i will throw my two cents in.

Sarah Palin winks during a vice-presidential debate in 2008 in St Louis, Missouri. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

today is a sad day in history.  sadder, even, than G-Dub’s last day in the white house.  why?  because no longer will we be able to look forward to such gems as this from sarah palin’s resignation:

“We know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities.”

/sigh

i can only hope she really does run for prez in 2012.  she’s better fodder than bushisms.

i was listening to a mix cd i made of stuff i listened to in high school and junior high and the beginnings of it is all this old 90’s era metal that i was just discovering through friends and mtv, and it made me nostalgic.  nostalgic and singing along to “hangar 18″ at top volume.

this mix is a tribute to all the metal bands i listened to when i was first coming into my own and discovering music outside of what was popular with the kids at school and my parents.

teh s3quence, version 5

01 pantera, walk (biomechanical mix)
02 faith no more, epic
03 slayer, guilty of being white
04 megadeth, ashes in your mouth
05 motley crue, shout at the devil
06 danzig, mother (live)
07 skid row, slave to the grind
08 kiss, god of thunder
09 iron maiden, the number of the beast
10 ozzy osbourne, crazy train
11 metallica, blackened
12 tool, prison sex

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d00d.

we just saw a m’f'ing MOOSE in the park that is one block away from us.

that might not be much when you live in the middle of nowhere, but this is downtown salt lake city (okay, not quite downtown, but close).

that moose-shaped object in the picture is, in fact, a moose.

objects in the image are more moose-like than they appear

kathy gets picked up by the police for the 2nd time

this will be my last disnts post.  why? because they’re boring.  i’m boring myself talking about it.  the lives of my sims just aren’t interesting enough to warrant a blog about them.  maybe i’m too involved, but it seemed to me like when i left free will to do most of the work, they just went through the motions…which is pretty much what sims do.  maybe there’s just not enough drama — certainly i don’t have anything like the parents being enemies with their kids, but i figured both parents being criminals and generally horrible people would, you know, probably result in a troubled youth.  maybe it’s that i don’t actively sabotage their happiness.  i’m not sure.  but i’m playing the game, and i’m playing it, and i realize that there just isn’t anything interesting enough to report.  even when kathy was carted off to the police station (again) it still wasn’t really all that newsworthy, more anticlimactic.

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charlene and jimmy play chess

charlene sneaks off to practice chess before work

charlene and jimmy challenge each other to a game of chess. the winner? jimmy, actually, despite the fact that his sister has the genius trait. the next day, she practices chess after school before she needs to go to work. jimmy, too, practices chess at the park nearby after he finishes his homework. while there, he gets the idea in his head to stay out past curfew. this leads him to get caught by the police and kathy gets a wakeup call at 2am to pick him up.
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i’ve been playing sims 3 a bit after being inspired by alice and kev. for those who haven’t seen or heard about them, alice and kev are two homeless sims in sims 3. the way alice and kev’s player portrays them, it seemed like there was quite a lot of serious ai advances and the story that was being told was a poignant and heartbreaking tale of realistically depicted homelessness. the things they got into, and the struggles they had seemed to be pretty realistic. strikingly realistic actually, and their player, robin burkinshaw, said on a number of occasions that she more or less let them do their own thing and let the free will ai make most of their decisions.

alice and kev are two homeless sims

recorded a new s3quence mix.  sort of a mix with some left field stuff in here.  i keep going back to hip hop, i guess it’s just what’s in my head these days.  but i threw in some acid jazz and indie electronic/idm-type stuff, too.  there’s also some scratching, but only some of it is actually me.  anyway, it was fun, so i hope you can listen to it without cringing.

this time i added album art.  i saw this taking the dog for a walk, looked sort of like the skateboard was embedded in the ground like after a tornado when there are 2×4s shoved through trees.

teh s3quence, version 4

1 lady sovereign, bang bang
2 cut chemist meets shortkut, who rocks the house
3 dj shadow, high noon
4 krii, dzaes manouverz
5 tricky, black steel
6 bat for lashes, bat’s mouth
7 the for carnation, tales (live from the crypt)
8 thom yorke, and it rained all night
9 carole king, pierre
10 mr. t, don’t talk to strangers
11 spooks, things i’ve seen
12 terror danjah, cock back v1.2
13 bear mccreary, something dark is coming

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i’ve discovered a new method to creating randomized, creative commons-based music.  wolfram tones will generate an entire composition based on variables you define in probably every musical style known to man. wolfram has been essentially compiling a database of all knowledge, ever, and it is being used to power a variety of applications, of which wolfram alpha is one. because i’m aware of the project and what they do, i’m fairly sure that they actually do allow you to create a composition in any style ever conceived, because each style, with its’ own unique scale and patterns, is stored in the database.

this track is my first experiment in wolfram tones. i created a composition in the “ambient” style and gave it 5 tracks. i played around with the individual instruments a bit on the site but after it sent me the midi file i changed them all in ableton, using the sampler tool to pull from some generated instruments i created out of loops from nine inch nails’ “beginning of the end” (which, since i have the bonus disk with the ableton tracks from yearzeroremixed, i had lying around). the result is dirty, and not very ambient (maybe if i changed the bpm to, say, 20, it would be more ambient), but it’s interesting, and i think i like it. i especially like some of the effects going on on some of the tracks.

