Huge Hacker School stencil at Etsy (Taken with instagram)
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Arvo Pärt, Spiegel im Spiegel
This piece has followed me in my head for years. It’s on the soundtrack to Heaven, a film that is ninety minutes of living in the times between times, living in the time you’ve got left, living in the time made golden by your doom.
That short passage, where the violin comes in and plays one long note and then goes up an interval and plays another long note, to me embodies the sensation of knowing you are living through an achingly beautiful moment, and knowing it is passing, and knowing that the knowledge of the passing is what turns mundane happiness into stabbing beauty.
Platform game with algorithmically generated levels
Cloudberry Kingdom is a 2D platformer that generates its levels automatically. The algorithm has heuristics to produce levels that are fun and of a specified difficulty. It dynamically simulates the physical properties of the player characters. This means it can automatically generate new levels for characters with new movement characteristics. It can even simulate a play through with an AI to prove levels are completable.
A great article that explains how the level generation algorithm works.
The trailer for the game:
“Mary is not dead woooo” cake made by Ellie to celebrate my third year of successfully not dying (Taken with instagram)
Taxi Driver
I love this shot from Taxi Driver. Even though Travis Bickle is supposedly God’s lonely man, we know him as the subject of a Hollywood film. But, earlier in the film, in this shot, he is just another unremarkable guy, alone in the early morning, in the distance, swigging from a bottle of whiskey.
And I love how, in the “Are you talking to me?” scene, you can hear the everyday noise of people outside as Travis Bickle goes mad inside:
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Tool, Third Eye
Tool and Mogwai made me realise that musicians are allowed to do anything they want.
But Tool had a stronger effect because they were my first real exposure to metal, which meant they were able to crystalise the most consistently important concept in my musical taste: beauty is harsh.
I first heard Mogwai in 1997, when I was about sixteen. I was lying in bed in the dark listening to The Breezeblock, Mary Ann Hobbs’s late night music programme on Radio One. She played Like Herod, a twelve-minute track from Mogwai’s first album, Young Team. I hadn’t heard music like that before: instrumental by default, symphonically structured, spoken word, moods rather than songs, occasional vocals that were accents, rather than scaffolding, and incongruous shifts in instrumentation and tone from section to section. I thought that Mogwai had, somehow, invented all this stuff. It wasn’t until 2002 that I realised that Slint had already got most of the way there by 1991.
I first heard Tool in 1998, when I was seventeen. My friend, Harry, lent me their 1996 album, Aenima, and I took it home and played it through the speakers built into the monitor of my Mac. I played it a lot over the next five or six years on my CD Walkman.
Aenima took me much further than Young Team. It was the first piece of modern music in which I heard the non-standard time signatures. It was the first record I heard that combined anger and sadness and melody into beauty. It was the first record I heard that had an overarching theme. The first record I heard that had continuity between songs. It made me consciously seek out weird, extreme music, music that would broaden my horizons and maybe give my brain more versions of that moment in Third Eye when Maynard James Keenan sings, “So good to see you, I missed you so much”: the joyous/agonising high of a sound that is simultaneously sad and beautiful, melodic and abrasive.
Most importantly, it was the record that made me fully aware of the fact that music doesn’t just come from some obscured, instinctual, idiot savant place in the brain. It is intentional art, just like novels and films and paintings. It is - can be - a series of conscious decisions, some of which the musician is unsure of. This is excellently illustrated in Third Eye by the two moments when Maynard James Keenan sings, “Prying open my third eye.” The first time, it stops the song with the long, arrhythmic pauses between repetitions. The second time, it is in parallel with a polyrhythmic drum beat, and repeated many more times, and totally cathartic.
Fourteen years later, poor Harry still hasn’t had his CD back.
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Moonface with Siinai, Headed for the Door
Dear Sarah,
I heard that you’ve turned into a goth, and I think that’s great, if that’s what makes you happy. I have an old pair of black boots with silver buckles that I don’t wear anymore, and you can have them if you want them. Also, I wanted to ask: What, if anything, is fluttering in your heart? I wanted to ask if it has to be a black crow or a vampire bat… or if maybe instead it could be a kite that has broken loose from the string that you were holding—or the string that we were holding—sometime when we were teenagers, or maybe in our early twenties? Could it be a kite which is now rolling over and over on itself in the sky like an unborn baby, and slowly shrinking into a dot, and then a spec of black, and then something we’re not even sure we’re watching, but then, for sure, absolutely nothing at all? Get back to me about this when you have a chance.
I hope you’re doing well.
xo
s
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Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind
I randomly heard someone called Ben Miller, apparently a comedian, talking about this track on BBC Radio 4. One of the things he said was that it contains the best joke in a song ever. It’s wonderful when someone else notices the same thing you do about a piece of art:
“They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me. I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”
My favourite line was always:
“I can’t even touch the books you’ve read.”
