First look at Musescore 4 and short look at my very first composition

So, Musescore 4 ...

My first impressions are ... meh. It does not (yet!) come across as smooth and pristine as Musescore 3 looks to me right now. A bit clunkier, a bit slower; you can only have 1 tab open (opening a second score will start another window) for sound engine reasons, and there is some overhead introduced by having to download MuseSound seperately via MuseHub, which is a program that will then decide to run in the background without asking you, for absolutely no reason.

I haven't done much with it yet, just a very short piano piece. Testing the sound - well, the piano sample is good, I think; the articulation does not sound any more sophisticated to me than in the previous version, and it is currently quite buggy. For example, if I click on the first note, and then 'play', it will do a fade-in, because, I suppose, the engine is not ready to start yet but we cannot let the user wait. However, if I click on the key before the first bar instead, it starts properly... I also saw some inconsistency with the cursor and what I actually hear.

I was surprised to find support for sagittal notation symbols - with detailed description notes including stuff like "2°up [43EDO]". That is promising, but since the sound engine cannot do the actual tuning, it is an empty promise as of now. (I already knew I would continue using Musescore 3 for xenharmonic stuff.) I don't know how compatible the new MuseSound will be with tunings in the long run.

As I said, I have only tested 1 piano sound yet, so I can't really say much about MuseSound, but I don't tend to trust new things... when I imported a random piece for a quick test I immediately run into some notes not being played, because they are out of range - are they tho? I have too often seen soundfonts being very conservative about what an instrument can play, completely unnecessarily constricting itself to a short range. Instead of, you know, just adding all the sounds anyways and if they sound bad, then they sound bad. I can edit a .sf2 file, but I won't be able to edit anything more complex, so I'm a bit pessimistic about that.

(While I do want to try writing down a few pieces of instrumental music that was meant for real instruments, and see how it looks, I also want to write something purely digital and there I don't know why I should give a fuck about a flute not being able to play a really low note, if it sounds right.)

~

Anyway, what I did write down was my very first composition (that I know of):

At the time, I could read german pretty well, but had zero knowledge of english pronounciation, and just randomly picked words that look cool. :D But I had strong opinions about the correct pronounciation: "head" is actually pronounced "heyd". I don't know whether I already had a particular meaning in mind when I was five, but I remember that a few years later I had decided that "Headboard Milano" was the name of a particularly gruesome war on my fantasy world. :)

This piece was written by someone with really small hands, so there are no wider spreads than a fifth and a sixth. It is very strange to me now, having very little (but some) memory of improvising on the piano until I had a canonical piece.

(I am going to be relentlessly proud about having written this at age 5. Sue me.)

edit:

Aaah I just remembered one more fun fact: The piece was always about a war: "white keys versus black keys" which is what's going on in the middle section. That's why there are F# major and C major chords. :D

December 2022 update

 Okay well... I haven't used this blog in a while, have I?

The thing is, for almost everything I want to say, there usually is a better platform. My thougts about worldbuilding and all related creative thinking (which is more than half of what I do) go to a dedicated forum, where I am also a moderator and part of a community that feels like an extended family with some people I love and some odd relatives that I'd rather not be related to...

I have stopped using youtube, preferring to upload my music on bandcamp. Youtube is owned by Google, and it is also often quite terrible when it comes to performance, because obviously the main goal of such platforms is advertisement and data collection.

I still post on Facebook - which is even more terrible - because some people I can only contact there, so I am stuck a bit - and my small corner is surprisingly calm; I do not engage in debates that suck out my life from my body.^^

I have left twitter since that buffoon took over (you might have heard of it), not that it was ever healthy to be on this platform; it compares well to how people used to imagine Hell to be, with everyone constantly trying to bring out the worst in everyone else...

I do have a mastodon account since earlier this year, and I quite enjoy that one; it is calmer than other places, and I am on a server where I genuinely don't have to deal with nazis and/or terfs. Or "proud nationalists" and "gender critical feminists", as they try to conceal their genocidal intentions.

Anyway, the fediverse is nice, it has a lot of amazing art (seriously, check out mastodon.art), but it seems to be lacking when it comes to music. There is a contemporary-music-group, but the only posts seem to be links to commercial sites like applemusic or spotify and shit like that - is that really where serious composers post their music nowadays? o_0

You can find me at @jundurg@mastodon.lol, if I remember correctly. I do post my music when I upload a piece, and even though a tag like #xenharmonic gets used by basically no one, somebody has to start.

(This is another reason to be on facebook - it does have an active group for xenharmonic music, where I discovered quite a bit of interesting music. There also is a dedicated discord server, but it's too big by now and overwhelmingto me.)

Anyways, lots of words about the state of the internet - what about me?

I currently have less time than ever before, because I started an internship, which will end in January. So, I hope I will get to do more creative stuff again afterward. Amongst those things... I kind of have a HUGE backlog of piano pieces that are in danger of vanishing from this planet because there is no recording and I am starting to lose memory, because I haven't played some of them in years. If I try hard, I usually manage to recover them, but sometimes that fails and it's scary.

So one of the things I would like to do in 2023 is attempt to write some of these down, and focus on those that are important to me - I do not actually want to be upset about forgetting pieces that weren't that important. And for that, I kind of want to have a space to just self-indulgently talk about my music despite not posting any of it - huzzah, there is a need for this blog. ^^

The other music news thing is ... MuseScore 4 just came out, and I may or may not find it useful to make some actually listenable versions of instrumental music. It may very well end up being a disappointment, but I already made a few instrumentations of piano pieces this year in Musescore 3, and a few of them turned out nicely.

Because the xenharmonic plugin I'm using only works on Musescore 3, I will most likely use both versions in parallel - 3 for composing weird cool stuff, 4 for writing down old piano stuff and 12edo instrumental experimenting. I really hope I will be able to do that!

I was meaning to write blog posts about my xenharmonic music that I wrote since October 2021, but I never got around it, so ... you can find it here: https://xoiii.bandcamp.com/ Let me just tell you, unidentified reader, that I had a lot of fun writing these. And MAYBE I will get around to write about them too, but there was always something else to do (including writing the next piece, for example)

I am not sure whether I should blog in English or in German; my update posts used to be in German but I might switch to English mostly.

~ .&"=%/&=")% ~

That was it for the informational part. Casual readers may stop here, as I just want to lay out what my piano piece situation currently is, and that's probably not particularly interesting if you can't listen to them. :P

The Piano Suites

There are 9 of them in total - in theory, as the 8th is sort of half-unfinished and also doubles as an experimental sonata that I SORT OF intended to get back to at some point. Suites 1 through 5 are gradually more complex early works (it feels weird to call them early, but hey, 2006 is actually a long time ago now, what the heck.) Suite 6 is written shortly before I started composition at the university, and is probably my most radical piano piece (along with No.8); I should in theory have a score of it (because I did show it to a professor once) but I don't know if I still have it. It has one rhythm in it that I have not been able to transcribe at the time and I am not sure if it is even reasonable to try; I might by now have forgotten how I originally played this section in 2008 and so that might be irrelevant.

Suite No.7 is kind of more boring and conventional (except that I did a somewhat reasonable job at variations) and in theory, a score should exist, but I am also not sure where. Suite No.8 is ... idk what the heck it even is, it consists mostly of improvisational parts stuck together. I made a new recording at some point in the last years, to try to work on it again, and push it towards being an actual piece, but idk. Finally, Suite No.9 is a very conservative two-movement thingy that I only recently decided would be No.9 because those two pieces lacked a title and I was like "eh, sort of fits in there".

The Program Music

There is three of them, the first being from 2007 and actually really fun to play, which is why I kind of want to prioritize a bit; then another one from ... also 2007? Those two are following the plot of two absurd theatre pieces, one of which was only a sketch. And the third one is from 2008, and I actually published it at the time, so there is a recording somewhere. It is Bartókian and fun, but I am currently not particularly keen on working on it - I started several times and it turned out to be difficult to write down, and there isn't a high risk of losing this piece, so...

The Sort-Of Program Music ... or just any other pieces, I guess

Those are pieces that don't follow a plot line directly but they have sort of programmatic titles sometimes. Idk. I'm gonna translate them into english, bc why not:

- Castanian Suite: Two movements, VERY Bartókian, and I love them

- Utnapishtim Suite: Two movements (third movement never finished and got lost), title referencing the Gilgamesh Epos

- Three aggressive pieces: I forgot the first two! Which weren't that good, but still. The third one does deserve some attention tho.

- Deep Night Suite: That one sort of does not require attention, as I kind of remade it into a newer project, and there is at least a partial recording somewhere.

- Neverwhere Suite: Same as above; the old version from 2005 is not worth preserving as it got reworked later; the reworked version does need my attention tho, but it will be moved into a different kind of project.

- the very early stuff. My first composition is from 1995 (I was five!) and it not only has a place in my heart but it is actually on the same level as stuff I wrote when I was sixteen. What the heck. There are other early pieces, but they will not get prioritized I think.

