Posted on
by

Writing well is a challenging task.  Whether you are the sort of person who meticulously plans their words for hours or days or the sort who writes off the top of your head and then spends hours or days editing, tweaking, agonizing, and polishing, getting from “thing you want to say” to “polished text” can take some time and some commitment.

It is also spectacularly, incredibly, worth doing.  The time spent learning to write well, of improving what you write by understanding what works and what doesn’t, the commitment to being a better writer, the whole process involved, makes you not just a better writer but also a more thoughtful person and better overall communicator.

It is a lifetime self-improvement project.

You can, perhaps, imagine my chagrin today when I was doing a little bit of online digging about AI detection tools and I stumbled across a website called “WriteHuman” which, for the low, low, price of $12/month will sanitize your AI-generated prose into something that will pass for human instead of being detected by AI detection tools.

Hole.

E.

Schitt.

Lemme get this straight.  You’re a human, right?  And you write text, by default, that sounds like it was written by a human, right?  You wish to write a paper or an essay or a letter or a script or a story or a poem or an email and you are too. what, lazy(?) to compose the text yourself so you ask a robot to write it for you but, in the end, it sounds like a robot, so you hire a DIFFERENT ROBOT to make it sound more passably like a human?

Am I taking crazy pills?

Thanks to email spammers, we can’t have nice email.  Thanks to phone scammers we can’t trust phone calls.  Thanks to social media oligarchs we can’t have functional relationships with information or loved ones.  Thanks to the shitbag contingent of our society, we all spend half our days doing multi-factor authentication, trying to prove we are human to CAPTCHAS, and wondering if any of this online thing has been worth it since, like, 2005.  And now we enter into an era in which increasingly sophisticated fake content will be spewing forth into the world on the one hand, efforts to detect the bullshit will trail behind, and more advanced tools will be developed to counter the countermeasures until nobody actually says or does or shares anything online again that isn’t digitally altered and there is no way to know what is real and what is completely trash.

And yes, your “AI” generated content, all of it, every goddamn pixel, every fucking sentence, it’s all trash.  It is all worse than if you had done it yourself, no matter how inexpertly.  If you “suck at _______” (drawing, writing, photography, video, whatever) your amateur efforts are still better than whatever polished turds come forth from the algorithmic-piracy-generator.

If you are willing to pay a computer to make the text you didn’t write sound like a person wrote it rather than just being a person and writing it, think twice.  You will never become a better writer by doing this.  You will never develop your own voice.  You will never actually SAY a single thing.  You will be silenced even if you post hundreds of thousands of words because none of those words will have actually come from you.  The personality of the creator is always lost in generated content.  100% of the time.

“AI writers” aren’t writers.

“AI musicians” aren’t musicians.

“AI artists” aren’t artists.

They never will be, no matter how they gussy it up and act like “prompt engineer” is a worthy thing to aspire to be.  Instead of trying to become a better writer of prompts, why not try to become, oh, I dunno…  A BETTER WRITER.

Geezzzzzzzzz I hate this tech…

Posted on
by

I have a new album out called Capistrano. I’ve written about it here before, mostly in terms of “it’s still coming” and “honestly, I know it’s been years but I’m still working on it”. Now, however, it’s out in the world and can be listened to on any major streaming service you care to mention. Pretty soon it will be able on vinyl and CD and if you ask nicely I will happily tattoo the song lyrics on the body part of your choosing.

One of the really cool things about the olden days of physical media was that you could have liner notes and lyric sheets and other groovy stuff like that which helped you connect with the music on a deeper level. This is mostly lost in the modern streaming era, and for many songs and albums that is no big, but an album like Capistrano is an Album in the !960’s/1970’s sense of the word and it is intended for that older style of listening. We live in a world of ephemeral singles with mayfly shelf lives but since I am a contrarian I went ahead and made a sort of concept album about life.

The first two tracks on the album, Ulven and Monkey Mind were the first two recorded, but not in that order. Monkey Mind was first and I recorded it all the way back in November of 2014, before I had even released my last little EP before disappearing musically for nine years. The song starts with these words:

I keep on playing the same old station in my car
the one that always plays that one damn song
there might be something broke at the transmission tower
somebody should go and see what’s wrong
cause I’m sick of always singing along

I was aging, I was feeling like I was in a rut, and I kept having the same mental dialog happening day in and day out. It was like my brain was tuned into a radio station that only played one song and I was tired of it. The vibe of the song was tired. I was feeling run down by life and I put it into words and I recorded it but I tried to cheer myself up by ending with a hopeful note:

no matter how it feels there must be hope
cause I’m sick of always running out of rope

The song sat for a month or so and then I had a flash of inspiration/moment of discovery and another lyric popped into my head:

the wolf is at the door
let’s invite him inside
it’s getting cold out there

I was feeling very connected to canines at the time, having just adopted the better part of a pack and working with my wife with a local animal rescue group called Safe Hands. We were bringing dogs up from Kentucky who had come from terrible conditions, cleaning them up, getting them healthy, fostering them, and finding them homes. It was really satisfying work. What had started with adopting a dachshund name Chi had turned into not only 50+ foster dogs, but also the adoption of Finn, then Capistrano (“Cappy”), Rosita and ultimately Buckley although he hadn’t arrived yet. The wolf at the door is a metaphor for there being some impending personal tragedy or calamity and I was at a place in my life where I did, indeed, feel that was possible but at the same time we were rescuing all of these dogs and it just felt like, ok, face life, let it in, let whatever is going to happen happen. Let the wolf in and take care of it.

It didn’t arrive in my head as a song, but as a declaration. A statement of intent about the next phase of my life. It felt like a reply to the questions raised in Monkey Mind. So, I decided to take all the instruments I could find in the studio, have them all play the same opening note, and make that statement. Dozens of tracks later I had the opening wall of sound which I later augmented with the addition of my very dear lifelong friend Jenn Sveigdalen reading the “wolf at the door” poem in Norwegian.

And then I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The first two statements had been made but the rest of the album was a mystery. I thought perhaps I could record a few EPs in different styles/genres as ways of finding out what I had to say and I thought of them as “Wolf Pups”. So, I hit the studio in December of that year with the idea of creating the “acoustic Wolf Pup”. I shut myself into the old basement coal room for a day and I recorded The Coal Room EP, a modest little six-song collection that would stand as my last solo release for over 9 years. It is absolutely a companion piece to Capistrano but I had no idea at the time where the actual album was going to take me and despite plans for three more, I never recorded any more “Wolf Pups”.

Instead I got active in other musical projects and allowed the album to come to me on its own terms and in its own time. I joined a band called Robots From the Future as their keyboard player and then I left that band but I soon joined another one, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas also, weirdly, on keys. I have always been a guitarist and bassist, primarily, but playing keys in a band is a good way to get better at keyboards so it was great experience, plus I had a lot of fun, played a lot of shows, and became a better musician. All the while, I was recording songs for the album I thought of simply as “The Wolf”.

