busybee fluffy rambles

When I work on an album, I’m not just working on the songs in isolation, I’m also constantly playing the album as a whole to check things like song-to-song flow, dynamics, and listening for defects that I’d like to fix later before I release the album, since noticing and fixing little issues as I go is a lot easier than trying to do one big quality pass at the end.

With Transitions, I started out by recording Valley Highway, because writing that song became the impetus for recording the whole album, and I ended up using it as the prototype for the overall production style for the album.

Gosh it’s been a while since I’ve checked in! Here’s stuff that’s going on with me, music-wise.

Transitions

The album is almost done. I finally settled on some album art, all but one song is recorded, and I just have a bit of mixing work to do on half of the songs. Hopefully the Bandcamp release will be available soon, and the streaming release will be soon after!

Choir

As always, my choir is doing a couple of shows for Trans Day of Remembrance. Both will be at University Congregational UCC, with one on November 16, 2024 at 3 PM and one on November 20, 2024 at 7:30 PM.

These will also hopefully be streamed, for those who can’t make it in person, but I hope you will be able to attend in the flesh if possible.

VRChat show

I’ll also be performing at a charity show for Aga’s Toys for Tots on November 15 at 2:30 PM Pacific. I don’t know if this show will be streamed but it’ll definitely be accessible in VRChat. I’ll be providing more information as it comes to me.

My big fibromyalgia flare seems to have finally subsided, so I’m back to working on music, yay.

Right now I’m working on recording “Sunny Again” for Transitions. The Transitions version has ended up being somewhat more complicated than I was expecting, so this will take a while to get finished. But I really like the arrangement that I have, and I hope that I can pull it off.

I’ve been having another major pain flareup, or rather the pain flareup that started a few weeks ago has continued to get worse, and it’s super difficult for me to do anything right now. Typing hurts, my brain is in constant fog, and there’s no freaking way I can work on music or art right now.

I’m super frustrated by this, of course, especially feeling like I’m so close to being done with Transitions as well as my new music website, but I gotta take care of myself so that there’s still a me to do the things I want to do with.

I ended up handing off one of my video editing projects to someone else so that at least takes some pressure off, and I’m just giving myself permission to nap, a lot, which my body has been craving.

Pretty much I only have the spoons for basic self-care right now, and that’s gonna have to be enough for a while. I’m also pretty much stuck at home because I don’t feel comfortable driving (or leaving the house, really) and even if the stuff I wanted to do were accessible by transit, I definitely don’t have the spoons to manage transit right now.

Also today I realized it’s been a year and a half since I started my disability claim, and it just keeps on getting blocked by bureaucratic nonsense.

John Oliver’s overview of the situation only scratches the surface of what I’ve been having to deal with.

So, I’m in a bit of a frustrating situation right now.

I’ve been releasing music as “Sockpuppet” since 2006, with my first album under that name released in 2009. From everything I can find online, this firmly establishes me as having “common law” trademark status; for example:

• Gerben Law: An Overview of Common Law Trademark Rights
• LegalZoom: How to Establish a Common Law Trademark
• Stan Soocher: Big Legal Battles Over Rights in Bands' Names

• Secure Your Trademark: Trademarking a band name

  The legal advice is in; the mega pop star can’t force you to drop your band name because, technically, you arrived on the music scene several years before she did. But from now on, when you mention the name of your band, people are probably going to start humming “All About That Bass.” Here, the degree of trademark protection you missed out on becomes evident.

  […]

  Key Takeaway: When two or more non-trademarked bands share the same or a similar name, the one with the highest seniority usually wins and ends up with trademark protection.

• USPTO: I Received a Letter/Email…, particularly this excerpt:

  Federal registration is not required to establish trademark rights. Even if a trademark registration expires or is cancelled, the trademark owner may continue to have “common law” rights in the mark. Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark for particular goods or services and may allow the common law user to successfully challenge another party’s use in court.

Anyway, back in 2021, I decided to try registering for a federal registered trademark on the name Sockpuppet, but it was denied because of an existing trademark on the band name “Sock Puppet Parody” which they considered to be too similar. So I decided to stick with my common-law trademark status for now and figured I’d only move forward until something came up.

And, well, something came up.

Grab-bag of stuff going on for me, apologies for my usual unstructured rambling