- the three late-summer-pieces from 2005... sort of precursors to the Suites, and they do deserve some attention actually. Part of the second piece is lost, I think, but that was kind of intentional, as it was kind of bad.^^

- ... probably more stuff I can't be bothered to look up right now ...

Early Instrumental Music

I wrote a piece for french horn and piano in ~2007, and a piece for cello and piano in ~2008. There should be scores of them somewhere (except the unfinished last movement of the latter) but particularly the horn piece is actually one of my favourites of the time, and I want to have a shiny new version of it.

...

The ongoing stuff

Collections of piano pieces that don't count as finished because I intend to add more whenever I feel like it. First and foremost, the Gunnerkrigg Chords, which can be found on youtube (until I might move them somewhere) and which I might also try to orchestrate a bit. About half of the 50 pieces already got written down properly, I might want to export them from Sibelius to Musescore though because Sibelius has an abominable user interface that I would like to not inflict on myself ever again.

Then there is the Deep Night collection, most of which is also on youtube. These are close to my heart and mostly VERY short. I'd love to have actual scores of them, because I am not able to play them without sheets and the sketches I am using for playing are abysmal. I kind of have memorized where to jump from where to where, and which things to repeat, and oftentimes, half of the piece isn't even written down. In short, it is a mess that I would like to fix.

And finally, the Neverwhere collection, which might get renamed into Shallow Night or something, because I do not want to use a trademark owned by the BBC. These are old pieces reworked and I also intend to add newer stuff here.

Soooooo.....

What should I prioritize? Deep Night needs the attention, because of the horrible state of it's current sketches... but the Deep Night is the summer solstice, and it is winter. It would be hard to get into the right mindset right now.

So maybe some of the earlier pieces ... Castanian Suite perhaps, 3rd and 4th piano suite (both probably being exhausting to work with, because of their weird rhythms and improvisational effects that are hard to transcribe), and throw in the occasional easy piece ... like my very first composition for example. :D

ALSO needed ... um ... replacing the two strings that are missing from my piano for years now. Oops. (There is actually a reason for that, I promised myself that I would only replace them if I had earned money myself) I might run into difficulties because piano string makers want to know what type of string to replace, and I am pretty sure I have thrown at least one of them away, and ... honestly, I'm not sure if the other one has been stuck somewhere inside the piano for a year now. Might be the case. Anyway, I really desperately need to lowest E for just *two* particular pieces, dammit.

Now ... well, I'm gonna check out Musescore 4 over the holidays, and see whether it turns out to be a disappointment or it motivates me to write stuff.

Reframing Gaps & Creating with ADHD

 As I described in the last post ("The Caretaker") I have been thinking about the weights I have taken onto myself as a creative person, and how to deal with them productively (or more precise, how to get rid of them, because they do not seem to serve a purpose anymore).

For my worldbuilding, 2021 has been witness to a pretty substantial change. I had some of the same issues there: Unfinished things, the urge to create a consistent history and maps, and the feeling of "I can't start a new thing unless I have figured out how XYZ works, because if I later change XYZ, everything will have to be changed again". Stuff like that. There other, unrelated issues, but I'm not gonna go into those here.

The important step #1 was: Screw consistency. Screw perfectionism.

But that's kind of the obvious one. And I had already been trying that for years, without success. It's not that easy, apparently.

Today I realized that one thing that I *also* did while throwing out perfectionism, was my attitude towards gaps. When I re-started my worldbuilding, I first made a list with things that would be interesting to explore further. It became apparent that while it would be cool to have a worked-out history timeline, it would also be an incredible amount of work, and not one that I enjoy doing. Yes, I could attempt to write 5000 years of world history, with thousands of cross-references. But then, that would be all I do. 

The formula that actually worked: Focus on the things that are actually fun, pick one of them at my own leisure, work on it until it bores me, move on the to the next. My ADHD makes that approach natural to me - I can get hyperfocused on one topic for a week or two, and then it suddenly becomes boring again. Many of my problems came from my attempts to continue and finish stuff when I already had moved on the the next *Shiny Thing* mentally.

But if I do that, then I will leave a huge trail of unfinished stuff. And that thought kind of depressed me. So I need to reframe what it means for something to be unfinished:

~~ Every unfinished thing is an opportunity to later come back and make something new. ~~ Whenever I run out of steam at a current project, I can go back to my pile of unfinished works and pick one, at my own leisure, *not* because I have to finish it, but rather because it sparks my interest.

And sometimes stuff *does* get finished, of course. Because at the time, I want to finish it. I can spend an entire day hyperfocused on a project, until it's done. In fact, my ADHD can make it almost impossible to *not* work on the thing that I am hyperfocusing on.

The main problem that remains is forgetting things. I am mainly unhappy with leaving pieces unfinished because I know that I will forget them and when I come back, find the thing in ruins. Maybe I can solve that by reframing ("It's an opportunity to create a slightly different thing"), maybe not. It's very similar to the consistency issue in my worldbuilding, and there I have the great advantage of just writing things down. That is much harder to do in music, because I have basically zero patience when it comes to making sketches. I write down exactly as much as I need to come back to a piece on the next day, but not enough to come back to it a week later.

(Yes, I am aware that I can also record myself playing, but then I run into the issue that I have basically no motivation to go through a recording later, so it effectively vanishes until I find it, like, 2 years later. Or never.)

Reframing gaps - one more thing that occured to me is that there is a difference in how I approach worldbuilding and music. You see, I don't ever intend to *finish* a world. It's all about having a space to add literally anything I want. Thinking about philosophy? Write about a school of thinking. Thinking about dreams? Write about dreamers and magic, or about prophetic culture, or metaphysics. I can even - and will, probably - create a history of orchestra music for northwestern Duogiana. Worldbuilding, to me, is just about the most flexible creative hobby possible.

Music is obviously different. A friend of mine recently shared the quote "music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects", apparently some ancient Greek´s opinion (but I do not care who said it. People ain't wise because they lived a long time ago.) I really like that phrasing. When I compose something non-derivative, I sometimes feel like I am working with something very abstract but somehow also very real. And then I "wake up" and have no idea what I just thought about.

Anyway, I got distracted again - the point is, there is no reason to view music as something that *needs to get finished*. Even a finished piece can be interesting enough to further spawn creativity. I'm free to go back to old pieces and extend on what I find there, instead of going "this is finished, I have to make something *entirely new*", a way of thinking that effectively stopped me from writing anything larger for years.

I will probably make lists with possible *fun* projects to do; not necessarily composing, I could also transcribe an older piece, program something, roll some dice, or catalogue and rename older stuff - I've held back from the latter because it seems horribly self-indulgent, but hey, I'm a pretty self-centered person and I'm gonna just own that, because I simply function better this way.

And I have been surprised several times over the last months that sometimes the nerdiest, least accessible stuff actually got the most positive feedback. And sometimes I get none - but if I already enjoyed working on it, who cares? :)

~

This blog post came out way less structured than I anticipated. It's more of an explorative thinking-aloud post than a polished essay, and ... well, that's similar to what I was talking about, so on a meta-level that's probably appropriate.^^

The Caretaker

 I've been on hiatus from playing piano since May; the longest hiatus of my life probably. It started because my wrists were not okay, but I continued it far longer than I needed to. At some point I realized that I don't want to start again exactly where I left off.

From my earliest childhood memories onward there has always been this pressure on me: "Don't wast your talent!". I realize now that I have rarely ever in my life *decided* to compose - most of the time I was more like "I have this idea, I *cannot* let it go to waste, it is my duty to not abandon a good idea". I got asked at my final exams why I, a supposed *serious composer* would spend half my time writing piano music laypeople can understand, and while that question is incredibly snobbish by itself, the answer is not merely "because I like it", it is actually "because I had this idea and I am now responsible for it's survival".

It's like if I lived at the edge of a forest and there is a constant flow of poor wounded forest animals seeking shelter, and I can't just abandon them, so I never leave the house longer than a day or two. Except music isn't alive - or is it?

There were a few times in my life when I had the urge to write music to communicate something that was beyond words, and the pieces I wrote then are those that I am still proud of. My last "true" ensemble piece was written in 2012, and was, ironically, about the impossibility to share a feeling. And then it never got played, because, as it turns out, if you write for oboes and tubas (plural), you won't find anyone that plays your music. So then I stopped. Everything I wrote after that, I either wrote for myself to play, or didn't take as seriously.

Sooooo... now when I re-start composing again, I want to do it on my terms, I want to stop the endless drain of "You can't just abandon this idea, it is good, it deserves to live!". I don't know how. As far as the "easy" music goes, I compose faster than I can write it down, so I will *never* reach a point where I'm done. And at the same time, I spend so much time on that, that I don't have any energy left to ask myself - why?