Ostrich on side B was one of the earlier tracks to join the party as well as Seagulls (Mostly Water) which closes out side A. It was at that point that I had started to notice a theme. Monkey, ostrich, seagull, wolf, there were a lot of animals making their way into the lyrics. This wasn’t some sort of intentional decision, it just kept happening. Songs would pop into my head and they often had animals in them which is weird because if you look at literally my entire recorded musical output over the course of decades you would be hard pressed to find animal references. Something was going on.

What it felt like was that I was coming to grips with the hard biological truth that I am an animal, just like the dogs and cats and wolves and birds. We all are. We are pretty much just neurotic bags of mostly water, blundering around in the natural world, uniquely gifted among our animal brethren with existential dread and ennui. What else was there to make music about? Religion? Politics? Lust? Ideas? I mean, sure, people do that, but who makes a concept album about how weird it is to be a sentient animal? I realized that seemed to be what I was doing, once I was a year or two into it.

Like I said, I was letting it come to me while I was piling up some new musical experiences.

Eventually I was honored to be invited to join a very cool local band called Awkward Bodies as their bass player. I was already a fan of their music and we all clicked really well from the first practice. Around the same time I became involved in the making of the Witness Underground documentary, a feature film that is centered around my old Nuclear Gopher record label and the whole thing that happened there with all of us (if you want the story, go watch the movie, it’s really good and the soundtrack is to die for and I’m not going to spoiler it for you). That process took a few years and again broadened my musical and personal horizons.

As expected, songs kept arriving at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. There were many that never made it past the demo stage. At least another dozen or more. The world got weird when the country I live in collectively lost it’s mind when a minority of the voters somehow managed to elect their cult leader to the presidency* and then we got a pandemic and man…. Those were some weird years.

I wandered a bit. Moved out to the country, built a new studio, raised the dogs, traveled to Uruguay and India and Portugal and drove around the US. I had experiences, I had a life. My new musical connections and experiences made their way onto the album. I Hate July was a remake of my acoustic version of the same song from my 2012 album Blood and Scotch/Valentine. It came about as a result of Awkward Bodies learning to play some of my songs to support a showing of Witness Underground at in Minneapolis and then made it onto the album when James Zimmerman listened to an early iteration of the record and said it needed more energy and a “rock song”. I also met local musician Chris Holm and when his sister Jamie was battling cancer I recorded a cover of her song Shine Again for what ultimately became a tribute record in her memory, Strange Medicine: Volume 1. Finally, I had recorded Never Replace You for the WU movie soundtrack in honor of my dear friend Derek Helland, who passed away during the recording of the album and it felt like a perfect fit for the album.

What no longer felt like the perfect fit was “The Wolf”. The album was cohering around a thematic tone or life and loss and longing but there also felt like a note of hope was in there and that felt under-represented by the provisional album title. It was then that a piece of serendipity occurred.

During the COVID lockdown I had decided to revisit my dormant interest in analog photography. Like most rational people I had transitioned to digital photography so many years ago that I couldn’t remember the last roll of film I had shot. I picked up a few elderly cameras at estate sales and auctions, read the Ansel Adams books, relearned how to develop film at home, and started snapping away. An early roll of film I shot was with an old folding camera from the 1920’s in an empty office building. One of the photos from that roll graces the back cover of the album in a colorized form. After shooting some black and white 120 film I decided to branch out into color 35mm and one day, several months and many rolls later, I was out with my trusty Nikon F and I looked up and there was Capistrano, looking up at a bird and smiling.

Snap.

When I developed the roll and scanned the photo I felt something. It was like I had taken a picture of joy. That was the missing ingredient to finish the record. Hope. Joy. The Wolf was now a smiling dog. I decided to name it Capistrano. After that decision, the rest of the process to finish the album began.

I started by revisiting all the Wolf songs and making candidate mixes. When I started to do this I had some different songs present and quite different versions of the songs that made the final album. BLJ didn’t have the horns or spacey guitars, Seagulls was missing the strings, but I had enough that it felt like an album. I thought I was mostly done. That was around 2-3 years ago. But try as I might, certain songs didn’t feel right and I tried to make them fit but I couldn’t find the shape that worked. By that point I had Flying Through The Frames and I knew what I needed to do to finish Brenda and Seagulls. I had a major revision in mind for Monkey Mind and things seemed tight but something was still missing. I kept promising the album would be done soon but soon kept moving into the future.

Finally, in January of this year, I had spent a few days wrestling with a particular song that wasn’t working and I thought to myself “I think I need to ditch this song and write something else, it just doesn’t work.” And that was what I did. I went down stairs into the Nuclear Gopher and that cover photo of Cappy popped into my head and in about 20 minutes I wrote the title track. It was hopeful, it was upbeat, it was catchy, and it was the perfect bookend to the wolf at the door, a song inspired by a dog taking his favorite toys to the door so he can go play in the yard.

A bit later I tracked the song with Jesse Miller and then I was on to the final mile: tweaking, mixing, mastering, etc. I got the final kick in the ass I needed to call it done when Nuclear Gopher labelmates Sakura and Kero finished And Then You’d Burst Into Fire Forever and I realized that they had beat me to the new album finish line. I had Capistrano in the can the next day.

And that, my friends, is the backstory behind the album. There are easter eggs hidden in there, little flourishes and ideas that I love, but I’ll let you listen and figure those out for yourself. Hopefully the album speaks for itself but I figured maybe some people might find this an interesting companion piece to the listening experience.

Thanks for reading, thanks for listening.

Peace!



* Despite him being a thoroughly corrupt, morally repugnant, sociopathic, criminal. I mean, come on, his opponent had the audacity to be competent and female so of course they had to vote for the blathering idiot with the fake hair, fake tan, fake fortune, fake competence, and track record of fraud and sexual assault. Jesus clearly prefers a criminal with a penis over a hard working woman who tries to act like she is above her God-given station in life. I swear I read that in the Bible somewhere…..

Posted on
by

I was born to parents who had recently become members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and that was how I was raised.

When I was a kid, 15 years old, I was convinced that Jehovah’s Witnesses knew The Truth about life, the universe, and everything.  I was sure that they had it all figured out and that the end of the world was rapidly approaching, so I got baptized.

When I was 30, I discovered that this was not, in fact, the case.  They Watchtower Society was just a human religion with no more claim to “truth” than any other and much of what they claimed to be True was provably False.  Well, darn.

In normal life, in typical situations, a person learns new things, discovers that something they thought was one way is actually another, and they can change their views and it’s not, like, the end of the world.  Not so with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  As it turns out, they don’t let you just leave without pretty much demolishing your entire life.  Everybody you ever knew and loved who happens to be a Witness is lost to you, forever, and it sucks.

