I got another poem accepted, much to my surprise and delight! Work sucks. But that's okay, I'm going to kick its ass. Plans to self-print and release a small collection of poems are not in the works, but proceeding. I'm almost done editing and I have formatting laid out. Next: colored paper to print on and commandeering printers from work. Next-next: Folding and hand-binding. Next next next: Hand-stamping covers. Lots of steps to take, but several steps already gradually taken. I'm pleased with myself on this because I knew it would be a big project to undertake and I'd have to tackle it in bite-size chunks gradually to make it, work, and I'm actually succeeding at doing that! I haven't done barely a whit of Christmas shopping.
Also, Christmas shopping is weighing on me as well. I have to get something for my wife and kids. Doh! I'll do that next week. Earings for wife, drum set for kid. Congrats on the publication, that's awesome. Alright, I'm off to kick ass!! Enjoy your dayWork sucks. But that's okay, I'm going to kick its ass.
Wow, you just took the words right out of my mouth! I'm headed out to kick some day-job ass! No negative thinking here, nope. I'm going to go make this job my byatch.
I sent this earlier to wasoxygen and the advice he gave me was to post it as soon as the pubski opened. ----------------------------- Weird hubski dream this morning. We had agreed to have a big party at my house. I’m forgetting many of the wild details, but at one point in the dream, I was having a long talk with mk’s mom telling her what a genius her son was. All night thinking about our puny race on this spinning sphere on the edge of a galaxy and feeling vaguely convinced that all previous conscious civilizations had got to a stage of civilization and then accidentally blew themselves up or blew their planet up through war and foolishness. And thinking, given the miracle of being a conscious monkey in clothes, is there any time to waste – doing puzzles or on-line games, for example. What is worth doing? And thinking the only thing worth doing is finding life out in the cosmos – because that is the only way foolish religions (i.e. all religions) will drop their notions of god and start to work together. But that would take thoughtfulness and reflection and more thoughtfulness. So now it’s morning. The pubski isn’t open yet, my eyes hurt, and there’s work to do (I mean in my puny life, not in the cosmos). Any advice? (Do I sound like a teenager? Ha ha) ------------------------------------------------------------ OK, I'm off to make a Jean-Paul Sartre omelette out of a cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones.
What is worth doing?
8bit advised me privately that what is worth doing is whatever you want to do. So I spent some time today creating a new blog inspired by hubski's #writebetterdammit tag. I believe the tag name was originated in this space by kb -- maybe it came over from reddit or somewhere. I don't know. I'll post it here in due course.
I always thought that it was caio that originally used the tag. mk, is there a way to check this out? Edit: So far as I can tell, this is the first post here on Hubski to use it: https://hubski.com/pub?id=16659
Fantastic, thanks for checking. I wouldn't want kb to accuse me of stealing, but I have so far called my blog "write better dammit" - it really is aimed at my students but some of it might be interesting to anyone. I googled the phrase and all I could find was hubski's use of it. Someone has an app called Write Dammit, and it's aimed at getting people to write. Period. Just write. I was looking through the tag today and one of the most intense discussions was on the use of periods and commas. My first blog entry is unfortunately long. These kiddies of mine have to be 100 words or fewer. (NOTE: fewer, not less.) First blog is 500 words. Second one is 100. But it's still under construction and consideration. It'll be fun. So keep this post buried in the pubski. I'm not ready to go public yet.
I used it first, but kb was a fan. ;)
My guess is that your mother assumed she was referring to your brother.
Funny you should mention that, tng. I wasn't going to say this originally because we all know that mk's brother is a valuable hubski contributor -- but and this is absolutely dream-true -- mk's mother replied to my praise of mk by saying, "Yeah, unlike his brother."
Applying to five grad schools will set you back $500 these days. Still, so worth it. I'll find out by mid-March where I'll slave away for my PhD. Going on a Caribbean cruise next week. Life is good.
Yeah, it's expensive. My wife applied to Med residencies and that was really pricey too. Had to fly all over the country on your own dime etc. Also boards, also student loans etc. Getting an education is extremely expensive. Good luck with the grad school hunt and enjoy the cruise.
