WoRDZ

maybe rock music is "done"

05/06/2024

i posted a bmth song that came out 2 days ago. i think bmth's music sounds very modern these days and have often described it using that word.

levi listened to the song and remarked that he at first thought the song was from decades ago.

how can this be?

yet i've often said that it feels like rock hasnt changed much in the past 20 or so years; people flippantly blame this on just a lack of creativity -- yet there are more people in the world than ever, and probably more people than ever attempting to make it. was there really that much more creativity per person a few decades ago?

here's another possibility:

john carmack said in 2004 that soon, audio in games would be 'done'; that the entire feature of sound in a game, accurate depiction inside 3d environments and all, will have been achieved with no real progress left to make.

actually, you might as well say that this already happened as soon as games were able to play mp3s/wavs of normal songs, instead of relying on technology like music trackers to program midi music for old games because they couldn't play audio with the fidelity of "real" songs.

since then, music technology in games has had nothing left to achieve; you are no longer forcibly limited by the technology. music in games as a feature is "done", complete.

so imagine, then, that maybe rock music as a genre was basically "done" by the early 2000s, since by that point...

1) digital technology allowed audio engineers to avoid the distortion imparted by analog hardware and tape formats, and

2) everyone had done enough experiments with audio gear and mixing techniques that they had pretty much discovered what the "best" choices were when deciding how to record and mix every instrument used in rock; sure, there's some margin for subjective preference, but apparently not as much as we hoped.

and doing things to intentionally deviate from #2 became a stylization choice, an attempt to do something different just for the curiosity and aesthetics, not an issue of availability.

so now, you can attempt to make rock that sounds different and "stylized" -- like making a 2d pixel-graphics game that looks like a game from 1993 but made in the year 2024 -- but you've already heard so much better, and now you "can't un-hear" that and how much better it is, and are spoiled by the better recording and mixing methods. and maybe the stylization of audio in that way simply doesn't feel as interesting as it does with visual or graphics representations. after all, it's hard to imagine a pixel art parallel for rock music -- bands that try to sound like classic rock from the 1960s or something? they run into their own problem...

(the stylization is post-technological; it's done merely in the pursuit of aesthetics and so it will always be forced. the quality which really made it exciting was the experimentation and error along the way.)

so maybe similarly, rock music is "done" or complete, and there's nowhere left to go.

affinity too late

01/09/2024

if you died infamously, many people would discover you; the affinity you craved would be found, but too late.

there are a handful of blades of grass that would give you everything you need; you can go and pick them right now. the problem is that they're surrounded by a zillion others, invisible as you stand in a vast open field.

what is a modern solution?

can you build a skyscraper in music?

06/27/2023

i don't think you can build a skyscraper in music; there's nothing you can spend 10 years on, musically, whose result makes it apparent that you spent 10 years of effort, or 10 times as many hours poured into it as compared to any other album. (and many great albums were produced without much planning or backtracking: some evidence for a 'sweet spot' of an ideal amount of time/effort invested for best results?)

you can spend 10 years refining a song or album, but it won't appear ten times better than a song or album that only took you 1 year: it might appear only 1.1 times better; maybe no better at all; or it could even be worse than it would've been, since overworking a project is one of the easiest pitfalls to make. that's just the nature of music (and maybe the nature of anything that's ultimately simple when concluded?) all of the mastery is in the microjudgments; there isn't actually much work to be done.

may you live in weird times

06/10/2023

There must be some point in human history, either now or in the past, when things were at their "weirdest" (whatever that means, but just imagine something).

so exactly when was the weirdest saeculum (period of one human lifespan)?

09/08/2022

09/08/2022

Reading about you is like touching the rim of a black hole whose gravity wraps around you like delicate gossamer, and you start to feel like you can faintly see through to the other side and that you might escape being human after all.