at any rate, it’s a beginning, and possibly something that will pull me through the rest of the project. next step is making something more listenable, as this was pretty deliberately experimental.

i realized after completing this track that i had downloaded samples for track 4 but had not actually created the track. so i used this as an excuse to test my new wolfram tones experiment. this time i created a random hip hop track and took out the drums (i added in my own drum loop later). i used the samples i downloaded as the instruments. then i ramped up the bpm. the result is much more, i dunno, digestible? while still having a real experimental/glitch/tweaker ambience from the sampled instruments. not sure i’m gonna finish the album like this, but i definitely want to try a few more things before i call the wolfram experiment done.

since both of these were done in ableton, i’m going to include the full ableton tracks when i release the full album. i think it will be interesting with these because you’ll be able to see the creative process and all the effects i used.

arcane palette just got our first affiliate commission. this is really exciting for us, because this is essentially like getting free money. and suddenly, i get it. i get how upstartblogger and probably countless other pro-bloggers make their living. it’s not through adsense, on which you make pennies unless you get thousands and thousands of hits a day (and even then it may not be enough revenue to support the effort), it’s through affiliate links.

segway for the lost: affiliate links are any link you get that goes to another site (generally something that sells stuff) that gives you a kickback or commission or discount or some kind of reward if they buy stuff. so, threadless has “street team” points which are redeemable for discounts on tshirts. jinx has a similar thing. with our webhost, 1and1 (and probably a lot of other webhosts and  businesses), we get cash back incentives. with me so far?

the theory is, if you can get enough traffic to your site, a thousand clicks a day, and you have something that gives a significant kickback reward — say $50 for a new account setup — and maybe 1% of your visitors decide “hey, that’s a good deal“, that’s 100 clicks on your affiliate link for 1000 hits to your site, which for $50 is $500. a day. the key is to get the traffic, and there’s a variety of schools and methods of how to do this and some are more sketchy than others and that’s a whole ‘nother deal.

this gets me thinking — this is a real, viable thing. something that could work. something that, for a lot of people, does work. every day. so i’m left with a quandry: do i want to sell my soul for a high traffic blog that needs constant attention, regular blog posts, and (ideally, and mostly because i am fairly strongly opposed to syndicating everything) legitimate content on a specific subject for a potentially lucrative income? i don’t know. i keep thinking that i don’t want to be writing all the time — i like writing, but i could give a million reasons why i’m not that guy, the pro-blogger guy. and i do like making art and making websites and making artful websites and if i was blogging for income that would take away from that.

on the other hand, we’re not at the point yet where we’re making buckets of cash doing web design, and probably we’ll never be making buckets. so it really comes down to whether i sell my soul or keep my soul. and yes, before i get the blogerati peanut gallery yelling at me, i know, making a living as a pro blogger does not necessarily mean selling your soul, however, it would feel like selling my soul to be doing something that’s okay for money rather than and as opposed to doing something that i love for money (no more so than any other job, but still…).

/sigh

so that takes me right back to the beginning.

the thing is no matter what you do in this industry (or any for that matter), you need to sell yourself.  we sell ourselves every day when we bid on design jobs.  we sell ourselves on our website.  by going on at lenght about arcane palette, i’m selling us again right now, and as i type this, i’m selling myself again.  and every day i’m thinking of ways to get traffic to arcanepalette.com that doesn’t go against my principles of getting hits that mean something from people who are interested in our work as artists — i’m trying to selectively bump our page ranking while not resorting to black hat methods to cheat our way to the top.  everything you do in the digital world that’s public is selling your online identity.  i have a lifestream page, so that sells quite a lot of my identity for anyone to see.  so i guess it really comes down to what do you want to be doing.  thing is, if i could make a living just ranting off on this blog about whatever i felt like, i’d be pretty happy — i just don’t see that ever happening.

but then, maybe that’s what’s holding me back.

it’s been a while since i posted or did one of these and i tweeted probably over a week ago that i wanted to do a hip-hop mix next time around, so i got around to doing it.  it’s longer by far than the others, and it only has a few minor effups (well, one glaring one which was a result of lack of forethought — but hey, it’s hard to think on the spot when you’re mixing and juggling two kids chasing each other around and falling off the couch).  otherwise, i’m pretty happy with this mix.  it had a lot of my favorite hip-hop tracks from the uk, the us, and, thanks to dj krush, japan.

tracklist for teh s3quence, version 3

1 lady sovereign, random
2 roots manuva, witness dubstep
3 dj krush, toki no tabiji (feat. Inden)
4 different levels, all i wanna do
5 cee-lo, closet freak
6 dj luck & mc neat, a little bit of luck
7 tricky, you don’t wanna
8 ice-t, big gun
9 tha dogg pound, what would you do?
10 RDB, snoop dogg, & akshay kumar, singh is kinng
11 pigface vs. the evil mothers, asphole
12 dj spooky & saul williams, the pledge to resist
13 lady sovereign & shystie vs. frost p & zuz rock, the battle
14 artful dodger, re-rewind (sweet n’ low remix)
15 the streets, blinded by the lights
16 buck 65, the suffering machine
17 tosca tango orchestra, ballade 4 part 1

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