Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

People’s PPE

Live blogging the former Greek finance minister.

The Greek words for debt and money have the same entomology and are nearly the same word. We are all in each other’s debt. Humans are collaborative. The first forms of money were tokens of debt.

The industrial revolution reversed the sequence between production distribution and debt. Under feudalism, the crop was produced, and debt came at the end of the distribution chain. Under enclosure, the land became a commodity and peasants became the proletariat. Debt was at the start the of the chain. Entrepreneurs would borrow to rent land, then hire workers, distributing ahead of harvest. This made loads of money and loads of poverty.

Debt is essential to capitalism. The banker is central in a rapid production system. The banker grabs value that doors not yet exist and lends it to the people who will create it.

Investors buy shares in companies with the anticipation of price increases. This a bet. You can also buy insurance in case it doesn’t go up. You can also buy obligation to buy future shares at the current price. Whether or not it goes up, you must but at the current price. These are  financial derivatives.

In 2010, Greece went bankrupt. Partly because the financial system in Europe resembles the 1920’s. A German banker said ‘life was brilliant before the euro’. He got courted by everyone.  He could consider loans. After the euro, he had to lend billions a week. He had to go begging people to take loans. The banks also sold debt to each other.

The finance minister suggested in an article that they accept bankruptcy. Instead, they got the largest loan in history, under the conditions that their income decrease. Do they owe more money and have less ability to repay it.

He went to institutions saying this was stupid. They knew it couldn’t work. But t they had invested a lot of political capital in this. He refused to sign agreements that would deepen the depression.

Soy Balls

I got myself a soy milk maker recently, which is pretty good. I soak soy beans overnight, put them and water into the machine and half an hour later I get a litre of soy milk out! I also get a sort of soy bean slurry, which is called ‘Okara’. This the ground, cooked soy beans leftover from making soy milk.

Okara is a bit watery, but absolutely edible. I’ve been experimenting with making bean burgers with it. This is a recipe I’ve developed, and which a few people have asked me for. If you have the bad luck not to own a soy milk maker, I think what you could do would be to soak 80 g of whole soy beans over night, then cook them for half an hour, drain them and blend or grind them. You might need to add a sprinkle of water to this recipe to get it to hold together.

Soy Balls

Soy Balls

  • Oakara from 1 litre soy milk
  • Optional pinch dried porcini mushrooms
  • 1 chopped onion
  • 1 clove chopped garlic
  • oil to sautee
  • ½ tsp chilli powder (or more to taste)
  • 1 tsp bullion powder
  • 2 tsp mixed spice (such as herbs de Provence)
  • ½ tsp yeast extract (such as marmite) (or more to taste)
  • 1 tsp paprica
  • 1 Tbsp olive oil
  • 3 Tbsp yeast flakes
  • 2 tsp corn starch
  • Optional dash hot sauce
  • Optional flour to thicken (in the 1-3 Tbsp range)

If you want to use porcini, grind the mushrooms down to small flakes and mix with the still-hot okara. Let stand for 10 minutes, then mix again. If the oakara has already cooled, then skip the mushrooms.

Sautee the onion and garlic in oil. Add the chilli powder and half the mixed herbes when the onions start getting translucent. When they become completely translucent, mix them and the remaining ingredients in with the soy bean mixture. The batter should be like a loose cookie dough. If it is very wet and soft, add a bit of flour to thicken it up.

There are two ways to cook the soy balls – the easiest is do drop teaspoon sized dollops on to baking trays and bake at 180 C (350 F) for 30-40 minutes until they firm up and brown slightly. They will come out looking like cookies!

It is also possible to first fry the balls in some oil to brown the outside and then bake them to make sure the middle is cooked through. This option is superior, but more work. They will absorb a lot of oil while cooking, if fried first. If done this way, they will look more like savoury balls and have a nicer outside texture. I’ve gotten favourable reviews from booth cooking methods.

