Beep boop. Still alive.

I’m not doing so hot though. I’ve been out of the city for three days, away from my normal environment, and it’s starting to really get to me. Last night I was tormented by visions of all the people I’ve “abandoned.”

I put “abandoned” in quotes because really, I’ve just had a slightly messier version of what every human being experiences. I get into relationships, they end badly sometimes, the end. I’m not on speaking terms with some of my exes. Welcome to life.

Alright, personal vent time. This one is going to be a little less edited (at least, I hope it will be).

I don’t know who the fuck I am. I don’t know what I stand for, what my beliefs are, what my values are, what I want. Instead, I have my internal panopticon. I experience my life as watching a performance of myself. Not as an out of body experience (although I have had those); but in the sense that when imagining myself doing something, I picture it in the third person. I experience myself as “the kind of person who would do X”, rather than “a person who does X”. I am the sum of what people around me want me to be, whether they’re real or imaginary, accurate or fabricated. My life is almost entirely performance.

RAW DATA FEEL by Everything Everything is fascinating to me, because it fails in ways that are interesting. It has by far the worst lyrics of any of their albums (check out "Shark Week" or "Pizza Boy" if you don't believe me), but the ways the lyrics are bad is interesting in itself.

Parallel Play by Panama Wedding is the perfect example of what I call “popslop”. It brings out every single pop production trick in the book, to the point that all of the songs on this EP are functionally the same structure and length. On both “Uma” and “Trust”, the transition before the pre-chorus is the classic “drop out except for a drum hit”, and each one sounds slightly bigger than the previous one. The production is incredibly slick, with tiny little call-and-response synth lines and huge, poppy percussion. I put this on for inspiration all the time lately, and I’m always finding some new trick that I can apply in my own music.

And then there’s the lyrics. Here are the chorus and pre-chorus of “All of the People”:

Oh hey, yeah I started this blog and then didn’t update it for a long time. That sounds like something I’d do. Look at all that ambition…

Going to try to make smaller, shorter, more manageable blog posts (she said, with a draft of a longer post about AI and mental health already started…)

Also this is on a new domain so yeah, probably new to everyone. So welcome.

For the last year, I’ve been off-and-on obsessed with the band Everything Everything. Their music tickles my brain in just the right way. Something about their lyrics always hooks me too, despite the fact that every album has some real head-scratchers (“fat child in a push chair” comes to mind).

This blog is an attempt to decouple my personal thoughts from my professional life. Previous blogs have been very work-friendly, mostly focusing on technical posts. It was stifling, since I had to be professional in my own hobby project.