Because of this particular facet of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because of the way they demonize, shun, ostracize, criticize, and dehumanize former members, there is a large community of former members who are, to put it mildly, fucking angry.  People go to therapy, they do self harm, they rant online, they picket Watchtower conventions.  In short, they do the very human and rational things that anybody would do when they are mistreated, falsely accused, judged and condemned without cause, and given no voice.  These people engage in activism against the Watchtower and in support of other former members.

I respect this community.  It is a community that is mostly fueled by righteous indignation over a major injustice.  I feel that, but I have always struggled with finding the balance for myself between that righteous indignation, my own mental health, and actually acting in a way that might somehow help alleviate some of the harm that Witnesses cause with the abuse they perpetrate on former members.

If you are vocal, strident, or direct, you will be accused of “hating your former brothers”.  They will say you are angry and bitter, that you are mentally diseased, when all you really are is outraged and hurt because you’ve been lied to and abused and they will cross the street if they so much as see you on the other side.  On the other hand, if you are quiet and swallow your objections down, they will still shun you but may occasionally reach out with an invitation to start attending their meetings again or something like that.  Every former JW that I know has had to decide for themselves just how vocal, how direct, they personally want to be, where their personal lines are.

I have learned that I am vocal but I am not an activist.  I have participated in activism when asked to and I believe the activists are on the side of justice, but I am not one of them.  In my down time I try to avoid “EXJW” content.  I am not interested in the videos, podcasts, books, or websites that obsess over the Watchtower Society and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I don’t enjoy rehashing old traumas.  When I do participate, I try very hard to represent a perspective of moving on, living a post-Witness life that is healthy, and finding balance.  I’d rather talk about pretty much anything than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I don’t want to give them any more of my too short time on this earth.

When a major part of your identity is your opposition to someone or something, you are still in a relationship with that thing and I don’t want to be in any sort of relationship with the Watchtower Society anymore.  Not with them, not against them, I just want to live my life.

However, since I opened myself up to a documentary film being made about a big part of my life, music, and past with the Witnesses I’ve participated in interviews and podcasts and conversations with various people in the EXJW world.  It isn’t the first time I have done this sort of thing.  When I first left the Witnesses I did a few interviews on podcasts and cable access TV shows and it was similar.  I considered writing a proper book, getting into free-thought and humanist activism, but I decided that it wasn’t for me.  Activism feels wrong for me.  That’s not who I am.  So, I did my appearances and then I declined additional invites and stopped because at the end of the day I would rather be an artist than an activist.  The problem with mixing the two, in my opinion, is that when art becomes too topical for me it becomes boring and predictable.  My problem with political or religious music isn’t the message, it’s the dullness of only writing songs about a single topic.  Snore.

Now I feel that I have to make this “how much to flirt with activism” decision again.  The activist community of former Witnesses are interested in the movie and I’m happy they are.  That’s great.  However, I sincerely hope the film’s exposure is not limited strictly to that community and I would love it if everybody saw the movie, even if they’ve never met a Jehovah’s Witness.  The movie is NOT targeted specifically at Jehovah’s Witnesses, current or former.  You don’t need to have gone to space to enjoy a documentary about the moon landing and you don’t need to know or care about the Jehovah’s Witnesses to enjoy Witness Underground.  Do you like music?  Do you have human feelings about things?  Congratulations, you are the target audience for Witness Underground.

That said, the XJW activists have been the ones who naturally want to talk about the film and the temptation has been there to get into that activism and I’ve felt really uncomfortable about it.  It seems like that same decision point I felt back in 2006.  Do I further engage in activism or do I step back?

I’ve decided, I’m once again stepping back.  I have to.  For my sanity, my health, my happiness.  As I said, at heart, I’m not an activist.  I’m glad they exist, I’m a fellow traveler, but I’m not going to picket or post or argue or debate or engage in the Watchtower topic on a regular basis if I can help it.

I believe the best thing for me is to focus on being a normal person.  I do not self identify as an “apostate”, or an “XJW”, just as a “human”.  A non-theistic Buddhist, if you press me further on the topic of religion but I wish you wouldn’t, thanks.  When I take on those identities I feel uncomfortable and unhappy.  I’m just a guy who likes computers and cars and dogs and fishing and making music and eating spicy food.  I want to spend time doing normal things and being happy and I don’t want to talk about the Watchtower Society or write about it or think about it or read about it or watch videos about it or listen to podcasts about it.  I lived happily like this for many years and I will do so again from here on out.  Make music.  Drive around in old stupid cool cars.  Take pictures with obsolete cameras.  Catch bass.  Be a dork.

So, you won’t be seeing me doing much more Witness chat from here on out, k?  It’s a part of my life, I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not going to avoid talking about it now and then, but I’m not a religious activist and I don’t want to become one.

Posted on
by

Another day, another rant.

I recently added an M2-powered iPad Pro to my life to go along with the M1 MacBook Pro and I have thoughts.

First thoughts…. Apple went ahead and revamped the iPad lineup shortly after I acquired my M2 iPad with the amazing new M4 processor. One might think that I would be disappointed to have missed the upgrade but the truth is that I am very happy with the one I have even if it’s not equipped with all the new fancy stuff because a) this one was a HELLUVA lot cheaper and b) there is almost no point to having an iPad with that much horsepower because there are so few apps that can even take advantage of it because iPadOS is garbage.

I already have to wonder when or if I will be able to really put the M2 to any serious use. It seems a damn shame that the faster of my two daily drivers is the iPad, not the Mac.

I could try to use the iPad for “serious” work, except, well, that’s pretty much impossible. Audio production? The apps and plugins I have used for years are all available on Mac OS but iPadOS? Nope. Ditto with video editing and production. I would LOVE to use Topaz Video AI on the M2 instead of the M1 but it’s not available for iPadOS. What about photography? Software development? Any serious productivity based work? No, no, no.

The iPad is not a serious computing platform because iPadOS is not a serious operating system. The iPad is an incredibly powerful piece of hardware that, when paired with a Magic Keyboard, is essentially the most capable laptop I own in terms of horsepower, but you simply cannot do real work with one unless you can accept tons of compromises and limited versions of software.

I’ve owned iPads for as long as there have been iPads. I have always enjoyed them for reading comic books, I love the iPad version of Garageband for doing quick demos and playing around with musical ideas, I love drawing on the iPad, it’s a great casual email and web surfing machine, but when I want to get anything legitimate done, I put the iPad away and I reach for a real computer. The iPad is a device, the Mac is a computer. The difference is the software. I am far from the first person to make this observation (Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right)
but I’ll tell you, it’s a serious missed opportunity. An M4 powered machine with a touch screen and actual serious professional applications (sorry Apple, but your Final Cut and Logic options only highlight the problem by being alone in their categories…) would be amazing.

As it is, I am sitting here feeling like the potential of even my M2 iPad is 99 percent wasted because I can’t find anything more challenging to do with it than I could with the old iPad that it replaced. Comics and ebooks reader, light productivity and journaling, a few cool virtual instrument apps, nothing serious. Nothing I can use do actually accomplish much of anything.

