I made this video as part of a camping trip for my sister. She wanted to sleep in a tent, wake up, walk out to a beach, and get married. Well if that isn’t what actually happened…
Musical credits:
Artist: Tycho
Track: Adrift
Album: Dive
Label: Ghostly International
https://ghostly.com/artists/tycho
https://radioreality.city
https://www.patreon.com/thehostofrrc
Yesterday I turned 21 years old, and was treated to a dinner and beach date by the love of my life who graciously took me out to eat, in formal wear, and it felt great. I didn’t have a drop of wine nor the corvidae-themed IPAs my sister and soon to be brother-in-law got me. It was actually quite redundant because I had more Turkish coffee last evening and that properly kept me awake until 2.
I intend to get a CC permit when it is convenient for me to, but until then yeah. 21. That’s kinda weird. It’s the last big birthday for a long time.
Let’s stop beating around that bush now, and beat around one twelve feet to the left, because I have OPERATIONAL news for Radio Reality City!
Ladies and gentlemen, I am now in possession of a real live editing PC! Sporting 8GB of RAM, a 2GB dedicated GPU, and 1TB of disk space, I now have the hardware and case I need to edit what I edit and beyond!
No longer shall I render 4k videos overnight! No longer shall I fear for overheating on the part of my laptop! No longer shall RRC live in my pocket while I’m at work, because that’s all it can fit on. The first thing I did upon plugging everything in was download all of RRC’s files and programs onto the hard drive, and the next day bought PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds after an inaugural match of Team Fortress 2. God damn, I can PC game now. And build more into my PC!
So when summer begins, and I record more and more and drone ever so slightly more as well, I will have a dedicated rig to support all of my interests. I might even start getting into VR dev stuff long enough to maintain a healthy interest!
It’s a short one for this journal. Just wanted to throw a little update out there and let you guys know what’s been happening around here.
Publishing has slowed down since I may actually finally be done with Pierce this time and am concentrating on work full time. Hopefully with that will come more opportunities to produce good content, as I’m still trying to hit a good stride for video stuff.
My friends and I did that Pirates! Gold recording, but that’s probably never going to see the light of day. It was awful. It was so bad. But we did it. So we can get better.
Honestly, I think the first thing I’m going to buy with my next paycheck is a proper fucking desk. This hunching over stuff is NOT conducive to a creative process.
With the uptick in everything else, poetry has taken a bit of a hit, but as usual what this means is that there’s plenty of material; it just hasn’t been written about yet.
So that’s all from myself tonight, I hope you’re all sleeping well and find the next couple of poems amusing at all!
Consume reality!
Radio Reality City!
Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these that I nearly forgot how I structured the titles. But I remembered how to write poetry today, that’s pretty fucking nice.
Today is a very prominent day in my history. It has to do with my introduction and coming-of-age story that occurred over the course of five years starting in 2013. Back then I thought I knew everything. And every succeeding year after that, I continued to. At least when I was in high school I was a real narcissistic prick, but college gave way to a more ego-minded person. At least when I got into college I was ready to accept I would be among peers. This was true for a while.
Still, self-awareness isn’t valiant in and of itself. You have to do something with it. Self-actualize a little bit. Not let the mandala effect take over and erase all the good stuff.
That’s why Reality City is organized the way it is. Over the years since its inception, it’s developed into this theory of metacognition and a way of visualizing it. I approached my psyche professor about writing a paper on it as part of an optional piece we can do this quarter, and he was fully on board. It helps that he double-majored in philosophy when he was going through his master’s program.
Wordy wordy word word. Sorry about that. It’s just been a while since I’ve done a journal, today is a historic day in my life for a variety of reasons, and since my last journal things have drastically changed.
I’m now under the employ of a full-time, benefits-giving job that effectively triples my wage. Relationship stuff last week entered a fever pitch and now we’re in the aftermath of an impossible decision, Kirke and I. I’m now a professional photographer today with the assistance of a couple of friends who needed some wedding pictures done. And I look towards the future with more vigor than I was looking a month or so ago.
