I just got back from the premiere of Continuous City, a theater production being workshopped at UC Berkeley by Marianne Weems of The Builders Association. I helped create the website at which you can (via webcam) perform scenes and choruses that will then be incorporated into the show. But this was my first time seeing the offline portion of the production, and I was really impressed. So if you’re in the Bay Area, I highly recommend you go check it out sometime before the last show on October 14th. If you’re interested at all in networked culture, or even if you’re not and sick of the hype, you’ll find it very entertaining. If you’re not in the Bay Area, or you can’t make it to Berkeley in the next week and a half, you can see the completed version when it goes on tour over the next few years. (The software I’ve been building for the site will have matured by then too; right now it’s rather early beta–we started writing code about 6 weeks ago and some of the seams are definitely still showing. I’ll post something geeky about the process of creating the site later in the month.)

While most of the blogosphere was atwitter over the tantrums being thrown at Digg, real injustice in Los Angeles was being ignored. After watching this video I was ashamed to be part of a community (the designers and evangelists of “Web 2.0″) which sanctimoniously promotes “people power” among the spoiled and entitled while disregarding the tightening grip of authority on the poor and disenfranchised.

A beautiful holiday weekend needs rock of the purest kind.

The little sister headbanging and playing air guitar in the front is the best. Lesser bands would have kicked her out of the room, claiming rock as older brother territory. The Gauchos knew better.

Yesterday’s New York Times reported that Candian police are experimenting with using YouTube to gather information on suspects captured by surveillance video. The footage shows men entering a nightclub. This is yet another example of the kind of “open source snitching” I wrote about in my paper on recognition markets (abstract). Seems like it’s not working too well, though: the latest comment on the YouTube page is “fuck the police.”

Last weekend Yuki and I heard Thomas Brinkmann spin a set of his custom remixes of Detroit techno at Recombinant Media Labs. He played a bunch of Jay Denham, Shake, and Carl Craig among others. Here’s a little taste:

This Friday we’re going back to hear Thomas Köner.

Google has released a patch with the changes they made to the VLC media player. Nothing too exciting–they’ve basically just crippled it by making sure that it will only play AVI and MPEG media types, and then only if they are served from http://video.google.com/. They’ve disabled the ffmpeg encoding functionality as well, presumably to avoid having to pay fees for distributing an MPEG-4 encoder. (Google has to pay MPEG LA $0.25 for every download of the GoogleVideoViewer after the first 50,000 downloads, up to $1 million per year. If they hadn’t disabled the encoding functionality, this per-download fee would double, so commenting out five lines of code saves them an additional million bucks per year.) The only bugfix appears to be something related to the ActiveX plugin (a mouse hovering problem). Other than that the bulk of the patch consists of changing “VideoLAN” to “GoogleVideoViewer” throughout the code.