tumblr?

i've been around the internets for a long time, from the era of angelfire and geocities (now defunct) and AIM/ICQ (and trillian!) thru gmail, MSN messenger and myspace, firefox to facebook, flickr, twitter, and blogger. now i'm trying the newest bandwagon, tumblr.

apparently tumblr is an amalgamation of various features of twitter, facebook, and a blog. you can post pictures, text, movies, audio, whatever your heart desires. i've got a very basic setup there, but we'll see what happens. i've heard positive reviews. like most new technologies, there's a bit of interface shock at first, but i think it will fade in time. peace in the free world, friends.

note the similarities to hip-hop/techno, and also to other forms of throat singing:

Inuit throat singing.

sweet. also similar to beatboxing. i feel like a funky groove with some of the above would make for delicious listening, but i'll leave that to the experts.

honestybomb

i am going to be completely honest here: i love Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA". i know, i know; whatever. it's catchy as hell. so there.

i am also developing a new interest in hip hop and associated musics. music of people, of the streets, of struggle. and i have also loved dance music, the music of the party.

to that (those?) end(s), check this out. and this. and maybe this.

don't judge me, just enjoy!

still around, i guess

man, i just haven't got much to say these days i guess.

at the moment i am playing in a travelling show for Christmas, Holiday Grande 2009. the guy who runs it, Jim McDonough, is a sort of sensation around Iowa. lots of people know him and like his stuff, so he takes his show on the road around Christmas time, performing first in his hometown of Monticello, and then in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, and Cedar Falls. i'm his hornist, and it's a fun show. i know several of the dancers and choreography folk from working at Celebration Iowa, and a majority of the orchestra players are UNI folks or central/eastern iowa musicians who i've met in the past.

also playing with UNI's Jazz Panthers, the second jazz band, in a stan kenton arrangement of Christmas tunes. our gig is this Thursday at The Hub in downtown Cedar Falls.

other than that, little enough to report. see you around.

prose about moments

briefly, earlier, i felt the weight of twenty-four years. just for a moment. it was sobering: twenty-four years is a lot of life, and it can be heavy. but it is also uplifting to know that at all times you carry the sum total of your path, your choices. it proves the lyrics to a song, covered many times: "you are never alone." there is always the past you and your past joys and lessons and mistakes and triumphs. i am sure there is a future you too, but it's weight is invisible and likely to be staggering if perceived.

i have made choices and decisions and mistakes and have traveled many paths, and there are many more choices and decisions and mistakes and paths ahead of me. this is an infinite continuously expanding realization, and over time we come to know parts of it like we come to know the picture of a jigsaw puzzle. maybe it never fits together, maybe we never see the tapestry of our lives for the threads we live each day, but it's there. maybe others can see it, maybe the Universe can see it. some days i think i can see it, and maybe that's folly, but even so it's a comfort.

every moment is a begining and i am starting to feel it, to know it in my composite atoms, to grok it. i have felt that before and come to that hard-earned knowledge before but because of the blessing and curse of our own limited minds we know, then we forget. perhaps that is the essence of humanity: we know, then we forget. then we learn again. it repeats. all good stories are cyclical. our lives are stories, an ouroboros that is everything that we are all the time, but we can only know a moment.

it was a good night, in its way.

locations!

just a little update: national novel writing month is proceeding excitingly well. i have just over 5000 words written so far, which means i'm on track for the 50,000 word end goal. that's awesome! i've got one chapter down and am proceeding with the second.

the story at the moment is about the son of nobility in a small northern community of the Kingdom Between the Rivers, a loose community of almost feudal states that exists three generations after some sort of catastrophe collapsed modern society. this particular place, Demios, is ruled by the Mallister family who have been there since the Cataclysm, and who through the generations have created a stable and lasting community in a few small towns and villages. there are four main areas in Demios: Demios itself, Defiance, The Three Villages, and Swan Lake. Demios the city is located centrally among them.

Demios is the capital and consists of a large granary called the Towers, the Central Keep (a castle based out of what was once a school), and the homes and shops of a bustling agrarian center. The city is fairly small and is surrounded by fields and farmsteads. The people who live in homes outside of the city come to spend the winter inside the city, to have access to centralized food and various other things (town guards, a school, etc.). The flag of Demios (the city itself and the confederacy of villages to which it lends its name) has a top half of yellow, for the sun, and a bottom half of green, for the growing things that keep the people alive. Lord Mallister and his family rule Demios and live in the Central Keep. There have been three Lords of Demios: Lord Thomas, Lord Robert, and Lord William, the current leader. William's only son, Erik, is heir-apparent.

The Three Villages are three small villages (duh) that are within walking distance of each other, to the east of Demios just over an hour on foot. The people of the Three Villages specialize in agriculture and woodworking. The Three Villages have no hereditary nobility but an elected council, the leader of which acts as their representative to the Lord of Demios. His name is Richard son of Benjamin. Their flag is a dark blue background with three yellow stars corresponding roughly to the locations of the villages relative to each other. People in the Three Villages seek to curry favor with the Lord of Demios by naming children after Thomas, Robert, William, and Erik. None of the villages are on the Flat Road that runs from Defiance in the west to the ruins of a city in the east, and none can even be seen from it, but some are north and some are south. The Flat Road is the best way to get from Demios to any of the villages, or to Defiance in the other direction.

