The obvious answer is some combination of pomodoro and telling yourself it's a draft that you'll delete later, but also, honestly? Go for a walk, or do something else that takes time but doesn't take focus. Give your brain some dead air so it can put the pieces together while you're not looking.

Nothing more relatable than a youtuber complaining that no one watched their video while showing a screenshot of it having gotten like half a million views.

You should really only be listening to whole tone music. It’s got the whole tones in it. A lot of these artists, they use semitones, which is just half of the tone and trust me, it’s not the part that’s good for you. It’s basically junk.

Any random set of words in Rob Zombie's "Well, Everybody's F*ckin' in a UFO".

Obvious choice but it's gotta be Rob Zombie, right?

Was getting all ready to brag that I was finally managing to publish a Ghost Notes episode on time for once, and then realized I never uploaded last month's at all so once again I have been struck down by my own hubris.

Orbán's electoral crushing is a far greater achievement than most people outside Hungary realise. He systemically consolidated power for 16 years, fixed the electoral map, abused govt power for political purposes & censored media. The hurdles that Hungarians overcame for this moment were immense.

AI ethics aside, specific vocational skills are not the place of core curriculums in either k-12 or college; just practically they develop way too fast to be embedded in curriculum, and morally, the cost of hyper-specific vocational skills ought to be born by industry, not the public.

Decided to take this script in a different direction so I have now made *negative* progress this week. It's gonna be a banger but I have no idea when this video's coming out.

This is musicology.

You know that feeling when you're about to finish writing an essay and you suddenly realize you have no idea what your conclusion is? It sucks.

it's weird to be numb and incandescently angry at the same time

Hey if you're a young adult in the US pay very close attention to the moment because in shockingly few years the popular account of who did or said or supported what right now will be at times unrecognizable. Don't let that break your brain or just you, as a person.

i think if you tweet "a whole civilization will die tonight" you shouldn't go to the hague, the hague should get to come to you

One of my favorite things about the small amount of academic writing I've done is getting a chance to work with an editor. I like to think I'm a pretty good writer, but these people rip my work to shreds and it always winds up better.

I keep seeing "all authors use AI, the real issue is they're being forced to be sneaky about it" headlines. Full stop No. This is a lie peddled for normalization. It's schoolyard-level pressure tactics "C'mon, all the cool kids are already doing it. We won't tell. It's fine. We're on your side."

I don't know who told band/product managers that this was a good format for cold emails to creators but as a heads-up it is not.

Music is bad.

This video keeps making me do day-long research dives that turn into, like, two sentences of script. On the one hand, great, on the other hand, awful. I contain multitudes.

A thousand years and nothing's changed.

Stringing together all 12 standard-tuning notes in precise, repeating orders following explicit rules to remove all sense of relative pitch hierarchy usually doesn't sound very good.

It's freedom fries all the way down, isn't it?

great article about the failure of the US media chomping at the bit and believing every single piece of bullshit said by CEOs and the billionaire class

This is true. The only thing you can do is make good stuff, package it decently, and hope the robot likes you right now. Any advice beyond that is, at best, anecdotal, and should be treated with the appropriate level of trust.

wouldn't it be funny if EVERYONE blocked this Attie AI account @ bsky.app/profile/atti... before they could do anything with it

This is actually a common misconception: All pieces of music have the same total amount of music theory except for Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer, which has around 15% more.

Music is good.

I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED

As you consider the run time of this video, please keep in mind that it is about a grand total of two bars of music.

I think we gave filming podcasts a fair enough shake and can stop now!

Beginning to seriously regret the structuring choices I made with this video, which is a sure sign it's almost ready to publish.

Just took a drawing that took me five full minutes to do and sped it up to cover less than a quarter of a second of video. Might be a new record.

This is musicology.

"placeholder text" "concept art" either the temporary thing you put in matters to the process, in which case you need to get a human to work on it, or it doesn't, in which case you can just as easily put a bright pink rectangle that says PLACEHOLDER in and save everyone time and effort

It was really fun working with Varun, and seriously, if you have any interest in emo and/or music theory, you should check out EmoCon: emocon2026.com

It's always fun watching through old videos on a channel and seeing exactly when they upgraded to a new camera.

Why does youtube keep recommending me videos where one guitarist accuses another guitarist of faking their playing? What part of my entire vibe makes you think I'd want to watch a video where one guitarist accuses another guitarist of faking their playing?

100%, and I'd even take it a step further: You can't critique anything if you don't know how to love *that thing*. It can be a frustrated, angry, disappointed kind of love, but if there's no kernel in you of what that thing could be, your opinion has nothing meaningful to say.

Hi yes this is relevant to my interests. (I haven't listened through the whole thread yet but that first song utterly whips.)

do yourself a favor folks, if you're 26 or younger, make a plan to dodge the draft. it's not making the problem about you -- the child you don't go overseas to kill will thank you for it in fact. and if it doesn't come to pass, better to have a plan and not need it than need it and not have it

I had a great time visiting UBC Vancouver, and it reminded me how much I enjoy doing that sort of thing in general, so just putting it out there that if you have a university or academic conference you want me to speak at, please don't hesitate to reach out!

@komaniecki.bsky.social Finally found one that works!

Yep. “Knowing who to be mad at is praxis” is Mariame Kaba’s quote and it is wisdom for these times. (1/2)

a public utility does not need to turn a profit. this is intentional.

Unambiguous evil.

What I don't understand is why anyone asked Billy Corgan in the first place.

ICE invaded LA almost a year ago and there's been so much awful stuff happening elsewhere in the country that for folks who don't live here, it's easy to forget they never left us either. Shoutout to Memo and the entire @lataco.bsky.social crew for staying vigilant on this story. True heroes.

I was really hoping I wouldn't have to retweet this a month and a half later about a completely different news event, but time makes fools of us all.

Fun, short little research quiz for anyone who wants to click some buttons and help some researchers at the same time:

Personally I like technology but I understand it as something that 1) Reliably 2) Does something useful. That doesn't seem to be true for these chatbots outside of some limited applications but we're supposed to act like it is and saying otherwise is Luddism