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surprise! album out today. it's bandcamp friday. available everywhere except spotify in a few days. you can visit my website for more info but i haven't put a page up for this one yet. thanks for listening

historically low covid hospital admissions this week. we haven't had fewer than 6000/wk since the onset of data

wastewater not as historically low, there's a handful of times it's been lower

this is a sign of decreasing immediate severity, but says nothing about longterm effects

I HATE EFFECTS CHAINING!! just rendered a project four times because i had the compressor after the limiter. sitting my dumb ass here going "WHY IS IT STILL CLIPPING." god

one of the stupidest music production tips i know is that you have to leave 200 milliseconds of silence at the beginning of the track or the first sound won't play every time. they don't teach you this at harvard business school

this is a lot like saying "one of napoleon's greatest generals" or "the most respected cryptocurrency exchange"

there's this thing that used to happen in music, mostly in the 90s i think, where a major label but not mainstream act (there were a lot of these at the time, labels used to believe they could just send talent scouts out anywhere and pick up as many people as possible and hope that one of them had it. this worked really well for a while until they realized you can just tell people someone has it and bring in the daughter of the guy who just bought 3% of the company) would see greater success when their work was recontextualized. this is not so different from how it is now really, except that you have to build your own studio and following before they'll pay you any attention

this scouting process happened to solicit a lot of singer-songwriter-producer auteurs who went off to record on a harpsichord and left the churchyard bull braying on the finished track and the label executives went "oh god. oh fuck. um. can we do a remix" and that's how tori amos and armand van helden got their only #1 billboard dance chart single

this is also what happened to suzanne vega with tom's diner, the original was an acapella hidden track at the end of the record. it's like then why did you bring in an auteur. it's like the difference between creativity and genius -- a creative finds it hard to hold themselves back from sheer volume of output, genius is an externally imposed notion in relation to the finished work. like there's the whole editing room floor left out of the picture there do you see what i mean. you have to put up with creatives when they're being weird if you want to evaluate any of their work as genius later

this is all garden variety cost cutting measures. the music industry used to have characters, now all they have is a brand. they invented boybands because of what a headache the alternative singer-songwriters were. imagine managing fiona apple and she comes in and says she wants to do tin pan alley and you shelve the project and then everybody starts mailing you apples

joe biden and elizabeth holmes in 2015

there's this tentpole of the mythology of capitalism that encourages you to see others "who do not make any effort to change their circumstances" as being in some way "deserving of their station." it allows you to write off all the attendant horror of the system as not really that big of a deal because it's only happening to people who brought it upon themselves. this is uniquely dehumanizing to not only those who are devalued in this way but also to those who perceive them as such. to sort people into categories of deserving and undeserving is the seed of eugenics taking root, and this is one reason why fascism is an inevitability of capital, along with inequality and monopoly. this is also one of the reasons i think liberalism purports to be so shocked when it sees fascism arise, it accepted the belief without following it to its logical end

i've said it time and time again for almost a decade now but for people who choose to accept these beliefs, most important point #1 is they want to be there, and point #2 is they're desperately searching for any reasoning that would allow them to feel morally placid about it, or at least righteously outraged or something. the content, the quality, the raw logic of the reasoning does not matter at all, what matters is that it provides justification for what they already wanted to do

having trouble staying motivated to work out. keeping track and making a chart had me riding on the high of making line go up for a couple weeks but it's gotten harder. i don't mean the physical activity itself, which like it has and should, marginally and progressively, but i mean it was easier to go through the motions for the first couple weeks (of keeping track) and i've hit a wall again where i have to wheedle and cajole the part of myself that thinks it's going to win out and do nothing instead of just getting up and doing it. so it goes with anything, but the really funny parts of this are a) keeping track has enabled me to recognize that i'm upset about taking it easy as opposed to taking a whole rest day and only pressing over a hundred benches instead of over two hundred yesterday, and b) getting noticeable results is doing NOTHING to motivate me. that one's really a surprise. finally getting it together and beating the emaciated allegations and who even cares. like obviously. of course. you can't press 2500 benches in three weeks and not progress. amazingly, this changes nothing about how i feel, which if i'm being honest probably has more to do with some unrelated thing that beggars complexity of explanation. but suffice to say, je kunt de hond niet temmen en de wolf houden denk ik

i don't think i have seen the defense secretary interrupted at a hearing before

it's been a year and i'm still sitting here saying "i could never love you because your life is too sad" like i've become an echo of the last thing that happened to me because i haven't really taken it upon myself to seek out any new experiences or meet new people since then. it truly changed my risk analysis. if people are capable of acting like that then i don't need anything from any of them. this is of course ridiculous because i've also fucked at least a dozen other men since then including one who simply had a wrong number (blanche devereaux voice) oh don't look so shocked rose i was watching creepy pasta about internet conspiracies and i had just said to myself out loud "the only thing that could make this more alarming is a text message from an unidentified number" and wouldn't you know it but that's exactly what happened. well what would you have done