Three fantastic pieces of music. First, a remixed Barack Obama album in the style of Wendy Carlos.

Secondly, Mind over Mirror’s “You Ain’t Reeling” or as i’ll know it, “the interzone national anthem”

And finally, a ghostly western song, by Lasso

All I can think about lately is cartoons and animation, probably because of Smears, Multiples and Other Animation Gimmicks. It’s a wonderful tumblr dedicated to all the single frame moments that make cartoons look cartoony.

From “Get a Job” (Brad Caslor, 1985) As seen on http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/

Probably my favorite thing in the last few months is this redrawn Mutt & Jeff cartoon that I found on Tusks Family Blog. Stylistically it’s square and animated to look like a 1920s comic, long before the squash and stretch of Tex Avery & Co became a standard. It is however, a cartoon entirely about FREAKING THE FUCK OUT:

A word of caution about the next cartoon: It may not be so funny if you have trouble with noise pollution.

Pluto and a bee steal some gum:

]]> http://jackaperkins.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/cartoons-cartoons-cartoons/feed/ 0 mrgrinick plut tumblr_lqh2n4H72y1qjhlhko1_500 http://jackaperkins.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/fletcher-hanks/ http://jackaperkins.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/fletcher-hanks/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:10:56 +0000 mrgrinick http://jackaperkins.wordpress.com/?p=349 ]]>

[[from Wikipedia]] “Fletcher Hanks, Sr  (1887-1976) was a cartoonist from the Golden Age of Comic Books, who wrote and drew stories detailing the adventures of all-powerful, supernatural heroes and their elaborate punishments of transgressors.”

Autechre's max patch aka "you messy motherfucker"

In Max, there are a large number of objects that let you scramble and remix lists of items in interesting ways. Because Max is music focused, a lot of your operations revolve around working with permanent sets. Defining a scale of possible notes doesn’t do you much good if your system is able to randomly select F# 300 times in a row. Max provides the Urn object for this purpose, a ‘grab bag’ for collections. Given a number range, urn returns a member every time it’s triggered. It’s unable to produce the same number again until all other members have been selected.

I’ve created a similar object in javascript. A single urn can contain multiple collections, each keyed by the array it’s self:

var urn = new Urn();
var items = ['mice','dogs','tigers','cats'];
urn.grab(items); //--> 'dogs'
urn.grab(items); //--> 'tigers'
urn.grab(items); //--> 'mice'
urn.grab(items); //--> 'cats'

//throw a different array into the same object
//one urn tracks all keys in parallel
var junk = ['maggie','lisa','bart'];
urn.grab(junk); //--> 'maggie'
urn.grab(junk); //--> 'bart'
urn.grab(junk); //--> 'lisa'
urn.grab(junk); //--> 'lisa'
urn.grab(junk); //--> 'maggie'
urn.grab(junk); //--> 'bart'

The only missing feature is preventing the end of one sequence being the same as the beginning of the next. Notice the two ‘lisa’s in a row in the above example. Each full round of urn grabs are managed independently.

Grab urnie.js over on the github: https://github.com/jackaperkins/urnie

“A new style of party-giving is beginning to grow up, even while the etiquette books cling to the same number of forks on the table and put into the hostess’s mouth the insincere words with which she begs her guests not to lift a finger. We are making a new etiquette, with a new set of manners for both hosts and guests. They are better manners, more truly gracious, because they are sincere, not a counterfeit of a vanished aristocracy but an honest product of our times. What they demand, more than anything else, is a new and more relaxed attitude on the part of all concerned.”

Mary and Russel Wright’s Guide To Easier Living features some classy mid century modern houses and sensible new ways to get things done. Originally published in 1950, much of the advice about the future of home life has become standard for every American. Serving food ‘family style’ instead of with vestigial plates and dishes for each person; building storage into furniture or even walls, Japanese style. The book suggests clean and open spaces, instead of cluttering life with grandmother’s table, china hutch and lowboy. The back section features huge charts about the resiliency of various materials under stressful conditions. If you need to know what kind of scrubable wall paper is best used in the kitchen, this is the book for you.

Wrote this quickie in Processing today.

Get the code: https://github.com/jackaperkins/squiggler

A serious audio and electronics geek, Eric has a whole grip of homemade devices and hacks on his website. His Andromeda series of noise makers feature some pretty rad features, including IR sync (in AND out!) warbly analog filters and a pretty neat sequencer. Here’s Eric and some friends running an event in Austin:

It’s not all bleeps and bloops though; he’s got quite a few projects involving some real esoteric miscellanea.  Here’s Eric modeling a bouncing ball with an analog computer:

WordPress leaves us with the solitary get_post_ancestors() which returns an array filled with the ID’s of the page’s parents, all the way up to the root. Not so helpful in the middle of your template… and what if you’re AT a top page? get_post_ancestors() returns null!

I wrapped it in a helper function that grabs the last element in the array or returns the current post ID in case of null. An alternative is to recursively follow the $post->parent_post links, but this is way simpler!

function get_top_id($mypost){
  //pass in a post, get the id of the top ancestor
  //or the post's id if it's the top
  $ancestors = get_post_ancestors($mypost);
  if($ancestors != null){
    //pull off the last element of the array
    return(end($ancestors));
  } else {
    return($mypost->ID);
  }
}

So, what do we do if we have the ID of the parent? We can perform lookups on special content that we stored there, for example a featured image (cryptically referred to as a ‘Post Thumbnail‘). We do this through the function get_the_post_thumbnail()

<?php echo get_the_post_thumbnail(get_top_id($post));?>

Now we’ve defined a single header on our top page and all the children have it too. This works for custom fields attached to the parent in the same way. I defined some fields called ‘quote’ and I can access them via get_post_custom_values() :

<?php
$quotes = get_post_custom_values('quote',get_top_id($post));
foreach ( $quotes as $value ) {
?>
<div class="blockquote">
<?php echo $value ?>
</div>
<?php } ?>

Bam!
Now my sidebar has a bunch of quotes from the head of the section all the way down to each child page.