Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
There’s a bit of a historical progression regarding my old high school’s mascot which amuses me quite a lot, and very few people know about it.
When I went there, the mascot was just the Highland High Hornet, our sports teams all being “The Hornets.” But nowadays it has a de-facto name of Herbie. And this has a very direct connection to me.
I watch a lot of Living Big in a Tiny House, and I have very mixed feelings about it. But there’s definitely a bunch of trends I’ve noticed with it (and also with other tiny house channels on YouTube).
I had my release party for Transitions today. It went pretty well! Around a dozen folks attended in VRChat, and another half-dozen tuned in to the stream. Everyone who came enjoyed it and had nice things to say.
I hope that over time I can get more attendance to things, but the time of day for this particular show wasn’t great, as a lot of people wanted to come but had other obligations (such as, you know, sleep). The time I chose was based on trying to split the difference between a lot of peoples' needs. But this is why I also record my shows for posting on YouTube.
This show was also really big and took a lot of work to put on and I am so freaking tired. What I’d like to do is to just start doing more frequent, smaller shows, instead of trying to do these big all-out things on a monthly basis. I should experiment with different times on day on both Saturday and Sunday (which is consistently the least-bad day for everyone) and see if I can get regular attendance going. These shows could just be for funs instead of having to be a big rigmarole.
Right now I’m super tired and I having finished the album I can at least take a break from music production for a while.
I’m also a bit disappointed with the world of indie music and the marketing thereof. I have a whole rant brewing about the asinine way that music marketing works, but tl;dr1: people only care about stuff that is coming out soon, nobody cares about stuff that’s already out. I hope I’m wrong about this. At least Transitions seems to have a bit more legs than my previous releases. (But my previous releases still exist! They’re still totally viable albums that you can buy and/or listen to!)
Anyway, I’ve submitted Transitions to a few different promo things but I’m not expecting a lot because they only care about stuff that’s upcoming or Brand New, and having been out for a few days it’s no longer Brand New. Which is just… dumb.
Today I somehow managed to tweak my back, right before I was going to do some gardening. I ended up doing the gardening anyway. This was, as it turns out, not a greaet way to help my back to feel better.
I got yet another letter from Social Security today, which I was expecting to be one of:
Instead it was a notice of yet another “psychological function evaluation.” On the plus side, at least this one is going to be done via telehealth, which is at least an improvement over the last time. On the minus side, it means they’re still trying to deny me based on ADHD as my sole disability, an given how the last one went I’m guessing that the ADHD screening is also going to be incredibly reductive and not actually reflective of what ADHD actually is or how it interacts with my other disabilities.
Now that I’m able to come up for air because the album is finally done I think I’ll talk about my next few intended album and music-related projects.
Today’s choir show went amazingly well.
I also finished the full youtube video for the album and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
I am currently not busy with anything and that feels weird.
I guess tomorrow I can finally get some groceries that keep getting put off, and maybe I can fill my time in with finally starting up that nostalgia vintage gaming stream idea that I’ve been sitting on for a while (namely streaming all of the games I played in my childhood). I have a bunch of other albums I want to do now but they can wait.
Or maybe I’ll get inspired to do more Novembeat. But probably not. I’ve released five albums this year. I feel like I’ve done enough.
I guess I could finally finish building the new sockpuppet.us website…
Last night’s show went really well! There were a bunch of technical hitches and I made a bunch of mistakes and so on but it was a good time and it was great to get a lot more people hearing my music. Hopefully I’ll be able to do more of these things.
Anyway. I have a few listening parties scheduled for the album release:
For the VRChat one, my plan is to perform some of the songs from the album live before we listen to the full studio version, but we’ll mostly play it by ear.
And, of course, I have my TDOR choir show in a few hours (and another one next Wednesday evening), both of which will hopefully be livestreamed.
There’s been a schedule change with Aga’s Toys for Tots event, and I will now be going on at 2 PM Pacific. Also it seems that I’ll be performing from an instance where I can invite a small audience to join me, so I hope to see folks there! The instance will be owned by my VRChat group. I was misinformed about this! Please join Corbelle’s group.
Transitions is (finally) almost done. There’s just a couple of little tweaks left to do (like, super duper minor things, decibel-level adjustments and slight timing tweaks and a little bit of vocal tuning). It’ll be really nice to finally have this album done after all this time. The oldest song on this was first recorded in 2001! And my first attempt at making an album of this stuff was back in 2003! This album is legally old enough to drink in the United States.
I’ll probably stick to my original preorder release date of November 20, 2024, as that’s Trans Day of Remembrance. Deadnames has also been done and ready to release for a while, and it will also be coming out on whatever day Transitions comes out.
These are the release dates for Bandcamp/itch/mirlo; streaming will come later, as a proper streaming release has a two-week lead time. So it’ll probably be November 29 for those platforms. (Streaming users can wait, anyway. Anyone who’s following me closely knows to buy my music, right? Right.)
I’ve also written some fun visualizer code which will be used to put a full-album video on my YouTube channel. Audio visualizers are super annoying and awkward on every code platform I know of these days, so I just went to Get It Done by modifying Wavemaker, a tool built by my friend John. Someday I want to build a better framework for this stuff but Good Enough is good enough.