Also, the operating system itself is incredibly half-baked in so many ways. File management and multi-tasking are stuck in the stone age, there is no window management worth mentioning (the split screen thing doesn’t even work for a lot of apps)…. I would argue that iPadOS, from a purely user-friendliness perspective, is not only worse than MacOS, it’s worse than Windows, it’s worse than most Linux distros, it’s worse than Android. It’s my least favorite operating system, the one that annoys me the most often, the one that limits what I can do with my computer more than any other. My phone runs Android and I don’t love it but I ask very little of it, it’s a smartphone, I don’t like smartphones much and as long as I can use it as a casual camera, GPS, and phone, I don’t much care about the OS. Mac, Windows, and the various Linux desktops all have mature and capable and well understood ways of getting just about anything done that a user might desire. Only iPadOS, the bastard offspring of MacOS and iOS that can’t decide what the hell it’s supposed to be, only iPadOS goes out of it’s way to frustrate me, limit me, and neuter the potential of the very device it is designed to run on.

The iPad could and should be the touchable Mac. It should and could be the best touchscreen-centric personal computer in the world instead of just being an App Store limited, disposable, hamstrung, awkward “device”. It has all the power, but thanks to iPadOS, the worst operating system currently on the market, most of the power doesn’t matter a bit.

Posted on
by

When something seems to bother me an inordinate amount, I like to see it as an opportunity for self-reflection.  I ask myself just why it is that the thing bothers me so much?  What nerve is it touching and why is that a nerve for me?

I remember my first brush with social media websites all the way back in the olden times of MySpace.  By the time MySpace launched, I had already been online in one way or another for a decade.  I had built a bunch of personal websites and I was proto-blogging at sites like LiveJournal.  Somebody told me about this new site and I checked it out and it felt…  off.  Like taking a sniff from a bottle of milk that is just beginning to sour.  I did not feel compelled and, in truth, I didn’t want to use the site because of that initial gut reaction.  It took milliseconds for my brain to construct a picture of a future in which people didn’t make their own quirky expressions of creativity on their own websites but rather they just dumped themselves into a pre-existing mold, a templated website that collected all the ephemeral human content into a nice pen where it could be commodified and corralled and monetized.  I am not retroactively crediting myself with more foresight than I actually possessed. I had been a technology professional for a decade, and an enthusiast before that.  I had read all sorts of books about future directions of networks and technology.  I had been on closed community silos like AOL and CompuServe before I ever even heard the word “internet”.  I knew what I was looking at the moment I saw it and I didn’t like it.  It seemed like a harbinger of the end of the wild wild web.

Which, of course, it was.

I did put a few songs up on MySpace, at the urgings of others, but I felt really irritated by the ask.  I didn’t want to be in a silo, my songs were already available on my own site, and it seemed like an imposition to have to participate in this new stupid thing or else risk being completely outside of the social sphere.

Then, of course, it all got even worse.  People started prodding me to join some new site called Facebook.  Which I did.  And I hated.  And I unsubscribed from immediately.  And then people prodded me again and I did, again.  And then I got a “poke” and I immediately unsubscribed again which of course didn’t last.  Everything about the core idea behind “social media” sites and apps felt like an attempt to corral us all together in order to advertise at us and turn us from free thinking, free range, homo sapiens into a manageable network of predictable marketing demographics.

Which, of course, it is.

It was clear from day one that this new paradigm of social silos was going to create a flood of change that would almost entirely erase the antediluvian world of self-hosted websites, GeoCities pages, quirky web forums, webrings, and nutball creativity that had flourished on the web prior to their arrival.  No more would Mahir kiss you, no more would there be another Zombo.com to fulfill your every dream, it was time to monetize, monetize, monetize the web and it’s webdom.

I hated this shift.

I hated it because it was anti-creative.

I hated it because it was addictive.

I hated it because it was bad for relationships and society at large.

I hated it because it enforced a grid of conformity on human expression.

I hated it because it was closed and proprietary.

I hated it because it was antithetical to the entire concept of the internet in which information wants to be free and standards of interoperability need to be OPEN.

Nothing that has happened in the ensuing decades has changed my mind in the slightest.  The tingling of my spidey senses the first time I saw MySpace have been absolutely confirmed in every horrifying detail.

The web is a wasteland of low traffic, mostly ignored, little watering holes like this blog here that sit outside in the lonely dark while the majority of humanity spends their waking moments funneling their photos, videos, comments, relationships, experiences, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and souls into a tiny handful of dopamine dispensing closed-silo apps that are designed to aggregate humanity into big piles for ease of commercial exploitation.

But that’s old news.  The new news is the new thing that is tingling my spidey senses again.  “AI”.

My spidey sense about AI has been ringing louder and louder for a couple of years now.  It’s not for the reasons every techno-utopian seems to want to talk about.  They talk about the fear of a global super-intelligence arising or us “losing control” of the tech, big science fiction fears, and they then tell us all about how this tech will actually solve all of our problems, solve climate change, let us live forever, blah blah blah.  The people developing this technology, pushing this technology, are talking about it in the same glowing terms that they have previously talked about crypto, smartphones, virtual reality, and all sorts of other tech.  In every single case, the technology has arrived, disrupted, been incorporated into our lives to one degree or another, and proceeded to deliver on about 10% of the amazing world-changing life improvement that was promised.  Remember when Siri or Alexa or “Hey Google” were going to change your lives in so many ways and everybody got a smart speaker and now the only thing the technology gets used for is to reply to a text message hands free while driving?  Would that change if they were smarter?  Would you have an in-car conversation with an LLM instead of listening to the radio?  Would that make your life better in any way?

The fact is that an LLM can have a human like conversation and it has a lot of information to back it up but it’s not an enjoyable conversation.  It is boring.  A generative image pooper can make 25 images of a pretty lady in the time it takes to type “make me 25 images of a pretty lady” but they are all boring.  A song generator can create three country songs that sound just like Shania Twain in response to a single prompt for a “make me a country western song about my cat” but they are all boring too.  It’s all boring because there is no “there” there.  If you like the song, can you go see the artist play live, learn about their lives, relate to their story?  Nope, there is no artist.  AI creations are hollow, they mean nothing.  They are not art, they are content.

Why on earth would I as a sentient being want to have a conversation with an echo box beyond (maybe) asking it for directions?  Why would I want to contemplate a machine-generated video or image?  There is no meaning there, no creative choices were made, no intentionality is expressed.  It can’t be beautiful even to the level that a child’s crayon drawing can be beautiful.  It can’t even be ugly in an interesting way.  It’s just pixels.

This is a shallow critique and I realize it is not really what’s bothering me, when I probe my own thoughts a bit deeper.  The core thing that’s bothering me is that generators are already teaching people to short-circuit the creative process and in so doing, removing about 99% of the value of creating to the person themselves, never mind the end product.

