i think it's as clear as day that they are shutting down comments - for political reasons. they want this shut down before the election cycle heats up.
as time consuming as this has been, i actually waited too long to do it and have lost much more than i wanted. the last few days of vlogs have dealt with this topic. i've got over a thousand pages off, and have quite a bit more to go, but i've also lost a lot of really interesting conversations.
with the character limit? it's over. it's useless. i'm moving to my own space - there's no other solution.
it's going to be a while before i get back to work, unfortunately. but if i had doubts about the worth of this, the character limit has reinforced the need for me to be doing this asap.
youtube, as we know it, is on the verge of collapse. it's been too successful in spreading ideas. and, it's getting shut down.
bernie sanders may very well win the election. that is a failure of the propaganda system.
the result is just pointless clutter. and, i'm not going to pull back from it out of aesthetic - i'm going to push it hard, to demonstrate how bad it looks and why you should change it.
so, i will need to post five separate posts - part 1, part 2, etc.
nor will it allow me to post it as replies.
i am trying to post a comment on my own page, and it will not allow me to paste the entire thing in.
character limits?
wow.
getting worse and worse by the day, youtube.
do you know what character limits accomplish? they force users to copy and paste a long reply into multiple shorter replies.
it's an incredibly pointless, utter dick move.
here's a tip: if my post is too long, don't read it. zero fucks given. and, if i post too many long posts, and you don't want to read them? maybe you should unsubscribe from my feed.
i can't even believe, really, that this is seriously a thing. it's so horrifically backwards and so remarkably stupid...
i hit my first post-smoking show last night, and how did i do?
well, i did have a few. three. although, i regretted it immediately and i walked out with no cravings. chances of a relapse - in the form of buying a pack - are zero.
the vlog for the night will come up at my site on feb 24th at 12:30 am. in the mean time, i'll do a written review here (which will get moved to the appropriate places, in time).
---
i ended up a little irritated at ritual howls, but i really ought to be irritated with the bar, instead. this isn't the first time i've seen the bar try and combine shows like this. they'll get a local band in on a touring band's bill, then essentially give the show to the opening act. and, i'm not exaggerating. the bar legitimately really seems to be very strongly biased towards the local bands, and essentially treats the touring acts as a kind of burden to deal with. it's this "we let you play here, you should thank us" kind of attitude.
the problem is really in the marketing. if you bill a show for a touring band, people expect they're going to be the focus. if you bill a show for a local band, people will expect they're the focus, too. what is really shitty is to bill the show for the touring band, and then go out of your way to co-opt it for the opening band. you're not doing that local band any favours by pissing off a possible new audience.
it's consequently really not fair to attack the opening act for setting up late and then acting like it was their show - it's the bar that enables this. this then forces the headliner to cut their set short.
but, it does mean that i was irritated and less than objective about the set as it was happening.
were ritual howls any good? the actual truth is that they really weren't much to take note of. at their best, they were yet another joy division knock-off. they weren't horrible, or anything - they were legitimately mildly enjoyable, but they were very much the archetype of an opening act. so, i would have absolutely preferred to have them play a shorter set earlier in the night, to allow for a longer set by the headliners (who have well over an hour of material). and, the fact that i've seen this happen twice at this bar, now, means that i'm less excited about going there.
they had a chance to allow a substantial touring act to play a lengthy set; instead, they gave the floor to a mediocre local act.
i need to acknowledge, though, that they brought their own crowd, and they made them happy. it's this scene of kids that is all about grasping on to an aesthetic. so, what they're interested in is time capsuling this forty-year old sound as a kind of a fashion trend. the less original you are, the better. they catered almost perfectly to this audience.
but, there's truly not a whole lot to take not of in what they're doing - it's a competent instantiation of a formula that's been done to death for decades.
we got a roughly fifty minute set in from disappears, who i think are a well enough known entity that there's not really much use in being descriptive. they did what they do, and they did it well. i was in the correct state of inebriation to enjoy it, and i did.
it just would have been nice if they weren't cut short by by bylaws and if i didn't have to catch the bus at 1:10 - although i'll point out that i would have certainly missed the bus to stay late, too.
there are longer and fully professionally recorded sets on youtube, but this is the closest to what the show was actually like. i caught some audio that will come up on my vlog next week.
update: i have less than a year of posts to clear out of youtube.
but, that's just part one of a three or four part process.
it's slow. but necessary. and i need to be clear: i'm done with the youtube comments section, once i'm done.
the koala central command would like to request your help in tracking down our prime fugitive, deathtokoalas.
we have managed to take over her page and will soon have succeeded in erasing all of her comments. our koalas are hard at work in accomplishing this task. however, she, herself, remains at large.
this individual has recently changed her name and identity. she is considered armed with wit and dangerous to communicate with, so please approach (verbally) with caution.
we believe that she will continue to communicate from the following known pseudonyms:
i just want to point out that, in line with what i'm doing to wipe my profile down, i'm removing access to subscriber stats. and, i'd hide the hit counts, too, if i could.
see, the lesson i'm walking away from this with may not be what you're expecting. i learned that my previous approach generated what i'm suggesting is the wrong kind of interest.
what does wrong interest mean?
well, i still have 350 subscribers at the koala profile. there were at most five people (i think less) that followed me to the vlog site. i'm not selling units. these are people that are neither interested in my music nor my opinions. they seem to have really just liked my hair. i'm honestly not exaggerating.
i don't want to generate a group of followers that like my hair. i know that this is a thing that people do, but it's really kind of scary for me to think about. i don't have profiles at flickr or snapshot or whatever is being used nowadays for pictures. instagram? i don't even know what the sites are.
