Stutter

It’s a late Friday night alone, and my demons are talking at me. They’re telling me that since I am alone, late on a Friday night, that I obviously must have done something wrong with my life. That there had to be one missed opportunity, one blind moment, one bad mistake early on in my adulthood to begin a chain of events, decisions, and lost potential that lead up to yet another night alone. I can’t deny that our lives are more than the sum of our choices, but our choices nonetheless impinge on our lives and hammer us into the shape we are at the present.

I just cannot see where I may have turned wrong. Was it my volition (or lack thereof), or was it outside forces beyond my control (or lack of willpower)? Did I get too greedy? Did I not get bold enough? Did I not answer my hunger when the bounty was rich? I simply do not know, and even with counsel, I never will.

One event is all it takes to initiate a reverberating series of fumbles, misteps, and stutters. I want to recover.

Greasing Wheels

So I’ve finally started pushing the Record button.

The hardest part of making music is learning your instruments and your tools. After picking up all this equipment, it’s taken me some time to get familiar with the basics of my synth, sampler, sound module, drum machine, and DAW software. Five months ago, when I knew a lot less than I do now, every time I pressed Record on the DAW software, it was screwup after screwup after screwup. Frustration rose and overpowered joy, and so I let the music project lie fallow for months.

Until March, when I got the synth. It became a joy again. I got to peck and poke, pushing parameters around, finding sounds, figuring out what that damn thing can do. It became fun and novel again. I had to know more. So I picked up the manual and read it, and started reading the manuals to the rest of my gear. Now I’m getting familiar with it, and that, my friends, is a good, good thing.

I sat at my workstation last night and hammered out a nasty bassline. I recorded the midi of it, learned how to clean it up, loop it, record an audio loop of it. Laid down a track with a GM patch called “Nylon Guitar” (mildly reminiscent of the real thing). Worked up a drum track. (Yeah, I know…Creativity, WOW!) It’s mostly a throw-away track; the vibe is totally not Glass Door material, but I’ll keep punching at it. Each hour spent with it is a new learning experience.

There’s plenty more work to do.

Wrapped Up Like a Douche

Lyrics websites — those sites that appear on the first page of search engine results when you type a song name followed by “lyrics” — have proven themselves useful to me from time to time. Since my CD collection is locked away at home, when I need to look up the lyrics to Manfred Mann’s “Blinded By the Light” [Google], I can pick a site, any site (none of which I’ll link to here since they are so widespread, yet deceivingly similar),and I’ll see that Manfred is singing “Revved up like a deuce”. Rather handy.

My problem with these lyric sites is that they are essentially traps for personal information. Every one of these sites is set up to entice unknowing users into giving up their personal contact info. Every link suggesting you “download this as a ringtone”, “send this song to your phone”, “download this song”, “share this song with a friend”, “add to library”, is a trick to get the user to divulge their cellphone number, their email address, name, contact information of a friend, sometimes even the user’s secret login details on a social networking site. If it’s data, they want it for free.

I’m wary enough that I don’t provide them with any info, but not everyone is savvy enough to catch wise to the ruse. The promise of musical rewards in exchange for a verified bit of info is the bitwise equivalent of a Nigerian 419 scam, where the victim must put up something valuable first before the deal can go through. That deal never goes through. What happens, instead, is the victim’s contact info is collected, used and sold for unsolicited advertising. What you expect is a ringtone; what you get is marketing texts that won’t stop. What you expect is to share your favorite song with your best friend; what you get is you and your bestie dumped on by a mountain of spam.

Personally, I hope my friends and family are wise to this, but that is seldom the case. And that scares me.

My final complaint about the lyrics sites is that they are predatory money-mills for their owners. They’ve figured out the formula for maximizing ad revenue and minimizing cost per click by publishing these sites in bulk. Each site has its own domain name and templates, but they’re run on the same servers by the same companies. There are centralized databases of song lyrics behind whole groups of them; the same content is served by all of a group’s sites. There are companies whose only product is an interface to return lyrics for plugging into a webpage. The lyrics now mean nothing; they are bait. They are just a draw to expose users to a page full of advertisements. Each time an ad is served and presented to a user, that’s pennies in the bank. Draw enough users, and the site owner is raking in good income. Run enough websites, each as disposable as the one before it, and you are guaranteed a heavy income for almost nothing.

Honestly, I can’t begrudge anyone their ability to make money. We all have to survive. It’s just that I see it as a cheap move, and part of me is pissed that I’ve never been able to drop my morals low enough to try this kind of income stream. Slime molds grow on any surface. I don’t see an end to this kind of business model any time soon; the model of using a shedload of cheap, disposable gateway sites to lead the user (and their wallets) to a pyramidding series of websites has been around since the early days of Internet porn, and exists in some parts in the spamming world. As long as it’s cheap enough to flood the market with worthless content on cheap websites, each referencing the other in order to bump up their PageRank on the search engines, while raking in the cash while serving advertising, then this kind of model will persist.

Phaysis.com: Celebrating a Decade of High Hopes

> whois phaysis.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain Name: PHAYSIS.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Updated Date: 09-mar-2010
Creation Date: 14-apr-2000
Expiration Date: 14-apr-2011

Yeah, you read that right! Today, Phaysis.com (this very website, yo) is TEN YEARS OLD! Oh shit! That’s older than most websites I visit. If it were my kid, it’d be in fifth grade by now! What a mild ride this past decade has been! So much squandered potential, so many false starts, so many failed attempts, but my website still stands.

I started this site in April of 2000 as a way to learn web programming, to finally have a place on the web to call my own. Once I moved to Austin, it became a way to keep in touch with friends back home. Time and tide wears all shores, and Phaysis itself has changed, albeit slowly and almost imperceptably (and sometimes nonexistently). And now, it is the mostly-functioning site you see now. Hail Progress!

Today is an important milestone for my site, and I want to thank all of you for reading as often as you have and for coming back even after all my update neglect and my half-assed attempts at the Big Dreams. I still have dreams, and still have hope. You people are why I keep doing this. Thank you!

So here’s to ten more years!

Least Career

So I’m getting feedback from three of my proofreaders regarding “Lost Carrier”, and it’s all some heavy stuff. They’ve provided me with a ton of ideas and a few pounds of problems to work through. They’re proving to me that no matter how “done” I think a thing is, there will always be more work necessary to get it polished.

The general feeling I’m getting is that the story needs more, that the world of the story needs more flesh on its bones. In the spirit of a noire story, I made most of my descriptions as sparse and dry as possible. But the instances where I rambled on, I provided too much detail, and they stand out as accidental focal points. So the solution is to either trim them back or backfill everything else.

I had set out to make this a short story, but with the number of named characters, scenes, and themes, it calls out to be a novella or a serial. This will require of me more time and attention — and more writing — so I will not be publishing as soon as I had hoped. Sorry, kids.

Again, I would like to thank my proofreaders Amy, Rachel, and Jana. Your notes and comments have been incredibly helpful. Fresh eyes see best. To the rest of my proofreaders, let me gently nudge at you for a bit. Nudge-nudge.