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.