13/116 = 11%.

that's how many front page views have officially counted over the last two days. the other 89% did not meet some kind of youtube condition. i'm able to get more reliable stats on this video, because the count is under 300 - so it increments immediately, and then the scripts "confirm" the hits after.

i'm not here to argue about conditions. it's quite obvious that these hits "should count". i'm here to point out how grossly inaccurate the view counts really are.

i've been through this in this space before: i don't care about hit counts. youtube is not a marketplace, it's an advertising area. i seek to maximize sales, not to correctly enumerate advertising reach.

it's just that it would help if i could correctly enumerate advertising reach.

89% is not a minor error to be written off or otherwise ignored. the stats are completely useless.

and, i still don't know why ~60,000 views on this page disappear and reappear - although i do expect them to come back any day, now. before i get to 300,000, anyways, so i can get the snapshot. thanks.

i'm not the one going on about the sanctity of the metrics. i'm just pointing out that they're basically worthless.

with 42 finally done, 43 on hold and 44 decided upon, i had to take a moment to pause for 45 before i moved to 46 as i wasn't going to look back a second time. i uploaded it the other day, as it was left in 2002. but was it really done?

i run this page as a journal, not a marketing site. facebook is useless for marketing. this needs a journal entry to explain what i'm thinking. for historical reasons.....

i claimed that i couldn't figure out where to go with this, but it's a slight fib. it's more that i came to dislike it as i was recording it. it struck me as cheesy and goofy; i just abandoned it, and then avoided it. all these years later, and with a little hindsight, those concerns are less relevant to me. i mean, i agree with my twelve year-ago self: this is cheesy. and goofy. but that's cool with me, at this point.

so, what was i going to do with this? well, i had vocals in mind, and i think i wrote them down, but they seem to have evaporated into nowhere. i don't remember them now and i'm not going to make up new ones. besides that, i was mostly just going to fill up the "chorus" with extra electric guitar parts.

listening to it today, i feel that adding electric guitar riffs into the track would in some ways be obvious but would ultimately not be beneficial for the following reasons:

1) the spectrum is already saturated. adding guitars would necessarily blunt the attack of the bass, drums or both - and i sort of like them how they are. one way to work with this is to saturate the guitars (perhaps by vocoding them into a synth), but thought experiments on the point presented the existing minimalist structure as preferable.

2) for the second chorus, it would create a fake crescendo that would be flat out trite. with the rising breakbeats, i'd have no way out of it. and, it would be reducing the track to some kind of parody.

the result remains frustrating. it's not done, but i've concluded that finishing it is impossible without ruining it. it really has no future but stasis.

so, i've acknowledged as much, left it is a download only outtake release and am moving on.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/ostrich

that ended up taking two days rather than one but i am now ready to wrap up in that blanket and work through from 45-55 over roughly the next week. expect relatively frequent uploads.

at the end of it, i expect my throat to be in better shape, and i should be able to take a shot at finishing 43.

it's basically going to have to wait until my throat is good enough for it.