For those of you at the last WtT who were kind enough to listen to the final (really, really  final now) version of the Songs I've been working on, now titled 'Songs of Barbelith - First Sun', and who have since been bugging me for links to it, this post is for you.

I've been working on a bunch of different things trying to get them all in a mildly presentable state for a 'big opening ' where I can send this link out to the general public, and today I've realized that those things are bigger projects than I had anticipated for even a quick summary and in the meantime I've been holding back on sending this out to my friends, some of whom just want the music and the rest will hopefully be patient with me while I get my website and such up and running.

If you've heard the previous version of 'Songs of Barbelith', then you should know this is now a very different beast.  It incorporates everything in the original Songs, but has now been intregrated with two neuroacoustic entrainment tracks designed to simultaneously engender Epsilon and Lambda brain wave states.  You can get the gist of why I chose to do so here:

http://www.neuroacoustic.com/epsilon.html

Please feel free to share the link to First Sun with anyone that you think would enjoy it.  It is free for everyone and is under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which basically means you can do whatever the fuck you want with it as long as you attribute the original work to me.

Though there's nothing up yet to back it up, it's worth noting here that First Sun is just one piece of a much larger project I am working on, which will center on a website, 'www.growthepath.net'.  To give you an idea of the flavor of what I'm cooking, here's the intro paragraph to the site:

"This is an invitation to grow the pathnet.  This site offers detailed information on a diverse array of simple, powerful methods to fundamentally change and expand consciousness.  The purpose of this site is to grow these paths beyond their individual potential by revealing the many synergies that connect them.  Through putting the harmonies of these disciplines into practice one walks a web of ways that is far stronger than any of its strands.  When you in turn bring your own knowledge and awareness to this net of paths new connections are found and forged, then distilled and shared here with the world-wide web."

And without further ado, here's the link to download First Sun:

http://www.archive.org/details/SongsOfBarbelith-FirstSun

  I am working on the best method of distribution for an uncompressed WAV file, but for now here's the link to the Free Lossless Audio Codec page where you can download the codec to play it as a FLAC:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

I'm going to begin putting together a web page soon.  I was wondering if any of the wonderfully web-techy folks on my Friends list here could help me out with that.  The principle thing I'm looking for is information.  Best how-to sites, best programs to use, best places to host both for free and for cheap, etc.  I would gladly accept more in-depth help, but I don't require it.  The website will initially at least be non-commercial.  Thanks in advance!

   Some of you with long memories (and those who bear grudges hard) may remember me posting back around September about my 'musical' composition, Songs of Barbelith, and my request to have people download it and share it via Bittorrent.  I didn't really follow up further on it at that point, never let people in general know about it, so there was little point in asking you to share it then.  However, I am getting a better idea of how it fits into the other things I am working on, and I'd like to get it out on the interwebz now.

   If you would like to help me out with that, here is the Torrent file for it:

http://isohunt.com/download/50145844/Songs+of+Barbelith.torrent 

For some reason on Saturday I was ridiculously tired despite getting more sleep Friday night than I normally do.  Like goofy falling asleep standing up tired.  So when I saw this out of the corner of my eye in the ethnic food section, it drove me to my knees I was laughing so hard.



Sometimes you just can't get enough spicy cock in your soup.  Moving onward, I give you a music video!  While it is both amusing and frightening, I bring it to your attention because of its delicious lack of self awareness or irony.


Also, if I get it stuck in other peoples' heads, it will get out mine.  Lastly, you shall have stories from my childs' hoods.

The other day Solace was boldly declaring herself to be an alien angel princess with an emphasis on alien.  I asked her where she was from, but she said she didn't know.  Since the crash of the cosmic space palace obviously gave her amnesia, I decided to help jog her memory.

"Are you from the Pleiades?"
"No..."
"Are you from Sirius?"
"Nooo..."
"Are you from Lyra?"
"Nope."
"What about Zeta Reticuli?"
"Uh-uh."
"Well, where are you from then?"
"I'm from Canada!"

It is also important to note that Jhy's heroes are Iron Man, Richard Dawkins, Leonardo da Vinci, and Dr. Frankenstein, and he will often randomly exclaim "I'm going to rule the world... WITH SCIENCE!"

   There's a 'music' project I've been playing around with off and on for a few years now. I got it into a rough finished form before the house fire, and gave my Mom a copy of it on a CD. When the house burned down, it destroyed all of the material I had built up over the years that went into it, and the rough draft my Mom had was the only record of it. A lot has changed since then for me personally and in the world, and as a result I've decided to share my little project, to let it do what good it can and receive from it what I will. About a week ago the title for it came to me, and it became clear it was time to send 'Songs of Barbelith' out into the world.