Variations

These can be made much ore spicy and adding all kinds of herbs or spices might be interesting. I’ve had good success with mustard seeds, nigella seeds, dried chilli flakes, oregano, etc. You can also add a few Tbsp of corn kernels and some extra spice for a chilli burger flavour. Okara has a mild flavour, so you have a lot of latitude to try out different spices.

Block lists are no substitute for moderation: Twitter sucks

Previously, I posted that you should be ready to have a block list. This is 100% true. Go do that now.

Ok, a block list can ameliorate the worst excesses of hate mobs and you should have one, but it’s not a silver bullet.

Ok, first let me start off with a confession: I used extremely intemperate language when tweeting at a corporate account. I regret this action. Further context will be forthcoming in a later post. Regrettably, my intemperate post was screen capped:

That’s the tweet that set off several hours of fun as people dropped by to call me names back. You can see that it was liked 430 times and retweeted 279 times.

To stem the flow of abuse, the most obvious actions would be to block all of the people who ‘liked’ it, all of the people who retweeted it, and, to really stem the tide, all the followers of the people who retweeted it – as these are the people who will see it and come be mean to me.

If only it were so simple.

I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that.

This list of people to block is literally thousands of people. The only way to do it is via a script. However, there are problems:

API – Likers

The Twitter API does not give me access to the likers. I can get a few of the most recent ones via the the website, but none in an automated script.

API – Retweeters

I can only get the 100 most recent retweeters.

API – Speed

The Twitter API lets me do around 180 things in an hour. I wrote a script to block all the retweeters and their followers. It’s been running more than 24 hours. It’s not even a quarter of the way through.

Block Limit

I just exported my block list from Twitter and it’s at 25000 people. I exported it again bit later after more blocking and it was still at 25000 people. Block together also shows that’s how many people I’ve got blocked. Which would appear to mean that my old blocks are quietly disappearing as I add new ones. Checking back on some of my most alarming early blocks, I can see this is not the case. However, the export limit means that I can’t share a complete block list with the other person targeted.

You Can’t Block Everyone

Milo, a major instigator of harassment, has 154K followers. A few days ago, he tweeted this:

His followers will understand this to be a call to action.

As it happens, the account @BlockAllTwerps is running a script, blocking everyone who tweeted or retweeted that post and their followers.

It will tweet again when it’s done. Which will probably be in a few weeks. And, apparently, the block list will be impossible to export.

Milo can reach over a hundred thousand people instantly, but blocking by discovering relationships is rate limited and blocking by sharing lists is capped.

This Sucks

There are a lot of things Twitter could try to sort out their abuse problem, but this is what they picked. Blocking is a terrible model. The most glaring problem being that it puts the onus on the person being harassed. The technical issues just highlight the failure of the model.

Blocking on Twitter – a guide for normal users

Stop! Before you scroll past thinking, ‘this doesn’t effect me.’ It doesn’t until it does. A friend of mine recently had a a mob descend for tweeting ‘wow’ at me. Read on:

Last Friday, I was minding my own business participating in a wee bit of a twitter pile-on, which may or may not be ironic. Anyway, I’ll cover this more in a later post, but a few important things happened.

Somebody with a LOT of followers retweeted me, due to agreement. Then somebody, who has an influential follower, screen capped my tweet, adding some negative commentary. And then the influential follower, who directs large hordes of angry twitter mobs, retweeted that.

Hordes of twitter mobs, in this instance, meant, according to Twitter’s metrics, about 35k people. Some of them were people who came by to ‘like’ my comment, who saw it because of the prominent approval. Much more noticeable were the people who came by to complain.

Also caught in the crossfire was a friend of mine from Real Life who replied to my tweet with ‘wow’. Her reply got caught in the screen grab, entirely incidentally. My twitter presence is vaguely gender ambiguous, but hers is not. Women are fair targets to online mobs (as far as the mobs are concerned). So even if you don’t tweet any political statements and just reply to a friend, you can still get drowned in a mob.

What to do when it happens to you

Be prepared

If you use Twitter like I did until friday, you’ve got a few spam accounts blocked, but your block list is mostly unused. You have, perhaps, given no thought to block management. If a mob notices you, however, your approach to this may change.

