deathmtn

16 checks today. A lot of those were unconscious "open a tab, type a letter, hit enter" visits that I also want to train myself out of.

I found out a few months ago that someone had grabbed one of the old blogs that I had intentionally let expire, bought the domain, and reposted the content. I don't know exactly why they did it, but the reasons can't be good.

Anyway, I finally got around to sending DMCA takedowns. My friend Dave said it was easy, and indeed, it was. If someone pulls some weird, possibly identity-theft-related stunt on you, you can:

- Find out what registrar has the domain using the `whois` command.
- Use the `dig` command to find the IP of the web host.
- Use `whois` on that IP to find out who's providing that host.

Then, write emails to the abuse contacts of each of those companies using a template.

After you send it, you're presumably done, but I have no idea how these companies will respond. Tasks like this are incredibly aggravating because you can call it done after you do your part, but you don't know if it's truly done or if there will be more to do at some indeterminate time in the future.

I had a pretty good day today. I worked on stuff that's new-ish and interesting. I slept decently. I saw the sun.

Interview with Pete Sandoval and Lee Harrison (who is now in Terrorizer) via josalkun on Mastodon.

I'm delighted Lee Harrison has something to do other than Monstrosity. I imagine him being frustrated about losing band numbers and trying so hard to keep things going. (A few of them got recruited by Cannibal Corpse.) Go and have fun doing something else fun for a while, Lee!

And I always expect to hear that Pete Sandoval has died. Good to see him happy. Hearing him count out "1-2-3-4" is a joy.

Heh, before the term "blast beat" caught on, people called it the "super faster" beat. Also, Lee Harrison learned to play from the drummer of the Bee Gees!

10-5-5-4-4-4, with a couple of long breaks for squirrel photography.

9 checks yesterday.

Why images are still recognizable (or not) after they go through Colorer: The brain relies heavily on edge detection to do object identification. In edge detection, color doesn't matter; changes in luminance do. (Hence, colorblind people can identify objects.) The Colorer results preserve a lot of those edges. Some of them even make those edges easier to detect by increasing the luminance on the opposing sides of the edges.

(In nature, most lightness differences between edges are subtle. e.g. A yellow next to a slightly darker yellow gives the visual cortex a clue that one facet of a banana is ending and another is starting. When Colorer picks two colors at random, there's a good chance that the contrast is going to be higher between them than Yellow and Slightly Darker Yellow.)

There's also some Colorer images that make it harder to tell what is being depicted in the image by either cutting it down to too few colors or by making it easier to see edges that you may not have noticed in the original. However, those edges may suggest to you new things that were not in the original at all.



This picture was captioned "McNalley and Pines Fires in California: Natural Hazards". I at first thought that it was pine trees in a front of a mountain with smoke rising from them. In actuality, the original (second image on that page) is a map of the Pacific Ocean and California.

BTW, I learned about human visual processing by reading Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone. It's incredibly good and very layperson-accessible.

Like basically everything, writing a newsletter is taking much longer than I thought.

Wow. The demand is so high for bees to pollinate almond trees that massive bee heists are happening.

Was just listening to this old Idle Thumbs making fun of some game industry bigwig talking about how the next step for video games is to make you cry. I think they were mostly having a laugh about the ridiculousness of a sort of industry directive like that, but it was weird to hear the future makers of Firewatch and Gone Home seemingly mock the idea of emotional content in video games.

At the end, Steve Gaynor did talk about how a game not known for that kind of thing did make him mist up. While I can't think of a game that's done this for me, mostly because my game-playing dropped precipitously before games really were able to do much of that, I did have an experience like that the first time I listened all the way through Ozzy Osbourne's Mr. Crowley.

Like most solo Ozzy, it's a song that is easy to make fun of, and I was listening to it with arms crossed, metaphorically. It is just so good, though. While I didn't connect with the words, which seem mostly about wanting to ask fan questions to Aleister Crowley, the riffs and the mood and all the buildups really caught me by surprise. And those solos. But it's the riff that leads up to that last solo that somehow brought literal tears to my eyes. It sounded like an impossible magic at the time. And it's not that it's all that technically wizardrous — it is just the absolute perfect line in that context.

I don't even like Randy Rhoads that much on the whole; but wow, that tripped some nerves.

Two checks. Really tried hard not to look notifications and shit while posting about my newsletter on the social medias.

Like and subscribe to my new newsletter! (Just subscribing is fine.)

I've turned around a bit on newsletters. I wasn't excited about email as a medium, but now I can't deny that email is something everyone already has and understands, which is incredibly important.

My newsletter will be somewhere between my D&D recaps (which I've come to enjoy writing once I actually get around to starting) and my Patreon updates. That is to say, news about my work, reduced to digestible one-sentence anecdotes, stacked roughly into a narrative. I'm making this because I think it's too much to expect people to find your stuff by scrolling back through social media, sometimes fruitlessly.

This is a good recoloring! I thought the original was pine trees on fire, but it wasn't that at all.

I didn't catch it on video, but a marching band just played the Requiem for a Dream theme.