Here is what I mean by this.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I sit down to write about it with the hope that by doing so I might be able to put into words what I am feeling.  I journal, I think, I take a break after 20 minutes and go sit and drink a cup of coffee and stare out the window, pet my dog, meditate, eat an apple.  An hour later my thoughts have crystalized a bit.  My first thoughts have been flushed and my second thoughts have come to the fore.  I have discovered a way to say what I’m feeling and I have written something in the process, a creative piece, but I don’t share it with anybody, no matter how beautifully written it may be.  The point of the exercise was the personal process.  It wasn’t about output, it was about personal exploration.  The technology required to go through this process?  A notepad.  A writing utensil.  A cup of coffee.  An apple.  A canine.  People have done this for millennia.  This is creativity even if nobody ever reads it.  This is a practice, a process.

That night I go to sleep and my mind processes the days inputs during REM sleep, I have vivid dreams in which pieces of my past and present intermingle in unexpected ways.  When the alarm clock goes off, I’m engaged in a conversation that I don’t want to leave.  Something important is about to be said.  But the dream dissipates after the second hit of the snooze button and I wake up to feed the dog and make a pot of coffee.  Images from the dream linger in my mind, snatches of words, I head straight to the notepad again and write it down before it burns off like morning fog.  As I write the words start to transform from prose into poetry.  Pretty soon I’m writing metaphorically, I’m making allusions, I’m finding something new to say that I didn’t even know I wanted to say.  My subconscious processes have combined with my creative practice and now new perspectives are being found, I’m thinking laterally, I’m less sad, and something is emerging.  It has a sound, it has a color, it has a shape, it has a smell.

Then, snap, I hear a symphony in my mind.  There is a song, the words are there, I’m plugged back into my subconscious, the process, the practice, the persistence, they have led me to a creative moment that feels like it comes from somewhere out in the sky, like I’m channeling something, I’m just writing it down.  The lyrics and melody and structure of the song are all there, I’m just transcribing them.  I write the last line of the last verse and I sit back feeling giddy and a little high although I never managed to get to the coffee cup.  It feels like magic.  It feels supernatural.  I can understand why people believe in god.

After this magical moment, I have a choice.  I can stop there.  I can keep the art to myself, hum the song when I want, it’s mine, it’s personal, it’s uniquely a product of my experiences, my practice, my process, my brain, my feelings, my heart.  I could keep it, nothing wrong with that.  But, I also have the option to share it.  I could take the time to create a representation, to polish the rough edges, to refine the words, maybe expand the song structure, spend hours, days, weeks, crafting a representation of the song so I can share it with others in case, in so doing, those other people will resonate with it.  That takes a lot of work.  Technical work.  Craft work.  Artisan work.  But it’s also social work.  Maybe the song is beyond my ability to play.  Maybe I hear a violin part and I don’t play the violin so I have to involve a friend who plays violin.  I need a drummer and a piano player, I have friends who do that.  We spend time in the studio together, we collaborate on the song.  They resonate with it and bring some of their own perspectives, their own thoughts and feelings, their own musical riffs and ideas.  As the song is born, multiple voices are brought in, it connects minds and hearts in the very act of crafting the work.

I am months beyond that initial restless feeling at this point.  I am now sitting in a recording studio with a bass guitar trying to get through a couple of takes without any flubs and listening to the song via playback and, between takes, I am suddenly hit by just how COOL this is.  How something I was feeling that I didn’t even have a name for was now this THING that didn’t exist before and this THING is not just the resulting 5 minutes of audio, it’s everything involved in getting to this point.  The journaling, the dreaming, the moment of inspiration, the choice to share, the crafting, the collaborating, and then, at the end there are two things.  There is a creative journey and there is a song.  When I listen to the song, I relive the journey.  During the journey, I have grown as a person.

Art isn’t merely the song.  Art is also the process that leads to the song.  Art is the practice of introspection, the use of creative tools of expression as tools to explore experiences, and the continual commitment to personal exploration and growth.  The song is the tip of a very large iceberg that the listener never sees but it is the process of living with an artistic practice, writing, painting, music, whichever language the artist uses, that enriches the life of the artist.

Let’s now compare this experience, one I have had countless times over the course of my creative life, and compare that to “AI” based “creativity”.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I try to use an LLM-based therapy bot app which gives me some emulated empathy and regurgitated and remixed self-help information and suggestions but I feel pretty much the same and I’m no closer to understanding why or transforming those emotions into anything.  I decide to write about it on my computer and the AI assistant starts suggesting what it thinks I might want to say, rewriting my raw thoughts into something “better” but it no longer sounds like me and the whole exercise is getting me no closer to any sense of self-discovery.  I’m being course-corrected and guided towards the statistical norm, pushed to the hump of the bell curve by an inscrutable algorithm that is trained on the collectively homogenized writing of every text every human has published online.  I give up and spend an hour doomscrolling.

I sleep badly, I can’t remember if I had any dreams or not.  I feel like shit the next morning.  I heard about this cool new AI music generator while doomscrolling before bed.  I install the app and I type in “make an angry song about being confused about my life” and it generates three options.  The lyrics are angry.  The songs sound like a cover band that are playing familiar songs from faulty memories, accidentally morphing them into new songs that seem oddly familiar although they are not exactly bangers.  Still, it’s amusing, for a minute.  I am impressed by how “realistic” the result is.  I click regenerate a few times to hear the variants until I like one a little better than the others and I pat myself on the back for “creating a song”.  I click a button that shares it with other users of the platform.  I go pour myself a bowl of cereal, I’m still angry, two days from now I will forget this ever happened and I will still feel like shit.

I have successfully avoided the journey, I have made a “professional” sounding song without growing, without crafting, without any personal benefit.  It’s like showing up at the trailhead of a 2000 mile hiking trail, taking a selfie with the sign, and then taking a helicopter to the end of the trail and taking a selfie with the other sign as a method to experience the trail.  Is it faster?  Sure.  Does it serve you in the same way?  Absolutely not.

This is the concern that really gets to me.  I worry about people taking this shortcut because it’s so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that it never occurs to them that they are shorting themselves, stunting their own growth.  Creative practice deepens your understanding of yourself. Creative collaboration creates powerful interpersonal connections. Being “bad” at writing, painting, playing the guitar, singing, sculpting, or poetry is not a sin that needs to be “corrected” by a computer, it’s merely a stage in learning.  Some of the best art in terms of humanity, relatability, and resonance is raw, unpolished, unprofessional, voices cracking, colors blurry, message unclear.  When a pitch corrector “fixes” my singing, it’s no longer really my voice.  When an LLM “fixes” my prose, they are no longer really my words.  When an image or audio generator creates, from whole cloth, the thing I ask for from a prompt, none of that is actually me.  No wonder it feels beige, benign, hollow, dull, polished but pointless.  If this is the way of the future, people taking shortcuts to create digital artifacts that are shiny but vapid, the artistic equivalent of cotton candy, and real creative process is considered to be too hard, too slow, too cumbersome, and too inefficient, well, that’s just a fucking tragedy.  For the creators themselves.  I fail to see how it is possible to reap the benefits of creative work if you don’t actually do any creative WORK.