Thanks, tng. I'm lucky in that I'll have my tuition fees waved and receive a stipend for being either a teaching or research assistant, but other folks studying different subjects aren't so kind. I'll be living on pennies though, I haven't really saved enough working my current job to do much damage. Oh well.
One of my colleagues joked "Sure, it sucks, but it's negligible compared to the costs of the impending schooling :D".
The way I understand it is that it's fairly well adjusted for the cost of living wherever the school's located. The stipend from UCLA is around 35k, but Dartmouth's is only ~25k. So yeah, around $10k variance. I'm going to accrue some dept, because Ramen noodles are going to get really boring after a couple months. That's ok though, this is an investment in future salaries. What's ironic is that I'll be making far less during my post-doc than I am right now, but things should rapidly improve from there.
Honestly, I think it's just cultural... a nationwide pact between universities to milk every last drop of cheap labor out of soon-to-be ex-students. If I ever hear otherwise, I'll try to remember to let you know.
WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS I have a TC Electronic Reverb 6000. I bought it at the Todd Soundelux auction. See that fancy touchscreen? Mine doesn't work. It shows white. The device is fancy enough that you talk to it over the network and use an HD15 out to monitor it, though, so I know the brain and the 'verb itself are fine. Reverb 6000s are way more dope when they are fully functional than when they aren't. It'll cost me ~$600 to get it fixed, which is $600 less profit I'll get out of the box when I sell it. BUT The box has just about every license under the sun. It's probably got $12k worth of options. It was recently gone over by TC. And if I'm willing to spend $2500 before December 31, in addition to the $600, it'll be a fully functional, fully loaded TC Reverb 6000 Mk II. Which includes another year of warranty and an operating system that will take new plugins. A Mk II is about a $12k gadget. But my sunk costs suddenly become over $5k. And I'm not sure I'll be able to sell it for more than $6k. And I'm really worried that I won't have the discipline to sell the stupid thing because Holy Fuck are Sys6000s cool and a Mk II fully loaded will actually allow me to do stupid shit like this: But I'm not at that level. I've seen Atmos once. Nobody's asked me to mix anything in it. I haven't even had any surround work this year. And the biggest post-production facility in LA just shut down, in part because of pikers like me, except the pikers like me are a lot further along than me and besides, I'm moving back to Seattle. I realized the other day that I no longer have any friends in Seattle. They all moved away. So what started out as a "how much do I have to spend to fix this fucking thing so I can sell it" problem has become a fully-blown existential crisis about what the fuck I'm doing with my life. It didn't help that my agent fucked off last month after five months of footsie and trying to find a new agent is an awful lot like trying to find a job, and this is the wrong time of year to do that shit. I'd like to say that having a fully dialed pro tools studio with a 6000mkII will encourage the universe to find me work up in Seattle but the money I spend on this gadget is literally money that isn't feeding my baby. Most people don't have agents to lose, system 6000s to upgrade and businesses to move. Compared to the shit demure posted yesterday I'm rawkin' it. But deliberately spending tens of thousands of dollars in order to not make a living for a year while you restart your business? It's fucking scary. And the choices matter. Anyway. That's my little boojie, overprivileged problem of the week. Not so much spending money to make money as spending money to make money back because I did that daring shit that all the books tell you to do and here I am with a fancy Danish tarbaby with a busted touch screen.
So kleinbl00 are you an audio engineer? I went to school for music business, but I haven't really pursued any jobs in the market because of advancement of technology and pikers. I want to get back into it, but to do so I need to drop money I don't have. Any advice? Thanks!
Near Chicago. Probably not the best place to be in regards to music business.
Not the worst, though! Go to clubs. Volunteer. Meet bands. Ask to hang out at recording sessions. Offer to do remixes. Get up in everyone's grille. Spend lots of time at it. Remember names and faces and always be nice, always be on time. You will do this enough that eventually you will be paid. If you continue down this path you will specialize. Keep at it long enough and you may become Butch Vig. But it all starts by being there and helping. People hire their friends. A semi-talented friend will get the job that the extraordinarily-talented stranger wants. Make lots of friends.
