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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
i mean, you gotta understand that a big part of what i'm doing right
now is saving the comments before they disappear, rather than deleting
them.
almost everything on youtube will eventually be
deleted. when google+ and youtube were integrated, that didn't matter -
the comments remained on google+. even when the video was removed. i
would not have moved here, otherwise.
but, now there's a link to "view comments on youtube" that just goes to a 404.
if i don't do this, i will lose all of the comments.
and, so why keep commenting here at all?
like, i need to be clear.
i haven't lost a couple of comments.
i've lost hundreds of threads - many that carried on for months, with dozens of people.
hundreds of pages worth of writing.
hours - days, weeks - of my time.
and, i'm not happy about that.
if you're a heavy user of the comment section on youtube, take a flip through your google+ profile. it's no doubt a bloodbath.
this isn't a safe place to type.
so, it's kind of wrongheaded for you to think i'm destroying my profile.
i'm saving my writing.
i've
cleared off the first six months of 2014. and, even with the dozens of
threads that i've lost, it's over 280 pages. that suggests i should get
over a thousand pages off by the time i'm done - and that i've lost who
knows how much.
what i'll say, at least, is that most
of what i've lost seems to be related to album discussions rather than
politics. i'm not crying persecution or anything. i'm not being
targeted. it was just incredible incompetence on the programming side of
things, and it's left me with absolutely no confidence in the platform.
again:
up until a point in late august, 2015, videos going down did not
delete the comments. so, comments could be made safely at youtube with
the understanding that they would be archived at google+. with no
warning that i received, the products were separated at the snap of a
finger and all of the archived comments were deleted. these were
comments that the previous system had safely stored in the google+
profiles, even though the videos were down.
the reality is that the separation deleted large amounts of google+ content.
i've
been posting hyperlinks at google+ since, waiting for a youtube comment
feed to appear. it's not happening. so, i'm cutting my losses and
getting out.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
as i've explained a few times, this page will relaunch once it's wiped - before july, anyways. probably more like april. but, it will be focusing purely on a perspective of 1996, moving forwards.
you know where my vlog site is.
the following page, however, may be a better continuity, as it will explore my cd collection - records i've actually purchased at some point.
as i'm going through and archiving posts one by one, i'm running
across some videos that are set to "private". i cannot access these
discussions.
this is different than videos that have
been deleted or profiles that have been removed. unfortunately, google
fucked this up. before it disentangled youtube from google, those posts
could be read on google+ - even if the videos had been deleted. now,
they've been removed along with the videos.
part of the
reason i moved to youtube was because i liked the integration. part of
the reason i'm moving out is that the separation makes the platform
useless. as these posts come down, the comments will disappear and
become unrecoverable. so, what's the point of making them?
examples of destroyed content:
1)
i had a long discussion about punk rock on a video for death. this was
permanently destroyed when the video was taken down on copyright
infringement.
2) i had a long discussion about language on a video for la dispute. destroyed, in a copyright takedown.
so, why would i continue to use the platform when i know the content will eventually be destroyed?
i'm
going to put out a public request that the videos set to private are
temporarily republished (and i'm informed of it) so that i can get the
conversation out. as the page strips down, these posts set to private
will reveal themselves as all that is left.
i'm not going to be able to recover any of this.
another thing that's happening repeatedly is that threads that i muted have evaporated altogether.
as
a consequence of all of this, i've actually made the decision to
refrain from using the comments section at all. google/youtube does not
seem to have the slightest interest in developing the platform as a
permanent record. to be frank, i'm not sure what the point of having
comments is at all if the author is to lose all their content at the
whim of somebody else.
once this page is wiped down, i
will be commenting entirely on my own site - and those comments will be
sent out solely through rss.
please follow my lead on this. let's decentralize...
i'm
not going to pretend that i thought the move to google/youtube would be
permanent. but, it's absolutely inconceivable - and totally
unacceptable - to have entire conversations disappear like this.
i
mean, imagine waking up and finding out that half of your facebook
profile had just disappeared because of copyright claims. or that all of
the tweets that you made about a specific topic have evaporated.
they
had a good idea in integrating. it's not up to me to tell them how to
run their network, either. but, the way they separated the two products
was a disaster.