My advice to anybody who thinks they want to be creative is to be very mindful about how/if you make use of these tools because you might find that they become a barrier to actual creativity, a substance-free substitute for being an artist, finding your own voice, and inhabiting a creative process.

I’m honestly struggling to see an upside to generative LLM-based technologies.  The further we get from living in real space with each other, working in real space with each other, and interacting in real time with each other, the lonelier we get, the sadder we get, the more disconnected and fragile we feel.  Now tech companies are going to augment this reality with these digital simulacrums of intelligence that try to trick us into feeling less alone and give us the ability to “create” without reaping any of the benefits of creating.  The obvious beneficiaries are the companies running the server farms that run the code that powers these “AI” products and the companies that sell information about us to each other so they can sell products to us.  Our human experience, our quality of life, our depth of personal understanding?  These are necessary grist for the mills of the algorithms but they are also being starved by the very technologies that rely on them.

We are already seeing the beginning of a sort of “AI” Ouroboros, with new models being trained on the output from previous models, trending towards a polished mediocrity, a sort of bland vanilla soft-serve of images, audio, video, and text that has no ability to inspire, to infuriate, or to improve us.  Actual humans must continue to sit with actual feelings and do actual creative practice.  They must share this with each other in real life, in real space, in the real world, in real time.  Actual creativity must continue, and it will, because humans are awesome.

My prediction: the trash flood that happened in the wake of the rise of social media was NOTHING like the trash flood that is coming for us now with this tech.  Pointless “art”, fake news and misinformation, the end of the internet being enjoyable in any way, shape, or form, integrated LLM bullshit in every tech product that cannot be disabled, and a never ending temptation to short circuit the creative process to get that sweet dopamine hit without doing all that pesky personal growth.

The 10% that is good that will come from this tech?  Smarter GPS route guidance.  Occasional useful suggestions when doing advanced technical tasks with lots of details (like writing software, for example).  Deeper understandings of how biochemistry works.  Better real time language translation between people who speak different languages.  There are, clearly, some very useful and helpful applications of this technology, but that’s not what is happening.  That’s not what is going to make big money for big tech companies.  They want pervasive “AI” everywhere because they have a lot of spare server cycles and stockholders to please. They want it to serve them and their commercial interests.

In his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” Marshall McLuhan argued that “the media is the message”.  In other words, that it is perhaps more important to focus on the medium by which something is expressed than on the message itself.  If the message is “Hello, Bob” and it is verbally uttered face to face that is different than if it were communicated via skywriting, or a letter in the mail, or an email, or broadcast on television, or by tattooing it on a body part.  The message is the same, the media is different, and the choice of media provides the all important context that makes the words mean whatever they mean to Bob.  The media is, in fact, the message.  If most of the messages in the future will be delivered via LLM/GA, those messages will feel hollow, untrustworthy, soulless, empty, bland, boring, and lazy.

My spidey sense says that this is going to be a net negative for our species and our general enjoyment of life.

Posted on
by

I just watched this:



I will one say that one person’s “amazing” and “hopeful” future is another person’s dystopian hellscape and this, to me, is a horror show. Nearly everything about “AI” sucks and I hate it because it’s already making things worse. There is more misinformation, more confusion, less creativity and thinking, more reliance on giant pirating remix engines instead of developing personal skills and intelligence. It’s not fear of Skynet happening that I find so awful, we’re still a millennium away from sentience, it’s the absolute shit show of what is happening with this technology right now. Namely, the marketing hype that is trying to sell us all on the idea that ChatGPT and generative image poopers are some sort of intelligence and that we need/want to have this intelligence embedded in every piece of technology we ever interact with. What the “AI” people have actually created are computationally massive software algorithms that can mimic human behaviors well enough (by stealing and remixing actual human creativity) that they can give the illusion of intelligence, sometimes, as long as you don’t examine them too closely. The AI techno-utopians have created the world’s most expensive and well-informed blind and dispassionate sociopaths. Code that is possessed of no awareness, no mind, no thoughts which is already enshittifying everything it touches. This is easily my least favorite technology development of all time.  It’s auto-tune for your brain and what could be worse than that?

Got yer answer right here:

Posted on
by

Today, April 14 2024, I finished recording my new album, Capistrano.  The album runs 38 minutes and 40 seconds.

I started working on the album on November 23, 2014 so that means that this one album of 39-ish minutes of music took me a grand total of 9 years, 4 months, and 23 days to create meaning this is officially the longest gestated album I’ve ever worked on, beating The Lavone’s 1999 album “The Hiatus” by about three years.

There is still mixing and mastering to do, artwork to create, etc., but no more recording.  I tracked the last bits this afternoon and made the first test mix of the album and just listened to it twice.  I pronounce it good.  I will attempt to take less time on the next one but apparently this is what needed to happen for this one to be born.  To quote Captain Kirk, “Who am I to argue with history?”

Posted on
by

For 30 years I’ve made my living in this world, paid my bills and my taxes, raised my kid, almost entirely from the writing of computer software.  It’s a solid skill, always in demand, and I’m good at it.  Both before and throughout that entire professional career I have also had a (far less lucrative but infinitely more satisfying) shadow career as an independent musician, writer, filmmaker and creator.  I have a resume that details the technology career, but not really one that details my career as a creator.  This is that resume.  Kind of…

I was born into a family of musicians and singers and raised with access to instruments and primitive recording technology but never had any formal training with two exceptions: I played french horn in school band for a few months in elementary school and I took a 6-week crash course in guitar when I was 12.  I didn’t consider that music was something that required training if you had an ear, and I had that, so, I figured I could work it out for myself.

Music was not my first creative passion.  The first was visual art.  I liked to draw and paint.  My mom was a singer in a band and my dad painted wildlife watercolors and could draw exceptionally well so I had my pick of parents to emulate and older brother Rhett was already obsessed with music so I wound up glued to my sketchbook.   As I got a little older I decided that even though I was good at drawing and enjoyed it what I really wanted to be was a writer.

By early adolescence I had broadened my interests still further, having taught myself how to write software for the home computers of the era and also having developed a rabid obsession with cars.  The first three years after I bought my first guitar I rarely practiced and was much more interested in the 0-60 times of the Porsche 959 and drawing and designing imaginary cars than I was in music making.  Then puberty hit and some switch in my brain went musical.

Rhett and I had our band, The Lavone, and we had recorded a lot of music, but I was a fairly passive participant until suddenly I wasn’t.  I started having musical ideas and interests and really learning what to do with them around the age of 15.  I upgraded my guitar and got some cool glasses and turned into one of those High School Art Kids.

