Thoughts, Raves & Outright Beatings

For those of you who’ve been following the progress of my CD, and are wondering why the hell it isn’t out yet, well…

• I received the masters of 8 of the CD’s songs from the mastering service I sent the them to; the guy who worked on them did such a good job, that I was able to hear some rather ugly mixing mistakes I made on two of the songs. So I remixed them, then sent them back to be remastered. I also sent him “Ringed by Lovers” to work on as well (I delayed my sending it to him, on account of changing a couple of lyrical passages - I mean, the song’s embarrassing enough as it is, really.) They should all be done by the end of the week.
• This means that I may or may not be able to set aside funds for an upcoming overseas trip AND pay for duping by Discmakers AND take advantage of their online distribution deal until maybe April 15th. I’ll watch my pennies and see.
• Today, I started my initial promoing for the CD like mad. It kinda pissed my husband off that I spent so much time in front of the PC doing this, but well, I’ve sat around and done nothing but sit in my room and write, or write and record. Now that I have something that can be called a viable piece of work put together, it’s time to, as they say, shit or get off the pot.

Things I did to make this happen:

• I updated my Soundclick page with Mp3s of 6 of the masters. Initially I was not getting any sound from the page players, until I realized that some of the ID tagging I had put on the MP3s were causing some encoding issues on Soundclick’s end. So I had to resave the MP3s but without the ID tagging, then re-upload. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….
• Soundclick has a partnership with creativecommons.org to apply CC licenses to any song you upload onto their OMD. So, of course, given that registering a song with the US Copyright office, the last time I checked, was US $45.00 PER SONG, obtaining a license I didn’t have to pay for was a pretty sweet deal. In fact, after we get back from said overseas trip, I may just start giving them some money each month, after taking a free ride for about 8 years on their servers. After all, I don’t think anyone expected Soundclick to survive the OMD wars in the early 2000’s, and yet, here they are, creating new services, and being artist-friendly. And where’s IUMA or MP3.com (wait, don’t ask…)?
• Also, for the first time since I started my profile there, I completely wiped my Myspace profile of any and all of my songs, and uploaded ones from the upcoming CD. I did a small little bulletin, and I’ve already gotten some comments and quite a few listens. Things, right now, are going pretty good. I was even able to add a playlist widget of songs from my Soundclick page.
• Now I’m starting to feel ambitious. I recall that I had an empty iLike profile that was probably started as a result of my attention-whoring ass being all over the internet. It DOES happen. Anyway, I figure what’s good for REM is good for me, I claim the rogue profile for my own, add images, songs and albums to it - even including the little EP I recorded in 2002 and made it available solely on Artistlaunch.com. (I may need to make it available again somewhere, now that I’ve told the greater world about it in even further detail…OOOPS!). It turns out that the iLike artist profiles will automatically port over to the Facebook music profiles that were just introduced. Killing two birds with one stone. Not a bad proposition.
• iLike also works with Bebo. I then remembered that I had started a profile there some time ago. So I went there and did a search. There were 3. YIKES!!! I took the one that was accessible and did some work on it. Uploaded songs, videos, etc. Then I tried to get it featured. Which got me this message:

Your Band has been reviewed and deemed unsuitable for featuring. There are many reasons we may decide not to feature a Band and we are unable to enter into discussions on why, we just receive too many requests. Sorry!

Whatever…serves me right for not jumping on their bandwagon right away.

• Anyway…all my efforts to put my ducks in a row took about 6 hours. This includes sending emails on my Facebook network, my Myspace network, et. al. It’s frankly rather exhausting. I don’t like spamming my friends in the first place, but also, I used to do all this sort of crap when I first put my mp3.com page up back in 1999. It was the start of a massive internet addiction that took me about 6 years to break. And occasionally, I still have to fight it. It’s not healthy. Not for either my online or offline relationships.

Hopefully, I won’t have to go onto these networks every day and remind people that I exist and that I have music. OTOH, nothing would piss folks off more than a nagging wuss.

We’ll see…

Every once in a while, I pop into the “Say Anything” blog, just because I need a maleable rightist that I don’t have to constantly point and laugh at.

Anyway, the peeps there initially posted that Fitna movie for viewing and discussion. Then the video company that hosted it, LiveLeak, pulled it due to “serious” threats to their staff.

So now, of course, it’s all over YouTube, and Google Video has it as well. How long will the video be up on those sites? Who knows? Maybe Sergei Brin will give in due to a phoned-in bomb threat from a disgruntled iman? Maybe not? I would hope for the latter.

