If I’m this neurotic, why aren’t I acting?

I like feedback on things. I really do. I kinda need it. I mean, I’m not looking for people to tell me what I should be recording and shouldn’t – fuck that. I have my music and I write it and I’m recording it, slowly. I kinda just want to know people care enough to react in some way. I tend to think other people want that too, which is why I’m a little hyperactive with the “like” link on Facebook posts, and junk like that. It’s a way of saying, “I saw this and am telling you so.”

I think people tend to forget that I’m totally still feeling my way forward on all this recording and writing and playing and just assume I know more than I do. In fact, this post is triggered by mentioning privately to someone that I was feeling kind of disappointed by the lack of commentary back to me on Sketchy Characters. (Mind you, I know a lot of tracks got played, because Bandcamp has good stats, and that’s super-awesome! But I heard from like four people out of substantially more than 100.) And the person I mentioned this to replied – paraphrasing all this, of course – that they’d listened and just kind of assumed that I knew they liked my music, which I kinda hadn’t done. I kind of have to fight off the whole, “well, they’re saying nothing rather than saying how much that sucked” insecurity bullshit.

I also think people think I have much, much more confidence than I actually do. I don’t, really. I just say fukkit and do things anyway.

And really I suppose were I a Better Self-Actualised Person or whatever psychobabble you put on it, I wouldn’t care. In fact, I shouldn’t! Good artists ignore critics and work for the work, I’m told. (And really, I do. I love this. I just played an hour set for my sound baffles. Yes, I’ll play for inanimate objects. It’s good practice for farmer’s markets, aheh…) But I’ve been playing anything other than flute for barely two years, and while yeah, I’ll say it: I learn pretty fucking fast, I’m still pretty overwhelmed by all the shit I don’t know, and all the things I don’t even know that I don’t know!

Plus there’s the whole, “does this even register out there?” thing. Does it?

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Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil.

LJ skeeviness

So LJ is being skeevy and stripping your referral links for online retailers and substituting their own. This is true for Amazon and several other retailers, so instead of you getting your micropayment for referring someone to a retailer for a purchase they get it instead. I hear that now that it's been found they're supposedly going to stop, but jeez, guys, skeevy or what? Also violates the fuck out of Amazon's affiliate TOS, which matters because LJ has to be an affiliate to be able to receive the moneys, and so is bound by it.

Anyway, be aware. Dreamwidth isn't doing this shit, so if you don't have a DW account, you could get one, mirror posts, and tell people to click on the DW link instead of the LJ link. Also, the stripping doesn't work if you use TinyURL or bit.ly or the other URL shortening services, so you could just use those instead.