There exists an app called Block Together. It is really useful because it allows users to share block lists. You can get a list of people with a history of mobbing and block them.

The only downside of this app is that it takes a few hours between joining it and it working. Ergo, join now. Perhaps mobs will never notice you. The app will quietly do nothing, aside from remembering the spammers you occasionally block. But if you need it, it will be ready to go.

When you’re noticed by a mob

Others, smarter and more experienced than me have written more about this. This is what I did for a one-off attack.

  1. Sign up for Block Together
  2. Subscribe a list that contains the kind of people who are attacking you. If you see a lot of people describing themselves either as Nazis, as ‘egalitarians’ or as ‘Gamers’, Wil Wheaton’s list is a good pick.
  3. While the event is ongoing add this block list. Remove it when the coast is clear. It blocks too many people for regular use, but is a good emergency measure.

The dispassionate response, of course, is to set your notifications only to people you know and to shut the computer and go have a cup of tea and read a nice book. This is the approach I’ve taken when a small number of people show up to complain, but a large number is so overwhelming that this reaction does not sem reasonable wile the event is ongoing.

You could decide to take your account private until things blow over. The advantage of this is that haters cannot reply to the tweet they don’t like. The disadvantage is that they will still tweet at you. People who have experience launching campaigns against individuals don’t reweet you. They tweet a picture of your tweet. That screen grab means that mobs can still see who you are and why they should be enraged at you. The other disadvantage in going private is that this does silence you, even if only temporarily. They will see it as a victory.

Responding to hate tweets

Do not reply. The minimised logic is that this is ‘feeding the trolls’ – they enjoy the attention. This is partially true, but it’s the more minor concern. Some of the trolls will respond to your attention by becoming extremely alarming or dangerous in Real Life. If only 1% of a hate mob are people who are going to actually make you worried for your safety, in 35k people, that’s 350 scary people. Perhaps one of them lives in your city? Don’t accidentally feed that troll. Just block everyone involved in the hate-tweet:

  1. Expand the tweet to find out who liked it. Block all the likers.
  2. Block everyone who retweeted it.
  3. Report the tweet if it’s vile enough that Twitter support may care.
  4. Block the person who tweeted it in the first place

And, in between taking these actions, keep your mentions on people you follow only and have some tea.

It is actually impossible to respond to things via blocking in real time, so do take a step back and block at your leisure. This isn’t your fault.

Tl;dr

Sign up for Block Together now, so it can jump to your aid rapidly.

Advertising Results

I recently ran an advert on Facebook. Ok, yes, Facebook is evil, but it was £7 for a week and the whole idea was so ludicrous that I gave it a go.

Originally, the advert was directed at US-based fans of Christian rock music, but they were so profoundly disinterested, that I started worrying a bit about wasting my money and so broadened out to also include Canadian fans of noise music.

My advertisement ‘reached’ 1,267 people. Which means, it was placed in the feeds of that number of people. Not that they saw it at all, just that it went into their feeds. Of those, 22 people interacted with it some way. 15 of them clicked ‘like’. One of them liked my page (more useful). One of them actually shared my promoted post!

So I went to his page. He shares everything he sees. Which is mostly about cars, guns and war. His 13 facebook friends probably have him muted.

Of the 15 people who liked the post, I ‘invited’ all of them to like my page. Two or three did.

Facebook does not tell me how many people clicked the link through to my shop. However, Etsy gives me statistics on views.

31 people found my shop via Facebook. I can’t say how many of them came from my advert, but I think having 17 views from Canada is possibly unusual.

I’ve also been promoting this round of commissions through blog posts (like this one), twitter and Diaspora. Etsy also is a traffic draw. Over the last 30 days, there have been 224 views of my shop, which may or may not mean it’s been seen by 224 people. 29 People came via twitter and 3 from my blog. Views peaked on Friday, when my shop had 60 views.

16 people actually got as far as looking at a listing. One person favourited the listing. Nobody commissioned me.

