Plaidophile

The year began just hours after my grandmother died.

I have a song in this week's Song Fight, entered as "Sockpuppet" (as usual). As always, listen to all the songs and vote for the ones you like. Song Fight also now requires voting for at least two songs to encourage people to not flood votes for their friends, which is a policy by which I can abide.

Anyway this is one of my better songs, I think.

Nice to know you guys are on top of things, and are registered Apple developers so that you can receive pre-release GM builds of upcoming operating systems so you aren't blind-sided by major operating system upgrades that people have known about a year in advance. Oh, wait.

What is it about pro audio vendors that makes them think it's okay to hold off on updating their software for major changes to their customers' platforms?

It's not just you guys, of course. Native Instruments and MOTU are even worse. At least you guys continue to support your products more than two months after they come out. But still.

I mean, sure, I could just hold off on updating my OS until the driver gets updated, except that this doesn't help me with the new Mac I just bought for my studio, because I'd been waiting to upgrade until Lion came out because Apple was withholding hardware upgrades until that happened. I'm not going to have any way to NOT run Lion on it. I guess I'm just going to have to use a cheap USB audio interface in the mean time.

I understand there being some brokenness and some beta-quality nature to various things when the OS actually comes out, but for a professional-audio hardware company to not be willing to get a single ADC developer license so that they can be prepared and be ready with SOME sort of driver upgrade when the OS itself is in beta - much less after it's actually been released to retail - is just ridiculous.

Apple is VERY GOOD to developers when it comes to keeping them ready for major OS changes. You guys really dropped the ball, and now I'm going to think twice about buying another PreSonus product in the future.

5. PARENTS: Reproducing asexually is a load of work. It is also very difficult to introduce beneficial mutations into a population if every offspring only inherits from a single genetic line. Unless you have a perfectly-set genome and a nutrient-rich stable environment, it's probably a good idea to reproduce sexually. Ideally with a mate you can trust. Someone with a matching genome. Someone who has also shown great survival traits. Someone who is willing to partake in a genetic exchange with you in which one of your gametes becomes fertilized by the others'. If your partner isn't willing to provide EVERY chromosome - e.g. bilateral symmetry, further reproductive ability, the ability to take in nutrients and excrete waste products - for you, chances are the organism in control of your future lineage (yes, survival is based on the ability to procreate further) may not have the best intentions for you or your species. Remember, everyone is looking to carve out an ecological niche and propagate their genes, too. Know who handles your genitalia, how they're handled (stimulated, bitten off after copulation, etc.), and how this partner plans to share the child-raising duties.

4. PARASITIC ATTACHMENT: What does this mean? The organism you're about to pair with is going to attach themselves to your body and make use of your own biological processes. Usually, this means there will be some up-front stimulation effect, but in the long run you're going to be doing extra work to sustain two lifeforms while only the attached one will benefit. Eat an apple. Parasite gets a cut. Eat a fermented soybean. Parasite gets a cut. Feeling heroic and want to burrow in a river bank. The parasite lives right there with you. Essentially, you do the work, parasite gets the benefits. That's the price you pay for an initial surge of dopamine. Even your excretory system is used to spread their eggs. Literally. Understand the tradeoffs and how your food intake is shared. A parasitic attachment only makes sense if there is a symbiotic relationship (e.g.the production of an enzyme which allows you to digest wood pulp or complex sugars) without having an ongoing drain on the resources you would otherwise be able to process through normal digestive mechanisms.

3. SURVIVAL INSTINCT: Normally, I'd put survival instinct before food intake, but since survival instinct is often less important due to herd strength or more advanced societal evolution, survival instinct falls just shy of food intake in order of importance. But survival instinct = your ability to survive. OK, think of survival instinct this way: You have a chance to become directly subservient to your hive queen and be responsible for protecting the safety of the colony. 92.3% Guaranteed. But you must attach your...uh, weapon directly to your entrails, and harming any interloper will mean certain death. There's no way you'd sacrifice your survival ability for a bit of pollen. Right? That's survival instinct. Don't compromise it. Ever. Why? Let's say you do compromise your survival instinct, 'cause those things that looked like berries tasted REALLY GOOD, or your tendril extended over an unfortunately placed barb, etc. You have ONE eye stalk that gets invaded by a foreign entity and a bird (it's possible!) thinks your eye is a tasty worm. The bird eats your eye and spreads the contained eggs aerially, 12 million infestations in 1 year. Everyone's getting infected by it. Awesome! Guess how much personal benefit you get from it? Zip! True, you may've regrown your infected eye stalk a few times and had it eaten by more birds, but the entity that infected your eye stalk gets the lion's share of the procreation. They get to continue in their large ecological niche throughout the rainforest, while no female will mate with you because of your missing eye stalk. Own your eye stalk. After eating (great) detritus, it's all you really have.

