Going Underground (Again)
Sunday, January 12th, 2025 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
28F and cloudy tonight, going down to 12F.
It snowed a bit back on Thursday, so we have a nice 3-inch blanket of the white stuff out there.
The new backpack was in the mailroom on Friday night, so I emptied out the floppy canvas one, and it's in the laundry basket to get washed tonight.
Since last summer, I've been carrying around a can of cat food, and the cat harness & leash I bought for Prowly, when I thought I was gonna be able to get him fixed and bring him with me.
I kept that stuff in the backpack all these months on the slim chance he were to track me down here, and confront me on a downtown city sidewalk.
So it was kinda sad to give up on that, but I didn't throw the stuff away... it's just in the kitchenette cabinets now, for some future cat.
I talked to Brian on Friday night, for the first time in three weeks, and it was all good news.
He's recovered from his back injury and is back to work.
But Max is also still digging his job at Farm & Fleet, and Karen's parents gave him a pickup truck they had sitting in the garage for years.
It's a real cream puff, with only 50K miles on it, and in perfect condition!
So now Max has a job and vehicle!
He's all set!
I was up by a decently early 1PM yesterday, and with my coffee, sat down to move all the TikTok videos I've made since last summer, off my phone, and onto a hard drive.
This was in anticipation of TikTok going dark this coming Sunday, the 19th.
I considered editing them into YouTube videos, to add to the, Melody Manor Maintenance channel... and watched several from the period of the move, in July... but... it's too soon!
Again I was seeing footage of Prowly, and hearing myself talk about taking him for walks downtown here, after the move.
And... well, we are finally on the opposite side of the sun from all of that, but... I'm not ready to torture myself with those memories yet.
I spent the rest of my Saturday back to work on, NYC Gargoyles.
Last weekend I got the dynamics pretty well worked in, but I noticed that I could not pan the guitars!
So I launched into this big troubleshooting session, checking other versions, and other songs... consulting YouTube tutorials for Sakura, and messing around with the plugin settings.
And finally I realized that I never could pan the guitars!
Sakura blends two different sounds to get the guitar sound, but it won't let you pan both those sounds together to the left or the right.
All it lets you do is control the, "stereo separation," of the two sounds... meaning you can either have them both together in the center, or separate them so that one is further, or full left, and the other is further, or full right.
At least that's my understanding of it tonight.
After doing a few more tweaks to the song, I exported it as a WAV, and then opened that WAV in Audacity, to add a siren sound effect.
We're talking about tornado sirens, and there's a recurring, short bridge, in the song where, last year, I'd tried to mimic a tornado siren sound... ramping up, and back down again... with oboes.
But it never really sounded right, and that is the song that challenges the CPU, so I eliminated the oboes and found a field recording I made, back in 2021, of real tornado sirens.
By editing and blending clips from that recording, I was able to create the desired effect... with the sirens ramping up, running for a second, then ramping back down, for the exact duration of the recurring bridge part.
And that song has a false ending, where it ends, but after a pause of about five seconds, starts back up with a rockin' guitar lead instrumental of several measures.
So I edited a much longer tornado siren clip to ramp up just before that coda begins, and run through the whole thing, ramping down at the very end of the song, as the guitars fade out... and it's great!
So, between last weekend and this one, the song's gone through quite a transformation!
From a, full-blast, fully orchestrated thing, from start to end, that felt a little tedious, and like too much was going on...
To now, where it starts simple, and slowly builds as the song goes, with varying quiet and loud parts throughout, and... those cool tornado sirens!
So, I'm actually renaming it now, from, NYC Gargoyles, to, Tuesday Siren.
Because what the song is really about is a super hot girl coming into the library in search of some interesting topic for a report, and me, as the library page, being in full emergency mode, trying to impress her by finding a book on just the right subject... which turned out to be, the gargoyles of NYC.
So the tornado sirens are to illustrate that sense of emergency.
Like... she's the tornado!
But I also realized, after getting the sirens on there, that the tornado sirens do go off on the first Tuesday of every month, at 10AM, and that I should try to capture a better version of them, if I can.
So that now makes four songs with sound effects added to them;
- ARCHEOLOGY: With tape hiss under the lo-fi verse parts.
- REAVIS 309: With a passing period bell, and students in the halls.
- NEVER RAINS: With thunder.
- TUESDAY SIREN: With tornado sirens.