Something today has been renewed in me. Maybe it’s reading poetry indirectly meant for me that does the trick sometimes. Or just getting out and taking pictures of some very happy people ready to celebrate each other. My life since 5/20/13 has revolved around relationships, and now more than ever that’s true for only the best of reasons.
With university looming, I’ve now decided to save up for a new car that isn’t quite as destroyed as my jeep (and it turns out I might like subcompacts, the newer manual Fiat 500’s to be specific). Which, due to recent events, is no longer marked with my name. Anonymity on my part is the current name of a game that I can’t quite yet talk about, but when I can the fucking doors are going to blast open. No NDA, but simple timing is a weapon right now that I must use effectively. Don’t worry, Radio Reality City will not be cloaked in obscurity for very long.
That being said, the title of this journal is the sound an A10 Warthog makes when it fires its guns! Which is exactly what’s going to happen when the truth can be wrought.
See, Reality City is all about reality. If you know your ingsocs or thought police, even reality can be subject to interpretation and mismanagement. My fear of memory loss has even made me aware of confabulation and implantation, which are actually even more terrifying prospects than losing it all entirely.
So today I’ve been able to open up my notebook for a good honest crack at writing I haven’t been able to stomach for at least a month. I’ve been producing, just nothing done. Kirke seems to think I’m too hard on myself, but I think that’s exactly the opposite of what’s going on. I’m not hard enough on myself!
And over the course of the last month instead of writing I’ve been really focusing on photography, drone stuff, graphic design, and a bunch of other things that aren’t primarily writing related. I’ve overwhelmed myself and needed to get my focus narrowed again. Getting to go do a day-long shoot with a few of my friends helped the photographer in me be satisfied for a couple of days:
And with the gold of May pouring onto trees at sunset I was able to get some good pictures of that, too.
And I’ve also been experimenting with a thing called “databending”, which is where you take an image, turn it into raw data (.tif file format works best, encoded with U-Law), put that data into Audacity, apply an audio effect to the result, and then retransmit that back into an image file (save as… mp3, but then change it to “other uncompressed formats” and apply your own file type extension).
It’ll turn this photo
Into this one
And this was achieved with a reverb effect over 6 minutes or so of the resulting data’s audio. Quite neat to do! I’ve done this after some fractal stuff in GIMP. So that’s pretty cool, I think. I don’t know what practical use it’s gonna have yet, but hey, it’s a thing.
LOT OF DIFFERENT CREATIVE FRONTS I’VE DECIDED TO BURY MYSELF IN
Sheesh, this comes off of testing out stream stuff in this thing I posted today, too.
But today I remembered music can make me think. Not about 5/20/13 or 5/20/14 or 15 or 16 or indeed 17. I had to be Somewhere Else. So I listened to GH by Deadmau5 again for the first time in a long time and the creative taps opened.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to churn some more out. I’ll take my camera to Pierce, leave my laptop here, and continue about my day with notebook at the ready. It’s a nice break from being buried. Probably been why I’ve been creatively blocked lately. I even got a proper twitter @JakeThomasShaw in my frenzy to expand. Still haven’t used it.
Back to the roots, eh? It’s 10:30 PM here and there’s coffee in my veins.
Think about it. A year ago, did you think you’d be here? I certainly didn’t. Voyagers, Foxes, Apocalypses, Destinations, Drones, and Psychopaths. I never thought I would ever be here. Made it this far, though. There’s so much more to go.
Thank you for tuning in, once again. Radio Reality City survives off of listeners, for if there’s no one to listen to one interpretation, there’s quite no point in being different people. And then there’s no point to defining reality.
There’s only 73 days left to Year v! So go forth, make stuff, and consume reality!
Radio Reality City!
A lot of people got together on May 1st, 2018, in Seattle and did a whole lot of disagreeing. And it made for a lovely photography convention.
