Blog
From Tyler Zahnke
This is my official blog! Hear from me; news updates, show details, random commentary on life, news commentary, and anything else you'd expect from a blog.
Contents |
07:38, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
Well, you may notice that the last four or so blog posts, despite the fact that it was a long time between them, were made without a single update to the regular home page! My blog changed, but not the rest of it! I realized that the home page sort of misrepresented me; yes, I write parodies, but my true spirit is in instrumental music. Well, finally, I quit procrastinating, learned a thing or two about Google Chrome (since Internet Explorer doesn't understand the cookie structure of the engine that my website runs on), and updated the thing! So, a lot of things have happened in my life since the last update. This is the closest to a full year this blog has ever gone without updating. Every time I say something about not updating in an update, it gets worse! So, new stuff in my life; plenty of it! Just before the last update, I got played on the Mad Music Top 20 Countdown (not as part of the countdown, but the middle segment called the FuMPtastic Multishot) after having some of my comedy songs posted on The FuMP Sideshow. Now, on that site, I wrote my page to make myself seem like someone who is devoted to comedy, but that's because The FuMP is a comedy website! Not only that; they've worked with radio personality Dr. Demento! The person who gave Weird Al his start! At the end of August of 2014, I started collecting digital versions of production library music, including some by Midas Touch, who have been played in the background for British commercials, British independent films, and even a few American independent films. Later in the year I discovered the stock work of British composer Richard Harvey, especially his 1980 album Nifty Digits, which is not mentioned on his site because it is special, rare stock music. It made me feel better about being a stock music collector when I got it; finally we have a stock record that was played on a kids' show instead of some X-rated flick like Midas Touch got played in! So now I have quite the collection of stock music; I only had one album when I made my last update, and I mentioned it by name in a 2012 post; free copy of one of the O'Ditzi Foundation DVD's will go to anyone who knows, or can guess, what album I'm talking about. That's my hint; 2012 blog post, and I contrast my own music with it, because believe me, it's a heapin' contrast! Nothing alike, except for the fact that there are pieces of audio that loop, which is why I ever compared them. So, as you can obviously tell by reading this blog, I love writing. I always wondered what it would be like to get paid for writing. Freelance writing, I heard, is common on the Internet. I won't even link to Elance or Freelancer; those sites are okay, but they're a process. I heard about a Craigslist ad for a site called Zemandi. Now, a lot of writers cringe at the sound of that name; they associate it with doing a lot of work for very little pay. But every single one of the complainer blogs that I read were written by people who didn't take the extra step. Not only did I learn the picky ways of the machine so that it doesn't reject my article; I wrote well enough that clients accepted them. After writing over a dozen articles from January to April 2015, I requested a writing coach, something Zemandi brings up in conversation, but it is not mentioned too much on their site. Well, after a long virtual wait list, I finally got my coach a few days ago, and did my first evaluation assignment; these are slightly higher-paying, but once I get evaluated, I will get even better ones! And if you want to try the Zemandi thing, go to that website. Now, the site often requires an invitation code, or invitation ID. If you use code 20753 you will be my referral. It's like, "Tell 'em Tyler sent ya!" Well, that's my code; you enter those five digits and they know I sent you. That's the interesting thing about the site; you need to give them an invitation ID; you can't just say, "I found this on Google and want to join". So I got to sign up through some random Craigslister's referral ID, so those of you who hear about the site through me can sign up using my referral ID. It's like network marketing! It makes me wonder how much the person who posted the Craigslist ad is making off of what I make! What if he is still a low-paid guy who never got up to coach level? He may have an influx of digits from me. If he even uses his Zemandi account! So, apart from writing, I have been obsessed with the audio and video mixtapes of mixtape guru FortyOne; I will soon be getting a box of the rare physical copies! Forty or so CD's, two cassettes, possibly a movie mixtape on DVD, some data disks with some additional video material, and possibly other things! I have really been into indie culture; you know Giuseppe Andrews, the actor who appeared in Independence Day and had even more of a role in Detroit Rock City? Well, he went on to become a director! ... ... A low budget film director with local residents playing the characters, that is. No trained actors, no major budget; just very simplistic filmmaking. Risqué at times, and I heard some of the films may even be a bit too much so for me, but Giuseppe is generally quite wonderful. He has some very strange movies, extremely strange books, and stranger than strange music CD's that he made, and they're all available on his website. I also learned that they made a a documentary about this strange material. Speaking of documentaries, Meep Morp is making the Dr. Demento documentary; say, that's going to be exciting! Now a transition from something exciting to something scary. Oh, save us! The robots are composing music! Please tell me that we as composers still have hope in life! You don't believe in music composing robots! Well, there's this one, and then there's this more elaborate one. Now, maybe I can use these in conjunction with the DECtalk programs, since I can program them to sing. If I program one thing to sing and another to play music, that's what I call a glory story! I've also been working with conference call service Conversation Station to try and get a music-themed conference going.And, last but not least; if I had a four word bio, it would be this; "I'm singing with glee!"