Swan Lake is a keep on the shores of a large natural lake to the south of Demios, connected to the capital by the Demios Road. The keep is a little more than an hour from Demios on foot. Their flag is a light blue background with (you guessed it) a white swan in the foreground. Swan Lake is considered fairly refined, and makes arts and crafts as well as wine and beer. The leader of Swan Lake is Lord Howard, who has one daughter, the Lady Michelle. Swan Lake has forests, fields, and of course the large lake whose name it bears.

Defiance is a rugged and individualistic place across the Udmo (a river) from Demios along the Flat Road. The keep itself, ruled by James the Elder, is located within a forest. There is a ruined town between Demios and Defiance, and within that town is a bridge over the Udmo that marks the beginning of Defiance. The people of Defiance are strong and proud and specialize in statuary and weaponscraft. The heir to Defiance, James the Younger (also called James son of James) is the close friend and companion of Erik Mallister.

Far to the south of these locales is a place known only as the City. A large urban area before the Cataclysm, the name of the City has been lost to all but a few of its inhabitants. The City is the only inhabited area aside from Demios in the north of the Kingdom Between the Rivers, and is the site where taxes must be brought: all of the Kingdom's tributary fiefdoms (such as Demios and a few others to the east and west of the City) must bring one-tenth of their annual harvest to the City to be sent even further south, by river, to the capital of the Kingdom. The City is also rumored to be the home of sorcerers, and is the place where the nobility of the fiefs of the Kingdom in the area come to undertake the Training, which is fairly mysterious and a well-guarded secret. The City is linked by river to the capital of the Kingdom, but the latter city is so far away that the trip is very rarely made. Legend has it that during the time of Lord Robert of Demios, the King Between the Rivers came as far north as the City to meet his northern lords. Since then, Demios and the City itself have had very very little contact with the King of any of his representatives, to the point where some no longer believe that the Kingdom still exists. The leaders of the City live in the golden-roofed Mansion, and are lead by a self-styled Prince of the Small Rivers.

so that's what my brain's been working on recently! i plan a post later on talking about characters, and maybe plot... but maybe that should be saved for the finished book, eh?

peace!

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts today, and I'm doing it, hella doing it. i will likely emerge only briefly. peace to you all!

in recent times i've been doing a lot of Wednesday Night Mayhem (behold this post) and also reading Wikipedia about filmmakers and people with real artistic visions. i think it is time to quit school and begin a life, and it's going to be hard. i have no illusions about it being fun or grandiose (well, i do; but i recognize them for what they are). i think part of me needs that challenge, needs that stimulation, and more: needs that accomplishment for actual work done rather than accomplishment based on ability to fold into an unjust system.

anyway, peace to you all. i love everbody, and that's not news.

be at peace

there's the old truism that "if you're bored then you're boring." i've wondered about that for some time. usually it's not that i'm bored, per se, it's just that i don't know how to articulate or share what i'm interested in.

recent flashes of interest have included George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (which i am reading again except for the last book, A Feast for Crows, which i will be reading for the first time). it's indescribably good, and say what you will about fantasy literature and escapism, it's what i need sometimes.

another book that i have been reading in the time between the abovementioned is William James' classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. again it's a re-read, but this book is invaluable for those of us who suffer from what james calls the "sick soul". it's just a pleasant reminder that perhaps in the future something fantastic awaits us.

i've been working on my annoyance at social structures recently, but it's hard to link to any work on that. i've been doing lots of writing and thinking and have not been taking a ton of action. what i'm looking at right now is how social structures, particularly those related to learning, are invested in the banking model of education (see Paolo Freire) and the legitimatization of knowledge and/or power through the creation of sanctioned structures for delivering that knowledge and/or power. then, alternatively, i've been looking at informal education and how that functions and how it might present a workable alternative to the formal processes of learning and power brokering.

reading a lot of Tenured Radical, to keep myself on track. practicing the Georges Barboteau Etudes for Horn because they're quite difficult. preparing for an orchestra concert this friday night, where we're playing Dvorak Eight. deciding whether to sell my horn after i graduate, or keep it around and try to use it to help make a living. trying to decide whether to finish out this year or not.

basically, i'm still going like i always have been, and am no closer to any sort of "goal" than ever. you're not surprised, neither am i.

namaste.

holes in walls

man, i spend much more time angry than i used to. my eccentric roommate kicked a hole in the wall of our house yesterday. this made me furious, but i did not kick a hole in a wall. perhaps i should have.

tonight i'll learn some things and see if i'm capable of making good decisions or only horrible, awful ones.

orchestra today was about letting a piece breathe, subsuming one's ego in the music, accessing whatever it is (ether?) that flows below the surface of a moment and making the music speak to that, and "spinning." i still don't know what the last part means.

then i ate pizza, now i shower; tonight is a night and it will lead to adventures which i hope to relate in positive tones in the future, but still i worry.