For my fellow adherents to the Gregorian calendar, a happy new year! This afternoon as I slowly built up enough momentum to leave the house, I heard a wonderful phrase in a documentary on movie musicals on PBS, describing Judy Garland as

> an amalgam of glamour and damage,

ascribed to a poet whose name I heard as “Mark Doughty” but Google sayeth it knoweth not a poet by this name. In my sourer moments, I would think it a fitting description for any celebrity.

Really cool featured set at Share tonight with beautiful visuals by Marlon. He uses a webcam and a flashlight to control most of his patches; tonight he pulled out a helmet he said he’d made a couple years ago. He’s a dancer, and very graceful, and his efforts to get more of his body involved are exactly the right idea for visual performance. Right now most of the “you dance, the video reacts” interfaces are thin prototypes; I think Marlon will be one of the first people to really nail it.

I rediscovered a timbre of brush I hadn’t used in a while — the tolerance parameter (sounds like a sci fi movie). It lowers the brightness at which pixels get fed back: in other words, you see less streaking, more detail and there’s a nice, grainy texture. I uploaded a bunch of screenshots from tonight to my flickr so you can see what I’m talking about.

addendum: bissextile, a word which ought to be dirty but isn’t.