2. FOOD INTAKE: Eat the fucking food! Don't ignore food. Don't gloss over entire sources of nutrition to get to the "Highly fermented sucrose" cache. Yeah, you want to know if you'll have enough food to construct a nice nest, but understand that food is scarce for a reason. And it's not for your benefit. Look to see what others of your species are eating; don't assume you know whether something is edible or not. Also, get an immune system. One you can trust. This is your biome and you don't want Cordyceps Bassiana - the brain-invading fungus you saw infect those beetles over there - inducing you to climb up to the top of a tree, only to leave your head swollen with spore sacs shortly before it explodes and spreads itself everywhere. The food chain is complicated. Species are protectionist, usually in favor of the species providing their own intake (i.e., silk worms -> tea leaves). For every species that says "We got fucked!", "Oxygen-producing phytoplankton made the waters unsurvivable outside of oceanic vents!", "Fuck those anglerfish... I was promised a tasty snack!", or "That cuckoo bird engaged in brood parasitism!", I wonder if they learned to gather their own food properly. Food scarcity and niche encroach create planet-shattering havoc. Always know where you eat before offering your nutrition to a competing genus. Always.

1. REPRODUCTION: OK, if survival instinct = your ability to live, what is reproduction then? Everything else. Without reproduction - you know, the kind that allows your offspring to continue your positive traits - you got nothing. You can't cell divide forever. Egg sacs for a creature without a penis won't ever get filled (though maybe there's a reproduction idea, but it'd only work for certain species of lizards and insects who reproduce via parthenogenesis via lesbian stimulation). A female won't accept your sperm without a delivery mechanism. Really, focus (like a spherical lensed eye, like a mammal, like an avian) on reproduction. Yeah, I know. You're excited, you want to stimulate yourself orally, get a dopamine response, ejaculate, make burrows, eat slime molds every night... the works! But if your reproductive ability isn't good (mom's sexual proclivity doesn't count), then forget it. I'm not talking about "long-term hibernating" your reproduction cycle. We all know the seventeen-year cicada story. But without solid reproduction, confidence (not attitude!) in your abilities at mating, and the physical stamina to back it all up, well, what's the point in going through with points 5, 4, 3, 2? Because you want to? Seriously, go get an RNA retrovirus instead. There's nothing wrong with being a pond goldfish or a colony of diatoms that clump together. 99.9% of biodiversity is made this way. But want it out in the public as a successful documented species then make sure the reproduction rates are better than a cryptozoology study.

For the last several days I've been back in NYC for the first time in six years, for Song Fight Live. The show went pretty well; there were some logistical problems and some equipment issues and of course things didn't go as amazingly as most people ever expect them to, but there isn't really anything new there. It was fun and a good time, when maintaining an appropriate perspective on what it was we were actually doing (PROTIP: we are not actually rock stars).

The main thing I was worried about is that much of our time would be spent treading old ground that represents about a year's worth of really bad memories for me, and I did everything I could to ignore the fact that I was physically in a place where mentally I was very bad off. Trying to ignore the familiar sight of the L train and Union Square and the like, in particular, made me feel twinges of ickiness (even obsessively pre-planning transit before flying here made me feel twinges of deep pit-of-the-stomach sickness), and I very purposefully let Mike (a fellow songfighter from Seattle with whom I was sharing a room and most of my time) lead the way everywhere, and basically played willfully ignorant about how to get around.

Last night, though, I ended up getting, shall we say, sufficiently intoxicated, and ended up getting separated from Mike, having gone with a different group that was going to do some further bar-hopping, but certain members of that group had much better judgement than myself and said I should probably head back to the hotel rather than drink more. (I fortunately had enough sense to realize that I was probably on the verge of feeling like I was going to die if I didn't get some water and lie down very soon. Even if it meant less time hanging out with certain friends who will remain nameless.)

