>>R.A.N.T.

Sound off, I shall.

[offyerass]

SO DUMB

I’d like to share knowledge, perspectives, creative insights on here, but the fucking reward system for making it show up in people’s feeds is absolutely absurd, and is a game I don’t want to play. You have to come up with click bait first, and then do your stuff. And the stuff you do, well it better be graspable within seconds.  So dumb. 

[offyerass]

Anyways, All This Is SO Useless

What a dump. Social Media and even Google. All algorithms rewarding a popularity contest for more ad dollars.  I think I might go ahead and install Duck Duck Go.

[offyerass]

Remember: SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT REAL LIFE.

Please take care of yourself, and do not turn to social media to fill any void or feelings of emptiness.  None of this is real. The interactions you get with real people in-person is unreplaceable.  The world is a dark and lonely place. But even if you can interact in-person with one person, spend your time and energy on that, rather than this. Unless...

Unless that person is toxic, then let social media be a break from that, but just temporarily, please. Don’t get addicted to it. I am a recovering social media addict. I’ve quit it twice. I’m in a better place with it now, I think.  I’m still navigating and learning.  But as I learn, I want you to remember that none of this is real.  I want to put my arm around you or shake your hand and tell you that THAT moment of contact is real, and even the smartest AI deep learning algorithms cannot reproduce the human touch. I want you to find peace, happiness, joy, a love for life. But don’t look for it here, my dear friend.

[offyerass]

Here’s a video I published tonight. It’s just a silly little thing I did on short power. It’s for my students, but I thought I’d make it public, just for fun.  There are actually 3 things I’m specifically doing that I’m not talking about - that is actually for my students.

[offyerass]

I Hate All The Major Social Media Platforms!!!

It’s been years since I’ve posted on here. I heard Tumblr might be making a little bit of a comeback since Elon Musk has jacked up twitter? Not sure if it’s true, but I heard some rumbling. I’m done with Facebook, I’m off of that thing. So worthless.  And TikTok? FORGET IT. I just cannot do short form content like that. I feel how it can damage people pretty quickly.  Instagram is pretty stupid, too.  YouTube, also jacked up. I just use it as content resources for my students, and if it happens to help with my marketing, great. But I have no real platform to express myself, and sound off. Maybe this will be it. We’ll see. I have a habit of starting and stopping things quickly.  Social media is definitely in a different place than when Tumblr was at its peak. I hope it thrives. It would be nice to have a place to sound off. Now, chances are, no one will see this, because it just doesn’t have good algorithmic content power. And I know ads are a big deal. If I don’t get much in the way of interactions with others on here, and am just left shouting into the abyss, I don’t know how long I’ll stay.  I guess we’ll see. I’d be curious to know others’ experience with Tumblr, and perhaps even stopping it, and then coming back on again.

[offyerass]

UGH!!! I HATE THIS ELECTION CYCLE!!! I WILL WRITE A PROTEST SONG EVERY DAY UNTIL THE FINAL DAY, NOV 8, 2016!!

Are Americans really this fucking dumb to make this a close election??!

I cannot stand it. A racist, sexist, misogynistic, bigoted, child rapist, illiterate, sexual predator, fraudulent con man who mocks disabled people and Gold Star families is somehow more qualified? FUCK YOU. You hate this country, and want to see it die. I really really really want people of color and women to push it over the edge to Hillary. It will be the biggest, most symbolic fuck you to the party of hate. I can’t check thefivethrityeight any more. Shoot, I used to check it all the time in 2012, when the mainstream media said the race is close. Fivethirtyeight said the odds were pretty strongly in Obama’s favor. Now, I can’t look at their site anymore. It used to be a source of comfort. Now it’s a source of discomfort. I hate knowing that the election is this close! That is soooooooo messed up! It should not be this close.  Paul Ryan just voted for Trump, the asshole! You realize, if Trump loses, it is now on his permanent and public record that he supported a racist, sexist, misogynistic, bigoted, child rapist, illiterate, sexual predator, fraudulent con man who mocks disabled people and Gold Star families. Disgusting. I’ll be back tomorrow with another song. They’ll most likely be instrumental, followed by a text flurry of my rantings.

