every long-awaited pause

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of feather-collaging photos together. This month’s piece is fairly simple: draw with the mouse to blend photos and field recordings together. You can swap out or add your own photos/sounds to the photos and sounds folders if that’s a thing that is interesting to you.

Download every long-awaited pause

Controls: escape: quit; mouse drag: blend photos/field recordings

The Rules:

• The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (7/1/23).
• All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
• All source code and assets are included, licensed under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
• As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.

Further Reading

Nick Cave writing to comfort someone who’s going through something terrible. CW: death, grief.

I like this game.

I found myself listening to A Silver Mt Zion again this month:

“We were all waiting to hear those words and no one ever said them.
And the tactics never hatched,
and the plans were never mapped,
and we all learned not to believe.
And strange lonesome monsters loped through the hills wondering why…
And it is best to never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever wonder why.”

Also this, from the liner notes to that album, titled ‘On the failure of one small community in achieving its own ill-defined dreams and/or goals…’:

”…And made believe that we were seditionaries, but were too easily moved or else did not move at all? And never stormed the gates or walls? But crafted clumsy things w/our hands, and those things were important to us, those clumsy abstracted towers and minurets we crafted w/our own worried hands? And built our own confused belief systems, which were endlessly and crucially beautiful in their small stubborn tangles of loss, worry, faith and need?”

A horrifying fact I came across recently: For nearly 200 years, miners in Scotland (and their families!) were bound by law to work for their masters in perpetuity, masters who were also legally obliged to press gang any “vagabounds and sturdie beggers” into service under the same terms.

These ambient deconstructions of Celine Dion songs are incredible.

When I lived in Glasgow I used to love going to the GFT. Partly because it’s a great cinema, and always showed films that I hadn’t heard of or wouldn’t have seen anywhere else. But I think mainly for that feeling of walking home after seeing a film that tilts the world around you, and how that changes your perception of the world on the walk home. Which is something you’re never going to get from a big multiplex.

This year I’ve been going to the DCA on and off, trying to recreate that feeling. Aftersun is the first film that’s really done it for me. Just an incredible, beautiful piece of work.

I guess this is the last here and then gone of 2022, so I hope the holidays are kind to you. I hope you get a chance to rest, and pause, before we head into what will probably be another difficult year. I have an idea of what my next here and then gone is going to be, so I’ll see you in January with more light and sound and code.