gwozdziec, stall

i realize that i have hit a stall on the gwozdziec project.  part of that has been due to technical difficulties — a couple of the times i tried to do stuff my computer decided not to output any sound from those applications.   but the main part is that i’ve gotten bored with the formula.  so i’ve decided that rather than just doing the same basic formula for each track, i need to change it up a bit once in a while.  i’ve toyed with the idea of using the analog synthesizer vst i used on the RPM project and rolling dice to determine the patch, where to put the notes, etc.  the last track i did any work on i did a random yahoo query and used windows’ built-in text-to-speech engine to read the text on the main page of the random site to use for the vocoder app.  this should make each post about the tracks be more interesting since it won’t just be a list of dice rolls and freesound samples, but it does mean i’ll need to spend a little bit more time figuring out how to compose each track and make it built on concepts of random and creative commons.

more as the project takes more shape in my head.

in the meantime, check out my new lifestream page.  I might change up the format but I’ve decided to use my own technology and site design rather than a 3rd party — storytlr was cool, but styling it looked like it was going to be an insane amount of work just to make it match my existing site, and even as I use this new technology (i’ve switched to profilactic), i realize that there isn’t anything special to any of these technologies — for the most part they’re just mashing up various RSS feeds that your online activities generate into a timeline.  storytlr had the option to break it down and create specific stories, which was cool, but something i hadn’t used and probably wouldn’t unless we went on a trip somewhere (and since I don’t have a laptop, the end result would be some pics from after the fact anyway).  lifestreaming is an idea, not bound to a specific technology, which didn’t fully occur to me until after i went to the lifestream blog. but the main thing i want to change on the lifestream page is to have the full articles for each item (where applicable), not just the headline for each post, which i’m thinking of doing by letting SimplePie handle profilactic’s main RSS feed.