Night School
Tags: dnalounge, firstperson, music, photography, sf
Location: 37° 46' 16.18" N, 122° 24' 45.96" W
Twitter's musical-chairs video specifications
Can anyone tell me what the actual limits for twit video are?- Duration should be between 0.5 seconds and 140 seconds (async only)
- Dimensions should be between 32x32 and 1280x1024
- Aspect ratio should be between 1:3 and 3:1
- Maximum video length is 2 minutes and 20 seconds
- Maximum file size is 512MB
- Maximum resolution: 1920 x 1200 (and 1200 x 1900)
- Aspect ratios: 1:2.39 - 2.39:1 range (inclusive)
- Video size <= 15 MB
Three pages, and not a single number in agreement among them! Slow clap, guys. Slow clap.
Since a typical one minute 720p video is going to be around 30 MB, a two minute 15 MB limit forces you to do a pretty stupid juggling act, so I hope those aren't the real numbers.
Empirically, I'm getting this:
- 13 sec, 3 MB video: works.
- 60 sec, 28 MB video: upload fails with "Large file can not be finalized synchronously."
- 60 sec, 6 MB video: upload succeeds, but then posting fails with "Duration too long, maximum:30000, actual:60301"
So maybe they haven't actually rolled out the higher-than-30-second limit yet? Whatever that limit actually is?
Black Lives Matter Pulls Out Of SF Pride
Good for them!"For us, celebrating Pride this year meant choosing between the threat of homophobic vigilante violence and the threat of police violence," said a statement from Black Lives Matter, an organizational grand marshal; Janetta Johnson, a community grand marshal; and sex worker advocacy group St James Infirmary, a "Heritage of Pride" award recipient.
"We had a tough decision to make, and ultimately we chose to keep our people safe by not participating in any event that would leave our communities vulnerable to either."
On Tuesday, SF Pride announced that this year's events would have a "significant police presence" and that, for the first time in the celebration's 46-year history, attendees at the festival would be required to pass through security screening. The decision was made in the wake of the mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, in which 49 people were killed.
Many LGBT people of color expressed concern with that news, citing the historic targeting and harassment of communities of color by police.
"I'm more afraid of police than terrorists," Johnson, who is a black transgender woman, told the Guardian on Tuesday.
ACLU NC: SFPD's Racism and Bigotry Don't Mix with SF Pride
Bringing in more police, especially undercover officers, is not the way to promote racial and economic justice.
The history of pride is rooted in rioting against bigoted police and has been led by LGBT youth of color. And the LGBT people in this city, especially LGBT people of color, deal with regular profiling, discrimination and harassment by law enforcement.
As we have seen time and time again, there are systemic problems within the SFPD that must be addressed. Increasing the number of officers on the streets will not only alienate and prevent people from coming to celebrate but may put those who do show up in danger. [...]
"Only 50 percent of LGBTQI people of color believe the police would help them if needed, 46 percent of transgender respondents, and 40 percent of transgender people of color shared that belief," according to the report. "Respondents identifying as Native American or Middle Eastern are least likely to believe the police would help them if needed."
While the SFPD promotes the message that San Francisco is a welcoming city for the LGBT community, it fails to point out the history of racism and bigotry within its ranks. This is the same police force that was recently in the news again when officers were exposed for exchanging racist and homophobic texts. This is the same police force that treats people of color as enemies and arrests black people in dramatically higher numbers. This is the same department that had its police chief dismissed because his officers continue to murder people of color in the streets. [...]
Cops in the clubs won't make people feel safer. And SF Pride should not be an excuse to over police the city's most vulnerable communities.
Tags: big brother, security, sf, stormtroopers
DNA Lounge: Wherein the robots are coming.
The Third Annual Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge is coming up in just two and a half weeks, Sunday July 10!So if you're going to enter your robot, the time is very much nigh.
We have eight entries so far:
- TARB 2.0: Totally Analog Robotic Bartender!
- The Assembly Line: Cocktails of the Industrial Revolution!
- N. E. BREE-8: Three Laws Compliant!
- Chassis: Shiny and mobile!
- The Manhattan Project: Turn the crank!
- Beerbot: It follows...
- The Tea Engine: Dial in your tea service!
- The Volcano God: Prepare your sacrifice!
Not all of them have glossy glamour shots, but we do have a few. This is a pretty attractive crew of robots, if you ask me.
Bring a friend and share a miracle.
Typeset In The Future: Blade Runner
The font-nerdery in this is truly excellent, and I enjoyed the deconstruction of the errors in the replicant serial numbers, but it's when he tears apart the ESPER that it really shines:
Typeset In The Future: Blade Runner
This chunky-looking gadget is a voice-controlled photographic enhancer with an almost supernatural ability to follow its controller's verbal instructions. When Deckard inserts Leon's photo into the ESPER and asks it to enhance 224 to 176, it diligently enhances 197 to 334 as requested: [...]
