parker higgins

Just a quick meta note: I’ve moved this site to a new hosting situation, but there shouldn’t be any disruption to its availability. I’ll probably also be looking into different CMS options while I’m here at Recurse Center.

After I posted yesterday about my automated datamoshing experiment, I got a nice message on Twitter from developer and botmaker Ryan Bauman who was able to run my script on his own videos. We talked for a bit about how it could be improved, and I had a major realization that I had to test immediately.

Datamoshing is a glitch art technique applied to videos to intentionally create “pixel bleeding” and other digital motion artifacts. It became popular several years ago when it was used in near-simultaneous music videos by Chairlift and Kanye West. In those cases, and in the tutorials and techniques documented since then, the glitches are typically introduced to a single edited video, and done manually in a visual editing program.

Twitter users who want to ensure that the Wayback Machine has stored a copy of the pages they link to can now sign up with @LinkArchiver to make it happen automatically. @LinkArchiver is the first project I’ve worked on in my 12-week stay at Recurse Center, where I’m learning to be a better programmer.

As the federated social network Mastodon has surged in popularity over the last month, more than a thousand instances — ranging from a single user to tens of thousands — have been started by the community.

A Ninth Circuit copyright decision in Mavrix v. LiveJournal could bring nasty implications for online communities, threatening the copyright “safe harbor” provisions that allows those communities to form.

This week I went to the SFMOMA for the first time. It’s great! I spent hours there and felt like I had to rush to see even a fraction of the collection. One of the pieces that really struck me was Gerhard Richter’s massive 1974 painting “256 Colors” (or “256 Farben” in his original German). I took a picture of it there:

Joe Brainard’s 1975 book “I Remember” is an incredible work of poetry. The New Yorker called it “his miniaturist memoir-poem,” and Paul Auster’s blurb for the 2001 edition gives a good sense of it:

After five amazing years, I’m done (for now) at EFF. It’s impossible to boil the experience down into numbers, but here’s a big one: 215 Deeplinks blog posts bear my name as author. Here they are, collected in one place for posterity. After the first hundred and the second hundred, I picked out some of my favorites.

Building on the previous cyber-supercut, here’s a new video that incorporates all the cybers from all of the general election debates, both Presidential and Vice-Presidential, set to music from Mr. Robot.