Visual arts and explorations into videography and photography were of nearly as much interest as the music.  When I was in high school I was always creating one thing or another.  I wrote a few bad novels, created sculptures and jewelry and pottery and learned basic woodworking, made some paintings, all the usual stuff that a teenager does to look for ways to express themselves.  Rhett and I started our little basement record label, Nuclear Gopher, and music became a core part of my identity even as I started doing less writing, less painting, less drawing, etc.

Post high-school I got married and my time for creative work trended downward but my need for it didn’t.  I started coming up with ways to give myself excuses to keep recording albums with The Lavone and creating visual art even as my software engineering career began.  Since the internet was a new phenomenon at the time, that meant building a website for the Nuclear Gopher as well as making music videos and short films.  I can honestly say, however, that my 20’s were a period of creative challenge.  I made some great songs with The Lavone and the Nuclear Gopher turned into it’s own amazing thing, but I found a role for myself as more of a producer, a technician, a documenter, an archivist, and an enabler than as a musician.

As I was approaching 30 I was getting nervous that the life of a creative person was becoming too inaccessible for me.  I had a young child to raise, my other career was time consuming, and I often wondered if I was just deluding myself that I had anything worth creating inside me.  I started to turn my attention more towards filmmaking and writing.  I taught myself digital video editing and the basics of cinematography.  I made some shorts and started planning to make an indie feature film.

But, as John Lennon once sang, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  My 30’s started with the general disruption of my entire family, life, and self.  A lost religion, a failed marriage, and estrangement from my family and friends.  I had nothing really to fall back on except music.

I realized that I wanted to, NEEDED to, make music, and I started my solo music career at the grand old age of 30.

At first I had a lot to learn.  Despite spending over half my life in and around bands and recording studios, I had never really engineered or produced my own music.  I could play guitar and sing but I couldn’t drum worth a damn and keyboards were a mystery.  Regardless, I tracked an album that I didn’t share with anybody and then I tracked an EP called The Context in 2004 and then my first proper album, Songs of Be Redoubt, the following year.  I wrote the songs, engineered the tracks, played all the instruments, designed the cover art, mixed and mastered it, the whole thing was a learning process.  By the end of working on Bo Redoubt, I was quite a bit better at the whole solo music making thing but I was still missing some of the polish that would come from playing in a band that had regular practices, live shows, and opportunities to hone my skills.

An opportunity soon arose to do so and I decided to join a band called The Eclectics, a Unitarian Universalist church band that played at Sunday services.  I played the guitar and sang, we played in front of the congregation, and after a year or so I was feeling a lot more confident musically.  In February of 2007 this lead to the formation of my (to date only) post-Lavone band, Trumpet Marine with three other members of The Eclectics.  We tracked an album called Longer, Louder, Lobster and it was arguably the best thing I had ever done up to that point.  I felt like I had arrived, at least a little, enough to try my hand at fronting the band on stage for some gigs.

Trumpet Marine was short lived, however.  Competing commitments caused members to come and go, we were constantly relearning the songs with new people, I just couldn’t hold it together and by early 2009 I gave up the idea.  I had recorded another solo album in the meantime and it was…  OK… but I was not yet a confident musical artist.

The next year or two involved some personal drama and my bandwidth was once again limited to really reach for what I wanted to do musically.  I was almost ready to give up on music but then I wrote a song called “I Sleep With My Hands In Fists” and it rallied me to get up off the mat and come out swinging again.  I had my studio and I was recording and writing, I had also played here and there in another few short lived bands, but it wasn’t clicking.  If I wanted to get things to click I needed to change something.

In early 2012 I struck some creative gold with an album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, which I tracked in a couple of weeks all on my own.  I even broke out the art supplies and painted the cover, a bright yellow heart amidst a haze of chaos.  I knew I didn’t want to give up after that record.  I just didn’t know exactly what happened next.

I remembered that playing in other bands had helped me develop my skills and increase my passion for music so I decided to try that again.  I joined a local Ween-meets-Devo group called Robots From the Future as their keyboardist despite being pretty bad at keys.  I figured I wouldn’t get better unless I had a good reason to do so.  We played shows and practiced and I did get better.  There was no real pressure because I wasn’t the front man and they weren’t my songs.  I could just focus on playing.  Robots music wasn’t really my best fit, though, so I left the band and started making plans for the album I really wanted to make.  I had a sort of “back to basics” idea where I would record a few short EPs and then get serious about making a record that I would be totally happy with.  I figured that might take me a year or two.  I released the first of the EPs, The Coal Room, on Christmas of 2014.

I also joined another band, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas, but this time on bass guitar and occasional auxiliary keys.  One of the Robots, Keith Lodermeier, was in that band and through that band I also met some other fantastic people, his wife Liz, Cris Arias-Romero, Maya Burroughs, and Mackenzie Lahren.  Another one of the Robots, Reynold Kissling, came on board near the tail end of my tenure with the group.

During the couple of years I played with that band I had a blast, met a lot of people, and improved my skills but that solo album I had committed to sort of went into development hell.  I just didn’t have the time to devote to solo studio work while also living the grown up life of a married career man in his 40’s.  I was having fun but I wasn’t creative.  Somehow the years were slipping by without much progress, even though I kept locking myself in the studio now and then.

I played a solo set at a now defunct space in St. Paul to try out some of my new album material in front of an audience and that led to an invite to join yet another band, Awkward Bodies, as a bass player.  The music of Awkward Bodies was definitely more up my alley than 90’s cover songs so I was really excited to join them and more shows followed.  Things were going pretty good and my spirits were high, I thought I might finally get my new album done, but then John Lennon happened again.

I don’t know what it was, exactly, but the world seemed to go nuts starting in 2016.  An orange sociopath was somehow put in power in my country and I became too obsessed with the fallout.  Social media and podcasts and news feeds and negativity took over my headspace.  My creative output dwindled to nearly nothing, despite having a great studio sitting in my own damn basement.  At least I was playing in Awkward Bodies and enjoying that but musically I was closer than I had ever been to hanging it up.  The world seemed too stupid to want to create within it.  It seemed like every day there was some outrage or insanity and playing cool indie rock was just not enough.  My software career had changed from writing code to running the department so I spent none of my day doing hands-on work, instead getting enmeshed in emails and meetings and exhaustion.

Then something weird happened in 2018.  A filmmaker named Scott Homan contacted me about telling my story for a documentary.  We met.  I told him my story.  I had no expectation that this would lead anywhere bigger than a short on YouTube, if that.  I didn’t know him or how serious and committed he turned out to be.  That event changed my life.

The world descended further into chaos with a global pandemic and my beloved Minneapolis being torn apart in the wake of the George Floyd riots.  Awkward Bodies struggled to hold the band together and keep some sort of momentum.  I continued to struggle to find personal creative traction.  But Scott and his editor, Sian Walmsley, just kept hacking away at making a movie and as it took shape I started to see my creative career differently.  It had not been a success but had also not been a failure.  I had struggled, sure, but so does everybody else who creates.  I was no longer in my 20’s but I had improved at every aspect of making music and art in the meantime.  And, most importantly, I had made a positive difference in the world with Nuclear Gopher and with my writing and my art.  When I saw the movie for the first time I woke up and knew what I needed to do.  I saw a possible future.  Not commercially, but artistically.  And I felt inspired again.

