. He explains that the party must covert its enemies completely before they are killed. They must avoid making martyrs like previous regimes had done.
Eventually, they stop beating Winston and he gets stronger. He slowly understands how to DoubleThink and CrimeStop, the opposite of ThoughtCrime. Just when he thinks he’s been “cured“. He cries out Julia’s name. O’Brien hears this and knows that Winston is still rebelling a bit. He asks Winston what he thinks of bb and Winston’s says he hates him. O’Brien tells Winston he must love Big Brother to be cured. Winston is sent to Room 101.
Room 101 contains what a person fears the most. For Winston, it is rats. He is forced to put on a helmet that is filled with rats that can be released to eat him alive. Right before this happens he begs that they torture Julia instead. He has failed to rebel. In the end he loves Big Brother, just as O’Brein wanted.
I’ve been trying to take notes as I read books now. I tend to totally forget what a book was about a few months after I read it. This is an attempt to counter that a bit.
My friend Karl mentioned he had read this book, so I decided to give it a go. I’m stoked I did.
Taqwacores is a book about a college student in Buffalo, NY named Yussef that moves into a Muslim Punk house. The beginning of the book spends a lot of time creating the environment of the house. Wild punk parties intermixed with daily prayers. There’s a lot of different ideas of what Islam is and the book spends a lot of time exploring that. He draws a quick parallel with punk, a lot of people have different ideas what that is and it’s interesting to explore that as well. There’s also a bit of general boy growing up exploration that happens: Yussef starts making out with a girl and eventually demurs. His roommates get him a Victoria secrets catalog so he can learn to masturbate. He needs to decide how his sexuality works at that point. The books ends with a large show of west coast mulsim punk bands put together by a house member named Johnger. At the end of the show, the female member of the house gives a male member a blowjob on stage and spits the cum out at the audience. This causes a riot and one of the punks dies. An intense (and somewhat random) ending!
I’d recommend reading the book just to think about how elastic Islam (or any religion/idea) really is. Also to learn some terms you probably hadn’t heard before. I hadn’t heard ‘haram’ before, but after reading the book I noticed hearing it randomly. I’ve heard the author, Michael Muhammad Knight’s, other writings are interesting, so something to check out later.
Ok, this was Feb 17, but it was so rad I wanted to document it. This was three drummers:
Louis Cole
Justin Brown
Roni Kaspi
Basically just doing a jam session. It was super fun to watch these folks trade beats back and forth. (I didn’t take any pics, will get better about this!)
Kontravoid at Lodge Room
Buzz Kull opened and he was fun to watch. Angry screaming dude over some beats with a lot of glitchy visuals projected behind him. Boring description, but it worked for me at the time!
Kontravoid was better than I expected. I was always 50/50 on him, but he put on a good show and I really enjoyed it. So I am now 70/30 on Kontravoid. Highlight was the backing video of him riding a jetski with the mask on (heavily processed of course). Very fun!
Failed to see Javier Santiago at Stowaway
We tried to see this, but the street that the Stowaway was shutdown because the cops were protecting some fancy dinner event that benefited the IDF. Bullshit! After having cops tell me to lie to other cops to get access to the road, we gave up.
Jermaine Paul Quintet
Luckily, Javier was playing with this quintet, so we didn’t miss him fully. This was a show at a space in Sherman Oaks. I forgot who drummed, but I remember really enjoying his work.
Ben Frost at Lodge Room
Totally floored by this show. I didn’t know what to expect. I’m more familar with his ambientish work. For this show, he was working with a guitar player. It seemed like the guitars could trigger percussion samples and Ben Frost was creating the sounds beneath the guitar/percussion combo. It was great! It was loud! It was awesome!
Mononeon at Lodge Room
Mononeon was super fun. His new songs are good, he had a lot of folks up on stage. At one point, there was like 4-6 backup singers.
Minaret Show @ Left Method
Opened with Luke Titus on drums and Elijah Fox on keys. Luke Titus is definitely in my top 5 list of drummers. I love his style and he can play really fast. I sometimes feel like I’m listening to drum and bass, but then I open my eyes and it’s a HUMAN BEING hitting the drums.
It closed with Henry Solomon, chiquitamagic, Billy Voltage doing a set with synths and saxophone. It worked out pretty well! There were some really cool moments during their set.
Been really enjoying the shows Minaret Records puts on. They are often at venues I’d otherwise never make it to. It feels like a scavenger hunt through a new city to me.
Tsutomu Nakai @ Zinc
Part of a series called ‘Guitar Masters’, which isn’t normally my thing, but I had a lot of fun at this show. Zinc Bar in NYC is a cool space. The drummer was really good. I enjoyed his solos quite a bit!
Hiromi’s Sonicwonder @ Blue Note
We made it to the famous Blue Note in NYC to see Hiromi Sonicwonder do their thing. Hiromi was great on keys. I really enjoyed the drummer, I liked that he gave space to be quiet during his solo.
Webb All Stars @ Baked Potato
I went to this to see Danny Carey hit the drums. I was not disappointed. It was great to see him drum in such a small space. You could see him listening the the music and see how focused he was on what he was doing. It was great. The Baked Potato is a really cool venue, looking forward to going back!
These images were generated with a pretty simple program. It takes an input image and compares it against the current painted image. The program generates a new brush stroke and the new error is calculated between the input image and the painted image, if the stroke reduces the error it is kept, otherwise it is rejected. Final image here
I like how this one turned out, the source image of Tank Man was a bit noisy and I think it interacted with the algorithm in a cool way. Final image here.