I'm good at making friends, and feel comfortable talking to anyone. So that's good. Thanks for the advice!
Ha! You should hear me rant and grumble every time I have to call the "engineering department" at work when I want to get a hold of a plumber, electrician, or general handyman (for work I could do myself, but am typically barred from, because that's how companies work). I know I shouldn't be that protective of the title, but still, five years of engineering school seems degraded by calling a mister-fix-it "engineer". (To be fair, I never had a PE. I worked automotive, for which one isn't required. Although with the shitty ethics and shoddy designs we've seen across the industry recently, perhaps that needs to change.)
And I worked architectural consulting, in a state in which you couldn't get a PE in acoustics. Our firm did HVAC and plumbing, though, and we had one guy who got to call himself an engineer. It was actually in the process of studying for the EIT that I decided I didn't want to be an engineer. I believe that was also the year that the PE pass rate for my state was 16%. Spending that much time on a subject I hated that didn't directly apply to my way of life with chances of success that slim kinda made me go "fuck everything about that" and within 18 months I was mixing television in Hollywood.
Handed in two big assignments this Monday, and I'll hand a third one in today. All I have to do after today is to write a small paper on philosophy, and then I'm done here! This chapter of my life feels like it's closing. Because I don't leave for another two weeks, I'm going to visit family and I'm gonna go skiing. I went skiing for the first time (x-country) this weekend: Even though I fell over a dozen times, I started to get the hang of it and by the end I finished one of the intermediate trails. So I'm gonna go downhill skiing tomorrow, see how that goes!
After more than 1.5 months without a proper internet connection, I am online again! It was a weird time. I noticed how much I rely on being connected to the internet. The luxury of being able to check everything at any time, listen to all the music I want (spotify, I missed you!) or watch TV shows/movies. But it also showed me what I could do else with my time. Mostly, I spent my evenings reading a PDF version of HPMoR that I downloaded at work, spinning poi or watching TV/quizzing with my grandma. I should try to keep a balance of online and offline time (meat- vs. cyberspace?). You might remember that I decided to quit my current PhD position. I decided that I will try applying for graduate schools (the ones that are still open for applicants) and contact Profs directly if their work interests me. Additionally I will try to get as much information about the PIs through friends at universities as possible. Don't want to do the same mistakes again. I have been having troubles falling asleep because my mind keeps thinking and thinking about all the things that I have to do and all the things I worry about. I wonder how I could turn it "off". Any suggestions?
interesting location. It seems that brewskis may owe the namesake of the street it is on for the very beer that it peddles.
It was my birthday Sunday. 27. Feels weird, like the awkwardness from middle school but in the context of actual, real life. My lab submitted our first paper in my two years here. It got rejected. Which I expected. My labmate and I tried to talk our boss out of it until we did more work but he wasn't having it. We're gonna start working on warts soon, probably. I don't care about warts. But I have a pet snail and it had babies, and they're really adorable. So that's cool. I should go to grad school.
That put a stupid smile on my face and now I want a pet snail.
Four bands that I helped release through Dadstache Records were included on a list of the 20 best tracks in 2014 from the city we all live in, which is pretty rad. We're also releasing a new EP from the first band we ever released, Skirts, this Friday. Should be a great house show, those are always a lot of fun. Edit: Are any of you spiritual? I'm not particularly religious, but sometimes I feel like things happen for reasons that are beyond me. I watched Senna tonight, and the entire time I couldn't help but relate parts of the movie to things I have experienced. Except, instead of carrying on, I quit and moved on to new occupations. Now I'm feeling an intense wave of regret, and a desire to reignite the competitive spark I once had in a sport. It's almost as if watching that movie was a way to say "maybe you should pick this back up" and continue the pursuit of being somebody great.
