water pressure - pipe frozen somewhere in the basement?

hi.

there appears to be an issue with the water pressure. it comes in and out, which is not the end of the world - so long as it comes back, and it always does. but, it seems to be dependent on the weather. it seems to slow down a lot when the temperature comes down. that relationship has held this morning. so, i'm left to conclude that maybe something is freezing over....?

i'll let you know if the pressure comes back when it warms up over the next few days.

(pause)

yeah, i think that what's happened is that the heat upstairs was turned off, and the pipes somewhere in the basement have frozen as a consequence of that. i'm leaving the water running (cold) to try and de-ice the pipes.

it was very nice last weekend. but, it's been below zero for the last several days. and, there's no source of heat in the basement. so, if you don't have the heat upstairs on, it gets very cold in the basement (causing me to turn my heat up to buffer).

what i'm getting across is that i understand that i have a lease responsibility to prevent the pipes from freezing. i've had the heat on in the unit. but, it seems like the heat is not on on the main floor. so, i need to deflect responsibility for any burst, frozen or broken pipes.

(pause)

i let it run for a few hours and turned it off because it wasn't making any difference. also, the pressure is the same for both the cold and the hot; one would think that a frozen pipe would affect one more than the other, unless the frozen pipe is on the way into the building. i still think the dominant factor is like the heat coming off upstairs.

i'm just pulling out a correlation with temperature and making a guess. it should warm up on monday. i'll let you know if the pressure comes back before then.

03-03-2016: trudging through the snow on little sleep to catch julia holter in ferndale

concert footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Hj5_bT2yY

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/03/03.html

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

26-02-2016: grouchy from not smoking, or just a shoddy night all around? (pop 1280 in detroit)

concert footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIdRom9QCiU

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/02/26.html

music in picture segue:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/fuck-the-dead

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

j reacts to posters that marked her as a spammer for deleting their replies

so, i've done enough testing that it's clear to me that a lot (most...) of the posts that i'm making on youtube are invisible to everybody except myself.

that goes a long way to explain why the hit count came down. and, this is very sneaky - because i experience no signs of censorship. i can see my posts. if i go back to the page, my posts are there. i get no error message. but, if i log out of the site and come back, i can no longer see the posts.

that is behaviour that couldn't possibly be designed with anything other than political censorship in mind.

let's see if i can jam this....

i may have been targeted specifically because i had a habit of removing posts made to my posts. but, let's be clear about a few things.

(1) it was my post. i had the functionality to remove the responses to my posts. and, frankly, i believe i had ownership of those posts. no rules broken, there.
(2) i was actually very enlightened in the way i did this. i'm trying to save the conversations i had. that means plenty of people didn't get deleted - and there were plenty of interesting back and forths.

now, of course, some of the morons that ended up with deleted posts may disagree. but, that's a function of their idiocy - and the problem in the first place. just because they don't realize they're buffoons doesn't mean i have a responsibility to listen to them.

it's just another symptom, really. youtube was perhaps too good for it's user base, for a while.

i don't feel i have a choice but to stop posting here, seriously. they've reduced the platform to something that is essentially useless for anything but trolling. but, if that's what they want, they can get ready for some of it...

what i'm saying is that i may have gotten a very high number of complaints, because i deleted a large number of posts.

but, if you saw those posts, you'd understand -  they were personal attacks, baseless insults, unsupported arguments and just flagrant idiocy.

the difference is that i didn't cry to an authority figure. i just removed the posts. then, the people that were posting nonsense and insults complained that their posts were being removed, and i'm the one that ends up getting silenced - while they keep on posting stupidity.

should i have reported them instead of taking matters into my own hands?

no.

the system was designed so that people could police their own content, and that was actually an ideal way to do it.

1) the owner of the video could decide if they wanted the thread there or not; if the owner of the video removed the thread, it appeared only in google+.
2) the owner of the thread could decide who was allowed to comment on the thread, and which comments were allowed to stand.

this allowed for people to moderate their own content - this is the anarchist ideal of self-moderation. it's easy to see why i liked it...

but, people didn't seem to understand the system, or thought that they should have the right to comment on other people's posts, whether they liked it or not. they weren't able to get the abstraction of personal property rights. so, they complained to authority figures, who had to step in - and i'm the one that got punished for it.

again: it's not a situation where i wish i had reacted differently. it's a situation where i'm learning that this is a bad platform, and that i need to adjust to it's failings.

the other option was that my content, while it existed, would not have been the pleasant conversations that people became accustomed to seeing my name attached to. instead, it would have been full of people posting personal insults, back and forth name-calling, strawmen arguments, unsupported arguments, stupid memes - everything else on youtube, essentially. and, then i would have stopped using the platform quite a long time ago. it was either that i cleaned these threads up and pissed a lot of people off, or that i didn't use the system at all.

