if you really want to entertain the notion, breaking the cycle would necessarily mean erasing yourself entirely from history. there's interesting consequences of that (as history would take a different path without you, however miniscule), but it's not what i was thinking about at first.

what that means is we could never know of anybody that's actually succeeded, because all trace of them would cease to exist.

it follows that all claims of enlightenment through this process are necessarily false.

but, frustratingly, it doesn't eliminate the possibility. it even opens up explanations as to why the event seems so rare - we can only remember the fakes.

it's remarkable how these ideas can reinforce themselves through seeming absurdities.

do dogs understand that they're being used for nefarious purposes?

like a drug sniffing dog for example. do they have enough awareness and empathy to say "yeah, i smell it on this person, but they seem cool so i'm not going to draw attention to it.".

well, we know that dogs are very good at sensing personalities. they seem to react differently depending on your emotional state. so, it's not pure fantasy.

i don't think i'd want to be the one that tests that idea....

you have to wonder if wolves have similar capacities. i mean, they're pack animals. it makes sense that some kind of concept of emotion would develop out of that. but, i would think that contact with humans would be a driving force in evolving that trait. knowing which humans are cool and which humans are assholes is something a semi-wild dog needs to be able to do on a day-to-day basis in order to survive.

you can see something similar in elephants. apparently, they react negatively to people who speak certain languages, because they associate poaching behaviour with those languages. that's something of value to pass on to future generations, even if it's kind of racist.

but what i'm thinking of is pretty sneaky. i think dogs may need at least a few more centuries before they can do sneaky things like that...

i'd love to come across a file of mine deep in the state (i think i'm getting my psychiatric evaluation, just from a distance) somewhere that has this broad stamp of deduction on it, in startling blunt clarity. like, a file marked BONKERS in red stamp. presented as a medical diagnosis...

our evaluation of this suspect is that she is simply bonkers.

....signed off for by a doctor, illegibly, but with credentials typed in boldface. to scream it's legitimacy.

yeah. this guitar sampler has consistency problems, overall. the idea that i could have created this ideal sound by mixing several streams together isn't sustainable. no two renders sound exactly alike.

in fact, i've had to mix a few of the guitar parts down to lock them in place, then add some filters and eqs. i was trying to find stasis in flux and becoming confused by it. i may have to lock a few more down. so, it's looking like it may be a tomorrow upload.

it turns out i have an email list...

so, i just randomly checked my bandcamp settings and out of the blue realized i have a small email list. i've never asked you for your email addresses, because i kind of didn't plan on doing this. but given that you seem to have gone out of your way to provide me with your email addresses, i'm going to oblige the request.

i've been releasing a lot of singles lately, and i'm not generally going to send out an email update when i do. part of the reason i didn't want to do this is that, as a consumer, i find the email update route a little invasive, but i can't tell you how to interact with things and people and ideas, so hey, whatever, man. it does mean i'm going to reserve these messages for major updates. so, email updates will happen only when official records are finished. that's my own rules and bounds for this.

i'm in the final stages of finishing the material i wrote during a "serious music" phase i went through from roughly 2000-2002. putting the singles aside, i'm going to get two official full length records and a number of lps that are not official records out of this. so, this is the update:

1) i finished my fifth disc back in october, which is this one:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

it's comprised of material written mostly over 2001 and recorded between 2001 and 2014. it's heavily oriented towards the idea of music as a written form.

2) i'm putting the finishing touches on my sixth record over the next few weeks, which is this one:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj-2

this record also has a lot of written ideas, but integrates more fluid writing as well. it was written mostly over 2001 and 2002 and finished mostly over 2014.

3) there are two lps of rabit is wolf material from this period, but they are not official releases in my album chronology.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-wave
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/rabit-is-wolf

4) there will be a double-cd concept record housing the written music written over this period. the first disc will feature the tracks played through a 1990s soundblaster card. these versions are what the songs sounded like as i was writing them, and there's an interesting quality to the sound produced. the second cd will be a mirror image of this, but updated to include more modern vst-synth arrangements. it will exist here:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/thru

so, that concludes this update. until we meet again....

j

if mixing is about making decisions then the mix is done. i just have to make some final edits in the morning.

so, i'm going to do that vst record after all - as a mirror image of the midi disc, to prevent it from seeming superfluous. so, i'm going to release it as a double. hey, it's a neat concept to have the thing flipped over like that, to demonstrate the changes in technology (available to me) that occurred between when the songs were written and when they were finalized.

i guess it turns out that there's more than one way to coherently present this material. rather than fight against that, i'd rather present multiple options.

so, there will be the two proper jjjjjjjjjj discs that have mixes of sequenced music and non-sequenced music. records 5 and 6. then there will be the flip of the midi disc, which has just purely sequenced vst versions of some of the material on the two proper jjjjjjjjj discs. then, there's the collection of singles that have all the versions of each specific track.

