On May 24, 2010, my girl and I became homeowners… in case you were wondering what else is new in the list of reasons I haven’t been writing new music. So yeah, every day is an adventure in painting, joint compound, shelving, carpeting, and “kinda sucks the inspector didn’t mention that.” Until the big projects are done, there shall continue to be no new music. Act surprised.

Oh, I resigned from ASCAP. That felt kinda good. They never did anything for me, anyway. The musical landscape is really changing, and I think their model will die off pretty quickly.

And thus, I am tossing around the idea of signing up on a site like TuneCore.com and releasing an album. It’d probably just be 10 or so tracks, either ones I think represent my style the best, or ones my fans (yes, both of you!) think are good. I already have an offer for assistance on creating the album cover, so now I’d just need to pick tracks, probably remaster them for the release (ugggh), and… yeah! But I still haven’t decided if I want to do it at all, so we’ll see.

In Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, players perform repetitive tasks in order to improve the effectiveness of their avatars in the game. There is no way to win because as soon as you think you’ve finished, Blizzard adds new content that invalidates all the work you’ve done. It is never-ending, and in this way, it is quite a bit like life itself: you can’t “win” at dishes, laundry, garbage/recycling, and even your job, because you’ll be doing them all over again soon enough.

At Warcraft’s current stage, one of the things that can help add to your avatar’s effectiveness is the Frozen Orb (albeit in minor and roundabout ways: you can sell them or use them to build new equipment). Players typically acquire these by hacking and slashing their way through a dungeon filled with challenges that require working together in teams of five. The experience can be a rewarding one, as each player has a specific role (shield others from harm, heal the wounded, deal damage to the enemy) and the end result is plundered treasure, usually a piece of equipment that could be of use to someone in the group. And then there’s the cherry on top: a Frozen Orb one player will get to keep.

At this point, all five players must make a decision: do you roll Need or Greed? In other words, do you declare that you truly Need the Frozen Orb, or do you merely Want it? This is important because if just one player claims that he Needs it, that player gets priority and anyone who rolled Greed is immediately out of the running. This system works out relatively well for other types of treasure, but it fails abysmally when it comes to Frozen Orbs because no one actually requires Frozen Orbs. They can help you get stuff, yes, but ultimately they’re icing on the cake, and players all know this.

Here’s where something very interesting happens (and where I get to the point). When all this started, most players would roll Greed on the Frozen Orb at the end of the adventure because that’s the polite and socially acceptable thing to do. After all, it’s just a tiny bonus and it doesn’t do anyone harm to walk away without it (nor any great good to walk away with it). But of course, with five people involved, there’s a good chance at least one of them will be a troll (and I don’t mean the playable race) and roll Need, guaranteeing that he wins the Frozen Orb. This isn’t the end of the world at all, but it comes off as rude: everyone is on the same playing field here, so what makes you so special? If you’re going to roll Need, why shouldn’t I?

What it comes down to is that one player has decided he is more important than the other four players. Alright, fair enough, that can be respected to a certain extent; at our very core is the will to survive and thrive. But that doesn’t make it any less rude seeing as the other four people in this team all managed to put that aside and were willing to let random chance make the decision for them. Those four players observe this behavior and each comes to a conclusion: some will shrug it off and continue to roll Greed in the future, and others will decide to take matters into their own hands by rolling Need from this point forward. Of course, those who join the latter group are part of a snowball effect in thinking that assumes everyone else will, or at least could, do the same based on the actions of one selfish player. This eventually spreads even to the former group because those players tire of always being the only one out of five to roll Greed, which effectively makes it so they can never win a Frozen Orb (while everyone else can). By the time all is said and done, all players are rolling Need because they don’t trust anyone else. The only way to win is to drop the manners and the socially acceptable conventions and do what it takes to win, even if that means directly interfering with the success of others.

All this over an item I described as icing on the cake? Is this guy really that upset about his stupid game? No, no. But I think this phenomenon demonstrates, on a smaller scale, what I’ve observed in the real world: people are ruthless. It spreads like a plague because Person A’s antisocial behavior impacts Person B, who naturally seeks to prevent further harm to himself in the future. But in so doing, he takes the initiative against Person C… which is exactly what Person A did to Person B in the first place. This propagates forever, as people farther down the alphabet realize that they must act in the interest of preventative self-preservation. What we end up with is an endless stream of jerks.