18:17, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
You probably noticed that I haven't written a blog since early December. Well, I was going to do one in June, but the computer I was using had restrictions on it that wouldn't let me log into my own site! Well, I'm on another machine now. So, the first exciting thing that happened since I did my last blog was on December 22, 2013. That day, a music blog called Song-A-Day had "Art Bomb," a musical piece I composed for Song Fight on December 5, featured as song of the day. Click here to see the article. This year has been quite awesome; movies that are not allowed on YouTube are getting cleaned up to the point of being YouTube safe. Debbie O'Ditzi is an important figure in this movement, maintaining a wiki of edited movies. So I watch pretty much every edited movie. I have been communicating with mathematician Sbiis Saibian, talking about what will be in the next edition of his book, One to Infinity. I've also been researching some of the amazing things that have happened in math! There's a guy who is only referred to by pen names (such as Cookie Fonster) who's only in his mid teens, writing a fairly good book about numbers. You can read it here. Googology is everywhere! I was in Spring Thing 2014. I did not score in any of the first three places, but I did well enough to win a copy of the book The Zork Chronicles. Also, I plan to work with Hierogamous Enterprises and the Norbury Chronicle. For those who don't know, the Norbury Chronicle is a magazine for fans of Sherlock Holmes. I'm not exactly obsessed with Holmes, and mystery is probably the genre I read the least, but I found a copy of the Norbury Chronicle laying on a virtual shelf somewhere on the Hierogamous Enterprises website. I'm also trying to learn Dominissimo, a very pataphysical, intentionally confusing game invented by Andre Joyce. The rules are on the Joyce section of the Hierogamous site. I recently set up Dropbox, so music downloads will soon be available from my website once again. Lately, I have been working with The OSC (the website is down as of this writing). I am currently writing a novel called Peintown Front. I hope to use CreateSpace to publish it. And Debbie O'Ditzi, our movie-editing creation of the pataphysical mind, will appear in the novel, but she won't be seen editing movies, or at least not much. I've listened to a lot of great albums lately, including Rolf is a Nazi: A Song Fight Tribute to the Sound of Music (2005), DJ Zax's What's That Sound (2009), DJ Wich's The Golden Touch (2008), "Weird Al" Yankovic's Mandatory Fun (2014), and, just today on the NPR Music site, Imogen Heap's Sparks (2014). I am planning a few musicals. I will not reveal them until they are complete. The bad news is, Audio Access FM, an oh-so-faithful Internet radio station, shut down at the end of last year. But there are plenty of other stations like it, so that should be good. I also hope good things continue to come out of the Neil Rogers fan club. Not too often do old talk shows from the 1980s and 1990s get a lot of attention, but this guy was so great, somebody started this virtual fan club. Even though I didn't mention it, I've been a member of this group since May of 2012. And, as far as comedy songs, I should have some being played on The FuMP pretty soon, if everything works out. I have been reviewing newsongs (a lot of them are likely hits) on SliceThePie, where people get paid for song reviews. It isn't much, but it is something. If it weren't for SliceThePie, I would have never heard of the Junior Gordon Band. Let me know if country music fans all over the United States ever start talking about the Junior Gordon Band. I've heard more dance mixes than Scrillex! So that's pretty much all I have to say ... or is it?