[offyerass]

This one actually has a Red Hot Chili Peppers influence, from their song "Johnny Kick a Hole in the Sky." But you'd never know that unless I specifically told you! So we got some thick distortion sounds thanks to the Fullbore Metal (MXR) distortion pedal. Holy crap, that pedal is genius! It replicates the sound that bands like Hum developed by using huge stacks of Orange amplifiers with crazy pedal setups! The Fullbore Metal sound gives you that scoop you must have for thickening up the bass attack when you chunk on the guitar. I also got the bass to sound a little like the bass in Korn. The Guitar Center people tell me all kinds of retarded things to get my bass to sound like that. They at least geared me to the right pedals. One guy said I needed an overdrive. Another guy said I needed an EQ pedal. Eh?? Well, I figured out what I needed to do: - Drop tune the E string several octaves - Crank the overdrive, a healthy amount of gain but then barely, barely turn the volume knob up. I'm not even talking about halfway to 1, maybe like .3 on the overdrive bass pedal. Seriously. Otherwise the sound is too fuzzy, too thick. - Boost the highs and the lows on the EQ and drop the mids on the EQ pedal. Do one track with a regular tuned bass, and do another track with the E-string-dropped-several-octaves tuned bass, and voila!! My friend, Kaplia Love, sang a really awesomely haunting Indian music riff, and I constructed around it. She sang it to a metronome, so it stayed on beat really well. The bells actually came from my Yamaha DJX keyboard! Old school, right?? It's just a bell tone, that I created a riff with. The gating and stuttering effects came from the studio.HD app on the iPad. It came from the FX tab, it's a really sweet function! Wah pedal was, of course, Crybaby brand.

[offyerass]

DUBSTEP meets INDY ROCK meets INDIAN MUSIC So Dubstep has grown on me. I like its cadence. It's different, and very cool that a new genre has been created, particularly one that speaks to the youth. So here's another attempt at merging my indy rock stylings, using Kapila Love's Indian singing, with some Dubstep elements. I realize pop songs now are using dubstep elements, too. That's cool, I'm all for it. But the problem is, pop songs are generally manufactured products with a lot of executives making decisions. So Dubstep has this machine-like quality to it, so putting that machine-like quality to manufactured music, is, a little, meh. But dubstep combined with music that comes from the soul could be a powerful and interesting combination.  Well anyways, who cares. I'm not a hater of Dubstep anymore. I can generally find my peace with unfamiliar genres of music, if I can find some way to connect/compose with it.  Again, I used studio.HD on my iPad. They have Dubstep elements as prepackaged loops. Kind of a very cool thing for creative folks, it gives us a platform to jump from.

[offyerass]

WHAT THE HELL IS DUBSTEP, EXACTLY???!! Yes, I know, I'm an old fart. I know Dubstep is all the rage with the youngins.  So there's a Dubstep loop "kit" in my studio.HD program for my iPad. I thought I'd try my hand with some of its elements, in combination with what I do.

Dubstep sounds very inhuman to me. It sounds very machine. Nothing wrong with that, I just like the human element to be a little more tangible in music.

So, what you're hearing is my live bass with live guitars, and my friend Kapila Love singing some Sa Re Ga Ma bits from Indian music. My guitars and bass are indy rock in nature. So this is a Dubstep joint with a human feel to it, I guess?? Dubstep sort of sounds like the slowed down portions of drum-n-bass music. I'm not knocking it, I'm just observing. I'll post another Dubstep joint I made, soon. 

