So I have subscribed for the couple of years to Foreign Affairs magazine, which I love. Subscription also entitles you to get one year of back-issues online for free. The magazines come out every two months, and normally cost $10 a pop ($60/year).
I just got an offer to get two subscriptions for a total of $44. Does anyone reading this want to split the subscription with me? If so, shoot me an email.
So it looks like friend of the journal, nicerobot, has had too many problems with WordPress or something and destroyed his “Just for Friends” community blog in a fit of rage. He has suggested the handful of us who frequented ( or infrequented) there should start up Friendfeed accounts and keep in touch that way.
I don’t know Friednfeed, but it seems kind of Twittery to me. Nothing against Twitter, but I just can’t get into massive quantities of one sentence phrases coming in fromall directions like an attack of locusts. It seems like the logical progression of online Attention Deficit Disorder. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I Just Don’t Get It. But it seems likemore and more data is coming in with less and less information and context.
I think that’s my biggest issue here – lack of context. I guess you can make your own context with very short messages. I think I will start a messaging service with a message length limited to one character:
etc. If enough of these feeds are coming at you at once, I am sure you will begin to see the patterns in the traffic.
I know I have been lax in posting here lately. I’m not going to make excuses. But I am working now on enacting some positive daily habits, and I will include daily posts to this diary as a part of this. So expect to see a coming deluge of mostly meaningless musings on a variety of subjects that will probably only have meaning to me.
One of the reasons I want to start writing regularly here is to try to organize my thoughts on a few initiatives and thought processes I am trying to get started or continue. Getting started is the most difficult thing for me, but hopefully I will get the ball rolling here and get some good work in motion.
The first initiative I am trying to focus on is reworking and relaunching my Commercial Voice Over business. I finally have a working set of recording hardware and software, and I am planning to record some additional demos and send out some mailers. I have been pretty inspired by my wife Laura’s cloth diaper and stroller bag business, Andromeda’s Attic, which is starting to take off. Those of you with kids should check it out.
Another initiative is to get back on track with composing. 2007 was the first year that I did not finish a composition since 1999, and for some reason right now I’m struggling to get back to it. I may decide to post some of the many half formed ideas I have for some compositions here in order to get some order around them and hopefully get them finished and recorded. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to start finding a way to more widely distribute the works I have already completed. To this end, I have plans to remaster and possibly remix some of my older compositions, especially softshoeballet and tones(a)tones. Collecting some of these recordings into cohesive albums (with album art, or course) would be a part of this initiative as well. I’m also thinking of ways to sell my music while still distributing the audio files for free – but I think this part of the modern issues with monetizing recorded music.
On another note, I recently found some papers from high school and found my old ASVAB test scores. There was a question asking what my expected profession would be, and in that totally high-school-artsy-know-it-all way, I simply wrote “Writer”. I had forgotten how badly I wanted to be a writer in high school. This was when I was just starting to read William Gibson and feeling super inspired. There is some speculative fiction rattling around in my brain these days that I may or may not end up committing to writing. I am most hesitant about this initiative – it’s just so easy to write this type of stuff horribly – but I think writing in general is something I miss and posting to the journal will help here. But whether I write stories or not, I just can’t help but create worlds in my head.
There are other things I think about as well that I plan to post – mainly philosophy (especially the current zeitgeist of intellectual property concepts and the “copyleft” movement) and history, which is what I was actually trained in (especially the history of corporations and technology, but also general world history). Current events and brewing beer are on the table as well, of course.
So hopefully in the future there will be more frequent posts, but not quite this long. I am sure all the multitudes reading this journal have been waiting with baited breath.
I am brewing another batch of beer tonight. This one, according to The Brewer’s Apprentice, is supposed to be similar to Old Speckled Hen, one of my favorite English beers (and available, I may add, at the Cincinnati Airport).I am finding that, while cooking up the beer, I have started to listen consistently to a Jethro Tull playlist. There seems to be something fitting there for me. The woodsy flute-induced classic rock mixes well with the act of brewing an old English ale. To contrast that, I have gravitated to listening to Gary Numan while mowing the lawn. I can’t quite rationalize that one, but it’s the truth. And the soundtrack to writing functional specifications for complex software systems (my bread and butter)? Morton Feldman, of course. Or possibly Lief Inge or some other extremely slowed down piece of music.
OK, so it’s been over a month since I’ve written in my journal. Hey, it’s my journal – I can write when I want to!
That being, said, I have a whole list of things on my iGoogle task gadget to write entries about, but I have not made the time to write. Why is this? I have always had issues when starting a journal, but once I get the ball rolling things usually pick up steam. It doesn’t help that I have been incredibly busy lately, but I digress…
Part of this, in addition, is that I have another journal that competes with my time. That one is made out of paper. Making the transition to an online journal (not a “web log”, or “blog”, mind you – a web log to me is a list of http connections and other system events, not so exciting) is very similar to my transition from recording on analog tape (Istill have my Yamaha MT-120 4-track in the closet, just in case!) to digital recording. This transition is still ongoing for me, and may be one of the reasons why I haven’t made a lot of recordings since that transition.
So I will try to get these posts up in the coming weeks…probably.
Doing my part to propogate a certain meme I read about on several websites, I am posting my official randomly generated indie rock album. If you want to know the rules for creating one, look at the links above – I’m too lazy to type them out. Basically everything is based on random quotes, random images, and random Wikipedia Articles.
Fuller Baronets
An expert is the mathematics of probability
The surest way to do something about it
As long as people hate their friends
Nothing amuses me more – a burden it was.
Fuller Baronets [x4]
Make sure to rise and go home
A harbor, even, is worth the price
A human being is like a beautiful sadness
There’s only one corner – kind and neat.
Fuller Baronets [x4]
I admit I cheated a little on the lyrics – the quotes themselves just didn’t fit right.
This whole concept is intriguing to me from a John Cage type of perspective – there is a real pull for me to aleatory elements in music. If I could find a system to work in a randomizer for the music itself, this might be interesting.
I might find a way to work parts of these concepts into my next piece (after the in-progress Piano studies), which I have a name for but no music – I will withhold the name until I get some music written, but let’s say it speaks to randomness and/or divination.
Although I have been writing in this blog to myself for the last week or two, I have finally put a link to the blog on the front page of NathanBibb.com. I am not sure yet what the purpose of this blog will be other than to collect my random thoughts. I guess it might not be advisable to open up my random thoughts to the entire world, but until I get a sense for a defined thematic use for this journal, that’s how it will have to be.
Feel free to comment if you think I should focus on something in particular. Otherwise, you are left to my capricious whims!