News You Can Bruise for 2000 February 6

Daniel Hsu sent me a link to GDancer, a plug-in for XMMS. XMMS is evidently an MP3 player of some kind. What GDancer does is it makes Space Ghost dance to music. I've never heard of XMMS, but strangely enough I had it on sal despite having recently gone through and trashing every package I'd never used. I had to upgrade the package anyway, and install xmms-devel to compile the plugin.

And what do I get for all this trouble? I'll tell you what. Like The Young Ones, Space Ghost does not dance to music. He just stands there like Napolean and occasionally lunges at the table as though he is about to vomit.

Experimentation shows that it totally depends on the song. The program has four pixmaps of Space Ghost and shows one of them depending on what range of frequencies is most prevalent at a given sample point. The only MP3s I have that made Space Ghost do much of anything were some of Kris'. Even then, it wasn't really dancing.

I don't know how you'd go about actually making a thing that made Space Ghost dance (Space Ghost Ghost Dance), but I'm afraid this technique (and it would have to be something like this technique) doesn't work. I can't recommend GDancer.