CATSYNTH

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Category: Cats

  • Weekend Cat Blogging #112 and Chaos #3: Unemployment Lifestyle

    We at CatSynth are still getting used to this whole unemployment thing. For me, this is a very novel experience, not having work. However, there is a lot that cats can teach us about not working:

    Our friends Kashim and Othello have a “mess” theme for the Bad Kitty Cat Festival of Chaos, and we have a recent pic that sums up both messiness and idleness:

    I leave laundry on the floor, and Luna takes a nap on it. A little guilty non-working pleasure for both of us.

    On more serious note our friends at the Bad Kitty Cats are dealing with more difficulties, as Braum has fallen ill and Zed Monster had an accident that severely injured his tail. We hope they both make a full recovery.

    Of course, there is more feline fun with a Simpsons theme, D'oh!, at The Weekend Cat Blogging #112 roundup with Kate and Puddy. (I'm always struck how similar Puddy and Luna look.) And also check out Friday Ark , where we are late as always, and Carnival of the Cats at This, That and the Other thing. I think that's it for now.

  • Preparing for tonight's performance: Cats, Rehearsal and Software

    First, I have to remind myself to ABC: Always Bring a Camera. I missed several photo opportunities before and during our rehearsal in San Francisco on Wednesday. There were some great shots on the new Central Freeway terminal ramp. And then the “kitty moments” during the rehearsal with Polly Moller and John Moreira. I did snap this cell-phone pic of John Moreira's cat Crescenda rolling around among our cue sheets and amps. She and her fellow cat Pearl joined us several times during the rehearsal, but Crescenda's little act stole the show.

    Musically, I had a minimal setup – a subset of what brought to the Skonkathon two weeks ago – just the MacBook, the E-MU 0202 | USB and a MIDI keyboard. The Mac was running the new script-based Open Sound World to process live guitar input. The processing worked quite well, I think, with several wavetables, ring modulation, and a rather nasty little FM algorithm (it's a lot like those distortion-modulation “sound mangler” pedals). Both the guitar and processing needed to fit within pieces with voice, flute and existing electronic material.

    UPDATE: You can read Polly's account of the rehearsal and Crescenda here.

    The one concern was the frequent OSW crashes – it wasn't a huge problem during the rehearsal because the system can reset itself very quickly (far more quickly than the older UI-centric version), with only a few seconds of dead time. But still, that's not cool. I suspected something related to the MIDI input handling. Fortunately, last night I was able to track down the crashes last night. They were indeed in the MIDI handling, some issues exposed by the multi-processing with the Core2 Duo. Easily found and fixed by playing the patch with a lot of MIDI control, with the laptop and keyboard on the coffee table. Actually, I made some interesting lo-fi music with the built-in mic and speaker and feedback while testing and debugging. This will probably form the basis of my next piece.

  • LolCatSynth: From Synthtopia

    The next contribution from our first lolcat-synth contest comes from Synthtopia. The headline is “Cat Announces Plan To Rule The World!”:

    Synthtopia included this in an article promoting our contest, and they produced one of the best examples in the process.

  • CatSynth pic: Francesca with Andromeda

    Submitted by Ross Totino of Fans of Collision:

    Fans of Collision is an interesting site with Flash-based music and visuals. I'm going to spend more time there later today…

    These synthesizers.com modulars have been showing up in several pics lately. What do people think of them, sound, quality, ease of use, etc?

  • We're back!

    Well, after five days in exile, we're back.
    Thanks to all those who visited us at our temporary home and Luna's Catster Page to show their support.

    For those who are curious, you can find out what happened with our inept hosting service failing to renew our domain ptank.com.

  • CatSynth 1st Anniversary

    Today we celebrate CatSynth's first anniversary.

    It's been one year since we posted this photo on July 19, 2006:

    The idea came from a friend who said something like “dude, you should do a website about cats and synths.” So I did. Really didn't have too much idea what I would write about. I quickly learned that there was quite an abundance of pictures of cats and synths, and sites like matrixsynth had been collecting such images for a while. Indeed, one of the first external “CatSynth pics” to be posted here was of matrix's own cat JD:

    Sadly, we recently learned that JD passed away this month. We offer matrix our sympathies. It's always sad to hear about cat friends passing away (or human friends, for that matter), and we at CatSynth have seen our share this past year.