[offyerass]

So this track my good friend Scott Elrick and I made has an interesting context to it. Scott and I have been composing music together for literally over 2 decades. It started out, basically with my guitar/amp/line-out, his keyboard, and my 4 track. I think we started in 1991. I know, we're a couple of old farts! We made a few good things. A lot of the stuff we made had some good riffs to it, but quite frankly, the way we put it together sounded like a hot mess. There were a lot of good ideas, but we basically layered THE SHIT out of everything. We're both spazzes, so the idea of "less is more" did not enter into our noggins. Scott and I did music off and on. I would be in bands and stuff, and once in awhile, in the interim between bands, I get together with him and make stuff. My riffs got a little more sophisticated, but it didn't matter, our composing style remained the same- a bunch of decent riffs mooshed together into a cloudy hodgepodge of noise. And we'd feel pretty good about it afterwards, kinda like the way you feel after the final piss you take after unloading a metric ton of diarrhea! I like how different our tastes and influences are in music. We definitely like some of e same things, but when it comes to personal preferences and styles, our top 3 are probably pretty different. Which is actually a fantastic thing, because that makes our collaborative effort that much more unique! Kind of like mating - diversity will yield in some great combinations. Inbreeding will not! So on this track that we created, literally a few days ago, Saturday, Oct 19, 2013, we had a different result for different reasons. Oh wait, I gotta mention this! (Stop whining about the length of this post!) I hadn't composed a whole lot, ever since moving to Austin in 2006. I used to do it all on a desktop computer. When my son jacked up the mic input on my iMac, I had no real desire to fix it, as I wasn't composing as much anyways. When we got an iPad, eventually I thought about the idea of composing on it. Scott, a huge fanboy of everything Mac, said GarageBand is on the iPad. I tried it out, and it was dog shit. I found studio.HD, and loved it! It is loop based, and very user friendly. Unlike fucking GarageBand for the iPad! I hooked up with an old singer friend of mine, Kapila Love, who sings Indian music. Back in Champaign, I sampled her voice for a track. We reconnected a few years ago when she told me she was moving to Texas. She gave me some incredible vocal samples, and I went to town on them! Made 2 albums from them! I was like a junkie in a heroin shop! When creating with her voice samples, on the very cool studio.HD platform on the iPad, I became more aware of putting instrumentation together. And, how to structure music pieces, particulalrly what to direct the listener to. I started understanding dynamics a little better. In other words, I was learning how to turn down the SUCK knob! So, in this piece that I made with Scott, we started out in our typical process. He'd find a beat, and we'd jam on it for a little bit. We started throwing down a few tracks, and Scott was arranging them as we were creating. That's what we always did. This had the potential to be another one of our mediocre tracks with a bunch of random riffs mooshed together. But then, recalling my process with Kapila's voice samples on my studio.HD, I said, "Let's keep making a few more riffs, and then we'll put it all together at the end." So we did. When it was time to put all the riffs together, that was the most interesting part. It turned into a discussion on what fits best where, and what kinds of things did we want to stand out, and what would create a greater impact to the listener. In fact, as we were doing that, we realized things like, "Hmm, if that is the effect, we should add a little more ____." So this was probably one of the more thought out, cerebral pieces we made. Breaking all the elements apart and then figuring out how to arrange them was something we'd never really done before. I'm really happy with the results, particularly since this was the first time we worked like this. I'm looking forward to the next time we do this! I'd like to get our old friend Chad Beckett involved, who's a Morrisy influenced singer!

[offyerass]

Reflecting Any Nebulous Thought

That is what R.A.N.T. stands for. I'm trying to make the transition to tumblr from Facebook. The problem is, I'm old lol. I've got a bunch of friends on fb, and its good that I can keep in touch with them through that medium. But I feel I need a different vehicle to broadcast some of my creativity. Not that I want to get famous for it, but it would be great if eyes who might appreciate some of my creative risks could peer into some of what I come up with. On Facebook, a lot of times, my creative risks fall flat. But, any time I post something about family or kids, I get a lot of attention. That's all good, but I'd also like to potentially foster a community that digs the crazy shit I make up, But damn, dude, Facebook is addictive! I keep posting shit on there. It makes a good family journal. But it's hampering my creativity. I need to get more active on tumblr and twitter. I'm trying. And I know it takes awhile to build a community on these types of networks. Facebook becomes addictive because you know what things to post, essentially, to get your "friends" to react. On twitter or tumblr, if you don't have a community established, initially it feels like shouting into a void. But I guess you have to start somewhere. So, here goes Incidentally, I'm gonna type these posts from my iPad, to get more practice typing with this device. Have had it for 2 years and still not very used to it!

