Wow, I have a lot of poetry to read now. Thanks to everyone who suggested and emailed me stuff. I'll have to ask about good pulpy sci-fi books later.
I'm retiring, says George Michael:
Pop star George Michael is abandoning the music business to release his songs online for free instead.
The multi-millionaire singer said he will never make another album for sale in record shops because he does not need the cash and does not enjoy fame.
Fans will be given the option to make donations online in exchange for downloading the tracks, and the proceeds will be given to charity.
Neato.
Hope everyone has a great Christmas!
Anybody complaining about the current state of the American music industry should read this Billboard article about Iraqi pop stars:
Yousef fled the country after Uday had a group of girls beat him up at a concert, Khaled said. Former workers at Shebab recall other incidents, one involving Uday urinating on a singer.
and:
Like other exile singers, Bahr would return each year to sing for Saddam. "We had no choice so I think we can be forgiven. Most people understand this," he said.
Thankfully the RIAA has never urinated on me or had girls beat me up.
Your 99c belong to the RIAA - Steve Jobs. This article in The Register is a little cynical sounding but it opens with a quote I like:
Wasn't the Internet, this weightless kingdom of bits and bytes, supposed to make distribution costs just vanish?
The author of this article seems really deeply angry at major record labels and possibly just angry in general. He also seems totally bewildered at some basic ideas in business. But I think I sympathize in that I find this whole iTunes universe totally bizarre and unnatural. To me it seems too much like the old decidedly F'd up model dressed up to look like something new. Maybe it'll stick, but right now it just feels like a step backwards to me and that technology + progress is going to lay the smack down on it any day now.
I've hastily put together a gallery finally. It has some art and things that nice folks have sent in. If anyone has anything to add, it would be awesome of you to send it in.
This has been a tremendously awful week. Staggering proportions of suck. The Outside the Inbox master will be mailed to Cafe Press tomorrow providing I don't die on the way to the post office.
Well, I thought I was going to be really hard-up for songs for Outside the Inbox but at the last moment lots of submissions came in and they are so awesome. A few people have asked for some more time so if you thought your dreams of being on the compilation was lost forever, hurry up and it can still be a reality.
Here's a fun thread from Homerecording.com which illustrates an interesting songwriter phenomenon I've encountered. In my experience, when you start talking about structures and formulas and tricks and techniques around musicians and songwriters and music fans, everyone who cares enough about the subject to hear you out almost always goes totally insane.
I don't really understand why that is, but I've never found a songwriter forum anywhere that had people who seemed interested in figuring out how you make songs entertaining for people. I secretly believe that the people who know about such things purposefully fill up songwriting forums with crazy ramblings about muses and souls.
Now that I have outed the conspiracy I believe I will be assassinated.
Almost every time I start to do anything creative I look around to see if a decent generator is available to help me out. I don't know why, but this is how I wound up writing and running a comic strip generator, which turned out to be about a kabillion times more work than just coping with putting clipart together in Photoshop. Lyrics are one area where I'm constantly looking into generators and tools and toys for some automated inspiration and am almost always disappointed. The Google searches have been the same for years, and even before that, the same group of DOS programs were kicking around the public domain BBS scene.
The best one I've ever used is Babble by Korenthal Associates in 1991. It's really almost perfect as far as I'm concerned. It allows you to load text files in and then mix them on the fly as you would audio on a mixing board, controlling the levels of the text files in the generated output and at the same time its overall coherence. It has logging, display speed control, even a whole bunch of goofy fun text effects if you want to make your generated text sound like Elmer Fudd dialogue.
The only problems are the limitations. You can only load four text files in at a time and they can't be very large. I'm not sure what the actual memory limit is, but one 100k file analyzed at high resolution won't even fit in memory. Twelve years ago that was an understandable limit, but I have a massive amount of memory on this machine and I'd like to use it to generate crazy nonsense, please.
But yet since 1991 nothing else interesting seems to have come along (on the PC at least). William S. Burroughs and David Bowie have both brought cut-up technique to reasonably mainstream attention and it seems like language nerds should have been all over this by now. I can't be the only person interested in this.