Sometimes I feel that we (you and I) are either connected by being of a similar age, or are connected through something else. Because sometimes you describe thoughts that I just recently had. Like never sticking with something and always chasing what is new. By the way, if the latter is correct (we are connected by something else than being of similar age), then maybe I should think a little more about spirituality... We had a podcast about spirituality and a good discussion below it some times ago.
Thank you for sharing that, it has been quite a while since I have listened to it (about 96 days, to be exact). Yes, I agree that it is possible to feel connected to people on a different level, even if it is people you have never met (such as you and I). While I think some of that can be ascribed to personal experiences, past lessons learned, and an outlook on life, sometimes there is more to it than that. The human condition is a weird thing, and I agree with you about thinking more about spirituality. What you have described, I have felt about numerous people on this site and others, and I think it's something worth thinking (and talking) about.
Last exam tomorrow. About to leave for my review session, to study logic and how everything I know about the scientific process is wrong. Exam is tomorrow afternoon and immediately after my classmates and I are going crawl our way through every bar we can. Senior year is fun.
Took the Illinois civil service test this morning. I'm thinking I rocked it, so I hope I get this new job. If it doesn't work out I have a back-up plan to continue working on my business. Balloon animals anyone? I recently realized I have/had feelings for this girl I met in college. It really didn't strike me until she contacted me recently, but we'll see if that works out.
All in all things have been looking up. I'm stoked for this new year. I hope all of you have a good holidays!
Another lesson with another member of the Cleveland Orchestra today. Hopefull this one goes better than the last one!
Update: This went SO MUCH better than the other one did, and this one is for a much more prestigious school. Unfortunately prestigious generally means more money. fingers crossed for a scholarship when I audition.
I finished my year-long term with AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (AmeriCorps NCCC, a team based residential community service program, where teams travel the country doing service for several, 3-8 week long projects) two weeks ago. Besides being glad to be back and among family and friends I haven't seen in a while, being free of the responsibility of leading/motivating a group of eight 18-24 year olds (I was a team leader), I'm glad to have some time to myself again. I have a job lined up next summer that I'm really looking forward to, working for someone I served with. There's a big summer camp in Northern Michigan that I'll be doing a bunch of maintenance work for; construction, electrical, plumbing, all things I'm eager to learn how to do on my own. To boot, the guy I'll be working with is hands down the best boss I've ever had, not to mention one of the best guys I've ever met, and I hope some of his patience and good spirit rubs off on me. He's also a motorcycle hobbyist and's gonna teach me a thing or two about working on bikes. And then, I'm thinking I'll do another service term with AmeriCorps, this time as a support team leader, one who works with the full-time staff back on campus and supports the team and team leaders in the field. I'm picking between two campuses, Sacramento or Denver (serving the Pacific coast states and the Southwest states, respectively). I'm seriously considering a career in public service. Which is very weird to me, the idea of settling on a career. But I've let the idea occupy me for several months now and it's really sticking with me, the idea of expanding service opportunities to young people, or even being a unit leader (a team leader's direct supervisor, a full-time staff member). AmeriCorps was the most challenging, fulfilling year of my life. And I think I could do a way better job than my boss, or any of the unit leaders. And I think service should be a compulsory part of every person's life. Ok, that last bit is more of a policy issue than a job prospect, but can you tell yet that I really loved AmeriCorps? It's just very, very weird to me to have identified so strongly with something, to have an actual career in mind, when I was positively drifting a year and change ago. Part of me is inherently suspicious of this, like, "Gee, blackbootz is really sipping the kool-aid after just a year." But then part of me realizes that that suspicion is couched in a hypothetical third party judging me, and if I divorce that and just look at the program and what I did last year and how it made me feel, then it's unadulterated joy, meaning, and passion. I now realize how long and rambling this is but how much I want input. And by input, I mean corroboration that this would be a good move. Which is ironic, because I just said that I need to divorce third party judgment. Goodness. This is my head right now.