2^2*3^2 = 36.

i have to...

there's just too many variables to keep fiddling. this is actually the more efficient approach. which is what i said in the first place, then argued against, but it really is.

except everything came out weird.

i'm going to have to use a spreadsheet instead.

i'm also glad the days are getting longer, again.

i think i'm pretty much used to that hour difference, now. it's from moving from one end of the same time zone to the other end. i'm used to the sun being up by 6:30 pretty much the entire year - and becoming visible not longer after 4:00 during the summer. here, it's quite often not up until well after 7:00. even at the peak of the summer, you're pushing 6:00, which kind of makes it feel like spring the whole year. i made it home in the dark from a compost-drop at 7:45 the other day.

the flip of that is that the sun is still up at 5:30 for pretty much the whole year. which has got me feeling like fall never ended, because i never got the cue of night time at 4:00 on a cloudy day.

i've actually tried switching to central time to recapture the difference, but i just found myself constantly converting in my head. it was just reminding me of it, rather than helping me forget it.

so, i think i'm used to it. but i'd still be nice to get the sun up a bit earlier...

you know, i was going to say something about how people have to go to work in the dark here.

but i guess it's also true that people have to go home in the dark in ottawa. i can remember getting off work in the dark quite frequently.

i think it's kind of better to get off work in the dark, because it just plunges you directly into the night, which is where you want to be when you're working during the day, anyways. but that's just a perception.

i think the more valid reflection is that you're stuck with one way or the other up to a relatively high longitude.

you know, it's true - cats really are always plotting to eat us. like, that cat that's been following me around..

see, i always knew that the cat was really stalking me as a possible prey item, but i was trying to rationalize ways around that obvious deduction, because it's not something you really want to come to terms with. that cat is following me around because it would like to eat me. how pleasant.

i think if it was a really serious concern to me, i'd of course react differently. but it's a cute, black and white furry cat with a bit of a swagger in it's steps. it doesn't really strike me as ominous, even if i know what it's really thinking.

when it comes down to it, though, do i really want to get into a fight with a cat? they seem cute and harmless. but, they're very agile and absolutely capable of catching you by surprise. we have a weak spot - our necks. and, cats are entirely aware of that weak spot. it doesn't take much to take you out through your neck. a smart cat would be able to exploit this.

you think past it, though. it's just a cute cat.

a cute cat that sees you as a possible prey item, if it can just get the right opportunity.

i think these studies that suggest that people that listen to specific types of music are more intelligent because they listen to that music are getting the causality backwards.

first, if you're focusing on a specific genre, you're doing this wrong. if the idea is the abstraction in the music, no specific genre has a monopoly on that. you may get different correlations, depending on personality. debussy is going to appeal to a different type of person than mozart does. and skinny puppy is going to appeal to a different type of person than genesis does. but, it's all abstract music and it should all have basically the same effect, if the factor is the abstraction in the music.

focusing specifically on "classical" music is going to mostly simply produce class differences, which are well understood as having an effect on test scores. it's a situation where x is correlated with y, y is correlated with z and a fallacious conclusion is being drawn that z is therefore caused by y - when it could very well be that x and z are where the causal relationship is occurring.

but the point of this shouldn't be to isolate "intelligent people". "intelligent people" is a pretty broad category, that encompasses humans with a wide variety of tastes. rather, the useful conclusion is something like as follows:

"if you actually legitimately enjoy mainstream pop music, it is probably because you are not of above average intelligence."

but you don't need a study to understand that.

even that's maybe a little unfair, as it's not impossible that you could be into abstract music and still like pop.

maybe something like...

