Philip Goddard's Blog Pages (1)

Introduction

I started this blog belatedly, in June 2017.

For many years I'd rather vaguely been intending to have some sort of blog on this site, in which I could post notes on interesting experiences, new thinking, and of course breaking news, but somehow it always ran into long grass because I had so many other demands on my time. Actually getting this started here should hopefully encourage me to be reasonably regular if not hugely frequent in posting items here.

I know that some people have been wanting me all along to be running a blog because their primary interest was in having a place where they could 'get into discussion' with me or indeed simply post their own ideas or indeed abuse and destructive criticisms — and those people will continue to be frustrated by this arrogant son of a right old cow, for I don't have time to engage with them, and my sites are not here for people to go expressing opinions / beliefs.

That wouldn't be much of an issue, but those who've visited my Clarity of Being site will well understand (surely!?) that I'm in very many people's BAD BOOKS because of the intransigent and indeed 'arrogant' way that this bad boy challenges and cuts through all their beliefs and indeed ALL belief. So, it's just hard cheese for all those poor people who are being so disenfranchised and not being given an opportunity here to pollute this space by adding their own opinions / beliefs!

Here Beginneth the Belated Blog…

(Most recent entries first)

More recent posts (after 5 February 2022)

Those posts are on Page 2 of this Blog.

 

Closure of 'the astral non-reality' completed last Sunday — Just possibly it really has!…

(Mickey Mouse the Mighty does it again!)

5 February 2022

Oops, this is a belated post as I've been very busy on various website matters. This is a sequel to the previous post here.

Yes, on the basis of strong indications I've been getting from within, it would appear that my outlandish little experimental project, which perhaps we could call Project 'Astral Termination', has now scored its ultimate jackpot, apparently with completion of the closure of the astral non-reality last Sunday afternoon, 30 Jan 2022. For the sordid details, please see the 30 February update on the project's page, Project Fix the Human Condition. Please take on board the various cautions and caveats I give there about taking an objective view on this and awaiting verification through effects getting noticed widely in the world at large.

As I explain there, because this is a completely unprecedented happening (i.e., if indeed it really has occurred), my inner inquiry is unable to indicate how soon or even whether at all any changes would really come to notice widely before we all get wiped out by economic collapse or/and some other self-inflicted calamity. That's not necessarily because such changes aren't happening, but they may be taking place too slowly to attract attention from the vast majority of people yet (because of their load of soul programming).

I myself am getting consistent clear internal observations that point to something in the nature of astral closure indeed having come about, and I've been getting consistent and clear indications in various ways from my own deepest aspects that this is for real now — but nonetheless I'm being very wary about this and, as I say, I await verification before I can sensibly and honestly say that astral closure really does appear to have come about.

As to why many people would still be getting apparent garbage attacks and seeing astral-sourced visuals, and apparitions, I explain about that on the Project page. It doesn't necessarily mean that the astral and garbage are still with us, thank goodness!

I should just add here that, even in the absence of external verification for the time being, the longer my own internal impressions and observations of what's changed in my own system remain consistent without significant reversions, the more confident I personally shall become of the authenticity of the two events I've reported here, while still remaining fairly guarded about what I say in public.

Dissolution of the garbage / 'forces of darkness' completed yesterday — Just possibly it really has!…

26 January 2022

If you're unfamiliar with my Clarity of Being site and the bogeymen and paranoid-schizophrenic dragons (just waiting to 'get' you) that dwell therein, this may raise your eyebrows or/and your dismissive invective sky-high!

It appears that a little boldly innovative but completely rationally based experimental project of mine (it's completely free from any belief basis) with monumentally world-changing potential may now be at fruition point, with the garbage (mistakenly equated with 'forces of darkness', 'dark force', 'forces of evil') dissolution allegedly having completed yesterday morning (UK time), and completion of astral closure apparently to follow within a few weeks.

Just ponder the enormity of what this cheeky little monkey may have succeeded in initiating…

Please see yesterday's update to Project Fix the Human Condition, which explains all, complete with due pile of cautions and caveats.

Further intensive improvement work on websites, but almost all 'invisible' — my new blitz…

27 December 2021

On 19 December, Phil Ricketts, with pro experience in website design, coding and SEO, and one of those benefiting from my Clarity of Being site, emailed me offering some punchy and quite radical suggestions for improving my sites' SEO through implementing semantic markup on my sites. A fairly small number of 'semantic' tags have been widely used for decades, and I use them too, but the majority are nothing like so widely used, and had seemed to me to be a dark world of esoteric mysteries that would take far too much of my time to get involved with.

So, when Phil approached me about that I felt pretty dubious, particularly in view of the likely huge time investment in applying such additions / changes to all my web pages, but at least he'd taken the considerable trouble to make a 'skeleton' mock-up of one of my Clarity of Being pages, with just basic structure, stripped of content, and with HTML5 semantic tags (with ARIA roles) replacing the tags I was using, with explanatory comments.

This proved to be a real wake-up call, for I could see clearly how use of those tags would make it much, much easier for search engines and screen readers for people with impaired sight to understand the structure of the site and its elements, and understand the relative importance of each, and any special meaning intended by use of a particular element at a particular location. That should translate into eventual somewhat improved page rankings in search engines, though I assume it would make only a minor and not necessarily significant difference with Google, which appears to have a much bigger reason for having my Clarity of Being site severely down-ranked.

