#nomerit — Public Fediverse posts

Fascinating discovery in this process: instrumental songs where I actually wrote a narrative rather than lyrics in the pattern notes. This is for Fractal, which ended up in No Merit. What, 2010s me, being a little cringe while processing religious trauma? Unpossible!

I literally completely forgot I ever did this, and now I'm sure I made similar non-lyric notes in some other tracks.

#NoMerit

Okay, the extra effort for per-track album art absolutely paid the frell off in the #NoMerit republish. The one thing I wish I did was timestamped lyrics for the songs with vocals, but that should be an afternoon worth of work from here. I looked up the LRC file format, and while there's a bunch of extensions with varying levels of support, the core format is actually incredibly similar to some closed caption stuff I've done before.

https://maddiem4.cc/blog/fuller-stack/0033-no-merit

Most of this blog post will be old news, unless you missed it yesterday. No Merit is out, here's some process stuff why it's the best republish I've done so far (and will probably have me go back and improve some previous releases), and hey, here's a biased review from someone I'm dating. Nice!

But you know what I guarantee you is new news? My blog pages having "next" and "previous" links at the bottom, finally! I kicked the can on that feature forever, until I finally decided this evening "well I'll just make it work - if it's a little slow, the only one inconvenienced is me while generating the site." And then it didn't really slow down the SSG noticeably, at all. So while I have future refactors to do later, this is pretty much a straight up usability win.

(edit: fixed the link)

#NoMerit

Okay, had a much better process on this album, and now everything's consistently OGG with good metadata (including lyrics where applicable, per-song cover art etc.). No Merit, the album I produced in 2015, is out now to just download or play at will on my website. I know some of you were looking forward to it after the hype, and I hope it lives up to all that!

https://maddiem4.cc/music#nm

#NoMerit #Music

Rested enough to have a burst of energy. I might get this album out after all. I've discovered #kid3 for tag editing, although I'm using the GUI instead of the CLI like a scrub - hey, it helps wrangle the diverse mess of the existing metadata! I even have per-song covers set up for the songs that originally had custom covers.

So remaining work items:

- Lyrics in the comment field, for songs with lyrics (thankfully few)
- Update the back cover to include all songs that were eventually added to the album
- Site publishing, which involves a bit of commentary, HTML tedium, and QA.

Update: It's out! https://maddiem4.cc/music#nm

#NoMerit

Today is apparently mostly a laying sick in bed day, but when I can get a fucking break from that, I need to finish the transcoding and metadata work and publish No Merit.

#NoMerit

Yeah, that's enough for tonight. Looks like tomorrow's orders of business are going to be:

1. Go for a walk!
2. Figure out how to get the printer to comply. Timebox this since I have a workaround in mind, and the problem might be a lack of ink, which I can't solve anytime soon.
2. Shoot and edit a brief video.
4. Abuse git to deploy website updates.
5. Fix metadata for #NoMerit tracks.
6. If I somehow have time and energy left over, get back to this VST research.

Well, turns out this *was* a good track order (I knew Ideal Pictures was a good ending track!), so the remaining work is just going to be a bunch of transcoding and metadata (and back cover edits for increased content). Honestly pretty manageable! Also, nearly 56 minutes of decent music I'll be putting up for free, that ain't bad work.

I didn't originally want to put a bunch of effort into old music, I just wanted to make it freely available and more securely archived in a place I control - having to split the work over a couple weeks just felt like a process artifact. But as I've gone, and especially with #NoMerit where I'm finding a groove, I'm finding it's really cool to post about the process itself, because it builds hype that leads to people actually hearing the music, and it's fun, and it gets people involved. It also gives me more reason to do stuff right, including commentary and lyrics.

You know I had to do it to 'em.

#NoMerit

You know I had to do it to 'em.