So, of course, the way back to the hotel was very familiar: the L to Union Square, then the 6 up to my hotel in Midtown. It had aspects of trips I'd done many times before, and normally the majority of that would have been in order to go to work (L to 5th Ave, F/V to 25th St - or just walk, if no train was there). I also used to take a bit of extra time to myself to just walk to Union Square after work to clear my head further, so that particular station is also quite familiar to me.

But it might have just been the alcohol but I just plain didn't care. The whole journey was simple and easy and came completely naturally, and it was actually comforting in a way to be alone in the middle of a crowd of strangers. I got to thinking about my relationship with NYC and so on. I came to the realization that I'd gone to NYC to begin with because I needed to launch my career and I was just so desperate that I was willing to take anything, and the reason I put up with the hell I was in was simply because I had no self-worth to speak of. But now I know better, and while I still wouldn't want to live in NYC, I no longer hate it, because it's where I finally started to learn to appreciate myself.

For those in or near NYC and wanting to see me perform live or otherwise see the various Song Fight shenanigans, here is the current schedule of events. Hopefully there will be a real website soon although it seems that we seem to get less good at organization every year.

While waiting for CreateSpace to validate my art assets, someone on Song Fight mentioned Mixonic, which I hadn't looked into for a few years, since the last time I checked they were better than CafePress but still pretty terrible, pricing- and feature-wise. Their current prices are pretty good, and beat all the other short-run manufacturers I'm aware of.

However, I have so far had nothing but problems with them, and I will not be using them or recommending their services.

Check it out, yo.

I am one click away from submitting my final master of Love and Monsters to CreateSpace for replication. I'm not at the point where I'm sure whether it's ready or not. On the one hand it sounds great but on the other hand every little defect makes me think I should spend even more time polishing it even though I'm not sure that would help at this point. I just know that as soon as I get it replicated, people will finally start to tell me "oh hey well this bit could have been better" and then I'll just be all >.> so

I've been asking this on LJ for the last week or so but now I'm asking here. Please please please listen and tell me if there's something that I should fix before it goes out.

A few years ago I did the music, sound effects, and some of the voice acting on a little animation called "Pirate Scum" by my friend Patrick. For those in or near San Francisco, it's going to be showing at the Peaches Christ Film Festival on April 15, 2011, and Patrick, Mo (main voice talent, best known as the voice of Erin Esurance) and I will (probably) all be there too.

So, my musical mission has for quite some time been to make music in as many genres as I can, with as little repetition as possible. Today I realized that this isn't anything new, and in fact it's probably been well-established by my biggest musical inspiration ever — The Beatles. As I have been listening to their self-titled album (the so-called "white album") for the first time in years I can't help but realize that they actually have a much wider stylistic and acoustic dynamic range than anything I'm struggling with on Love and Monsters. Back in the days before the loudness wars they just went ahead and let every song be equalized completely differently. So maybe I'll only focus on fixing the last few vocal pitch problems before considering it "done" (at least done enough for submission to Createspace and BandCamp, anyway).

I'm working on another album, and I'm getting close enough that it's time to start looking at CD manufacturing options.

My primary sales channel will (hopefully) just be my BandCamp page, but some weirdos still want to buy physical CDs. As with last time, the only real options are Discmakers, OasisCD, and CreateSpace.

Since Song Fight Live is coming up in a few months (June 11-12 in New York!), I'm trying to get another album done by then. I've got about 2/3 of a decent-sized album right now. This is a great time for people with specific requests of back-catalog songs of mine to put in.

• ∆songs: 5 Song Fight solo efforts, 2 Song Fight collaborations, 4 covers, 6 remixes, various sound experiments and short soundtracks produced, ~20 songs written but not recorded, 2 live shows (both went way better than any shows I'd done before)
• ∆comics: 120 published; 1 long-running series completed (Unity), 2 short series in their entirety (Unity:Planetfall and Unity:Breeder), 1 long-running series rebooted (Pernicious), 1 short series started (Unity:Meat), several miscellaneous one-offs and journal comics
• ∆artwork: various smatterings posted to various art-sharing sites
• ∆body mass: unchanged within statistical error; still fat a little overweight
• ∆grandparents: -2; grandfather(paternal, age=99y1w) passed in August, grandmother(maternal, age=99y7m) passed about an hour ago and I'm still processing it. Remaining grandparents = 0

All in all, the year could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse, too.

