Image by MelvinSchlubman via Flickr

Well, I played my first live performance in about 4 years last night. A big thanks to Buenos Airwaves and the people of the Sycamore House in Harrisburg. It was a blast! Hopefully I’ll have some pictures up.

I’m learning a lot about the music I make and the genre I play in. When people ask me what kind of music I make I have a bunch of different answers ranging from electronic to laptop rock. Playing music using computer software and various electronic peripherals is fun and affords infinite creative control, but performance-wise I find it difficult to engage the crowd. When playing on stage behind a guitar there is a raw energy of always connecting with the instrument that feeds the excitement of the crowd. Playing behind a computer makes me feel more like a drummer – trapped behind a bevy of equipment, separating my energy and crowds energy. I really have to learn to adjust my thinking from being a guitar player who isn’t used to having that wall to being more like a drummer and going nuts like Animal to project a massive amount of crowd enraging energy.

The other part of that equation is the music. The electronic sub-genres that are most accessible to enthusiastic live crowds typically have very very simple beats. The magic of these genres is more in the production, quality and attention to detail of the sounds than in the creative explosion of rhythms you’ve never thought of before (exceptions apply, of course). For two completed (and one upcoming) albums my rhythms and beats reflect a mash of playful exploration, hip-hop and dance. I typically find this inhibits the typical dj-driven dance floor movements. Driving, continuous, uninterrupted beats are the order of the evening in almost all situations where you want people to dance all night long – that and recognizable tunes (mostly stateside).

But I’m learning. In addition to these reflections that I wanted “on paper” for future reference here is a checklist of things for future performances:

• Always have takeaways. Have freebies and sell-ables that people can take away from the show. I went in with nobody knowing who I was and I left with maybe 3 people knowing who I was. Moreover, there’s no telling if they will remember my name, my music’s name, or even this website.
• Practice on a PA sound system setup and bring it whenever possible. No offense to the Sycamore house, but my sound was terrible. I wasn’t used to being in a sound system. I didn’t know their sound system. When my main beat tracks weren’t shining through the other layers the way they should have, there was no way for me to know it was because my stereo output was jacked into a mono input.
• Build and maintain various live set list projects in Live and Reason. After a massive number of attempted sync settings I finally caved and pulled in all my tracks and samples into one HUGE Live project. Seriously, over 50 tracks and over 150 scenes. Then, with Reason slaved to Live I was loading new Reason files for different sections of the set. That ended up being near-fatal because many tracks were setup to get signals from the same output from Reason. Halfway through the set 3 tracks could be running the same sound making it 3 times louder than it ought to have been. The solution I want to explore is to build several live sets that include various configurations of songs from my repertoire. Each set would be laid out not by song, but only by track and sample so that the live performance would be more creative and responsive. Also, each set would have only one associated Reason file with every instrument wired to outputs one-to-one so that there won’t be any track “bleeds”.

Anyways, the show was a great learning experience. I’m hoping to finish MetaTheories this month! (The last track is in the production phase) Afterwards I want to have a record release show and begin passing out the album to try and get more shows. Hopefully at some point next year, I will see you – the internet – out on the dance floor jamming to one of my tunes.

Image via Wikipedia

Ok, so I know I’m not perfect and I know that no one else is. But with so much going on I feel like the world is on an exponential graph (f(x^2)). I digress. As many of you may know, I like to listen to talk radio when I’m driving in my car. It’s much more engaging than most of the commercial music drivel that’s on. Recently on one of the shows a guest to the show was presenting an argument for Animal Rights. (I wish I could remember his name and his book) While to his larger points, I disagree, one thing he said stood out to me. Paraphrased, he mentioned that the amount of grains used to feed animals was massively disproportionate to the amount of nutrition produced by food from those animals (meat).

To sum up my experience, I’m a species-centric person. I believe that human life is more important than animal life. In a life boat situation I have no problem throwing another species or lifeform out of the boat in order to survive. This is the way of nature. There may be some moral conflict in upholding rules governing fair treatment of other humans versus allowing poor treatment of animals for the “betterment” of human society (for food, for medicine, etc.) but in general I’m a much bigger fan of a human that I’m in competition with in the food chain with than another species I’m competing with.

And so, I’m left with this: Is my over-consumption of meat in conflict with my wish of betterment for the human species? My only answer can be yes.

If it takes so much grain to feed the cow that I could be fed and 100 other people be fed I am content with my loaf of bread so that 100 more can survive a day longer. And I say this with all gravity, that I am fully aware that I’m one person, and knowledge that I change little in my personal choices (or even that all my choices align properly to the same moral compass 100% of the time). I do not make this choice to make a change, and yet I do not wish to make this choice to in some way cleanse a guilty conscience. I am not guilty, I am redeemed. I will make this choice out of love and conviction.

On eating meat: After weighing what information I can find (and hopefully have linked on to you), I have decided not to swear off meat to the point of being an inconsolable prick or an ungrateful, ungracious guest (for still, in some cultures the providing and consuming of meat is a great honor for both guest and host). I have decided that the meals I furnish for myself will consider the greater cost of production. And in the case of mass produced meats I cannot find a defense for continuing to partake of their waste.

