China, Album, Wandering, and Cock

So, in about an hour I'm going to head over to 21 Grand for a screening of The Invisible Forest. This is the film I shot back in August for Mr. Antero Alli, where I grew my hair and beard out to insane lengths and then dyed it all white in order to play an actor who was playing Prospero. I've seen an almost finished cut of the film already, but I am very curious to see what a paying audience thinks of it. It's a very beautiful film, but I'm too close to it to know if it will make sense to people not involved in the project. Films about madness and dreams are funny that way.

The Sweetie Tanya cast album is limping forward right now, although everything is currently depending on me getting all four musicians into the same room at the same time so they they can jam the songs they have and get a feel for how they work with bass and drums. I've never sat in on something like this before, so it promises to be quite the experience.

I've just been asked to appear on the Jennifer Justice show on Feb 19th. This is a somewhat underground comedy-variety-interview show that Ms. Justice was doing out of 50 Mason until they had to close their doors due to some mysterious problem that most likely involves the Yakuza and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. All I know at this point is that I will be the guest for a segment called "Ask a Man's Cock". What my cock has to say will be a matter of great interest and surprise, especially to me. Normally all it tells me is that it wants to go into a nice, warm, wet, dark space and throw up. I wonder if it wants to vote for Hillary or Obama. Neither are normally its type.

I've started being a bit more intense about monitoring what's going on with Radiostar, since we're getting between 12 to 15 thousand downloads a month. I've already identified a couple of daily download robots and blocked those, but other potential non-humans are harder to target. One IP address downloaded the same show 43 times in eleven days, but there was no clear pattern in when those 43 downloads happened, and any remote site that has a Flash based medial player that is referencing our stuff could generate those kinds of responses. The fact that the IP address comes out of China adds another layer of mystery since my understanding is that everything online in China is being filtered through their servers before it gets to the end user, so 43 people in Beijing could very well be listening to our shows, but we're only seeing the government server they're passing through.

I'll continue to monitor shows that get extra high amounts of traffic and see if I can determine any other patterns, but for now I expect to see our "audience" shrink over the next few months while I remove access of the bandwidth sucking robots that are coming way to close to costing me extra domain hosting monies.

Life has generally been greatly improved since I started working at least three days a week from home. I get much more done here, and when I *do* have some down time, I can be much more productive with it. For example, I did laundry, swept, vacuumed, and mopped the kitchen during time I would normally have spent waiting for downloads to complete, or walking to and from the office. My home smells like pine sol.

Yesterday I took the day "off", since I had only about an hour's worth of work to do all day, and only about fifteen minutes work that I knew of. I ended up walking all over Lake Merritt and downtown Oakland with a new friend who lives nearby and who was also off work. It was a gorgeous day and I can't remember feeling so good and refreshed between 11am and 4pm on a Thursday.