From that point onwards it didn't need anyone to try to 'sell' semantic markup to me anymore — I just started working on it right away. It would be such a big task to do completely that I assume that a lot of the smaller detail stuff won't get done, but at least for the time being I'm working on what I can apply on a large scale — primarily though not exclusively by use of PowerGrep to carry out various global search / replace actions using sometimes pretty complex regular expressions.

I'm carrying out this work taking one element at a time to amend throughout the sites; today I completed processing the 'At a glance…' panels that come near the top of all main content pages. The only visible change is that the 'At a glance…' bit is now in a heading 2 element instead of bold / italics in a paragraph — though it looks different from my normal headings because it's styled to be 'inline' rather than 'block' display. What a normal visitor wouldn't see is that the container that constitutes that panel now has a tag saying <section role="doc-abstract"> — the quotes there enclosing two relevant ARIA roles for that panel's contents —, instead of the original eponymous and pretty anonymous <div> without any indication of its raison d'être. That tells search engines and screen readers that that panel's contents are some sort of abstract of the main content and so is important, rather than being just a note or aside.

Most or all of the further changes will also be more or less invisible to the normal site visitor, and I mention this here primarily to explain why I'll not be doing much other site updating for a while. Under the bonnet, though, the changes in the markup are already beginning to make each page's code look easier for me to understand at a glance, and to carry out further management operations in the future. More identifiable elements can often mean it being easier to carry out global search / replace operations using appropriate regexes.

Serendipity time! — Seeing cosmic ray effects and so-called 'visual snow'

1 October 2021

It's snowing and has always been snowing wherever I've been — only I hadn't realized!

Just kidding, of course! — Or am I?

But first things first.

Very occasionally this year (and apparently never before) I've seen — seemingly within my physical vision (i.e., rather than looking to be something external) — a point of light travelling quite slowly across a smallish part of my field of view, drawing a fairly erratic clear bright but not dazzling moderately narrow, very solid-looking white trail. I'd see each for about one to five seconds before the whole track rapidly faded away. Until that fading-away, the whole track was of constant brightness — no progression of a fade from back towards front as one might reasonably expect. On one or two occasions I've seen two appear at the same time, fairly close together but tracing independent tracks.

The overall direction of movement has so far always been an erratic leftwards from approximately centre, and I'm not sure at the moment whether these are being seen at all in my right eye (the 'lazy' one, whose central vision is suppressed). I don't remember any of them moving vertically apart from the vertical component of their erratic leftward progress.

Every time I saw one of those, which appeared much more 'real' and 'solid' than any other visual disturbances I got, such as my occasional ocular migraines ('migraine auras'), I got an intuitive impression that I must be seeing the movement of some sort of atomic / subatomic particle within the eye.

That wouldn't be my directly seeing the particle, of course, which would be immensely too tiny to see directly at all, but either a neurological disturbance in one's internal optical system triggered by the particle, or, I guess much more likely, physiological disturbances on the retina caused by the particle's travel there.

Anyway, today at last I got round to doing an online search for such a phenomenon. My findings from that indicate high probability (at least) that so-called cosmic rays are the culprit. In truth they aren't rays but high-energy subatomic particles from the Sun and from other parts of the Universe.

Just why I've started noticing this phenomenon only so recently, I don't know, but my inner inquiry on this points to it resulting from an actual slight improvement in retina function over about a year now — it becoming somewhat more sensitive in a positive way, giving rise to somewhat improved definition of fine detail: a handy partial compensation for the progressive degrading of contrast caused by my developing cataracts and masses of PVD (posterior vitreous detachment) debris, including 'floater' material.

Actually, in retrospect now, I think I have seen a fair number of cosmic ray disturbances throughout my life, but looking qualitatively different and nothing like so conspicuous. More typically I'd see something much more like a meteor — fast-moving, generally obliquely downward-bound in a straight line, and gone within half a second, and generally thinner and less bright. — But then cosmic ray particles are of a variety of types, so such a difference isn't surprising.

Okay, now about that snow…

Actually, my first online search to find the cause of those weird white tracks turned up an amazing serendipity — a phenomenon called 'visual snow'. Could that conceivably be referring to the ever seething visual 'system noise' covering my whole field of view, 24/7, most strongly seen in the dark or at least low light conditions?

It turned out to be just that. Right from my toddler years I was always aware of that, and never commented on it to anyone because I had no means to know that apparently the majority of people don't have that 'system noise', at least to any noticeable level. Indeed nowadays it's actually recognised, rightly or wrongly, as a neurological disorder, though one for which there isn't as yet a recognised effective treatment or means of prevention / cure.

As I've always had that phenomenon and wasn't aware that I was in a minority in having it, I've lived okay with it, without seeing it as a problem — though it's always limited my ability to see small details in the dark or low-light conditions.

I'm suspicious that there's more to this phenomenon than the medics / neurologists could ever get their heads around because of their entrenched attachment to the materialist-reductionist belief system. It was out of that seething mass of flashing dots and more diffuse other shapes that all my base-level hell visuals arose every night when I closed my eyes, and even nowadays if I allow my focus to dwell on that 'visual snow', the flickering, ever-moving shapes and patterns very soon start morphing into weird forms and figures, and my indications are that all that is astral stuff, and thus a potential lead-in to hell experiences.

I'm thus wondering whether people who experience visual snow — or at least those who always have done so from early childhood — are at least primarily people with little or no soul programming — the 'visual snow' actually being a superficial display of astral material (ALL untoward to focus or dwell upon).

If that is the case, I and other people with that issue should find that it rapidly fades out if / when the aspect of consciousness that people experience as the astral non-reality becomes closed off from everyone's 'ordinary mind' (see Project Fix the Human Condition).

