arty musings from outside the matrix

http://n3wt0n.com/blog/?p=326

having been a long time fan of musagi, it is a joy to get to experience another creation from the same genius, "sfxr". it's a gorgeous little app for making sound effects. oh my... my music is gonna take another change of direction.... crap... i was really hoping to get the latest album i had been working on polished off and released... but i can see this will interfere with that plan. :)

now if only i could get musagi and gungirlsequencer (or another similar basic audio sequencer in e-jay style) on the go too... musically, i'd be provisioned with everything i need then.

lmms and ardour, they're nice to have, but not quite my preference for how i like to compose my musical creations. for the most part.


for my animation stuff, i still feel a little short handed. i miss the likes of animation shop. gimp's gap, it just dont cut the mustard when ya need workflow. still early developement for it.

i just recently started playing around with synfig studio, a simple vector graphics animation package (which i originally thought was more bitmap oriented), and it's showing some promise.

i also miss adobe after effects a bit. but this is my own doing. i chose this path, i chose to renounce slavery and proprietary and all that crap. idk if there anything close to similar in the open source community yet.

blender and softimage|XSI.
mmm. i do miss softimage from time to time. i recieved some top notch intensive training on it, and that helped me be familiar with it, and get some level of workflow outta it. my learnings with blender have been far more sparse, far less intensive, and less focussed with a hundred other things on my plate, and as a result, there are times in blender when i still, even years removed, find myself thinking in softimage terms.

still, i'd never get to poke under the hood of softimage, so i know i'm on the right path with blender.

this is a point i think many folks must look at me and think me a fool for opting to go for a kinda richardstallmanesque renunciation of proprietary software. i'm in it for the longer view, i see not only which way the wind is blowing, so to speak, but i see just how much faster and further i'll go if i steer my ship into those winds. the sooner i'm with them, the better. of course, (leaving the sailing analogy) i'll need to learn alot more.
.....this is not a bad thing.
this is not a "con", it is very much a "pro".
i do not want to be dumbed down by plastic wrapped convenience, i want to know how things work.

i dont want to be hostage to dependance, i want to be empowered with competence.
this is the difference.

so i choose non-proprietary as much as possible.... tho convenience does have me reaching for proprietary flash still, rather than the fsf initiative versions of GPL released flash. ideally though, if i was imbuing myself with the spirit of socrates and empiricus or other philosophers who made a point of sticking ot yer guns, then i'd stick to learning how to program, how to hack my own code to get it to work.... again... convenience traps the lazy and impatient.

ok, i'm straying wildly again...

but thats ok i suppose. its my blog, and i can do what i like. no fascist mod wanting to keep up appearances and excersize their powers of authority over me here. :D

so yeah... it's all on topic really, i just think broadly. :D

lemme pull it back round for you to see i'm correct in asserting i'm still on topic.

so as an artist, with fanciful delusions of grandure, of being up there with the greats, i too, like them, prefer to retain more control over my tools, and therefor over my artwork.

i want to make my own paints, fetch my own ingredients for the paints, etc. metaphorically speaking.

my paint comes in the form of complex arrangements of ones and zeros.

i could just leave it to the whim of the authorities, or i could (like the sentiment in the video in my last blog depicted), renounce the esstablishment, and do something actually progressive for us all. :)

heh, talk about limiting beliefs.... i've just noticed i've been holding myself back because of what i think other people think, because i think myself incapable of explaining or them incapable of understanding, the alternative sence of worth outside the stringent linear quantitative monetary terms.

there's the old idea (i once read in a book on taoism) that artists should not make money from art, that profit should be kept seperate from art, that art is above profiteering, that an artist would never lower themselves to be as low as the businessman, who is only a peg above the criminal.

... as someone identifyingy themselves with being an artist, you can see why i'd take to that idea. :D especially living in the society we do where businessmen have been allowed to seize too much power and status, and pressure the rest of us to conform to their ways.... it seems quite the paradise utopian society where businessmen are regarded as just barely better than criminals and artists just barely worse than saints. :)

even tho i think it's fading these days, there's still some remaining residual ridicule and demonising of open-soure freedom-software folks. probably exponentially increasing now, folks are starting to see free software in a rather divine light. it is rather saintly and angelic. it's very nice. "sharing", "community"... these are two big words in the ... community. whether you're calling it the open-source community or the more die-hard free(dom) software community, we're effectively all the same community. the ven diagram would be quite clear on this i'm sure. there's ecconomies of gifting, of giving, without expectation of anything in return. we've left the paradigm so heavily enforced upon us by dominator industrialists. we're more tesla, than westinghouse. we're achieving what the technocrats of lefist political ideologies dreamed of. ok, sure, so far we're pretty much only achieving this in digital realms. but i think its not long now before the dam bursts completely, and the corporatist oligarch can no longer plug the leak of all the technologies which will set us free. this will be none other than the surfacing of all those sci-fi technologies.... the total liberation of man from uneceassry toil. we'll have zero-point vacuum energy devices, capable of providing all our energy needs, we'll have 3d printers and hologram technology synthesizing to produce star-trek like replicators and other fabrication devices, geet engines, water fuel, solar paint, and piles and piles of other stuff... i could go on and on, and i'd still never scratch the surface of all the liberationary technologies that ALREADY EXIST and the many more which have yet to be imagined.

think i'm off topic again?

nope.

this is the point.

this is exactly why i, as an artist went to open source software over proprietary.

this is exactly the thing which will enable artists of the world continue to create their art, and do so without profit incentive-ising them, distracting them. ( to show that i still communicate my thoughts in ted-talks videos: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html ;D )

"why do you have to pay to live on the world you are born on?" asked the visitor to our world.

zero obliged outgoings.

and why not?

only if you are addicted to having a billion crypto-slaves should you baulk at the idea, and even then... you aught to reccognise the precarious situation you're in as master of a billion slaves who are at risk of waking up to realise they are but slaves for you... and they might not like it.

so yeah... i take my choice of software pretty seriously huh. :D

i got told in one of those silly little internet quizes recently that i was from arcutus, and as such, i'm a 5th dimensional being with a strong inclination to do things forthe benefit of all. well, idk if i'm from arturus, but the rest seemed to fit. ;)

time to beam up to my ship http://omploader.org/vMm9wcQ/booingwhirie1.wav
(first sound i just made in sfxr)