And the goal is to incorporate sound effects for all the rest of them.
So, Our Cold Feet, needs to have a downtown nightlife ambiance at the start of it, and then morning birdsong at the end, because it's a song about staying up all night.
Closer To You, needs trolley car sounds, like whistles, bells, and wheels on the tracks... which I'd like to capture myself... but it'll require a trip to the trolley museum in Elgin.
Live It Fast, needs to have daytime summer sounds of grasshoppers and cicadas... which I'll have to dig for in my archives.
Bed in the Suburbs, Just needs crickets.
And, Spell I'm Under, is the one that needs the police sirens in the distance.
That leaves, Magic Monday, Clue Phone, Other Friends, and Miss Fortune, for me to still figure out.
Magic Monday Is about the town transformed by an ice storm into a magical setting, so...? I dunno... maybe a good train horn in the distance would do the trick?
I suppose, Clue Phone should incorporate old phone sounds like a dial tone or a ringing rotary phone or whatever, but I'm not sure how I could possibly capture those now, myself!
I was hunting through the tape archive a while back for such sounds I recall recording in the past, but still haven't found them.
But the goal is definitely to use all my own sound effects!
Not only to avoid copyright issues... because nothing is more identifiable than a stock sound effect... but also because I fancy myself a field recording engineer, so it's a matter of pride.
"All sound effects recorded by Patrick Melody," kind of thing.
I also talked to Tim for a few hours last night, and he's doing well.
He's got a lot of web design work at the moment, which is always good for him in January and February to make ends meet.
We're both still kinda formulating our strategies for 2025.
Today I slept in until nearly 4PM, and then went out to get gas and groceries.
I'm getting pretty good at keeping it to two bags, every week, which means I can simply park in the garage and walk the groceries back to the building.
It's sad to think about TikTok going away.
I installed that app back in early 2019, a full year before the rest of the Millenneals, and GenX discovered it, during the Covid lockdowns.
So for me, it's been six years, scrolling through TikTok... posting my own videos on it, for a little over four years.
2023 was kind of the peak of that, where I was this guy with an old house, whose mission in life was to fix it up, and have my little adventures with my dog and two cats... and the little oak tree I planted... making my videos for my two-thousand followers.
So, it's kinda shitty to think that not only did capitalism take that house away from me... but it's also taking away that app... and all the videos I made... and my two-thousand followers!
Like, What's THIS?.. some peasant class low-life managed to get himself a house, AND visibility online? NO!.. Absolutely NOT!.. take his house, and destroy that platform!
And that was all under the Biden administration, so... just sayin!
Tim was talking last night about how a big feature of capitalism is, the generating of false scarcity.
And I'm very much the victim of the false scarcity they've been creating in the housing market.
Dad & Mom were gulled into taking out that home equity line of credit, back in 2013... thanks to a false scarcity of money itself, for retired seniors like them.
And the whole concept of a balloon payment at the end of 10 years, was one of many devices meant to create the housing scarcity we see now!
BMO knew both Dad & Mom would be dead by 2023, and the balloon functioned just as intended!.. to force that house back onto the market, preferably into the hands of a slum lord, to be an overpriced rental forever more.
And it was no coincidence that the only place I could find was this studio apartment.
And it was no coincidence that I pay way more for this studio now, adjusting for inflation, than I paid for a 1BR in this same building, back in 1999.
Back in the 90s and 2000s, none of these rental properties were ever fully occupied!
They always had vacant units they were desperate to rent.
But these days?.. all rental properties are at full occupancy all the time!
Because capitalism has put an end to the construction of new housing, and at the same time, snatched up all the existing houses from their dying owners, and put them into the hands of land lords!
As for TikTok, the only reason it's getting banned, in the US, is because it's foreign owned, and has been running circles around the American competition!
How are Musk and Zuckerberg supposed to dominate the social media market, and turn it into an overpriced subscription model, for a shit experience, with TikTok out there?
I've been thinking about mastering my album to tape cassette, and CD, when it's done... so that there is some way to actually circulate it phycically... because I'm not super confident anymore that there will ever be a digital space to host it, that won't collapse after a few years.
I mean, YouTube's probably safe? But you never know!
Still, I do remember a day, before the internet, where music spread via cassette tapes!
There was a whole underground network, from the high schools, to the colleges, to the downtowns of, scene cities, around the country... and news spread by word of mouth, cassette tape, and little zines created at the local Kinko's copy center!