NSKit, some really good and free acoustic drum samples:
the aim: to create the best sampled acoustic drum-kit available on the net for free. or maybe just the best sampled drum-kit, period.
I have been busy and tired and annoyed. My modem, which half blew up a month ago, blew up the rest of the way this morning. It seems like every time I leave here and come back, something is a little bit more broken. I'm beginning to suspect people are breaking in here and using my stuff just a little bit too hard. I've been trying to put my little album compilation together, which has been about 50/50 good experience and neurotic waste of time experience.
I had a three day addiction to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City which is now thankfully over.
I've been reworking the forums on Stripcreator to deal with community issues. The forums really get only a fraction of the traffic compared to the rest of Stripcreator and yet they are a million times more annoying to maintain.
I keep almost posting things here, but they're all links stolen from Scott Andrew.
Here's a link to some free one-shot drum samples for Muzys, Reason and/or DR-008.
Found here. Made with this, by this guy.
As prophesied, my song I Think I Started A Trend has taken a tumble on somesongs. It's down to #4 for the week, with a 7.5 score. Pretty neat stuff.
My last sound card related entry in this journal ended on a hopeful note. That was a lie sent to me by God to destroy my mind and soul. In the end it turned out that 12ms was the latency I could use without it clicking, which was about what I was getting on my Darla24 with WDM drivers. So then I decided to try the SPDIF from my Boss GT-6 to the Mia, hoping that digital audio would provide more awesome clarity and thereby justify keeping the Mia. Sure, about the same latency, same driver issues, but hey, SPDIF. I hooked it all up and not only was the sound quality not really significantly better in my opinion, but there were tiny little clicks recorded with the audio.
I had had just about enough clicking. I tried to isolate the problem, failed, decided to be done with all of this bullshit and return it. On Saturday I returned the card and found out I could only get store credit, which is something I had suspected. So I ask them to recommend me another card to try out and they suggest the Audiophile 2496. It was $50 cheaper, so I took a chance on it.
I brought it home, installed it. First of all, I noticed no real significant sound quality difference other than that the inputs seem much louder than the Darla's. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or what.
The ASIO drivers that come with it actually work, which is kind of cool. The on card MIDI port is emulated, which is something Cubase SX tells me is bad and wrong.
When Cubase loses sync on the Darla24, there's usually an audio dropout (click and silence) while it gets its bearings. On the Audiophile there's a harsh, very loud buzzing noise during this drop-out period. That is stupid and annoying.
So my hopefully final decision is to return the Audiophile and be happy with what I have until the next generation of cards that promise things like stability and general awesomeness come out.
In the end, I don't know how much of this is my fault and how much is the card's fault. My system is a pretty standard setup with not too much strangeness, but other people claim to be running happily with these cards. I also may be demanding a bit more than the average user, but there doesn't seem to be any higher-end option that isn't just the same thing but with more outputs and breakout boxes tacked on.
But whatever. I'm done with all this crap and am now trying to figure out what else to blow my $300 music store credit on.
It is the 26th anniversary of my existence today. How about that.
It's been a busy week here at Brad Sucks headquarters. My website Stripcreator reached its 100,000th created comic strip, which despite my best efforts has triggered some sort of wave of nostalgia in me. Almost two years of running that site, over 100,000th comics. Very strange. I spent more time than I should have reworking my other site In4mador and I'm not quite done yet, though I think it can probably coast as-is for a little while.
I still need to whip this Brad Sucks page into shape, what with its default web design and all.
So as a test of my ability to record a song in Cubase SX, I put together this short little rock track called Quit Complaining. My first problem with it was that a few friends of mine had issues with the ending, which I'm not sure how to fix. So I'll wait until someone gives me specific instructions.
My second problem with it is that I just recently found out that the verse guitar riff is almost exactly the same as the riff in "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd (which I like a lot). They're fairly different tracks, but yet I'm still apparently accidentally a hack, which sucks. I usually prefer to deliberately be a hack instead of having it surprise me like this.
So I've uploaded it. You can check it out and judge me. It'll be fun.