Deckard continues to direct the ESPER to navigate around his blurry, out-of-focus photo. He asks it to enhance 34 to 36, and it obediently enhances 197 to 334 as instructed:
The ESPER zooms in further still, focusing on the mirror on the far wall of the next room. As image quality becomes more and more challenging due to distance, resolution, and the fundamental laws of physics, the ESPER's enhancement algorithm automatically switches from "blurry VHS" to "high-quality film stock": [...]
I'm not going to lie: this whole scene is spectacularly geographically confusing. By my reckoning, the final photo above is a reflection in a mirror of a reflection in a mirror, although even then I'm not entirely sure.
To try and help, I've put together a precise map of how I think the apartment's layout works, which will hopefully help us all make sense of what's going on:
Indeed, things got so confusing at this point in the movie that I decided to make an painstakingly-edited recreation of the entire ESPER sequence, just to work out how far we crop, zoom, and enhance at each stage of the machine's photo-processing. Here's the entire thing, for your delight and delectation:
That's right: by my calculations, that final photo of Zhora is a 667.9-times zoom in on the original photograph. It's no wonder, then, that the image of Zhora that Deckard prints from the ESPER machine is a little bit grainy.
Also, BR9732 is a truly ridiculous 3D model of Deckard's apartment:
Tags: computers, eyes, mad science, movies, mpegs, robots, the future
Current Music: Perturbator -- Retrogenesis ♬
DNA Lounge: Wherein the MTA took my parklet away.
(To the tune of The Ramones.) 
As mentioned last month, the "9 San Bruno Rapid Project" means that the sidewalk between DNA Pizza and Harrison Street is being widened. The whole year-long project is slated to begin in the first week of July, and they swear up and down that they are starting with our block of Eleventh Street, so yes, really, our parklet had to be gone this week. Also all of our bike racks. So this happened today:
That big stack of metal those guys are sliding into the back of the van is our parklet. It's going to go live in our bread supplier's warehouse (really) for a while. "A while".
Since the project is absolutely definitely starting in the first week of July and it's totally for sure absolutely starting on our block of Eleventh Street, that means there's no chance that we're going to be sitting here looking at the empty spot where our parklet used to be while they do nothing on our block for the next twelve months. Nope.
No chance of that at all.
Nope.
You remember what it was like when you wanted to sit outside and drink your coffee before we had a parklet, right?
I can't believe we have to go through this already. We only installed the thing less than three years ago.
When we re-install it, it will look different. There are so many constraints about where it can go. There are all of these vaults buried in our sidewalk that we can't cover up, and MTA wants it to be 18" from the curb instead of right up against it (which doesn't make any sense to me, but you can never get a "why" out of these people more sophisticated than "that's policy".) So instead of being L-shaped and sitting at the curb, it's going to be a straight bar with seating on both sides going down the middle of the sidewalk. And it will be smaller by about 9'. We will have to cut off the short leg of the L, plus about 3' on one end.
I think.
Part of the reason that they tell us we need to shorten it is to make space for the bus loading zone directly in front of the DNA Lounge main door.
Yup, that's going to work out so well for everybody involved. At least the bus shelter itself is staying where it is, down at the end of the block. But their current plan is that this bus stop will be busy enough that often there will be two busses docked here at once, and one of them is going to load and unload basically directly into DNA Lounge.
I can't wait.
So maybe it's going to look like this?
We still don't even know if they're just pouring a new slab into the street to widen the sidewalk, or if they're tearing up our entire sidewalk and re-doing the whole thing. Apparently nobody can answer that question. We're interested in the answer because we'd like to be able to, you know, get in and out of our doors.
Sigh.
Well, though it rarely seems like it, this is supposed to be a blog about running a nightclub, not about interminable construction projects. So let's talk about music, shall well? We have an awesome show coming up this Friday with Casket Girls, Stardeath and White Dwarfs, and Night School. I've seen Casket Girls a few times and they're really fun and put on a great show.
....aaaaaaaand, we've sold 15 tickets, so it's probably going to tank. Here, watch some videos:
Everyone I've mentioned the show to has said, "Who?" and had a look on their face like "I don't actually enjoy discovering new music by bands that I wasn't already listening to in high school," because my friends are terrible people. Let's not turn this into another Gazelle Twin situation -- another show that I spent weeks talking up to everyone I knew, and yet the performers nearly outnumbered the audience. It was an amazing show that none of you saw.So, yeah. Come to this show, ok? Don't be That Guy. That guy sucks.
Megalodon
Tags: art, mad science, mpegs, robots, toys
Current Music: Daniel Avery -- Free Floating ♬