Social media existed long before the internet!
And with the death of TikTok, my instinct is simply to go back underground.
I've done it several times now!
After the fall of MySpace, in 2007, I went into the wind for a few years.
I resurfaced on YouTube for a while, but Mom's death was kind of the burn notice, for me, on that... because I couldn't really do it anymore with Dad right downstairs in the living room.
I was on Tumblr, until news came they were cracking down on that... and so I deleted my profile and ducked out.
I was on Twitter for years, but as soon as Musk bought it, I not only deleted my account, but uninstalled it from my phone.
And I think I still have Instagram on my phone, but haven't used at all it since TikTok came along.
The point here is that you do have to just fold up and retreat to the woods, every so often, when it comes to social media!
You visit the train tracks and put your ear to the rail.
You slide into town by night, to glean the word on the street.
And when the next platform comes along, you kinda reinvent yourself for it, and resurface for a while.
That's the game!
And occasionally, you run into a refugee from the old platform who recognizes you, and that's fine!
You've got war stories to reminisce about.
Well, I'm all clean & shiny but down in the laundry room, every single washer is in use right now!
I've never run into that before, so I can only imagine it has something to do with the fact that this past week was the first normal work-week after the holidays?
This coming week is another normal 5-day week, but then there's a 3-day weekend, thanks to MLK Day... which will also be inauguration day, as well as Frank's 21st birthday.
I'm thinking of putting in for TUE 21 off, so that I can get my car to Jiffy Lube finally... and make it a 4-day weekend.
Mark will be going in for his surgery on Tuesday, I believe, but unfortunately, Kristina will not be covering for him!
Apparently she's too busy, so they're sending some school district dude from Aqua Dale instead.
Whatever the case, it shouldn't be hard to get TUE 21 approved by Mark, on his last day before a two month leave of absence.
And then, hopefully the rest of the world will just go to work that day, having already had their oil changed, and having caught up on their holiday laundry.
Back to the subject of social media... I do intend to keep this blog going through the years to come.
This blog was originally created to help the SEO of the Snoozefest SoundCloud account.
Back in the summer of 2022, when I had big plans to get traction there, as an amateur field recording engineer, the idea was to embed that content here, and write about it, so that Google's bots would see some link-backs from a page that wasn't itself bot generated.
The link to this blog in my TikTok was in furtherance of that plan.
I did, briefly, rebrand my TikTok that year, as SnoozefestAudio, and sought to promote the SoundCloud there, as well... hoping to bring traffic to this blog, and thus, more plays of the embedded tracks from SoundCloud.
And it kinda worked!
By far, the best content on that SoundCloud is the thunderstorm playlist!
And I think that I did get a few TikTokers to go there, hear that, and check back to the blog, now and again.
Of course, life itself did not want to cooperate with those plans, with new thunderstorms failing to materialize, crickets not cooperating, distant speeders taking the year off, because of high gas prices, and SoundCloud itself shitting down the sound quality of my newer HD tracks, to strong-arm fans into paying their own subscription fees... to hear shit that I already PAID for them to host!
And then Dad broke his hip, and all the rest!
That's when my TikTok went back to being focused on home improvements, and this blog morphed into the companion journal for THAT, and not for the field recordings.
On the TikTok, my username changed from PatsMyGuy, the handyman service, to SnoozefestAudio, to just Patrick Melody, and then... to the code name, Ransoluso, when I was applying to district 313 for that job at Odlaw... because I didn't want them finding my TikTok in a background check.
But I kept the username, Ransoluso after that, because of all these other dealings, from mortgages, to other job applications, to apartment applications.
So... I do think when I resurface online, I'll return as Ransoluso again... because it's a good code name that nobody else is using!
It's the middle name of one of my ancestors on my Mom's side; Ransom Ransoluso Partridge, the father of her great grandmother, Anna Partridge, who became Anna Frost upon marrying her great grandfather.
Anna was the mother of Charles Frost, who was the father of Gertrude Frost, my mother's mom (and my grandmother).
And at any rate, Ransoluso, is just a kick ass name that is at once, easy to remember, but also impossible for modern people to dream up for a username.
So, in the future, I will be, Ransoluso... and maybe people will find me that way.
But this blog is, very darknet!
It's here and it's viewable, but you have to know it's here.
DreamWidth itself is a very obscure place... having arisen in the death throes of LiveJournal... another deep cut callback to a forgotten era!