I got serious about finishing my slowly developing album.  I started planning for a new chapter in the Nuclear Gopher story.  I came to the realization that my time spent wandering in the creative wilderness, taking my licks, getting better at my craft, making mistakes, failing at plans, meeting people, playing Spice Girls covers while dressed as a zombie, and just generally living my life had made me stronger and more self-aware.  Sure, I’m older now, oldest I’ve ever been, but I’m not slow, I’m not tired, I’m not out of ideas, and I’m not ready to hang it up, not just yet.

The last couple of years have involved a LOT of work below the waterline.  Renovated my studio for future commercial use, making plans for the new Gopher, several revisions of the album (which is now practically done), and a new attitude towards the work I am doing that has really put me in a good place mentally.

My creative career could be counted in how many albums I’ve contributed to, how many shows I’ve played, how many films and videos I’ve made, etc, but I don’t even know the answers to those questions.  I guess I don’t care or I would keep track.  What I do know is that I’ve been dedicated to a life of making whatever art I can manage for as long as I can remember and for helping others do the same.  That’s my career.  That’s what I want to be remembered for when I die.  If nothing else, I’m leaving behind artifacts that prove I was here and that I did my best.  What else can a person do?

Skills and Experience:

I have demonstrated proficiency with:

  • audio engineering and production (both digital and analog)
  • digital video editing using Final Cut Pro and Davinci Resolve
  • guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, and other instruments
  • photography (both film and digital)
  • graphic design, painting, drawing
  • website development
  • writing

Salary Requirements:

Happiness.

Posted on
by

I’ve been threatening to relaunch NuclearGopher.com for years.  One rather ridiculous reason I have struggled to make this happen is that I truly and deeply find the modern style of website building to be boring, annoying, and uninspiring.

  1. Setup a content management system (probably WordPress but if you’re really unsure of what to do you can use something like Bandzoogle or Wix or Strikingly or something)
  2. Install one of the myriad number of available responsive “beautiful” themes and change some colors and logos
  3. Start cranking out “content”
  4. For every special feature you want (comments, newsletter signup, blah blah blah) install a plugin and probably signup for some cloud based subscription service
  5. To get statistics or visitor info add in Google Analytics or use an SEO optimizer service so your site can secretly track visitors and report the data to marketing firms

Congratulations, you now have a website that looks just like every other site on the internet and you are likely going to pay multiple monthly fees to keep it online!

It’s really not that hard.  I’ve built such sites dozens of times.  But…  honestly?  I hate them.  They are not memorable or distinctive, they are intrusive and heavy, and they are BORING AS HELL.

I didn’t want to build a site like that.  Not for my favorite little site of all time.  The thought of doing so was dispiriting.  But what was the alternative in the modern era?  Surely that is what people expect of websites these days?  The entire internet is made up of Every Fucking Bootstrap Site Ever these days, right?

I want a website that is quirky and weird, a site that is memorable, the kind of website that existed during the Old Weird Internet Era.  I have nothing against modern web standards, CSS and HTML5 are so much nicer to work with than the primitive Web 1.0 iterations of those technologies, but I want to make something that meets the following criteria:

  1. No tracking or spying on visitors
  2. No dependence on Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, etc..)
  3. A unique flavor that changes over time
  4. No dependence on third-party external cloud services

In other words, I want to build a website with modern tools that is indie.  Indie in design, indie in spirit, indie in execution, and uniquely it’s own beast.

In theory this is straightforward.  All you need is:

  1. A webserver
  2. Web pages and other content
  3. Ideas and know how

The problem I was facing as I contemplated this was that the simple, straightforward, “old school” path to building websites is almost non-existent these days and the companies that run traditional web hosting go out of their way to make the creation and administration of such sites challenging.  They want you to buy rather than build and since so few people try to build this sort of website anymore they often provide very little support or guidance to help people do so.

But, moron that I am, I put a stake in the ground a few years back and made a landing page at nucleargopher.com that merely rendered our old logo in the middle of the page and held down the fort while I went and educated myself.

I had MANY false starts.  I thought I might be able to wrangle WordPress into a shape that made me happy but after half a dozen attempts in which I was just sad about the result I ditched that.  I next took a look at a series of “static site generators” which create nicely styled and “plain old HTML” sites without databases and all that and that was closer to what I wanted.  Plain text, full control, host anywhere.  I fell in love with one in particular.  Still, time kept on timing and I was getting no closer to a web site that I would feel good about.  The big issue was still themes.  I just really hate the look of every theme out there and I kept losing patience at learning yet another templating language.  There are just sooooo many of them and none seem to be particularly better or worse than the others.

So I came to a decision.  I decided that I was just gonna party like it’s 1999 and damn the torpedos.  I picked one easily attainable starting point: a landing page that had a music player on it.  And not just any music player but WinAmp (or, to be more accurate, WebAmp, an HTML5 clone of the original WinAmp player).  Two days ago, on April Fools Day, I uploaded the updated NuclearGopher.com landing page with two initial songs on the playlist: the new Awkward Bodies cover of The Lavone’s 1986 song “My Adventure Flowerland” and “Hi-Fi” by HighTV (and some kick butt WinAmp skins if you can figure out how to change them).  You can go there right now and hear some tunes.  It’s the softest of soft launches ever considering that this a website that has essentially been dormant for about 20 years but it was (gasp!) fun.

Today I realized that it would be nice to have a newsletter signup and also the ability to view site traffic statistics.  Again I asked myself how exactly I ought to do those things in 2024 without signing up for anything or doing any tracking nonsense.  It took a few hours of tinkering because my web hosting provider has incomplete and misleading instructions that are years out of date, but I managed to setup the stats thing (still entirely anonymous, just crunching numbers from the server logs) and I am now auditioning an open-source, self-hosted, newsletter signup tool that will allow visitors to opt-in/out of basic updates about new releases, events, and the rest, again without any tracking or Big Tech involvement.  This is how I built websites 25 years ago.  By hand, using open-source, maintaining independent control and respecting visitor privacy.  It’s kind of ugly right now but in a goofy way that I like more than a fancy theme.

I’m really looking forward to adding to the site, putting up new pages, playing around with the look and feel, throwing in easter eggs and silly bits, and actually having a good time and enjoying the process.  It feels like the right way to do it.  So, please, feel free to go listen to a couple of songs and take a look at the embryonic new nucleargopher.com.  I have interesting plans for it and I promise that the changes won’t be measured in decades or even years from here on out.  The internet need not be boring or corporate, dominated by apps, subscriptions, paywalls, and pretentious BS.  It used to be fun.  I hope I can bring a little bit of fun back to it.  It can’t all be as cool as zombo.com but we can try.  And those two songs are pretty sweet…