ftrain at twenty

Paul Ford continues to be an inspiration, even if ftrain.com isn’t as active as it once was. You really should go read the archives if somehow you haven’t explored them before.

20 years is arbitrary nonsense. A blip. Our software is bullshit, our literary essays are too long, the good editors all quit or got fired, hardly anyone is experimenting with form in a way that wakes me up, the IDEs haven’t caught up with the 1970s, the R&D budgets are weak, the little zines are badly edited, the tweets are poor, the short stories make no sense, people still care too much about magazines, the Facebook posts are nightmares, LinkedIn has ruined capitalism, and the big tech companies that have arisen are exhausting, lumbering gold-thirsty kraken that swim around with sour looks on their face wondering why we won’t just give them all our gold and save the time … In the spirit of this thing I won’t be editing this paragraph.

Thanks for sharing what you know!

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Displaced Sounds

Excited to see this blog from STUK (where we presented ShiftSpace last year) on sound art:

It’s clear that we live in a world inhabited and surrounded, some say polluted, by sound. We are losing and neglecting our ability to hear and listen because we’re so busy with tuning things out instead of tuning in.

I love the quote by Toshiya Tsunoda they’ve placed prominently at the top of the page:

We can say that field recording is considered to be a work which crops a part from a whole complete picture. What does that mean? An incident is continuously followed by the next incident like a domino. What is a criterion to cut a moment and distinguish it from other moments?

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Music Journalism is the New Piracy

This hits close to home since I’ve started posting about music here.

In cases like this, attacks on music blogs seem to be the latest example of the widening disconnect between the goals of the music industry’s promotional wing and its enforcement wing. Smart musicians and promoters understand that the Net is a powerful promotional tool, and know that sharing an artist’s music is the best way to earn new fans. The IFPI, on the other hand, writes clearly in its takedown notices that “Our top priority is to prevent the continued availability of the IFPI Represented Companies’ content on the internet.”

Link via Andy Baio

The second post

This is my second post here. That is, if you only count the longer-form stuff and ignore my prior attempts at blogging. I wrote a sufficient amount of explication in my first post, but I’m going to indulge just a bit longer with the meta blogging. I’ve been an enthusiastic blog reader for several years now and thought I’d look back at some other Second Posts of my long-time favorites. I’m hoping to ape these blogger-heros to the extent that I can.

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