busybee fluffy rambles

So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.

And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):

Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.

However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.

Independent musicians thank you.

Got some things done today, figured I’d talk about them.

Last night I was having a massive pain flareup so I smoked huge amounts of cannabis. That made me feel somewhat better (if a bit silly) but it also meant I was extremely hung-over today and ended up having to cancel meeting up with Spud for a thing.

But, I got some basement reorganization done and hit a major milestone, and also listened to some great music while doing it.

The air was clear enough™ today (AQI in the upper 80s, which is still no fun for me to be outside but that’s good enough for being in the basement) and I got goaded along by some folks on the Song Fight! discord to “just do it,” so I decided to start the process of reorganizing stuff.

I’m still having some pretty bad anxiety while driving, but the choir has started up rehearsals again which gives me a reason to drive at least once a week. Last night I felt anxious on my way there but totally fine on the way back.

Anyway, today I finally made my way out to the Renton Uwajimaya, which I’d been wanting to go to for a while, mostly as a driving acclimation thing but also to get some ingredients that I haven’t found at any of the Asian groceries in White Center. Most of the drive, as it turns out, is the same as the drive to the church the choir’s rehearsals are at, which makes sense since Renton is just a bit further down Rainier Ave. And I was anxious but I made it just fine, and on my drive back I was anxious in a few spots but I made it just fine.

I think if I keep doing this stuff I’ll feel fine faster.

I got stuff done today! For example:

• Uploaded a new release of the VRChat critter avatar (which is still on sale for $10) which fixes a long-standing bug in an Easter egg that people keep on complaining about about 5 seconds after they learn about the Easter egg
• Finally replaced the AI cover art on my Novembeat 2022 album, on both Bandcamp and itch.io (sadly it’s a huge pain to replace it on Spotify/iTunes/etc. and totally not worth it)
• Uploaded a full album video of Novembeat 2022, mostly to make it easier to share on VRChat (I will probably do the same for other albums as well)
• Wrote a couple of long-winded posts on Cohost, namely:
  • Answering a question about my computing setup
  • Answering a question about VR stuff
• Also finally set up automatic crossposting from Cohost to Mastodon

Oh yeah also I’m getting fairly active on Cohost and my asks are open. It’s fun. Way nicer than Tumblr, anyway.