#NoMerit

Doing something a bit smarter with my audio this time for No Merit. I'm actually renaming tracks into `04-order-format.ogg` type names in my personal library, which should let me figure out and QC track order from the command line really early on (`clvc 0* 1*`), and reduce the potential for human error in the rest of the process. Up until now I've been leaving my personal library nearly untouched, and doing the rename as part of my static site generator step.

I think it's also going to make sense to look into setting metadata for these files, which requires a little research, but should allow for these to show up with correct names, track order, etc. in audio players. A lot of my songs have individual rather than album cover art, which is something I'd really love to bake into the files themselves. In some cases this might require transcoding, since the files are in a variety of formats, and I don't think .wav supports all this stuff, so I might try to pick a single format here.

#NoMerit

Type of funny shit that happens when you name a song after one of the more infamous config files in older Linux desktop users' war trauma flashbacks. I don't know how to explain to a normal person why this is funny.

#NoMerit

One thing I might add to my website eventually (after the audio itself is up) is lyrics. At the time, I intentionally avoided making any lyrics too clear, they were on the teetering border of private. I think, with the distance I have now (and the fact that I'm finally okay depression-wise), I'm okay with doing lyric reveals for basically the first time in my life. And these are the ones for Ideal Pictures, which is about agoraphobia.

Ideal pictures
on the wall
I didn't paint them
but they keep the psychos out
Not a single brushstroke
just cross and hatch
They look like motion
They feel like noise
They feel like life

Ideal pictures
on the wall
Blame isn't useful
and I'm sick of it right now
Not a single moment
just across the latch
I don't want your motion
I don't want your noise

#NoMerit

Also, no, I have no idea what the fuck I was on* when I arranged the tracks for #NoMerit on Soundcloud and started them off with Ideal Pictures of all tracks. That's more like, knife in the middle of the album material, or a melancholy ending note like what I did with Important Things closing out #VictoryForADay .

Do I hate the song? No. I have a place in my heart for all my little .xrns children, and a particular corner for the stuff that most obviously came from a rough place. But I do think, for vocals and lyrics reasons, it's one of the less representative ways to introduce me or this album, despite the actual music being fine. But if you like Malort (I do!) you might not be totally put off: https://soundcloud.com/campadrenalin/ideal-pictures

*I hadn't discovered drugs yet, which rules out all the obvious suspects.

So yeah, there's one more complete album from my Soundcloud era (No Merit), and while it's going to be some kind of obnoxious struggle to get all the audio files for it (I knew I'd have that problem eventually), it's something I can spend some time on tomorrow. It also seems like I find a surprise local file every time with these, so Init is going to be a new track that you can't currently find online.

After that, I have an incomplete experimental album, Diadem, which I started during serious musical burnout, and might be interesting to complete and publish under my current screen name instead of my old one. I also have a bunch of pre-Soundcloud stuff, much of which I'd need to harvest from Soundclick (this is why I can't abbreviate to SC, it's ambiguous!), as well as Daybreak, which is all pre-Renoise material even and just super early pure MIDI stuff. And eventually, someday, I'll produce all the material I have lyrics for in Monster Codex and Crocodile Tears. That's everything, right? 😅

#NoMerit

"The Trump Justice Department’s new indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is even more absurd than the previous indictment. That one failed to state a crime. This one fabricates a crime":
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-doj-brings-a-second-bogus-comey-indictment/
#NoMerit #vendetta #injustice #lawfare #politics copy: @renewedresistance

"The Trump Justice Department’s new indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is even more absurd than the previous indictment. That one failed to state a crime. This one fabricates a crime":
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-doj-brings-a-second-bogus-comey-indictment/
#NoMerit #vendetta #injustice #lawfare #politics copy: @renewedresistance

Such a perfecting timing for this photo series as #AI and #deepfakes are frontpage. #WankersoftheWorld portray #Tories if they had been born in different circumstances. The #SuellaBraverman is particularly striking. #hostileenvironment #nomerit

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=550154333918061&set=pcb.550154473918047&locale=en_GB