This isn't a crisis. I could always just go on, and I would make some music that a few people like, and also some other music that *nobody* except me even listens to (seriously, I have youtube videos with 0 views). On my piano, there are sketches for about 10 unfinished "easy" pieces - and already I feel the urge to just go and work on these, "so that they don't get wasted", despite knowing that it will never stop. I have 100+ piano pieces and too many of them I have neither written down or recorded, so the only thing I can do is play them again and again just to hold off the inevitable. Should I just go through them and decide "Okay, you'll gonna die with me"? It's super ironic that one of my favourite composers just literally burned her pieces, if they weren't good enough to her almost impossibly high standards - whereas I go back to stuff I wrote when I was 11 and say "hah, kinda cute, let's save it". And that mentality has even crept into my thinking when I'm composing so-called serious stuff. I just cannot bring myself to delete anything, and it starts to clutter. I spend all my time caring for mediocre stuff and never look further, because the next one is already waiting.

LD 02 - Velocity in Dreams

I am supposedly at "square 1" of lucid dreaming again, per last post, but I am really not - I thought about writing about a specific topic on the blog, and promptly had 2 lucid dreams that were already influenced by what I was planning to write about. I kind of needed the idea of *starting anew*, but obviously that's completely arbitrary, I'm just somewhere along the road.

~

So, velocity. - Huh? Why do I think about velocity?

Well. Despite the entire surroundings in a dream being decidedly not-real, and therefore not bound to any rules, they usually conform to a lot of assumptions based on what I experience in my daily life in this world.

For example, if something looks far away, then it is supposed to take a while to get there. If something is so far away that I can't even see it (or I just know it's super far away) then it should take even longer.

But why? The only real distance is the one in my mind, right? If I want to go to Africa, all I have to do is make it so Africa starts right aroung the corner. Of course, my mind fights back, because in WL (waking life) this is an absurd statement.

In today´s LD I remembered this idea:

I manage to get out of my bed and into the dream version of the room I am sleeping in. As usual I spend the first moments establishing the dream, I put as much focus as possible into the sensation of my feet on the floor and move away from the bed, through the rest of the flat, and run outside into the inner courtyard. IRL, there is not much to go after that, a fence would block the way into the garden. In my dreams however, this fence usually doesn't exist, and I can run directly onto the meadow. I can feel the grass under my naked feet - that was another thing I was wondering about recently, how much sensation I really had in my dreams, since I often don't spend any thought on that. 

For some reason, I really want to touch some nice cool water. Looking at the closest tree, I decided that there will be water behind it. I go there, and there is a small puddle of water right next to the strunk. I use it to wash my face and enjoy the sensation. I want more water, so I pull deeper into the puddle, but  there is just a lot of mud. I take a large junk of mud and put it onto my face, and then onto my hair. I am reminded of Nnedi Okorafor´s novella Binti, where the protagonist comes from a specific Nigerian tribe that uses a specific kind of mud or clay to put it in their hair. On the tree is now a mirror, but a very dysfunctional one: While it sometimes mirrors my movements, half of the time the person in the mirror does slightly other things. I use the mirror to look at my hair, A bit later into the dream, an african person turns up and offers to dance with me for a bit.

I don't usually have dreams that are about foreign places, but the idea of "Africa right behind the corner" had been in my mind, hence the theme. I didn't travel anywhere though, I was just in an unspecified meadow, next to a nice old tree. You could say me putting mud into my hair was technically cultural appropriation of some sorts, but for me it was really just about getting a different sensation. Mud feels really nice, and I can't smear it into my hair IRL without quite some suffering consequences. ;-) Anyway, what I do in my dreams is no concern of ethics - only how and if I write about them is.

~

The second thing that made me think about velocity is the experience of speed, and of rapidly changing environments. If I sit in a fast-running train, it is to be expected that things will just woosh past me, and I can't even see them properly. In a dream, this could a bit of a problem, as my mind has to come up with new scenes in a rapid succession. It can do that, but when I fly very fast, I tend to lose contact with my environment after a while, especially since no part of my body actually touches anything besides air, which tends to count as "nothing" or perhaps some sensation of wind.

One way to look at it, would be, that my experience would be similar to someone watching TV; I sit still in a chair, but what I see can be very fast. The dream ultimately is like a virtual reality, but there is no actual space I am bolting through, I just get (some of) the sensations I would have if I did move.

Another dream of today:

As I become aware of my dream-state, I am running on the street, focussing on the feeling of my feet on the ground at first, then eventually deciding on flying. As I move upward a bit, the scene I was in fades away fast, I am accelerating towards the (very beautifully coloured) horizon, while below me, treetops rush past me. At some point, there is very little sensation of actually being there, and it is more like watching a zoomquilt. I did enjoy the changing patterns of pink sky and green leaves though.

 ~

As I write this, I feel I'm more and more unhappy about the sheer number of assumptions I make about what is possible in my dreams, despite knowing from other people´s accounts, that those limits can be surpassed. There are people for whom their dream environment is so stable and unchangable that it behaves way more like a real place than a virtual reality. Why am I deconstructing my dreams to such a degree?

I want to mention that one of my side-goals for pracising lucid dreaming is to get inspiration for my fantasy worlds, in which dreams, while also deeply personal at times, can be actual places. So I'm torn between two contradicting views - one pretends to be scientific (while ignoring some data), the other one pretends to be fantastic (while sometimes being closer to actual experience).

So, where to go? I feel like over-analyzing dreams in that way does not actually help me at all. My plan was to improve my dream-control, and to do that by shredding away my misconceptions about what rules a dream has to follow. But if I'm honest, the dreams I find most interesting are not those where the dreamer is in full control, but those where the dream environment resists manipulation.

So I'd better focus on sensations (as I already did in today´s dreams!) and exploration. I got sidetracked A LOT, holy fuck.

So here's the actual points of this post:

1) There is no point in moving through dreams in a high velocity, unless experiencing velocity is the goal.

2) To travel somewhere is to assume that I am not already there, which may not be necessary at all times.

~

Next up, I want to:

a) more sensations! including eating, bc eating lots of food without any concern for health is cool

b) have some actual conversations (it has been a while) like asking people who they are

For the second one to happen, I seem to need a bit more time. My dreams tend to start with me being completely alone (even if I'm in a cityscape), and other people only appear when I got distracted by some other activity. I've had complicated analytical ideas about *why* that is the case, but honestly, I might make more progress by throwing those into a dustbin for now; idk.

~

Restricting myself to writing in english is more exhausting than I thought it would be. There is no reason to do so, if I truly do this for myself and not for other people. I thought that writing in a different language than in the past 15 years would force me to think differently, but that doesn't seem to be the case overall.

Future posts will therefore be in whatever language I feel like writing at the time.

Back to Square One! - Writing & Lucid Dreaming (and how I got to where I am now)

Introduction

Back in 2006 I started getting into Lucid Dreaming. I bought books, and started a daily dream journal which I would keep up diligently for half a decade. I joined an online community which quickly became a major influence on many aspects of my life - artistically, spiritually (until I parted with esotericism in the early 2010s), philosophically, politically; I watched and participated in countless debates on the nature of conciousness (on good days), on whether you can actually leave your body (on worse days) and on my own basic human rights (on really bad days). As I met more people personally, my focus slowly drifted aways from Lucid Dreaming itself, naturally, as there is only so much to discuss technique-wise, until you hit the barrier of "yeah it kinda works differently for everyone".

This spring, I finally decided to leave. I really feel like I have outgrown the place. Instead of taking/sharing inspiration, exchanging expertise, helping newbies, all I did was getting drawn into debates, most or all not really worth my time. In the last 15 years, I moved significantly to the queerfeminist left, while the community stayed firmly liberal-centrist, with the occasional leftists, but also occasional far-right "just asking questions" trolls. Add to that the covid-skeptics, anti-vaxxers, creepy misogynists, and just about every flavour of esoteric believers... while certainly entertaining at times, ultimately it ended up a waste of time and energy.

Reboots

I will admit, the last half year has been kinda rough. My physical and mental health went down and my wrists still make it impossible for me to play piano, amongst many other things. But while all that was going on, I made huge progress elsewhere. With writing one of the few things my wrists and my depression consistently allowed me to do, that is where my focus went.

I was unhappy with my world-building for a long time. I was constantly holding myself back in fear of other´s reaction, and there was all this "leftover energy" from not really having a good place anymore to let myself go wild into surreal/metaphysical thinking. Finally, I had enough. Screw this, I told myself, I'm doing what I want, and if people don't like it, or think that I' losing my sanity - so be it.

}{ was born, the anti-world, where no rules of conventional worldbuilding apply other than "everything can happen". I won't go into detail here, I'm just mentioning it because this project was like the bursting of a dam. I don't think I have ever been more productive in my worldbuilding than the last months. I seemlessly went from writing absurdist meta-commentary of my own life to world-building my main fantasy worlds, and from there to a new, more fluid understanding of who I am and what I want. And with that came the realization that I needed to stop wasting my time on people that weren't coming with me anyways.

Go forward, don't look back too much.

Square One

So here I am. Lucid Dreaming.

["Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor, und bin so klug als wie zuvor..."] 

