Monday, October 30, 2023

Marge Simpson's General Composure

Maggie Simpson hasn't said her first word yet (except in that one episode), so that places her age around one year. And that means Marge Simpson is perpetually caring for a newborn baby. Considering that situation, she seems really well-rested and composed. Impressive.

Friday, May 27, 2022

 What are these stupid arrows trying to tell me?



Wednesday, May 11, 2022

The Story of May 11th (A Holiday for Hosey)

Once upon a time, when young Hughes and Phalen would come up with a new idea for a song and they didn’t have a title yet, they would use that day’s date as a placeholder for it. Then in the Spring of 2000, as they stumbled across a new riff looking for a name, they realized they already had four songs called “May 11th.” There was already too much confusion at band practice, so it was declared a Holiday for Hosey. No jamming allowed! They couldn’t dare risk writing another “May 11th.”

Monday, August 10, 2020

init...

Hey. I am not a podcast not a podcast. Stamp.scom

Will you play with me... Y/N? 

 

 

DO NOT LISTEN TO _THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS!!!_

On August 14th 2004, two young men boarded a train in New Orleans bound for New York City. This 100-year-old line follows the Gulf Coast through the Pine Belt, and then up the eastern seaboard, all the way to Penn Station in New York City. The 36 hour ride is traditionally called "The Crescent Run," after one of the many nicknames for the city it departs from. For these two it was supposed to be an escape route.


Those young men never got off that train in New York. Not on their Earth, at least. Instead, the next day they woke up and stepped off that train here, on this Earth. A world that was created for them, to test them, so they could create content and their ideas could be sampled, so they could entertain the "people" who constructed all this.

Now their world wants them back.

Those who created this reality and brought the men here have powerful technology, but they are not gods. They still have to play by The Rules. Particularly, they must abide by the terms of the Metaversal Harmonized Tariff Schedule XLII-B, subsection 7-G overseeing Interdimensional Import/Export of Conscious Materials. In other words, taxes are indeed a mathematical certainty, and Customs duties must be paid on any materials crossing The Borders. It doesn’t matter if it’s the border of the universe, the border between Life and Death, or the borders between dimensions. Everything must be assessed for metaphysical market value and taxed accordingly.

So anyway, the big dumdums who took those smart, good-looking guys from their home world did it by devising a way to steal energy and matter from Earths in other dimensions, which they immediately started doing without considering the consequences. They didn’t even file form SS-2 to apply for an EIN with Metaversal Customs & Border Patrol.

Needless to say, they pissed off some Very Big Bureaucrats. And these stonefaces don’t keep track of “money.” The only currency they care about is spacetime itself. And Undeclared Realities like this one tend to suck up a lot of that “currency.” It was only a matter of time before they noticed and began The Audit. 

__________


All right, let me back up so I can explain this a little better. It gets kind of complicated here. Those “people” who took our two guys, let’s call them The Dumdums. They’re pretty smart but they didn’t really figure out how to smuggle what you and I would call "stuff" across dimensional borders. They only figured out how to steal less heavy metaphysical objects like a consciousness, or bad subway etiquette, or even someone’s memory from another reality where Sinbad is famous for his role as a genie in a series of ‘90s movies. They smuggled those meta-objects into their universe, broke them down into a discrete series of instructions, and fed them to a supercomputer tasked with running a simulation of an entire universe. That simulated universe is this universe. Our world.

I guess you’ve probably figured out by now that I was one of those young men on that train. Hughes was the other. But here’s the thing: if you’re reading this then something similar happened to you. You got on a plane and fell asleep, or you closed your eyes in the shower too long, got snatched, and you opened your eyes in a different world. A virtually perfect recreation of the one you came from. Here we are.

They’ve been bringing us here for years, trapping us in this giant content farm and mining our dreams for sitcom plots, robbing our precious DJs of their most fire beats, and making us believe other people like kale so that we’ll pretend to like it too, because they get a kick out of watching us all try not to choke on it at dinner parties.

But there’s a problem with simulating an entire universe: even at maximum efficiency you still need 1 bit of information to represent each quantum “bit” of real universe. If your simulation is 1:1 perfect, then you’ve used up all the “information” in your entire universe to “write” the simulation. There’s nothing left over; every available atom down to the quark has been turned into a 1 or 0 in your giant program code. Now you need another entire universe to mine for the materials to power it up. And you need yet another universe where you can actually run that simulation!

So once they figured out how to reach across realities and dimensions, the clever Dumdums had an idea: what if they were to skim just the tiniest little slice off of billions of other Earths and use those little bits to build a universe under the table? Plus, they could skim more bits to use as a source of computing power for their giant content farm simulation. No one would notice a proton here and an electron there, right?

In the Metaverse Prime, this is known as “That Scam from Superman III.”

