i'm starting to become more cognizant of this strange tick in my neck. now, what i'm going to say may seem unscientific, and would probably be rejected by most doctors, but if you ask them to provide a better explanation, you'll be disappointed in their responses. i'm grasping the situation through experiencing it; i'm carrying out the experiment. and, while i may not be the person best positioned to measure my own behaviour, my notes should be analyzed for a mechanism rather than discarded as "impossible".

i seem to have developed too much control over my autonomous nervous system. seems ridiculous, i know. but, can you point me to studies that prove it impossible to gain control over the autonomous nervous system? because i bet i could find some studies that blur the lines pretty substantially.

i seem to have developed a fear of swallowing. that's at the crux of it. due to throat inflammation for various reasons, but one obvious, i may have nearly choked once or twice. i suppose we all cough something up once in a while, and it's a lesson to be more careful when you're eating. but, we mostly tend to shrug it off after a day or two, right? instead, i seem to have internalized it to the point that i'm not able to open my throat to let liquids in. i find myself fighting a battle against my own throat.

that might seem to indicate a loss of control, but not if it's thought about more carefully. if everything was firing correctly, i'd expect my throat would open when i pick up a glass of water. instead, it shuts and i have to consciously struggle with myself to open it. if i were in full conscious control, i would not have to struggle; if it were truly autonomous, it would not close at all. that indicates that it's my subconscious that must be interfering and shutting it out of a repressed fear of choking, which indicates too much control - but not consciously.

i understand i'm not likely to convince anybody with a doctorate in anything of this. but, i believe it's what's actually happening. in theory, the solution should be in the realm of mental health. but, even if i could convince somebody to take me seriously, i'm skeptical that they'd have any good ideas. it's maybe the kind of thing something like yoga might fix, without as of yet understanding the mechanism.

i don't think i actually need to go to a yoga studio. but, the answer may be spending a little bit of time sitting and breathing. i've spent most of my time recently fighting with a computer, and most of my time before that mixing and mastering. maybe i need to spend a little time with the guitar.

i'm not as dismissive of hypnotism as you might suspect i am, i just wish we could get a better handle of the mechanism.

i mean, you have to wonder if that's what demons are - repressed fears - and if that's what an exorcism really is - hypnosis to escape a repressed memory, fear or other such thing. we can do without the spells and religious mumbo jumbo, no doubt. but, it might be getting at stimulating a condition that allows for erasure.

my understanding is that there are actually experimental techniques underway that can erase undesirable memories using electronic equipment. that could be demon removal, on demand.

perhaps certain systems of eastern mysticism may have thrived for the reason that they minimize the onsets of these sorts of stresses.

and, if that's true, the mechanism would be in stimulating the hormonal condition that allows for stress release (jumbled language, it's still sort of magic at this point).

which, i believe - through direct personal experience and the observations of others regarding how i appear when i play the instrument - i can stimulate by expression on the guitar.

when you live in a basement, outside lawn mowers can make some rather gorgeous ambient music.

now that i've got my drivers clean, i'm back to the issue with the eqs.

to recall: there seems to be a programming error in cubase (a truncation error, it seems) that corrupts mixer settings on the first save. it's something i'm going to have to fine tooth everything over. i wasn't previously able to tell the difference on a/bs, but i can now. so, i may have to re-upload some of those files one last time.

my fears were unfounded - the machine booted up to a perfectly clean sound. i am finally confident that the machine is fixed.

all i've done since the last reboot is reinstall the operating system firewire drivers. i didn't even swap them, i just disabled them and rebooted, which forced me to also reinstall the mixer drivers. that seems to be the only thing i needed to do (besides locking the drivers).

it might seem like something i should have never overlooked; that it should have been one of the first trouble-shooting steps. but, i've got all my driver installs sequenced in an install script, so when i reinstall the machine i'm dealing with fresh, updated driver installs for every device in the machine. it's reasonable that it never crossed my mind to reinstall drivers for a system device immediately on a clean boot.

but, there's some evidence that it may actually be the registry wipe i run post-install.

before i run the script, i can uninstall the firewire drivers through device manager. after i run the script, it tells me i can't uninstall them because they're locked by a parent driver required for start-up. that sounds wrong - as though i've crossed something during the registry wipe. what i have to do, instead, is disable them first and then uninstall them.

what i've got back now is the "sound stage" - i can hear the reverb in proper stereo and all the effects have their decay back. it's the reversal of that compressed sound that i was associating with bad conversion. so, i have to conclude that the firewire port was somehow truncating the stream. when i put it into the context of the files always nulling when output to disc, it does, in hindsight, make sense to tie the issue entirely to the firewire streaming, as the issue was purely playback related.

that was a long, difficult process for what in the end was a triviality. but, i really think it's figured out now, and i should be able to get some listening in this week and back to mixing next week.

well, i got my forms mailed today. that's to cancel my student loan.

i can't be certain what the bureaucracy will do, but my understanding is that they basically can't overrule the doctor.