05:33, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
I have been working on a comedy novel, The Life and Times of McKaitma and Jacob. I tried entering it in National Novel Writing Month, but I couldn't get enough words in thirty days. Maybe I'll be more inspired next time. I did a game for IF Comp this year; my game didn't do so well. I won't give up, though. My Reels game was quite complex. I also did a short game for Ectocomp around the time of Halloween. I was in the second Behind Our Eyes anthology, which came out in June. I may have mentioned it in a past post. My TapeVille project from Prosomawi Media has over 50 subscribers. I'm doing humorous and/or experimental DECtalk speech-synthesizer work on The DECtalk Archive. In the future, expect a new game from me to be released at The Spring Thing 2014, IntroComp 2014, the New Year Minicomp, The Ludum Dare, maybe the next year's IF Comp; I'll be doing games throughout the interactive fiction scene. If you want to read even more of my work, I've written quite a number of articles on Encyclopedia Encyc. Just contact me if you want to know which ones. Another thing that's sort of relevant to the people that know me; the website TheBubbleTank.org from Imogen Heap and Thomas Ermacora has shut down. Well, we loved it while it lasted; the Live 4 X charity webcasts were about 10^10^100 times better than the Jerry Lewis Telethon. At least we can, at least for now, watch the BubbleTank movie Love The Earth. And speaking of that movie, you fantasy buffs out there will really be in for a treat when we make our fictionalized version of the film. It will be called Love Ardrana. And if any of you fans of elves, orcs and other strange fantasy creatures have never heard of Ardrana, then this site is the entire Ardrana compendium. It's best if you start with the home page, then click the link marked Ardrana in the welcome ssection of the page. We are not affiliated with Ardrana. Ardrana is a creation of John Proulx, and characters are added by the gamers in his Dungeons & Dragons gaming groups. But I am in contact with the Ardrana players. I occasionally tune into the streaming game meetings. The software lets me talk to them before the game, so I might have some fantasy writing contacts. But during the making of Love Ardrana, I'll make sure to get a close-up of Querth the gnome cleric traveling with Princess Conchita of Mentoncha. Oh, and I'll do a long, two-minute inspection of the Filitir Forest. And if we see Meriel Lilitha RowenStaff the elf wizard, then we could make ... uh ... hundreds of dollars on this film! And I'm going to play as Querth. Who shall be Conchita? Well, I've thought of that. You'll know once the video comes up on YouTube, or Gnome TV, or Elf Shelf, or whatever parallel universe of 10^10^100 dimensions you might be from. But, all jokes aside, a fantasy version of Coyaanisqatsi would be pretty cool. By the way, does anyone actually read this? If you do, tweet me @Tzahnke, or email me at programmer651@comcast.net.
09:11, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
As all of my fans who follow me on Twitter know, I am still technologically active. Sorry if this sounds like an insult to my own webhost, but EditThis.info is often slow. Even for visitors of sites hosted on it! So I have to wait for my blog to load, wait for the log-in page to load, log in, wait for my blog to load again, type in a command to create a new post, and then wait for the post page to load. Well, that's what I finally did; of course, it probably HTML-cached along the way, making things faster. I know! I could be using Blogger or Wordpress or Tumblr, but then I wouldn't feel like a programmer! You might not know, but I manually enter a command to put the timestamp on my blog posts, and a command to make it look like a section heading. Well, even though you blog readers probably think I tossed out my technology, and all of you who wonder if I'm still alive, everything's fine! My Magicassette computer game is done, but I wasn't even eligible for the XYZZY Awards. Why? Because it was already 2013 when I finished coding, so it will be in next year's awards. Also, I received the first music-related publicity of my life. I wrote a song for an online songwriting show called Song Fight. And, before you ask, I'll say it; no! I'm not going to tell you the names of my Song Fight Songs, or even give separate MP3 links on my site; Song Fight already has a site for my Song Fight songs, so if you're interested, go visit it. And I didn't say that to be mean; it's a simple fact; they have a web page for me. A mean person wouldn't even link to their page! February 2013 was my first appearance on that show, and I got both good and bad publicity in the Song Fight Review. It is mostly loop/ambient/experimental, while most of you here know me as a comedy/parody/filk musician (filk is a modern term for fan fiction music, such as songs about Star Wars). Also, my more filk-style songs (for example, a parody about a sci-fi novel, but not one about programming) will also be put on the Filk Archive site. I have no songs there, so I don't have a profile to link to. Also, since the FileUpYours.com server shut down on 12/21/2012, I have to move everything. My album will be individual MP3 links, hosted on SoundCloud.com. But instead of having you listen via SoundCloud, I'll be nice to blind people (especially BrailleNote users), and get direct SoundCloud links using wimp3.net. So I know my site currently looks like a parody/filk songbook with no audio, but once I have time to load each update box, I'll do that. So, I have new apps out. One is as simple as checking if a randomly-picked integer is odd or even, and playing one sound loop for even, and a variant of that loop for odd. I've also got some DECtalk singing/talking synthesizer files made. So if you want those up on the SoundCloud (and eventually on one of the virtual albums on the site), email me at programmer651@comcast.net.
