Hurricanes and Halloween
We have another "life stuff" month for the October newsletter, which is why it's coming in November, but at least it's new stuff largely brought on by Hurricane Helene. The hurricane flooded much of North Carolina. I'm a long way from it, but the main grocery store I go to is based there and they just got card payments back online as I draft this in early October. Stock disruptions were still visible in the gaps in shelves of every grocery store in the area even now as I finish this newsletter up on November 3.
I did manage to get one long-deferred task done: some of my old albums from previous music projects are now back up on my main Bandcamp page.
Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 9, 2024
Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 9, 2024
Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 9, 2024
Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 9, 2024
Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 9, 2024
There's more, but I'm thinking in terms of what best represents my current aims and history as a musician. If you want everything up to about 2023, that's available in The Vault. $10+ supporters get it along with their subscription.
On the subject of music, this was one of the first melodies I made that made any sense. I didn't know what glide or monophonic meant, but I did know it sounded great with some bee related preset for Mojito in Studio One.
Now I know a little more and I think made it better. The full thing is patron-only, but anyone can listen to a short preview.
I was reminded of a Yokai called Mikoshi-nyūdō. From the wikipedia article:
Mikoshi-nyūdō (見越し入道 or 見越入道) is a type of bald-headed yōkai "goblin" with an ever-extending neck. In Japanese folklore and Edo period (1603–1868) kaidan "ghost story" texts, mikoshi-nyūdō will frighten people who look over the top of things such as byōbu folding screens.[1] The name combines mikoshi 見越し (lit. "see over") "looking over the top (of a fence); anticipation; expectation" and nyūdō 入道 (lit. "enter the Way") "a (Buddhist) priest; a bonze; a tonsured monster".[2]
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
In an extremely "yes! that's a thing I've been thinking about too but wasn't sure how to articulate" post, an ancient blog concludes with an extremely blog sort of post.
On Substack, the mere prospect of making money reliably (something the blogosphere was spectacularly shitty at, and remains so in its dotage) seems to get people to adopt a more respectable demeanor, and second-guess the shitposting instincts that would have served them well in the blogosphere at its peak. The blogosphere didn’t so much move to Substack as get gentrified by it, much as they’d like you to believe it did. And many of us transplanted bloggers got a shave and haircut, put on a suit, and went to work there, shoulder-to-shoulder with the old media types we once maintained ritual rivalries with, but are now increasingly indistinguishable from.
I don't know if social media is as doomed as this post presents it, but I do think its headed into the same place of faded importance as old guard media before it. Things are changing and I'm not quite sure what the future looks like. It feels like the 2000s in that way: new technologies are swirling around us, new applications of old technologies are giving refuge to people who are tired of it all and just want a weird little hole to chat in, and the rest of us are nearly adrift waiting for the wind to change. The resurgence of Gopher and the return of webrings on Neocities is neat, but I don't think it's for me. My days of 88x31 buttons in the sidebar are past.
I do know I've shifted to thinking of this as a place to put ideas I keep having where in a distant past I used a blog the way I use social media now: as a place to share random thoughts, respond to other people's ideas, and find new stuff.
Lots to think about.
Venkatesh Rao
A necessary counterpoint to the last section from someone who found a future in a return to blogging. It's a good read, but this part stood out:
This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is gone. What is the experience of asking for something to appear and then instantly receiving it? What changes between the thought and the manifestation? I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves. But then, what does it mean to be unchanged, for your feet to pass so lightly over the ground they don’t so much as disturb the sand? Even the dead make change in the world, as their bodies decay and and are transformed into food for beasts and bugs and trees. But in eliminating the effort, in refusing the temporality of making, the outcome of an “AI”-driven creative process is a phantasm, an unsubstantiality, something that passes through the world without leaving any trace. A root that twists back upon itself and tries to suck the water from its own desiccated veins.