I started with the hopes of asking for suggestions for my own personal vegetarian manifesto, but found I pretty much knew what I wanted to say. Still, I would welcome comments, suggestions, critiques, and questions so that this manifesto of mine will be practical and yet responsible as well.

In addition to the links in the articles, here are some links I found to read up on before I came to this conclusion.

http://www.veggie123.com/
http://zenhabits.net/2007/08/how-to-become-a-vegetarian-the-easy-way/
http://www.goveg.com/index.aspx
http://www.theppk.com/
http://www.vegcooking.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_vegetarianism
http://www.all-creatures.org/cva/

(also since I’m about to be getting married this is subject to the approval of my S.O.)

(oh and sarah asked if I get a kick back on donations through the link. The answer is a resounding no. In fact they most likely don’t know I’m linking to their site. I simply don’t generate that much traffic.)

xoxo

Lee

I pledge to vote for Ron Paul. I pledge to vote regardless of political strategy. I choose to vote for the right candidate, the best candidate, and the candidate that lines up most with my beliefs on how the government should run. I refuse to vote based on party lines and sacrifice quality for control.

And to those who would discourage, saying “thanks for a vote for the other guys.” I say,

1. read the quote below, think, repeat. (it applies to both sides)
2. go do this to yourself.

Money quote:

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno’s FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993, it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened.

• upgrades destroy plugins.
• witness my beautiful WoW UI go to poop this weekend after they patched to 2.2. On the upside, i did find a couple nice new add-ons.
• witness now my well organized, well oiled wordpress. i did the automatic upgrade, which worked out quite nicely, but then i went on to upgrade my plugins as well. disaster.
• No more rants.

I will be starting to post pictures of my WoW self. (I’m a female Cow in that game… and no i don’t find it disgusting, i find it hilarious.)

i’m not worried about people listening to my music for free, i’m worried about people saying my work is their work. that’s really not a nice thing to do. and if you believe it or not, it has happened to me before. back in the day, i used to write cheezy college poetry on an old blog site called xanga. i had two, one called haeven and one called suncherry. i would post a lot of the poems i wrote back then to the haeven blog while suncherry was my personal day-to-day-bore-your-face-off blog. well, sometime last year one of my old college buddies emailed me asking if i knew such and such a blog person. i said no, and he said well, someone is stealing one of your poems. and sure enough. i asked the person to either attribute it to me or take it down. he took it down.

record labels that gauge peoples eyes out for records made by sucky bands is bad business. the RIAA deserves to die for what they do to their customers. so please, feel free to listen to my music and share it with anyone you know, but don’t try to pass it off as your own work. i don’t make music to make money, i make music to enjoy it and to enjoy other people enjoying my work.

-rlee

Article about taxing in Second Life

indeed the line between real and virtual are being blurred. this
article is specific to the economics prevalent in SL. the general
theme of these articles is that slowly ideas and institutions such as
realty, rights management, and even a justice system are moving into
these virtual realms. you just have to remember that as a human you
still need to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom.

I’m about to comment where I haven’t done any specific research, so I
apologize if I miss something or generalize. In my opinion Linden has
created a hybrid technology of wiki (or community based creation) and
3d immersion.

On the wiki side it seems they have made a few excellent decisions.
They have created an in game modeling system (i may be incorrect about
this since i haven’t actually tried to use it), an uploading system,
and a scripting system. Key among this may very well be the scripting
which is (or closely based on) javaScript. This makes it widely
accessible because most people who build websites for a living are at
least on speaking terms with javaScript and don’t require too much
nudging to apply it to object behaviors.

However on the 3d side of things they’ve added some neat feature which
can be attributed to its wide success but have left out some key
feature which will, if not soon addressed, lead to its ultimate
failure. Their largest boon overall the previously mentioned features
is the economy and real estate focused elements. I have read many
articles of people actually turning such a profit in game whether
through small business or real estate that the it has been discussed
as becoming a taxable income. In one case a man actually turned a $1
mil. profit through real estate in game. However on the flip side of
things Linden seems to be in a boom that they haven’t foreseen. This
is causing a huge lag element that if not addressed immediately will
amount to the fallout closely equivalent to when AOL had one modem for
every 50+ (i forget the exact stats, i think it was worse than that)
users. In my experience over the pass week, I have spent so much time
dealing with lag – even in lowly populated areas with little
architecture – that in about 7 hours of play, I have yet to complete a
physical appearance that suits my taste. This is unacceptable. In a
game interface with a plethora of menus and gaming interfaces dealing
with lag while trying to search for friends, find an object in your
library, or looking for a neat new area to explore can be a
discouraging experience. Linden has to improve this and it isn’t an
impossible task if you look at all the mmorpg’s who successfully host
thousands upon thousands of users with gorgeous graphics and simple
interfaces with half the lag I’ve seen on Linden’s servers.

I know this doesn’t really answer the question. Sorry. I think this is
considered a rant. But the truth is, I haven’t really found an
equivalent hybrid to this point, so there really isn’t a way around
the current downfalls of SL, except patiently waiting for them to
upgrade their systems and the program itself. One interesting
near-equivalent system is IMVU. It is more a hybrid social networking
- chat – 3d environment. I doesn’t allow the in depth scripting or
interactions that are available in SL, so I wouldn’t begin to consider
it acceptable for e-Learning use.