i write essays. i write symphonies. i've recently gotten into the habit of recording myself ranting. but, i don't do modelling - and i really don't want to, either. sorry. it's just not what i want to be selling.
so, by taking that information out altogether, i can avoid these kinds of people and avoid these kinds of conversations.
everybody will tell me i'm wrong. but, if you follow my reasoning, i'm actually right for exactly the reasons they claim i'm wrong. deductions require assumptions. and, if you change your assumptions in certain ways, you can sometimes modify your conclusions without recalculating anything.
i just wanted to make it clear that this was done on purpose, and that i'm hiding the information to reject the issue altogether, rather than to hide what the stats actually are.
i mean, you gotta understand that a big part of what i'm doing right now is saving the comments before they disappear, rather than deleting them.
almost everything on youtube will eventually be deleted. when google+ and youtube were integrated, that didn't matter - the comments remained on google+. even when the video was removed. i would not have moved here, otherwise.
but, now there's a link to "view comments on youtube" that just goes to a 404.
if i don't do this, i will lose all of the comments.
and, so why keep commenting here at all?
like, i need to be clear.
i haven't lost a couple of comments.
i've lost hundreds of threads - many that carried on for months, with dozens of people.
hundreds of pages worth of writing.
hours - days, weeks - of my time.
and, i'm not happy about that.
if you're a heavy user of the comment section on youtube, take a flip through your google+ profile. it's no doubt a bloodbath.
this isn't a safe place to type.
so, it's kind of wrongheaded for you to think i'm destroying my profile.
i'm saving my writing.
i've cleared off the first six months of 2014. and, even with the dozens of threads that i've lost, it's over 280 pages. that suggests i should get over a thousand pages off by the time i'm done - and that i've lost who knows how much.
what i'll say, at least, is that most of what i've lost seems to be related to album discussions rather than politics. i'm not crying persecution or anything. i'm not being targeted. it was just incredible incompetence on the programming side of things, and it's left me with absolutely no confidence in the platform.
again: up until a point in late august, 2015, videos going down did not delete the comments. so, comments could be made safely at youtube with the understanding that they would be archived at google+. with no warning that i received, the products were separated at the snap of a finger and all of the archived comments were deleted. these were comments that the previous system had safely stored in the google+ profiles, even though the videos were down.
the reality is that the separation deleted large amounts of google+ content.
i've been posting hyperlinks at google+ since, waiting for a youtube comment feed to appear. it's not happening. so, i'm cutting my losses and getting out.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
as i'm going through and archiving posts one by one, i'm running across some videos that are set to "private". i cannot access these discussions.
this is different than videos that have been deleted or profiles that have been removed. unfortunately, google fucked this up. before it disentangled youtube from google, those posts could be read on google+ - even if the videos had been deleted. now, they've been removed along with the videos.
part of the reason i moved to youtube was because i liked the integration. part of the reason i'm moving out is that the separation makes the platform useless. as these posts come down, the comments will disappear and become unrecoverable. so, what's the point of making them?
examples of destroyed content:
1) i had a long discussion about punk rock on a video for death. this was permanently destroyed when the video was taken down on copyright infringement.
2) i had a long discussion about language on a video for la dispute. destroyed, in a copyright takedown.
so, why would i continue to use the platform when i know the content will eventually be destroyed?
i'm going to put out a public request that the videos set to private are temporarily republished (and i'm informed of it) so that i can get the conversation out. as the page strips down, these posts set to private will reveal themselves as all that is left.
i'm not going to be able to recover any of this.
another thing that's happening repeatedly is that threads that i muted have evaporated altogether.
as a consequence of all of this, i've actually made the decision to refrain from using the comments section at all. google/youtube does not seem to have the slightest interest in developing the platform as a permanent record. to be frank, i'm not sure what the point of having comments is at all if the author is to lose all their content at the whim of somebody else.
once this page is wiped down, i will be commenting entirely on my own site - and those comments will be sent out solely through rss.
please follow my lead on this. let's decentralize...
i'm not going to pretend that i thought the move to google/youtube would be permanent. but, it's absolutely inconceivable - and totally unacceptable - to have entire conversations disappear like this.
i mean, imagine waking up and finding out that half of your facebook profile had just disappeared because of copyright claims. or that all of the tweets that you made about a specific topic have evaporated.
they had a good idea in integrating. it's not up to me to tell them how to run their network, either. but, the way they separated the two products was a disaster.
i would have never moved here if it wasn't for the integration - i want a feed of my comments. and, i gave them some time to work it out. but it's not being fixed. so, i'm out of here.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
streaming media sites like spotify are not the future of independent music. rather, what i'm doing at this very moment - telling you to buy a couple of my records or to stop wasting my time, to fuck off and to stop following me on the internet - is the future of independent music.
as consumers, you have a choice to keep art alive. if you choose not to do this, the era of art as an accessible product for middle class consumption will end. the era of consumption will end, altogether.
this is the future that the internet is leading us towards:
Music is banned in Khomeini's Iran On the grounds that it stimulates the brain We've done him one better in the land of coke & honey using music to put people's brains to sleep
Ever wonder why commercial radio's so bad? It's 'cause someone upstairs wants it that way If the Doors or John Lennon were getting started now The industry wouldn't sign 'em in a million years
So what do we get GOVERNMENT MUSIC Christian censorship and taxed blank tapes Shoppers strung out on our false hopes Will flock to obey
i've got a start on wiping the old deathtokoalas profile. the videos are all gone. the truth is that it's going to be a while.