and, you just have to laugh, right? people wanted in on my comments because they were high profile enough to be noticed. but, that relied on my ability to screen the garbage out. in the end, the garbage i screened out seems to have ganged up on me and has gotten me declared a spammer, out of spite.

but, i wouldn't have had anything worth noting if i had let anybody and everybody go ahead and vomit all over my posts.

in the end, i got nailed for using the system as it was designed, and actually succeeding in making it better, and the youtube comment system has remained a nest of absolute stupidity. if anything, it's worse now than it's ever been.

i can't regret that. rather, i have to point out that i'm a victim of stupidity.

listen: this is how the world works, right?

where's the alternate history where everybody listens to jesus, agrees and goes to smoke a fatty in the park?

mass idiocy is normal. intelligence is always persecuted.

they hate you when you're clever....

the reality is that any other outcome would be unheard of - astonishing.

really, i should be content in realizing that i'm lucky that i haven't been lynched, yet.

i'm almost done in clearing the page down. i should get close to 1500 pages in the end. it's probably 1500/2000 or so. i'm sure the lost ideas will regenerate elsewhere, eventually.

it's now been six weeks without smoking, btw. and i'm feeling like i'm over it.

youtube just pushed down a character limit.

i think it's as clear as day that they are shutting down comments - for political reasons. they want this shut down before the election cycle heats up.

as time consuming as this has been, i actually waited too long to do it and have lost much more than i wanted. the last few days of vlogs have dealt with this topic. i've got over a thousand pages off, and have quite a bit more to go, but i've also lost a lot of really interesting conversations.

with the character limit? it's over. it's useless. i'm moving to my own space - there's no other solution.

it's going to be a while before i get back to work, unfortunately. but if i had doubts about the worth of this, the character limit has reinforced the need for me to be doing this asap.

youtube, as we know it, is on the verge of collapse. it's been too successful in spreading ideas.  and, it's getting shut down.

bernie sanders may very well win the election. that is a failure of the propaganda system.

the result is just pointless clutter. and, i'm not going to pull back from it out of aesthetic - i'm going to push it hard, to demonstrate how bad it looks and why you should change it.

so, i will need to post five separate posts - part 1, part 2, etc.

nor will it allow me to post it as replies.

i am trying to post a comment on my own page, and it will not allow me to paste the entire thing in.

character limits?

wow.

getting worse and worse by the day, youtube.

do you know what character limits accomplish? they force users to copy and paste a long reply into multiple shorter replies.

it's an incredibly pointless, utter dick move.

here's a tip: if my post is too long, don't read it. zero fucks given. and, if i post too many long posts, and you don't want to read them? maybe you should unsubscribe from my feed.

i can't even believe, really, that this is seriously a thing. it's so horrifically backwards and so remarkably stupid...

j reacts to the realization that she's being actively censored

i wasn't crying censorship before, but i'm noticing that a lot of my posts disappear when i log out. meaning only i can see them. see, that's sneaky - it means i don't actually know that i'm being censored.

and that i don't know how long i've been being censored for.

listen: i don't want my content on somebody else's channel. that was never my intent. my intent was always to have a feed of content.

comments are content.

the cross-link was just incredibly useful.

i've explained this already: i'll be vlogging my comments. yes, it's stupid. but, don't look at me, i'm just adjusting to a stupid system.

but, i'm not just figuring out that the videos are down and the content is evaporated - i'm figuring out that i'm not getting posts through. it's pretty random. and, when something like this is random there are two possible causes:

1) error. which is exceedingly unlikely. this is youtube.
2) active censorship.

i wanted to avoid that conclusion. i really did. but it's unavoidable.

i've been posting comments here for the last several months, hardlinked to google. flip through the page (or the koalas page), open a few links and tell me - how many of the links bring you somewhere other than the comment they're hardcoded to?

it's probably not google, exactly.

google has probably allowed full control over my profile to somebody at some ministry of information.

i'm not sure if my status as a canadian gives me more or less rights, here.

disappearing to detroit for the night

i hit my first post-smoking show last night, and how did i do?

well, i did have a few. three. although, i regretted it immediately and i walked out with no cravings. chances of a relapse - in the form of buying a pack - are zero.

the vlog for the night will come up at my site on feb 24th at 12:30 am. in the mean time, i'll do a written review here (which will get moved to the appropriate places, in time).

