Here we go again!

First up, more music, of course!

How depressing. I remember being so pleased with that piece when I finished it. But listening to it now, it’s not nearly the finely crafted bit of clockwork I thought it was. The timing is off, and the integration is sloppy.

Oh well. At least people also have fun “not what it looks like” and others kinds of type pics. And I am sure I am being harder on my tunes than any listener.

But that’s what it is like to be a creator. For anyone else, it’s just art. But for you, it’s a part of yourself.

Next, another long talker. Twelve minutes!

Probably could have been eight minutes if I planned these things out. But that ain’t gonna happen, at least, not until I am way more emotionally stable. Right now, planning things out robs me of the motivation to do them and gives my neuroses a chance to attack the whole idea and make me feel like the whole thing is stupid and not worth doing and I might as well give up.

It’s a script they know all too well. All I can do is deny them the opportunity.

Our next act is me talking again, but even less coherently.

Glad to see my little attempt at adding some scenery to the vid worked. I don’t know what I thought it might not. I know where the front facing camera is on my tablet. If it is pointing out the window, I’m golden.

Maybe next time I do a vid on the bus, I will just slap my tablet up against the window for the whole thing, and only appear as a voiceover. Give the whole thing the feeling of a documentary, kinda.

Or I could add some Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, throw a black and white film stock filter on it, and boom, it’s the opening to Kids In The Hall.

Next up, a talk I felt very strongly that I should do :

That rambled on even worse than usual. Oy. I get the feeling that my ideas about motivation were not quite done yet when I took them out of the oven for that talk, and so you folks got some half-baked ideas for your troubles.

Oh well, there’s good stuff in there. If you want to be motivated to do something, you already are. There’s no difference between wanting to want something and wanting it.

Next up, I get all perverted with a cartoon. Twice!

That’s quite good animation and art for Russia in the late 50’s. Clearly they were trying to do Disney. Instead, they ended up with something that, to me at least, looks like Easter product packaging come to life.

The original cartoon is much longer, of course, but here’s the thing. The bunnies don’t talk. At all. So all I had to work with was the creepy little girl.

Still, I love how gentle it is. There is zero violence or anger. Just bunnies, a little girl who doesn’t quite understand about pets yet, and a little rescue.

Next up, music with a twist : lyrics!

Of sorts. I do hope people can make out what the robot brothers are saying. The text to speech built into the program I use to compose is not the most sophisticated in the world. I looked around for something better, but all I found were sites you can type text into all right, but it doesn’t output to a file and hence would be a serious pain in the ass to use in my composing.

More music, no lyrics :

Musically very… odd. Angular, and sort of off key sounding, but not entirely unpleasant. If anyone complains, I will just tell them it’s experimental.

That covers just about anything.

Oh, and once more, don’t ask me about the title. It’s not based on anything except the words that popped into my head when it came time to give the damned thing a name.

I really love that I found a very literal interpretation of the title to use as the background image for the vid. Google Image Search did not fail me.

Bext up, the truth about terrorism :

I think the public, by and large, doesn’t think terrorism is important any more. They are more worried about economics, because unlike terrorism, bankruptcy happens. Loss of social status happens. Middle class people slipping into the working poor happens. And parents watching their children flounder in an economy that doesn’t have any room from them happens.

Problem is, all that shit we tacitly agreed to when we were scared of terrorism is still there, soaking up our hard earned tax money and doing absolutely nothing to make anyone safer.

They have our money. They don’t give a shit what we think any more.

Next, another million dollar business idea I am too lazy to pursue :

I like this idea of a cruise ship lifestyle on land. What’s wrong with the idea of an all-inclusive residence? Who wouldn’t want to come home to that kind of easy living? Cooking, cleaning, laundry, everything, all taken care of by the system so you don’t have to take time away from your life to get the little things done.

Of course, like any cruise ship or all-inclusive resort, you would be basically living in a functional socialist city-state.

But people don’t like thinking about that.

Finally, some mellow music to play us out :

Pretty darn groovy, if you ask me. One thing about these low tempo tunes is they give me fewer opportunities to fuck things up. The reasons are technical, but let’s just say that the lower the tempo, the less I have to invent.

Well, that’s it for this trip to Video City. I have a busy evening ahead of me and I haven’t even done today’s video yet, so I had better get down to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry it’s been so long, should do these more often, not that hard to post a video after I do it, blah blah blah.

WARNING : As usual, lots of music, but at least a lot of them have slideshows now.

Starting up, we have this sweet little number, A Special Treat.

