About the Music Part 2

As I stated in my original post, I have been strongly considering not posting any more music up to the web. My soundcloud account has run out of FREE space and the time it takes to create and share the music, just takes too much time if nobody is supporting it. Basically it becomes a complete waste of time without any support. From the feedback I received, I noticed that a number of people thought the only way to support a musician was by purchasing their music. That is hardly the case and not what I was trying to get across. So let me make this perfectly clear for future reference. There are many ways to support a band/artist. Of course you can buy the music, but you can also share a link to it, or even just tell your friends. You can also show your support by following them on various sites.

At any rate, a funny thing seemed to happen, after I posted my last song to Soundcloud. I started gaining more followers. While at the same time people who rarely RT’ed my music posts, pretty much stopped. With all this conflicting information, I am left at a loss, as to where to go.

I decided, the most simple way to find out is to add new songs to Reverbnation and Bandcamp only, thus watching the plays at those sites and how much sharing is going on, should provide me with all the information I need, in order to decide if sharing music is something to continue with or not.

However, I will be deleting my Fb band page and Soundcloud account, merely for the fact that they have proven useful in no way what-so-ever. If you are a band I connected with on FB or Soundcloud, you are welcome to instead connect on Reverbnation,  or Bandcamp.

Guess we will just have to play it by ear. 😉 

Axe

The “like” button…On WordPress.com

I found this post today. Seems when I left Facebook, I thought I left behind the days on people just hitting the like button and never gracing my post with a comment. Since leaving Facebook due to this lack of communication, I have discovered that they have done the same thing here at WordPress.com. Only they have made it worse! Not only does the like button leave no way for the Original poster to reply back, but now it has become a mechanism of spam. You see, at this beloved website host, you lured me into hosting my blog here 7 yrs. ago with promises of NO ADS, and have since added ads. Promises of no spam with Akismet spam protection, and now you have now created an easy way for spammers and other bloggers for that matter, to put links into my posts but simply clicking one frickin’ little button… the like button. This provides a link to their Gravatar, which then provides links, to all of their websites. Hey, wordpress, that is exactly what every blogger wanted! They wanted a way for any blogger to come by and place unasked for links to other sites. We want our readers to not reply! We want our readers to go elsewhere and not bother with seeing more of our site! We want the ads, we were promised we would not get! We want spam, we did not ask for! NOT!

I have no idea what craphead is running this blog hosting site, but they obviously need to pull their head out of their ass. I am getting sick of people lying to get you into joining their sites, and then changing policies later, to make more money. If you are tired of crap like this speak up, make this post the top post and maybe things will change. Or you can just sit on your fat ass and be a sheep!

Axe

Farewell Facebook.

I want to start this the right way, the correct way. But I am not really sure there is one. So I’ll start, with what I usually do, when I first get on my computer. Once it is up and everything has loaded, the first thing I do is check email. I know that seems odd, in these days of social media, but it is a habit now. It is what I have been doing, since I first got on a computer, more than 15 yrs. ago. As I was looking and noticing that I once again had nothing new to see, I accidentally clicked on the right side of the email list, and somehow managed to end up at the first email I still have.  I then started glancing through the names, periodically stopping to take a glance, at this old email and that one, when I stopped upon the very first email, I received a reply from someone here, where this blog has lived for the last 7 yrs. You see I had just begun my blog here, and she was kind enough to reply to one of my first posts, so I sent her a “Thank You” email. Hoping it would encourage her to come back because I had taken the time. The idea worked, she came by and commented and I replied. Soon after, her friends were coming by and with time, I believe more people were coming by, not because of the astounding posts I was making, but because of the interaction they expected to get and indeed got. I replied to nearly every comment. In fact, when RSS feeds became the thing of the day, I was not surprised to discover, that more and more people subscribed to the comments feed, than the actual blog feed.

In fact, it grew so disproportional, that I eventually had to remove the RSS comments feed link. I began to realize that those people who were not visiting the website and getting to comment. were missing out on the most important part of the entire experience. They were completing missing out on the interaction.

Not going to state that the early days of Facebook reminded me of that, because the early days of Facebook, I had no friends there yet. In fact, I sent an invite to every one of my old friends before they arrived there. I am not saying they all discovered Facebook because of me or something egotistical like that. I am merely stating when I got there, none of them were there yet, and it was a lonely and barren place for me. But with time all things change and eventually they showed up, one by one, and the days of interacting once again were upon me. They were commenting and I was again replying, in my most sarcastic manner…life was good. But then the “Like” button appeared. I am pretty certain it was not always there. But perhaps it was and people just did not use it. People in general, seemed to still be, in the age of interaction. They seemed to still get that interacting with the OP( Original Poster) was the way to establish communication and develop any kind of real relationship.