I'm not at all claiming that there isn't a neurological abnormality in such people, which can be viewed as a malfunction. My point is that the medics / neurologists, because of their limiting belief system, consistently fail to look for underlying causes beyond 'the physical', because they fail over and over again to understand that consciousness / experience itself is the only 'ultimate' reality we can ever know (as distinct from believing in). See On the nature of reality and truth — Too simple to believe! :-).

In other words, it's not enough to spot a neurological abnormality and identify it as a (or indeed the) cause and label it with a name as a supposed disorder (then of course to treat with drugs or other harmful interventions). One needs to look further, to what has caused or is causing that observed abnormality.

In this case, if we are going to talk in any intelligent and genuinely useful way about 'the cause' of the issue we'd most likely need to be looking to a decidedly fundamental-level type of garbage interference, and the neurological abnormalities as being just part of the chain of cause / effect arising from that interference. It would then be that underlying interference that's the prime thing that needs to be addressed in order to resolve the issue. Closing of the astral from everyone's 'ordinary mind' would most likely be the ultimate 'cure', and, as I've indicated, there appears to be a possibility that that is currently in the process of being implemented, with completion supposedly within a very few years, though I've learnt to keep clear of such time-scale predictions with anything non-physical.

My first smartphone — after all this time!

25 August 2021

The whole smartphone mindset has been anathema to me all along, and that hasn't changed significantly — but I was also aware that I'm already starting to lose out through not having one — just because services / businesses that I use are nowadays increasingly offering various services or benefits only through smartphone apps — and it appears that before long without a smartphone I'd be denied service altogether from some of those.

Also, a smartphone would be extremely helpful for any out-in-the-wilds sound recording sessions aiming to capture thunderstorms, for I'd then be able to track current rain and lightning activity on frequently updated weather maps — indeed much more effectively than with a dedicated lightning detector device. — and of course on hikes more generally I could keep an eye on weather developments and would have a much better idea of when to curtail a walk and get on my hitch-hike back to Exeter.

So, it made sense to start pointing myself towards getting a smartphone just a bit in advance of absolutely having to, so that when such a phone is really needed I not only already have one but have had sufficient time to get used to using it, and to have configured it to work as far as possible for rather than against me.

The further issue that had been holding me back was the additional cost of buying and running one. Fortunately I saw a highly relevant phone review in the now defunct Web User magazine about a year ago, recommending the Samsung Galaxy A21S phone as an exceptional value low price-range model, and I kept a note of that as first one to look up when I did finally research models for imminent purchase. I thought it might be a bit too slow, as some user reviews had complained, but wasn't seeking for my prospective phone to be usable as a substitute for my desktop PC anyway.

This month, as my 79th birthday approached and a tiny annuity payment was due then, I decided it was time to get seriously researching. I looked up a lot of models, but to my surprise that researching whittled down to — guess what! — none other than the Samsung Galaxy A21S!

At just under £150 at the time of ordering, it wasn't too severe an expense, and, regarding cost of a mobile service package, rather than use pay-as-you-go, I opted for Plusnet's cheapest mobile deal, at £6 per month, allowing me unlimited calls and texts, and a monthly data limit of 5GB (including a 2GB bonus because I'm a Plusnet customer for my broadband and landline), and a rolling monthly contract, giving me decent freedom to change if appropriate.

In practice, I expect even that package to be much under-used, because I detest texts and am not a socializer and so wouldn't be making many calls, and most of my mobile data usage would be through my wi-fi and thus my extant broadband package ('unlimited' use). The advantage over PAYG, however, would be that I'd no longer feel inhibited against making phone calls during the daytime, and so could make my calls all from the mobile rather than the landline phone.

Having got the phone now, I'm still in an active process of finding out how to achieve things on it, and still have certain things to settle. In particular, password manager and call-screening apps.

The only password manager I really want to use on it is the free version of one called MYKI, which, once fully set up, allegedly doesn't need a password to be entered again, because of its rather clever system of being initially set up to recognise the device it's running on as a 'trusted device'. I really wanted to use Roboform, as I already use that on my desktop PC, but the free version allows only one device, so problems are liable to arise if I seek to set it up in a second device without upgrading to the paid 'Everywhere' version. I simply don't have funds to pay for everything — at least, not those confounded recurring subscriptions.

The problem with MYKI just at the moment is that, although I've installed it on the mobile, it allows me no opportunity to import my pile of logins exported from Roboform — and there's no way I'm going to manually enter my long strong passwords for each login. Apparently one needs the browser extension version of MYKI to do that importing — but of course, the respective versions of those refuse to install on either Firefox or Chrome on this mobile, and I can't find any solution to this in my online searches. I've emailed the MYKI people for a solution, so hope to have that running very soon.

The other thing I'm struggling with at the moment is my quest for a mobile app that provides the sort of call-screening function that I have on my little hardware TrueCall unit connected to my landline phone. There are masses of call-blocker apps out there, yes, but all the ones I've looked at still allow you to be disturbed by calls from unknown callers — at least to be prompted to allow or block them.

The rather obvious method I opted for on my TrueCall unit was the one they call 'Shield', in which the unrecognised caller hears a recorded message (in my case, customized) asking them, if they're a commercial cold-caller, to hang up now and not to call me again, and otherwise, to press key [n] to continue. My use of that has resulted in my being unaware of any unwanted calls while the unit was running, since I bought it in 2010 — except on just one occasion when a salesperson at my previous site hosting company breached rules and made an unsolicited sales call to me, presumably because he thought it was okay as I was one of their customers. That 'Shield' really is working is clear to see in my call history stored on the TrueCall site. — plenty of obnoxious callers recorded as 'hung up at Shield'.

