waiting at the airport

it really does kind of feel like the key to staying alive is just finding something to do until you die. but I also feel like that applies to getting through any "state" i guess. you just have to do something that will prevent you from doing something worse until it fades. Idk, it just always feels sometimes like no matter how plugged in i am, there is always a lil bit of extra me who is still self aware and like wants to do some thing or sit around going "well now what" and idk, most of my problems go away once that part of my brain figures out what to do. Like, idk, i just sort of view all of life as distracting myself while various states start and end, and idk, i guess that means my whole life is waiting. It's kind of like waiting at the airport. Unless something really fucked up happens, the plane is gonna come, and like no one is gonna murder you in an airport terminal prolly, so you just have to figure out something to do in the meantime. I think "the mean time" is my favorite time, but it is the time i understand the least. 

The Problem with Music

Its kind of late and I am not around any of my music equipment, and I'm stuck in a real shitty youtube video vortex, and I guess this blog post is my last attempt to escape it. Basically, I stumbled upon this video after watching a few Glen Fricker vids (real smart dude by the way, even if his aesthetic is a bit overdone, check out his channel here). After reading the comments on said video, I felt a real compulsion to listen to shlohmo and write this post.

Glen Fricker spends quite a bit of time talking about how the human element of music is being "edited out." He spends quite a long amount of time ragging on drum samples, and how they can never have the feel and emotion and subtle variation of live drums. Glen also talks about autotune, and this one comment on the aforementioned boyinband.com video cited autotune as being the one sign of "no talent." Basically, it seems to me like alot of these people are seeing a fundamental issue with alot of music technology that has come out today. They see it as corrupting, or trying to shortcut some essential element of music, and they want to lambast the culprits for it.

First, let me address Glen Fricker. Glen Fricker's complaints about samples make absolute sense, given his exposure to drum samples and how he has seen them used in the studio. If you are a metal band, and you want to get that big fucking drum sound, then yeah sample replacing will make ur drums sound lame as shit, because glen is absolutely right when he says that samples will never have the feel of live drums. Samples aren't live drums, and the idea that supposedly talented musicians are content with having producers sample replace their hits is fucking sad. So in that respect, I agree with glen.

I disagree with the concept that samples in general are always bad in every conceivable way. Like, shit, do you listen to hiphop? Like, come on. Really? You think all hiphop is terrible? Glen probably can tell sampled drums from real drums, and so i guess he is allowed to hate "all hip hop" but the rest of you probs couldn't pass a double blind test. My guess is that all of you are about as dumb as me, and I sometimes wonder if I could truly tell the different between live drums and sampled drums with my eyes closed. But the point, sampling is objectively not a bad thing, and has an interesting aesthetic in its own right. Early hardware samplers in particular have a very interesting lowpass filter (becuz of the lower sample rate) and graininess to them that live drums don't have. Samples can be pitched up, pitched down, reversed, bitscrambled, and enveloped all with relative ease, and that shit can sound cool as fuck. Like seriously, it can. Yeah, samples can't replace live drums, but i'd like to see live drums make some venetian snares.



Like, live drums cannot make that sound. Like, they fucking can't. And I don't mean to say that live drummers can't play as fast, because they can, but live drums will never sound that choppy, never sound that screwed, it will never sound like that. Do you see what I'm saying? And if you wanna say "well sounding like that sounds dumb" then thats your prerogative, but its my right to buy and purchase and share music that I think is cool so I'm gonna do that, but don't go around saying that venetian snares doesn't make music or doesn't have talent. Literally, pull your head out of your ass. It would take you literally a million years to figure out how to make that song, shut the fuck up. And it is music, because a substantial group of people enjoy it like they enjoy other things that you call music, and music is a social construct anyway, so fuck off.