so, i'm celebrating this week. which means listening, but carefully - i know i can't mix when i'm celebrating.

and, it means making some different lifestyle choices starting next week.

i suppose i should be happy that i'm healthy enough that my lungs are still able to go into overdrive whenever i quit smoking. i've been through this often enough to know that this is the last phase before normalcy: the white blood cells start coming out in a quantity that sometimes makes me feel like i'm choking. i can literally stand over the sink and watch a connected gob of slimy goop fall out of my throat for upwards of a minute at a time. it only lasts a day or two. rather than clear my lungs slowly, my body seems to want to go into hyperdrive and flush it all out as soon as it can...

i'm actually scarily healthy. i tell people i won't live to 50. the reality is that if i can cut the smoking out now, otherwise keep my lifestyle (healthy eating, but more importantly no car) similar and get a little luck on inheriting dna from my mom's side, i'll probably make it to 90.

and i can't help but feel that this exaggerated response i always get when i quit is a function of being as healthy as i am.

i made a point of not getting anything done today, because i was expecting to pass out. i've actually been awake for a normal 17 hour day at this point and i'm feeling very alert. but, i'm still not doing anything...

tomorrow, i think, will be time to start again.

i determined yesterday, briefly, that the primary problem was, in fact, the firewire driver. i'm expecting it to boot up to a clean signal. perhaps another reason i didn't do anything today is fear that it won't.

not quite.

...what day is it?

i think i'm out of the haze and ready to finish troubleshooting.

so, after caving into various self-rationalizations over the first half of september, i've been de-nicing the last few days and have every intention to stick with it this time. i've said that for a long time. but, i've got my income stable for the next five years, i'm no longer in a hurry to do much of anything and i'm very much intent on getting over this. i had a little heatstroke when i got back on tuesday night and have been sleeping that off as well, but i think i'm alert enough now to at least try and get the machine back up.

i turned it off tuesday morning right before the script runs. i'm going to want to make sure i can get the firewire drivers correctly working before i run the script.

i didn't get my forms on tuesday. it turns out that the psychiatrist has to fill them out, and i'll have to wait until monday. nor does it seem as though the nurse practitioner is going to carry through with my prescriptions. he claims he'll work as a go between if i can find an endocrinologist, but he won't work with the guy from london because he claims he's unprofessional, which i think is a cop out - i think it's a religious thing, again. he said he put out a referral, but i'm kind of sketchy on it. i'm not convinced it's even a real person. but we'll find out. if i don't have an answer by monday, i'm going to have to get in contact with the guy in london.

i can't think of any reason why i should need to actually go to london and physically speak with him. i'm just asking for a refill of something i've been on for years and will be on for the rest of my life. it should be a five minute conversation, and it's not really necessary. and, if he insists on a blood test or something, i don't see any reason why i can't just get the blood test here and have the results sent to him.

the ideal remains trying to get the guy in windsor to see me because then i can indulge whatever silliness he wants at essentially no cost to me.

i'll find out these things in a few days.

and i think i should have the machine up in a few hours, even if i need to spend a few more days sleeping to finish the detox.

yeah, i think it's partly related to the operating system's firewire driver, strangely enough. at the least, this seems to be *one*of the things - and it's pretty pronounced. it seems to be reversing the compressed sound that i was associating with kmixer sample rate conversion and giving it back it's fullness. but, it's still fading...

i ended up breaking the audio in the machine pretty badly before i got there (i wanted to completely isolate the asio, so i did crazy things like delete the windows audio service, purge the registry of all mentions to all drivers, delete the system audio files, etc), so i'm going to have to reinstall again. like, i can't get it to pick up the directsound out on the m-audio card - which is what i wanted to isolate the asio, but now i need it back. so, i just don't really have a clean system to test with. the fading had stopped before i busted it, so i want to get back to where i was, do the firewire reinstall and see what happens.

it's been the same thing almost every day for weeks now. months, even.

i find some fix. it seems like it worked. i go to sleep. i wake up and it's back to where it was.

i dunno. am i playing tricks on myself? the truth is everything is nulling, so i'm not looking for changes in the actual waveform, i'm looking for changes in playback. is it possible that i'm getting used to the sound every night, only to have to start again the next day? are my headphones or my amp warming up overnight, then cooling down?

this morning's apparent fix was deleting the operating system's firewire drivers and replacing them with drivers from a firewire card i have in the other machine. it sort of makes sense relative to the weird tone issues, insofar as it seems bandwidth related. i'm taking guesses. i've been taking guesses for a while.

and, like so many of these steps, it seems vaguely familiar.

we'll see tomorrow if it's the same thing yet again, or if it's actually a meaningful fix, this time.

is it even the coffee?

there's a little box called "direct monitoring" in the cubase vst panel. unclicking this seems to have FINALLY broken through the sample rate issue and given me the sound i remember. that means i'm going to have to go back over this one more time. but it seems to be the answer i've been trying to figure out.

