Archive for 2010

Updating…

Um, Bloglines died of course, I was was just listing my subs in the sidebar here before…now I’m redoing it. It’s just going to be a mess it I sort out how it should work and hopefully becomes more of a stable thing. If I don’t make it a list with some kind of limit I’ll just have hundreds of subs and it’s complete chaos rather that the ideal 10 to 67% chaos.

I might be worse at even math than at writing, but it’s how the numbers come out.

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Oh man, titles. There’s an art. I could tell you…man.

I’ve painted myself into a corner. It was the perfect plan: paint self into corner, then enjoy some sweet, sweet standin’ & lookin’. Is there anything more satisfying than that first step onto tasty, fresh, completely dry floor paint after witnessing the full majesty that is the paint drying process? I think not.

But enough about my life, let’s talk internet. I announced the end of meta posts— so this can’t possibly be one—and have started working on a review. But I can’t seem to get through it without a particular meta topic polluting it to the point of total distraction.

It’s social networks. I used to have a consistent standard of rules for these things. If it got stupid, I would just quit that one and start over. Things seem to be getting more stable with these sites…and this is the problem. Networks in real life are fuzzy and chaotic. People come and go (or don’t) often for no reason. I felt like I had reached some kind of emotional maturity about this stuff in real life and it applied the same way online. But that was years ago.

I now have a different set of friend-adding rules for each profile. I’ll be going into these in this new ‘networks’ category. Been trying to sum it all up in one post but this is obviously an evolving subject. All of this is about different aspects of culture and finding (a) place(s) in it. Music is a part of culture and recordings are really just concrete artifacts of specific social networks actualizing themselves. I want to share my experience with something that can be experienced by others; you can listen to the records and have your own experience. If you’ve already had the experience you can share it in the comments or link from your own site or whatever. If you haven’t heard the record, me telling you about it is part of your experience. (You could leave that part out, I’ll never know.) Everyone’s experience is valid.

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This will be the last in the ‘meta’ series, so I figured I’d give it a title that won’t be funny even a week from now.

OK. I’ve suffered another hard drive crash. It was one of my externals, and almost everything was backed-up on one of the other ones. But it made me rethink the whole way I was doing this. (And by “doing this” I mean “thinking about doing this“.)

A problem that bugged me about the randomness of what record to select depends on a process that is easily corrupted (by me) or disrupted by technical concerns. A less asshole way to say this is I’m trying to make it easier to continue while making it harder for me to cheat.

Enter: my sidebar blog. I’ve been fucking with tumblr a lot more than wordpress lately. Really, I’m trying not to as much since I want to create at least some original content on my own server that I pay for. (I now remember starting that tumblr to remind myself to care less about last.fm…eh.) Anyway, I got everything merged together now and it looks cool and it works so who cares what the original concept was because it was way too complicated.

This really feels like a huge cop-out to me, but life goes on. [Note to self: get life.]

Click here and you get a record I not only own, but have listened to. I will be choosing records to talk about from there. Now I need to clean up and recode that a bit, but I’ll try not to get too crazy.

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It’s a valid question.

It wasn’t asked directly of me, it was a thought I had towards someone else the other day, but I’m sure the same thought has been in many people brains at some time, and many of those times, I was putting it there. It should be answered directly.

Sometimes I have a point. But it becomes a habit, as I find it has with others. I try not to get mad. We just can’t stop talking like assholes. Maybe we are assholes. But this is a simile, followed by a metaphor.

I want to tell you about my record collection.

My record collection is something real. It exists, in the present. It consists of many forms of recorded music, which might be a serious debate for some people, but, if you make music and are serious about it, the fact that you have a recording of it or not is infinitely more important than the playback medium. The next important thing would be the quality of the recording process, but even that’s getting into subjectivity. The medium (and number of copies made) determine the survivability of the recording. I’m going to tell you about the copies that I personally have.

I try to make music and have a number of songs running around my brain at any time. And I spend a lot of time fooling around of various instruments. It might not ever turn into anything. If I die tomorrow, definitely not. But my record collection will still go right on existing. Unless I’m killed in some sort of house explosion, or fire, or planes fly into my house causing a flaming explosion, which I feel is always in the cards.

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Bloglines seems to have died and/or outlived it’s usefulness.

First, Bloglines is back up and I’m still using it, it was only down for a few days. And many people still think a working RSS is a good idea. (The rest I follow on twitter.) Second and maybe more important, I myself am barely alive and currently not very useful. Should I write something off with a better overall percentage of working than me?

I kinda had to take a little break being hard on myself, but I clearly went too far. I’m hardly doing anything lately but giving other people (and web servers, inanimate objects, etc) crap at the first sign of temporary failure. Then to top it off, I make a blog entry (on a whole new blog, at a new address, which I expect people to find, and love) that seems to be designed to earn me sympathy for being a horrible person.

Well, if I know anything about the internet, it’s full of horrible people. Let me know it’s working.

Nah, j/k. But comments are open.

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