As time passed by, the “Like” button, become more and more the predominant form of communication. Someone would see something you posted, but instead of adding their own original thoughts on the subject, they would simply click the button and in return for that small effort, they received the same on a post or two of theirs. But for you, as I sure you are beginning to see, the communication, the interaction, was totally lost in the process. Because you cannot reply to a “Like”. You can only give what you have received. The “like” button completely eliminated the need for communication. The need and desire to interact became non-existent. The “Like” button was not building any relationships. It was destroying all the essential elements required in creating them. It was this simple little button, that I believe, was the beginning of Facebook’s fall from grace. Facebook no longer was a place to find and make new friends. As Facebook aged, and more and more people began to simply just click the button, real interaction and communication took a huge down turn and people began to lose their sense of connectedness, to this site. People began to notice that they were no longer making connections. For awhile, I and many others, sat in denial of the facts. We did not want to see what was really taking place. But everyone eventually has to face the truth. It does not matter how ugly or unpleasant it might be, there always comes the day of reckoning. The day when we are forced to accept the hard and often cruel truth. It seems, I was one of those who accepted it later, and held on longer than most.

As I went through my purge earlier this week, I could not help but notice the number of friends I was blocking that simply had left. No words were spoken to me, or perhaps I simply missed the memo. They had seen that Facebook was no longer a place to make friends or build any kind of relationship. I, being the stubborn person that I am, thought somehow I could change the mindset of my friends on Facebook and thusly, wrote a series of posts aimed at emphasizing the importance of feedback. I even threatened to block them and then followed through, when nothing changed. All this was in vain though. It changed nothing. I now have fewer friends(that for the most part were not really friends anyway) and still mostly, just get the same results.

If you ignore all the evidence that stands before you, then you are a fool. I do not consider myself a fool and thusly, have decided that my time with Facebook is over. It is a complete waste of my time to be there, when the only forms of communication and interaction I am going to be getting, are going to be likes, pokes, and a rare message. I am far too old and have way too many things I need to accomplish, with what little time I remain upon this planet, to be wasting any of it on a site that does not promote any real interaction amoungst it’s members. Sadly, my eyes have now opened, and I clearly see the time to leave has come.

To those of you who still wish to remain friends, I can only offer a list of websites you should subscribe to( to be informed when there is a new post) and my personal guarantee that I will be genuine in every communication between us, as I always have been. To those of you who desire to go our separate ways…goodbye, good luck, and may life grant you all you desire. Here is a list of the websites, I will still be keeping for sure(not making any guarantees on how long).-

https://twitter.com/JB_Thomas Twitter account, mostly used to link sites.
https://axewielderx.wordpress.com/  My main blog. Nearly everything gets put here. All of my jokes, funny pics, and even my music can be heard here.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Axewielderx My host for all my videos.
http://www.reverbnation.com/lucidchaos My host of EVERY song I have created over the last 11 yrs.
http://authorjbthomas.wordpress.com/ The ONLY site where any of my writings exist.
http://naturalwildlifedesigns.wordpress.com/ A site where eventually, all the pics I have taken will be hosted. A work in progress…

Over the course of the next few days, I will be removing content from my Facebook personal and Band pages. I won’t deactivate the personal account because I use it to login at certain sites. Then I will simply be gone.

It is funny, that it was the last thing I said in that email I spoke of earlier, that finally made me decide to do this. It was this…”After all, if we spend our life alone, what have we lived for.”

Axe

Birthdays, what do they really mean?

I suppose they can mean many things, to many people. They can be just another day for some. For others, they can be a day they wish would just end, or would rather forget it even existed. I view them a little differently than most, I suppose, but I am certain there are others out there like me, who view birthdays as milestones.  But what does that mean, really?

Well, let’s look at what an actual milestone is and then the picture may become clearer. A milestone is a place you stop, and you can then take a minute to look back at all you have seen, since your last one. Now you can see, I hope, what I mean when I say I view a birthday as a milestone. I stop, and look back over the previous year and take inventory of what I learned. With that idea in mind, last year implemented new settings to my Facebook account. The major setting, that was most important, was for nobody to be able to post to my timeline, but myself. This allowed two things to happen. People could not post crap and tag it with my name, to use it as a way of getting more people to go, to their timeline. It also meant if someone had something they wanted to say to me, they had to reply to something I posted(which as a side note, they would have to actually read my posts) or they had to send me a direct message.

