I got a complaint that there is no one simple way to collect music that I've made and posted to the internet.  Odeo.com was supposed to fill that need but people don't seem to know to go to it anymore, and besides, its interface is a bit dodgy and this Xanga blog is becoming quite a mess with my ramblings, Twitter imports, and other junk messing things up.

With that in mind, I created http://chunter16.wordpress.com/ to collect everything.

I also got an unhub.com titlebar, so if you visit http://unhub.com/chunter you'll see all my little social engines collected in one more organized place.

Between my girlfriend's house and my brother's house, there is a homemade decorated cross in the median of the highway marking a place where a teenager was killed in a car wreck.  Before the cross was placed there, it was a pile of plush toys to mark the spot.  Her family has my deepest sympathies.

Without violating anonymity, I'd like to say first-hand that I think I understand where alcoholism comes from and where it is perpetuated.  In the distant past I've written about the notion of "engineered poverty," the idea that we are psychologically conditioned to become poor and remain poor, with drug and alcohol addiction being the prime examples of such engineering.

Three years after being the least drunk of a group of friends leaving a bar that closed and therefore required them to leave, this person was asked to use the breathylizer, and ended up scoring barely on the "drunk" side of the line.  He was driving because he was at home alone, and he was at home alone drinking because the original DUI sentence led to him never wanting to drink away from home again.

Drinking at home alone is one of the first and largest signs of alcoholism beginning.

What awaits this person is about a year without a driver's license, which means more drinking at home, and more time alone, since his friends are more likely to not want to visit him or may become bored of giving him rides everywhere.  In the meantime, a teenager that really is too drunk to drive has probably died while I'm writing this, at least according to MADD and SADD statistics.  Now, how exactly does this anonymous 30-year-old's twelve month revokation prevent this teenager from dying?  It doesn't.  And I want to make it clear that while this person may have been drunk by letter of law, he was not a drunk driver.  Was a bad decision made?  Yes.  Should the bad decision carry such a large punishment when it is clear that nobody was hurt or was even likely to be hurt?
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Thank you for the comment.

ELNatural: What you said is not so far fetched as it may seem at a first glance.  I distinctly remember hearing a kind of "chucka-chucka" rhythm in the sound of water swirling down the toilet; I also know that certain pre-school and toddler television trends will soon translate into interactive toys, once they are cost effective.  Take these examples:




My evidence that there are people that can make anything that can make a noise sound funky, Tucker:



See you next time.

http://ping.fm/YxZmo

Much of what I post here lately, the music I create and the things that I think about, are a celebration of how it is much less expensive to create and record music nowadays.  What are the effects of music becoming so cheap and easy to create and obtain?  Powerful software and inexpensive computers and synthesizers make it easier than ever to create passable to brilliant music, and now, thanks to the internet, we have oceans of free and cheap music that anyone can find and listen to at will.

Guitars and simple music forms like The Blues and rock music made entry into creating music easier than ever, but now, cheap synthesizers, consumer keyboards, and software programs make it so simple to create a musical sound, and the internet makes it incredibly easy to distribute the result, that critics find the unrefined sounds tiresome.

I find that comments about my music tend to come only from other musicians.  It can be said that I can only blame myself for this fact; my music is available in places that are generally by, for, and frequented by other musicians, but as I become one of the people that has "been around a while" instead of being new to all these competition, sharing, and distribution sites, I meet a lot more people that are more novice in skill than I am at both the internet distributing and music theory (or literally, playing an instrument or composing music, mix technique and use of the software tools,) and I wonder if someday, the only people that like music made for music's own sake (eg. not as background sound for advertising, movies, video games) are other musicians.

This is not a new thought for me, I even think I may have written something about it before, but lately it takes a newer context, a change that is neither positive nor negative (for now.)

As music becomes easier and easier to create, does that mean there will be more novice musicians that in turn become larger audiences for music that isn't your typical pop?  Maybe pop music will change as more and more people are able to create it; it's difficult to say, but maybe it's best to use the 20's or 50's as a slight model, with a different kind of moneymaking machine spawning in the results.

In the meantime, music still has a powerful psychological effect in film/theatre and advertising, so music as a background and such will remain important for some time.

150 isn't a lot in the biggest scheme of things, but it's about 100 more people listening than I ever expected, so thank you all. http://ping.fm/uSkHE

Again, Release Zero can be downloaded here: http://ping.fm/iLgT8