Rage Faces Compilation

07/22/2022

The planet of Saturn (or its moons) are at the center of a conspiracy

07/20/2022

ever since a few years ago when i watched beetlejuice for probably the first time as an adult, ive been wondering what-the-fuck at one specific minor detail in the story of that movie: why, when the characters try to leave the house and are suddenly transported to a desert world with sandworms, is it explained that they were just on Saturn? like, Saturn the planet?

i had looked this up before and found that apparently in the original script, it was written as Titan, the moon of Saturn, but they changed it -- to Saturn, which makes absolutely no more sense: for a movie that doesn't take itself seriously otherwise at all, has no problem transporting characters to nether-realms and silly takes on an afterlife, it seems bizarre that they arbitrarily chose a real, physical place in the non-afterlife that's simply far away -- a barely-known moon of a planet, no less -- that's got nothing to do with anything, and decided that it's inhabited by giant sandworms. The editing of the script from Titan to Saturn only makes it weirder, since apparently there was enough of a discussion over this to change it, yet not to something that has any more of a connection to the rest of the movie's world or theme.

so i just googled this again and i found this blog post and apparently other people have been wondering about the same thing.

Of course, the fact that i've been known to laugh at schizoid-magnet film conspiracies doesn't make this moment ironic; it cements me as the touchstone for reason 😏 and also highlights that there is, in fact, something going on here.

what happens at the end of humanity? can i really be the hero?

06/04/2022

just as people oscillate though the spectra of their needs (like, but obviously not exactly, maslow's hierarchy), a society does too. a successful society is able to raise the floor of its society's needs.

the frontrunners of humanity, the first-world, as of this writing, are currently bottlenecked at sex: so many things that people do are just roundabout pursuits of more sex, because all less-critical needs are already met on a societal level (finding shelter is solved, acquiring food is so thoroughly solved that for some people it's a pathology, medicine is mostly solved). sex is the next tier of desire that's not yet fully solved.

what comes next? and what does the very end look like?

the need for altruism commands billionaires to philanthropy in an attempt to uplift the impoverished world. at some point, the market, so to speak, will reach maturation, and there will be fewer people left to help in the world than there will be philanthropists. there may be a period of an esteem-crisis, wherein a general malaise overcomes the entirety of society, as people no longer have a sense of utility or helpfulness. the "bored billionaire" syndrome will be society's bottleneck. out of desperation, some people may even create chaos just so that they can be credited with solving it.

in keeping with humanity's trend of incorporating ever-more technology to address problems, the solution may just be the simulation: plug yourself into an instanced world that's worse than reality. this time, you're given much higher stats than you were in reality, and/or a super-high Luck skill; you progress through life in the simulation, and there are challenges for sure, but things just always seem to work out. Of course they do, because you're the hero; the monomyth.

Back in reality: your sense of self-actualization (your most abstract psychological need and last unmet need of all), is satisfied. AI programs are always carefully recalibrating the difficulty of your challenges in your simulation, pushing you to your limits such that whenever you think all hope is lost, your own ingenuity and spirit and determination leads you to prevail.

but in order for that to work, you must never know any of this, because you don't even know you're simulating at all. so then what's the point? it's all fake. why not just plug into a dopamine machine?

yes, why not. maybe eventually, it will become clear that living itself has become a novelty. humanity will have solved all of its problems. maybe it will feel that there's nothing left to do but shut it down, and probably leave some wisdom out at some schelling point, just in case some other beings one day stumble across it (to fulfill one last act of altruism and mitigate the death anxiety).

the neverending party #1

06/02/2022

your life is not a story

05/19/2022

Meth Rampage™

05/13/2022

damn, Tristan x_x;
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qC-i8j_R14

Doomerfest 2022

04/26/2022

Information Superhighway Robbery

04/22/2022

Boost your Discord server for onwy ten dowwas per monf :3 you can haz some extra emojis and a custom backgwound uwu;

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$4.99 * 14 per MONF!!!!

*barely
**owned by discord and can be canceled at any time for any reason

Or if you awe a twue gamer, get da super ebic maximum tier for onwy $20,000/month and get 10 extra emoji spots :3

For 100 years?

04/20/2022

IRL Party Next Month!

04/19/2022

Link

04/15/2022

interesting link (159 results)

Da Future :3

04/13/2022

da future is a technocwatic videogame progwammed by manchildren nanniez and you are never awwowed to decide for youwself who da good guyz or bad guyz are :3