Next, I want to address the complaint by Glen Fricker and millions of other "true music fans" that autotune sucks. Again, autotune sucks when its used to make up for a singer's bad and out of practice singing. But, when autotune is used as an effect itself, it can sound pretty cool. When a singer who can actually control their voice sings with autotune, and the settings on the autotune are just right, then autotune can essentially be used to allow a singer to control a synthesizer. Check this shit out:

   

Like, look at that shit, they took two vocal tracks, ran them both through autotune, and hardpanned them, and you get this fuckin sweet stereo soundscape thing, where the machine processes the voice differently at some points, and the same at other times, and it sounds real cool. You get this weird funky thing which sounds cool. Thats what autotune can do if you use it right. It's like, the song has to be built around the autotune, it can't just be thrown in for no reason.

But lets really address a deeper issue here. People keep talking about a "problem with music" and here is the real truth. There is no fucking problem with music. Or really, put much better, the problem with music is not the fact that people are using samples or autotuning their voice. The problem is that idiots who don't know what the fuck they are talking about say dumb shit on the internet and it makes me get mad and write these dumb blog posts about a topic that everyone already knows the truth about. There is no such thing as "good music" other than music that lives up to its own standards, and its up to us as a society to decide whether artists succeed and fail in doing what they want to do. Some people think very heavily about that, some people don't, but it is all a process, an active interpretation. We all actively contest the definition and value of music everyday by what we listen to, how we listen to it, and how much we pay for it. And its evident that based on youtube comments, some people value music alot more highly than others.

This was a shit blog im sorry just like fucking youtube comments man oh my god.

THE RAP ALBUM IS HERE

lol literally forgot to update this yesterday haha



thanks for all my carleton homies for keeping it real! t-shirt will be here soon.

THE RAP ALBUM IS REAL

told ya.

It's been a while

So I have't been very active, both for good reasons and bad. The good reason I guess is that there was a lot of personal shit going on in my life and i felt it might be smarter to experience life for a while rather then spend all my time narrating it. Idk, After Shoegazing I wasn't feeling a lot of inspiration, and I felt like I wasn't making the type of music I wanted to make. I guess I should've been active on the blog, but I'm not that type of creator. I'm the type that updates in spurts, when the moment strikes me. I'm not the kind to schedule my creativity on a weekly basis. I've also been focusing on trying to build a stereo distortion pedal for a while and it ended up being not properly grounded and electrocuting me. Idk how or why but it is, and so I'm just gonna let it be for a while and come back when i know a thing or too about electricity. I really do wanna finish it though because it sounded really good and if anyone has any tips on how to ground a circuit they should tell me. The truth is these past couple of months have been a real roller coaster, and I'm heading off to college soon, and I felt that I couldn't just sit in my house clicking things with my mouse while there was all this life happening around me. I've never been the most popular kid, art was a refugee for me in a lot of ways. While all the cool kids were out drinking and driving i was sitting at home making music. And that was cool, I'm glad I did it. But I'm ready for a change of scene now. I'm gonna make music for the rest of my life, but it's not gonna be in this house. I wanna get out and see a different part of the world, and college is that opportunity for me. All music stuff is packed up and ready to go. That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about music. I've got all this material lined up in my head. One of these days I'm gonna come out with like three albums at once. If I can manage it I might even get an album in by this winter. There are just a lot of complications and I feel like a lot of the projects require things I can't deliver. There's also just a lot of pieces that need to be put in place and I haven't yet figure out how to do it. Anyway, thank you everyone. Thank you everyone whose downloaded a song, watched a video, read a blog post, like the facebook, or even followed me on twitter. Those are helpful, and it makes me feel good to know that someone appreciates what I do. But I'm ready for something different now. I will never quit being x^2, don't you worry. Not ever. x^2 will never die.

Parts of the Apple Terms of Service agreement that are funny

"E. YOU FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND SERVICES ARE NOT INTENDED OR SUITABLE FOR USE IN SITUATIONS OR ENVIRONMENTS WHERE THE FAILURE OR TIME DELAYS OF, OR ERRORS OR INACCURACIES IN THE CONTENT, DATA OR INFORMATION PROVIDED BY, THE APPLE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, LIFE SUPPORT OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS."