[offyerass]

Thoughts on "Judgmental Austin Map"

I think Albert Bui's "Judgmental Austin Map" is brilliant. It definitely struck a nerve with the Austin community, as it went really viral really quickly amongst Austinites. If you haven't seen it, it is here: http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/197817_595445854957_1779530429_n.jpg 

I'm just thinking, totally stream of conscious, what was it that made this so effective.

For one thing, the labels are hilarious! They are not commonly heard or referred to, but indeed create visuals in the mind.

Obviously, there is some truth behind the labels, which is what amplifies the labels, as it is  recognized by others. Maybe labels isn't the best word...creative classifications. That's way better. These are Creative Classifications.

I think another component that cuts a little deeper is that he calls it "Judgmental". I think most of us would like to be seen as non-judgmental. So the fact that this piece outright calls itself judgmental is funny.

Also, regarding the Judgmental piece, it sort of instantly disarms the criticism of, "Hey you're being judgmental..." And all one has to do is say, "You're absolutely right! It's in the title." So the fact that it instantly rebutts a knee-jerk reaction by its title is pretty funny.

On top of that, Albert Bui is a person of color, so the author of a piece that is judgmental is part of a Minority group. I'm not sure if the humor element would be exactly the same, if the piece were created by a White male. Maybe it would, but I'm not sure.

With the particular creative classifications, one could infer that Bui's political leanings are probably left of center. I think that element also adds to the humor. If this were authored by a more conservative/right wing Asian American, like Michelle Malkin for example, this piece may not have had the same comic element to it...mainly because the right wing and politically incorrect humor tend to be perceived as more hateful. Whether true or not, it seems that that is the perception.

Another thing that I think strikes a chord with people is the state of dissonance it puts us in. The internal dialogue might be something like, "Haha that's hilarious! Oh wait, am I bad for laughing at that?" Sort of the phenomenon of, "If I laugh at a joke that targets a particular group, does that make me a bigot towards that group?" 

My take on that matter is, not if you don't hold ill spirits towards that group. It's fun and even healthy to point out our differences and laugh at them. If you like this map, then you'd probably be more apt to liking a comedian like Russell Peters. He is an Indian-Canadian comedian who does incredible accents mimicking different cultures. He pokes fun at everybody, including himself, and none of it seems like it comes from a place of hatred. I believe this Judgmental Austin Map is in that same ballpark.

Can stereotyping lead to hate? I suppose my reaction to that question is similar to if I think marijuana is a "gateway" drug. It can be if you're sort of unstable to begin with. I give a lot of weight to personal responsibility. Whether skewed perspectives come from group-think, or trying harder substances from peer-pressure, ultimately, you the individual, get to make the choice on how you respond.

I think we have so many comedians from practically every background who joke about themselves and other groups, that perhaps we as a culture have come to a place where it is okay to laugh at these observations. Maybe, maybe not. There is the Michael Richards example to sort of remind us that there is a line.

Reading some of the comments posted for the Judgmental Austin Map, there were definitely the predictable, "Hey I think this is demeaning towards xyz" and the, "Oh, but you left out the blah blah blah" and of course, the classic, "I live in xyz and I am totally not a blah blah blah." 

When you have reactions like that, you know you've become a sensation/lighting rod. The good thing, though, is that it seems like the majority of people commenting on it have a light-hearted attitude about it, and think it is really funny. 

The HEB grocery store classification was a brilliant revelation of how these stores tend to reflect their neighborhoods. 

Those are my most immediate thoughts on the Judgmental Austin Map, and its response. I'd love to hear more thoughts on what made this creation become so viral to the Austin community.