Friday, August 10, 2012

In the gripping ongoing tale of lyrical transcription

Behind the near-daily stream of lyrics that a couple dozen people* apparently view on average each day is a monumental work of transcription - I have to date written over 3,500 songs in the course of these projects, of which over 1,800 remain to be transcribed - the halfway point of this project being (as the math geniuses among you have already deduced) a ways off yet.

Throughout the blogging of the first project, for the most part I barely kept up with the posting and indeed running out of transcribed songs (and the will to transcribe them) held up the posting many times, sometimes for weeks or months.  Eventually I acquired a discipline about it, something you'd think I'd kind of have a method for at this point.  And so I've slowly but surely been getting ahead.  At the moment I have a stockpile of three hundred and some transcribed songs for the posting.  At some point in the future I'd like to actually attain parity - get caught up and then just transcribe them as I write them.

I recently decided to start closing the gap from both sides.  I started a new notebook not too long ago (June 16 to be precise) and decided that from here on out I was going to transcribe all the new songs, so I caught up from June 16 and now I'm current.  Meanwhile the older songs slowly bridge the gap - the most recent addition was from 6/22/07, so I guess it's a 5 year gap, which remains daunting, but I guess that's the song of the day in a nutshell - taking a daunting number and fucking it up a little bit one day at a time.

It's interesting though - when I finally got on track transcribing the first project the songs were all 10 years old.  It had been a real active ten years in my life (changed jobs 3 times, got married, bought a house, had a kid) and in many ways the songs were quite remote, almost artifacts.  Often I wondered where did this come from?  Since there was a long hiatus between the projects in real life, the currency of what I was transcribing took a sharp jump when I moved into that project, and the more my transcribing gets ahead of the daily composing and posting schedule the closer to the now I get.  Now I'm also transcribing stuff I wrote yesterday, if not five minutes ago.  Will it change how I feel about it?  Will I even look at any of the new stuff until half a dozen years from now when I finally post it?

*I suspect that in fact I have considerably less regular readers than that.  I've been looking at my traffic lately and there are more than a couple anomalies suggesting that things may be getting gamed in some number of obscure ways.  For starts there are implausible numbers of visitors from outside the United States.  Like, Germany has supposedly generated almost half of recent pageviews.  That seems unlikely.  If not, yo Deutschland up in hizzy!  Give me a shout out in the comments my Germans, ich bin ein Berliner!  But seriously no, right?  But what in the hell angle can there be in visiting random blog pages?  Put on your tinfoil hat with me for a minute and I'll tell you one thing I've been noticing - more than a few times I've seen little traffic spikes originating from sites that just don't make any sense and when I go there it's some awful advertisement, like the real awful kind where a video autostarts telling you about seduction tactics and if you try to close the window it runs some Javascript bullshit on you that's all like "naw man you don't really wanna leave this solid gold get laid advice for reals?" and you have to click "like for reals dawg I'm out" to close the page and after you've done it you feel like you should maybe wash your clicker finger.

I'll just lay it out straight I think people have figured out that pathetic bloggers sit and troll around their sad little BS traffic statistics and have figured out how to make their shitty sites show up in your stats.  If anyone has an explanation for this that makes me seem like less of an asshole I'm way up to hear about it though.

what

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