Featuring every good photo I’ve taken since August 2013.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announce the acquisition of a Canon 100D, the Rebel SL1. With this comes new worlds of A/V productions. Suddenly I can do things I’ve been wanting to for years. A 2K video package in a DSLR body. I even already have the lenses for it that would be most useful.
FOUND OUT WHY PEOPLE BUY BETTER LENSES: the motor on my telephoto lens is LOUd as hell. So probably won’t use that outside of manual focus if I find myself filming with it. But I do already have the fixed 24mm macro lens that will be most useful with its much quieter motor. Now I need to grab a shotgun microphone and possibly even a cage for the thing. This has gotten real interesting this year.
Still on the list is to go to a SLAM event, only to be done once I get a shotgun mic for the SL1. That way we can gonzo-style document the whole night. I think that poetry is only a tool in the journey through any given day. It’s a great thing, but is it ever really the focal point? I’ve been wondering that for a few days.
It’s all about the experience. But the reality is made afterwards.
Funny, then, that I strive away from poems and more towards the video end of things. Wanting to capture exact images of the things I see and experience. Poetry is meant to be the grand interpretation of all of this stuff, but Monarchs now reign in its place. For now, at least.
With that, things around the station have somewhat simmered. Normalized, I could call it, but nothing is ever normal anymore. Not with Monarchs and video and audio and poems and photographs all out to be picked apart.
I’m more concerned with drawing and videography than other stuff.
Which is good! I think. Those kind of skills will pay the bills a lot better than poetry will. The market is where you make it and I’m going to need everything I’ve got to be able to kick off Year V with a bang.
IF THAT MEANS coming up with a plan to produce season 1 of Days of Reality City until then, so be it. I know I can produce those now. But Monarch stuff, and video stuff, is a little different. That requires more power and know-how. I ALSO hate the sound of my own voice and that makes editing those really difficult for me.
It’s with the ease of video that I’m allured to. It’s less meticulous, it seems, and having a good camera now opens up worlds of stuff to do. As aerial stuff is now a thing, so too are dual-camera works utilizing this thing. I REALLY need to get a shotgun mic to make it viable, though.
BUUUUUT if I… say… wanted to film something in my bedroom with the addition of a Yeti microphone along the lines of making fun of advertisements or something like that… I could. Look at that. Suddenly there’s something I can do.
Life has been decently overwhelming. At least now I can document it as it trudges along.
All the while I’ll be consuming what I’m doing. What’s that, you might ask? Why, I’ll be consuming reality!
Radio Reality City!
Today’s planned Monarch run around Puyallup had to be cancelled thanks to the weather. I upgraded all my firmware for it yesterday, but woke up to the dread of rain. The motors on the DJI Phantom 3 Professional are exposed to the air by their vents, rather intuitively, but that also means that flying them in the rain is asking for a short.
So instead today I’ve decided to coup up in my room and continue housekeeping.
I’m still irritated at myself for the absence of writing drive lately. Still waiting on another rush of 12 poems to come rumbling out like it did a week ago. I might need to dig deep to poems I wrote a year ago and rehash some of those. Like Abstergo Invictus and the like. I need to write more like those, and I have ideas to write about the two of those, all I’m waiting for is the fuel.
Keeping that irritation at bay, I’m wiping my old laptop at long last. After I got this new one at the turn of the new year, I’ve been kicking around what I need to do with the old one. Perfectly functioning, just not useful to me anymore. I needed it to sync my iTunes music (over 15,000 songs at this point, weighing in at 130GB), but have recently found out that I can sync my music from an external hard drive, as well. Since I have one of those, I have no use for all the space on my old computer.
Fantastic. Today is off to an alright start but it’s almost 3 PM.
My interest in blackout poetry is increasing as time goes on, but like with execution of creativity lately it hasn’t much gone anywhere.
