drillkicker

I'm having trouble with this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNmWgybMKIs

Sleep deprivation is an essential part of Orthodox spirituality.

The real tragedy about What.CD is that it was barely even a piracy site. A major fraction of the stuff on there was music that's been forgotten entirely by the industry and can't be located for sale at all. It's a shame they couldn't work out a way of keeping all the archival data. It's funny you should ask, because I actually have it right next to my computer at the moment. I still wear it occasionally. I'm surprised anyone remembers that post, though.

I don't have any worldly connection to Panagouda, but St. Paisios is one of the saints who's been one of the biggest influences in my life. His hagiography by Hieromonk Isaac is the book that introduced me to monasticism and it's made me really want to see the places where St. Paisios lived. One of the monks I know here in America told me it isn't really worth going if I don't know Greek or Russian, so it's on the backburner for now. Also, since today is the feast day of the monastery where I go for pilgrimages, I'll post their patronal troparion for the thread:

I listened to Rpeg once before class in high school while still very tired, and somehow I thought I was seeing the song instead of hearing it. A similar thing happened with Infant Dressing Table by Animal Collective and I thought I was having a conversation with the distorted voice in the beginning and didn't realize that I couldn't understand what it was saying.

Athos is the one place in the world that I'd like to go more than anywhere else. Did you get a chance to visit Panagouda while there ?

This is how I've always seen it. The idea of permanence of online data is scary to most, but I find it reassuring, considering that I tend to forget about things and computers don't. That's why I love the Internet Archive so much.

I originally made this post on Twoism, but due to that site's decreased activity I'm reposting it here: Now that music is free to listen to and free to make, the old industry has been made obsolete, and everybody is a musician, what could the future of the medium look like ? I've been coming to the shocking realization that the recordings we've made decades ago are still in existence, and new ones are being made at an exponential rate by practically everyone under the sun. We now have such a daunting mass of recordings that there exist more genres than any one person can be aware of, let alone individual artists, albums, Bandcamp pages, etc. There now exists such an amount of diverse recordings that trying to discover new music is like scooping up a bucket of sand and trying to pick out the few grains that look the most interesting. Trying to put this phenomenon into the context of human culture throughout history has been confusing and even slightly unsettling. Music was once an incidental, ephemeral activity that could be done in a participatory, communal way. When my grandparents were my age, they would get together with their friends and sing songs with one another all night long, and they claim that there was never a moment when the singing ceased. There was no stage, nor were there any dedicated performers, but everybody contributed to the energy of the music that surrounded them; this was uniquely defined by the people who were present, never again to be repeated in any plane but that of memory. And what's especially notable is that everybody was perfectly fine with that. Nobody cared about plucking the songs out of the air and storing them forever because each instance of music was understood as something inseparable from the moment, uniquely tied to the air into which it was born. I suppose the great tragedy is the shift in our social structure from community to individual. No longer is there any sense of binding camaraderie or sobornost that involves the total giving of oneself into an indissoluble whole, and so music in our age is developing in increasing contradiction to what has long been its traditional conception. As our society has become massively hyper-atomized, thus paradoxically contrasting with the definition of "society," so has our music undergone a similar subversion. We no longer make music in common, we no longer listen to music in common. Everybody has a "sound" and everybody has a "taste." The zebras have isolated themselves to display their unique stripes, and in the process negating the actual purpose of the camouflage. Taking this into consideration, it can be posited that magnetic tape (or even before that, the invention of scoring) has, in a sense, killed the old form of music. No longer is it a living, continual, perennial part of a cultural organism, but rather an individual form of personal expression that can only be shared with a community after it has already completed its cycle of life. An album is, in this sense, akin to a stuffed animal rather than a breathing companion, a musician's role now as something of a cultural taxidermist. Nonetheless, our desire for community hasn't dissipated in the same way that its actual presence has. We still make music with the intent of contributing to a human collective. But, as music is no longer made as a collective, we do this in the form of sharing our finished works in any way we can. In former eras this was done mainly in concert halls and conservatories, later in record stores, and now in Bandcamp pages. In a metaphorical sense, we are singing into a void and waiting for someone else to sing along, only we are all singing different songs. The result is a much more antisocial reality than we had in the past, and music has become a race to gain exposure, and thus more voices singing along. The reason I post this is because I'm wondering what to make of all this, and whether there's still any room for music to exist. How much longer can this continue before the possibilities have simply been exhausted ? Will anybody even bother to keep listening to stuff that was recorded just five years in the past ? Is the growth of Bandcamp and similar platforms actually a portent of the collapse of our cultural artifice, bringing the return of ephemeral, communal music into the coming generations ? What does WATMM think ?