LiveJournal... was once the absolute SHIT! Everybody who was anybody had a good LiveJournal blog!
We're talkin'... the browser war days before Google even existed!.. and long before Blogger.Com.
But LiveJournal was facing oblivion, by around the early 20-teens, and was purchased by the Russians!
They actually kept it alive through the 20-teens, but the government had the same concerns about it, as they do now about, Chinese owned, TikTok.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, some plucky westerners created DreamWidth, as a LiveJournal clone, that allowed people to mirror their LiveJournal content, on a safe platform.
It used to be possible to port over your entire LiveJornal to Dreamwidth in one go... or to set up your LiveJornal to cross-post to Dreamwidth... just in case.
LiveJournal's now long gone, but Dreamwidth serves a very niche, but very dedicated user base, who keep it alive with donations.
And it's the perfect place, now, for a darknet blog, because it's just not on anybody's radar!
Hell!.. blogs themselves aren't even a thing anymore!
But this all goes to the deeper history and meaning of what the internet actually IS!
It's been 30 years or so, since the WWW really took off, and in those three decades, we've had a lot of different options to explore.
As I said above, social media existed long before the internet, but the WWW gave us a way to amp it up, and be more creative with it.
That started with personal web pages, a'la, Geocities and Angelfire, where you coded it yourself with HTML, and included your in-line graphics thanks to the brilliant innovation that was Netscape Navigator.
Instant messaging then became the craze, and blogging also came into it's own... right around the time the MP3 was developed... allowing music to be shared online for the first time.
And I won't go through the whole history, but the point is... there were some good things along the way that got abandoned in favor of more modern things that... in hindsight, were not superior.
Twitter, for example, was first hailed as a, "micro-blogging" site, where the whole art of it was to just sum up your thoughts in 140 characters!
At the same time, the, still new, YouTube, was being taken over by, "vloggers," or, video-bloggers.
And those two things together, brought an end to regular blogging.
YouTube remained the only place to post a video of any length, for decades, with vlogging remaining strong through the entire 2000s and 20-teens.
But Twitter's micro-blogging concept caught fire on the new smart phones, inspiring a bunch more short-burst content apps like Instagram... for photos only... SnapChat, for perishable content that would vanish soon after it's publication, and Vine, for six-second videos!
Six seconds!
"Short attention span," was the phrase being thrown around, back in those days.
And short-form content was seen as the natural consequence of modernity.
Text posts would soon be down to a single character... and photos would only exist for a fraction of a second, because all videos would be one second long.
YouTube Vloggers fought this tide, holding to their three-minute videos... but employing jump-cuts to keep things snapping along!
Tumblr then appeared to defend the long form, with it's mix of blogs and memes.
And yeah, I know I'm overlooking Forchan, and Reddit, and the whole history of podcasting... as well as the entire gaming universe, and the online indy music universe.
But that whole side of the internet has always been way more wedded to the mainstream than what I'm focused on tonight.
Gaming and indy music have always been deeply tied to the existing mainstream entertainment machinery.
And the Forchan, reddit, podcast bro's have always been deeply tied to mainstream politics and economics.
Both the above factions have never sought anything but to merge with the mainstream, and transform it... and they really suck at it!
But I'm focused on the actual counter-culture that existed pre-internet, that used the WWW to create a viable alternative to the mainstream.
A kind of non-capitalist, utopia of free apps, discourse, and content, created by regular people, for regular people.
A place where we could just support, inform, and enterain each other, with no need for a capitalist mainstream machine, and little need for a government.
But that's a slippery dream!
It's been 30 years, and we have kept that vibe alive... most recently on TikTok, for the past six yers.
But sooner or later, a good platform either gets killed by a trend, sold to a billionaire to be gutted, or banned by the government.
And that will be the way of things, until such time as the government itself creates public social media platforms, funded by taxes, that are beyond the reach of capitalist exploitation, tech bro disruption, and passing trends.
And how likely do you think that's gonna be... in our lifetimes?
No, this game of social media is the same as it was in the 1980s.
You are an agent of the underground, and as such, you will need to survive periods of radio silence.
There will be burn notices, and you will need to survive on your own.
Ear to the rail.
Word on the street.
Keeping your content alive offline, as you keep the faith, and wait for the next platform to rise up out of the sea.
To paraphrase the Mandalorian, "This is the way."
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