Yesyes, thank you Mr. Goethe! Anyways. I am interested to see whether I can get some of that fascination back that had gripped me back in 2006, when it felt like I had basically discovered an actually working magic. The promise of "endless possibilities" faded away soon, met with the realization that endless possibilities, by definition, also included "kinda mediocre, boring experiences". The worthwile lucid dreams were spread out far between tons of false successes - where I did become aware of my dream-state only to quickly lose control, be dropped in ever-new variations of the same boring empty dreamscape (usually the house where I grew up in), or just in a dark void.

If I have learned something from the last months of worldbuilding, it's that it is always a good idea to check where I am; trying to figure out the issues I am having as precisely as possible. So that is what I want to try next. And while I'm doing that, I might as well see if I can give some basic introductions into LDing for people that have no experience. That is also a good way for myself to find out what I don't know or have never understood properly. Let's see.

Lucid Dreaming 101

So, for all the newbies: What even is lucid dreaming? :)

Well, the basic definition: A lucid dream (LD) is a dream where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming, and have some control over the dream.

This isn't the only way to define it. Some people consider being aware of the dream-state to be sufficient in order to count as lucid, some people go way farther on the control-side. German pioneer Paul Tholey´s criteria include being able to have full sensations (being able to see, hear, smell, ...), having a good memory of what happened, or even understanding the meaning of a dream while dreaming. ["Klarheit über den Sinn des Traumes"] That last point of course raises the question: Do dreams even have meanings? And if so, what do we mean with that?

I'd say that there is some consensus that lucidity exists on a multi-dimensional scale: One can be fully aware of the dream-state while having poor control, or vice versa be able to navigate through a dream effortlessy while not even thinking about it as being a dream.

Abbreviations

Lucid Dreaming communities have come up with a lot of jargon and acronyms - far too many, honestly - and I'm not sure if I want to use them here. If I force myself to avoid commonly used language it might even drive me towards a better understanding, since often, if you have learned what a word means, you fall into the trap of also thinking that you know a lot about it.

So, just for the sake of giving sort of the minimum, the most common distinction being made is whether one enters a dream directly from waking state (ie staying lucid during falling asleep) or gaining lucidity during an ongoing dream, whether through some kind of sudden realization, or gradually.

The first one is called WILD (wake-initiated lucid dream), the latter DILD (dream-initiated lucid dream). Those terms, as far as I know, were coined by dream researcher Stephen LaBerge, who was also (one of) the first to prove that LDs are actually a real phenomenon to the wider scientific community. Paul Tholey used a similar dichotomy, he wrote about Klarheit bewahrende Technik (technique of staying lucid) and Klarheit gewinnende Technik (technique of becoming lucid).

From there, language evolved over the years, so nowadays a verb to wild could just mean to be in the process of (attempting to) entering a dream-state (and not refer to to be dreaming a dream that was entered directly from waking-state) I should also add that the "directly going from being awake to being in a dream" is something that many dreamers don't actually experience that literally; it can also be about staying just aware enough that you can regain full(er) consciousness when the dream has formed.

And now?

This state of in-between is currently the one that is most interesting to me to pursue - in part because I sometimes only have very limited time to dream between one louder snore of my partner to the next. :D

Another goal is getting access to earlier dreams, the ones that happen when I am still very much asleep, and therefore less at risk of just randomly waking up over and over again.

Lastly, I have to figure out a way to deal with memory. I have a major handicap in that I am quite literally unable to keep a written dream-journal (even if I was super-motivated, which, honestly, I'm really not) because of my wrist issues. That almost forces me into a position where my main focus is the actual dreaming and not so much remembering it. From a journaling, analyzing and re-living perspective that sucks. But I'm gonna try make the best of it, because, in principle, I actually like the idea of putting the focus right there, on the actual thing.

That's it for now. As usual, I cannot promise that I will continue this, but as I have explained, I'm kind of out of places to go with this one interest of mine, so if I have something to say, I might as well do it on a blog - a space that I have more personal control over. Dreams are pretty personal, after all.

J C

Thoughts on Titles

I'm currently working on older piano pieces that I wrote in 2015 and ... I noticed a thing.

The concept I had back then was a series of pieces called "Hierarchies", which the individual pieces titled "The Peasant", "The Nobility", "The Preacher", "The Factory worker" and "The Asylum Seeker". At the time, I felt some kind of urgency to make my music more political, as this was the time when lots of refugees from Syria came to Europe and right-wingers used them as talking points.

Only now I do not feel comfortable any more with both the titles for these pieces and the concept behind it. "Hierarchies" was meant to point a finger towards classism, but I did not understand much about it. Why did I include a piece called "The Peasants"? Not because I saw some kind of political statement, but because I already had this peace that was basically a peasant song, and ... it sort of fit? I handwaved it in.

Calling a piece "Asylum Seeker" while doing basically nothing to make it an actual meaningful statement was also ... just a really bad idea. Even if I had found the time to actually finish the piece itself to my satisfaction.

And "The Preacher" ... well. Back then I was more involved with Atheism and I had personally met an anti-gay-preacher (for example) and listened to plenty more. But now I realize that there are just as many bigoted non-believers out there - and frankly, the number of cishet atheist men that have disappointed me is staggering, so it no longer feels right to point the finger at religious extremists. Especially since right-wingers use that rhetoric to justify their hatred of Muslims.

The world has changed since 2015. Trump happened, for example. Is still happening, and people are in the process of getting denied fundamental human rights...

"Hierarchies" was a way to just say: Hey, there are those different people and they don't have equal rights. But even that was messed up because I threw together status/class ("nobility"), action (hate-speech "preacher") and put together some half-hearted sad-music for the refugees. It feels like I instrumentalized their pain for a mediocre (ok, actually worse than that) piece of music, instead of doing the opposite, using art as a way to help a cause.

"Factory Worker" ... I'm uncomfortable with that too. I never worked in a factory, for once, and factory work is only one particular kind of shitty experience that capitalism provides (and not a particular new one). So yes, the piece absolutely works as a parody of the kind of hand movements a worker does at an assembly line, but do I really need to make a parody of that?

From the five original pieces, I'll rework two to include them in my folder for my masters degree... the Preacher will get a different name, and for the other piece I think I'll go with "'Etude" subtitled "A sado-minimalist meditation on Capitalism". I feel that this makes it clearer that I do not attempt to describe a situation that I've never experienced myself. It is merely a piece in a particular style (sado-minimalism is a term some dude invented to describe Ustvolskaya, and while I disagree with it's use for her work, it does describe my piece pretty much perfectly), a style that I relate to and I do think about Capitalism and how it relates to our lives a lot - while not having experienced its worst sides. And I probably never will, with all my privileges and such...

The Bible According to Google Translate - Genesis 2, 1-7

The story so far:

The Ten Commandments
Genesis 1, 1-5
Genesis 1, 6-10
Genesis 1, 11-19
Genesis 1, 20-25
Genesis 1, 26-31

Based on Genesis 2, 1-7:

So the heavens and the earth were changed. These days, the son is not the owner.

On the seventh day, the Lord will end his work. Never make the sun.

Keep blessing for three days and keep everything you own.

God created the heavens and the earth, the heavens and the earth and the heavens and the earth.

There is no rain without rain.

There are six locations in the world. God took the land, and it was very rocky.

And God made the earth forever.

~

Right at the beginning of the second chapter, appropriately, there are big changes. Ownership is taken of the son (who apparently had it before... the writing was a bit vague on that).

Plot twist. Will the sun actually get created yet? Or does God just procrastinate a bit? Anyway, we get some advice on what to do in the meantime. Don't sell stuff.

It gets a bit repetitive after that. But I suppose, there is some mystical meaning behind it. After all, it's a very well documented historical fact that the number three is God´s favourite. And there is more wisdom to come, because we are revealed the truth about rain.

Since God created heaven and earth three times, it makes a lot of sense for there to be six places in the world. Three earths, and three heavens. Or three sets of heavens, because don't forget about the plural. Wait - now that I think about it a little bit longer: This is about directions! Up, down, forwards, backwards, left, right. And three of them are rocky ground, and the other three are heavenly. And all that for eternity, yay!

~

I don't know if I continue regular updates on this silly book. ;-)

Toxic Debate Culture

 (This was originally posted on my facebook wall in march 2018.)

Toxic debate culture:

When you think that if a person cannot articulate their position, they have lost and that makes you right.

When you think that if a person cannot defend their position, they have lost and that makes you right.

When you think that if a person refuses to debate you, they do so because they cannot defend their position, and so they have lost and that makes you right.

When you think that if your opponent shows any kind of emotional response to what you have said, they are obviously not reasonable, and thus have lost ... and that makes you right, of course.

When you think that all questions are up for debate, regardless of either you or the other person having any expertise on the subject.

When you think that you have a right to debate anyone that disagrees with anything you say.

When you try to make as many controversial statements as possible - just because you like peoples emotional reactions to them.

When you get so infatuated with being technically correct that you spend most of your time defending bigots because someone makes slightly incorrect assumptions about their views.

When you admire people just for their skill of winning against your opponents, but not for what they actually say, teach, or do.

~

I feel like I could re-post this every year. It is such a common pattern online, especially from anti-feminists. I'm getting better at countering those strategies, though. "Why do you think you are qualified for this debate?" has worked pretty well (okay, I only tested it once so far).