Unfortunately, the Very Big Bureaucrats have also seen that film. Did the Dumdums think the stories of a super alien growing up as a stranger on another planet were unique to Earth? They have Richard Pryor in every dimension! He’s just that funny, y’all.

So it didn’t take very long for the Very Big Bureaucrats (VBBs) to figure out what was going on, and even less time to locate this illegal Undeclared Reality we find ourselves in. Now they’ve come to shut down the simulation, return the missing pieces of each universe, and send all of our consciouses, our souls, our lives back to the same Earth we all conveniently came from.

But history on that Earth has been very different since 2004. I heard a VBB calling to me in a dream the other night--it was trying to fish out our reality--and I saw for a moment the world they’re taking us back to. I barely managed to stop them at the interdimensional threshold before they could get login access to our simulation (more on that in a second). But that world... we can’t go back to there. This is just a glimpse of what I saw:

> Lost was cancelled after season 4.

> Do you remember The Black Eyed Peas? “My Humps?” You won’t anymore.

> After “The Amazing Race Incident” of 2005 (a live broadcast septuple homicide) reality television was outlawed everywhere forever. Every badly tanned, thin-skinned reality star you know here never existed there. They're all rotting in jail on unpaid DUI fines. Because they’re also broke.

And that’s just a taste of what’s waiting for us back on the Earth we came from.

I told you earlier that a VBB reached out to me in a dream. Hughes had the same dream. It seems that since we’re in a world inside another world, they can’t reach directly into the simulation and bring us back. They have to lure us, to get us to come back on our own, and they’re doing it with music. These bastards are playing Pied Pipers of the Multiverse with us. But they can only get to you when your mind is most susceptible to the gigantic vibrations caused by the Multiverse passing through the Metaverse. The only time you can hear soundwaves that are longer than galaxies are wide. When you're dreaming, naturally.

I'm afraid, that is to say, that *used* to be the only way they could get to us. Gulp. Let me explain...

__________

There I was tight-rope walking on the line between awake and asleep when a strange synthesizer chord started swelling all around me. It was playing in two keys at once. I turned my head one way and it was B minor, the other and it was A flat minor. Strange combination, but I get a lot of weird musical ideas at the border of dreams, so the unusual is, uh, "usual" so to speak. I paused between my steps on that somnambulent line, one foot still in the air, and tried to hold my balance; teetering between waking up to write this musical arrangement down, or falling blissfully into it and the arms of Morphea. Concentrate, Phalen... concentrate!... ... Wobble wobble, and with the agonizing grace of a flamingo with hiccups, I fell to the left. Sigh. Back to life. Back to reality.

I opened my eyes and standing over me was the shadow of a man in a poorly-tailored suit and and the intruding scent of Bengay. Then a familiar feeling: my chest getting heavy and my body being pulled through the mattress. Sleep Paralysis. We now know that Hughes was having the same dream.

Luckily, both Hughes and I are 11th level lucid dreamers and purple belt hypnagogic telepaths. Even the infinite distance between Brooklyn and Queens can't separate us when it's time for another battle in the sleepscape. In our separate dreams, we looked out the window and saw the crescent moon, we reached out and flipped the light switch that is always there, and... 

We were standing together in front of a Bureaucrat so big it stretched my eyes. My pupils swallowed in on themselves in a desperate attempt to take in the smallest piece of this giant. So immense that it confused the horizon. Its red Sears tie like a theater curtain falling from the neckline of the sky. Poorly-cuffed pants reaching down into dark depths, piling awkwardly on orthopedic shoes planted in the soils of hell. The beast was hard to contemplate at this size, seeming more environment than enemy--

Suddenly, we were in our recording studio and somehow the creature had managed to fit itself into the room with us, but just the same it was still massive enough that time slowed down around it so rapidly that you could see it; peeling off out of the air into red ribbons that wrapped themselves around the Bureaucrat, until time stopped flowing altogether.

It was obvious nothing would get past that stoneface. A living wall. Why did it bring us there? The acoustics?

Then from the studio speakers, a soft whistle that grew and spread into a quick arpeggio all across the F minor scale. Hypnotic. I started to see visions of the Earth they were trying take us back to and I finally understood what was happening. But I was frozen, I had to hear the arpeggio resolve itself. Thankfully Hughes had figured out was happening too and he was already in action. With his T-Bird bass in hand he dropped a distorted muffed out B5 chord loud enough to wake the dead and kill 'em again...

Dissonant bliss... The devil's chord fills the room... the VBB's arpeggio loses its grip on me... Don't wake up yet don'twakeupyet don't... wake... up--

White light all around me. Presence. Shake it off. I see all three of us in the studio now, in third-person from the northwest corner. My heart skips a beat and then I'm back in control of the scene:

This is *our* studio.