i would have never moved here if it
wasn't for the integration - i want a feed of my comments. and, i gave
them some time to work it out. but it's not being fixed. so, i'm out of
here.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
streaming media sites like spotify are not the future of independent music. rather, what i'm doing at this very moment - telling you to buy a couple of my records or to stop wasting my time, to fuck off and to stop following me on the internet - is the future of independent music.
as consumers, you have a choice to keep art alive. if you choose not to do this, the era of art as an accessible product for middle class consumption will end. the era of consumption will end, altogether.
this is the future that the internet is leading us towards:
Music is banned in Khomeini's Iran On the grounds that it stimulates the brain We've done him one better in the land of coke & honey using music to put people's brains to sleep
Ever wonder why commercial radio's so bad? It's 'cause someone upstairs wants it that way If the Doors or John Lennon were getting started now The industry wouldn't sign 'em in a million years
So what do we get GOVERNMENT MUSIC Christian censorship and taxed blank tapes Shoppers strung out on our false hopes Will flock to obey
i've got a start on wiping the old deathtokoalas profile. the videos are all gone. the truth is that it's going to be a while.
on second thought, i'm going to wait for this page because i'm going to have to do it all over again when i finish the period one disc, anyways.
i'm just going to get right to wiping out the deathtokoalas page, instead.
i just finished wiping/cleaning my main profile. that's done. this is up next. and, that will be it for my facebook wipe. it will be monthly cleaning after that.
this page will continue to exist as it does. i will create a new page for the alter-reality.
i've changed the profile to
allow for my birth date, which is 1981, to be public. that's not an
error. i am actually 35 years old. really.
i'm entirely
aware that i literally look half of my age. or, let me rephrase that. i
look precisely like a fashionable (and single) 35 year old woman - but i
can very easily be mistaken for an unruly-looking 17 year-old boy. is
that really particularly unusual?
while i acknowledge
that there are some advantages to looking young, especially considering
that i do not at all act my age, i also need to point out that i'm at
the age where a significant generation gap exists. i'm not 17 years old.
i'm 35 years old. i identify as generation x (people born from
1965-1985). that might be your parents' generation. and, i'm
consequently a little bit leery about being hit on by 17 year-olds. or
25 year-olds, for that matter. of either gender.
and it does happen. which is why i'm pointing this out.
so,
yeah. i'm old. we don't need to draw attention to it. but, it would be
nice if we all realize it. if you see me out or about, just understand
that i'm there to see the show and nothing more.
no: i don't want to hang out with a bunch of kids. i'm friendly. sure. but, no.
no: i don't want to get hit on by kids.
and, no: i'm not going to hit on children.
but,
when you center your life around music as much as i have, you don't
grow out of it. it's a lifelong thing. i'll be continuing to attend
small shows when i'm 50, so long as i don't get bounced. not for the
people, and not for the scene. just for the tunes.
this message will self-deconstruct....
it's not just an internet/distance thing. don't be embarassed if you thought i was in my 20s or younger. i get it all the time.
when
i went to see jimmy chamberlain a few months ago, i ended up having a
smoke outside with a kid from in the bar. i could see he was in his late
teens. i ended up giving him a pumpkins lesson (he was there to see the
sax player). but, his jaw just dropped when i told him my age - because
it opened up a generation gap. he thought he was talking to a peer, at
first. then, he felt like he was talking to an adult, and that changed
his entire perspective of the situation. he visibly didn't like the idea
of "smoking an adult".
then there's the kid in the
unit upstairs. he seems to be in high school. and, it took him over two
years for him to realize i wasn't in his age group. he seemed offended
that i was keeping my distance. he kept obviously waiting for me to ask
him to come hang out. but, i hardly want to hang out with the high
school kid upstairs. it's just that he had no idea, right. he can't be
more than 18, but he interpreted me as in his peer group; the feeling
was not at all mutual - i immediately interpreted him as a kid. a few
months ago, i gave him a link to my bandcamp site and i think he finally
figured it out, because he's seemed more cognizant, since.
so,
it's not just you. it's everybody. online. in real life. it's just how i
look. and, in fact, it runs in the family - it's those finnish
bottleneck genes. everybody from finland is like this.
