I accidentally started making a book

(Why I said making instead of writing will become obvious quickly) In late December, as things start to slow down and wrap up for the year, I was feeling pretty burned out. I’ve been feeling burned out for a while (and I’m certainly not alone in this sentiment, there are so many reasons to feel burned out even in the best of personal circumstances, which are my circumstances). I also had a lot of pain...
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Twenty Twenty-One Annual Report and Twenty Twenty-Two Goals

This is my eighth annual report. Here’s last year’s. Every year, I’m like “wow I did nothing” and then I look back and realize “hey, I did some things!” – here are those things. This year, it’s especially surprising and relieving because I’ve felt that I’ve had to drop so many things in order to just keep getting by. My brain capacity feels so low; my mental stack has felt so full that it can’t...
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Translations for the A/V Artifact Atlas

The A/V Artifact Atlas is a resource for identifying errors and anomalies in analog and digital video. For almost a year, I’ve had the idea to add translations to the A/VAA, to broaden the reach of the resource to communities working with legacy audiovisual materials but speak languages other than English. This got held up for several reasons (other commitments, burnout, lack of funding to pay translators, much less any for myself). Anyway, I outlined...
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IETF RFCs that are actually just poems

This blog post is very short, but I just had to get these out of my head! 21 January 1973 PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR 22 June 1973 ARPAwocky December 1985 ‘Twas the Night Before Start-up’ September 1989 “Act One - The Poems” February 1992 Remembrances of Things Past December 1995 The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas Not poems but close: September 1989 The hitchhiker’s guide to the internet 1 April 1994 A VIEW FROM THE...
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WebRTC lingo

A big problem with getting into video in general is all of the esoteric lingo that you have to learn, and WebRTC introduces a slew of new acronyms and words into the mix. Since WebRTC is basically a protocol composed of or built using many other protocols, it can turn into an acronym soup pretty quickly. It can make it difficult to even have a high-level conversation about live video streaming on the web without...
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Community-derived suggestions for handling burnout

I recently made a tweet that seems to resonate with a lot of people. It’s entirely not surprising, because I’ve been talking friends, hearing anecdotes from acquaintences, and listening to strangers repeating the same things with increasing intensity for like five years, with a major leap in the past 13 months and another jump in the past 2 months – the entire world is totally burned out. My tweets auto-delete after a time, but the...
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Media Collection Viewer

Overview / project vision I’ve spent the last few weekends working on this thing, tentatively titled Media Collection Viewer (and it seems like that name might just stick!). The way it works is that you provide it with a valid JSON file derived from the audiovisual file analysis tool MediaInfo and it produces charts based on that data, so that you can get a broad understanding of the files you are having to handle. (Note:...
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Twenty Twenty Annual Report and Twenty Twenty-One Goals

This is the seventh year of my annual reports. Here is last year’s, if you’re curious at what I said I wanted to do before a global pandemic kicked off. Although spoiler alert, my goals were to have less plans and travel less. Well, mission fucking accomplished, eh? I didn’t go anywhere and all my plans were cancelled. I was burned out, and I stayed burned out all year long. I started off the year...
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Enter the TikkiLand: MTV Spring Break Online

The below writing was included in Screen Slate’s “The Year the Internet Broke”, a publication corresponding with a film series held at Anthology Film Archives earlier this year, right before the big shutdown of 2020 and the last time I used the subway, walked in Manhattan, saw people casually, hugged a person I don’t live with, and ate at a restaurant. Copies still available through the link above, and it goes towards supporting this excellent...
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Notes on exploring the Vasulka PDF archive

Update: Project page is now up, here! Go there if you want demos and a high-level overview of this project. In anticipation of Recurse Center’s Never Graduate Week (essentially an alumni week time of celebration), a week I had planned to take off from work, I started to think of projects that might fit well into the scope of just one week, both at the angle of R&D work but also technical work. Stumbling through...
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Throttled: a few things I learned making this network-based performance

For the past little while, I’ve been working on this network-based performance project that I have named Throttled. It’s a performance by 233 gifs and a very slow network connection. This blog post is a bit about what I learned while making it. I’m writing this somewhat in haste, so the notes are a bit sloppy. This project had me asking some questions that are the opposite of what people usually want to learn about...
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MediaInfoInfo: Metadata tags

This is the eight and (perhaps) penultimate in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo”. (And the last until this project is able to be wrapped up after code review, which hasn’t started yet so it could be a while.) Anyway, I suppose this means that this is the last of the weekly post series. This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. MediaInfoInfo: Initialize...
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MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo” (with weekly associated blog posts). This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. Other posts: MediaInfoInfo: Initialize project MediaInfoInfo: Parameters / making a plan MediaInfoInfo: General streams MediaInfoInfo: Video streams MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text and Other streams MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words MediaInfoInfo: Metadata Tags MediaInfo-specific words Going through parameters and their...
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MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text, and Other streams

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo”. This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. Other posts: MediaInfoInfo: Initialize project MediaInfoInfo: Parameters / making a plan MediaInfoInfo: General streams MediaInfoInfo: Video streams MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text and Other streams MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words MediaInfoInfo: Metadata Tags I’ve tackled the largest sections – General, Video, and Audio. I was...
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MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams

This is the fifth!! in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo” (with weekly associated blog posts). This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. Other posts: MediaInfoInfo: Initialize project MediaInfoInfo: Parameters / making a plan MediaInfoInfo: General streams MediaInfoInfo: Video streams MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text and Other streams MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words MediaInfoInfo: Metadata Tags Audio! Like the Video streams section, the...
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