For the Gift of Music, I did a NES-style cover of Salt in the Wound.

This year, Song Fight had another Cover Fight. I did two entries, one cover of Minty Handy's "Tomato" (with both the instrumental scratch track and a full orchestral arrangement), and a cover of Sven Mullet's "Moscow, Idaho." Also, LMNOP did an amazing cover of my "tw3rp!" I'm very very happy with how it all turned out.

I have a song up at Song Fight! this week. I'd appreciate people listening to the songs and voting for the ones they like, especially if they like Sockpuppet.

So a few days ago I picked up a Kaossilator since Musician's Friend had them on sale for $120 (which, incidentally, seems to be Amazon's normal price). It's pretty fun to mess with. Tonight I recorded a few impromptu jams with it: 1 2 3 4

All of them were done in the hidden "dly" mode, which seems to be much more useful for jamming purposes (it has 16 beats instead of 8, you can set the loop size to sub-beat increments, and — apparently this is a bug but it's a fun one — changing the loop size during playback also affects the recorded loop).

It's a fun tool for experimenting, and also for creating new loops (rhythm loops especially) which I will sure to be use in other songs. It's a lot more fun and natural-feeling than sequencing it in a step sequencer or whatever, at least. Note control is very imprecise but that's also not really the point to it; it's more about navigating through an evolving soundscape than about playing a specific song.

It's also surprisingly handy to just screw around with it at work and have a looping bed playing while I write code. Unfortunately, it's also a distraction because I start to mess around with the music while it plays. I am of course keeping it at home from now on.

The first thing that struck me was how different the user interface was. Apple have yet again disregarded their own UI mechanisms in order to make iTunes look different than everything else. The window control "stoplight" is now arranged vertically, and all of the icons in the app are monochrome and low-contrast. Even for someone with normal vision like me, it makes major parts of the UI a lot harder to see and parse at a glance.

They also hid the AirPlay (nee AirTunes) stuff in a little tiny widget in the corner, which makes it much less clear if AirPlay is available, and they just use a gray vs. blue icon to indicate whether it's active. You have to click on it to learn what your particular configuration is. Considering they're really trying to push AirPlay now, this seems like a curious design decision.

I was also a bit annoyed that when I started it up, it was in "group with album art" view, which I usually turn off, but they've done a bit of tweaking to it to make it actually useful (even though the vast majority of my music doesn't have album art) and so I'm leaving it on for now.

So of course I tried out Ping, and was immediately annoyed by the following aspects:

• It requires your real name, which is tied to your billing account
• It requires your gender, which is of course the binary male/female
• You are only allowed to select up to three genres you like. The list of genres is pretty pathetic and mainstream anyway, though.
• There is no way for independent artists to add a profile (hopefully that will change in the future)
• The "privacy" settings are just "do you want to let people follow you?" and nothing like, for example, "do you want this information to be available?" Apparently, no, they haven't learned from Facebook's bad example.
• The only activity it records is actively purchasing and rating things on the iTunes store. So much for Last.fm-style discovery.

On the plus side, iTunes feels much more responsive and less laggy, and it's obviously they've put a lot of work into handling large libraries better. Hopefully they'll address the "too cool for colors" issue on the user interface, and it's not like you have to use Ping.

For those who care, the CreateSpace edition of my album just went live. The CreateSpace edition is a bit better-looking than the one that's currently at CDBaby, and has full lyrics in the liner notes. Eventually CDBaby will be carrying the CreateSpace edition though (if I ever sell out of the DiscMakers run, which is more contingent on me having successful live shows than anything I think).

Not that it matters or anything. I'm much more interested in the potential for getting noticed on Amazon's retail distribution channel, although that also seems fairly unlikely. Maybe I should make my music, you know, good first.

Meanwhile, I'd still appreciate getting reviews on the CDBaby page (or even on the Amazon page, when it finally goes live).