I wrote this program in Racket. I’ve been meaning to learn a LISP or Scheme based language for a long time. I thought this program would be a fun way to start. The brush strokes use a technique called
Globs which basically connect to circles together with splines in a way that it has first-derivative continuity with the circles. It’s a nice way to generate brush strokes. Final image here.
It was inspired by the Create Applications of Deep Learning class and Ben Garney’s blog posts about writing a proof of concept video chat system. In both cases, the technique of defining, measuring, and reducing error is the core concept that makes it all work. Final brain here.
In the future, I’m planning to apply this to video. It’ll be straightforward to take the previous frame of a video and use it as the starting point for the next frame. I think the effect could be cool. I might also port a simple version of this to a more popular language and give a DorkbotPDX workshop on it. Final clocks here.
iOSBNIZ is a port of IBNIZ by viznut to iPhone and iPad. This allows me to program little audiovisual hacks on my iPhone with minimal typing. IBNIZ features a VM with opcodes that are one character long, ideal for not hitting too many buttons. It also has a FORTH like stack which is a fun puzzle to play with. The VM calls the program for each pixel and pushes time, x, and y onto the stack. Your program uses these values to generate the visuals (and audio). You can also write a full program and ignore this loop as well.
iOSBNIZ is available on the Apple App Store. Download and have fun!
I’ve been meaning to document my work on this project for about year now. TBA 2014 reminded me it is time to actually do it! So here it is:
For the past year and a half I’ve been working with a dance company called BOBBEVY. I’ve been creating graphics that go along with the dance performance called “This is how we disappear”. Here’s a review at Portland Monthly.
Jesse Meija was doing music and got me involved with this project, I’m very grateful!
Version 1
Effects for the first set of performances:
A forest of trees created from a drawings by David Stein.
Particle effects that mimiced the dancers movement.
Particle effects that just fly across the screen
In order to accomplish this, I wrote a piece of software that would do the animation and handle tracking the dancers. There were two versions, the first version was used to perform a few times. Notably Dance+ in 2012 and as part of Experimental Half Hour XXXVII. It consisted of the following pieces:
Freenect, used to interface to the Microsoft Kinect.
Control, used to control the software from an iPad
This version worked ok. Before I started using Control, I had been triggering all of the sequences with keyboard commands. It worked fine, but I had to have a cheatsheet that told me what keys did what. Also, each command just mutated the state of the program, so if you triggered things in a different order you’d end up in different states. This made some rehersals hard, because it was difficult to return the graphics to a previous state. However, with Control, it became easier to use the software. BOBBEVY performed in Milwaukee without me and was able to use the software just fine! For Dance+ the Kinect refused to work in the studio, I think because the temperature in the room was so high. So I ended up “drawing” the dancers with a multi-touch interface in Control.
For the particle effects that followed the dancers, I ended up using blob tracking and distingugishing blobs based on distance away from the Kinect. I liked the stateless design because the dancers would move in and out of view of the Kinect and I feel that keeping track of them properly would have been a nightmare. This created some surprising benefits though. The swarms move between the dancer when their relationship to the Kinect changes and it created some really nice animations. Also, this piece has a lot of tension between the dancers and the particles ended up expressing some tension when the dancers were about the same distance away from the Kinect.
Version 2
Additional effects for the second set of performances:
Static/simple projection mapped screens (similar to my Party House project).
Realtime projection mapped patterns on the dancers bodies
For the second version of the software, I used the following new pieces:
QTimeline, this is a timeline that allows one to control tweens of variables
QuNeo, as much as I liked Control using a touchscreen while not looking at it (I had to look at the dancers for my cues!) is not ideal. A physical controller allows you to rest you finger on the button/slider you need to push without triggering it. (The cool kids pronounce it keeen-wah).
For TBA, 3, yes 3! Projectors. Two of them were used to cover the wide background, and one was used to project onto the dancers themselves.
The timeline solved many problems for me. It took what I used to have hard code in the application (fade times, animation speed, etc) and moved it to a data format. The editing GUI was nice to have as well. A new version of Cinder that made using multiple displays easier to use was really nice to have as well. I didn’t need to mirror my desktop screen anymore, which meant I could display debug and other helpful info on my screen. The QuNeo also allowed me to directly control ramp parameters which meant I didn’t need to rely on predetermined fades as much. This also allowed me to be more engaged with the visuals which was really fun. I think the trick to this will be finding the right balance between direct control and triggers to presets. It is probably the same balance electronic musicians search for.
The newest effect for the second run was the projection mapped dancers. In order to accomplish this, I was going to have to find the dancers with the Kinect and then project onto them as close as possible. I used the vvvv patch from here as a starting point to learn how to calibrate my projector with the Kinect. In the end, I wrote my own calibration code because it fit the setup workflow a bit better.
The projection mapped dancers worked pretty well. I was really excited to see them turn into just an indistigushable mass at moments and then turn back into dancers the next. I think this is what projection mapping should do: transform objects and confuse you, then bring you back to reality. I hope to do more of this in the future!
On March 25th, 2013 the Church of Robotron gave a sermon at DorkbotPDX0x0A. It focused on the mobile Church of Robotron installation we did at Toorcamp 2012. James gave live sermons interspersed with presentation snippets about the installation. We projected our faces onto old TV’s, an homage to Dr. O’Blivion and the Wizard of Oz. I mutated the Party House project to support webcams and applying shaders to the input stream. I was able to control the video source and shaders at realtime during the sermon. We also had slides. I think it was a nice mix of a live human being, psuedo live humans being projected, and standard slides. I hope to do more sermons in the future!