It’s worth noting that only nine of my facebook visitors came from the non-mobile website and the rest were mobile users. this may be a reflection of the growing importance or the mobile web. Or there is the tiniest possibility that it’s more strongly related to the facebook mobile UI. Users complain frequently that it’s impossible to use and they keep clicking on adverts accidentally. But, if it looks like clicks to advertisers, why would facebook fix it? It’s not like their users are their customers.

I think it’s clear that I just wasted £7, spending it on ineffective, annoying evil. It’s like selling your soul to the devil for a subway sandwich.

I started this project nearly 10 years ago. Before crowd funding sites and before patreon. Both of those models are potentially well-suited to this project. Indeed, in many ways, they’re both better suited than my model. If I had done crowd-funding, I could have made naming tracks rewards for sponsorship, which is more or less what I’m doing now, but with a model that makes a bit more sense and guarantees that people will actually end up with the album at the end. If I had gone with Patreon, I would not be wedded to the one-minute-of-noise format I’ve chosen, as subscribers would be supporting my output more generally. It would, however, create pressure to make and post tracks frequently enough that I didn’t feel guilty for taking people’s money. Through sponsorship and reliable posting, there’s a potential I could grow my listener base.

This is not a good time of year for doing this sort of project, which may have performed better before Christmas. Every time I do it, I worry I’ve exhausted my social capital. People who commission me are usually only one degree away. Once in a while, I’ll get somebody two degrees away. Alas, my original, foundational hope that people would hear their friend’s commissions and want one for themselves has not come to be.

On the other hand, I started this before my PhD, something which did force me to take along break from it. I do it when I feel like it and pause it when I don’t. I have a lot of control over when I’m not working on this project, which is something I needed towards the start.

I’ve got another advert about to run on a porn blog. Will anybody commission me from it? Probably not, but at least this one will result in a new piece of music, so I don’t care.

This is an advert right here. Have you noticed it? Have you ever clicked through? Have you ever wanted to commission short bursts of noise for the same amount of money I spent advertising that possibility? Go for it! Order now for this Valentines Day!

Musical Influences

For hundreds of years, the Catholic church used Gregorian Chant. Until the second Vatican Council in the latter half of the 20th century, and then they stopped. But in the mean time, every mass-going Catholic heard chant every week. A medieval form of music was thus influencing Catholic composers for hundreds of years, long after chant had been in the early modern charts. Even if the composers weren’t interested in it or didn’t even particularly like it that much, it was still something they had known from early childhood, that could not help but burrow into their unconscious. Refreshed, week and week.

Which is why I felt so horrified on giving a brief listen to Attention K Mart Shoppers. My upbringing was thoroughly suburban – a consumer culture made up of gigantic retail outlets surrounded by even more gigantic parking lots. My stay-at-home mother, quite reasonably, took my brother and I along for shopping trips. Sometimes we followed her and the grocery cart around, whining endlessly for whatever sugar-coated precursor to the obesity epidemic had been advertised on TV that week. In some larger/ more varied stores, such as Gemco, she would allow us to wander around in the sports and camping section. (Thus sparking my profound fascination with camping gadgets and inflatable rafts. (My plan to save up enough of my allowance to buy my own raft never came to fruition.))

We spent an hour in church every week, listening to the newer liturgical music, required by canon law not to be overly distracting (read: interesting/good). I don’t know how many hours a week we spent in shopping establishments, but, especially during my teen years, I suspect it was a lot more time. Which means I heard at least as much elevator music as a Catholic composer a century earlier would have heard chant.

The songs on Attention K Mart Shoppers aren’t bad, per se. The people who worked on them were clearly skilled. Taken individually, the music isn’t even bland. Their formal constructions are so intuitively familiar – the timbres, the rhythms, the note choices. When I was in my teens and twenties, I had a recurring dream where I was flying/floating in a shopping mall, with an especially grand layout, escalators criss crossing over the atriums. And then, in my adulthood, I went to Valley Fair mall in the South San Francisco Bay Area. It was incredibly eerie. Here was the mall I had been dreaming about. My family had been local to it in my early childhood, but had moved away when I was 7 or 8. I had forgotten it, except not. It was still rooted in my subconscious, impossible to shake away completely. How much deeper-rooted is the music, which would have been heard across multiple locations?

