Lucas Gonze blog

Guitar effects take a stream of audio, usually in real time, and modify it. Text effects would take a stream of written words and perform artful modifications.

Auto-translation is a text modification that isn’t about art.

• Input: Hello. I like you. You are a very good person.

• Output: Hola. Me gustas. Eres una muy buena persona.

Round-trip auto-translation would translate forward, then translate the translated text back. It would add a layer of weirdness.

If I send “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” from English through Somali, Latvian, Tajik, and back to English, I get “The best times were the worst times.“

Text effects and guitar effects could be chained together.

1. Talk into a mic
2. Speech to text
3. English to Somali to Latvian to Tajik to English
4. Text to speech
5. Distortion
6. Cathedral reverb

Joyful mayhem!

All the words for non-white people are wrong. There is no one word that makes sense. The shortcomings of POC led to BIPOC, and BIPOC will into an infinity of additional initials. The problem is is that we are thinking about the people affected by racism, not the people doing the racism.

I am making up better words.

Instead of POC or BIPOC, we could say TWA, standing for Targets of White Aggression.

Instead of racism:

• Europeanism
• Colonialism
• Whiteism (whitism?)

The important thing is for the language to focus on the people driving this shitshow. Everybody else is just sucked into their (our) dysfunction. It has never been about race or color.

More than anything we are maintaining a mortuary here at the fish counter keeping all our skinned dead friends looking glam for the customer. We retrieve their corpses from the back, and then begin coaxing some semblance of “fresh” or “life” out of them.

The Secret Life of Groceries

I’m planting this post as googlebait to protect people who may install a piece of software called Manycam. Manycam is software to combine multiple feeds into a video stream. Maybe this post will be interesting to ordinary blog readers, maybe not. I didn’t find a good centralized location to share warnings like this, so I’m hoping search engines will help out.

I tried it out in hopes of using my Android phone as an IP camera embedded in a recorded presentation at the same time as a slide deck, then recording them together. It was way too buggy to use – for example the IP camera feature couldn’t see my IP camera or load the presentation file – so I uninstalled it.

I wasn’t able to get a refund without complaining to Paypal. Their customer service promised but failed, and the site tried for days, again and again, to charge my credit card.

On uninstalling the software on OS X by dragging it to the trash I found that it remained attached to video conferencing tools like Zoom, posting up an ad in my video feed.

After complaining to support they provided instructions to drag it to the trash, which has no benefit, or to install it all over again and *then* drag it to the trash, and incidentally enclosed a shell script to do the uninstall. It had a small bug in it but was not outright malicious, so I fixed the bug. Here are the steps to remove it using Terminal:

find_exec="sudo rm -rf"
sudo find /tmp -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /System/Library/Extensions -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/Extensions -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/LaunchDaemons -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Applications -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/QuickTime -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/Graphics -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;
sudo find /Library/Compositions -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;