The first cyberpunk novel I read was True Names by Rudy Rucker. John Shirley has been called 'patient zero of cyberpunk' for his novel Eclipse.
(I published a collection of Cyberpunk stories called Error Message Eyes Release 3.0 and it will be a free download on Kindle on August 24th. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5CCRRSB I apologize for the blatant self promotion.)
This pattern looks like the semantic "missing link" between the two meanings of jerk: the fast driver is as stupid as the slow one, but in an especially annoying/harmful way.
After this specialization, from general stupidity to obnoxious and irritating stupidity, it is a small shift to pure obnoxiousness, implying moral but not intellectual inferiority.
But why, of many suitable words, "jerk" was the one who made this transition? Who is responsible?
Harp player here. When I first started playing, I had a Gindick's book, Country and Blues Harmonica For the Musically Hopeless. This was maybe 35 years ago. I would recommend that book and the tape (cd? mp3?) that comes with it, for beginners.
You can't see the notes you are playing on a harmonica. You have to hear them. You start by playing clear single notes and then shaping the note by articulating eeeh-yah or something similar and the note magically bends. You have to hear the note so you can tell if the note bends. It is very organic, and I don't think an app will help much. It may confirm what is happening, but it is not going to help if you can't do it.
Personally, I played along with Little Walter's greatest hits on my hour long morning commute, and eventually it was just natural to bend the notes at the right time.
My advice is to look for Jason Ricci on YouTube. He has hundreds or thousands of videos on beginner to advanced subjects. He is a weird dude, but I've never known a better teacher.
Thanks for sharing that — I really appreciate your perspective and experience.
I absolutely agree: bending is a deeply organic thing that you need to feel and hear in your body. No app can replace that. The goal of my app is not to teach you how to bend, but to help you understand what you're actually playing — especially for beginners who are unsure whether their bend reached the target pitch.
It’s more like a "mirror" than a teacher: you still have to do the work with your ears, but the app can help confirm (or challenge) what you think you hear. Some folks find that helpful in the early stages.
Also — yes to Gindick and Jason Ricci! Two amazing resources. I hope my app can complement, not replace, that kind of learning journey.
I also learned from that book + tape about 30 years ago. I also have to strongly agree with this. It's quite different from learning stringed instruments. I'm sure it has a lot in common with some brass instruments, but either way, seeing doesn't help. Hearing and feeling is everything. That also makes it easier than most to learn via cassette tape! :)
The app seems neat, but focused on precision in bending. Precision in bends doesn't matter a ton for most styles. It's more about feel. Build and resolve tension. Don't worry too much about hitting things exactly. That advice will eventually fail you if you go into styles that need a more complete scale, but for blues/rock/country, it's much more about intuition than precision. The best way to learn is to play along with a lot of things and build "feel" instead of trying to precisely hit notes. (though you do need to hit a clean note to start bending)
Howie the Crab was a weirdly warm place on social media. The daily cute pictures and videos of a pet land crab attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. The funny hats, visiting squirrels, a hedgehog, and friendly narrative always made the feed a nice place to visit. Rest in Peace Howie.
Damn! One of my old books can be found in the Anna's Archive search. The book has been out of print for years. I pity the Meta users who get results based on something that I wrote.
(Check Anna's for 'Keith P. Graham', and the first book listed is mine.)
I was there. It started three hours late. They showed a samurai movie with subtitles while we waited. My GF was sick from all the smoke. Dylan seemed drunk.
But it is a fantastic album!
It used to be possible to make a radio receiver out of a diaper pin and a blue razor blade. The coating on the blade acted like a crystal. You needed a cheap pair of headphones or a tiny transistor radio speaker. I made one when I was a kid, and I could clearly pick up 77 ABC in New York City from 50 miles away.
Razor blades aren't blue anymore, but there must be other things that work.
Fun fact, the blueing that creates that effect is literally just steel blue. You can accomplish the same thing by torching a razor blade until it glows then letting it cool.
Did you do this before you ever used a full on radio? That seems hard to believe, so I guess you are implying that it is an experience that feels different. I wonder how so?
Consumer radios operate by witchcraft. Presumably a fairy from another dimension rides into town on horseback with a satchel full of vinyl and then camps out outside your window so when she sees you switch on the radio she can play the vinyl for you.
It feels different when you put it together yourself out of basic components and see that there is no magic in there, and yet... there is.
On a serious note, it concerns me a little how easy new generations accept that everything is a magical black box and not even question how their smartphones work.
Isn’t it interesting that the more technology people have, the less they understand how it works?
The profit motive for business is to make things easier to use, but ironically that also makes it less likely for anyone using it to have any idea how it actually works. The reason most of us are here is because we had to struggle and learn in order to get computers to work. I don’t think as many kids today will have that opportunity, which probably means that we’ll have more people who use technology but less of them capable of creating it.
This is true, but those kids will simply operate at a higher level of abstraction than we do and get bigger things done. I don't know how to fab a transistor, but I can make good things happen across billions of them.
Coming back to correct this obvious typo so that site search (and outside crawlers) will pick it up. The correct name is: Bizarre Stuff You Can Make In Your Kitchen.
It's a shame a lot of Europe is either killing off its AM output or already has which will render this impossible, the last transmitters other than a couple of low-power enthusiast stations including the venerable BBC Radio 4 longwave are being shut down over the next couple of years.
Definitely reckon Ofcom should open the band up to hobbyists given it's not much good for anything else.
There a surprising amount of things it can be used for and some really interesting innovation at the bottom end of the spectrum. Well worth getting qualified as an Amateur operator if you want to experiment.
In the early 1980s, I got a job at Western Union (the old telecom company, not the thing it became). I was programming special reports in 4GL languages like RAMIS and MARK IV plus a little COBOL, and I was asked at one point to see if I could find a use for the Xerox Star, a descendant of the Alto. It was the first time I had ever heard of a mouse, and I had never seen a real GUI before. The system was very cool, but my experience was that it was best used as a word processor and typesetting machine. It had a programming environment, but I did have a language manual and was never able to write any programs for it.
I loved the machine, and even wrote part of a short story using the word processor. They moved it to corporate headquarters after two weeks, so I did not get very far with it, but I remember loving the experience. Windows was a poor substitute to the feel of the Star interface.