I’ve encountered many moderate Muslims. But why, oh why, do they constantly stand by and let their more extremist brethren attempt to force, cajole, and and out-and-out coerce Western economies into muting points of view on their religion that they don’t like:

while they post their own disrespectful and racist drawings in their own newspapers:

Puts these Danish depictions of Mohammed into perspective, no?

Sorry, Muslim extremists, you can’t have it both ways. If you choose to dish it out to religions and ethnicities you don’t like, you damn well better be prepared to take it.

Sure, the Wilders film was created to provoke and incite. Sure, it’s overblown and bombastic. Sure it’s like watching a Fox News segment in Dutch. Sure it takes passages from the Koran out of context. The Bible is full of sex and violence too. However…

No matter how much you may hate someone’s view on something, you do NOT have the right to permanently silence him/her. Or threaten to do so. In fact, thanks to some of these overseas Muslim extremist douchebags threatening the lives of ordinary citizens over this piece of tomfoolery, American Muslims are now feeling even more threatened by the local redneck population wanting to take out a piece of Islamic ass. Does this make this debate any better?

Geert Wilders may not have been right in making this movie. But it was his right to do so.

Anyway, here’s another link to the movie. Argue all you want about it. Thanks to Moslem Pakistanis burning flags over this thing, it’s not going away anytime soon.

I thought this was a nice little list to share.

I would have to say that, in the past, ALL of that has happened to me at one point or another.  Sometimes, all at once.   I had details of it in this blog somewhere of specific instances, but I erased the evidence.

Sometimes, some baggage needs to be cut.

I came across these two entries in my blog roll this morning, and I thought they were worthy of discussion here:

Being Jesus

and

Online Bigotry

These two entries are related, due to the differing viewpoints they have on the allowance of comments (or certain types of comments) on blog or site entries. The Being Jesus entry by Chartreuse refers to an entry on TechCrunch about bloggers and blogging networks raising money.  As with Chartreuse, I also found Michael Arrington’s thinking on this issue to be rather bizarre.   It could be because I don’t blog to make money.  But that’s beside the point.   However, Chartreuse also argues that, in the zeal to for high-level bloggers and blogging networks to make money, obtain capital, and provide a political voice to the blogosphere, the participation of the readers is now being left out of the equation.  Now, all of a sudden, there’s a Blog War, and the people who seem to be losing are the ones to read said blogs and comment on them in the comments section.

His whole thing, from what I understand, is that it’s the readers, stupid!  Which is a great argument.  However, as with that image debacle he had on his blog many moons ago (I still stand by my arguments made on that btw; once you unleash it on the internet, unless you can set up your html to prevent linking; it’s there for the taking - but that’s a discussion for another day), he’s arguing that content needs to be free to be traversed, discussed, et. al.  The more the content is allowed via commentary, the larger the audience will grow.

Which is all fine and good if your blogs preach to take any and all comers.  Which means occasionally hosting hurtful and spiteful comments, while your blog entries profess to be anything but.

You all remember what happened to Kathy Sierra, right?  Noone, but NOONE, should have to have been driven off the internet the way that she was.

This is why I had to start monitoring my comments.   I don’t like doing it.  And I think aspects of my blog’s supposed popularity has suffered as a result of it.   I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog anyway, so in the grander scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. 

However, there were a couple of times, particularly when I was posting about the Jena 6 and showed support for the guy who put together the fake airline ticket, where I came across some angry assumptions about me, my character, my political affiliation, even my race, from doofuses in the the digital nether regions who’d rather call me names than provide a reasoned debate.

And you know what?  Every once in a while, I’ll post a strong opinion, I’ll even post a viewpoint that may be unpopular with many.  But I will not, will NOT tolerate any disrespect from anyone in MY house. 

And I think that’s the problem these days.  Too many blogs, especially high level blogs, in the interest of maintaining eye traffic, are not monitoring their comment content.  The Fox News site is a great example of this, allowing some racist rhetoric directed toward Barack Obama to sit in the comments section of their blogs.    The Huffington Post was also guilty of allowing disrespectful, hateful comments toward Nancy Reagan to be posted on THEIR site, before they finally got wise, cleaned up their act, and closed the post to any further commenting.

Granted, I’m not a fan of Nancy either, but geez! Show some respect!

It’s YOUR house, people!  Why are you letting some dogs shit all over your carpet?!?!?!?!?!

