Dogsitting & Masuda & Brier & Veo 3

I had to take some time away from my PC to dogsit, during which I listened to a couple of musicians' music...

My parents just got back from a 10-day holiday. While they were gone, I had to house- and dog-sit, like the previous times this has happened. I didn’t want to cruelly force the dog to spend all day in my room, so I’ve been away from my PC for the most part.

I hoped to at least chip away at the archive/portfolio website I’ve been working on, like maybe an hour or two a day when the dog would settle, but… well, that didn’t happen.

I mostly just ‘doomscrolled’ or played old emulated games on my phone.

Still, just being out of my usual self-imposed prison cell for a while led to some significant psychological shift. I felt more alive, more mature, less restricted, more human; something like that.

Being unable to devote my time to worthwhile endeavours also got me thinking how much I’d hate to be unemployed in the sense that others are; I’d need to do something or I’d go mad! Or madder, anyway. I’m not exactly employed now, but the stuff I do does at least register to my mind as work, and I’m always working on something or other, even if much of it leads nowhere or takes forever.

I need to move out; I know I’d be so much better mentally if I had my own space. But to afford that, I’d need to get a normal job, plus I don’t know whether I could endure the isolation…

I’ve been meaning to see a therapist again for a while, in the hopes of having help getting out of this pit of tangles. I started the process months ago, chose one and had an initial call… but then stuff kept coming up and it fell by the wayside.

Rather than talking about how I should try that again, I’ll do that right now.

There! I booked an(other) intro phone call thing that I’ll be having in a couple of days.

To book that appointment, I had to fill in a form where I had 500 characters to describe why I was seeking counselling. Pfff! That’s hardly enough! I wonder what other people write. I wrote that I’ve never really lived an adult life due to social anxiety, though it’s all more complicated than that.

The initial call will be 15 minutes, which won’t be long enough to summarise anything really. And the sessions are £45 for just an hour, which also isn’t long enough to achieve anything and a lot of money for me, which is why I’ve been putting it off…

But my hope is that just getting out of the house once a week to talk about stuff might lead somewhere, and that paying will motivate me to make it count. We’ll see.

Better than doing nothing, at any rate…

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Since I feel that just posting about that isn’t worth it, here are a couple of music-related things I came across while doomscrolling:

In the first generation of Pokemon games, interacting with the NES in Copycat’s room mentions a game where Mario has a bucket on his head, which is a reference to this game, also made by Game Freak. The music in it is composed by Junichi Masuda, one of the founding members of Game Freak who’s composed music for all the main Pokemon games (he was the sole composer for generation I), among other things. Mario & Wario was released in 1993, Pokemon Red and Green in 1996.

I find this music to be harsh, rambling, aimless, repetitive, unintentionally dissonant, and generally incompetently made! In a way that reminds me very much of my own early compositions when I had no idea what I was doing.

Which is surprising! Because despite that, he was paid for his work, and people in the comments were talking about how much they liked it.

I love his music in Pokemon! But I also grew up with it, and first heard it when I was far less discerning. I wonder if it sounds as bad to the ears of people who didn’t grow up with it as this music does to me now? I wonder if this music sounds as bad to people reading this as it does to me? Far worse stuff fills the charts…

I’ve been listening to my old compositions a lot recently, and they don’t sound bad at all to me… but that’s because I’ve heard them so many times and have an emotional connection to them. MARDEK’s music is very flawed from a compositional standpoint, but for people who played the game when they were young and associate its music with fonder times, I doubt that matters.

Speaking of Pokemon music, here’s a pianist called Tom Brier first sight-reading and then improvising on the original Game Corner music. His skills are ridiculously impressive!

I first saw videos of him many years ago, and for whatever reason the algorithm suggested some more to me recently.

Apparently, there’s a website which lists all of his compositions from over the years, which I’m writing about here because it’s similar to the archive I’m making of my own creative works. That site includes audio files, which I’ve been reluctant to do myself as their filesizes aren’t small. I suppose sites like that aren’t exactly going to be drowning in traffic, though… hmm.

I listened to a few of his compositions, and they’re certainly very competently made… though from what I can tell, they’re all ragtime pieces? I could never share that single-minded obsession over a particular approach; I like that the music I make - inspired by games - explores more musical territory.

I also only listened to the first few seconds of a handful of pieces in the archive of hundreds, and I’m actually interested in music and this person specifically (to some degree), so I imagine the music in my own archive will get similar or less attention from whoever even bothers to view it… which is part of the reason it’s tough to motivate myself to finish it.

Tom Brier’s tale in a tragic one: he’s currently still alive, but unable to perform music - or even speak - any more due to brain damage from being crashed into by a stranger’s car. So much brilliance, extinguished by a random accident… It’s not a fair world.

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Half way through writing this post, I checked Reddit and saw a post with a video generated entirely by AI: both visuals and voices. It couldn’t do that before. It can now.

God… It’s all happening so fast. Too fast.

Earlier, my step-dad told me about some money-making opportunity he’d seen on Facebook, endorsed by a celebrity… which turned out to be a scam that makes use of deepfakes to fool the gullible and elderly. With technology like this, I wonder how many vulnerable peoples’ lives will be ruined…

ON THAT NOTE SUBSCRIBE TO MY POSTS TO SUPPORT MY WORK or whatever!! (If I don’t include two subscription button things in a post I get a message telling me I should go back and do that!)