---

i ended up a little irritated at ritual howls, but i really ought to be irritated with the bar, instead. this isn't the first time i've seen the bar try and combine shows like this. they'll get a local band in on a touring band's bill, then essentially give the show to the opening act. and, i'm not exaggerating. the bar legitimately really seems to be very strongly biased towards the local bands, and essentially treats the touring acts as a kind of burden to deal with. it's this "we let you play here, you should thank us" kind of attitude.

the problem is really in the marketing. if you bill a show for a touring band, people expect they're going to be the focus. if you bill a show for a local band, people will expect they're the focus, too. what is really shitty is to bill the show for the touring band, and then go out of your way to co-opt it for the opening band. you're not doing that local band any favours by pissing off a possible new audience.

it's consequently really not fair to attack the opening act for setting up late and then acting like it was their show - it's the bar that enables this. this then forces the headliner to cut their set short.

but, it does mean that i was irritated and less than objective about the set as it was happening.

were ritual howls any good? the actual truth is that they really weren't much to take note of. at their best, they were yet another joy division knock-off. they weren't horrible, or anything - they were legitimately mildly enjoyable, but they were very much the archetype of an opening act. so, i would have absolutely preferred to have them play a shorter set earlier in the night, to allow for a longer set by the headliners (who have well over an hour of material). and, the fact that i've seen this happen twice at this bar, now, means that i'm less excited about going there.

they had a chance to allow a substantial touring act to play a lengthy set; instead, they gave the floor to a mediocre local act.

i need to acknowledge, though, that they brought their own crowd, and they made them happy. it's this scene of kids that is all about grasping on to an aesthetic. so, what they're interested in is time capsuling this forty-year old sound as a kind of a fashion trend. the less original you are, the better. they catered almost perfectly to this audience.

but, there's truly not a whole lot to take not of in what they're doing - it's a competent instantiation of a formula that's been done to death for decades.

we got a roughly fifty minute set in from disappears, who i think are a well enough known entity that there's not really much use in being descriptive. they did what they do, and they did it well. i was in the correct state of inebriation to enjoy it, and i did.

it just would have been nice if they weren't cut short by by bylaws and if i didn't have to catch the bus at 1:10 - although i'll point out that i would have certainly missed the bus to stay late, too.

there are longer and fully professionally recorded sets on youtube, but this is the closest to what the show was actually like. i caught some audio that will come up on my vlog next week.

here is my audio from the show:

 

here is a full set:

here is the day's vlog:

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/02/16.html

16-02-2016: getting out of the house (disappears in detroit)

concert footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYm9Tu1qxPk

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/02/16.html

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

update: i have less than a year of posts to clear out of youtube.

but, that's just part one of a three or four part process.

it's slow. but necessary. and i need to be clear: i'm done with the youtube comments section, once i'm done.

the koala central command would like to request your help in tracking down our prime fugitive, deathtokoalas.

we have managed to take over her page and will soon have succeeded in erasing all of her comments. our koalas are hard at work in accomplishing this task. however, she, herself, remains at large.

this individual has recently changed her name and identity. she is considered armed with wit and dangerous to communicate with, so please approach (verbally) with caution.

we believe that she will continue to communicate from the following known pseudonyms:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCinQSeEtF0vSN1XVhQGfwKA

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0re8yuNEZyCde7CQpK0QNw

(https://plus.google.com/b/115697117379871673298/+jessicatemporarydeletion/posts/EWD3zvKoQDB)

i just want to point out that, in line with what i'm doing to wipe my profile down, i'm removing access to subscriber stats. and, i'd hide the hit counts, too, if i could.

see, the lesson i'm walking away from this with may not be what you're expecting. i learned that my previous approach generated what i'm suggesting is the wrong kind of interest.

what does wrong interest mean?

well, i still have 350 subscribers at the koala profile. there were at most five people (i think less) that followed me to the vlog site. i'm not selling units. these are people that are neither interested in my music nor my opinions. they seem to have really just liked my hair. i'm honestly not exaggerating.

i don't want to generate a group of followers that like my hair. i know that this is a thing that people do, but it's really kind of scary for me to think about. i don't have profiles at flickr or snapshot or whatever is being used nowadays for pictures. instagram? i don't even know what the sites are.

i write essays. i write symphonies. i've recently gotten into the habit of recording myself ranting. but, i don't do modelling - and i really don't want to, either. sorry. it's just not what i want to be selling.

so, by taking that information out altogether, i can avoid these kinds of people and avoid these kinds of conversations.

everybody will tell me i'm wrong. but, if you follow my reasoning, i'm actually right for exactly the reasons they claim i'm wrong. deductions require assumptions. and, if you change your assumptions in certain ways, you can sometimes modify your conclusions without recalculating anything.

i just wanted to make it clear that this was done on purpose, and that i'm hiding the information to reject the issue altogether, rather than to hide what the stats actually are.

