Artwork

I’m writing about..

singing sex embodied therapy health aerial food humor geek stuff love performances badass depression music travel relationships arty things personality burning questions making a difference thoughts money not applicable massage truthiness life injuries insight modeling insecurity
February 5, 2012, 8:08 pm in updates
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*squints in puzzlement at youtube* .. I remember Good Idea / Bad Idea being more consistently-good than this. Some of them are even reversed.

February 4, 2012, 6:01 pm in public

Fascist Pandora

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I just sat down to write a rant about Pandora and their flip-floppy principals of having intricate, almost hieroglyphic explanations for track selections, but no way to tell them why you liked or disliked a track.

Sure, it’s great to know that you picked Sinewave for me because of its “electronica roots, downtempo influences, unsyncopated ensemble rhythms, straight drum beats and use of modal harmonies” — but you don’t care why I’m thumbing it up or down?

I’ve developed a fucking complex about it man, cause like.. I’m sick to fucking death of “Teardrop” and that fucking track from the Virgin Suicides, but I still want Pandora to play similar tracks and not deprive my station of the “electronica roots, ambient soundscapes, downtempo influences, headnodic beats and unsyncopated ensemble rhythms” because I gave an Air track the stinkythumb.

Similarly, I sometimes want to thumbs up a track because of it’s intro or outro before all those stupid drums and shit kick in, but I don’t because then my station transforms into some kind of glitchrave, and I get all sorts of weird twitchy shit that’s full of the part of the song I just thumbsup’d that I didn’t like.

I was just sitting down to bitch about this when I poked around the site a little bit and found an “I’m tired of this track” option buried under the uparrow submenu thingie for the track that says “Why was this track selected?”

So there. Hopefully that helps someone out there. But don’t even think about trying to be remotely granular in your Pandora feedback from the fucking mobile app. That thing won’t even let me go back to thumbs up a track I heard while I had grease all over my hands and my fist burrowed between someones internal organs.

The dangers of using Pandora at work..

January 31, 2012, 11:29 am in public

Near Miss

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So I’m working through the drafts on neevita, not sure how they accumulate actually, it looks as though sometimes I’ll write up status updates and decide they’re not quite ready or maybe I don’t want to post it as it is and then forget about them. I just found this one from July 23 of 2011:

One thing about my life that’s special and somewhat unique, is the way I utilize the internet to express myself and also to allow people to get to know me. I sometimes forget what it’s like to connect with someone over time who doesn’t know my mother left when I was a kid, hasn’t read about the way I utilize artistry to cope with trauma, doesn’t follow neevita or know about the deep experiences I’ve processed here.

Sometimes the ripening of a connection with a person reveals something I had previously been disconnected with, or unable to articulate. That happened last night,

*sigh* – AGH! What was it what was it?!

January 31, 2012, 3:32 am in updates
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Sometimes, when I’m bored or something, I load up the iSight webcam on the macbook air, just so I can marvel at how completely horrible the quality is. I’m really stunned that apple bothered to put the raging piece of shit in this at all.

January 24, 2012, 8:14 am in updates
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Ha. Finally figured out why my macbook air wasn’t charging. Improper seating due to a tiny little piece of gravel which apparently had a high iron property to it and was sticking to the magnetic port.

January 19, 2012, 9:27 pm in public

Embodied: The Album, is taking shape

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Bill Nash - End Credits It’s a slow process, one that’s pressing against the boundaries of my comfort zone, working on the audio for Embodied. And stressful, too — My favorite plugin costs $250 to authorize but has a 10 day full-access trial period, of which I have 8 days left to finish the album.

My body hates me for being on the computer so much, and it’s hard once I’m in the zone to surface again. I piss away hours in what seems like minutes and before I know it it’s past dinner time and I realize I haven’t eaten since breakfast.

On the plus side, I have had little interest in venturing outdoors during Snowpacolypse 2012, as being wet and cold with aching digits isn’t my thing. It’s been helpful to have a project to focus on, even if it’s a frustrating one.

Bill Nash - Whatever Lola Wants My arm is a wreck after 10+ hours ignoring my own education while editing music on a laptop yesterday. I set up a better workstation and broke out my arm and back braces in addition to using an actual mouse instead of a trackpad and fared much better it seems. Out of context, I probably looked like I’d gotten hit by a truck or something, but it worked.

In the spirit of fumbling with buggy tech shit, which seems to be the totality of my life right now, one of the highlights of the experience was running across this clip of Infinite Reality from the first night of the show.

I feel like I haven’t laughed something off like that in a long time.

December 19, 2011, 2:08 pm in updates
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Researching all this health stuff is often bringing back snips and sensations of what it was like taking anatomy/physiology at Brian Utting School of Massage — as well as betraying how much I’ve forgotten over the years. I’m thankful for the refresher.

November 28, 2011, 7:53 pm in updates
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Test

September 17, 2011, 6:47 pm in public

Juno Surgery

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I got my first Juno 106 in 1999 off ebay. It arrived with a broken bender, and in the years ahead I somehow lost the ENV slider — not just the cap, but the metal stem as well.

I got my second Juno 106 in 2002, when my friend and test manager at Microsoft gave me the one I had borrowed to put on a music show in my living room. It’s also missing a stem and cap from its LFO slider. As a side note, Stu also deserves props for most of the songs I’ve released since my two mp3.com albums, as they were made on the XP-30 he loaned and eventually gifted me as well.

