Friday, December 18, 2015

god, my brain hurts.

you know what? i know where the baltics are. i can identify each of them on a map. i know their capital cities. i know which language groups their dominant ethnicities fall into. and, i even know a fair bit of their history.

but, i don't have a favourite one. because that's really NOT a thing.

well, maybe prussia. it's them hats. but that would be a confusing answer.

i don't have a favourite balkan, favourite korea or favourite caribbean island, either.

i really hope the stupidity stops, soon. the canadian media is making fox news look insightful, right now.

this isn't tabloid quality journalism. it's closer to onion quality journalism.

...and it's sinking the conservatives to an ontario pc party level of amateurism. suddenly, they're more humorous than scary.

do they really think people can't work this out? really?

globalnews.ca/news/2409408/baltics-a-thing-because-its-2015/

Jane tow
Good for you Jessica, you sound like a very intelligent young lady. I hope one day you are PM!!

jessica amber murray
that's a good laugh.

maybe i should address this point. i've been rambling enough places that i think i have a passive audience. just a feeling. maybe paranoia, maybe solipsism - but maybe accurate. it's at least as likely, really, isn't it?

the idea of me running for office right now is really something that ought to be explained in the terms of a comic strip, with hilarious hijinks leading to total failure along the way. but, even if it weren't such an outrageously ludicrous proposition, the reality is that i wish my focus was 100% on music production at the moment. hear me out on this.

so, i've been dealing with radio interference in my head phones since july. since then, canada has been through an election and i've been kind of vocal about it. but, it was totally by the accident that my system was malfunctioning, and i had absolutely no idea why.

it took me forever to figure it out. first, i had to check things like drivers and system files, as it's the most likely option. that took months to rule out entirely, and i wasn't helped by the fact that i had two sets of headphones, both, it turns out, with shorts. so, every time i checked for issues with the phones, it was always "either the equipment is faulty, or both my phones are faulty.". and, you always take the odds on that gamble - you always say the equipment is faulty.

but, then i finally realized it had to be electrical. so, you have to check everything that could be creating interference. in a room full of gear, that's a nightmare. eventually, i realized that i was getting the same noise out of an mp3 player as i was getting out of the grid - indicating that the interference had to be in the air, as the mp3 player is not connected to the grid.

so, then i had to check to see how far i could go with this interference, realizing it has boundaries that are blocks away - meaning the interference is broadly environmental, and not coming from inside the unit. but, in the process i found the short in one pair of the phones. then, maybe both pairs had shorts, after all.

so, i think the shorts in my phones are interacting with the environmental field to turn my phones into radio antennas, and i'm picking up the local am radio signals. this isn't creating the sound of a radio station, it's just making the audio sound like am radio - kind of jagged and rough at the edges.

it turns out i can block the radio signals relatively well using tinfoil.

but, it took me six long months of experiments to get me this far. and, i'd never had taken the time to ramble on the internet, if it weren't to vent frustration about not knowing why i can't be done mixing this project by now.

that said, i might think about it. one day. in the exceedingly distant future. under certain unlikely conditions. so, it's not likely. but note that i have thought about how unlikely it is on more than one occasion.