13-02-2016: understanding the causes of decline

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

end section post:
http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.ca/2016/02/i-just-want-to-point-out-that-it-was-at.html

j reacts to an analysis of her own decline

i just want to point out that it was at this point that i can trace the beginning of a decrease in my hit count. the changes in youtube have not helped and make it almost impossible to reverse the problem. but, this is the real root cause of the decline.

i talk about this in the vlog for feb 13th. but, it's very disappointing - depressing, really - to truly be cognizant of what has actually happened...

my metrics were consistently increasing up to this point. i peaked at over 3000 hits in october - substantial, and enough to think i'm growing and am breaking through something. yet, by the middle of 2015, my hits were cut down to almost nothing. what happened?

well, it seems as though people were not actually interested in what i was typing. rather, people were interested in my profile picture.

i consciously picked that profile picture because it was a "bad shot" - i was very badly hungover. i liked the irony of this, in juxtaposition to the world of fake media images. it was a kind of fuck you to selfie culture.

but, it became it's own fake media image. i had dozens of comments directed at it. the reaction that was most instructive was to point out that the nature of the commentary fit the picture well - and this is why the hit count increased so much, and i ended up with so many upvotes on my comments. it wasn't that what i said affected anybody, or caused anybody to think about anything. people weren't indicating any kind of actual solidarity. it was merely that people found my picture amusing, and wanted to see it near the top of the comments. it didn't really matter what i was saying, so long as it vaguely fit their preconception of what they imagined i ought to be saying.

other comments, in hindsight, were more illuminating than i realized: suggestions that i look "emo", or "black metal", for example. this was both completely wrong and entirely void of any substance - it was merely extrapolated from the fact that i was hungover. it seems that a false perception of who i am was projected from the image, and it was that false projection that was getting upvoted and generating views.

it also generated negative comments. much of this was at a low level of discourse - crude insults that can be broadly summarized as claims that i was "ugly", and often in ways that forced me to research terms i hadn't seen before. this was annoying, but it wasn't what forced me to change the profile picture.

what forced me to change was the misgendering. you can imagine how that might be irritating. i didn't upload the picture thinking that it made me look "emo" or "metal" or anything of the sort. rather, i thought it just made me look like a hungover female with a overactive gothic dye job. i really didn't need or want this kind of abuse.

so, i changed the profile picture to a more recent shot of me as a blonde with a bit of lipstick. my intent was to prevent me from being misgendered. and, this seems to have worked.

in the process, the false projection of me as "emo" or "metal" or whatever it is that people made out of the black dye job and hungover eyes [in truth, i mostly listen to instrumental music, although i once listened to a lot of socal punk, which is how i dress - tshirts, jeans and minimal makeup] evaporated. as people were more interested in how i looked than what i thought, the attention that i was generating dried up. i also think that my newly unambiguous self-gendering alienated young girls that thought i was cute as much as it alienated dudes that found out that i was actually seriously queer, not just faggy in a metal kind of way.

again: i've never liked metal. i don't even really like rock music, in the broadest sense. the only rock music i've ever liked is some early psych and the anti-rock strains of punk/post-punk and grunge. rock culture has always sickened me. i'm a very bookish nerd. i'd rather hang out in the library.

i have a degree in mathematics. i've studied deep into degrees in physics, computer science and law.

nerd. total. and, not afraid of stating it.

but, that's not what my hungover picture suggested. and, so, everything came crashing down when i changed it....

i don't regret this change, and i would do it again. rather, i think i learned an important lesson. i thought people were actually interested in what i had to say about things - that admittedly surprised me, and i should be less naive about things as i move forward.

in the broader scope of things, it doesn't do me any good to get thousands of purely social-media level hits from young girls that are misgendering me (and would be freaked out to actually see me) or guys that i'd never talk to. the truth is that i'd rather have friend-level conversations with those girls and get hit on by those guys (if they're old enough). the reality of everything being backwards was not useful to me in getting an image out. it was, and may unfortunately remain for some time, much more of a hindrance to me.

and, did i even want to get an image out? was i gunning for subscribers and views? the truth is that i didn't ever care. i wanted people to listen to my music. and, neither teenage girls nor metalhead/emo guys are (on average) going to be interested in listening to my blender rock.

moving forwards, i should perhaps target my audience a little bit more carefully. it was maybe pointless to bother posting insults on the emo band's site, as nobody interested in who i am or what i do is going to post there. i should perhaps be focusing more on music that i actually like and less on trends that i do not. my discography channel will deal with this, while my vlog channel will focus more on my ideas and opinions of things.

the reality is that this is all still experimental. there's no understood model. and, in a real sense, i'm trying to accomplish the impossible. i get all of this. but, i've learned a few things along the way and hope that i can apply them.

but, it was the profile pic change that killed me. and, that's a really sad reflection of society - style meant everything, substance meant nothing.

https://plus.google.com/b/115697117379871673298/+jessicatemporarydeletion/posts/YdtY8RVDqAH

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/2014/10/blog-post_15.html