"if you *only* listen to pop music, then chances are high that you're not that bright."

i think the key thing that bugs me about the studies is that they tend to focus so much on mozart. mozart was not the most abstract, creative or interesting writer of his era from any perspective. even people that really like mozart will acknowledge how prodding he could be from time to time. if the studies were based on something a bit more difficult....

i'd expect that if they did a direct comparison between kids that listen to mozart specifically and kids that listen to a spectrum of other "classical" composers, mozart would actually rank near the bottom in terms of test results.

i entirely agree that things are constantly in flux, and the causal model has problems at the micro level. i think the intuitive understanding is that things are happening too quickly for causality to apply. i say intuitive, but that's a tricky thing to understand if you try to break it down, despite it being the intuitive way to kind of understand it.

i think you can try and put some kind of conceptual bounds around it, though. every causal reaction requires a finite amount of time. if there's so much energy in a system that it pushes the cause through faster than a reaction can occur in, then you'd see causality seem like it's not working. you could think of it like a censor failing, by missing a signal because it's too fast - or in some cases like a censor exploding by taking in a signal that zaps it like a laser.

depending on the scale of the subject, the micro might be very perceptible to us. so, the question of how music affects intelligence is micro on this scale - it's reinforcing each other, because it's happening at a time scale that is shorter than a reaction can develop in.

but i think you can still pull out patterns, and the patterns are still meaningful, even if they require some careful analysis.

so, there's two ways to finish a mix.

the first is to fuck with it until you get it right. the second is to fuck with it until you numb yourself to it, and what you've been listening to starts to sound right. the second approach is not inferior, as it reflects the way you've changed your idea of what it should sound like as you've brought it into reality.

this wasn't supposed to take this long; i didn't spend a lot of time setting the guitar modelling in the first place, i just got lost in it because something changed without me controlling it. so, i got lost in finding a "lost ideal". i need to acknowledge that and just move forwards with it.

yeah, so i *did* have to reinstall my guitar sampler. and, what's annoying is that the first part very quickly fell back to where it ought to be. that is, it didn't sound right because the samples were corrupting...and i lost a full week on this....

at least it's evidence that i'm hearing what i am, rather than what i wish i was. what a piss off, though. i think the second half should now finish itself up quickly - maybe even by the end of the night.

maybe i should make a kickstarter or something. hey, it's worth a shot - i'd reflexively have to project it as a joke, in character...but, it's really not all that improbable that it might get me from project to project, if i can put the proper level of eccentricity into it.

the music business is morphing into some other kind of economy altogether. the idea of purchasing music is just kind of becoming out of date. listen, there was a time before music existed for sale in the form of media. it was always likely that a time would come after this, as well.

and, what is the media? it's a product. so, the product is shifting. that is all.

i think the future of this is still a little unclear. could we go back to the days of wealthy benefactors supporting eccentric artists? it might increase the level of discourse. substantially. but, then you need to deal with, like, rupert murdoch in total control of all art in the universe. it may dilute the pool a little, but artistic freedom is totally valuable.

maybe it's a kind of project-auction setup. i mean, if i make it a crazy enough idea, it might just be so crazy that it might work. bwahahaha. ahahaha. (that's an evil laugh, of course mocking of myself, because i'm arrogant enough to value mocking myself, because i enjoy pretending i'm arrogant enough to pretend i value mocking myself, because i enjoy mocking myself, because i'm arrogant enough to ... )

grargh. now, i'm getting weird relics in the second half. distortion running through clean guitar parts. etc. i may have to rebuild it, but kind of don't want to...

i think my device is running a little hot. so, i'm going to stop for the night and hope it's running normally when i wake up.

it sounds like something's crossed....

like, even if i turn the effect off i'm getting distortion, which is not something i've seen before.

it's a melodic distortion, though, so i don't think something blew. it sounds like something's...crossed. like i said. maybe some more plugin reinstalls is in order...

but, to the fucker at the mixing desk: it's supposed to have a cure-like kind of chorus sound, not that bloody overused radiohead light distortion sound.

well, i picked one. tested at multiple volumes. it's what i want.

but i'm kind of feeling like i wasted a week. because it's exactly what i had in the first place.

whatever. moving on...

this is my basic argument.

=====================

So, the problem isn’t really whether I’m capable or even willing to find employment, it’s more a question of whether anybody is willing to allow me to work for them. And, the answer is that nobody is, and nobody’s going to.