   Here is my request to you, my friends: if you use Bittorrent, and have some hard drive space and bandwidth to spare, will you download the Songs and stay on as seeders until it cacthes on? I plan to spread the word in forums related to my target audience (meditators, trippers, healers and such), and it would be nice to be handing off a torrent that has some meat to it. You can help spread the news yourselves to people you think might like it.  Oh, and you could even listen to it, and tell me what you think. It's not music as such, but... Well, I won't precondition your thought on it too much. Here's the link to the torrent file:

http://isohunt.com/download/50145844/Songs+of+Barbelith.torrent

   And by way of further introduction, here is the contents of the text file included in the torrent, ( mercifully placed behind a cut. )

   A few nights ago, I dreamt.  I was visiting a temple.  It was styled halfway between Middle-Eastern and European, somewhat similar to Byzantine architecture or the Hagia Sophia.  It was completely white, as if of plain unpolished marble.  Inside, it consisted primarly of just one large round room with a high hemispeherical dome.  Across from the main entrance at the juncture of wall and dome there was a large rectangular stone which had four characters carved into it in a script I didn't recognize.  It was very simple, composed of lines and dots, somewhat cuneiform.  There proceeded from that stone a line of text in a similar script that spiralled around and up the inner surface of the temple, all the way to the top of the dome where there was another large stone, this one circular and perfectly smooth.

   There was a priest or guide there talking about the history and purpose of the temple, and I think I came up on him mid-way in the lecture.  He said that the temple had been destroyed in one of the early Crusades, and later rebuilt.  A particular sect of Crusaders had set it as their mission to destroy this temple because of the incredible heresy they thought it represented.  He went on to say that the 'heresy' primarily centerred on the four characters on the stone, as they represented the first name of God.  He pronounced the four words (which I don't remember) and then said that it translated best into English as "One life, many souls".  The Crusaders thought the four character Name was a direct affront to YHVH, and so sacked the first temple.

   He went on to say that the spiralling text wrapped around the dome was intellectually something of a cross between a philosophical essay and a prayer, but it's intended use ran deeper than its words.  The seeker of this faith uses the temple as a moving meditation, reading the text of the prayer, sometimes chanting it aloud, all while slowly spinning and raising one's attention to the ceiling and the empty stone.  He said that in the course of the 'prayer' it describes the individual in contrast to God as "One soul, many lives," and that as a whole it is a description and invocation of one's relationship to God.  As it draws to a close near the top of the temple it points to a merging, a synergy between God and individual that transcends the nature of both.  This is what is represented by the smooth circular stone, because what is found in that union is indescribable and unnameable.

I can't tell you had terribly cool it is to open up a long, narrow and completely unexpected package, especially when it contains two brand new shinai!  And very high-quality, well-balanced and appropriately lengthed to boot.

Firefen, you rock!  You are a goddess, even if you do still live in Texas!

Gradually, we seem to be getting most everything replaced that can be replaced, and sometimes (such as this) with even nicer/newer stuff.  Now if only someone will get the hair up their ass to replace my ~$1,000 sword.  I miss that piece of steel...

If I had a geek filter, that would definitely be the place for this entry.  As it is, you all get to find out just how much of a kick ass dork I am.

There is a game called VGA Planets that I have been playing on and off for about 17 years now, and through several iterations and expansions of the game.  In its current form it is the single most complex strategy game I have ever seen, and it is a minor obsession of mine.  (Minor!  Minor I say!  Summer, no comments allowed.)

There has been a Planets league running for about two years now.  Which is to say it has run two rounds, as games as complex as these league games require about a year to complete.  I did well in the first round, and earned a spot in the top tier of the league, with some of the best players in the world.  And this round...  I have won!  I conquer all!  Here, you can see the evidence of my geeky victory!  I'm Sphere in the Planets world.

Uh...  Yeah.  I hope you're impressed.  Well at least I'm damn proud of me!

As some of you may know, I have next to no memory of my childhood prior to about 12 years old.  Here in the last few weeks I have recalled several small things, like the fact that I enjoyed doing word-burning using a large circular magnifying glass.  (I bought just such a lens the other day in celebration of remembering something from kiddie land.)

One thing that comes up every so often are images from a particular movie or TV show that I must have found particularly affecting/disturbing.  Every now and then I'll prod the people around me to see if they know what I'm talking about, but I have yet to meet with any success.  So here's my latest try, this time to all my LJ buds.

It's either an outright horror movie, or at the very least a dark fantasy.  There is lots of fog in the movie.  Glowing balls of different colors (I remember yellow and green) about the size of a grapefruit that are carried around by different characters figure strongly in the plot.  I think that these balls transform people at some point, possibly into something unpleasant.  There is a large, cloaked and hooded character, possibly a monster of some sort.  It definitely has one of the balls.  There is a gate (wrought-iron?).  There is a somewhat otherworldly place, like a large building or hall made entirely out of matte white marble, which might be accessed through this gate.  The balls may also have something to do with the gate.  The tone of the memories of this movie are extremely surreal and disturbing, like the freaky twisted dark side of all things faerie.

I can't tell you how psyched I would be to see this movie again, even if it's some shitty B-movie disaster.  It would be entirely worthwhile just to be able to put these old, fragmented memories into some sort of context, and see what sort of thing affected my childhood enough to have actually formed a memory that can break through the cloud that obscures the rest of them.

While Summer is at home bustin' her ass to get ready to leave for Thresholds (at about 3AM tonight), I am stuck at work doing jack shit.  So, I got inspired and decided to cobble together some tasteless icons.  And some moderately tasteless ones from sinfest.com, which seems to have something of a following amongst my friends.  I even gave in and threw up some lolcattitude.

I'd love to create some meaningful or at least cool-looking icons, as so many of you seem to have, but I have icon block.  Meh.

Thresholds, take me away!