However, I did pop open my lightbox yesterday and did some close-ups of sentimental items from my life. And I feel like I’m getting better at digital marketing. Bit by bit, my Instagram @jake_thomas_shaw is growing. It seems to be doing a little better than what I did advertising elsewhere. I’ve also finally gotten a hang of that whole Instagram Poetry thing by using my old notebooks as the subjects. Still playing with how to make it all the best it can be. Tagging seems to be a big deal.
I’ve come up with a paper marketing campaign that can put my printer to use, to debut in April at places I’m close to. The only thing I’d be missing is a lamination machine. But hey, piece by piece we can get to where we want as long as we have a plan and keep going.
That’s today. A wipeout. A clean slate of a studio to make things in, and waiting for that slayer of idleness to creep up and take me down. All this setdressing to make sure that when creativity strikes, I am ready.
It feels like I’ve been preparing for war. And that feeling is good. Preparing for so much, for the next offensive. Next time. For November Defensives. It’s been a 24 hour period of reminiscing, making peace, and cleaning my slate. Dusting, as it were. The arms race for Year V is ramping up ever so slightly. Sometimes I need to list out what’s happened so far to keep myself going. That I have done stuff and can continue to. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Let’s get those taps flowing.
Consume reality!
And happy Monday from Radio Reality City!
Flying in Ellensburg wasn’t very fun at all. Nor was the drive. Actually, don’t go to Ellensburg on a whim. Not much to do there besides think.
https://radioreality.city
https://www.patreon.com/thehostofrrc
Monarch Flight: 3/11/18, over Alder Lake in Washington State.
Featuring “When You’re Out”, by Kauf.
https://radioreality.city
https://www.patreon.com/thehostofrrc
It’s been a year of journals! Hooray! And before the mark was even hit I discovered that some content of mine had been stolen in the form of two of these journals! Following is an email I sent a number of days ago to the host of this website that I still haven’t heard from:
“Hello,
I’m the owner of the website https://radioreality.city writing in regards to a website under your host that has stolen two of my posts in their entirety.
The offending material in question appears to have been found by a bot searching for any post on wordpress.com tagged “drones” and simply copy/pasted it to their website at good-planes.com.
Offending material: https://good-planes.com/drones/skulduggery-journal-2-12-18-radio-reality-city/14422/ and https://good-planes.com/drones/the-grind-journal-2-25-18-radio-reality-city/14894/.
Original content: https://radioreality.city/2018/02/12/skulduggery-journal-2-12-18/ and https://radioreality.city/2018/02/25/the-grind-journal-2-25-18/.
As you can see, the original blog content has been simply reuploaded after it had been found by the bot on good-planes.com website. No alteration to the text whatsoever.
I’m asking that we escalate this process to have the offending posts removed from good-planes.com under bounds of copyright infringement. The contact address for the website itself has not yet responded, and I am afraid that this event could potentially be taking traffic from my own website.
Regards, Jake Thomas Shaw.”
So that’s fantastic. A bot has stolen two of the higher-demand pieces of content from my site and copy/pasted it to an aggregating website for aviation stuff. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if I had been asked beforehand. Not like a bot was going to ask permission in the first place, which is all the more reason for me to pursue this.
As you can tell, I’m a pretty tiny poetry and arts website that really can’t have large-scale attacks on my work. Something as petty as this seems funny, and I laugh knowing that when I tag this post with the word “drones” this very post will most likely end up on their website. So to they I say “Go fuck yourself, Good Planes! I’m going to buy your domain in July if you don’t comply!”
Because of this my creative efforts have been stalling, as every single time I think of making something I rather think on what ways I can fight this copyright infringement. I have to be the enforcer, since no one else is going to do that for me. With that in mind, if you’ve ever wanted to use a piece of content I have, just shoot on over to the about page and let me know! I’m actually quite chill about it!
Don’t worry, though, there’s still tons of that in the works.
Once I can cut off a piece of Good Planes and wear it like a proud hunting trophy, I’ve got poems about people I haven’t spoken to in 3 years to write, as I’ve learned more about those I used to know. In the past month, every single friend group I’ve ever belonged to has had a presence in some way, and that itself is compelling enough to write.
