so i never thought i'd reach a point i would neglect my LJ friends page not because i'm too busy but because i've placed another social network as a priority over it, but over the past four or five days it happened. my g+ stream continues to be incredibly active and full of neat new people that this avenue fell a bit to the wayside.

but i've caught up now and catching up makes me realize that this place isn't nearly as dead as i make it out to be when i check it daily. Sure, it's not nearly as active as it used to be in the pre-myspace and pre-facebook days, but there are still some people posting on a regular basis that i care about, and there's a couple of communities i belong to that are always active that are important to me.

so yeah. no more neglecting this place. as much as i like g+ and what i'm getting out of it these days, blogging and friend page blogs are still my home.

this morning in the laundromat while i was waiting for my laundry to finish in the dryers, i had my headphones in listening to the Traveling Dream of the Inception App whilst working on a semi-important email to a friend, and i was interrupted by a woman sitting not too far away from me who was similarly waiting for her laundry to dry.

she was talking to me and i couldn't hear her, so i undid my headphones and asked her to repeat herself. The woman, who i'd put in her late forties or early fifties, was basically asking me questions about my laptop, saying that it looked very nice, asking some basic questions about it (it's a MacBook Pro). i smiled and nodded and was generally friendly to her about it and thought that this was going to be the extent of the conversation, but it turned out that this was just a gateway question, a pretext of which to start up random conversation, and in that regard she was a spicket that would not turn off. She talked my ear off all the while while she was waiting for her laundry to dry, through folding her laundry, and even staying an extra five minutes or so to continue talking. It was nonstop.

at first it was mildly annoying, mainly because the email i was trying to finish was fairly urgent because my friend was going through a pseudo-crisis that i was trying to console her on and i told her that i was going to get back to her within the hour. But as this woman started to talk more about herself and i got a picture of her life and her perceptions of it, my attitude about it changed.

because she was such a sad woman.

( picture of a woman. )

--

anyway, forward and onward. i'm not trying to keep up with life. life is trying to keep up with me.

it's strange how flip-floppy i feel about this movie. On the one hand, it does a very good job of capturing the magic of classic Muppets that i have memories of as a kid and in a way that i think can appeal to new audiences as well as old. It made me laugh out loud many times and hearing The Rainbow Connection was a heartstring pull of a unique sort that happens very rarely in movies for me these days.

On the other hand, the movie's plot felt very elementary with a tissue-thin structure whose sole purpose was to serve as a conduit for a movie that bordered on being overbearingly self-referential. In a way it was kind of clever to incorporate the idea of "The Muppets used to be great, they can be great again" into the movie, but the extreme in which that idea seemed to be pounded into the head of me as a viewer started to feel like that one person who loses his credibility about his awesomeness by spending too much time saying that he's awesome. The Muppets are timeless. I think that the movie would have been more successful if it allowed the audience to acknowledge that of their own free will rather than through the eyes of the Muppet's greatest fanboy who also happened to be a muppet.

a majority of my clothes shopping i do at eddie bauer. as such, i have a rewards card from them and get their emails which informs me of sales which they have in abundance.

This past weekend, they were running a "only until sunday!" sale of everything in their store at 25% off. it might have been a members only thing or a web only thing, i'm not sure. i had contemplated buying something since i need to restock up on khakis, but it's not a priority so i let it slip by.

Today, i got a new sale notification: "Buy one item and get a second at 50% off!"

*blink*

i mean, i guess that's not *exactly* the same thing because if you buy two items at different values, you're paying more for the current sale than the past sale. But it still struck me as odd that they would choose to run both of those sales back to back, especially after the "last chance to save!!!" email on sunday.

wonder what sort of thing i'll get after this sale is done.

recently i put up the backing track for my google hangout performance piece on youtube. This morning i was sending those tracks to a friend in an email and i noticed that this track had a "matched third party content" flag on it.

i mentally cocked my head to the mental side. All of this music was written by me. i'm pretty sure i didn't sic the copyright dogs on myself. I clicked on the notification. The Music Publishing Collective Society claimed that there was material in my video that matched some tune called "Lagoon".

I didn't go find Lagoon to listen to it and see if it resembled my piece. I just started going through the steps to dispute the copyright claim. several menu option clicks later and a small blurb saying, "all of this content is mine, i have paper sketchwork if you need further proof," i hit "submit" to dispute the claim.

The instant i hit "submit", i got an email notification - not a receipt that i submitted the dispute, but a notification that action was already taken - that the Music Publishing Collective Society released the copyright claim, and it's acknowledged that the content belongs to me.

