owning up to the worst music ever

Posted on July 10th, 2010

Filed under: Music News — Karl Olson @ 7:38 pm

EDIT – Living Link Again:cuo2duo – comp1337

1. Yes, that was me.
2. Yes, it is horrible, offensive and stupid, but it’s a satire of image board culture, so it can’t be anything but those things. Think of it more through a Mark Twain perspective if you put any thought it into it. I didn’t.
2a. The instrumentals are nice though. very different for me.
3. Yes, it does mean last year I put out 119 songs.
3a. If you count writing the backings for and producing rai’s album.
3b. More than 119 if you count the c2d instrumentals separate from the album.
4. Yes, that means about half of everything I put out last year was freely available, and the rest was easily piratable.

So, you can see why I can take some time off to finish university. Not many musicians in general have ever been that prolific in that time frame, and I did so with plenty of generosity in the process. Thing a week? Try 2+.

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podcasts, performances and other stuff

Posted on June 8th, 2010

Filed under: General,Music News — Karl Olson @ 2:56 am

So, like a manufacture with an early model android phone, I’ve been bad about updating in a timely fashion. Recently, I opened for Death Star at their CD release party at the Blue Moon Tavern. I had a fun time, Death Star put on a great show, and the Seattle Geekly noted that I “effortlessly kicked out a set that I imagine most performers would happily trade a major internal organ to be able to pull off.”

Speaking of the Geekly, they also did a podcast featuring an interview with myself amongst other awesome nerd musicians.

As to the other stuff? Well, I’m taking summer courses, so I’m staying quite busy. The secondary agenda to school will be helping Nursehella do vocals for her debut record. Considering how quickly Rai’s record went once it had a similar foreground priority, I think it’s gonna go well, and go fast.

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Facebook is the Hedgehog’s Dilemma

Posted on May 12th, 2010

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 9:04 pm

My aggressive aversion to facebook apps that want personal data assuredly obscures a section of reality from my vision. However, this section surely contains information about how others perceive me, and thus, in that sense, I am forbidden from knowing a part of myself as I am unwilling to share information about myself.

More pressingly, regardless of which path of action is taken, I will feel some sense of loss. Either I am to relinquish my privacy to a stranger, so that I may know what my friends and acquaintances think of me, or I am forbidden from knowing information about myself. Some might argue I could always ask my friends what they said in a given, but on facebook, such connections are not always as strong as friendship, and even that still requires some exchange on my part. It reveals more directly to those people that I want to know what they think of me.

And well, I do want to know; such concerns are natural to human beings. However, I don’t wish to sacrifice anything personal to know such things. See blog title.

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Built In A Day

Posted on May 6th, 2010

Filed under: Music News — Karl Olson @ 10:30 pm

A little 9 song mixtape that I made today:


mix cloud
datpiff flash player
megaupload
easy share
badongo
deposit files
dat piff
upload bro

Beats featured should be familiar to many HipHop fans. Subject matter? The usual: myself, anime girls, playa haters, semiotics, etc.

Expect Ultraklystron stuff like this when I’m on break unless I’m doing work with one of my collaborators. Also, I recorded it on my netbook with dollar store earbuds. Expect the roughest mix ever.

Also, have a music “video”.

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Success!(?)

Posted on April 29th, 2010

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 12:01 pm

So, I squeaked through my first quarter at SFU with good enough grades (Discrete Math, B-, Comp Sci C+, English B+, Philosophy A-) to continue on my degree track. I’ve moved into my own place in Burnaby off-campus. I am underway properly now as a student. The biggest debate for me should be whether I want to spend the 45-100 something bucks a month to have a parking pass, or whether I should lose a 20+ minutes a day to the bus.

Yet, meanwhile, I have friends without degrees working for Microsoft and Google. To be fair, they are contract or orange badge or some other code word for temporary and hourly, but they are working, now. Doing jobs I could also do, now. Putting the best companies in the world on their resumes now.

I hope the $60K+ of my parents dough I’m about to plow into getting a degree is the right long term play. I really, really do. I really hope it means a salary, a house and all that other American Dream stuff. The grass better end up greener on my side, otherwise why am I gardening, and stressing ’til my arteries are hardening?

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Success is my only option; Failure’s not.

Posted on April 23rd, 2010

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 3:21 pm

So, I’m over in Victoria, visiting Danielle, and clearly things must be chill as we’ve had time to go out for a couple meals, went swimming and we even yet again fed the seals (video eventually uploaded and linked to this parentheses’d text,) but pretty every other waking moment has been spent cramming on Discrete Math, which quite plainly I need to do well on, at least if I intend to continue my pursuit of Comp Sci. I haven’t even browsed my philosophy notes yet, both because I only need a D, and because I doubt I’d get anything less than a B- even going into the exam cold.

Ah, the liberal arts, I’m so good at you, but it’s ever so difficult to eat off you, and you’re boring compared to programming.