Unfortunately I've not yet found any app that enables me to have that simple but incredibly effective method of call screening. So effective indeed that I've not had cause to blacklist a single number. The effective principle is that the unknown would-be caller has to respond appropriately to a challenge, and pretty well always an unwanted caller would recognise that continuing with such a challenge would be a waste of time, and of course auto-diallers would fail the challenge anyway.

Okay, aside from the current teething troubles, let's say that I'm truly impressed by this phone. I'm clearly not expecting lightning speed from it, but it's easily fast enough for all I'd do on it. Web pages pop up mostly more or less as quickly as on my desktop PC (Windows).

One thing that particularly pleases me is to see just how successful I've been in making my web pages mobile-friendly. I was at least expecting the longest pages to have a noticeable delay before displaying, but in fact even they took hardly more than a second to appear, and then it was an instant switch-on effect, with absolutely none of the shuffling around you see on many sites while the browser is still rendering parts of the page. No doubt people in very far-removed countries would experience a bit more delay, though.

Another great thing about viewing my sites online through the mobile is that I quickly identified a few further things I needed to change to further improve the mobile visitor experience.

Particularly, the page listing my Original Writings on my Clarity of Being site needed the brief descriptions for most pages to be 'collapsed' (using the Details / Summary HTML elements), and I've just done that, so now the page is much quicker to scroll. And also I found a page on my Broad Horizon Nature site, where a table of sub-site contents was below the fairly long introductory text. I've put that TOC at the top as well now, and I think there will be another page or two there needing the same treatment.

 

Sound recordings — I'm in some pretty dubious company — yes, I've done a U-turn!

(Oh, hello Uncle Boris — didn't realize you were listening!)

7 August 2021

Quite some years ago I came to notice that I could improve nearly all of my natural soundscape recordings made with the Sony PCM-D100 recorder by applying a modest 'tilt' to their frequency spectrum to somewhat boost the higher frequencies, by applying a straight-line 'curve' from 100Hz (unchanged) to 8KHz (+2dB). This appeared to me to considerably increase the detail in the recordings without making them over-bright (as they would have been if I'd applied a more focused treble boost). It did seem odd to me, though, that the D100 was a bit deficient in its sound quality in that manner in the first place, to make such a measure necessary or at least advantageous.

So, I went through all my extant recordings then, applying that tilt to a considerable majority of them — and I added that equalization function to the initial processing sequence for D100 recordings, which I'd automated as a set of macros in the Audacity sound-file editor.

Well, earlier this week I edited a recording of a rain shower high up in the Teign Gorge valley woods, and, having completed that task, woke up to the fact that the raindrops and drips from the trees had an abrasive snap-crackle-pop sort of sound, which I'd just negligently accepted in earlier recordings, and indeed seemed to be the norm in a lot of other people's recordings of rain in similar situations. In fact I knew bloody well that 'snap-crackle-pop' wasn't at all what I actually heard during the recording session, nor any previous recording session with rain in it, so I was just starting to get into hair-tearing mode, wondering how to rectify that, when I remembered the EQ tilt that had been automatically applied during initial processing. Supposing I took that away?

Could it be that all along I'd been mistaken, and had been using that tilt to resolve a purely imaginary issue with the D100's sound quality? — Well, there was an easy way to check that without having to process and edit a new copy of the original. I could simply apply an inverse version of that same tilt to my edited copy, and compare 'before' and 'after'.

To my embarrassment but considerable relief, with the tilt neutralized the raindrops and drips at last sounded like the beautiful patterings that I'd actually heard. Clear but pretty gentle. The rain was caressing the landscape rather than attacking it! I hadn't lost detail of sound by doing that; it was just that the details were then not over-emphasized. Switching to and fro between tilt and removed-tilt left me in no doubt that I'd all along been besotted with hearing details clearly and had consequently been turning out relatively harsh, exaggerated versions of what I'd actually heard when making the recordings.

It's the same sort of effect as indiscriminately processing one's photos with boosted midrange contrast. They may look impressive and full of detail like that, but in many cases those details would actually be jumping out at you in a way they were not doing in the original scene, to give an unrestfully 'busy'-looking version of that scene.

I confirmed my initial finding and conclusion by doing a similar test upon a variety of earlier D100 recordings, and so recognised that I'd need to neutralize that tilt in all the D100 recordings to which I'd applied it — a big task, especially as for various practical reasons I can't sensibly automate / batch-process this. Carrying out that EQ on a recording can take 5 to 10 minutes on each of the longer recordings, and I have to listen to a bit of the recording so readjusted, and usually slightly raise its level to compensate for the level loss caused by the EQ. Even saving the file in flac format can take 5 minutes or so for longer recordings — so it all adds up to quite a labour of love, or something!

I'm therefore now in the process of working through all of those from the earliest. Although a nuisance in some ways, this does bring a welcome restoration of the full recording quality, together with a simplification of the required processing for further recordings, so I don't grudge doing this task.

One exception, where I'm not removing the tilt, is with the half-speed versions of certain of the wind chimes combinations. There we have no standard of what is usefully 'correct', and that extra emphasis on the higher frequencies brings life and vibrancy to those versions, which have a rather claustrophobic and 'unreal' feel without that little 'lift'.

I have no plans, though, to do all the extra work to update the preview samples in my Downloads Store.

