HEY, I MADE A CD!

I made a CD!!  A cd-ette, really, it's only about 45 minutes long.  I've been slaving away at the tables for a couple of months now, so here's an accurate representation of my level of talent at the moment and where I'm at musically speaking.

I guess you could classify all this as progressive trance, but if you wanted to nuance it a bit, there's some breaks, leftfield downbeat, and house influences...and a LOT of vocals.  Beats in and of themselves are sort of boring to me, I need some meat in there--and there's lots of soothing female vocals in here from Justine Suissa, Ashley Tomberlin, Mavie Marcos, and Jes Brieden that MAKE these tracks as far as I'm concerned.  If I was going to invent a phrase to describe it, I'd call it "Dreamtime Dance".

I hope you enjoy.  I would appreciate critique in any form, so leave me a comment or write me an email.

Here's a 192k version (about 63MB):

DJ Zeon - 1st Mix 192k.mp3

Track List:

1.  Andain - Beautiful Things (Gabriel & Dresden Unplugged Mix)

2.  Deepsky - Ghost (Filo & Peri Mix)

3.  Luminary - Amsterdam (Smith & Pledger Remix)

4.  Firewall - Sincere (Smith & Pledger 2005 Remix)

5.  Blank & Jones - Revealed (Progressive Mix)

6.  Vadim Zhukov - Exit (Robert Nickson Remix)

7.  OceanLab - Satellite (Markus Schulz Coldharbour Mix)

MUCH thanks to Edgar Binning and Matt Davis for the continual support, to Maegan Hackworth for putting up with me playing the same 10 records over and over for hours on end, and to Jon Webb for his help in post-production and recording.

Hero Worship

Dr. Wagy was talking about Roger Williams and his dissatisfaction and eventual departure from the Massachusetts Bay puritan colonies of John Winthrop.  He asked the class who our heroes were.  He called on me, and I think I surprised him with my answer...Yuri Gagarin, first human in space.  He responded with, "Right, he's your hero because he broke barriers, in this case, physical barriers."

He missed the mark.  Of course, Gagarin did indeed break physical barriers.  The Cosmonaut space program tested the very limits of human endurance.  Rocket technology was the pinnacle of our engineering capabilities.  An accomplished test pilot arising from communal agrarian roots, he got the tap to pilot Vostok I and accomplish Russia's greatest hope--to beat the United States into space, claim a media coup in the emerging Cold War, and imply the lethal capability of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Gagarin's courage and determination are enough to make him a man to admire...but that's not why he's my hero. 

It's what Gagarin represents--mankind's civilization of other worlds.  Like Leif Ericsson, Columbus, or Magellan, Gagarin was the first of many.  An explorer with the backing of a powerful nation with fervent ambition and dreams of economic and political gain.  He broke the boundary of space the same way these men broke the barriers of vast world oceans.

I generally detest the sermonizing of fundamentalist true believers .  I value idealism as a quaint human trait that only seldom bears fruit.  Most idealists find enough doubt in their own belief structures or eventually crumble under the weight of a reality that never quite measures up.  Winthrop found even when he had established his City Upon a Hill that dissenters like Williams and Hooker threatened his ideas of what was right and true.  Williams wanted to thumb his nose at the monarchs and take Winthrop's experiment a step further.  He would challenge not only the religious heirarchy but the political power structure as well.  He was an equal-opportunity offender.

"I looked and looked but I didn't see God."

— Yuri Gagarin (Þðèé Àëåêñååâè÷ Ãàãàðèí), 14 April 1961. Quoted in 'To Rise from Earth' (1996) by Wayne Lee

Yuri was a man who exemplified the age in which he lived.  His social credentials with the Communist government were impeccable:  his family lived on a communal farm and took every educational opportunity to attain his goal.  A regular guy who became an enigma, an explorer.  He represented the dawn of the space age, or at least Man's part in it.  The fruits of the scientific revolution, secular government, and good old fashioned arrogance.  He helped pave the way for the idealists like me, disillusioned with the status quo, believing in the prospect of a fresh start.  Separatist congregations, whole families with dynasties to create, fortunes to build, and governments and religious institutions to piss off.