Fuck you. Seriously, you are an awful person. Please just stop posting.

Those things would probably go over my head if it weren't for the explanatory notes in the appendices. They really help a lot. Parnell is sort of a universal Joyce thing, though, so that one didn't slip by me the second time he used his death in his writings.

I've been having dreams about my dead cat lately and it's making me feel down. This sucks.

Holy shit, that got intense.

It's kind of funny in an ironic sort of way that the police officer had a much better sense of humor than the activist-type students.

Do you not know Charls?

Read it once, but might need to re-visit again. I liked it, but I am sure a lot went over my head. Didn't find it too difficult. It's a pretty banal story in the end. Or then I'll read some other work byy Joyce. Like Finnegan's Wake. I don't think the story is very important in the book, it's more about the way the story is told, which is really interesting. I can understand that Joyce really isn't for everyone, but I'm really digging his writing style. The edition I have contains notes in the appendices that explain all of the different allusions in the story, so it's taking a long time to get through. It's worth it, though, for the extra understanding that that adds. Just out of curiosity, did you read A Portrait of the Artist… first, or not? If not, then there are a lot of parts that probably didn't make sense to you, so it would be worth going back and reading both of them just for that.

I've been reading Ulysses for nearly a week now and I am on page 48, out of 732 pages. This is way more than what I was prepared for, and I love it.

There was a time when people were content to do the dishes in silence, but life is so busy these days that we have to have some feeling of excitement with every action.

I just finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I think it's easily my favorite book that I've read. I don't recall reading anything else with such a unique writing style. Now, onto Ulysses. Also, I drafted up a list of thirteen books that I want to read sometime in the near future. Highest on the list are Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Stirner's The Ego and His Own, and of course Ulysses.

I fucking hate it when people do that. I don't understand why they have to have the television on when they aren't watching, it makes no sense and it's distracting.

Thoreau already did that though.

I meant to reply to this one earlier, but it seems to me that the Internet is significantly less guided than previous information networks were. The 20th century, especially the first half of it, was a telling indicator of how easily people's access to information and perspectives could be manipulated completely. The Internet makes that much more difficult and contains a large variety of opinions in comparison, so I wouldn't call it "guided thought."

That's exactly my situation. I just want to go outside and do something, but there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. Southern Maryland is boring and not pedestrian-friendly at all. America isn't nice to people who don't have automobiles. I wish I could take scenic walks like at my grandparents' town in Germany, but that isn't an option in the US.

The hard part for me about removing technology is that I don't know how to pass the time without it. I enjoy reading, but if it's all I do I start to think too much about my life and quickly start to get depressed. That's why I wanted to travel by land to South America, because then I can actually have a goal, and I can fully detach myself and feel good about it. Unfortunately, though, I can't get a job to save up money, so that doesn't seem realistic anymore.

I had my Facebook gone for a while and it was good, but I had to reanimate it because I have a friend who has no other way to communicate with me. I don't use it for anything else, though, and have a fake name on it with no images of myself. Facebook doesn't have to be a big part of your life, just don't even think about putting any real information on it (especially photos of yourself or people you know).