That explains Chernobyl.

9. Export Control. You may not use or otherwise export or reexport the Apple Software except as authorized by United States law and the laws of the jurisdiction in which the Apple Software was obtained. In particular, but without limitation, the Apple Software may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S. embargoed countries or (b) to anyone on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of Specially Designated Nationals or the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Person’s List or Entity List. By using the Apple Software, you represent and warrant that you are not located in any such country or on any such list. You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons."

Aww Shucks.

"8. Limitation of Liability. TO THE EXTENT NOT PROHIBITED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL APPLE BE LIABLE FOR PERSONAL INJURY, OR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF DATA, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR ANY OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES OR LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE APPLE SOFTWARE, HOWEVER CAUSED, REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY OF LIABILITY (CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE) AND EVEN IF APPLE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR PERSONAL INJURY, OR OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THIS LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. In no event shall Apple's total liability to you for all damages (other than as may be required by applicable law in cases involving personal injury) exceed the amount of fifty dollars ($50.00). The foregoing limitations will apply even if the above stated remedy fails of its essential purpose."

So basically, if the software fucks up when you need it not to, even if Apple knows it could fuck up, and EVEN if you have a contract that says "oh if apple fucks up they owe me shit", you are basically fucked, because at most all they will do is pay you 50 BUCKS, which is a very small amount of money given the kinds of fuckups they are talking about there.

People should read more.

Why the future won't solve all our problems

Everyone (and when I say that I mean myself, i don't know enough people to say that accurately, but I assume there are others) tend to look toward the future with a false sense of optimism. "All our problems will be fixed in the future" I say to myself. "Everyone will stop being stupid because education will get better", "that energy crisis will figure itself out because renewable energy will get more and more efficient", the list of problems that the simple passage of time seems to solve goes on and on and on and it isn't hard for me to imagine a future cyber paradise where everyone listens to Far Side Virtual all day atop geodesic skyscrapers.

It is true that as the future goes on we will get more liberal. This is fact. The absolutism of the paleolithic era, the simple kill or be killed dogma will no doubt vanish as time goes on and technology improves simply because life itself will get less competitive. Our ability to satisfy ourselves biologically will no doubt improve dramatically to the point where it may never even be a question whether or not food is on the table. I have no doubt that simple progress will be able to completely satisfy the bottom layer of Maxwell's hierarchy of needs. In the future (assuming nothing extremely cataclysmic happens) we will no doubt be able to maintain homeostasis like never before.

But think about how many of us actually complain about maintaining homeostasis on any given day. Admittedly, the answer is quite a sizable majority of population, but certainly none of the people who can speak the language this blog is written have that much a problem with homeostasis (even that statement isn't entirely true.) But my point is, you, the person reading this blog (who certainly has enough free time to journey deep into the Google search engine to find it) probably has no trouble accounting for all your basics biological needs on a long time basis. Homeostasis is not what we are worried about when we look hopefully to the future. What we are hoping for, even praying for in the future is the total absence of conflict (and even just unwanted turmoil) in general. We are hoping for the elimination of all our current societal woes, be they nuclear war, poverty, energy crisis, etc. We look to the future with the hope that everything that is problem now will be not a problem later. Then we get all fuzzy inside.

Lets grant that though. Let's assume that every problem we have now will be solved in the future. Great, that fantastic. Your life still won't be a living seventh heaven. Do you want to know why? When you eliminate all the problems you know you have, the problems that you don't know you have will emerge. I mean, even if we treat the universe as a static object that won't collapse into a black hole in 90 billion years, and we exempt the earth from external apocalypses brought by asteroids and the like, we will still face the unforeseen consequences of our actions in the self contained environment of our planet. Do you think anyone for saw the problems we would face today a hundred years ago? Of course not. People a hundred years ago didn't know computers would be a thing. I mean, its quite possible people wrote about them in stories and the like, but they were never considered as a practical reality. And they shouldn't have been. It would've been illogical to prepare for something that we weren't sure existed or not.