I did this because of some very obvious reasons. I wanted to know who was actually reading what I posted, and I wanted to know which people really actually gave a shit enough about others, to send a message or even reply to a post on my timeline, on my next birthday. By last years birthday, I already suspected that most people were not reading a damn thing I posted and wondered why I would then get so many b-day wishes, if people were completely ignoring me. Then I realized, that people were not reading anything other than the little notification on their home screen, and replying directly from that. Therefore, there was no reason to ever read anything. You can just post a happy b-day message once a year, and never have to visit that person’s profile or read one fucking word, that they wrote.

This year I have the results of those settings. I may have had to wait an entire year to be sure, and to KNOW I had completely accurate results, but I believe it was worth the wait.

On Facebook, I have a total of 1064 friends. Out of those 1064 “friends” only 19 considered me worthy, of them taking their time to send me a personal Happy Birthday wish. I also made one post about it being my birthday. This post was meant to see how many would actually go to my profile. Only 2 people replied, to that b-day post. So there you have it, 21 people out of 1064 “friends” actually took the time to wish me happy b-day. That is a grand total of 2% of the people I know on FB, actually gave a shit enough to say anything to me, on my birthday.

I am betting a lot of you are now wondering how many people really give a fuck about you. My advice to you, don’t bother. The answer, even if it is better results than mine, will still be very disappointing.

Now getting this information, this hard proof, at this time could not probably not have been timed better. For awhile now I had been asking myself why it was that everything I posted, no matter where I posted it at(Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, G+, Myspace, ReverbNation, Soundcloud, Youtube, just to name a few) seemed to generate little or no response. In fact, no response has really become the norm, at nearly every place. It did not seem to matter what I posted either. A writing, a joke, a picture, a song, etc. I just did not matter where or what I posted. I began to figure out that I could post I died and it would be like everything else. Simply ignored.

I began to realize that the universe was trying to tell me something. But exactly what, I was not sure of. For awhile, I was convinced that it was trying to tell me, that I simply do not matter and should just end it. That seemed to be the message it was sending me. So loudly, so clearly, I cannot say I never considered just putting myself, out of my misery.

But then my little birthday experiment told me, that there are people, who do give a shit about me. There might not be many but there are a few. This message, combined with everything else, gave me a complete picture. Now the message, that the universe has been trying to send me, is a bit more defined.

All the years of life, that I have lived, I have had to deal with everything, from being bullied to being abused to being ignored. Yet, I have always said, it does not matter, if people, in general, hate me the moment they meet me. It does not matter, if family and friends backstab me. It does not matter, how much this world abuses me, I will rise above it all. I will be the better person. I will continue giving people a chance, by opening up, by sharing my self and my life. Now I finally realize, that I was doing it all wrong. I finally got, what the universe has been trying to tell me, and now I can see how I was wrong, in my thinking.

What I have been doing all along, is instead of rising above everything bad, that has happened to me, I have been rewarding people for their abuse. I have been giving, and giving and giving, and not receiving. I have been trying to be better but I now see, that it was a complete waste. If you give money to a fool, then the money is simply lost and has served no purpose. It has helped no one.

Now I get what the universe has been saying. It has been trying to tell me, that I have already given too much, and that I have given it to people who do not deserve it, or do not know how to receive it. I have given to fools, and no one will benefit from that. They shall not be enriched and I shall never be thanked, for all that I have given. The time for me to give, has now come to an end. The universe has been trying to tell me, that I have already given to much, and now that I can clearly see this, I shall give no more.

This does not mean I won’t ever post again. On the contrary, I might actually post more(not making any guarantees). But , what I do post in the future, will not be of my blood, time, creativity, and energy, spent. It will be other people’s crap. I will go steal and share someone else’s crap, just like every other motherfucker out there does. Nothing I post in the future will be something I created with my camera, computer, or musical instruments, unless it is something I have already created. Those works I have started, will be finished, but then all new stuff will stay with me, until the universe sends me a clear message to the contrary.

This year’s birthday milestone was a very important one for me. I learned sharing with people who are undeserving of it is the equivalent of rewarding bad behavior. I won’t make that mistake again. Thank you for reading and may your minestones show you as much, as mine have.

Axe

 

Par Typical

WordPress says they added a new feature and it does not work. Supposedly our blog is supposed to be able to be put on Facebook. However here is the result of my attempt.Just click on the thumbnail. I tried using both the url and the feed with no success.

As a side note, WordPress has went into the censorship business also. They deleted 2 of my comments to recent wordpress news articles. Kinda funny when you consider neither one of the posts contained even remotely vulgar or discrimitory.

Gotta love wordpress! (In case you did not notice that was sarcasm)

AXE