Moral: Don’t let me borrow sound equipment from you, because I’ll do such awesome things with it you won’t want to take it back from me.

With the show coming up, it was about time to fix these things. I rallied a couple friends to contribute things like epoxy, Juno knowledge and paper clips, and all is now well in the land of my synths. At least.. I think so. I haven’t actually turned either of them on again yet. :P

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Behold, the innards of the illustrious Juno 106 analog synthesizer. Isn’t it beautiful?

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More vintage hardware porn. Mmmm. Sassy.

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It turned out the bender on my original 106 was floppy because it wasn’t actually attached to the assembly anymore. It’s normally screwed into a metal bracket by two plastic tabs that were pretty thin to enable the vertical functionality of the bender to work. Those tabs were broken at some point. This is a photo of Lukes handywork: two tiny pieces of sheet metal epoxied across the break and clamped for drying.

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We also found that large plastic coated paper clips fit perfectly into the plastic divets of a broken slider on a Juno 106. That’s a red one in my mouth there as I’m taking apart the second Juno…

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And epoxying it into the divets of the plastic base.

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Ta Da. The yellow version on Stu’s old Juno. All that’s left to do is put the slider caps back on the rest of them and let that yellow hack shine in all its glory. I can’t even tell you how awesome I think this is.

The next fix, which may or may not happen before the show, is to replace the felt that sits along all the sliders. It’s so dry and stiff that it’s completely falling apart.

Super fun project.

July 21, 2011, 2:31 am in updates
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It seems like I have a lot of content on this website. Then I look at the posts in the admin panel, and I still have more drafts (1500, almost entirely old written posts from phuqed/the drupal version of neevita) than published posts (1300 which include my status messages, posts displaying images, and quotes and shit). Wow.

July 14, 2011, 7:47 pm in public
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Every once in a while, it really hits me just how much of myself I put out there in some ways, and just how little I do in others.

Also; I find it really fascinating that while phuqed/neevita used to be the first wave, and then I would decide what to put on LJ/facebook, it’s now reversed. Maybe it’s because I wipe my facebook wall periodically, and keep what I put here — or that somewhere deep in me, I actually trust facebooks privacy settings with those instant, meandering streams of consciousness?

Scary.

July 7, 2011, 8:54 pm in updates
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If I hit facebook at just the right time and just the right amount of inebriation, I can almost see the pound sign forming on my status updates, like the channel names on IRC. Facebook comments FTW.

June 1, 2011, 11:35 am in events

RHoK, 6/3

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Who: Zita the aerialist
When: Friday June 3, 7-11pm
Where: Georgetown Ballroom 5623 Airport Way S
Cost: FREE!

Reception details:
There will be aerials, acrobalance, juggling, and sweet tunes interspersed with presentations from NASA, Google, GWOB, Microsoft, and Crisis Commons VIPs. Entrance is free but beer is not. Must be 21+ to attend the reception. We’ll start at 19:00 and run until 23:30.

May 3, 2011, 9:58 am in public
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Guess I posted something Facebook didn’t like. At about 3am Facebook decided to wipe out my account, and removed all pages I was admin of — including pages that I didn’t even own. Looks like the Day Spa page, Artful touch, my Courtnee Papastathis artist page and Vita Arts page are all unavailable through facebook now. Classy!

What in the world will I do with all my free time today?

April 29, 2011, 11:00 am in public

Sony

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Unless a company is selling customer data encryption, assume that encrypting their customer data is not part of their bottom line.

Unless you are celibate from the internet, assume that your information can be hacked. It can. Even with condoms.

Unless our attitude that being hacked is shameful is put to rest, people will continue to be hurt. By the effect fraud has on economies to the corrosion of our sense of the integrity we should be holding to the people we make stinking, disproportionately rich by abusing the trust and ignorance of the public, people will continue to be hurt.

Unless Sony and their arrogance are called out and owned, it stays the same for a while.

Unless people become more responsible for themselves and what is done with their data, it stays the same for a while.

Sony is the playboy who doesn’t bother bagging it and thinks he won’t ever get teh Herps. We’re the dumb drunk bitches who know better but bang him anyway.

But some day, this shit is gonna change.

April 29, 2011, 10:30 am in updates
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Thanks, Sony, for leaving only 3 digits to crack. #customerdataprotectionEPICfa

April 19, 2011, 10:55 am in updates
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Argh go FUCK YOURSELF FACEBOOK! I set my fucking notifications how i WANTED THEM. Bunch of spammy shitheads! Skullfuck you!

April 17, 2011, 11:47 am in updates
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Yes!! I figured out why my phone wasn’t seeing the home wireless network! UP YOUR ASS, D-LINK!

April 14, 2011, 1:44 pm in public

Neevita the unruley

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Neevita is starting to get unruley again. It’s reminding me of 2006 or so when realizing I was hand editing 2000 HTML files every time I redesigned my website, and moved to a CMS. Now I look at all the shit I have on here and I really want to design a better interface to find things, but I like the look of the site and don’t wish to change it too much.

Any ideas/suggestions?

February 22, 2011, 10:00 pm in updates
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What’s the consensus on the Droid Milestone, Droid Global 2, and Droid X-1? Other than I’d have to sell my unfertilized eggs to afford any of them?

 
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