Funky, fun, not the tightest integration ever, but still quite pleasant.

As you can tell, when I can’t think of a title, I use one that refers to whatever audio clip I have used to end my tune. I use audio clips because it’s a lot easier than figuring out how to end the damn thing.

Next up, we have “Lead In The Chimney, Same As The Door”.

Like I say in the YouTube description for this piece, that is literally the first thing that popped into my mind when I was trying to come up with a title for this piece. And this worries me.

But it was too weird and specific not to use.

Not my best work. It’s fast, but that’s about it. Well, and a certain amount of craftsmanship. But otherwise, it’s just overcaffeinated twitchy garbage.

Damn I am harsh on myself. Lighten up, me!

Next, I get all serious about homelessness and humanism and status and stuff.

This is what happens when you start off a talk without an end goal in mind. But I have given up on end goals because there’s almost no chance I will actually end up there.

Every time I start talking, it’s an adventure.

Given that, it is surprising how good those talks of mine end up being. They are usually a lot more coherent than other ramblers, at least. I’d love to be able to produce tightly edited, fully realized, popcorn sized content bites, but at least point in my life, I don’t have it in me.

But some day I will!

Next we have me messing around with foreign language video by adding my own subtitles, this time to a trailer for a German cyberpunk movie from 1981.

I had agreed to work my magic on that trailer before I realized it didn’t have much speech in it. So what you are seeing there is absolutely every second of speech in the trailer for Decoder.

As for the content, I have two main methods when it comes to doing those. I either make up an absurd story based on what’s in the video, or I base the subtitles on what it sounds like they are saying.

This one was mostly the latter, thus, more random-ish.

Back to music : “The Key To Parenting”.

Gah, that was awful. Oh well, they can’t all be gems. ^[1] It definitely seems to me that things sound good in my head, while I am making them, that are actually absolute crap.

I feel lucky that any of it comes out okay. I mean, intellectually, I know that all good art comes from making enough bad art to get good at it, but yikes.

Next up is another talker, and warning, it’s over ten minutes long. Apparently, I had a lot more thoughts on the subject of workplace social dynamics than I thought.

That’s how I look with the overhead light and my bedside light AND YouTube enhancement!

Maybe I should dye my beard blonde.

We would be a lot better off if we took off our individualist blinders, accepted that we are social animals not rugged individuals, and stop pretending that nothing exists outside personal concerns.

We are more than an aggregation of individuals. We are social, we are connected, we need one another.

We are human.

Next up, wistful melancholy.

Hmph. I swear, the mix favored the piano more when I composed the damn thing.

I have had those utterly gorgeously sad piano sample for a long time, and that night, I decided to use them. And it would have been gorgeous if I had gotten the volume balance right.

As is, it’s pretty but disjointed and unbalanced. Despite all my efforts, the non-piano elements overwhelm the piano part rather than enhance them.

So much of my creative output would be great if I just took more time with it.

Maybe Kwantlen will teach me to not be in such a hurry to be “done”.

Next up, music…. and astrology!

As many of you know, I am an expert astrologer. Initially, I picked it up from my sister Anne, but then went on to study more on my own, and I know it more or less inside out now.

So in retrospect, it’s obvious that I would be unable to post Vallejo’s Zodiac without saying something about each sign.

As for my little piece of music, not bad. Better than some of the other stuff I am posting tonight.

Not sure those machine-gun strings were a good idea. Oh well.

I have no idea why there is no title for this talk.

I could have called it “Listen To Their Day”, or something.

People don’t really get this point, even though we talk about the value of listening all the time. Since at least the time of Dale Carnegie and his book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, we have been telling each other that we really should listen to one another, but we don’t do it because we are so goddamned spoiled that the idea of enduring half an hour of listening to someone who isn’t as fun as television seems worse than being asked to donate a kidney.

Finally for night, I go a little nuts with the rhythm.

A lot of my little pieces of music end up sounding like they ended just when they were getting started, but that piece kind of takes the prize for that.

Again, too eager to be “done”. Premature publishing! Maybe I should just think about baseball.

Anyhow, not a bad little piece, feeling of non-completion aside. I absolutely love that crazy, delicate yet driving bongo beat. It needs stronger drums to lend it weight, but it just sounds so cool.

I guess that’s it for now. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow with more video madness.