But all examples aside, the point I'm making still stands. There are always unknown unknowns, and even if they wont be unknown in the future, they are unknown now. And that's the crux of my argument. The problems we have now are no doubt a small, select portion of all the problems we could be having. Even excluding the fact that humans are always gonna remain the fickle creatures that we are, the universe (heck even just the planet earth) is bigger then you can ever imagine, and that's not any fault of your own. You can at most only know about 300 people, what makes you think you can predict the collective consequences of 7 billion people?

"But x^2," you think as read this blog, "surely our ability to predict the future will get better as well! We may not be able to process the universe, but surely we can build a computer that can. I mean it's all just math, right?" Fair enough, we may be able to build a computer that can comprehend all seven billion people on the planet and then run predictive analysis to determine the best course of action. My point still stands: When you've dealt with all the problems you can see, the only problems you have are the one's you aren't aware of, and to suggest that there is a finite amount of things you can't be aware of is almost certainly illogical (and that wouldn't be very futurist of you). On another note, what makes you think we will be able to understand the answer the computer gives us? Why should we follow the advice that doesn't make sense to us? And don't pull that "God works in mysterious ways bullshit" because that's not very futurist of you either.

Neil Degrasse Tyson said that if you define God as all the stuff we aren't able to explain then God will slowly shrink as scientific progress moves onward. Sure, there may come a point were we are able to explain everything that happens, but that doesn't mean that we will be able to stop it from happening (heck, maybe it will turn out that it needs to happen.) There is a reason why throughout all of human history people who think the present is Humanity's lowest point and exist alongside people who think this is the highest point. We can only compare things to the past, and if things look worse now than they did back then (or better), what else are you supposed to think? We know we can't predict the future, so we ignore it, but in doing so, we get all worked up about the present.

If believing in the future is your way of coping with an uncertain world, then that's fine. Believe all you want. Base your dreams on the knowledge of the future, but make base your reasoning on the knowledge of the present. And besides, how fair would it be if at some point humans just stopped having problems? That would be a boring ass place to live. Conflict is what makes life interesting. You can't have good without the bad. That's something that will always be true.

But who knows for sure? Only time will tell.

Look how close the donate button is to your mouse

It is surprisingly close now. Only the most recent post is available to look at and there isn't an archive which is maybe not the best idea thing but I really like the fact that the donate button is so close because now people might actually be able to see it and only when they see it can they click it and give me all of their money.

I had a weird dream. I went to a Dubstep concert and some nerdy kid I know was blowing up a playground. It was kinda lame and underwhelming.

In other dubstep news, my MLP dubstep video has reached nearly 1000 views, with 661 of the views coming from the United states. That is a pretty clear act of god in my opinion, and definitely shows you wear the internet's priorities are. 931 views, it is my most viewed video of all time. Other interesting statistics include that 90 percent of people stop watching the video after the first minute, and the video is most popular with men aged over 65.

Anyway I'm still stuck in the midwest so no new content but you can watch this video of me playing "Big Buck Hunter". It's pretty friggin sexy and I get every bitches. I didn't want to talk loud though because I thought everyone on the boat would look at me weird. But after they saw my impressive Bison hunting skills they did all look at me but instead of laughing at me they said "Look at his powerful erection" and I was like "thank you it is very powerful" and then every girl sucked my dick and I am not lying at all.

Blogging is hard when you can't think of anything to blog about.

NEW ITEMS AT THE STORE

CHECK THEM OUT

BAM.
BAM.

Ok so now i am done

so now all the updates are done. The site is good as new. And better also. Heres a rundown of the new sections.

Videos - Contains some of the videos from the youtube account. All the good ones at least.

Moar x^2 - contains all the links to all the other pages affiliated with x^2 (shop, youtube, facebook, twitter.)

Those are the only two new pages. Bam.

WELL THEN

This will be the new blog I guess. If the old one gets reinstated thats cool too. I doubt it though. The man don't give a shit bout me.