Indeed, what I heard most immediately on listening to this sound track of my childhood, was not eerie nostalgia but the echos that are in my own composition. When I’m writing something that’s melodic, my tool kit of notes, timbres and rhythms is build off a foundation of elevator music. This is the well-spring of my creativity. I don’t just make noise. I make the noise of late 20th century capitalism. I can leave American suburbia, but American suburbia will never leave me.

The Les Said the Better music section is home of many fine varieties of noise music. From analogue to digital to acoustic, there’s something in it for you. Head over to the shop now for Valentines Day noise, great for a friend or a partner. With every day low prices and a wide selection, when you think of noise commissions, think of celesteh.etsy.com.

Send me your dick pics

Friends, Romans, countrymen, send me your dick pics! It’s for an art project.

You might want to encrypt them first. It turns out the UK’s government has the world’s largest of dick pics. Not because civil servants are extra-randy, but because they’ve intercepted them. From people’s private webcam conversations. Which is another way of saying they’re all stolen. Which is another way of saying: those dick pics are yours. You took them (or other intimate pictures involving your own anatomy) to share with someone special and now they’re in the mitts of Davey Cameron.

(Don’t worry about this too much unless you happen to resemble a ham. He’s probably not personally seen them. Anyway, if you haven’t done anything illegal, you’ve got nothing to hide. Aside from your dick pics, if you have some completely unreasonable notion that you should be able to control the distribution of these pictures and resent third parties taking copies of them mid-transit. Like a terrorist would think.)

If you would like to send me your dick pic, but prevent it from falling into the hands of spads, feel free to encrypt it. To be extra-secure, you need not send me your decryption keys. I will not decrypt your images because, despite me asking for photos, I don’t actually want to look at your knob.

I’ve been commissioned by one of Tumblr’s popular porn blogs to create a minute of noise. And what better to use than actual sexy images? Oh sure, some people might suggest using sexy sounds, but still images have a certain quiet grace to them.

There is a type of harsh noise practice called ‘data bending’, which is very easy to do. The image is played as if it were a sound file. This method of music make would allow me to turn your dick pic into something that’s completely unrecognisable. Especially if you send it encrypted!

This is conceptual, but it seems reasonable to make an ode to dick pics out of dick pics. And hopefully we can all learn about encryption in the process. One of the best ways to encrypt a single image is GNU Privacy guard. You can also use this to encrypt lots of your different forms of communications. There’s a brief introduction to it in this Lifehacker article.

So please send me your GPG-encrypted dick pic, but not any of your keys. Also, let me know how you would like to receive credit for your contribution.

You too can commission romantic or sexy music. Order now for this Valentines Day!

Back Catalogue

As a New Year’s Resolution, I’ve put some of my back catalogue available for download.

In the case of my first album, this is the first time this work has ever been available in a high quality format.

When I put out my 3rd album in 2005, the original pressing was only 50 CDs. But now, thanks to digital distribution, anybody can get a copy!

And, of course, my latest album of Christmas music is now kind of unseasonable, but free (with the expectation that those who can afford to will make a donation to a listed Charity such as Crisis).

Some of you may be wondering what happened to my second album. It was called Virtual Memory. It had two tracks on it instead of one, because there was a duration limit per-track on Mp3.com.The sound was an example of ‘data bending’ – that is, taking a data file and playing it as if it were an audio file. The source was the virtual memory for my operating system. Mac OS 9. I added some reberb and a drum machine to make things a bit more interesting.

The first several minutes are epic harsh noise with an incredible beat. And then it carried on for the rest of the album. Why I thought this was a good idea is kind of lost in the mists of time, but I think I was probably being kind of a dick.

