And by 'the light' I mean the mainstream web...

Anyone who has been on tumblr this last week knows it has experienced some controversy and frankly, it's getting ridiculous. Tumblr barely knows how to communicate and tend to it's user's concerns, and the behaviour of the CEO has been pathetic and unprofessional. The cherry on the cake with this whole debacle is that the current owners of tumblr are in the process of making deals with MidJourney to scrape data from all the art posted. Tumblr has been an 'art site' that recently has pushed for this persona of 'supporting and platforming artists', and now have stabbed us all in the back. One of Tumblr's appeals is that it is seen as dead by the rest of the online sphere, but this double edged sword means that it can be difficult to make a career with you art on there, or get any interactions. And now with Midjourney stealing your content to feed its machine, you stand no reason to post at all. So we wait. Will they pawn off Tumblr to another company to steadily milk it until it dies? Or will something else happen? Maybe Nightshade will keep the site alive.

The way AI has picked up in the last year is freaking me out a bit. It's changing art so fast it's hard to keep up with. I feel like I want to distance myself from that whole thing, and go old school. It's probably because all of my favourite things that require skill to learn are being replaced... even at my work AI has crept in so quickly that a year ago I wouldn't have conceived of it. I don't think it's all bad of course, but the way it has replaced art and it's use in acedemia (things like ChatGPT writing papers) has left me a little concerned. With the way world events are going... if this technology falls into the wrong hands awful things could happen... I'm scared for the future.

On a nicer note, I've been reading a lot more than usual and have started making more music again. I read Kafka's 'The Trial' and absolutely loved it, and at the moment I'm mid way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'. Rodya Raskolnikov is an interesting one to put it lightly.

Well, I haven't posted in months, but I am still here and I still have plans for this site. My work has been intense, It's one of those jobs that tends to be 'all or nothing'. I'm either sat around or running at 100mph. I don't mind of course, but now my schedule has cooled off a bit with Christmas, I can maybe start to put more focus into adding more stuff to the site. I'm sick at the moment with possibly COVID, so doing everything is harder than usual, but when the new year comes I hope to get back on the saddle and start doing things again! And of course, Happy New Year!

Last month for my birthday, my parents found me a second hand cd player/tape deck. It was intended to be furniture for the place I was expected to move into but that never went through.... So it sat for a month, but I finally used the much anticipated recording function!

^ Here is my wonderful walkman that I've had for about 5 years now. In January of 2022 I gave it a tuneup by replacing the belt and setting the motor speed. It can be unstable at times but for the most part it works great! I love working on my cassettes, collecting and servicing them. When I was 17/18, I often went out and bought my cassette player with me, along with a bag of a few tapes. It was (and still sort of is) my main method of playing music portably. I never had iTunes, or Spotify, and I never will. I use Youtube a lot for music, but at times in which I can't use internet, I jump straight back to the cassette player.

^ The Deck I was using to record. After running a few test recordings on an old used tape I was given, I did my first proper recording onto a blank one. I chose to record my old Future Funk mixtape I made when I was 17, originally on CD. I'm listening to the finished tape now. It sounds awesome, and I can't wait to record more!

I'm not gonna be one of those people who believe that tape secretly has 'superior audio quality' or something. It really doesn't. There's noise, flutter, tape destroying itself or getting eaten, and most machines struggle after a certain age. It is much smarter to work with CD Audio, but I love the cassette. The rituals, the way playing through it adds a new quality, the experience of how the machines sounds, watching the reels go round and round. It really is a guilty pleasure of mine! I really am a hipster lol.

My newest project as of June has been fixing up a guitar. Not just your standard fender or something though.... it's a Soviet Era 1982 guitar.. the "Урал" (or "Ural" in english). I actually bumped into in on reverb by accident while looking for a cheap guitar for my brother to try experimental pickups in. As soon as I saw it, it lodged itself in my brain and I bought it for myself two weeks later.

It arrived in two pieces as expected, has a bit of a crack on the exterior, and as I soon found out, had never been opened and needed a lot of work. It was covered in dirt and gunk but I have really enjoyed cleaning it up so far! I have replaced all the rusty screws, cleaned the pickup springs, opened and cleaned out the bridge and cleaned and oiled the fretboard. It's important to note that the guitar will most likely not fix up to an excellent quality, maybe not even good, but as I play for fun I am not too bothered if it comes out "cheap".

Anyways, todays fix up was regarding the switches. The Урал has two sets of 3 switches - One set controls the pickup selection (instead of the traditional 3 or 5 way switch), and the other controls an EQ profile. When it first arrived I began pushing the pickup switches and one got stuck, which was definitely not something I was going to ignore. So today I got to fixing the switch for good.

The actual switch had these tiny springy metal things in them that allowed the signal to contact, and they were very easy to lose. They also had these two metal overlay things that applied pressure to a tiny rod that allowed the switch to click in and out of position. We actually had to scrape a new groove in the plastic in order for the rod to stop getting stuck in the 'on' position. I've heard that these soviet guitars often recycled old kitchen appliances to work their switches so I really didn't want to rip it out and just replace it with a new one. My goal was to keep the guitar as authentic as possible unless something small needed to be replaced in order to preserve longevity (for example, rusted screws).

I also put the pickups back together after cleaning the springs that were so crusty they were stuck in a contracted position, and replacing the height adjustment screws. My next target is the 5 pin input jack.

For whatever reason, guitars in the Soviet Union included a 5 pin input jack instead of the standard Quarter inch. This input when combined with the amps they used to make could theoretically allow you to control on board effects. I also suspect this was to slightly distance themselves from the Western world, in which the electric guitar was seen as a cultural icon.

After I solder that, then I gotta put it together and test it! Hopefully if everything is good to go, I'll work on the absolutely horrible tuning pegs, adjust the truss rod, put some new strings on, and start playing! I will update this when I work on it next!

My first actual entry on this site! Hopefully I will remember to update it. I'm still active on tumblr (hello if you have come from there!) and I've heard that Youtube is beginning to roll out anti-adblocking protocols. I personally haven't seen it yet but it doesn't surprise me. Tumblr and Youtube are the last social medias that I actually use everyday. And even then the general trend that social media has taken has left a bad taste in my mouth. If these sites keep adding these advert obsessed or counter productive features then I will leave. I have been using Youtube since 2006, and they lost me somehow. Tumblr is also doing its best to cash in on its sense of community, so there might come a time that I say bye bye to that too. Sucks man. Social media blew my mind when it came out. It seemed so good, but greed has rotted the net over the last 15 years. At least we have places like Neocities again :)

On a slightly happier note my new flute came today!! It sounds amazing. Its a Trevor James Copper flute, and it a million times better than my old cheap Thomann one. It's also lighter and is easier to play too. Man I can't wait to dig into it properly.

I'm enjoying learning some HTML too. It's not as bad as I thought. Obviously my site is pretty basic but I'm happy with how it looks so far!