We've got so many other problems at the moment that it'll be a long while before we put a significant financial effort into putting more people in space, especially on a permanent basis.  Not to mention there will have to be some kind of economic venture at the root of it all.  Regardless,

"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct."
                                                                       -Carl Sagan

                                                                                      so it's just a matter of time.

I'm actually kind of a self-righteous asshole idealist, too, when you get me on the right topic...I bet you can guess what at least one of them is by now.  I've come to terms with the notion that I personally will never go to space.  However, at some point in the future, some crazy idealist Roger-Williams-of-space-motherfucker like me will get the tap.

And I wish him well.

Where do you draw the line?

It's the fundamental dichotomy of democratic governance.  Do self-governing societies have room to allow people to be wrong?

I always try and find a way to apply the lessons of history, integrating and discarding concepts as I see fit...shaping my worldview into something new every day.  My History of Colonial America class has brought up a lot of issues I'm struggling with in my own life.

John Winthrop came to the New World to create a society pure in God's sight.  The evils of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches had reached a breaking point for Winthrop and many like him.  He believed the decadent societies in England were going to be punished, so it was off to the New World with a congregation of his own.  The idea was to gather like-minded individuals who wanted to create a heaven on earth apart from the rule of a heirarchical religious structure (little did he know he was also sowing the seeds of challenging the dominant political structure as well).  When these "individuals" got there and somebody wanted to be more "individual" than they were, they were told to go be an individual someplace else and purged from the society.  Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

***

The commune.  Or whatever it is going on at my house.  I jokingly call it a commune, though I guess it could really be something more like a weak constitutional monarchy.  Whatever you want to call it, most governmental structures look basically the same when it's 4 people.  What a friggin mess.

Basically because there are lazy motherfuckers who have gotten soft on the idea of "everybody works".  So lazy in fact that I'm considering changing my governmental structure to more of an iron-fisted evil dictatorship.  This, of course, may be a personal moral failure but I'm tired of running such a loose ship.  If I wanted to look after children, I'd have children.

Do egalitarian communes inherently breed dissent?  Other than a few simple house rules regarding having people over, I don't have a lot to say about what anybody else does.  Have I had it wrong from the get-go?  Possibly.  I'm an idealist at heart.  Maybe I'm not too different from many other "leaders" who think their brand of government can work with them at the helm. 

I hate being a dick, but I wonder if that's what people really want subconsciously.  No real thought involved, everyone has a place and duties that they must fulfil or risk being purged from the society.  After all, a heirarchical power structure with one Grand Poobah at the top has been how societies have been arranged for thousands of years.  Do the concepts of self-governance go against human nature?

Currently Watching Stargate SG-1 - Season 8 Boxed Set By Richard Dean Anderson see related

Most regular bloggers would say a month without updates equals abandonment.  I can't say I could disagree with that point of view.  I could give you the biggest line of shit ever told about how I've been busy or whatever or I could just get down to business and fill you in on what's been going on inside this collection of neurons and mush over the last month.  I'm going to cover several topics I've been thinking about, none of them in grand detail...but I might expand on one or more later.  MONTAGE!

***

Christmas (more commonly known as the Feast of Alvis around my house)...more time with the family than I ever want to spend...gotta be in 5 places at once...catching up with old high school buddies...got an X-Box with Halo and Halo2...big keg party for New Year's that almost rivaled the wedding after-party...etc...

Roommate thing is working out OK.  I've even almost gotten used to a 3rd person in the house (and a 4th, 5th, or even 6th sometimes on weekends...it's turned into a fucking commune around here ).  I mean, it's weird...it's like having a second person to look after.  I doubt a couple with a child would find this basic concept that foreign, but it is to me.  It's been an adjustment, but as long as things keep going the way they are, I think I can live with it (no pun intended).

I'm a user.  In the clinical sense.  I've recognized the behavior and am calling it for what it is.  I never blog when I'm having a spectacular day or when something important happens or when SWMBO and I are arguing.  When the mood strikes me, though, I use this blog just like any other cathartic substance or meditative process.  And that's the only time I do it.  I don't post for anybody's entertainment, I post for my own mental stability...not that there's not a certain level of weird voyeurism about it that I kind of enjoy.

