Admittedly poor attendance without presence

I finally decided I won't be going back to school this summer. I mean, I would have loved to, but I was irked by the fact that the admissions + accessibility process was painful. Literally, headache-inducing. I figured that my college admission would be far easier to complete than my university application, and I was proven wrong. Two, three, four meetings (some over Zoom - not a fan of the service at all), and they still wanted more out of me. I thought it would be practical. It's too bad, because I was looking forward to travelling across town a few times a week instead of sauntering through the same back-and-forth path that takes me to the south.

Anyway, I'll probably defer my entrance to September, when all the other full-time survivors come in. I figure I'll have a better chance of making it as a full-timer then.

I'll leave this post with this anecdote: a man sat in front of a Zoom meeting. He admired the people who spoke up, and respected the silent listeners and speakers who took their turn when wanting to speak; but on the old computer screen, there was no way to answer a burning question: was my hand raised or not, and if it was, how was I supposed to indicate that it was raised when I could not find the button to do so despite my hand not being raised on screen?

My apologies for the confusing rant; it's one of these posts where I just want to write something down, but I wouldn't call it a freewrite because I came back to this and added many more words to my draft that I must now publish before I lose another ant (i.e. my audience).

Listening to: Murray Perahia, Zubin Mehta & Chopin from a CD that I'm too lazy to go pick up to do due diligence on.

Talked to my dad about Columbia records.

Ignore that shiz

I press backspace once to erase thepossibiity of beings piedon

Deep house is playing. GOnna have to cite again.

As I question how I could possibly have switched - WELL, we have different defintions of freewriting, now don't we?

Went to the fire station recently.

No band aid.

No cap either, but no one nomes ane.

Raptors lost. Nothing new, but it was more embarassing than Iron being near hydrogen (plus, there were fewer systematic errors back then).

It's kind of frustrating how the most stressful times of the year seem to be based on school & work. Like, for example, take September. Change of season, so the birds are stressed out 'cause they gotta get to where they gotta go; the kids are all prepped up with plastic backpacks; and then, the full-timers are getting ready for another fiscal quarter.

I refuse to edit for the moment. I'll actually publish this, then worry about a speling mistake somewhere, and come back here somehere in time (I said I'd find you again; I gotta take a break from singing).

Fan Expo should be good this year. Probably gonna go alone again at this rate.

a^3+b^2+c=0 =/ y=mx+b =/ f(x) = 1

Foggy day morning upload

once the moss you're livin' under

disappears

the noise that you'll hear

is the crashing down of Hollow Years

-Dream Theater(ish)

 

Kinda sick of plants, man.

Transcription is calming as well

Listening to: Paramore, Rush

Finalement! Une chanson Paramore en français! Je ne vais pas me prononcer sur la prononciation (même si c'est ma première réaction dont je veux parler), parce-que sinon j'ouvre la porte à être critiqué pour mon écriture française, qui est effectivement en péril.

Writer's pivot to Tupac

I like writing about writing. I find it calming, and so I do it often on here.

But what about singing about writing? Or rapping about it?

I don't consider myself a good singer nor rapper (although I've attempted to "remix" lyrics and written/performed original slam poetry before), but I have a good amount of reverence for those that do. Whether someone is or isn't actually isn't all that important in my eyes: it's the drive to be good at the artform that matters. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch: if your music sucks, I probably won't listen to it but you won't catch me trying to dissuade you from making it. One likes to believe in the freedom of music, after all.

-

I want to pivot away from my Paramore fanaticism, at least for this post, and talk about 2Pac.

I should mention I'm not a diehard fan or anything. As it happens I've played artists like Eminem, 50 Cent, Kanye and the like a lot more over the course of my life; but I'm familiar enough with his music and his legacy. I only got into his music in my mid-twenties, though I was first exposed to him in middle school when there was a whole group of kids in my grade who were big fans, somehow. I've never even been to the States but I believe that his music transcends geographical borders and cultures. His uplifting of African-american subculture through art is truly inspiring, and it makes sense that a bunch of Canadian school kids would be into his music given the relatively barren Canadian Hip-Hop/Rap scene at the time.

He actually made a lot of music. When I downloaded his discography a few years back, there were so many albums! The sheer number rivalled the Pink Floyd and the Rush in my iTunes library. I don't really know what his biggest/most popular hits are other than maybe California Love. Often I'll find myself listening to a 2Pac song I've never heard before and thinking: "Wow, this is a killer beat!" and then I listen to the lyrics and I'm like: "Shit, these lyrics are lit!" and thus I slowly but surely get more familiar with his works.

-

My favourite song currently is Ambitionz As A Ridah. 

Given the title of this post, can you guess the reason why?

...

...

...

Yeah, I've got ambitions as a writer, how could you tell?

Okay, so Tupac might not have been rapping about writing per se, but it's a hella catchy song nonetheless:

I won't deny it, I'm a straight ridah
You don't wanna fuck with me
Got the police bustin' at me
But they can't do nothin' to a G

Here, I'll embarrass myself with my censored "whiteboi" interpretation:

If I'm a straight writer - which I usually am -
then you don't wanna mess with me
Got the grammer police all riled up
But they can't do nothin' to a G

Till the next blog post,

Gabe out.

A community of netizens

I think I've finally found something I've been searching for since the very start of kaleidoughscope: a community of bloggers.

It's not just bloggers that are part of this online community that I'm about to speak on. There's programmers and writers and system administrators and webmasters and students and scientists and many more of course, and most of them don't identify as bloggers like I am wont to do, but many of them maintain blogs on personal websites. And they publish at least somewhat regularly. Sure, some might have published but a few posts here and there over a couple years' time, and these places are like singular time capsules into the lives of people I've never met and interest me in and of themselves. But there are others who have decades of writing laid bare, kinda like here, and these make for engaging archive perusal by me. Both these kinds of people are bloggers in my eyes.

So I've uncovered a veritable trove of websites published by people who appreciate the internet for what it once was and what it can be: not corporate and "FAANG"-owned. Many of these folks have meticulously crafted and maintain their own personal websites, using free and open-source tools, and made the decision to not rely on the big guys like Amazon and Google. It's really inspiring, and something I aspire to do one day with this blog (Blogger started out independent but was bought by Google back in 2003).

I check in here and there on the Discord server that, to me, serves as a meeting place for this community: The 32-Bit Cafe. Like many cool things I've discovered online, I stumbled on it purely by chance (using a discovery engine like StumbleUpon - CloudHiker it's now called). The people that make up this loose community are from all over the world, and are of different ages and genders, and are from different socioeconomic backgrounds; they are, like me, global netizens. The "tech-saviness" floating around this server is impressive: I constantly find myself "knowingly" nodding along to conversations about some obscure computer protocol until I realize I don't actually know what they're talking about, like, at all. But, that makes me appreciate the discussion even more, and lights up my curiosity!

But what's the primary reason I'm so excited about having discovered this community?

Because blogging/writing is lonely as hell, man. But seeing others who write about their lonely or not-so-lonely hells ultimately encourages me to write more. It reminds me that it's possible to be lonely - together.

That's right: it wouldn't be a classic kaleidoughscope post if I didn't manage to sneak in a Paramore reference. The worst part is, I've already written extensively about this song in a previous post a decade ago. My updated take on it is that it's a song about writing and writers. That's how I now choose to interpret it and the beauty of music is that you can do that.

Anyway, here's that "lonely" Paramore song, Be Alone: