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  1. ↪ Barnaby Walters: Event: Tanzimpro/Balfolk Workshop in Múltí Kúltí https://waterpigs.co.uk/img/kreistanz.jpeg When: Saturday the 26th of March 15:00 until 18:00 Where: Múltí Kúltí, Barónsstígur 3, Reykjavík What: Tanzimpro (“Traditional European Dance-improvisation, also known as “balfolk” or “eurodance”) is a form of music and dance which has evolved all over Europe for centuries, and continues to do so today. Casting aside the nationalism, gender roles and silly costumes so commonly associated with “folk dance”, tanzimpro focuses on the intense, flowing connection between dancers, music and musicians as everyone involved improvises and reacts to each other. If that sounds like fun, come along and learn the basic grooves for a variety of common dances (wickler/slängpolska, schottisch, polka, waltz, mazurka, polska… if we have time!) as well as techniques for building connection with your partner and the music, and ideas for improvisation and variations. No need to bring a dance partner along if you don’t have one, you’ll probably end up dancing with everyone anyway :) Entry is free, donations for the musicians and dance leader are gladly accepted. Who: Barnaby Walters (Hodgepig, Buzz, Duo Gerhardt & Walters) is a hurdy gurdy player and builder who, after spending ten years playing various folk and traditional music, discovered tanzimpro two years ago and wondered what he had been doing with his life for the previous eight years. Trying to make up for lost time, he has since danced and played for dancing in Iceland, Turkey, France, England, Germany and Austria, most recently as half of Duo Gerhardt & Walters. Benjamin Bech (Bech and Bomholt, PÚLK, Vildspil, Tyrolerband) is an excellent dancer and clarinet player from Denmark, currently researching Icelandic traditional dance music.

    Thanks to everyone who came to the workshop on Saturday! It was great fun to dance with you all, and to get some international perspectives on polka traditions :) I hope you all had as good a time as I did!

    If you missed it, didn’t hear about it or want to do it all over again, we’ll be running a similar workshop at this year’s Vaka festival in Akureyri (15th-18th June), and there’ll be all sorts of other nice stuff going on too.

    Until then, keep up the nice music and dancing in Reykjavík, I’m looking forward to being back :)

    P.S. if anyone took photos, it’d be great to have copies — posted here is fine, emailed in high resolution to barnaby@waterpigs.co.uk is even better!

  4. ↪ Shane Becker: The “we don’t know each other” song and dance that Yoda and R2-D2 put on for Luke on Dagobah is pretty great.

    @veganstraightedge additionally: when all watched in order (prequels, Clone Wars, OT), the most emotional scene in the entire thing is in A New Hope when R2 runs into Obi Wan and he says “hello, little friend” and you think “OMG they’ve been through so much together and now they’re totally going to pretend they don’t know each other for some reason actually what’s up with that?”

  5. ↪ Shane Becker: The “we don’t know each other” song and dance that Yoda and R2-D2 put on for Luke on Dagobah is pretty great.

    @veganstraightedge my headcannon: R2’s memory was never wiped after the clone wars, so he(it/they?) spent the entire original trilogy trolling EVERYONE. I keep meaning to pick out a bunch of scenes where R2 is making bleeping noises and add subtitles implying that he’s actually trying to tell everyone what’s going on (“vader’s your father”, etc) and everyone’s just ignoring him.

  6. ↪ Tom Morris: For the blockchain enthusiasts angry at my scepticism, how is Namecoin getting on? Can I read your Namecoin-backed blog yet?

    @tommorris I’m hardly a blockchain enthusiast but it might still be possible to read my site at barnabywalters.bit if you have a namecoin DNS resolver set up. I experimented with namecoin a bit purely for the experience. Results: it does actually work, and isn’t a terrible experience (terrible being relative to the current system for buying and managing domain names) but whether or not using a blockchain for DNS is actually scalable or at all feasible for the entire web I have no idea.

  9. ↪ Tantek Çelik: Japan airport security is basically pre-2001 (sans theater) * keep shoes & jacket on * metal detector Unlike: American airport security * remove hoodie, jacket, etc. * slower and more radiative millimeter/backscatter I went through both Tokyo/Haneda and Chitose airport security this week. Haneda's security was also ok with using a single tray for liquids, devices, laptop, coins etc. for their x-ray machiens, in contrast to U.S. airport security requiring separate trays for each laptop, and any liquids or anything else. I can only conclude that the TSA's extra procedures and expensive radar devices are a waste of time & resources, no more than a perpetuation of a culture of fear since 2001. I remain hopeful that the TSA will eventually adopt measures similar to Japanese airports and return to just using metal detectors.

    @t sounds about right, see also https://takingsenseaway.wordpress.com/ blog written by a former TSA employee, debunks a lot of TSA practise as nonsense. I’ve found European airports to vary, e.g. some want shoes off, every electronic device in it’s own tray, some don’t care. When traveling with the gurdy I’ve had reactions ranging from highly suspicious with swabs being taken, to people not caring, or wanting to hear it played purely out of curiosity.

  10. ↪ Roopa Gulati: Wish I could have been there - nothing beats British apples. https://twitter.com/SybilKapoor/status/656405338015535104

    @roopagulati German apples aren’t too bad either — there was recently a mobile apple press in town, so we collected ~100kg of apples and pears from the region and had them pressed into 80 litres of delicious apple juice!

  15. ↪ solarference: @BarnabyWalters awesome! have fun reverse-engineering Three Sisters - happy to give hints if you need them :) -n

    @solarference thanks :) Right now I’m most curious about the lyrics — are they from a source, or arranged? I can find many songs with similar structures or names, but none quite the same as yours.

  16. ↪ solarference: @BarnabyWalters which effect was it Barnaby? Saw your patch but couldn't work it out... -n #puredata

    @solarference beat slicing sampler, divides the recording up into n chunks and plays them back randomly. There were some bugs in the version I screenshotted (e.g. mistaking sample number for millisecond delay) which are now fixed. I’m currently working on reproducing as much of The Three Sisters as I can figure out from the recording.

  17. ↪ deray mckesson: The biker gangs have put out a call for retaliation on the police, who killed some of their members. And still no State of Emergency. Waco.

    Reading @deray’s tweets about biker violence in Waco and how it’s being reported, it took me a while to realise that “Waco” is a place, and not a denouncement of these events as “wacko”. Totally applies, esp. to the way the media is reacting :/

  18. ↪ Roopa Gulati: Things I learnt last night: the dial on toasters has nowt to do with temperature. It's just a timer. I need to get out more.

    @roopagulati any wisdom to impart about what the funny floppy wire things on the top of my toaster are? I have never been able to figure out what they’re supposed to do.

  20. ↪ Emil Björklund: Thinking so far: accept the webmention, send a signal passing along the URL somehow, model listens to signal, looks up instance and checks.

    @thatEmil Taproot works almost the other way round — a “mentions” module stores incoming mentions, noting their target path after resolving redirects. Then, each content module queries the mentions module for mentions of a particular URL. That way the two are decoupled, and I can keep track of mentions of static URLs and things not represented by a “model”. Haven’t figured out how to handle redirects well yet though.