I have an idea now. From where? No questions. The VBB doesn't know how to modulate keys yet, but soon enough it will figure out how the pitch-shifter works. If I can just get to the record button in the control room before then--

It's more clever than I thought.

The Bureaucrat is right in front of the door to the control room and the precious record button. Nothing will get past it. Even in all the dissonance, it has the easy posture of a guard at Fort Knox. Damn. Hughes and I will eventually get tired, and we can't keep modulating keys anyway because it's expanding its taste. No matter how avante garde we get, it will eventually devise chromaticism and learn to appreciate it. And then it's just a countdown to Schoenberg. Eventually we'll have to listen to its demo.

I don't know how I know this, but if I can record it *now,* in this dream, I can stop it. Why? Because that's how this sort of thing works, right? This is still *my* dream.

...wait.

That's the answer! It is my dream. *I* brought us here. Think fast, Phalen!

Hughes is buying us time by routing his bass through a broken analog delay pedal and dropping in a popped A note for maximum discord. The dissonant soundwaves are crashing together so hard the room feels like it's moving. Can sound pressure kill a man?

I have to concentrate...

Concentrate... don't concentrate...

And the briefcase is in my hand.

Drop to my knees. Combination: 1-2-3-4-5 and... it's in there. It always is. My trusty SP-404 sampler. Always ready to record at a moment's notice. Portable. Battery-powered.

No time for a mic check. I'll have to use the internal microphone. Can I set the gain staging--there's no time, man! This is the most important recording gig of your life! You have to nail this in one take!

I look over at Hughes and he's thinking the same thing I am: beat number six on that sampler. One nod between us and I press record. Then the count off, fingers in the air, "1... 2..." I slide the sampler across the floor and it comes to a stop right between the Bureaucrat's Dr. Scholl's. "3... 4...!"

The beat drops.

Time almost goes backwards for a second when Hughes resolves the dissonance by tearing into a one-note groove on F, the root of the VBB's attack, nailing its flighty little melody against the wall like the insignificant sound it is. Then he neck-grabs the whole key and drags it into G major by willpower alone, before slamming it down to E flat just because now we're kind of angry. This song isn't a hypnotic lilt anymore, it's a black Ferrari tearing through downtown Tokyo in 1980. The kind of midnight ride that kills hair-metal stars.

Forget about this cosmic pied piper, baby, this groove hits so hard we're pulling the VBB into our simulated world!

Hughes does a little walk up and down the scale before resolving everything back to F. He's just showing off, but he's earned it. The Bureaucrat looks small now, and getting smaller. Unraveling into the red tape of time that surrounded it before, being pulled slowly into the sampler's tiny microphone. I think it's trying to say something. I can still kind of hear it fading out. First the lows go, then the highs, then it sounds like someone on the telephone, then an AM radio broadcast, then static, then...

Everything's gone. The room-- Hughes?

__________


My alarm was going off. "h4cked" theme from Mr. Robot, just like every morning. It was time for work.

.daylight=groan
.bowels=urgent
.coffee=loading...

It wasn't until I was heading for the shower that I noticed the blinking light on my sampler, an old-school SP-404, sitting on my music stand where it always is. I must have had too much to drink the night before and blacked out. "Why would I use my sampler to record something?" I thought to myself. I shrugged and moved on with my morning ablutions.

.smell=deodorant
.beard=oiled
.hair=perfect.forever

I had forgotten about the sampler until I was about to head out the door for work. The display was blinking "EXP" for export, meaning I had recorded something that I intended to put on my computer. But I hadn't used the sampler's export process in years. That's a tedious, cumbersome workflow. It's much faster, and sounds a lot better to record the sampler's output directly, the same way I would record a keyboard, turntable, or any other line-level instrument.

I must have been really wasted. I didn't even remember drinking.

I hit the cancel button to back out of the export process, so I could listen to what I recorded the night before, but the display aggressively flashed "Prt" for "protected." Odd. That's not even how that function works. Then again, I had barely used the sampler at all in my recording process for the last seven years, I only use it to "sketch" out ideas for music but not for any serious tasks, so maybe I had forgotten some things. Maybe it was just a glitch. The beauty of all these machines is that eventually they get old, too.

I tapped "export" and pulled the memory card out of the sampler and slotted it into my computer.

B.S.O.D.

Computer crash. I didn't have time for that. Q train in ten minutes. I had to go.

.keys=check
.wallet=check
.phone=check

It was when the train was going over the Manhattan Bridge that my subconscious first started tugging on my jacket. "If you were so wasted, why would you go through the complicated process of working on the sampler instead of just hitting the big red record button by the computer?" But what it really wanted to know was "How was the sampler even turned on?" I had taken it with me on vacation and I accidentally left the power supply at a beach house in New Jersey. And it's battery power hadn't functioned for years.