New recordings of my compositions — I've run into a major obstacle

5 July 2021

Well, despite all the perversities of the relevant software, and the resultant delays and frustrations, it's been a joy to be producing a series of improved renditions / recordings of various of my music works — but recently I got to the point of having re-recorded apparently all the compositions that are for small numbers of instruments (including some choral works). But that meant that finally I'd have to bite the bullet and see how it would work out for compositions involving an orchestra (and up to 60 MIDI channels needed) — for that would greatly augment the difficulties I was already having with the software when preparing the smaller-scale works for recording.

In practice, my hopeful optimism wasn't borne out by the realities of the situation. Without going into all the sordid details, I had a really stressfully exasperating time trying to get SynthFont 2 and then Overture to co-operate, for in their different ways they were perverse to the point of malevolence, and it became clear that even if, once in a long while, I did manage to get one of those works fully prepared for recording, it would have taken so much time and given me so much stress for extended periods, that it wasn't worth my continuing with the project, at least for the time being.

However, that's not the end of the story, because I already have the score form of each work transferred from my old Sibelius scores to MuseScore, and, while MuseScore doesn't really help with high-grade renditions / recordings at the moment, the projected MuseScore 4, likely to be issued towards the end of this year, will offer a real way forward once it's been upgraded to include not only VST plugin support but also integrated full MIDI editing / sequencing functionality (probably sometime in second half of next year) — aiming to become a comprehensive high-grade composing tool rather than just a notation program.

So, realistically, it looks as though I could save myself a whole lot of stress and probably unnecessarily poor results, by waiting probably a year or a bit more, for MuseScore 4 to be not only released but fully upgraded. I could then do bits of editing of the music itself to improve certain works a little before I record them, and do all the MIDI work and recording in MuseScore. At the moment I could do that editing in MuseScore, BUT all the MIDI controller data (expression and instrument sound changes) would be lost, so at the moment I couldn't get a decent recording from a MuseScore-edited version.

A couple of days ago I decided I'd record and upload to YouTube my strange and haunting Monument and Reflections (trio version), which I'd initially been thinking to defer alongside the orchestral works, because it needed a bit of editing of the piano part in a few spots — primarily replacing certain plain chords with furious tremolos in the brief 'storm' episode. In the event I thought the improvements to the sound were sufficient to warrant an interim new recording, which will be replaced when I've finally done the editing of the piano part, hopefully next year. The work certainly sounds more effective now, with the different instrument placement (piano at centre, flute to left, clarinet to right) and more effective piano sound with much longer natural decay of lower notes when held, and also with bigger dynamic range, increasing the dramatic intensity.

…Oh, and actually when I'd just started writing this post I remembered that there is still one further work that I can record without significant problems, and will do so in the next few days — my Symphony 10 (Journey of Awakenings, Joys and Sorrows). That uses no orchestra at all, but instead a choir with tubular bell sounds used over a huge tessitura (note range).

Gobsmacked by my new 'toy' camera — Panasonic DMC-TZ70

14 June 2021

My trusty old Fuji FinePix S9600 'bridge'-type digital camera, purchased in 2007, still works fine, but its bulk and weight, especially in its rather bulky third-party carrying pouch, was bugging me increasingly as I saw people casually take out their smartphones and take all manner of (often quite excellent) photos while I'd so often left my camera at home to save all the hassle, or it was all too often slow for me to get the camera out and focused on the current object of interest when I did deign to take it with me. I'd got a supposedly better camera than most of those phones and small 'casual' cameras, but most of the time was simply not getting the photos. And in poor light conditions I often saw people getting remarkable results on their phone cameras while I usually wouldn't bother because I knew I couldn't get acceptable results in those light conditions or at the particular distances.

Final straw was when my immediate neighbour asked me about the lizards (Common Lizard, Lacerta vivipara) she'd photographed on her phone — and at least on the phone's screen they looked excellent. Why the eff was I carrying this bulk and weight around (or all too often, leaving it at home), when she could do so much of the same on a confounded phone of all things!

I was first of all considering whether it was time for me to get a smartphone myself, and researched online to get a better idea of the functionality and picture quality of the better smartphones compared with my bulky sort of camera on the one hand and modern compact cameras on the other.

On functionality and sheer point-and-shoot convenience, the better smartphones looked to be winners for me in relation to what I wanted to do, and would considerably extend the range of subjects I'd be able to photograph, and over a wider range of light conditions — BUT what they lack as compared with a feature-packed dedicated compact camera is much (or indeed any) user control over each photo creation, so some photos come out great, but many others come out poorly (e.g., with burnt-out highlights) because they lacked user override of the auto-exposure system.

So, my quest among compact cameras soon narrowed down to the pretty diminutive Panasonic DMC-TZ70. I understand that model itself to be a relatively old one, of 2016 vintage, but in many ways more recent models would add little that I really needed, and would cost significantly more to buy — and the TZ70 is still very popular and highly rated today. I soon bit the bullet and bought one — not online as it happens, because the local London Camera Exchange shop is just three minutes' walk from my abode and had the model in stock, and in my long-term experience they're good people there and a good company, and I was happy to pay some £10 more than it would have cost me from Amazon, to have friendly, helpful and knowledgeable service in the event of issues arising.

I'm still very much finding my way around with this little joy of a 'toy', but am learning fast. I had it with me for my sound recording session at the south end of Beeny Cliff (near Boscastle, Cornwall) a couple of days ago, and was initially disappointed and irked by its point-and-shoot mode allowing the bright white of breaking waves on the sea all to be burnt out, so I deleted all those shots. Manual mode is more fiddly to use than on my Fuji, so I wanted to do as much as I could using point-and-shoot mode (called iA — Intelligent Auto).