    I expect to post more this evening reviewing the year with photos, not-so-useful stats and the other things we at CatSynth like to think we do well…





  • Bandwidth and image stealing

    A few months ago I noticed some surprising links from a site called neopets.com. Turns out a few users there had appropriated this October-themed image of Luna for their own works. In the case of one neopet user, she was labeled as “Brokenessence: darkhearted girl”. Another user at neopets even got her gender wrong and impugned her honor by declaring her some male dark demon character.

    Regular readers know how I feel about demonizing black cats, but that's not what this article is about. It's about the appropriation of images and the corresponding bandwidth from this site. The image in the example above now carries the “catsynth.com” label, as do most of my own images used on this site – some of the art photos carry my name and a date, but the idea is still the same.

    But the issue also extends to the images appropriated for this site from others, e.g., the many “CatSynth pics” contributed by others. They have been used at other sites not by copying them, but linking directly back here, thus I end up serving these images to their sites using my bandwidth costs. And they don't even link back here. For those who link back and bring more people to CatSynth, I'm generally OK eating the bandwidth costs. But for those who just grab images from this site, that's just plain stealing.

    The worst offenders appear to be forums – blogs and other sites are usually good about copying the images to their own locations and/or linking back. It's the forums where people dash off a random post with an image from CatSynth that are the problem. And this month these forum sites are the most common “referrers”, even though they don't link back.

    The biggest offenders for July are:

    low-bee.com, where someone used a pic of Mimì.
    punkas.com, where I'm paying for a good laugh at a lolbush pic (though I do approve of people ridiculing W).
    biggie.co in New Zealand, again serving up a lolbush.
    therocksalt.net – looks like lolbush again.
    And of course the long-term offender detroitluv.com.

    I will probably from now on post the biggest (monthly) bandwidth stealers at least once per month.

    While I am happy to see people use images from this site to link back, or to ridicule “W”, I don't appreciate serving up images for free. The bandwidth so far hasn't really cost me much, but it's a lot of work to keep this site running, including the many images which make CatSynth such a rich and rewarding place to visit.

    If you want to use an image from this site, please link back and give us credit. Failing that, at least copy it to your own site or one of the popular image hosting sites like photobucket or imageshack (I use ImageShack for sites where I don't have real storage space, like MySpace).

  • LolCatSynth: from the "contest"

    Well, we saw a lot of great captions come out of our first LolCatSynth contest. I quite liked this one:

    I'll post some of the others over the next few weeks, including some from reposts at matrixsynth and elsewhere. And stay tuned for more pics just begging to be “cap-shunned”.

  • CatSynth pic: Roar Studio

    Submitted by megawatt

    Guess the gear!

  • Alan Rabinowitz, the "Jaguar Man"

    I heard this story on the radio earlier this evening:

    'Jaguar Man,' Alan Rabinowitz, tells us how his story of making a promise to a big cat, and traveling deep into the Belize jungle to fulfill it.

    Now this is a man who had a serious stutter until the age of 21, and suffered a lot of the social problems that come with it. He developed a strong bond with animals, including the ability to speak to them without stuttering. A supportive father brought him to the Bronx Zoo, where he made his promise to a jaguar in one of the old-school cages at the time. There is bit of irony in a man who found his way through a socially difficult childhood at the zoo, yet remains troubled about the existence and nature of zoos:

    We end the hour with the story of boy who feels great sadness at the zoo. He doesn't like cages so he sets out to dedicate his life to keeping animals in the wild. In the end though, he'll find himself back at the zoo, as a zoo employee, to accomplish his mission.

    We at CatSynth thought this story might be of interest to readers, a combination of overcome social difficulties, the human-animal connection, and the starkly ambivalent quality of institutions like zoos for those who love animals (the ability to admire and appreciate our closeness, while being aware of the harsh reality of captivity). And no, this story does not mirror my own life, I did not stutter as a child and probably wouldn't survive too long in the Central American jungle. Nonetheless, we can draw inspiration from it.