And that's weird and/or fishy to me. I can understand it if whatever algorithm exists to check for matched content would flag something inappropriately, but i would think that the release of those rights back to me should take some actual checking. the fact that it was all automated feels like the algorithm has a wide criteria in the hopes that a person would be too lazy or too scared to go through the dispute process because they don't truly understand whether or not the claim is valid.

what that means practically i don't know, but it's interesting.

so i have an account on fandalism. earlier today, another member named Aniruddha Bhattacharya contacted me via private message complimenting me on my recent upload of my Shifting Signals Zero backing track. He also asked me some questions about the composition.

I went to go access the fandalism page and discovered that the site was down. this is the sort of thing that can easily slip below the radar for me, so i thought that rather than waiting for the fandalism site to go back up later and forgetting about it, i'd try to take care of it by looking the guy up on facebook (all fandalism accounts are linked through facebook) thinking that there can't be that many Aniruddha Bhattacharya's in existence.

And here's where my cultural ignorance comes in, because this is clearly a more common name than i give credit for. a fb search for Aniruddha Bhattacharya pulled over 80 unique accounts.

what wonderful knowledge to stumble on, to have my conception of what is common and what is unique be challenged like that.

so i'm still far from being an awesome poker player, but there's a hand i played last night that i'm fairly happy with. Someone can tell me if i played it in error, because it's possible that i should have either conceded the hand early or played it more aggressive from the outset.

( it's brief. )

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the plan right now is to get some food, and then come back and keep ticking off my big to-do list. A few hours will probably go into some website development, an hour or so will go into fall show design for hermiston.

this book was the 'book of the month' at FedEx Office when i went to pick up the programs for my concert. I leafed through it out of idle curiosity, and i was amazed at how absurd the book was. It's one of those self-motivation self-help sort of things, the premise being something like (iirc) "most people may go 211 degrees, you need to go 212 degrees, go that extra degree because it's only one degree that changes water from hot to boiling." the book was done in all strong bold large font text meant to be all inspirational and energizing and other sort of nonsense.

some byline at FedEx said that this was a New York Times Bestseller which i found utterly fascinating. How does a book that basically just finds a clever way to say "try harder" manage to make a best seller list? how does a book like that actually instill change in people's lives that they wouldn't have found on their own?

maybe i'm being too hard about it because i'm generally not a deflated sort of individual that needs that sort of external kick in the arse to get motivated about something, but it seems to me that if i *were* the sort that needed that external kick, i'd try to find it in something that was able to give me more substance and less infomercial.

There's a Whole Foods in the Garden District. I don't go in there to shop very often (maybe once or twice a year) because it's clear across town and i have a decent grocery within walking distance of where i live, but i do have to go in there every now and again because it's the only place that sells the hair texturizer i use which i'm fairly picky about.

i went there yesterday to pick up said texturizer and a few other random supplies, and as i walked around and took in the environment - the kinds of products, the way the store was organized, the look and feel of the people that were shopping there - i couldn't shake this smug air about the whole place. A kind of high-class "the world would be a much better place if everyone shopped or worked at Whole Foods like I do" sort of vibe. I felt very much like a foreigner and outsider to the atmosphere, and afterwards i kind of felt the urge to take a mental shower.

I don't think that this is reflective entirely of Whole Foods as a grocery and brand more than a product of this particular Whole Foods being in the rich neighborhood of new orleans. i don't *think* i've gotten that vibe (or at least to that degree) from other Whole Foods i've visited, but the experience i had at this one makes me want to visit other ones for the express purpose of seeing how uncomfortable it makes me.

in any case, i'm probably going to start buying that hair texturizer online.

these questions came from laurel. i'm betting this will be the last one as i imagine that most people who wanted questions got them from me already and i doubt i'll get more questions from other people. oh, except that i still need to answer dan's last question about monogamy. that will probably be an easter weekend project.

anyway. questions were:

1. Why don't you like Facebook?
2. Is there a specific characteristic or behavior of yourself that you can identify as derived from your upbringing?
3. When was the last time you were in a strip club? Do you enjoy strip/ gentlemen's clubs?
4. When was the last time something made you gleefully, euphorically happy?
5. What's your favorite childhood memory (10 years or younger)?

( answers. )

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i did that sleep-through-dinner-so-now-my-options-are-limited thing again. i would kill for a salad right now, but i hate fast food salads. them's the breaks.