Why? Because it hits their ego.

Those kind of guys (well, it's almost always guys, although I'm sure there are plenty toxic "debaters" of other genders out there) believe that they are rational, quasi immune to bias, and for them to acknowledge that they might actually need to educate themselves is too frustrating. Because debating is fun, and researching is not.

I get that. I loved debating, and still do, when it's about topics that have no real-life consequence for people around me. However, I do no longer feel the need to point out why your argument for the existance of gods is wrong... because there are *so many* more important things to worry about. Like, literal apocalypse within this century. Rise of fascism. Or whether this fucking dress is blue or gold. Okay, not the last one. But seriously, I'd rather have a good time with a hardcore christian who also happens to be a genuinely good ally to marginalized people than a "rational" dude whose opinion of equality is that other people can have it, but only if he never has to lift a finger to actually promote it.

Well, this has kind of turned into another rant... I'm writing this now because another man I once looked up to has been consistently more shitty and I have to do something with my disappointment. Like, thanks for teaching me skepticism when I was an esoteric weirdo and needed this lesson, but ... I'm gonna move on, I guess. So long, and thanks for all the ghoti.

The Bible According to Google Translate - Genesis 1, 26-31

(What is this? Begin here.)

Based on Genesis 1, 26-31:

And God said: "We have pictures of our fishermen, and fish, wind birds, and all those who fight against the world."

Male and female God created man who missed God and His meaning. He created God in the form of God in the image of God.

Charles and her women were created. It was done by the creatures of God.

God strikes and tells them, "There are children and birds in the air, and they go to the depths of the earth."

God said to me, "I have all the earth's herbs in all the trees that came out, and they eat. All the birds in the air, and all the beasts that are upon the earth, are all living things for every one of them. I am green plants. So."

All of God will be there, God lives in there, then smashes it and everything we got. Then there will be a break.

All animals and animals need gifts and gifts.

And God was pleased with all that he did and felt good. About 6 hours.

~

Well, it's good to see male and female God getting along well enough to create something. They've also taken pictures, though they seem to be mostly interested in fishermen.

But what about those who fight against the world? I wonder if we'll hear from them again. At least there's pictures of them as well. We got this.

New characters! We learn about Charles, who seems to be the leader of a group of women. We don't really get any information about which creatures created her - the past verses have already mentioned a plethora of beasts, so I suppose there is much space for speculation. I kind of like Charles, though - maybe we will see her again later on?

Children in the air - well, I don't know what that is about. The depths of the earth sounds ominous, though. Somewhat mystical.

Herbs that eat? God is green plants? Wild stuff going on here... I like that life-affirming verse about every animal being a living thing for itself. God comes across a little bit annoyed here, though.

Good to know that there will be a break after everything's been smashed.

This version of the bible clearly uses a sophisticated version of grammar. "Animals and animals" corresponds very well to "gifts and gifts". Maybe just using normal plural forms is not enough to express this. Or it is two groups, each of which gets their own set of gifts.

So much happened, and yet God was only satisfied for about six hours. They should be a little bit self-confident, maybe. But then, didn't they just talk about being a bunch of plants? Sounds exhausting.

The Bible According to Google Translate - Genesis 1, 20-25

(What is this? Begin here.)

Genesis 1, 20-25:

And he said. "If you do not drink an empty bird, and the water that is in China, they will fly over. They fly through the sky above the ground."

He made the wild animals and the sea in the sea, their cattle, and their sockets for his sake, and God blessed them abundantly, and filled them with water from the sea, and from the fowl of the air.

And they are not water.

The sky was filled with the angels of the sea, on the fifteenth day of the Pentecost, when the holidays..

He said, "I love animals, wild animals, cattle, and cattle."

Then he said, "Be like wild animals! What is the skin of the skin? Wolf skin is alive."

Most of all the Lord says to the Lord: "Art."

~

It is important to drink empty birds - those are the birds that are not yet filled with water from the sea, I suppose. Oh, and don't forget the water from China, otherwise some beings will fly over; maybe it's those angels of the sea. Which is exactly what happened in the next verse, so someone failed to drink empty birds, I guess.

Or maybe the birds are empty because God used the water stored in them to fill all the other beasts? Was there not enough water in China? I admit, I am a bit confused, but there must be some way to explain this theologically.

"What is the skin of the skin?" sounds like some Zen koan. I can definitely get behind that "Be like the wild animals!" thing, even more if it means that some advanced lycanthropy is involved. Or inwolfed.

~

(It occurs to me that I might at some point have to come up with my own verse numbers, since I am already out of sync. It's just more fun to mesh things together a bit, or use the same verse twice.)

The Bible According to Google Translate - Genesis 1, 11-19

(What is this? Begin here.)

Genesis 1, 11-19:

And God said, "The fruit of tree fruits are fruits and terrible dreams."

And that's it: Complete capture of destiny and God.

The land has sprouted; and in the evening there was morning there - on the third day.

And God said, "Let the air be up, and talk with a loud voice per day, and at the festival."

"Explain the heavens, to be a sign of the celebration of night and time, the sacred days and years. There are fifteen lights that shine in the sky."

(There were not.)

And God created two wonderful conversations, strong light and light. It will also be visible! Prepared and paced.

He sent forty beasts and raised that rock, for more than eight days, at night, to light the darkness at four o'clock in the morning.

~

Don't eat those fruits, you don't want to get nightmares. Maybe that is already some kind of foreshadowing? Adam has yet to enter our narrative. But I suppose you can actually say that this is destiny in a nutshell, theologically speaking.

With that settled, it is time for some parties. Festivals and celebrations - don't bother going there with a soft voice, it's got to be loud! Time itself is a worthy thing to be celebrated, especially night-time.

Then, God makes his first mistake - he claims that there are fifteen lights, but actually there are not. That seems to be a good conversation-starter though, so maybe that's why he did it. He even thought ahead to prepare some visual aid for what he had to say.

Nothing better to do at four in the morning than getting woken up by a bunch of beasts and that rock. You know which rock we are talking about, do you? At least, the author of the Holy Book certainly expects you to. And I only just realized the sexual innuendo there.

(to the next part)

The Bible According to Google Translate - Genesis 1, 6-10

(What is this? Click here for part 1.)

(based on Genesis 1, 6-10)

And God Almighty said: "There is a petition in the water. Let me pour water and leave water out of the water!"

God went to heaven, the wind and the water.

God remembered the "paradise" button and was there in the morning, and it was there in the morning, on the second day.

And he said, "Ye shall dwell in the heaven, and ye shall inherit the land." And he said, "It is in heaven, and in the earth." - And he is right.

The ocean is called "Earth", which is allowed in the ocean. She finds you well.

~

There seems to be some political uprising in the water. God addresses this problem first, and then goes on to the wind and heaven as well, even though the Holy Book does not describe in detail what is going on there.

It's a good thing God remembered the button of paradise! One could scarcely imagine what would have happened if he hadn't. Also good to know it didn't vanish after that, and was still there in the morning. So nobody got that drunk in the first night.

Anyway, after that, we learn that someone inherited basically everything, or more concretely, a land that is both in heaven and in the earth. Underground? Or maybe underwater, since Earth also seems to refer to the ocean. I suppose 'she' refers to Earth the ocean - she apparently takes personal interest in the people reading the Holy Book.

(to the next part)

The Bible According to Google Translate - Genesis 1, 1-5

(based on Genesis 1, 1-5)

Is the first in the world, which was first created.

I did not have a game. The beasts of the field are destroyed.

Jesus Christ said: "I have come to myself. The girl is the Holy Ghost."

There are lights of light and darkness.

That is good for the night.

(I'm using roughly the same technique as with the ten commandments here - in order to make this more fun I'm going to allow myself to get a little bit creative, mixing verses together and using some material twice.)

~

I don't know which language translated "God" into "Jesus Christ", but that certainly makes for a good plot twist.^^

Sadly, after the destruction of the beasts, the game could not start. But maybe that was a good thing? It might have lead to Jesus announcing that the holy spirit is a girl. But what are those lights of darkness? Sure, they might be good for the night, but I have a feeling that this is a setup for some conflict. We shall see.

(to the next part)

Why Do I Like ... Latvian?

Three years after learning my first latvian words - "towel", "brick" and the numbers from one to ten, as far as I can remember - I'm still spending time with this language. Which is not spoken by anyone in my immediate vicinity, but by a relatively small population worldwide, most of them in a country that I probably won't be able to visit again in the foreseeable future, if ever.

So the question is: Why? What is it about Latvian specifically, that keeps me coming back to it again and again?

~ ẞ ~

Sure, meeting some cool Latvians helped, in the beginning. I had such a hard time trying to pronounce the word ķieģelis for over a month, failing and failing again, to the amusement of said Latvians around me.

But if it was just that, I would have moved on to other languages by now. So what do I like about Latvian?

