Book of Mormon production review
Last night I saw the Chicago production of The Book of Mormon! As expected, it was really fun and really high energy. And, of course, hilarious. It was amazingly written and produced, but I (of course) have some critiques.
The staging was full of fun little subtleties and jokes, and the pit and pit mix were quite good. The set and lighting design were also quite good. I particularly liked the lighting in the second half of Sal Tlay Ka Siti. I don’t usually like fake stars, but it was very tasteful and actually rather beautiful.
However, the tightness among the singers (mostly the Elders) and between them and the pit left something to be desired. I feel like it got a little better in the second half, but they got off to a weak start. The Africans seemed tighter, at least. I could have used a little more vocal in the mix, or just a little more high end on the vocals to add some definition. That actually may have been over-corrected, because at first it felt like the front fills were a little harsh from where we were sitting (fourth row of the dress circle). Not that the mixer can hear that from where they sit. Of course, more enunciation would have done the trick, too.
And the best vocal work in the show (by far, I thought) was Nabulungi.
As a side comment/thought: does anyone know who owns the rights to the show? As far as I can tell, it’s independent, which means they had to pay cash for the rights to characters from Walt Disney, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek. That can’t be cheap.
gMoog
I’ll admit it: hearing about today’s Google Doodle Moog synth pulled me in from DuckDuckGo. After messing around a bit this morning, I think I’ve figured out all the knobs in the Oscillators section. I’m hoping to figure out the details of the other sections later.
Basically, there are three oscillators. The two big knobs control the tuning offset from the primary (i.e. nonadjustable) oscillator. The three knobs on the left control the octave of the fundamental of each of the three (measured in feet as a reference to tube length in an organ, I’m assuming); the knobs on the right switch the shape of the wave (sawtooth, square, etc.) of each oscillator, affecting the harmonic structure.
Notes in versus
A summary of my notes from Patrick’s MTS talk:
- ICT skill vs. interactional skill
- Skills vs. norms
- Norms vs. affordances
- Tech properties vs. norms
- Functionality vs. norms
- Materiality vs. practice
- Knowledge vs. practice
- Understanding vs. enacting
Fiction suggestions
Thanks to everyone who gave me book suggestions! I put Hunger Games on my iPad last night and am enjoying it.
Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger
Isaac Asimov – The Foundation Trilogy
Bernard Beckett – Genesis
Aimee Bender — The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Ernest Cline – Ready Player One
Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games
Susan Cooper – The Dark is Rising Sequence
Bryce Courtenay – The Power of One
Jonathan Franzen – Freedom
Robert A.Heinlein – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner
Barbara Kingsolver – The Poisonwood Bible
Jhumpa Lahiri – Unaccustomed Earth
Yann Martel – Life of Pi*
Stephenie Meyer – Twilight**
Brandon Sanderson – Mistborn
Gary Shteyngart – Super-Sad True Love Story
Neal Stephenson – Diamond Age
Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
* means I’ve already read this
** means I hope this suggestion was in jest ;)
Quantify everything?
When I first started using Pro Tools (audio editing/mixing software), it frustrated me that it didn’t afford doing everything by the numbers like Photoshop. Then I stepped back and asked, “Yes, but does it sound good?”
Cyberpunk Apple Consumerism
Interesting perspective, but how is it different from any other infrastructure? Specialization and abstraction are trade-offs for a complex society. Turn on the faucet, water comes out. People don’t want to have to care where it comes from, how it got clean, or how it got to their tap. Same for information: press a button, information comes out. That people don’t want agency in all aspects of their lives is not necessarily bad: remember your grandma.
RT @pjrey: “Apple isn’t selling a product, it’s selling an illusion.” http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/12/01/how-cyberpunk-warned-against-apples-consumer-revolution/
Thankful
This.
I ate too much turkey,
I ate too much corn,
I ate too much pudding and pie,
I’m stuffed up with muffins
and much too much stuffin’,
I’m probably going to die.
I piled up my plate
and I ate and I ate,
but I wish I had known when to stop,
for I’m so crammed with yams,
sauces, gravies, and jams
that my buttons are starting to pop.
I’m full of tomatoes
and french fried potatoes,
my stomach is swollen and sore,
but there’s still some dessert,
so I guess it won’t hurt
if I eat just a little bit more.
Jack Prelutsky
4S?
Really torn. On the one hand, my phone seems to occasionally decide to drain its battery in ~2 hours. Otherwise, it’s fine. A little slow, maybe. But worth dropping $399 on a new phone? What with all the labor and material sourcing issues, it’s hard to justify. I’m even up in the middle of the night and could pre-order at the 0 hour. But I think my gadget lust is wearing off. It’s a weird feeling.
iAnnotate
I spent several hours with iAnnotate tonight. The verdict: lots of capability, lots of weird, non-standard interactions, and lots of weird, non-standard UI elements. In other words, it feels like a Windows app.
The main thing I’d really like to be able to do is use two fingers to scroll and turn pages while in the highlighted or drawing tool. The fact that I can’t stay in toolbar-less full screen and turn pages while highlighting is annoying. Add to that the fact that if I’m in full screen and I hold to get the context menu and choose the highlighter, when I tell it I’m done with the highlighter, it drops me out of full screen. Darn near infuriating.
And Dropbox support is a pretty big deal, although it’d be nice if treated Dropbox like an equal member of the PDF library rather than requiring a separate download process. And I’m not even sure if my annotation data is being synced back to the PDFs in Dropbox. Ideally it would, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.
But it does support an impressive array of annotation types, and it’s clear they gave some thought to what reading a PDF on the iPad is like (horizontal zoom locking is a really nice touch).
Reverse scroll(wheel)ing
A funny thing happened. When I first tried a mouse in Lion with reverse scrolling on the scroll wheel, I hated it. So I changed it. But within hours I found myself wanting to flip it the other way. Maybe because I’m focusing more on content on less on the scrollbar? (Although I turned on always showing the scrollbar, too, so I don’t know.)