vicmara.com

I finished (?) my first attempt in the direction of minimal-tech-electro-house, which I started creating back in January, after becoming actual.

It is dedicated to Black Daemon..

I don’t want to drown in writing, so listen, and comment (if you wish).

Predictive Beats – Requiem for the Denied

I hereby thank all the 0 people providing feedback on the site not really usable under the Windows-integrated browser.

Never mind, I noticed it, so it has been fixed.

The cause of the problem: IE does not support “self-closing” SPAN and DIV (and, for the sake of interest, SCRIPT!!) tags (that is, the form <SPAN class=”xx” /> is not supported, not even if it has content filled from within CSS, so the form <SPAN class=”xx”></SPAN> must be used)

This entry merits its existence on par with the moment’s practical requirements.

I am mad for weeks now, because the SoundCloud player does not work on bulletin boards.

Either “This track is unavailable”, or an empty player was my receptionist, the latter I uselessly pushed and pushed the Play button in, nothing happened.

Now, however, I installed a plugin for exactly the same reason.

And, what gives God?

For free? Nothing.

It did not work here either.

Later it turned out that the overly paranoid Flash player settings were the culprit for the situation formed.

Flash Player global storage settings

On this link, the Flash Player Settings Manager can be found, in which, on the page shown, the Never ask again checkbox must be cleared, and the Allow third-party content to store data on your computer checkbox must be set.

If we are too paranoid, we have two choices.

One is that we refrain from using the SoundCloud player.

The other is, that after making these changes, we open (or refresh) the site with the player. This makes “p1.soundcloud.com” to the list of the page under the tab just before the last one.

After that, we can “undo” the “factory” status on the third page, while we can adjust the soundcloud settings separately on the tab mentioned in the previous paragraph.

One shortcoming may be that one may repeat these steps whenever a player refuses to “work”.

I uploaded two more tracks to my SoundCloud page.

One is a bit psychedelic, acidish music, disguised as retail electro.

Its actuality, being finished at the beginning of the year, is given by the World Cup, which brought the vuvuzela madness along with itself.

One “ethno” instrument used in the track is giving actually the same voice as the vuvuzela. Well, apart from one thing: being tonal, that is, it not only sounding on B-3, but on whichever one wants, that is, “melody” can be “manufactured” with it.

Even that I know millions got frustrated from the phenomenon, the sound, and anyway, I hereby want to express my honest gratitude to the manufacturer Masincedane Sport company, that they managed to mold them with “scientific accuracy”, and thus the pitch of all of them is the same.

Just imagine the case for a moment, when – due to the scatter inherent to nowadays’ “technology” – one could hear all possible halftones (what half? quarter! eighth!) in between say, A-3 and C#4 in the stadium! Compared to that, the minor seventh inherent to Eastern Europe’s (and maybe other places’) train horn would sound like a Beethoven’s lullaby…

Predictive Beats – Afroasia

The other track is a rework of the – for me – most listenable and beautiful piece of “Just Be” from DJ Tiesto, entitled “Walking on Clouds”. The remix is in “Full On Psytrance” style. It worths noting that the track was made by Tijs sided with Josh Gabriel who is one half of the more-known “Gabriel & Dresden” group – this can be heard anyway, and this is a positive critique here anyway.

The technique with which this track was born is called – by me – “dub remix”. Others however happened to label it “bootleg” or “mashup”, so I’d give a break of few lines to clarify the difference.

A mash-up, or bootleg, is such a “genre” that is made of parts of two or more tracks.

The “dub remix”, which I pretend to have coined myself, is supposed to mean, that a remix is made from parts sampled of the original track.

So the main difference is that, for the latter, the part(s) dubbed to the “main” track are own compositions, while in the case of the mashup/bootleg, the “creator” is not the author of any parts, “only” the mixing, sampling is his own effort.

Tiesto with Josh Gabriel feat. Kirsty Hawkshaw – Walking on Clouds (Passion Fruit Dub Remix)

Now that the obsoleteness of the music-hosting on own server is being proved by a complete business sector appeared from nothing, with a plethora of free services, I finally gave up and signed up to the page mentioned.

Surely, our mutual friendship will remain till they won’t force me to pay for whatever I got for free till then (I always dodge “free-for-catch-period” things), or, if I personally order some paid services, till they won’t screw me.

There are some tracks, namely 4, at the moment.

The link:

http://soundcloud.com/predictive-beats

UPDATE:

Predictive Beats – Hearttripper (Part I – minimalish; Part II – prog-acid-electro-house-ish)

Passion Fruit – Unpredictable Present (Full On Psytrance)

Predictive Beats – Leave Those Words Alone (preview; dallamos prog-psy-attempt)

This latter I even recommend to ones with sensible ears..

This is one of my “favourite” term nowadays. I’ve heard it that many times that I feel sick of it.