There's nothing really creative about it--just me blathering on and on in the vaccuum of the Internet, making my contribution to the collective "wisdom" of "teh intrawebs!" (You didn't know it was cool to misspell shit?  Where have you been?)  I kind of owe it to The Internet, really, since I've taken so much from it.  It has become, for all practical purposes, THE SINGULAR learning tool for everyday life.  Anytime somebody asks me something I don't know, I reply "Ask the Robot." and point over at the computer.  Sometimes, though, you find important truths in the least likely places, even on the web.....

***

I came across a link to Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation in a message board thread a while back.  Fascinating read about the future of automation and its impact on the economy  I'm not as well-versed in SciFi (or economics, really) as I'd like to be, but I get the impression this isn't a new concept.  But the way Brain describes it is.  Honda's Asimo isn't going to walk into your office tomorrow, hand you a pink slip, and tell you to pack your shit.  BUT, over time, that's basically what's going to happen...and Brain points out several automation processes already in place as well as key triggers that will eventually bring about this robotic workforce (and therefore mass unemployment).  Don't get me wrong, it's not all fire and brimstone--he also discusses how the technological singularity will free up millions of people to follow their own creative and innovative interests, which is all gravy.  A merit-based society where everyones basic needs were met sounds nice.  Bring on the robots and techno music and all that shit...

I'd never thought much about that...what the fuck are we going to do when the whole economic system no longer works (of course it depends on who you're talking to as to whether the current economic system "works")?  What is going to happen to all the displaced workers?  Is this going to have the added "benefit" of population control based on the ability to survive in such a worldwide economic environment?  We are harvesting resources at an unsustainable rate given the current population + growth..........Brain of course touches on all of this, and how we can make some adjustments to the current system, over time, to make it all work out.  It's an interesting vision of the future that makes one ask, "Do we HAVE to strictly go by what 'works' or can we, with a robotic workforce, start making the economy work the way we want it to?"

Reading this thread on Fark was a little daunting as there are like a million posts by every amateur non-PoliSci major out there with a keyboard and a bad attitude (usually I'm one of them).  "Robobagpiper" comes up with the goods in my opinion (several posts run together here):

Communism failed for the same reason any revolutionary system fails. True revolution, by its nature, sweeps away the institutions that provide checks and balances that keep society in near-equilibrium. In doing so, it concentrates all power, economic and political, in the hands of a very few, who are quickly corrupted by it into a good-old fashioned oliogarchy.

 

(FYI...China is a communist state with the fastest and strongest growing economy in the world.)

China is communist in name only; it's a perfect example of the corrupt oliogarchy that comes out of revolutionary systems. And it survives entirely because it's succeeded in creating an export-based economy in ways the Soviets never could (people always buy more VCRs and cheap trinkets than AK-47s and Su-27s).

 

There seems to be a lot of confusion here: communism is not about the ownership of private personal property. It is about who owns means of economic production.

But because it comes to be put into practice by a revolutionary programme, you see attacks on private personal property for two reasons: lower-class resentment leads to an orgy of seizures from the old ruling class and its middle-class supporters; and when the revolution is over and those in charge establish themselves as the new oliogarchs, they claim the seized property for themselves.

I just had a vision....

it was like my dream, but it was real. 

It was like I was actually here in ancient times.

Let's just say that all the world knows about ancient Egypt barely scratches the surface. 

The truth is more incredible than any of us ever imagined.

TRUTH

As is well known there are literally hundreds of pyramids of various styles scattered over the Earth, in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Far East, Southeast Asia and South Pacific, and in North and South America. A few of these sites demonstrating the different styles are:

 

 

Iraq, Egypt², Mexico^8, Guatemala, Peru^5, Bolivia, Java, Ryuku Islands, China, Polynesia, Samoa, Greece, Canary Islands, Yonagumi, United States

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Weir:	What's the shortest distance between two points?
Mr.Justin:	A straight line.
Dr. Weir:	Wrong. The shortest distance between two points is zero.

Heh......

Will a robot discover the Great Pyramid's secret?--Will it bother to tell US if it does?

WILL he in fact like Cheese Doodles?

...you don't say?

You may now take off your

and return to your regularly scheduled illusions.

I'm going back to watching Stargate.