i'm not entirely clear on what this does. it appears to be related to whether i can hear files coming in from the mixer or not. if i was running an input driver all the time, i may have screwed up the output driver. i dunno, that's a guess.

but, i'm feeling good about this. now, though, is sleep...

if i go back to this feeling i was having that i was being eavesdropped on, it kind of adds up. it's probably obvious that i have unusually sensitive ears. the direct monitoring takes the input from the mixer and sends it to the output. just the bandwidth could have been bothering me.

there's been nothing attached to the input the whole time, of course - i've been mixing old four track parts. so, if that's what it was, it's, like, a virtual ground loop on the signal.

false update on just say no to mood altering prescription drugs

this has been updated.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/just-say-no-to-mood-altering-prescription-drugs
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/nope

on second thought, i slept a little later than i planned and i'm not going to be able to hit the show unless i decide not to eat, which i'm not keen on. and, i'm not really up for sitting in that ice cream shop overnight; it's going to be relatively cold. cold snap had to hit tonight, huh? i was a big sonic youth fan years ago, and i'd certainly go if it was across the street but i'm really more focused on what i'm doing...

so, i'm staying in tonight.

i think the mix for nine is done; i was actually fighting with the drivers again last night, as it's fading again. i made the error of accidentally uninstalling the underlying windows drivers, and it seems to have screwed up the asio. i'm going to try to avoid reinstalling, but i may have to. now that i've got asio connected directly to foobar, i have tested it with the windows driver completely uninstalled and it does seem to be stable - lthough i'd like to be able to bring these back in. for now, it seems like i can get the drivers to stay put for a while before i have to reinstall them....it's workable, but i'm still tinkering because i'm still not clear exactly what is causing it to randomly resample...

i think 09 should be up pretty soon.

that was trivial to fix, actually. and i even remember...

at some point, i brought in the original 1998 mix to do a compare, which meant i had to take the effect off the master (otherwise it would run through the effect) and set the rest of the tracks up to their own fader. i seem to have never put the effect back. i must have accidentally saved this, then forgot about it. those vague memories, right?

putting the effect back on the master got me back where i want to be. i will need to replace this file.

track 09 is just sounding funny one way or the other; i remember it having a nice compressed punch, and instead it's sounding very digital. i dunno.

but, i hope to get a bit done tonight.

i'm going to hit thurston moore tomorrow night, and use it as sort of a head clearing. i got almost nothing done this summer, which is disappointing. and, i have what is hopefully my last appointment for a while on tuesday. so, hopefully, i can get this past me and start refocusing on wednesday.

expect sporadic uploads over the next few days; hopefully, i can be almost done cleaning this up by wednesday.

i just got an email...

i want to be clear.

i will never, ever, ever press anything on vinyl. you could say i'm boycotting the technology.

there's two reasons:

1) it's terrible, obsolete, shitty sounding technology that should be rounded up and bunker bombed.
2) i record everything using digital technology. even if you want to pull some wrong argument out of your ass about "tape saturation" or something, transferring material that is recorded over digital technology at a relatively low bit rate on to vinyl can never have any possible result but sound degradation.

i will not degrade the sound quality. i will not sell you garbage. i will not press vinyl.

if you want a crappy sounding but nice looking commodity, you'll have to look elsewhere.

vinyl sounds like shit.

it's never happening.

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i suppose, in hindsight, that this is the beginning of the radiohead that most people know, isn't it? at the time, it was just dark. i've never been able to find a mix that sounds like i remember first hearing it, with a really pounding bottom end. it might have been a bad realaudio encoding that muddied up the bottom. you don't want to know what realaudio is, if you don't know. but, it came out as the weirdest funk i'd ever heard - because it was both dirty and reflecting; it was like shaking your booty on the floor and hiding and crying in the corner at the same time. but, all in your head. of course.

(relevant tracks: thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i just remember dark rides on the bus; stuff passing by outside the windows, humans i couldn't care less about all around me and wishing they'd just go away (although i should have been trying to communicate with them), self-consumed introverted thoughts that i have no recollection of...

it's the harmonies. through a good pair of headphones, and sufficiently disconnected from the things around you, it's a lift-off. a little cliched, if you demand to over-analyze it. but it's incredibly effective.

(relevant tracks: thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down.)

not updating i still don’t fully understand this

so, i've convinced myself that the version of this that is already uploaded is superior to anything i could reset with the eqs, and that i probably initially outed it post-save in the first place.

i know i re-opened it and re-rendered on the 12th of july, but i think i even vaguely recall that the file nulled, but i replaced it anyways thinking the initial was corrupted in metadata or something. this was when i didn't yet realize the cards were misbehaving...

this needs to be blared at almost dangerous levels to get the effect of it. that's generally true - it's all headphone music. but, it's especially true with this. the layers of distortion need to cascade at high volume; at low volumes, it's going to sound compressed.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-dont-fully-understand-this