As to my next album, I am working on Shorts, which will be made up of the 1 minute long noises pieces that you commission! I only have eight left to go to meet my original goal of 45 pieces. If you want to have your name on the album, time is running out!

Or if you want to publish the album, get in contact. A wide variety of people have been involved in this project over the years and I’m optimistic about the album’s reach.

Music commissions make great gifts. Order now for this Valentines Day!

Facebook Advertising

Some readers may remember my advertising spree last winter, in support of my short commissions. I’m carrying on with the noise project again. I have a goal of putting out an album when I reach 45 noise shorts and I am currently on #36, so there’s just 9 to go! Check out my shop to order one.

For me, doing the promotion is part of doing the project. With my Christmas album, I tended to do facebook posts for every song I put out, so it seemed natural to kick off the latest (and possibly final) round of noise music commissions via a post to my facebook page.

Looking for a really unique valentines gift? Why not bespoke noise music? https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/celesteh

Posted by Charles Céleste Hutchins on Wednesday, 6 January 2016

Due to the temporary benevolence of facebook algorithms, a fair number of people actually saw the post. Then these same algorithms alerted me that this post was doing very well. Was I interested in promoting it, say to US-based fans of Christian rock?

I LOLed. Although, it was an idea that suck with me. When I lived in Berkeley, the guitarist/song writer for Sixpence None the Richer was my next door neighbour for a year. He turned out to be a very nice chap. We went for coffee many times and when we talked music tech, we had a very large number of interests and issues in common. While I tend to have more secular views, there’s certainly nothing in my music that has religious baggage either way. Are we not to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’?

Alas, I don’t think facebook advertising is ethical, because of its data collection and tracking, etc, but it’s also very cheap. Bless me, for I have sinned. I gave £7 to Facebook, in exchange for 7 days of showing my posts to Americans who probably knew what the Dove Awards were before living next door to a many-time winner.

Ardour Screen ShotAfter suggesting that I turn the post into an advert and taking my money, Facebook promptly declared that my advert was against their guidelines. The image, a screen shot of the Ardour program that I use for music-making, contains too much text. I made an appeal and they relented.

I’m still on the first day of this experiment. So far:

  • 2 Christian rock fans have clicked ‘like’ on the post (a cost of 50p each)
  • 6 people have clicked through to view the shop.
  • 0 people have clicked through to either sale item.
  • 0 people have made any orders.

I’m paying £1 / day for this little experiment, so the week-long advert will cost as much as 1 sale. I have a feeling this is not money well spent, but I can see why advertisers do pay facebook. If I had been less ridiculous and, say, paid to attract the attention of Canadian fans of noise music, it’s possible to speculate that the novelty of seeing ‘bespoke noise’ advertised to fans of the genre might actually gain me listeners if not orders.

Music commissions make great gifts. Order now for this Valentines Day!

12 Days of Crimbo

I had a plan in the fortnight before Christmas to write 12 songs in 12 days. I nearly made it in time!

I’ve posted all of the pieces as a free album on Bandcamp. My only request is that if you download it and can afford to, please donate to one of the listed charities, such as Crisis.

While I didn’t get twelve pieces in 12 days, each piece only got a few hours of attention. Because Christmas music tends to be tonal, I looked into more instrumental synthdefs and because of the constraints on time, I tended to borrow and adapt instead of inventing totally new sounds. I’ve not got a pretty good additive bell, based on Risset, a good karplus strong plucked sound and decent jingle bells. These shall go up shortly on the sccode site.

I used glitched jpegs as still images for each track on Bandcamp, so when I decided to also upload the tracks to youtube, I created a glitch movie maker script. It’s based on a workshop I saw Antonio Roberts do at Tate Britain. He opened up a jpeg file, typed some junk into it and then it glitched. I wrote a script to insert junk into jpegs. It first looks at the aiff, to decide how many jpegs will be needed, makes all of them, then turns them into a music video. I’ve posted it to github.

This is an example of the script’s output. All 12 pieces are up on YouTube also, if you would like to have a look.