I looked up online to see if this model had any means to preserve highlights in iA mode — and, blow me, although there was apparently no actual automatic 'preserve highlights' setting, there is a means for user-override of the iA exposure-setting to adjust the exposure up to 2 EV down or up in one-third EV steps. That's described in the full (Advanced) pdf manual.

As for what's particularly bowling me over with this diminutive camera, I should particularly mention its incredible degree of image stabilization (compensation for camera movement), AND its absurdly massive zoom range. My Fuji could zoom between 28 and 300mm focal length (35mm camera equivalent) — near enough to 10x zoom. There was really no point in using any longer focal length anyway for regular hand-held photography, because of the excessive movement of the magnified image.

— But this little Panasonic 'toy' has a notional 60x zoom (30x optical, supplemented on demand by digital wizardry), from 24mm (very wide-angle) to a whopping 1,440mm (35mm camera equivalent) focal length! I'd assumed that such a big zoom would have little application for me as nearly all of my photography is hand-held, and camera movement at such a zoom level would surely overwhelm the image stabilization.

So, imagine my amazement when I got perfectly clear, apparently shake-free hand-held shots of Exeter Cathedral's wind vanes from my kitchen window, and similar for the ornamental structures on the tip of St Leonard's Church spire, taken from Trew's Weir suspension bridge over the River Exe — for the latter occasion, with my hands 'supported' on a rail, which itself was merrily bobbing up and down because of other people on the bridge!

And then, for a test that surely couldn't come out so spectacularly, two days ago on the south end of Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle, Cornwall, I took a series of hand-held shots at up to the full 60x zoom. The guillemots were making their hilarious bedlams* in the big cave the other side of the mouth of Pentargon Cove, and I could just see many of the tiny specks with very fast-flapping wings flying out from the cave, and on excursions low over the sea (presumably after fish) and then flying back up into the cave — and I thought I could just see a few guillemot specks — so very tiny — on some of the cliff ledges surrounding the cave entrance.

Now, let's let the photos tell the story. These large thumbnails link to full-size copies of the respective photos (the third one had its bottom cropped off because of unsightly burnt-out sea highlights). Sorry about the watermarks on the full-size copies — necessary to discourage people from ripping them off or hot-linking to them. If you're using a mobile, and want to minimize data usage, it could be a good idea not to tap on these thumbnails.

…Well, no doubt plenty of people would be unimpressed by such results that I'm getting, for no doubt they're getting much more spectacular results from their state of the art smartphones or dedicated cameras than I could get from this little 2016-vintage 'toy' — but at least the latter's got a lot going for me — and presently no doubt I'll put the trusty Fuji hulk up for sale, at a modest price.

My only real concern is that the compact camera is so small that its working parts are unlikely to be anything like as robust as with my chunky old camera, so I can't imagine such a compact lasting for anything like the nearly 14 years that the Fuji has so far lasted me.

"…And therefore today is thrilling…" #2
— New rendering and recording of De Profundis Clamavi

30 May 2021

I had to defer re-rendering and recording my short work for organ and three trumpets called Fallen Soldiers, because I came to realize that I'd made the odd grievous omissions in originally composing it, and so it needed a small bit of work on the composition itself — and really to be able to do that and to be able to record the revised work, no software I currently have is really up to the job. So I've deferred that task till probably second half of next year, when, all being well, the primarily score-writing program MuseScore is planned to become a fully integrated composition tool, combining high-grade score production with a fully featured and exceptionally (classical) composer-friendly MIDI editor / sequencer, more comprehensive and intuitive to use than any current software claiming already to provide that combined functionality (Overture and Dorico come to mind).

Theoretically I already have that combination in Overture, but, alas, that program has many serious shortcomings (bugs and design flaws, with more or less nonexistent user support), and so is of frustratingly limited use to me — though I may fare better with its MIDI sequencer functions for my orchestral (/choral) works when I shortly get round to them, as long as I don't need to edit the compositions themselves.

As it happened, the next work of mine in the queue for re-rendering has been a very straightforward one to re-render — De Profundis Clamavi, for a specific faked church bell sound (as played on an extremely wide-range keyboard) and three trumpets. There was no better or even equivalent bell sound to use (it's a winner anyway), but I was able to improve upon the trumpets, bringing in more realism. Also I paid more attention to creating a lifelike spatial arrangement. In line with my general procedure for this round of re-recordings, I recorded the trio of trumpets and the bells separately, so I could process them differently and fine-tune the volume balance between them.

When I first listened to the final mix of the 'basic' (reverberant concert hall) version (using high-grade headphones) it was something of a bombshell experience once the trumpets had come in — the new realism considerably increasing the hair-raising emotional intensity. I also did a cathedral version, in which I placed the bell sounds fairly well back in the cathedral as compared with the trumpets, just as I'm doing for organ sound in a cathedral in other recordings. Really both versions are excellent.

My only regret is that relatively few listeners would listen at the proper level to experience much of its impact and at times almost apocalyptic sound. The point is that because of the big dynamic range, on my system the playback volume needs to be set at 6dB (a doubling of level) above what would be a sensible normal level, at least for lifelike rendition of symphonic orchestral music. Most people have little idea how loud a trio of trumpets can readily go, and this work has the trio indeed playing at that level at times.

For this reason, in the several bars after the trumpets first come in, the latter need to be peaking at a level that is somewhat uncomfortable to listen to (but NOT getting even close to painfulness!!).

At that lifelike listening level you then hear a lot more details and power in the music generally, including hearing masses more nuances in all the reverberations.

