Some call it XHaus, or what I personally call "Y!Fail" or internally, "Y!Bang" *smirk*. Yahoo let go of our team, and it's really -really- unfortunate. If anything, it's extremely short-sighted of Yahoo!.
As a "last word" for my fellow colleagues there, I want to thank above all Joy Mountford for starting our team and vision, and Ben Clemens for keeping everything in order and feeding us delicious lunches. They've worked many hard hours and fought to the bitter end for our team.
Every time a colleague asks me "Mike, why the hell are you working at Yahoo!?" I defended them. "Yahoo! is not about search!" I say. "They are a web portal and a nest for innovation, especially in our offices in San Francisco!" For weeks we were certain this would not affect us. I had hope, real hope, that what we believed in, what we defended, were true.
However, when push came to shove, Yahoo! fell flat on its face. This is not a criticism of Yahoo! per-se, but for the silly corporate squabble that puts finances too far above innovation.
To my colleagues in no particular order: Aaron Koblin, Aaron Meyers, Parul, Doug Fritz, Ray Mcclure, Juliana Yamashita, Daniel Massey, Carrie Burgener, Jen Lau, Jenny Chowdhury, Vaibhav Bhawsar, and Mia -- you are all by far the most professional and competent team I have ever worked with and it has been a tremendous honor working with you. My only wish leaving YHaus is to some day cross paths again and pick up where we have left off.
Kupo and I started a album project called the "Shiny Happy Fits of Rage", a phrase taken from one of Kimya Dawson's songs on the Junosoundtrack.
We haven't a page for this album yet so I'll post some links here for you to listen.
The first one is our trial run called Ladybug Editor. It's sort of our thesis to the Shiny Happy Fits of Rage; to set a laid back, merry sunday afternoon feel with a twitch of video-gamerism.
The second song that I've just completed editing tonight is called Counterfeit Kitten. It's slightly more aggressive but equally as mellow. I hope you have good weed!
List of works have now been posted in the section above. It's a bunch of links right now, the best I can do in my limited time. In addition, a ton of clients are left out because their rights aren't cleared yet. Ugh :/
The songs I've been making the past couple of days have been culminating in an album of sorts, "Darkness, Darling". Go there to check out new songs, progress notes, etc.
I can't remember where I found these violin samples. I think I found them from some internet collection of violin recordings as an example of "gypsy" violin playing styles. Anyway, I threw in there the Amen Break along with a chunk of some crazy-ass drum solo. Also, the song begins with a bassline from Birdland.
I might run out of unique samples to use at this rate, as it's terribly hard to find good, free samples off the internets. Time to learn how to sample properly?
I made a new song. FL Studio and the discovery of free acid drum loops gave me some motivation to make music again.
Want to talk about the Open Frameworks workshop in NYC that Zach Lieberman taught but that will have to wait till tomorrow. The Viewport project has been draining me all day... :/
There's a few exciting projects going on at design.Yahoo! right now but I will talk about them at a later date. Right now I want to introduce my new library! Vertext is a scalable typography library that pipes Processing's textMode(SHAPE) into OpenGL display-lists. What a mouthful. Long story short: LARGE LARGE TEXT, fast renders!!
I've also finished Crysis. Imagine someone telling you an amazing story, using all sorts of big words, analogies, detailed descriptions, depicting this outrageous incredible epic and suddenly stopping mid-sentence. -_-
Other stuff to rant about (paintball, videogame design, kickboxing blah blah). Basically I have way too many hobbies and projects to keep track of but I've come to accept this and just roll with it. Whatever it takes to not be bored!