Anyone who drives a car in a well-populated area knows exactly what I’m talking about, as does anyone who works at a job involving a lot of office politics. Most people are rude, cutthroat, and careless (about you, anyway). On the road and on the internet, anonymity makes it a thousand times easier to take out your frustrations on some idiot; because let’s face it, there probably won’t be any repercussions! And in the office, where there could actually be social consequences… “it’s either you or me, I want that promotion, and I won’t have to deal with you once I’m on the top, anyway!” Who could blame you for clawing your way through your co-workers? You must be working very hard to have earned such a mighty position!

I’ve come to the realization that I happen to be one of the poor idiots who follows the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have others do unto you”). This is cute, idealistic, and a bit dangerous. It is foolish to believe others won’t do things that they know will harm you, as most people are thinking only of themselves and they won’t hesitate to do what’s best for them — even at, and sometimes especially at, your expense. That’s difficult for me to comprehend since (to my knowledge) I manage to get by day-to-day without dragging other people down.

So should we join the Needers and quit giving others the benefit of the doubt? Should we let that mindset prevail? I don’t think so, and I still refuse to step on the heads of others just to get ahead. I don’t think I could be satisfied with the results, even if they were quite favorable for me. Unfortunately, that leaves me in a spot where I’ve essentially resigned myself to always coming in at second place, because inevitably someone will take advantage of my nature and use it to his own benefit. My current plan regarding this is another stupid old adage: “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Truth is, there are still some nice folks out there who will work with you and not against you. They’re few and far between, but you can’t find them if you indiscriminately step on everyone’s head from the outset. Thus, give each person one (and only one) opportunity to reveal his true colors. After that, you’ll know what to do. The real question here is whether or not that first opportunity is worth the risk. I guess that’s what separates Needers from Greeders.

In the end, Blizzard realized the flaw in regards to Frozen Orbs and made it so that no one is allowed to roll Need anymore; no one can get an unfair advantage. That’s great for Warcraft, but what about real life?

Just posted my A Glorious Dawn remix.

Alright, going to experiment with some “Web 2.0″ ideas. I’ve added a Facebook page here (which is nothing more than ComradeF on Facebook) and uploaded all my tracks to it… so now they’re there *and* here. I guess the benefit of the ones on Facebook is that they stream… So if you use Facebook, become a Fan for ComradeF! Coax me enough and maybe I’ll write something. =P

One quick look can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I really don’t do anything to my site these days. It’s got a tiny blog, it hosts my music, has a short and egotistical bio, some outdated links, and a contact form. What else could I possibly need?

But what I’ve noticed these days is a trend toward having everyone else host your stuff. It’s kind of back to Ye Olde Good Days of the internet, the times in which I grew up. When I was a kid, if you wanted an online presence and had no money, it was Angelfire or GeoCities (who remembers those terrible long URLs with the neighborhoods and the addresses… oh man!). But of course there were space and bandwidth limitations, so those got old. That and they started shutting down and whatnot. Then we all grew up and got our own domains and started paying for hosting. And now, somewhere along the way, we reverted right back to having other people host our stuff for us, often for free!

There are clear benefits to both approaches. Managing your own stuff affords you the ability to do just that: manage your own stuff. My domain, my rules. However, as we all well know by now, with great power comes great responsibility! Like uh, you have to pay for it. That, and you’ve got to keep all your third-party code updated. For example, I use WordPress to run this little blog-wannabe, and every other week there’s some horrible dramatic issue that requires patching immediately or I risk someone destroying my entire blog. Or something. I don’t know. But frankly, it gets old pretty quickly and I seriously wouldn’t mind never having to jerk around with it again!

I’d continue by saying that the benefit to having someone else host, say, my blog, is that all I have to do is bang away at the keyboard and click Publish. Done. But that’s really not true because I hate all the available Blogger templates and I’m probably going to have to design my own if I’m ever going to be satisfied. Ugh. Would you believe that there aren’t any sleek black and blue designs? AT ALL? Or they’ve all got some horrible header image that just destroys the whole thing, or they’re too narrow, whatever. I want to post code samples — narrow little blog columns are not good for that. Very not good.

I’m a bit nervous about the prospect of decentralizing everything, though. I mean I’d still have to host my own music because I don’t know where I’d put 800 MB of Mp3s… unless that’s peanuts to free hosts these days… heck and maybe it is, I haven’t really looked! If it is, the case for ditching the paid host becomes much stronger. Oh, er, except for the whole decentralized thing, like I was saying. If someone gets acquired, or if their servers just get knocked down for a day, I’m up a creek. I’m at THEIR mercy. Yikes. What if someone decides my blog has objectionable content because I say nasty things about religious zealots or something?