Direct links for the new recordings on YouTube:

Concert hall (reverberant) — https://youtu.be/H0Mkiyg3nQY

Cathedral — https://youtu.be/8L-cMuuPoD8

"…And therefore today is thrilling…" #1
— First Cornwall hike since February 2020 — with a difference!

30 May 2021

As I emphasize to so many people who unthinkingly, robotically, urge me to 'take care' / 'be careful', No I won't! It's an advencha! — I do dangerous things — sensibly of course! [The odd spelling reflecting the way I humorously pronounce the word to people who give me such silly admonishments]

Oh what blessed relief, to hitch-hike down from Exeter to Portreath again, and get walking on the coast path last Wednesday! Spring flowers, meadow pipits, skylarks, dunnocks and whitethroats along the way, and even the odd choughs for good measure. I knew I still wasn't in very good form for it, with the chronic fatigue thing still limiting what I could do on my fairly recent more local hikes (Teign Gorge and south-east Devon coast path), and my left ankle tendons still playing up somewhat. So, although notionally it was a 12-mile walk on the clifftop Coast Path to Perranporth, getting that far was really the outside option, and I was expecting to finish fairly early at Chapel Porth or Trevaunance Cove (near St Agnes), with my leg muscles getting prematurely stressed as usual nowadays.

And then, as I ascended the steep steps out of the first abrupt valley to cross (quaintly named Hayle Ulla), I got quite concerned at my being so unsteady on my legs and rather staggering around like a drunkard, and getting more out of breath than I've done for decades. As I then continued with easy relatively level walking for a while it still took a few minutes for my breathing to calm down. That filled me with apprehension about the further valleys to cross — particularly the next one, known as Sally's Bottom of all things (seriously!), where the track on both sides isn't only very steep and eroded but also has very awkward and unforgiving steps to negotiate.

My inner inquiry gave consistent indications that that breathlessness was just a result of a passing internal readjustment as my body started getting the special Cornish coast path treatment once more — and indeed, as otherwise normal, I didn't get noticeably out of breath on any of the further steep ascents — even out of Sally's Bottom. So, one big sigh of relief.

Beyond Porthtowan I could feel the premature leg muscle stress already starting to cause doubts upon how much further I'd sensibly be able to go, but I kept to a relatively gentle pace, and crossed the further steep-sided valley at Chapel Porth, then eating my packed lunch a little beyond, beside the well-known Towanroath engine house ruins (a tin-mining relic), then with further, more gentle ascent to the higher clifftop towards St Agnes head. It's then a long and relatively level walk, round St Agnes Head and a mile or so further to the tricky rough descent to Trevaunance Cove.

That stretch of clifftop coast path towards St Agnes Head from the south is wide and very, unpleasantly, stony. Although there are loose stones, many of them are just protruding and sometimes bluntly angular parts of the underlying rock. I generally do my best to keep on the more grassy or peaty patches, but there were bits where I had to walk on some of that rather cruel surface.

For the first time, at least on that stretch, I tripped on one of those protrusions, and that stony surface suddenly came up to 'get' me. I put my hands out to protect myself, but CRACK, — what a crack, as my chin hit one of those stones, and I was sure my jaw was now broken!

People came fussing around, and it was all I could do to dissuade them from calling an ambulance — at least until perhaps it be found that I really did need one. Of course I'd got abrasions and the odd lacerations, and of course the first thing I checked was my jaw, which I found to be still as solid as ever (just rather wrenched right-side jaw muscles), so straightaway I had cause for inner rejoicing. The fall had already happened now, so to me it was no longer a disaster but simply a new bit of my landscape, so picking up 'rejoicing points' was the name of part of my game for the rest of the day (or any other day, for that matter!).

Meanwhile the well-intentioned but typically, shall we say, somewhat thinking-challenged people around me were all reacting with quite unnecessary concern about my superficial injuries and whether I could cope without an ambulance — though one helpful woman did give me a bunch of tissues, which was helpful just to mop up still exuding blood (my blood from superficial wounds generally clots very quickly, and normal dirt on such wounds has no effect apart from helping maintain strength of my immune system).

I was still feeling very shaky and unsteady on my feet but my inner inquiry indicated the best choice still to be to continue to Trevaunance Cove, albeit gently, with extra care. That proved to be indeed the best choice. Amazingly, after my leg muscles initially feeling a whole lot more stressed and fatigued, they progressively 'lightened up', buoyed up by the sense of rejoicing because I hadn't sustained any breakages (I'd checked my ribs too, and realized that there was some bruising developing there, front and right side) — and my gentle speed became still brisk enough for me to start overtaking the odd older people on the track.

However, as I got closer to Trevaunance Cove I became aware that my chin wound (hidden in my beard) was still bleeding, even after an hour, so once I'd got there I'd have to seek assistance. In the event somebody there pointed me to the Lifeguards (it's a popular surfing beach), and they were brilliant, showing real concern in the really sensible way — backed up by not only their professional training but by their being very special, one could say 'humanitarian', individuals, as one would expect of those who choose to do such a job.

They briefly checked me out, and agreed with me that the chin wound would probably need stitching. They didn't know of a local facility available at that time for emergency first-aid, and so after brief deliberations, and not wanting me to be hitch-hiking (either to A&E or directly back to Exeter), they took me in their official car to the Treliske hospital A&E at Truro. More inner rejoicing — a whole range of possible difficulties wiped out at a stroke by those lovely guys' taking that 'simple' action. A pity that in view of the covid situation I couldn't sensibly give them a hug on parting!

