Daily Archives: June 20, 2015

Holy crap, videos!

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It’s… been a while since I posted any videos here, hasn’t it?

Time to fix that.

First, some music :

Kind of an abrupt ending there. I should really give up this “musical minute” idea and just call it “Musical Moments” or something similarly vague. Restricting myself to one minute is clearly not have the desired effect, namely getting me to make higher content density music.

Instead, it just makes me lazier and makes the music more awkward, and leads to me using the same tricks to pad things out every single time. Content density has actually gone down.

So, back to the drawing board on that one.

Next, we got us an SS :

Sarcastic Slideshow, of course. I feel like I have used some of those images before. I should organize my files in a way that I know which ones I have used and which I have not.

I guess I could move the image files into a separate folder after I use them. It would be a lot more work. Currently, I just select a swath of images and add them to the video project, then delete the ones I don’t like from the project (not the HD), and do audio captions for the rest.

Add the opening and closing tiles plus some background music, and abracadabra, you have another hilarious SS.

And now, this tale of woe :

La mort de moi souris d’ordinateur. Everything is okay now. I got a new wireless mouse and it works fine. Ir even takes an AA battery instead of AAA, like my previous wireless mouse, so I have no worries about what happens when the battery runs out.

All I have to do is charge up one of my purple AA rechargeables, and bob’s your uncle.

Say hi to Bob for me.

Next, my thoughts on Super 8 :

Honestly, I am still undecided about the movie. If I was Siskel or, let’s face it, Ebert, I would only be able to give a thumb half-up at best. A lot of it is wonderful but also cheesy and manipulative, and I am stuck between wanting to like it for its Spielbergian goodness and the part of me that just rolls his eyes at how obvious, corny, and at times downright stupid the movie is. It will take me a long time to fully digest that movie.

In a sense, it would be easier if I could just dismiss it cynically. But I can’t.

And now, more music.

I don’t know why I ended up putting in all those Foghorn Leghorn quotes. They just sounded right, I guess. Still, not one of my better efforts, in my opinion. Seems rushed and cheap. I am impressed with the rhythmic structure I built there though. That was one smoking hot beat for a few bars in there. Real pulse quickening stuff.

And now, my thoughts on Sense8.

Honestly, I could go on forever about that show. I am up to episode 9 or so now, and every episode is a wonder and a delight. The show is richly satisfying and the theme of these people from all over the world coming into contact with one another and slowly becoming a part of one another’s lives really appeals to me.

The show is just so… humanist.

And the characters are all very likable. That’s more of an achievement than it sounds like. So many shows do not grasp the need to do that, or lack the ability to make it happen.

But if you expect people to not only care about what happens to the characters but be willing to do through darkness and violence and death and horror with them, they have to be people you love being about.

What’s next…. oh yeah, more music.

A middling effort on my part. Nothing ear-grindingly wrong with it, but nothing particularly memorable about it.

I feel like, at this point, as a composer, I am just flinging myself repeatedly at the wall that has held me back for so long in hopes that I will eventually break through it and my output will match the songs in my head a bit more.

Or at least be more like the sort of music I want to make.

And now, for those who don’t care for music, more music.

But this time, I added random images! (I was SO tired. )

Can’t say I care for it, honestly. Things always go all to hell when I try to do melody. It ends up sounding like shit.

And now, another SS video (I am going to get such interesting traffic now) :

Use the wetness-heat evil. Sage advice. That is truly some of the most marvelously and ornately incomprehensible Engrish that I have ever seen. I wanted to put some oriental-type music behind my poetic reading of the text, but I couldn’t find anything that sounded right to me.

It was all too macho and martial and impressive sounding. Even the stuff that was supposed to be for meditation! I am not sure I ever want to meet the sort of person who finds power-strings and taicho drums soothing.

And now, some fun with interpretive subtitling :

Like I say in the end credits, I am never ever doing one with that many characters and cuts again. It was so hard to know who was talking when, and what was going on. I am pretty sure it will be hard to keep up with the subtitles as a result.

I will definitely stick to two-person scenes from now on.

And finally, a personal news update from a weirdly lit yours truly :

So yeah. Life has been weird lately, and not particularly pleasant or fun, but I am glad stuff is happening to me now and I will do what I can to keep that going.

Slowly, slowly, I prise the jaws of self-destruction out of my flesh. And as I do, I stop being the bone I chew.