But let’s see, what they used to mean by it.

For instance, I’ve heard from many of my friends, that his/her spouse/lover/darling “manipulates” him/her. Psy-cho-log-i-cal-ly.

Wow.

Really?

They usually mean, by it, such things like not being asked for-the-ninety-sixth-time-in-this-week-and-it-is-still-Monday that “Dear, would you like to come party with us?” The usual answer for this would be “If you want to come, you’ll tell”. This is, surely, offensive, but is it to that extent? These times I used to think, what is not offensive is boring, and vice versa. There are things that one has to get over. One example is “mutual agreement”, not exactly in scope of a divorce, rather of the problem given. Because this type of supposition does not take thoughts like “You wouldn’t feel good anyway”, not even with the extension of  ”and you refused to come last time to just exactly the same place anyway”.

Sure, the – statistically trivial – answer is that “Oh, sure, I would not go, but anyway, I expect (and co.) you to ask me every time (otherwise you do not love me, blah)…”

However, even this could be heard fewer and fewer times, as – again, statistically – the usual reaction is fireworks (in the sense of “a burst of temper”).

Why it could not be heard? Well – and here comes the preamble section of the reason of existence for the Facebook app “women dictionary” – mostly because even the last time, only anger, bitching, and rage followed.

And?? So what?? – I ask vehemently, albeit from myself this time. What ended the anger, the bitching, the rage?

Possible answers:

- The logical party (I try to be objective regarding gender) understood, that there is a need for asking the already-answered thing(s) again, for whatever reason(s). In other words, one thrown away one’s logical nature. This option I consider bullshit, unacceptable, so let’s “eject” it.

- The huffy party managed to understand that the whole syndrome is fucking dumbness, and thus the disagreement is void. This is the optimal (and accordingly, the statistically rarest) case.

- The “offended” party rejects the possibility of understanding that the whole story is bullshit, still,  acts like he/she had, for the sole reason of avoidance of anger, bitching and rage.

This latter option is the most frequent one, albeit total nonsense.

Nonsense, because there is no mention of practical agreement, it is only silent toleration and sustainment. In other words, the simulation of “peace” to the outside. This, however – not taking into account that it is one of the most disgusting and reprehensible phenomenon of the society, societies nowadays – has several disadvantages.

The first is the repression. We don’t give out what we have inside. This creates tension, or, with a trendy word, “stress” inside. We keep showing that we are “happy”, or similar, just like if anyone would be interested in our happiness. Then once we have enough, and commit suicide – or get mad and pursue a massacre on our family.

Or on the neighbour’s.

Be honest to ourselves, is it OK?

The second problem is that we just undermined the essence of “argument” successfully.

An argument always has one party who is right. (This does not exclude the possibility of both parties having “right”, if they talk aside each other without attention, but this will be the subject of a different post)

If we are right, few such “interest” can exist – in the life of a straight, honest and moral person – that can inspire one to repeatedly set this aside for a long period. Okay, sometimes it can happen that we “give in”, as the more clever party, for e.g. to see, whether we will have a “sorry” or “I was wrong, I just…” the next day.

But if we are not – and, in the example drafted above, my attitude is definite -, then it is totally unacceptable even in the smallest semi-representative, two-person entity of society, that we hold up our point repeatedly, again for a long time, while  ”rather keeping silent”.

We shall understand that our emotions are not logical (and, as such, it is both impossible and useless to argue over them substantively), moreover, if we think something, that creates tension inside us, and we still remember it the next day, we ought to say, tell, or whatever – it.

Or let’s move to an uninhabited island alone, as honesty can be expected solely on mutual basis.

And, love and its well-populated family is based, hopefully undebatedly, on honesty.

Sure, for instance, women could often defend themselves with what I did not hear till the time anyway, that under “millennial repression”, the answer for even their rational, logical, and real reactions was violence, and as such, at least in some – smaller or larger – parts of the world, they have a profound belief that the reward of free speech is battery, the usual form of violence.

But this very same woman, at the same time, shall refrain from talking about emancipation and similar, very trendy ideas, as they may not fit the same mentioned parts of the world.

And, accusing someone of “manipulation” for not asking the same question repeatedly, just because a day – or a week – passed again… is more than shameful.

(Hey!! Who dismissed the “shame” entry from the Webster’s and when?? )

Still, today, I’ve run into a meaning of the title, which had blown all the remaining fuses at me.

Namely, I’ve got “formulated in face” with that the selective presentation of facts is “manipulation”.

I emphasize that I am not talking about quibbling, crooked reasoning. Just the selection and distinction between parts of the truth not being tightly coherent. This is the method a honest, straight person can accept at most, while fulfilling his sometimes conflicting needs. That said, only the truth. Okay, but what if that can’t happen? Then what? What? I tell you. Silence. One can remain silent, lying is not a real necessity.