~ ẞ ~

First of all, it is an indo-european language, which means whatever is left of the latin grammar I learned at school can in theory be applied. In fact, there are quite a few words that are recognizably close to Latin. ignis (latin) uguns (latvian) comes to mind.

Second, it is neither a germanic nor a romanic, nor a slavic language, albeit the latter is somewhat arguable - slavic and baltic language share a lot of similarities. I wanted something that is a little different - both romanic and germanic languages are ubiquitous in Europe, and, well, the next big city from where I live is the capital of a slavic country. If I sit in the Viennese underground long enough, I will inevitably hear people speak several different slavic languages. Learning Czech would simply have made too much sense, which is boring to me.

So if I wanted to stay within the indo-european family, and staying with a latin script (because learning a different writing system is not something I enjoy), I still had several options: Albanian, celtic languages, and baltic languages. Celtic languages are cool and I definitely enjoyed them as well, but .. for now, at least, Latvian won this little contest. The rest is Sunk Cost Fallacy. ;-)

~ ẞ ~

Latvian spelling went to several reforms; if I look at how it was spelled before the 20st century, I can barely it - the spelling back then was based on german to large extent.

The current system has a lot of extra letters, some of which are shared with slavic languages, some of which are unique. Sadly, the letter Ŗ had been removed in one of the reforms, but Ķ, Ņ, Ļ remain and are so characteristic that you can basically immediatly tell that a text is latvian if you see one of them.

The grammar is strictly gendered. You might assume that I hate that, and you're not wrong, but on the other hand, I like how strict it is applied to words. Male nouns have to end on -s, female nouns have to end either on the vowels -e, -a or on -s. In nominative case, anyways.

And since Latvians have only gained autonomy at the end of the last century, there is a strong tendency to overdo it, when it comes to keeping their language clean. (Yes, this has a nationalist vibe, and I don't like nationalisms, ever - but I'm speaking about the aesthetics of the language itself here.)

Foreign names are rigorously translated, and the grammatical gender is attached to it. Thus, New York becomes Ņujorka, Würzburg becomes Vircburga, Nordrhein-Westfalen becomes Ziemeļreina-Vestfālene. Yes, cities are always female, apparently. The same happens to persons: Arnold Schoenberg is Arnolds Šēnbergs, there is Volfgangs Amadejs Mocarts, Angela Merkele, and Džoanna Roulinga.

Grammar sometimes even overrules spelling, leading to words like spožs, in which the final -s is not spoken. I rather like that feature. Also viss is written like that so that you know the declination - there are normally no double consonants.

~ ẞ ~

"Native" latvian words lack the letters f and h.  The language is rich with my favourite vowel - u - and there are a lot of consonant clusters, but it's not as fiendishly clustered as czech. The letter o is a diphtong, except in loan-words.

Speaking of loan-words, there are quite a few... a lot are from different variations of german, but also from swedish and nordic languages - and since Old Norse is basically one of the ancestors of modern english, there are occasionally weird similarities where you just wouldn't expect them.

~ ẞ ~

Latvian grammar is hard. The declinations and conjugations overlap in a way that most of the time, I have trouble to even decide if some word is a verb or a noun, or something else. There are no articles, and the only way to make a distinction between a book and the book is in ... adjectives. Which means you can only say the book if you say the red book. I thought this was weird, but I have to admit it kind of makes sense - after all, if you speak about a specific thing, you might as well throw in an adjective to tell which one.

Anyway, I have been rambling a lot. I can't possibly give an impression of a whole language in a blog post. It is very likely that I will find some other language that fascinates me, and for better reasons, maybe ... but for now I mostly stick to Latvian.

~ ẞ ~

Appendix... a list of some of my favourite latvian words:

trokšņot

ķieģelis

tumšs

raksts

tauriņš

uguns

galdauts

raktuve

neaizmirstule

šausmīgs

koks

bet

viņš

desmit

sarkans

rags

pils

dvielis

Okay, that was extremely random. :-D

BEHOLD! I bring to you the ten commandments

... according to Google Translate:

~ ẞ ~

All these words are God. I am happy for God and Egypt.

1. There is no god at all.

2. Heaven and earth are good, God is not a god.

3. God is a living, not God-oriented reason.

4. My father hugs animals on Sunday. It will be fairness.

5. Tell your family.

6. Do not drop.

7. Make a rich marriage.

8. Play music.

9 Do not trust your neighbor.

10. I want close friends or friends, wife's wife, friend's friend, friend or brother.

~ ẞ ~

(made with the same technique as this one, but selecting the best lines from different iterations. :-) )

~

Commandments 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10 are definitely good life advice, in my opinion. I am tempted to start a religion. It will be fairness.

"Some roads are hidden and other roads are away." - Google Translate Poetry

I've put some lyrics into GoogleTranslate and iterated it through almost every language it offers. (This is not a new idea, but definitely a fun thing to do on a free-ish afternoon.) The original text was a passage from Bernstein´s Candide, written by Richard Wilbur. I will not put the original version in this post, because I like to keep it a bit more mysterious. Also, I add extra line breaks for a more poetic reading experience.

~ ẞ ~

After some iterations, this was the first result. The author hasn't quite found their voice yet, but at least they are certainly showing some promise, even if their grammar tends to be overly complicated:

No. 1

Do not hesitate to think

that I might be irritating and angry,

but in fact I said

that I had a good life in this castle castle

and I would go every day.

I liked much and do not know

that they do not know

that their black party in this world.

I took the family ferns,

I wrote a crown

and dropped half of my dough.

He was wrong and met

and went away several times;

he was forced to stop all enthusiasm;

But recently, I believe

that the practical result

is comfortable and avoidance!

I am fascinated with the poet´s ability to write themself a crown. Also, "castle" is such an important element that it has to be said twice.

~

Several iterations later... there is definitely some existential angst coming to the surface, mixed with some lines about ... food?

No.2

It does matter, but they believe

they are problematic and difficult,

but it is considered

as a wonderful life

in the palace and in everyday life.

I really like them,

and I do not know,

you do not know what is

in this part of the black and white world on earth.

On the bunches of fungus,

on the crown and on the left of the pastry.

Some seasons went into the accident

and they went away because of some traffic.

Why do you think it's a recent event,

worship, and salvation?

~

A few iterations further down. I particularly like the line about roads - the author clearly found a way to express their feelings. A sharp contrast between the rich people in palaces and the author´s own longing for a place in the world.

No.3

I believe they are problematic

and complicated,

but they seem to be a beautiful life

in the palace and everyday life.

I love them and you do not know

what this black and white part is.

Crown and dessert on the left side of the grass.

Some roads are hidden and other roads are away.

Why is this the youngest event,

worship, security?

~

It has become quite a bit shorter already, as you can see. There are no big changes from No.3 to No.4 - mostly the author´s intent became clearer, in my opinion - but somehow, a sweater entered the narrative:

No.4

We believe they are difficult

and difficult,

but they seem to live a beautiful life

in everyday life

and everyday life.

I like it, but I do not know

it's black and white.

The crown and sweater on the left side of the pool.

Some roads are secrets and other roads are left.

What is the reason for this situation?

~

The author corrects their mistake - it wasn't a sweater, it was a jersey. And they got rid of the crown. Apparently it turns out you can't write yourself into royalty that easily. Which might be the reason why they urge the reader to see that the only way to go is to the political left, even if we do not know what got us into this mess. The first part seems to refer to the upper-class?

No.5

We believe they are heavy

and heavy,

but they seem to live a rich life

of everyday life.

I liked it,

but I did not know it was white.

Necklace and jersey on the left side of the tank.

Some of these are deeper but the remaining steps are left.

What's the cause of this situation?

~

In the next version, the author has decided to drop any pretense of a happy life. The individual gets reduced to himself, and ... I admit I have no clue what this line about clothing on the beach is about. But there seems to have been a tragic event, and only some people survived.

No.6

They are hungry, thirsty,

but want to live globally.

I, but I think it's not just that.

Clothing is also on the beach.

Some of them are left.

Who helped?

~

In this next iteration, the author has turned towards spirituality - is there a world beyond this one? Does the plight of the starving people on earth make any sense? I especially like the missing question mark at the end.

No.7

They are hungry, lucky,

but they want to live in the world.

But I think this is not the only one.

There is also trash.

Some of them have left.

Who helps

~

Apparently, looking for solace in religion did not work out, and the author returns to a more dadaistic style to express their angst:

No.8

They are hungry, but wanting to live in the world.

But I think this is not one

Crops

Who went out?

~

The language becomes more and more condensed. Still this lingering question at the end - is there someone out there to help?

No.9

People are hungry, and in the world.

But no one

plant

Who's there?

~

A preference for shorter phrasing characterizes the tenth iteration. The author has turned away from looking towards religion again - now the question is much more mundane, looking to another human for solace:

No.10

Everyone's hungry.

we had

factory

Who is this?

~

Finally, we have reached a state of exhaustion - humans are reduced to their basic needs - food, sex, contact to other people:

No.11

Everyone is hungry.

sex

phone

Who is this?

~

One last change - personhood has become irrelevant, the only question is about what, not whom.