To be honest, I would prefer not to. I don’t think that’s all that unusual. But, I do recognize that I’m not supposed to have a real choice in this matter. So, if I were to choose, what kind of job would I pick? Well, let’s separate out two kind of jobs – high wage jobs with lots of responsibility, or low wage jobs with little responsibility.

I would actually prefer the low wage job with little responsibility. The reason is that my aspirations and goals in life are not within the workforce, they’re within art and academia. Unfortunately, my art is quite unusual (and hence unmarketable) and my academic opinions are equally unusual. If I were to work a high wage job with a lot of responsibility, I would not have the time or energy to devote to my goals and aspirations and would consequently be very unhappy. So, I believe I would be less unhappy working a low wage job with small amounts of responsibility, as it would give me more time to focus on my goals and aspirations. I can also say that I’ve determined this through experiment.

So, let’s focus on the low wage jobs with low responsibility. Unfortunately, this option is not available to me, for the precise reason that I have a lot of education. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried removing the degree from the resume, I’ve tried adopting colloquial language, and I’m just too transparent – the hiring manager can see quite clearly that I’m introverted and bookish, have an IQ around 150 and am simply not going to fit in to that kind of environment. I don’t have the right profile for this sort of labour. So, while I would prefer this, it’s not something I can actually get. They want young, personable people. I’m simply not that person.

What about the high wage jobs with more responsibility, then? Well, ignoring the fact that I would be unhappy that way, it’s not an option that’s available to me, either, because I don’t have the psychological profile that fits into it. You need to have drive, motivation and a desire to compete. I have none of these things as they apply to private or government sector employment – my aspirations and goals are in art and academia. Worse, I’m not particularly good at integrating into systems of vertical management. Probably the best example to use is what happened when I applied for cra…

They had me write two tests. The first was an iq test, and my grades were very high. 95th percentile. This is consistent with past iq tests I’ve written. The second was a behavioural test, which I’ve failed thrice. What that means is that I’m basically certified by the state as unable to exist properly in a management system. I’m too independent-minded, too willing to take things into my own hands, too unwilling to rely on the hierarchy to make decisions. So, I’m not going to fit in there, either. We can have discussions about this, but my perspective is that the test results are essentially accurate – I’m not good at being told what to do or following what I perceive of as illogical rules for the purposes of protocol or convention. Again, I can’t change this – it’s my nature. A different system would value this, but ours rejects it as anti-social.

So, I’m left without any kind of option. I can’t do the drone work because they don’t want people like me doing it, and I can’t do the higher wage work because I can’t fit in there, either. So, I’m not left with any other option (so long as we accept that starving on the street is not a real option) besides trying to explore the reasons I can’t fit into either environment and trying to construct a disability out of it.

There isn’t a disability underlying my bookish introversion, it’s just my nature. However, I believe that there may be a personality disorder underlying my inability to fit into structured environments. This is what I’m trying to get diagnosed.

So, some examples of past behaviour that fit this pattern….

so, i've concluded that what i'm doing with this is mildly insane. and a waste of time.

i will have an arrangement decided upon by the end of the day, one way or another.

i'm about half done...

it just kind of became clear that trying to put a total order on this is stupid. i want one. so, i cleared out many that were obviously not serious candidates and am now down to about 30.

this isn't the last thing to do with this track, but it's almost the last thing to do. once it's done, the mix should be up within an hour or two.

and then i'll have to make decisions about what i want to pull into the final remaster, which i don't think is going to be anything - maybe just a few effects. i'm not even sure if it's the same timing. i *think* it is, though. i *think* i synced it all those years ago...

deathtokoalas
the title of john maus' new thesis has been leaked:

"On Projecting Pseudo-Intellectuality Through Performing Bad Retro for Stoned Teenagers."

RedPill Swallowed
Jealous.

deathtokoalas
naw. even in my late 90s synth-pop phase, i never had any aspirations towards this. and while my background is in math, and math is kind of like philosophy, my epistemology has always been empirically driven. i'm just dismissive.

RedPill Swallowed
I'm not even going to pretend that I don't need to google some of those words, lol....I'll just agree.  Have a nice day. :)

deathtokoalas
it's not that rough. if you ignore silly people like kant, like you should, and like maus doesn't, mathematics and philosophy share an approach to understanding knowledge, which is based in deducing things from assumptions with logic. this is somewhat - albeit not entirely - contradictory to a scientific worldview, which attempts to understand knowledge through experiment.

it gets confusing when you acknowledge that there are quasi-empirical branches of mathematics (like constructivism). but that can kind of be glossed over for the purposes of getting to my point.