I wish we had CanadaCorps here, it really sounds like a fun year :) I remember you're other post about your time in the AmeriCorps and really think we should make it a mandatory thing for 18 years olds. With exception for people with physical disabilities and the possibility to postpone it and do it after grad school as a team leader. Kinda like the army basically :)
Oh for sure, the details of this program would be important to get right: the program should be accommodating to people experiencing hardships or disabilities (like if a young person's income is instrumental to a family's livelihood, they should be able to postpone their service). But I think the question of compulsory service should be how, not if. And also, while I'm thankful for those men and women who choose to serve in our military, I think all service should be lauded.With exception for people with physical disabilities and the possibility to postpone it and do it after grad school as a team leader. Kinda like the army basically :)
If we are using an IRC client what details do we need for the server address and channel?
I would like details about this, because that server is run by a friend of mine and I never have any problems joining. Periodically (every few months) it goes down for a day or two before we can contact the host. I don't think that has happened recently. I have a feeling a lot of y'all's issues stem from using mibbit. But if there are legit connectivity problems, PM me and I can get them taken care of.
It wouldn't load for me on 2 different computers at 3 different connectivity locations (university computer/university wired, laptop/university wireless, laptop/home wifi). It's definitely always worked for me at least on the last one before. Can't remember the error message but like, "can't be loaded" or something.
We were given the marks for the first piece of my masters coursework today. I got 72 for a set of six compositional studies we had to produce. That's distinction level, so I'm quite happy. A good place to start. I've been questioning my place within music lately. I'm wondering if my constant drive to be unique is stifling my output. But at the same time, I don't see the point in making music that someone else has already done in a better way. There's always the danger that composition can devolve into a type of 'paint by numbers' approach if one isn't conscientious. On the other hand, I'm wary of becoming too esoteric. As much as I strive to be different, I don't want to get to a point where only other academics appreciate my work. I find the challenge of making a difficult concept more easy to digest enthralling. But it's a hard process and sometimes I feel like I get too caught up in trying to pinpoint what said concepts could be.
I think there is value in the emulation of other composers, if only for purely educational purposes. This came up in my medieval and baroque history class, actually, as it was one of the ways in which composers of that time learned their trade. Bach thoroughly studied Vivaldi, for example, to learn the Italian style. In my view, the value comes from artistic freedom. You never have to compose any one way, but if you learn to compose in many different ways and styles, then you have a gigantic toolbox at your disposal. As one of my bass teachers once said to me "technique will set you free" Or, alternatively, "you'll never be held back by too much technique." You've got the musicality, otherwise you wouldn't be in music school.
For sure, I totally agree. A lot of my compositional ideas start out as an emulation of a musical idea I heard. Then of course I'll take that and mould it into something of my own. I am very much an advocate of finding patterns between genres and artists in search of new perspectives. I am aware of my influences and embrace them. Good words. I've always felt this way about listening to music, that by having a wide range influences you have a lot to draw on. However, I've not properly considered that in terms of compositional practice. I feel this is perhaps impeding me at the moment, in that I've become stuck in my ways. I was producing steadfast in the Drum & Bass tradition for 4 years and only in the last year of two have I endeavoured to push some boundaries somewhat. As a consequence, all my ideas are still filtered through the said tradition and methodology which is becoming too small a garment, so to speak. I'm ready to break of out if it, I'm just not sure how quite yet. Thanks.You never have to compose any one way, but if you learn to compose in many different ways and styles, then you have a gigantic toolbox at your disposal.
I support what coffeesp00ns said and add in one more thing. It is hard to invent something completely new. You always begin from something that is already known and go a step further. Sometimes going a step further means combining things that are already known. But to be able to do that, you need to master the things that are already known because then the act of "going a step further" will come to you more naturally :)
Whenever someone says "I have no influences", one of two things is occurring: - they are lying - they are ignorant of their own influence.
72 hour week. Hanging shelves with Kate. Time is not on my side. Missing #longgoodreads. By Christmas I'll be free!
Last exam tomorrow. About to leave for my review session, to study logic and how everything I know about the scientific process is wrong. Exam is tomorrow afternoon and immediately after my classmates and I are going crawl our way through every bar we can. Senior year is fun.