Ad Ydologonia

This will probably be the last post this blog will ever receive.

The domain ydolon.com has moved, and it has a new blog of its own hosted in a place other than wordpress.com. I decided not to export what was already here in order to start fresh, and with a slightly different objective. So this is farewell.

See you at saychan.com and ydolon.com.

Facebook’s Like is Killing my Friends

Most people have seen them, a lot of people get them, and even more people give them away.

To my friends and family: You reap what you sow. I appreciate and love you, but one can only ignore so many offenses before getting extremely aggravated.

Facebook’s Like feature came as a way of telling your friends, acquaintances, and your favourite people that you liked what was going through their mind. Facebook is a huge network, and is bound to have right about every type of person that could possibly exist, and while that makes the community incredibly diverse, it is also a perfect place to herd people into doing something. More than once I have seen an artist or the administrator of a page asking something from their followers – both good things and bad things.

Something I have seen on the rise though, has been people mimicking other people’s conduct.

I had noticed it was happening more and more, but it was not until a little experiment I made last week that I noticed something was definitely wrong. After noticing there were some people that made a habit out of liking my status updates, I decided to post phrases and comments that I knew were morally incompatible with those people: I was already expecting them to do it, but it still surprised me to see them act… they liked things they should not have liked. After poking and wandering around other profiles I noticed that seldom do people disagree with others, and while this might be attributed to friends being respectful towards each other (yeah, right…), it is pretty obvious that people have found a new way to stop thinking.

I would like to believe that in a normal conversation an idea is brought up… Some people will agree with it, others will not, and some others will voice no opinion of it; A conversation on the Internet is a little different in that there are people who have an opinion, lurkers, and trolls. Now, the Facebook behaviour I described is just terrifying: Forget having an opinion, Facebook is 5% trolls, 90% likers, and 5% lurkers/newbies/annoyed people like me.

So what is wrong with liking your ideas? Would you rather have me NOT liking them?

I would rather have people telling me why they like or dislike my ideas. After a week of having Christian-Catholic people pretty much telling me (see: Like) that church burnings and CP are absolutely cool, I have no doubt that either people just randomly like my statuses or they have successfully stopped processing the information I hand them out.

I can only hope they are just morally obscure.

A morning at Marché Jean-Talon

This week the fridge at the apartment had been a rather unpleasant and depressing sight. Something needed to be done.

While it is easier to go to a supermarket or to the Maisonneuve market (which is closer to me), it is always much more fun to head over to the Jean Talon market in Montreal. Both winter and summer have always great sights to show, but summer is particularly colourful, and the weather makes navigation through the market incredibly easy.

Being the amateur photographer that I am, it is funny and frustrating when a hundred pictures turn into seventy, and those seventy pictures end up being six pictures in a post. Never again will I criticize concert photographers who deliver one or two pictures per event set.

Here are the other five pictures that made it here:

The Shape of Things to Come

I know I have written about three or four of these posts in this blog before, but they somehow help me update some people about my life and at the same time help me clear my mind.

Some things first…

Back in May 2009 I found myself with a four day pass for an event I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to attend, after merely months of listening Industrial music and coming from a background of Metalhead close-mindedness, I stood for hours during sets at Kinetik Festival 02… I can only say I was shocked. Fast forward to November, and I was already listening to many kinds of Electronic music (most of it was EBM). I picked up a couple of band names and decided I was going to make music with them… but I hadn’t really given all of that a decent thought. Anyway… ten months and six domains later I have finally figured something out. I am finally going to feed my own hunger for music and have fun experimenting at the same time. After giving it a lot of thought I decided to carry on with three of about seven different projects I created; three is a reasonable number considering I have little to no experience with the genres I am playing with… I will be listing them as soon as I start completing songs.

On another note, I have purposively slowed down my posting speed because… I will be erasing this blog soon. The domain ydolon.com will be used for a new blog (and probably a fully functional website) in late September or early October, so this place won’t get that many updates in the meantime. Sorry about that.

I will also (once again) stop being incredibly active in places other than twitter and last.fm. I am terribly behind my book quota and am actually trying to get some things done for a book (books) I would like to have published. Sorry for you MSN fiends… there are many matters that I must attend, and they will not be reflected online in any way… for the time being.

A Status Update Story: The Rockstar’s Wife

Another week gone wasted. Another month spent on alcohol.  Life as High School sweethearts was much easier for Tony and Olive than it was a few months ago. With the band’s big move to a major record label in around the corner, they were living it up as loud and as hard as they could.

It all began when he proposed a week before graduation, to everyone’s surprise there was no baby compelling him to take this course of action: There was only love. She was aiming for med school while he enrolled in an Art History program. Things rolled nicely even after they married: She had a part time job in a retail shop in the outskirts of town while he spent afternoons with his band Mannequin Voice. The band used to play a few gigs every couple of months whenever a band member or a friend of his needed someone to liven up a party a little. They were proud of what they were doing back then.

Back then, when they still had an ounce of pride.

Things went completely FUBAR (or maybe really good) when a local promoter saw they had something to offer and booked them as the opening act for a relatively large and popular band in the scene.

They destroyed the stage and conquered the crowd.

Even the headliner didn’t see it coming.

From that point on they were booked in almost every local show, and soon they found themselves playing in neighbouring cities every weekend. Things were going great for the band, but not so much for the band members. With loans piling up and no jobs to get rid of them, things were going not so good… especially for frontman Tony, who was always the one to place money in dangerous spots first, and the one who had to endure the hardest parts of parties and public attention.

But this is a story about Olive, so let’s go back to her.