08:57, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, I haven't updated this thing in three months. I figured that since it's getting close to Christmas that I should give you an update. Even though fans of my music (well, most of them) don't know it, I'm getting quite a bit of publicity among the interactive fiction computer game scene. My new game, Magicassette, is out now, and I'm going for the XYZZY Award. As always, I've been experimenting with music looping, computer programming, and much more. I've recently designed a JavaScript-based app that can tell me how many days I've lived so far. I'm also taking a challenge: I'm going to try and learn the x86 Assembly programming language. Sorry for my album not being available for download; I've been so busy that I haven't had time to resample it. It consists of comedy accompanied by electronic music. The sound quality's not all there, though. On Looper's Delight (the international sound looping mailing list/website), I'm going to get smoked! Per Boysen has the album Science and Technology Music from 2012; Michael Peters has Escape Veloopity from 1998; my looping is nothing! They know live looping; I know the delay/echo built into my Yamaha keyboard. But it's still worth a listen, if you like electronic music. I, the owner of Prosomawi Media, design websites. So, by New Year's, you should see a little surprise. Hint: It's not my music, but it is looping.
21:30, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
Well, TapeVille is active now! Remember I was joking around about the tape sampler network a few posts ago? Well, it's no longer a joke! We at Prosomawi have established a discussion mailing list for all interested in different things you can do with cassettes and other analogue tape. Some tape machines can do some crazy sounds (such as reverse effect). To subscribe to TapeVille, send an email to tape-request@freelists.org with the word subscribe in the subject and/or body. You can unsubscribe at any time. To post to the list, send an email to tape@freelists.org.
09:41, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
Well, I finally converted some cassette tapes into digital format. No, we haven't started the Tape Sampler Network yet! I very well could be working with Jim Schuyler. If so, he will send me tapes of the Neil Rogers Show (a talk show that was only heard in Miami and online). I would digitize these tapes, and send them to the archiver on Digital Colony. Still experimenting with new JavaScript looping techniques! Here's what to expect in future posts to this blog:
- Current events
- Commentary about my own work and my own life
- Reviews of movies, TV, music, websites and internet phenomena, amateur Internet audio/video/text bits, etc. (Links to the material given if possible)
- Updates about our think-and-do-tank, Prosomawi Media
- Stuff that will make you say "I can't believe I'm reading this!"
Questions or comments, email programmer651@comcast.net.
06:08, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Well, if you want to read things from before this date, read my Facebook and Twitter. But now I'm doing it on my own website, so there's no length limit! And now my non-social-networking fans who just like reading websites can hear from me! So, a lot of interesting things happened. From July 13-16, I got a chance to go to Ohio for the graduation party of one of my cousins. I calculated that that was the ninth time in my life that I went to Ohio. Life has been swell lately. I know my website as a whole has been up for ten months now, but we're finally setting up a little music studio! All my computer equipment is there, and so are all of those things (you know, cassette tapes! Those old things from 1962!), my microphones, cords, an electronic keyboard system, keyboard effects pedal that I stopped using in 2004 but just started using it again, and much more. Pretty soon, due to my male-male cord, I'll be able to get rid of every single cassette tape! Plug one end into the tape player, the other end into a microphone adapter which will plug into the computer. Hit Record on the computer and Play on the tape, and voila! Converted to MP3! Tape sampling, as this process is sometimes known, becomes part of every-day life for a tape-geek looping musician that reads and writes articles on Looper's Delight. If all my tapes were sampled into a computer, it would make the place a lot cleaner! Should I rip the CDs too? But those haven't really phased out yet. You still see new ones listed on Amazon; any tape you see on Amazon is used. This studio may mean something! If you noticed, my album is temporarily unavailable. Well, the re-release may be of studio-quality, but we still need to experiment with the equipment. Well, I don't want to make this too long, so please email topic suggestions or anything else to programmer651@comcast.net.