Putting together a blog is not rocket science.   Hell, if a BOT can do it, surely anyone can.  So, of course, there’s a lot of racist, sexist, Neanderthal rantings all over the blogosphere.  Personally, I’m okay with that.  Free country, freedom of speech, all that.  Since I don’t like them, I don’t go to them.  I don’t see them.  I’ve filtered them out of my personal online existence.

It’s when they decide to come to ME is when the trouble starts.   And Angry Aussie gets a lot of that, unfortunately, on his YouTube channel.

This political video really brought out the haters (both American AND Middle Eastern), after it won a YouTube award.

YouTube - Stop the Clash of Civilizations

Here’s the thing, folks.  These Neanderthals can never be stopped.  They can never be disposed of.  They can never be eliminated. 

They can, however, be controlled.

Disallow them from commenting on your work, and they will go elsewhere.  And if more folks prevent them from spewing on their blogs, they will eventually have no where to go and will go skulking back into the digital hellholes from which they came, sniffing and whining in their little websites like the puss-drenched pussy-puppies they are.

That is all…

So I got rid of a few of my older, more popular posts today.

Because, as I said previously, I’d rather be known as a singer and songwriter, than a commentator of other people’s music.

I’m sure this will change.   Especially after I see my WordPress stats plunge faster than a rock from the top of the Empire State Building.

OTOH, oh well…

The two or three regular readers of this rag can be forgiven for thinking that I had abandoned this site.   Nothing could be further from the truth.  I’ve just had my focus on a few other things lately.  Yes I’ve been watching the news.  Yes, Geraldine Ferraro and Reverend Wright are making John McCain look pretty damn good right now.  And Heather Mills is an insane - eh, you know.  Whatever.

The album’s release has been delayed, on account of me wanting to get it professionally mastered.  I found a site that would do it for a reasonable rate.    That, and I decided to throw another song together for the CD.  Haven’t decided what yet, but who knows…

I’m also trying to get my promotional game plan into action.  I may need to invest in advertising at various sites, as I don’t network enough online these days to encourage a street team.  I’ve read that Google’s AdSense doesn’t really cut it anymore, but I may just try it anyway.  I also may go bug a few music bloggers, risk getting the 20 point smackdown on Pitchfork, etc.

I also need to work on my guitar skills, and get out and perform.  I’m sure you all read what happened the last time I did an open mike, but I need to get over that.   Stage fright does not have to be debilitating, if you are doing what you love.  And if you hit a bum note, so what?

I’ll also need to do some further clean up on this blog.  At the risk of sounding as if I’ve been bitten by Scientologist, I’m experiencing a bit of a personal paradigm shift.  I’ve spent WAY too much time deep in self examination and I told myself, “Self, whatever shit came into life was shit that you allowed to come into your life, and in fact, occasionally encouraged it.   If you are all about the drama, then drama-filled your life will be.  If you take it upon your self to allow no shit to come into your life, and allow no drama to enter your life, then your life will be drama and shit free.  See?”  So, I’ll be removing anything and everything in my blog over the next few weeks that’s caused offense, hurt, pain…well, I’ll leave out the offence part, because offence is in eye of the beholder - see, I’m still as fed up with weak-livered crybabies as anyone else.  But I’m past attack mode.   I don’t need to pick any fights to make my point.   I can be opinionated, but show the love at the same time. 

Besides, after looking at  these “All Time” stats from my WordPress admin area, perhaps a better career move for me WOULD be to be consider a progressive, talented singer and songwriter, rather than someone who’s most famous rant was of going off on a song about punk rockers with flowers in their hair.  Puleeeeeeze!

“Oh I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker With Flow
19,108

“Everybody, move your feet and feel unit
3,316

Crossposted from my Myspace Blog, becaus
3,097

Boca Java Coffee Reviews #1 & 2
2,909

“Far Away, this ship is taking me f
2,078

I’m a Bunch of Celebrity Lookalikes, Get
1,912

“Ho Sit Down!” moments, #1
1,339

One Night In Paris’ Jail Cell
1,280

Exhibitionism for the Cause
1,165

Monday Evening Oggcast, July 23, 2007 -
975

• Congrats to Trent Reznor’s own album download scheme making him some money - but he needs to lay off Radiohead. :p 

Meanwhile…

• Muse is embracing the needs of the Itunes generation - go Matt, Dom and Chris!
• Sorry, Madonna - I’m sure you want to show off how damn good you look at age 50, but this cover is NOT the way to go about it.  UGH!!!  So much for all that Kaballah training.
• Now, why couldn’t Natalie Cole have been more like THIS guy?