I saw this whole thing coming.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, it has recently surfaced in the mainstream media that working conditions at these giant Amazon fulfillment centers (basically warehouses where they put your order together and ship it) are terrible. Specifically, it’s a very high-pressure, coldblooded, morale-killing wasteland where employees (all of whom are of low social status, whether it’s working class people or college kids) are held to an inhuman standard of efficiency and a lot of people get ground up and spit out of the system shattered and disillusioned.

I was worried this would happen.

When I first heard that Amazon was building these giant cube shaped fulfillment centers, I got nervous. Large scale facilities have a tendency to become as cold and dehumanizing as something out of Metropolis, and I was worried that even a golden-halo company like Amazon would fall prey to the inherent problems with this particular form of systemization.

Turns out, I was right to be worried.

Then, about a year ago, I started reading personal accounts of what life was like in an Amazon cube, and it confirmed my worst suspicions. Entirely the wrong kind of people were in control, and something akin to a human disaster was the result.

These people are clearly those who think efficiency is measured in numbers and whatever makes those numbers go up is good. Their narrow definition of efficiency ignores non-quantifiable human costs and drives them to demand increasingly inhumane things of their employees and feel nothing but glee at the fact that they made their numbers better.

Then something like a crisis in morale and subsequent breakdown of the entire work environment starts making those numbers go in the wrong direction and they are mystified, absolutely mystified, as to what might have caused it.

Sooner or later, they will blame the workers for not being enough like unfeeling machines and for having pesky needs like humanity, warmth, comfort, consideration, and some kind of sense that the system gives a shit whether they live or die.

Money in, work out! That’s how these people think it’s supposed to be.

So the situation at these fulfillment centers is dire. All the employees are expected to fulfill a very high number of orders per second, despite the fact that their inventory system puts incoming items in whatever space is available and therefore to fulfill one order, you might have to go all over the giant warehouse to get everything. New employees are given a woefully inadequate amount of time to get up to speed, and if they don’t, they are fired and replaced by someone else who is desperate for a job.

See, this, to me, is the real problem with high unemployment. It’s not just that it makes people poor. It’s that it makes them exploitable. The higher the unemployment rate, the shittier the workers can be treated.

And I am sure that’s exactly how the powers that be like it. Quick tip : if you can’t afford to quit your job, then you are not free. The whole premise of labour capitalism is that because you are free to quit a job where you are treated poorly, and this puts pressure on the system to treat their workers better, the workers are free, not slaves.

But how free can anyone be if losing their job will mean their children starve?

Anyhow, back to Amazon. Up to this point in my revelation, a point could be made that the conditions at these centers are harsh and it’s a demanding job, but overall it’s not that bad. I mean, some people must be able to meet these goals or the whole system would break down, right? So it’s a tough job, but it pays $15/hour, so it’s clearly worth it to people.

But the thing that clinched it for me, that proved that entirely the wrong kind of people are in charge, was that they have a snitching program, where employees are encouraged, and rewarded, for reporting their fellow workers slacking off and/or breaking the rules somehow.

And there are a LOT of rules.

Now that is out and out lunacy. The literature proving snitch programs are a terrible idea could fill the Grand Canyon. There is absolutely nothing that is a more effective morale killer. Sowing mistrust and paranoia amongst your employees is a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE idea and the very idea that the people in charge of these places would enact a policy that is the most deadly morale assassin known to humanity despite the fact that business literature is nearly unanimous in its opposition to it proves, without a doubt, that there are some cruel hearted bastards who hde their sadism behind their piss poor definition of “efficiency” in charge at these fulfillment gulags.

These bastards are primarily to blame for the problem, of course. But the mother corp bears some responsibility too, for farming the jobs out to these facilities then treating those fulfillment centers as “black boxes” that you never open as long as they continue to give you what you want.

I am sure a lot of the people who have been at Amazon for a long time, well educated middle class Silicon Valley types, are shocked, shocked to find out that the working class people doing the grunt work are being treated poorly. After all, they never told anyone to do that!

But as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Graib, and countless other examples, nobody needs to force evil into existence. All they have to do is set up the conditions for it, and then stop paying attention.

The nerds at Amazon can say, quite truthfully, that they had no idea that any of this was going on. And that’s the problem. They should have known what evils were being done in their name.

But they chose to close their eyes to what was going on inside their fulfillment centers, and as a certain song of which I am fond says, evil grows in the dark.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It just keeps happening.

Might not finish this one in one sitting. For some reason, sitting in front of the computer makes me sleepy now. How the fuck did that happen? It’s not like I use the computer before going to sleep every night. In fact that never happens.

I have a vague idea that it might be due to temperature. Tht’s all I got.