.depeche=mode
.kate=bush
.dj=shadow

Then during lunch at my desk at the local box factory, I got an email from my band's mastering engineer. It had been a long time since we released any music and I hadn't spoken to him in years, so I just assumed it might be some sort of promotion and quickly forgot about it.

Of course, he never ever does things like that. I should have noticed.

.bells=six
.listen=humor
.comedy=bang.bang

After getting a seat on the train home from work, I felt a strange premonition. I was thinking about that computer crash this morning. Then I felt a strange sensation...on my left leg. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and it was hot to the touch. I opened it and saw notifications blurring across the screen, until the phone was too hot to hold and I dropped it on the subway floor. I looked around and everyone else was absorbed in their totally normally operating phones.

When I picked up my phone it had cooled off, but it was a brick now. I couldn't turn it on or off, and it was frozen on a screen of computer code that was too tiny to read. I was getting pretty nervous so I shoved the phone into my messenger bag, and dug out my old-fashioned book of NY Times crossword puzzles.

.comedian=emo
.genre=emo
.despot=idi

I drifted off while I was trying to think of a 10-letter answer for "Notorious cinematic flop of 1980."

.world=/=yours
.you=rat
.piper.ME=LISTEN... LISTEN!!!

Last night's dream plays again, except this time it's a comic book. From this perspective, the story is pretty trite and predictable, but then again I guess you don't win wars with nuance.

Wake up. Wake up. Pleeease wake up!

The train is pulling out of the Parkside station when I wake up to my own mind berating me, "IDIOT!"

I have to get to my computer *now.*

.chastity=church
.patience=beverly
.diligence=cortelyou

I raced home from the subway station. When I got there, my roommates were nowhere to be found. They should have been there. My bedroom was ice cold, impossible for an August day in Brooklyn. My computer...

It was an old school command prompt. Like MS-DOS. Nostalgic for some of us old guys. It said:

C:\HOSEY\The Way the Future Was>_

So I did what anyone who was me would do: I asked the computer what was in that folder...

C:\HOSEY\The Way the Future Was>dir...
 
 
 
 

8 files.

8 songs I had never heard of. Songs I definitely did not record.

.world=hello
.world=goodbye
.sex=pistol

We'd been had. Hughes and I didn't stop the damn Bureaucrat from getting into our simulated world. We let it in! We gave it the keys. If this thing almost lured me to another Earth by making me dream of a stupid diatonic arpeggio in F minor, imagine what it can do when it has a whole album of the choicest Hosey songs to seduce the world with!

Then something compelled me. My stomach turned, and all I wanted to do was go back to last night. Never fall asleep, never have that dream. But I had to know...

C:\HOSEY\The Way the Future Was>assoc

.thank$=sarah
.thank$=matt
.thank$=andrew

Now my room is spinning. Those are the names of my roommates. I know exactly what's happening and I'm afraid.

I'm digging through the gadget junk drawer that we all have, and I pull out my ancient flip phone. A Samsung that can still pick up wi-fi. I check my email, I check that message from our old mastering engineer:

"These are done! Ready for release. Your bill is paid and you can find the master files here at this link..."

I feel heavy. So heavy...

I haven't logged into Facebook in two years. I swallow hard before I type that septic URL into the phone...

99 NOTIFICATIONS

Blood pounding through the walls of my ears. White light screaming all around me. This time I give in...

        .feelings=soft
        .game=over
        .thank$=for.playing

_________


I'm posting all of this now from my friend's computer in an undisclosed location. I don't think the VBB can block this line of communication yet. I came here to warn everyone:

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS!!!

It will tell you it's an album. It is not. It will tell you that the music is "savory." That part is true, but you must not listen.

It might pretend to be a true crime podcast about the most salacious serial killer ever. It is not. You must NEVER listen to it.

It is a device that cuts the code that is "you" out of this simulation and pastes it back into the real world. Every beat you listen to is one heart beat extracted to the "real" Earth. Every measure of music is a line of code, a line of you that gets taken back to the Earth we came from.  A world where David Bowie really is an alien, and he's not susceptible to our human diseases, so he's not dead yet.

It's a trap. It's a trick to lure us out of our simulated world back to the Earth we were taken from. A twisted Earth where Prince is half-robot and is going to live forever.

I really want to convey the horrors of that await you on that Earth if you listen to The Way the Future Was:

On that Earth, R. Kelly was shot instead of 2pac. So they never got Trapped in the Closet. Instead they had to settle for an 18-track mega-collaboration between 2pac, Outkast, and The Roots. Can you even imagine?

Conan O'Brien has been hosting The Tonight Show for eleven years.

Those paragons of corporate heroicism, the Board of Enron, they're all in jail.

No one has heard of reddit. No one.

________

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS!!!