So I write, and I’ve gotten three Monarch flights planned out for hopefully sometime by the end of this month. Might be a bit of a stretch, but the weather and location here hasn’t been too nice to fly a recently-repaired phantom in.
In addition to this, more short stories have been piling up on my proverbial desk as I continue starting stories and not finishing them. This is most certainly the cause for the delay of further iterations in the Deneb Mythos. There’s also two unnamed horror projects I have planned out and fleshed out slightly that haven’t been moved on in months.
Broadcasts finally have a refined season plan. The Days of Reality City will be published in seasons, but on an irregular schedule. I have the plotline of the pilot episode down, and an extension of that if it works through to the end of a 10-episode season. The first two Days published thus far, on Titans and Photography, will not count as episodes in that season. They will be labeled as being in Season Zero.
I’m trying to juggle a lot but am still drawn to the more immediate arena that I do well in: poetry. This year I’m going to be published in the Pierce College SLAM again, with Gothic Lotus, Death6ish, and Ides of May making their first print published appearance.
And to blend some audio and poetry together, I’m currently trying to get ahold of the Swedish electronic group Tape, to use their song Beams as a backing track for a reading of my poem Wrong Number; for which the inspiration came from the song. Because Wrong Number is such a strange little piece that isn’t exactly pronounceable all the way through, the idea when I wrote it was to distort it with common noises surrounding telecom. In fact the second poetry reading I did as part of SLAM was going to be Wrong Number before I realized I couldn’t read aloud what I had written. This would realize that dream and also be a piece of spoken word poetry that I can claim my name to. Which would be pretty neat.
I do have an excerpt for you this time! It’s been a while since we’ve had one of those. This is going to be the entirety of “6s Plus Autocomplete”, an experimental poem I wrote entirely using my new out-of-the-box iPhone’s autocomplete function to write. Since I will be posting this poem in its entirety, I will be charging $50,000 each for the license to republish this poem that I, Jake Thomas Shaw, have written. This offer is on the table from now until 3/16/18, and any other website found to have published this text during that time, through any outlet not representing me or given written consent, will be pursued for copyright infringement of the license above. This license will add to itself every day it is infringed upon, so a two day infringement shall cost $100,000, a three day infringement shall cost $150,000, and so on. This license is also on a per-case basis, meaning each individual iteration of this poem appearing will have the same penalties applied; two posts on one website equals the same penalty enforced on both instances, effectively multiplying the cost of the copyright infringement. With that lovely little court-enforceable disclaimer right smack dab nestled in this text, here is “6s Plus Autocomplete”:
“Hey you can have
it
tomorrow night
or maybe
tomorrow night
I will
let him in
and I will
let him out.”
“Hey you can have
it
tomorrow night
or maybe
tomorrow night
I will
let him in
and I will
let him out.”
The above poem is also © Jake Thomas Shaw 2018. Just for good measure.
This poem was a very spur of the moment idea, and I thoroughly enjoyed disabling the annoying autocomplete feature after this was done. What abstract things lie at the core of an Apple iPhone, I wonder, for it to turn out a poem as vivid as this?
Who knows?
That’s going to be all the energy I have today, listeners. I bid you to watch the skies, for there is Good Planes about, and they are a mindless, predatory drone aiming to take this post by tomorrow evening. I can’t wait to tell them they owe me a lot of money at about the same time tomorrow evening, since I’ll be watching them like a damn hawk. Or crow.
So to those of you here, I appreciate you sticking through this agonizingly slow progression of events, and content release, but I promise you we’ll begin Days of Reality City Season 1 very soon. And I’ve got a Deneb Mythos for you to pop out real soon!
And if you’re coming to my website through Good Planes, welcome! There’s much better content to be found here, I assure you!
Thank you all so much for listening, and please consider becoming a patron to support the station and keep it broadcasting. A single dollar can power this hilltop for 5 hours!
Consume reality! https://radioreality.city!