But the person forementioned made clear to me, that it is more “honest” to her talking rubbish in the name of “tolerance” – namely, when one is “kind” to someone – who is otherwise “fuck your mommy”, of course, only behind his back – on interest, than when one suppresses (or mentions) facts selectively.

We could think what my literature teacher could, when once analysed one of my loosely-crafted reading report, and labeled a sentence “factual error”.

However the total eclipse only followed when the person with “special honesty definition” expressed her emphasized protest for my postulation, which sounded like “then the media is manipulating, ain’t?” (which I, given the knowledge that not only the selective honesty is their only weapon, handle as a fact for ages now)

Unfortunately, I did not remain with more options than finishing the discussion with her for the mid- and long-term. And writing this entry, of course.

I just ran into a dilemma, which was created by the “onboard conjoined twins” labeled paranoia-attentionseeking. The essence of it was that, after I used the namesake expression in a Facebook comment, immediately started thinking of whether I should explain the matter in a separate comment.

It is so simple only, however, on the surface. The cold, yet unnecessarily complicated aspect that we often mock as “reality”, divides the potential reactions immediately into four. In theory, indeed, there are those who “don’t understand” it, and those who “do”. Those who do not, could be separated into those willing to get informed of its meaning and those not… Meanwhile, I use a different kind of classification here: those with the thought “using foreign words is arrogancy” and those without. This makes sense in one significant form: those “with”, will be almost exclusively unlikely to ever get interested in the meaning, or, as we will see, meanings, of the forementioned expression.

Those who “understand”, well, will get classified by the already-hinted misunderstandability (huh… what a word) – or, in “bigface wording”, linguistical ambiguity. And this will be the point of this post.

Namely, the most “foreign words” are inherently polymorphic. This could be traced back to (at least) two causes.

Firstly, the two dominant languages are Old Greek, and Latin. They, in “preserved” form, are simple (I intentionally avoid the potentially derogative ” rudimentary labeling here) both in terms of structure and vocabulary (being curious, how Marcus Aurelius would call an iPad, though ). But I would not divulge into expressing this, as this entry would never end.

Second – and much bigger – problem is that many of these words are “created” by such “scholars” who thought they mastered the given language, when in fact they did not. Those words being half-Greek, half-Latin are all falling into this category.

This manifests in the possibility (or, rather, fact) that back then, just like now, many words had several different meaning, and those “professionals” thinking they “speak” a given language, picked the less-common meaning, probably when that meaning had a more common denomination as well.

What? You don’t understand?

I try to exemplify it here.

One example is “engrish”, or when you read the labels of e.g. a “Chinese Miracle” cellphone, or many more things, from Asia. It is like “lorem ipsum”, ranging in meaning from barely understandable to complete nonsense.

The other is a practical problem for those who wish to learn e.g. Hungarian. We say “körte” with a meaning of  ”lightbulb” as well as “pear”. However, “lightbulb” is also “égő”, which, in turn, is “burner” and “burning” at the same time.

Now here everyone is in need of a clue..

OK, OK, the essence…

Subculture, as is trivial with some common sense, can be split into two parts.
One is “sub”, as “under something” – being lone.
The other is “cultura”, from Latin “colere”, cultivating, guarding, augmenting. Its meaning associable with concepts relating to education arose only after the end of the Middle Age, in the beginning of the 14th century, when Renaissance gave place for the development (what development! creation!) of education, as a concept.

Now, with thoughts like “we already knew this shhh”, the layman already solved the equation: solution: “under culture”. Like subordinate, inferior, irrespectable, being a derogatory term.

And really. Drawing an analogue with “Sub Rosa” movement (which I won’t rate -here- due to intent of objectivity), and our layman just found an example that supports him.

Please do not misunderstand me, this interpretation is correct, proper, and I also use it  ”cynically” in this sense sometimes.

However, the more frequently used meaning is “the” other. Here, the “sub” gets “subdivisio”, subdivision, as a role.

Thus, subdivisio culturae, or a part, a proportionate amount or sector of culture.

Indeed, we can often think whether “urban culture” (in sense related to nowadays “pop culture”) – or, keeping mention of impartiality, classical music – takes part of our perception of culture; if we are objective, then there is *the* culture, and it has different offsprings, or subclasses, no matter are they recognised or not, and if either, by whom.
And “subculture” – without irony or cynism – is just fit for drafting this.

Now that we managed to battle several issues between WordPress 3.0RC1, suhosin, safe_mode and access rights I gave up my previous hostility and started to provide our clients and partners with WordPress ability.

For demonstration of this, my “blog” has born.

Here I will keep you somewhat updated about things I do in my working and/or free time.

After some time, the main page (http://www.vicmara.com/) will refer you to my “Lab”, that is, all (or most of) the things I am used to/with.

Till then, stay tuned!

And, surely, thanks for visiting us