Truth is that I’d really like to start posting more of my thoughts online. Start discourses about every little thing, I don’t know. Little code tricks I discover whilst working with C# every day. Shows like LOST, Fringe, Venture Brothers, Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes… and there’s plenty to talk about with all the changes occurring in America, or at least the attempted changes which seem a little constipated right now (health care, for instance: frankly I’m all for universal care for citizens! About damn time!).

For reference, I’m experimenting with Blogger here at the moment. I don’t know if it will amount to anything. I don’t know if I’ll like it enough to bother maintaining it or making a template for it (which is bound to look a lot like this site, because frankly I still like the concept). There’s a possibility of course that I’ll just… somehow switch over to it entirely. It’s all up in the air right now. Perhaps I won’t do anything at all!

The world waits with baited breath for me to make a decision…

Yes, it’s true. Twenty months later — MUSIC! No, I’m serious! Really!! Hear for yourself! …but don’t expect too much.

Maybe I can shake out the rust and produce something better in the weeks ahead.

Hmm. Well, after an epic battle with WordPress (not that epic… delete the /wordpress/ directory and reupload it…), the administrative section is working again! I have no idea how long it’s been down, but it’s meant that no one could comment, and I couldn’t post. I guess that shows you how attentive I am to my site right now!

I was going to save this until I was finished, but… perhaps this will force me to wrap it up, finally… I have written a track. (GASP!!) Yeah! Really! Although I’m afraid that now there will be these really high expectations for it. I’ll have it out hopefully within the week, but the real news is that my style, regardless of going into hiding for two years, hasn’t changed at all. Amazing. That could be a good or a bad thing, and that’s yet to be seen. The resulting track (working name “garden”) isn’t something I’m super proud of, and hell it may even… nah, will, disappoint my old fans. Both of you. But it’s music, and I’ve needed to write some for a while now. It could even result in more as I attempt to stop being so horrible and out-of-practice! Who knows?

I’m considering making posts about my coding adventures at work here in this blog. A lot of people have saved my ass at work by posting weird solutions or tricks they’ve discovered along the way, and I feel like I need to be giving back, so-to-speak. I’d probably talk a lot about NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate (<3!!), Tesseract, Tessnet2, and maybe some generics, Linq, and other stuff along those lines. I’m sure whatever I’d say wouldn’t be all that impressive to most people, but I just spent the last six months being a total n00b with these technologies and now that I’ve been through the grinder, I may have a few things to share. And I freaking love C#. So much.

World of Warcraft! What can I say… I still play. But ever since I got my [Reins of the Raven Lord] some months ago, I just haven’t had the same drive to play. That’s what I wanted, then I got it, and now the whole thing is so much more relaxed for me. It’s as if I beat the game. How did I beat an MMO? Mad skills, I guess! I should post all the videos I’ve recorded of my adventures throughout the years. I’ve seen some pretty wacky things.

Alright… that’s enough of that. I’ll have that track out soon. It’s actually done, I just need to make sure it’s REALLY done. =P

Or shall I remain a solo artist? Once I start writing again in the first place? Hmm.

I was listening to some of my old collaborative work and I think it was really good. Would like to do that again…

Come to think of it, though, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will see this post. It’s weird, I still get a pretty hefty amount of traffic, but I don’t know where it’s coming from or why anyone would bother to come here. No new music in over a year, no other redeeming content… very confusing.

See title! It’s the truth. My life is still kicked into high-gear right now as I juggle the multitude of demands on my time: work, a new place of residence, the girlfriend-person Cat, World of Warcraft (not so much these days), and miscellaneous things that seem to fill in the elusive leftover “spare time.”

That’s not so much fun to read about, is it? Every couple of months, ol’ jerky here writes another post about how damn busy he is and how he’ll “try” to write some more tracks at some point. 2007 goes by with three, count ‘em, three tracks. 2008 goes by with NONE. Pretty pathetic. I have no excuse — my life probably isn’t any more jam-packed than anyone else’s. If I really made time for it, I could be composing several a month. But I’m not making time for it.

I definitely do miss it. It’s fun to finish one, give it a name, upload it, listen to it over and over again to make sure it’s as perfect as it’s going to get… then find a minor flaw no one else will notice and have to do all that over again, but I digress. I liked being able to say that I write music and not have to back it up a notch and add that “well, I did… it’s been over a year though…” Yuck.

Well, how about this: I’ve got Reason 4, a brand new office, and a fresh install of XP. I’ve also got a pretty good deal of inspiration. The problem is TIME. Got none of that stuff. And I need it so I can get a better understanding of Reason 4 (they changed a lot) and stop being rusty in general. Hah, jeez, when I do finally write again — and I will — it’s going to be… interesting!