Jim Stormdancer @mogwai_poet@mastodon.social

When I was a kid I read about a magic trick where if you touch your index fingers together and cross your eyes, a disembodied third finger appears between them. This is the kind of thing we had for entertainment in the 80s.

In the mid-80s, Too Short sold homemade tapes out of his trunk by Lake Merritt. If you gave him $20 and told him your car's make and color, he would record a custom song about you. Heck of a hustle.

(I haven't been able to find any of these on Youtube.)

Also Run DMC wore checkered blazers until their manager put them in track suits and Adidas.

Another thing that surprised me, though in retrospect it shouldn't have, is that a lot of the early folks are still alive. Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were in their teens in the early 70s, so they're only 60-ish now, and they appear in the documentary.

They'd never worked together before and they recorded Rapper's Delight in one take. They didn't know how to end it because you don't "finish a song" at parties, you just keep passing the mic. So the producer just faded the vocals out.

Learning interesting stuff from the Hip Hop Evolution documentary on Netflix. E.g., rap had just been something that happened at parties for 7 years when someone had the idea of making a rap *record*, and the Sugarhill Gang was just three dudes who happened to be in the room.

If Freesound goes down at the same time, every game developer will retire on the same day

Nobody is talking about it, presumably because everyone's still in shock.

Non-game-developers might not realize how big a deal OpenClipArt's extended outage is. It's completely impossible to make games if OpenClipArt is down.

Next time someone tries to tell you music was better forty years ago, play this for them: https://youtu.be/lAsvjVx-Mg4

The SP-1200 could store your entire song on a floppy disk, that's how little sample RAM it had. Also they go for $4000 used.

This is so relaxing. Like "how it's made" for sampling-era hip hop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkxjOTkZBM

Special thanks to the funky worm

So instead of eBaying a JV-2080 like I've been threatening to, I scratched the "new gear" itch by spending $20 on a SoundFont of the E-mu Planet Phatt: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mcpmotavgn9tj38/slyboots.mp3?dl=0

I did some research into how to drive 90s-era multitimbral hardware from a modern DAW, and you have to grovel in the raw MIDI data to send bank select events like a common criminal. It's barely a step up from dialing in sysex codes using just the up and down buttons on an MMT-8.

I just had to replace my phone and went with the Pixel 3A. It's $400, has a headphone jack, and is apparently the first Pixel that lets you easily-ish replace the screen or battery.

Back when fingerboards were in, this was a skate park for fingerboards. Luckily you can still have fun with a table with rocks on it

I swear it's not that I'm a dad. I've always been like this.