No.12

All hungry

Sex

phone

What is it?

~

Houses vs. A Challenge

How the Hogwarts-Houses approach a challenging Game

~ ẞ ~

Gryffindor: You're not really prepared, but you give your best. You fail, but it was worth it.

Slytherin: You win, but your strategy is deemed unfair and declared illegal from now on.

Ravenclaw: You were winning, but then you notice a flaw in the rules, and you give up to fix it.

Hufflepuff: You spent all your time practising, but now, because the rule haves have changed because of Ravenclaw, everything works completely different again. You win, but it was really close.

Gryffindor, 2nd time: You were careless and prepared for the wrong thing, which happened to be what the rules were changed into. You win.

~ ẞ ~

(Some random thing that I wrote on a small sheet of paper. I decided that I should post more random things from time to time.)

GKC - A Derivation Chart

I've made a chart:

A work-in-progress derivation tree of my Gunnerkrigg Chords pieces. :-)

This is by no means final. Just now I've plummaged through some loose sketches, and apparently there are at least 5 pieces that I've simply forgotten about, a few of which may be lost forever. (They weren't that good anyways.) Also, several pieces that are on this chart are not finished and titles might still change.

As you can see, almost every piece is derived from the Good Hope Theme. I've simply had too much fun to figure out if I can use the same motif in literally every key without transposing the motif itself.

It was in E Major in the original version, then I dropped down to E flat Minor in Dark Forest, and one more drop to D lead me to In the Fog. Then D flat - The Annan Waters - and C - Mort Fun Time. B minor is still a work in progress (one of the pieces that are missing in the chart), B flat Major however is there already in The Seed Bismuth (for just one example.)  A minor - Ghost Story (not yet finished); I'm not sure I have anything in A flat yet. G Major - Fanfare for the Robot King. While G flat is important in many pieces, I think there is no piece in G flat yet? In F however, I've got Lindsey.

I'm not done yet! :-)

(You can listen to the uploaded pieces here.)

New Blog, who dis?

Is this a beginning? Or a continuation? When I took down my old blog, I soon realized that I was not the least bit sad about getting an opportunity for a fresh start. It has never been easy for me to leave behind my past. But here I shall introduce myself as I am now.

~ ẞ ~

Ist dies ein Anfang? Oder eine Fortführung? Als ich meinen alten Blog vom Netz nahm, bemerkte ich schnell, dass ich keineswegs traurig war darüber, eine Gelegenheit für einen Neustart bekommen zu haben. Meine Vergangenheit hinter mir zu lassen, fiel mir noch nie leicht. Ich werde mich hier aber vorstellen, wie ich jetzt bin.

~ ẞ ~

Jundurg

That's the name I use online, in most spaces I go. Some people call be by that name offline too. Recently I've added Delphimė as a surname to go along with it.

Bi*

I was always interested in anything LGBTQ* that I could find, and I have known myself not to be really straight from a young age. And yet I did not say a word about myself, because I did not know if I was „queer enough“ to really belong in those communities. It was pure luck on my side that I decided to visit the Austrian pride parade in the exact year when there was a group of bi people there for the first time.

Since then I've learned that my experience in that regard is far from unique – bi people face both being excluded from queer spaces and being alienated in heteronormative spaces. It can sometimes seem like we belong nowhere.

Fortunately, there is now a growing bi* community in Vienna, to which I'm quite happy to contribute in whatever small way I can.

Neurodivergent

I've only recently been diagnosed with ADHD, but I have had problems with executive function(s) from early childhood on, especially in school. I'm also very likely on the autism-spectrum. I do not consider either to be something to be cured – it's just how I am. How to function in a society that is not constructed to accommodate divergence in general is another question.

Non-binary

I've been uncomfortable calling myself a man for most of my adult life, but only in the last few years have I found the necessary vocabulary to describe this discomfort, and it took even longer until I was finally able to acknowledge to myself that I could indeed be transgender. I do not fit the stereotypical narrative of „being in the wrong body“ (most trans people don't, by the way) – it's my body, how could it be the wrong one? – but I also don't feel comfortable if people want to describe me in masculine terms. I am also not a woman – neither of those societal boxes fit me very well, so I remain outside of the gender binary. :-)

At the moment, I use the pronouns he and she interchangable. You may use other pronouns for me – since the german language does not have any established gender-neutral pronoun for non-binary people, I tend to not using a singular they for myself even when writing in english, although I very much support it's use for other people. [Update 2019: I use she pronouns now, and he does feel wrong nowadays, though neo-pronouns are fine.]

Composer

I studied composition at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna for about seven years. I will hopefully get my degree this year, but due to executive dysfunction and depression, I am sometimes not able to work towards it for months.

I tend to have opinions about music. One of these is this: Any music that is purely based on sound will become more and more obsolete as soon as computers and artificial intelligence will become better at creating compelling music pieces all by itself. There are plenty of ways to go beyond just creating sound that other people can listen to – I will probably get to that in future posts, as experience tells me that I cannot keep my mouth shut about such things anyway. ;-)

Conworlder

I love creating fiction, and I especially love creating fictional worlds. In my fantasy worlds, I can explore different cultures and their philosophies, how they think about art, and how they think about gender. I can construct languages and think about how they inform the culture around them – and vice versa. Or any other topic that interests me. As a friend of mine put it „The nice thing about worldbuilding is that there is no idea crappy enough that you can't use it at least somewhere.“

In addition to that, the german worldbuilding community feels like a family to me. Sure, like in every family there are a few 'odd uncles' that I don't want to meet. But being surrounded by people who will have a long-winded discussion about even the most absurd topic is something I don't want to miss in my life. :-)

~ ẞ ~

Jundurg

Das ist der Name, den ich online am meisten verwende. Einige Leute nennen mich auch offline so. Vor kurzem habe ich Delphimė als Nachnamen angefügt.

Bi*

Ich habe mich immer für alles was ich aus dem LGBTQ*-Bereich finden konnte, interessiert, und ich wusste schon recht früh von mir, dass ich nicht wirklich hetero bin. Dennoch habe ich nie etwas davon nach außen gezeigt, weil ich mir nicht sicher war, ob ich „queer genug“ sei, um überhaupt einen Platz in queeren Orten zu haben. Aufgrund eines glücklichen Zufalls habe ich mich dann endlich entschieden, die Regenbogenparade in Wien ausgerechnet in dem Jahr zu besuchen, als es dort zum ersten Mal auch eine Fußgruppe von Bi*sexuellen gab.

Seitdem habe ich immer wieder gehört, dass es nicht nur mir so ging. Bi*sexuelle erfahren sowohl Ausgrenzung von queeren Räumen als auch Entfremdung in heteronormativen Räumen, und manchmal scheint es so, als würden wir überhaupt nirgends hingehören.

In Wien gibt es nun aber eine stetig wachsende Bi*-Community, in der ich mich gerne einbringe, so gut ich das halt kann.

Neurodivergent

Ich habe erst vor kurzem eine ADHS-Diagnose bekommen, aber ich hatte schon von meiner frühen Kindheit Probleme aufgrund von exekutiver Dysfunktion. Ich bin zudem höchstwahrscheinlich am Autismus-Spektrum. Nichts davon ist etwas, das „geheilt“ werden sollte – das ist einfach, wie ich bin. Wie es mir gelingt, in einer Gesellschaft zu leben, die nicht darauf hin ausgelegt ist, wie verschieden Menschen sind, ist eine andere Frage.

Nichtbinär

Ich habe mich schon über den Großteil meines Erwachsenenlebens unwohl damit gefühlt, mich als „Mann“ zu bezeichnen. Aber erst in den letzten paar Jahren habe ich die notwendigen Begriffe kennengelernt, um dieses Unwohlsein weiter zu präzisieren, und es hat noch um einiges länger gedauert, bis ich mir eingestehen konnte, dass ich trans sein könnte. Ich passe nicht in das gängige Klischee „im falschen Körper geboren“ (wie die meisten trans Leute übrigens!) - es ist mein Körper, wie sollte er der falsche sein? - aber ich fühle mich auch nicht besonders wohl damit, wenn andere Menschen mich mit männlichen Begriffen beschreiben. Genausowenig bin ich eine Frau. In keine dieser gesellschaftlichen Schubladen passe ich wirklich gut hinein; daher verbleibe ich außerhalb der Geschlechterbinarität. :-)

Im Moment verwende ich die Pronomen er und sie gleichermaßen. Andere Pronomen für mich zu verwenden, ist auch okay – da die deutsche Sprache kein etabliertes geschlechtsneutrales Pronomen (abseits des sächlichen) hat, tendiere ich dazu, auch im Englischen keines zu verwenden, auch wenn ich das Singular-They ansonsten sehr befürworte. [Update 2019: Ich verwende jetzt sie Pronomen, und er fühlt sich mittlerweile falsch an. Neopronomen sind okay.]

Komponist*in

Ich habe sieben Jahre an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien studiert – und bin dort immer noch Student*in, denn mir fehlt noch der Abschluss, den ich hoffentlich dieses Jahr machen werde. Aufgrund von exekutiver Dysfunktion und Depression schaffe ich es leider oft monatelang nicht, darauf hinzuarbeiten.