And the greater the chance of me actually getting somewhere in life.

All this intellect and talent has to be good for something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

About the Charleston Massacre

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Here we go again.

As one would expect to happen in the wake of a senseless act of brutality, the modern media beehive is abuzz with talk about this latest incident of that peculiarly American specialty, the mass shooting.

Yes, they happen in other places. But they don’t happen five to six times a year anywhere but the U S of A. And I am very happy that President Obama said so in his official response.

The rest of us in the “advanced world” (gonna steal that) have been saying it, or at least thinking it, for many years. If America was a person, it would be a highly unstable lunatic. The lunatic often means well, but ends up doing more harm than good. And as a rule, is very bad at self-control.

Of course, one of the things up for “debate” in the reality-hating world of right wing conservatism is “if” the crime was racially motivated. The evidence is overwhelming that it was. The dude said “I’m here to kill black people. ”

If that’s not evidence enough for you, then you are clearly operating to preserve belief, not understand the world.

Why do people want to deny the racial element? I think it comes down to not wanting to be part of the problem. The Fox News times went right ahead and adopted an absurd form of victimhood in order to achieve this : it wasn’t racist, it was anti-Christian.

I think that, in the Alzheimer’s demographic of Fox News, there is some seriously magical thinking going on. These people think that if there is no racism any more, they themselves are not racist.

They deeply suspect, in that part of their mind they keep locked away that deal with reality, that they really are racist. In fact, they are sure that they are. But that is clearly viewed as extremely wrong by society, and so they can’t admit to themselves that they are, or that any of their friends are.

So they are willing to deny the entire existence of racism just to escape the truth about themselves. Easier than having to change your mind, I suppose. At their age.

However, I think the fact that this crime is racially motivated tend to lead people in the wrong direction. People want to connect this to racism as a whole in order to make sense of this horror, but the truth is, there is very little connection.

Sure, this person was racist. He was also crazy. Racism is simply the form his insanity took. it could have been anti-semitism, sexism, or a deep belief that some people have flies in their eyes and must be destroyed.

Because of all the racial horror happening recently in the USA, it is extremely tempting to connect the dots. And who knows, maybe that influenced his choice of psychotic modalitity. In another time, he might have decided it was hippies that were responsible for all the evil in the world. Or the Illuminati.

But that doesn’t really say anything about the state of race relations in America. Cops killing unarmed black people is extremely relevant to the issue. One lone nut crossing that mysterious line that separates the one who does from the millions that don’t is not at all relevant.

Remember that line. There are, in the world, probably at least a hundred thousand people with the exact same beliefs as this man. But they don’t shoot up black churches. They never will. This guy did.

And nobody knows why.

All we know is that, for some reason, in any population, there is a chance that someone will really, truly, completely believe the things that people only say they believe because it makes them feel better.

If the extreme racists of the world truly believed what this man did, they would all do what he did. It would be the only thing they could do, from their point of view, to stem the rising black tide.

But they don’t do it, because that would be crazy. You can believe whatever the hell you want if you know, deep down, that you will never ever act on it. You can go around thinking everyone with blue eyes has no soul, or that children are parasites, or that everyone is a robot but you, and if it makes you happy to do so and you know you won’t act on it, who cares?

Once you understand ideology as serving emotional need far more often than any attempt to align one’s beliefs with reality, a lot of extreme ideologies make a lot more sense.

Another perennial topic being attached to this incident as people grope for answers to questions that may have no answers is guns and gun control.

I don’t think that has much to do with it either.

His father bought the gun. Background checks wouldn’t have stopped him, unless we were willing to say that anyone connected with a mentally ill person is banned from buying guns. Waiting periods wouldn’t have stopped him. He was crazy when he asked for the gun and he was still crazy when it got it.

There’s not a lot any law can do to keep a father from giving his son a gun. That would have been just as true up here in Canada as it would be down in the USA.

Better mental health services might have helped, especially if there was an early intervention. It’s less clear if they would have done any good with a more recent intervention, though. The truth is, the system only recognizes the criminally insane after they have committed a crime. Before that, they are just the same as a million other people with loose screws.

The only way to truly cut down on these incidents is to lower the societal pressure level. That means turning down the heat, embracing our mutual humanity, and working hard and making sacrifices in order to strive for moderation.

None of those things are American values.

So I return to my original point :

These things keep happening because America is fucking crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.