Anyhow, Rapture Palooza. The basic idea is that The Rapture happens, around half the population of Earth got Raptured right into Heaven, and the plagues from Revelations happen. First the locusts, which can talk and tend to shout “SUFFER!” at people, the blood rain, the wraiths (who have a weakness for pot, because honestly, potheads worship any movie with pot references in it), the fiery rocks falling from the sky.

The Antichrist has risen, and chosen to live in the film’s location, Seattle (suggesting it was filmed in Vancouver), because apparently he’s a big Mariners fan. Also in Seattle are two very modern (in other words, sort of depressive seeing) young people whose dreams of having their own food cart (see? Modern!) are smashed by one of those flaming rocks, causing them to finally agree to go to work with the male (Ben)’s dad at the mansion of, you guessed it, the Antichrist. Because wackiness, The Antichrist ends up falling for the female protagonist (Lindsey) and wants to make her the receptacle of his evil seed so she can be mother to a whole host of Devil babies.

Thus, Ben and Lindsey have no choice but to thwart The Beast’s plans or have to face the unthinkable : a pretty white girl having sex with a black dude who isn’t even good looking.

I kid, I kid.

It’s an okay flick, but kind of underwhelming. The two main character’s understated hipster-generation reactions to things and while that fits with how people their age are portrayed in media, it kind of undermines any sort of drama.

I mean, I know it’s a comedy, but there still has to be some sense of tension and risk.

Instead, there is this underinflated feeling to the flick. Listless, even. The movie doesn’t unfold so much as just drift by without making any attempt at eye contact.

And the thing is, on paper, this movie has a lot of things I like in it. It has an amusingly irreverent attitude, it has a great cast (including Rob Corddry as Ben’s father), it has a lot of fun with the whole idea of the Rapture, and it has a lot to do with Heaven, Hell, God, the Devil, et al.

And I love that kind of thing!

But the movie is too listless to connect with emotionally, and so after watching it, all I could say was “Well… that was okay. I guess. ” Which is exactly the kind of lifeless, enthusiasm-free response the protagonists would give.

That is probably not a coincidence. Did we Gen X’ers fuck up parenting so bad that we have raised a generation of depressives?

I mean, Gen X was afraid to show enthusiasm too, but at least we had enough life in us to be bitter.

Anyhow, I can’t really recommend this movie. There are bright spots. Anna Gasteyer does a great job as Lindsey’s mother, the only woman to get Raptured into heaven then sent back. (The movie doesn’t say why, but it heavily implies that she was sent back because she was being nagging and critical of how Heaven was run). As a result, she spends most of her time crying and saying “Why, why, WHY?”

And Rob Corddry is excellent as always as Ben’s dad, a man who literally made a deal with the devil. He’s a terrible parent, but in a funny way, and brings real energy to a movie that needs it very badly.

Plus, there is one little detail they added to the Travails that I thought was funny and well done : foul mouthed crows. Crows that look at you in that crow was and say “Your face is like a pig’s asshole! Your mother eats shit! ” and so on.

And the best part is that they just nailed having the swearing come out in the style of a crow’s caw. If crows could talk, that’s what it would sound like.

Uh oh, ZZZ time. Will finish in the morning.

(—–)

Now where was I? Oh yes.

And the movie isn’t bad, per se. I can’t say I hated watching it. I think my problem is not that it’s a terrible movie, it’s that it could have been so much better if they had just put more effort into it.

Instead, they made a movie that feels like everyone sleepwalked through it except for people like Gasteyer and Corddry, whose roles were small but appreciated for their energy. Otherwise, it feels like everyone showed up and went through the motions, doing what they do, and then went home and didn’t think about it.

Plus, spoiler alert, in the end Jesus, God, and Satan all die (I know, that makes no sense) , and there is this clumsy and heavy handed “But what do we do now? “Live our lives, I guess. ” ending that feels like something an atheist forum would mutter in its sleep before turning over in bed.

All in all, the movie, like its protagonists, couldn’t bother to be particularly good or bad. That would take energy. Instead, it shambles along for a while, then it ends.

I can completely understand why, despite it have a lot of star power, I had never heard of this movie before I saw it pop up in my suggestions on Netflix. I can’t imagine it did very well in the box office. It certainly wasn’t promoted very well.

So no, I cannot recommend this movie at all. You could do worse, but you could do a whole lot better too. Go watch something that at least cares enough to really suck.

Or you could just kick back and watch Mister Show on DVD!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.