Über Musik habe ich oft einiges zu sagen. Zum Beispiel: Jede Musik, die einzig und allein darauf basiert, wie sie klingt, wird immer mehr obsolet werden im selben Ausmaß wie Computer und künstliche Intelligenzen immer besser darin werden, selbst überzeugende Musikstücke zu kreieren. Es gibt eine Menge verschiedene Wege, um darüber hinauszugehen, bloß einen Klang zu erzeugen, den jemand anderes anhören kann – darauf werde ich bestimmt in zukünftigen Posts eingehen. Die bisherige Erfahrung zeigt, dass ich zu diesem Thema ohnehin nicht den Mund halten kann. ;-)

Weltenbastler

Ich liebe es, fiktive Welten zu erschaffen. In meinen Fantasywelten kann ich fremde Kulturen und deren Philosophien erforschen, oder wie sie über Kunst denken, oder über Geschlechter. Ich kann Sprachen entwickeln und darüber nachdenken, wie sie mit der Kultur, in der sie gesprochen werden, zusammenhängen. Oder im Prinzip jedes andere Thema. Wie eine Freundin es mal ausgedrückt hat: „Das Schöne am Weltenbasteln ist, dass man jeden Scheiß irgendwo einbauen kann.“

Zudem ist die deutsche Weltenbastler-Community für mich wie eine Familie. Klar, wie in jeder Familie gibt es auch hier ein paar komische Onkel, die ich nicht unbedingt treffen möchte. Aber von Menschen umgeben zu sein, die auch noch über das absurdeste Thema eine ausgedehnte Diskussion führen können, ist etwas, das ich im Leben nicht mehr missen möchte. :-)

~ ẞ ~

Other Things of Some Importance

This is getting long already, but I want the introduction post to be somewhat comprehensive, so here we go:

• Designing games: Somehow, I haven't finished any of the board games that I started to make in the last ... too many years. I still want to eventually get back to it. In the meantime, I will play other people´s games.
• Lucid dreaming: I used to be very active in the german lucid dreaming community, but lately, dreams aren't really a main focus of my life anymore. Nevertheless, the possibility to consciously experience being somewhere else than in the real world provides a phenomenal experience that has lots of potential both for creative and self-exploring purposes.
• Atheism: I grew up catholic, but it was mostly my evangelical christian friends that made it „necessary“ for me to know a lot more about religion than the average european. Because there have been to many prominent atheists who turned out to be assholes in some way or other, I nowadays only really care about the intersection of atheist and social justice activism.
• Feminism: My perspective here is informed by being bi* and non-binary. Reducing or ending sexism or any kind of privileges based on gender are important topics to me, but I admit that most of my attention goes to the specific areas that concern me the most - or those I think I know better.
• Mental Health: I have benefitted greatly from people who were open about their mental illnesses, and so I want to give some of that back and talk about mine. There is much harm done in our society by pretending that those are something to be ashamed of.
• Randomness: In all my creative work, I have a tendency to flirt with random elements – whether it is a random number generator, or a twenty-sided die, or a random page from Wikipedia. However, I do not leave art fully to chance.
• Dadaism and Surrealism: I owe much to both of these art movements. Within Dadaism, I am very fond of sound poetry. Within Surrealism, I am more interested in methods rather than a particular aesthetic.
• Teaching: This is what I am currently studying for – philosophy, psychology and computer science. I do not know if it will be possible for me to be an openly genderqueer teacher in Austria, but I won't find out if I do not at least try.
• Skepticism: I don't care much about some random weird beliefs people may have, but there are a few that I consider dangerous, both for an individual and for society. My prime example is the belief in fate, whether it is thought as a power far beyond human control, or – worse – something that can be controlled by positive thinking, prayer, or various other methods involving magical thinking.

~ ẞ ~

Weiteres von einiger Wichtigkeit

Der Post ist jetzt schon recht lang, aber ich möchte die Vorstellung auch einigermaßen vollständig haben, also:

• Spiele designen: Irgendwie habe ich es nie geschafft, eines der Brettspielprojekte der letzten Jahre auch abzuschließen, aber irgendwann möchte ich da auch wieder weitermachen. In der Zwischenzeit spiele ich halt Spiele von anderen.
• Klarträumen: In der deutschen Klartraumcommunity war ich mal sehr aktiv, aber in letzter Zeit sind Träume nicht mehr so ein zentraler Teil meines Lebens. Nichtsdestotrotz bietet die Möglichkeit, sich bewusst als außerhalb der realen Umgebung zu erleben, eine phänomenale Erfahrung mit viel Potential für Kreativ- und Selbstforschungszwecke.
• Atheismus: Ich wuchs katholisch auf, aber es waren hauptsächlich meine evangelikalen Freund*innen, die es für mich „notwendig“ machten, deutlich mehr über Religion zu wissen als eine durchschnittliche Europäer*in. In den letzten Jahren erwiesen sich zu viele prominente Atheisten in der einen oder anderen Weise als Arschlöcher, daher interessiere ich mich meist nur noch für die Überschneidung von Atheismus mit Social-Justice Aktivismus.
• Feminismus: Meine Perspektive ist geprägt davon, bi* und nichtbinär zu sein. Sexismus oder jegliche Arten von geschlechtsbezogenen Privilegien abzubauen ist mir wichtig, aber ich gebe zu, dass mein Hauptfokus auf den Bereichen liegt, die mich selbst betreffen, bzw. wo ich mich besser auszukennen glaube.
• Psychische Gesundheit: Ich habe viel von Leuten profitiert, die offen über ihre psychischen Probleme geschrieben haben, und daher möchte ich etwas davon zurückgeben und auch über meine offen sein. Viel Schaden wird in unserer Gesellschaft durch die Idee zugefügt, dass psychische Krankheiten etwas wären, wofür eines sich schämen müsste.
• Zufall: In meinen kreativen Arbeiten habe ich eine Tendenz dazu, mit Zufallsmechanismen zu flirten – seien es Zufallszahlengeneratoren, oder zwanzigseitige Würfel, oder die Wikipedia-Funktion „zufällige Seite anzeigen“. Allerdings überlasse ich in der Kunst nichts gänzlich dem Zufall.
• Dadaismus und Surrealismus: Ich verdanke vieles diesen beiden Künstler*innenbewegungen. Im Dadaismus finde ich vor allem Lautgedichte toll, im Surrealismus sind es eher die Methoden als eine bestimmte Ästhetik.
• Lehren: Darauf hin studiere ich im Prinzip im Moment – Philosophie, Psychologie und Informatik. Ich weiß nicht, ob es mir möglich sein wird, eine offen genderqueere Lehrperson in Österreich zu sein, aber ich werde es kaum herausfinden, wenn ich es nicht zumindest probiere.
• Skeptizismus: Wenn Leute nur irgendwelche seltsamen Ansichten haben, ist mir das eher egal, aber es gibt einige Ansichten, die ich für gefährlich halte, und zwar sowohl für Individuen als auch für die Gesellschaft. Mein Paradebeispiel dafür ist der Glaube ans Schicksal – ob es nun als eine Macht jenseits der menschlichen Kontrolle gedacht wird, oder – schlimmer – als eine Macht, die durch positives Denken, Gebet, oder sonstige Methoden die sich aus dem magischen Denken ergeben, beeinflusst werden kann.

~ ẞ ~

A Comment on Comments

While I appreciate discussion in some cases, I do not want to have to moderate this comment section. I've thought about closing it completely, but that does not seem necessary at this point. I've set it so that every comment goes into moderation, so don't be surprised when you cannot see it immediatly after writing.

Just be warned that I will not host comments that I am uncomfortable with, or that could potentially stir up a debate that I don't want to have at this moment. Also I will delete any comments that so much as mention a particular right-wing Canadian professor, whose bigotry and outright lies have done enough damage already. I'll add more people to my list of unwanted persons or topics as time goes on.

~ ẞ ~

Ein Kommentar zu Kommentaren

Während ich in manchen Räumen Diskussionen schätze, möchte ich hier eigentlich nicht moderieren müssen. Ich habe sogar darüber nachgedacht, die Kommentarfunktion komplett zu sperren, aber das scheint mir doch arg unnötig im Moment. Jetzt ist sie so eingestellt, dass jeder Kommentar zunächst von mir freigeschaltet werden muss.

Seid also vorgewarnt: Wenn mir etwas so erscheint, dass es eine Debatte entfachen könnte, die ich im Moment nicht führen möchte, werde ich die Kommentare dazu nicht freigeben. Außerdem werde ich alles löschen, was z.B. einen gewissen politisch rechten Kanadischen Professor erwähnt, dessen Intoleranz und bewusste Lügen schon genügend Schaden angerichtet haben. Ich werde wohl im Lauf der Zeit noch mehr Leute oder Themen meiner imaginären Bannliste hinzufügen.

~ ẞ ~

Jundurg Delphimė, 2018-04