....which is that i don't really have time for speculative branches of philosophy. well, i guess it's fun to read sometimes. and you have to define questions before you can test them. but there's not much room for jealousy, there, as a result of that.

accidentalprotégé
I don't agree with everything that comes out of John Maus' mouth but what makes his music "Bad Retro?" As someone who dislikes socialized medicine I still think Rights For Gays is a banger.

deathtokoalas
i'm a fan of the period he's drawing on, but i just don't hear anything except watered down emulation.

Me Ear
Do ya get out much? Me neither. I'm a fat, damaged idiot tho. And your aspirations to truth are fine if it gets you thru shit. Really. I'm not being sarcastic. Even your aspirations to a superiority over others are harmless here in youtube comment sections. Bluntly tho, you don't know shit. Humanity is a tribe of monkeys that fell out of a tree one unfortunate day. And there's good folks and cunts. That's it. But what do I know? lol. Best wishes.

deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm post-godel. i get that. that doesn't have much to do with what i was saying, though. if anything, it's an argument in favour of empiricism.

Me Ear
Well, thanks for replying. 1 or 2 folks were nasty to you on here. I can be nasty too, very. Godel? Not heard of him, if it's a dude. It's in humans to value truth, yes. But there isn't any. And what you believe? It's not important. I'm exaggerating somewhat, yes.

Religion, philosophy, science, can have a place, yes. But anyway, one guy, or girl, sees a cat with 3 legs, kicks it across the road. Another guy or girl feeds it. All the rest is theory, in my view. And, no, I wouldn't kick the cat, on my worst possible day.

deathtokoalas
godel was an early 20th century mathematician that produced a series of important proofs. he's been described as the most important logician since aristotle. and, in some sense he defined a type of thinking that is necessarily post-aristotlian.

i have to oversimplify dramatically. but, he demonstrated that we have a choice between completeness and consistency. what that means is that there are necessarily true statements that can never be proven true - and that we can in fact prove can never be proven, despite being true.

that has a lot of implications to the axiom-deduction approach to epistemology. it throws kant out the window, to begin with. his whole concept of synthetic a priori knowledge being superior is rendered ridiculous.

again: i don't really see any point where you're disagreeing with me. you're just displaying that you didn't really understand what i typed.

Me Ear
I drink, listen to music and type shit for something to do, which I don't usually remember because I'm mentally disordered, damaged and drunk.

A serious (not sarcastic) question - why post clever stuff on youtube? And, again seriously,  where can doing so lead to?

(There's clever folks on youtube, yes, but most of them seem to end up wanting to die fairly soon after they've posted on the toob amongst folk like me, don't they?) 

deathtokoalas
see, here's the thing: maybe people reading my ranting might click on my name and check out my channel, and then go to my bandcamp site. the more places i leave links, the higher the possibility.

it's a benevolent type of spam/marketing, in the sense that people get something out of it. and, i don't get deleted or marked as spam, either.

Me Ear
I'll look at your channel then. I used to rant til I got a troll. Who had a channel. lol. I looked at it eventually, worst music ever. lol again. You know what tho? Your enemy is your helper too. I imagine you're smart enough to have heard of the concept. Except young kids are killing themselves coz of trolls now.. There was a case of somebody in this country who trolled somebody on 6000 websites. Those 2 should've got married, they had very similar interests.lol. Peace. xxx

i'm making a little progress, but i didn't realize how similar so much of this is...

there's really three parts, with the third doubled and split l/r, but the drum is panned hard to the right so the effect is not commutative. the sound dominating in the headphones is on the left channel, with the right channel adding subtle levels of colour.

the first has some reverb and a little delay, the second is a heavy chorus and the third/fourth are a kind of heavier shadow delay, in that they have almost no dry signal. but the colouring is dramatic.

so, what i'm noticing is that each combination, if held static otherwise, is only minimally different on the right channel. which might seem like it would reduce possibilities - but not all the way down to 27 - but in fact actually requires very carefully listening to isolate the differences.

but i am making progress. splitting the set into three really helped a lot.