Beyond that, I’m taking Danielle back to her mom’s in Castlegar before looping through SpoKant to get back to Seattle. It seems there are tons of shows I’d love to see in my short break between semesters (well, w00tstock and MC Frontalot.) Perhaps it’s a reward for trying so darned hard to get through all this stuff, but in truth, it’s sort of a reminder that I have to get through this. I’m not touring with Damien Hess nor Adam Savage, so I better make sure I am educated such that I have good work, and thus can afford to see them when they are in my locality.

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“I’m about my bus[y]ness” – Drake

Posted on April 7th, 2010

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 2:08 pm

So, in the past week(ish) I:

Yet, on the plate for the month is:

I would say I’m super busy, but rationally I know I’ve had plenty of leisure time too. I’ve been able to watch what I want on TV (well, I’ve not been keeping up with Top Gear how I’d like, but it’s rerun constantly on BCC America, so I’ll catch it eventually,) incessantly call Danielle, incessantly call home and even do much more visiting than I expected to have time for. For what seemed to me to be a questionable and uneven start, I’ve managed to do okay here. Perhaps until I see the benefits of getting a Comp-Sci degree over the more remedial, but less expensive and closer to home Computer And Software System degree, I may always be a little tense as education is the most expensive endeavor I’ve taken on to date. One year of university costs me more than all the anime and comic book conventions I’ve attended since I first went to Sakuracon in 2003, and I’ve gone to a lot of conventions since then.

Back on leisure, I suppose there is even busyness there. Last Easter weekend was Sakuracon2010, and Danielle and I were not there. For me, that was the first time I’d missed the con since I first started attending it in 2003. In that sense, even time off now comes with some checks and balances I didn’t have before, but truthfully, I had a lot more fun in Victoria. We went shopping, we had an advance birthday dinner and we went swimming. At the pool, I went down a water slide for the first time. It was surprisingly fun, especially in comparison to going into a steam room for the first time, which I also did.

Beyond that, it was nice to not have to inflate a lack of news into a 500-word news post on top of writing a big paper. I suppose I’d have had to review the new Trigun movie, which would’ve been another 800 or more words. I also can’t be disappointed in a dealer’s room I didn’t see (as I have been in the past few years with most convention dealer’s rooms.) Yeah, there are some old industry friends I could’ve said hello too, and with the new CD out I could have hustled at least a half-dozen albums. I mean, there almost isn’t a convention I’ve attended in the past 4-or-5 years somebody hasn’t been “hey, you’re that guy!” Well, except for Google I/O in 2009.

However, I think I’ve realized that while “making my way in the world today takes everything I’ve got,” I guess I’ve grown up enough to know that it’s not about going “where everybody knows your name” but rather where the right person or people knows your name. For a long time I guess that was the cons, but not as much now.

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Time in a Sieve

Posted on March 19th, 2010

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 1:19 pm

It struck me between classes today that this time last year, I was just beginning to work for my friend Charlie at his now semi-defunct company. I was busy trying to sort through documentation that ultimately would be superseded by Motorola’s version of the Android dev environment where much of the code I was looking for was pre-built and better explained.

Anyways, that then made me realize the last time I had been in school in the spring was in 2006, and the last time I had a full time course load was spring 2005. Reflecting back on it, it’s beyond me how I managed to drag out getting back to school for so long. I guess there was always another little fire to put out or moment of poor planning that cost me time, but at the same time, I could have finished an entire 4-year from scratch if I’d just gone for it then. That’s not even taking into account trying to get into a real university right out of high school. If I’d done that, I’d have been square even sooner.

At the same time though, I think my weird journey forward afforded me a much broader range of experiences than I would have had otherwise, and I’m glad to have had the chance to try on those outfits. I may have only “cosplayed” as a journalist, start-up developer and most tellingly of all, a professional musician, but I think I had to try these things on first.

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See what satisfied customers say…

Posted on February 26th, 2010

Filed under: Music News — Karl Olson @ 11:53 am

So, Z of Hipster Please! has reviewed both Romance Language 2 and Electric Sheep. All things considered, I imagine anyone who reads Hipster Please! probably already knows about the albums, and thus have bought/pirated those albums, but if you needed the word of a critic, there you go. Truthfully, I’m kind of surprised at which songs he did and didn’t like, but par for the course perhaps.

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Be It Ever So Humble

Posted on January 24th, 2010

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 1:31 pm

So after two weekends of heading back to familiarity (be it family and Kirkland or Danielle and Victoria,) this is my first weekend in the Townhouses (which are basically 4 single occupancy dorm rooms with a kitchen and 2 bathrooms.) Like clockwork, there was a party going on downstairs, and well, I had no interest beer pong, not only because of a lack of interest in beer, but also a lack of interest in communicable disease.

However, I definitely feel like I’m getting more and more into the flow of life here. Beyond that, slowly but surely I seem to be making friends with folks in the ARC, so it’s not like I’m without social contact either. In fact, last night, I hung out with some of the nerd crew on campus. It’s much more my pace. I still have some disorienting moments sometimes when I wake up, but on the whole, I seem to be getting used to being at least quasi-adult.

In fact, I even feel comfortable enough to indulge a little. I’m going out for a Starbucks at the mall.

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