Woke up feeling super crappy. So, you guys get caught up on my video output two days early. Huzzah.

First up, some freaky ass space music :

My playing around with low tempo again. I just can’t resist. Things get so weird when you slow shit down that much. And kind of majestic. And, to be honest to the point of bluntness, the lower the tempo, the fewer things I have to come up with to fill my one minute for the day.

Not at all proud of that, but until my mental and physical health stabilize, some days you are going to get minimum effort, and others you will get my very best.

Most days will be in between, of course.

I’m doing okay with the CPAP. But I need to do better. Right now, I definitely put it on when I go to sleep at night. But if I get up to pee or eat, I don’t usually put it back on.

And I wonder why I wake up feeling like used shit?

So I have to crack down on myself. The thing goes on no matter what. If I sleep, it’s with CPAP. Period.

I talk to myself a lot on this blog.

Next vid : given what I confessed above, I am especially embarrassed to admit : more music.

But at least I included some other stuff!

Hmmmmm. Love that organ riff, been wanting to use it for a while. But I am not sure that vocal sample really works with it. And the whole thing seems sort of low density and unfinished.

At least I gave people some cool optical illusions to look at while they are not quite entertained by the music. I like my text explanations. I didn’t plan it that way, but they ended up coming across as quite surreal, at least to me. Looking at something while the text tells you what your eyes are lying to you about.

Makes me wish I had done a voiceover for them. Just a calm, neutral, precise voice telling you strange truths in plain language. The voice of HAL from 2001 would be perfect.

On the home front, I have been trying my best Google Fu to try to find scholarships, bursaries, et al to bolster my education fund. I figure, why have more student loan debt than necessary? And I did find a few things, so…. good on me, I guess.

One more piece of my original music :

I am proud of that one. It’s far from perfect… there’s holes in the beat that I could not figure out how to fix without throwing the whole thing off kilter, and obviously, not everyone is going to get behind the whole machine sound.

But still, I am proud, because it’s innovative, complex, and was a lot of fun to do.

The pictures of machine shops are just there to give people something to look at. The bit at the beginning about machines making music when we’re not looking came about purely because I miscalculated the number of pictures of machine shops I would need, and didn’t feel like opening my browser again to get more, so I had two slides worth of content missing.

So I put whatever popped into my head in there, and that happened to be some BS about machines coming to life and making music.

I’d already called the piece Music of the Machines, so it wasn’t exactly a huge leap.

They say success comes from hard work and innovation, and I suppose that’s true most of the time.

But sometimes, it’s innovation and laziness.

Our next piece is…. NOT MUSIC! It’s me talking.

Check it out, man. Production values! Not just me talking uploaded raw, but me talking with intro and outro and my snarky little Colbert’s “The Word” style commentary, which in my head I often here in the voice of Pat Cashman.

There’s no internal edits, granted, because I didn’t see any big errors, but listening to it now, there were some small ones that I could have snipped out to get rid of a few ums and ahhs and broken up the flow just enough to give the thing texture.

One of these days, I will get around to using my tablet and webcam together to finally have the two-camera effect I have wanted for so very long.

I would basically be using my tablet as the main camera and the webcam for asides and such. The tablet takes higher quality video than my rinky dink little webcam, so it has to be the main. But I think the change in quality when I switch to webcam footage will help cement it as a different POV.

It makes me happy just thinking about it. It would be just like TV!

And that means a lot to me.

Finally, we have our sneaky ulterior motive for wanting to do this video shit today : this video!

I am crazy proud of that. That looks practically good enough to actually share with strangers. I worked very hard on it last night and I adore it. I adore it because I actually went to the trouble of adding the content I have wanted to see in my own stuff after seeing it in other people’s similar content.

Yeah, I am not the first person to think of doing the “what the lyrics sound like to me” video. Hardly a surprise. And other people illustrated their silly lyrics. And before last night, I told myself that I didn’t have the energy to do that.

But last night, I sat down with Google Image Search and got my goddamned pictures. And it was a lot of work, but it wasn’t horrendously difficult. In fact, once I got warmed up, it was kind of fun.

And all because I did my blog writing in the afternoon so I would have all evening to work on video,

So I did the lyrics part, the text, then took a break, then did the pictures.

This could be the beginning of a brand new level of quality for me.

And all it cost me was time and effort that would have otherwise been wasted doing nothing.

Right on, Black Rain!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.