Of course A&E meant a very long wait, and gradually mounting concern about a very late hitch-hike from the hospital back to Exeter, but at least I knew I was in good hands there. As with the Trevaunance Lifeguards, I was having quite a few laughs at the incredulity of these people at what I'd been doing at my age — and the almost shocked double-incredulity at my buoyantly answering their questions as to where I'd go tonight by announcing that I had nowhere local to stay and was going to hitch-hike back to Exeter — yes, this evening, tonight, or whenever I get away!

The most hilarious shocked incredulity was actually from the doctor who did my stitches. His face was a wonder to behold when I nonchalantly answered his question with I'm going to hitch-hike back to Exeter. He was really concerned and wanting to put me in touch with another department in the hospital to see if anything could be arranged for me, but I was laughingly resolute that I was going to hitch-hike, and that it wasn't the big deal he was imagining, because that was what I'd been doing so many times, and even at night sometimes, and I was still alive to tell the tale.

I got away about 8.30 p.m. — after a bit over 4 hours there, and then it was the hitch-hike. I was a bit nervous about how that one would work out, but in the event it was perfectly straightforward. I got picked up after about a mile's walk along the main road, dropped at Carland Cross roundabout on the A30, and then after about 20 minutes' wait there, a lift to Alphington Junction outside Exeter, and I walked in to the city centre — another 1½ miles, but without my legs objecting significantly — and then back in my flat still before midnight.

So, with the sensible 'the glass is half-full' mindset, that day was indeed thrilling, and indeed 'an advencha' — and no, I still bloody-well won't 'take care' or 'be careful' on my further outings!

No more CDs, as from 4 June…

1 March 2021

Advance Notice!
My produce-on-demand CD service Amazon Media on Demand is scheduled to close down on 4 June this year.

What that means is that from then on I shall NOT have any service to produce my CDs, and so from then on my natural soundscapes Digital Download Catalogue and my music compositions Digital Download Catalogue will be offering only downloads.

For this reason, if you do want real physical CDs of my recordings / compositions, you'll need to place your orders soon. From 4 June you won't have a second chance.

The download versions will remain available from my Stores, and would still be supplied with any available relevant CD artwork, which, for the natural soundscapes, includes location photos and notes.

It's saddening for me, to be at the end of the road for CDs, after the huge amount of work and time I put into creating them and their artwork. However, I could see this coming, and had increasingly been sadly wondering 'Why the hell am I bothering to do this?'.

The sordid truth is that only the very occasional CD sales occurred during the years they'd been available, and I had the constant quietly nagging heartache of effectively 'performing to an empty house'. So really, the forthcoming cessation represents a rationalization and a bit of weight off my back, and hardly any significant financial loss for me.

Just had my first COVID-19 jab — and here's a homily for the anti-vaccination FOOLS…

23 January 2021

I had my first covid jab (Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine) this morning at the St Leonard's Practice here in Exeter, UK.

I was most impressed at the organisation there, with a team of nurses / practitioners giving the jabs and a whole bigger team of helpers directing the flow of people due for their jabs. I should think at least one jab per minute was being achieved — perhaps even twice that rate — and yet everyone I encountered there was friendly and helpful. Indeed, the whole atmosphere there struck me as joyful and celebratory — probably helped by a beautiful crisp sunny day with frost and already some spring birdsong among the surrounding trees.

For me and other people there, apart from the huge flow of 'vaccinees' and the buoyant-spirited bustle, and of course the extra paperwork, the experience wasn't materially different from one's annual flu jab. I hardly felt the needle make its puncture, and I walked straight out and got on with my day's proceedings. Yes, of course there is a very small risk of some complication, as exists for ANY injection or other medical procedure or treatment, but that's very, very tiny in relation to the health hazards and immense economic disruption (equating to MASSES of indirect health impacts further down the line) that the current pandemic represents for us all.

So, for those people who are making out that the covid vaccines are unsafe, I have a few gentle words (with some smoke issuing from my ears)…

At NO point in one's life is ANY of us safe — i.e., 100% safe!

At any moment a meteorite or indeed Steinway concert grand piano (or elephant, if different!) might fall out of the sky and smash you into a crater in the ground!

Do you drive? If so, you bloody fool! Driving is hair-raisingly dangerous, even if you yourself manage always to drive 100% safely (in any case, anyone who believes that about themselves would be an absolute menace)! The next person coming the other way could collapse or fall asleep at the wheel or (much more likely) be using a smartphone and not paying proper attention to what's on the road…

When on foot, do you cross roads? If so, you bloody fool! You might get knocked over by a vehicle or cyclist you didn't notice…

Starting to get the message?

If you seriously want to be at least nearly 100% safe, then don't get out of bed! — Well, er, except, no, don't go to bed at all because you might roll over too far and fall onto the floor and injure yourself!

Also, don't eat, because you don't know exactly what's in what you're eating, even if you've prepared it yourself. And even if you did, you couldn't possibly know all the long-term adverse effects of the things you're eating / drinking!

By living in your self-centred belief-based paranoid mindset, you're locked into a prison of fear, and are divorced from your intrinsic sense of personal and social responsibility. That impacts all the time on your overall mental and physical health, and thus upon your life expectancy.

By your very own paranoid logic, the only fully 'safe' thing for you to do is lie down and die!

Indeed, it's fair and considered comment of mine that if you refuse to play your part in beating such a troublesome pandemic, by getting the vaccination when it's available to you, and following all the covid-safety rules / guidelines such as social distancing, then I'd question your moral right to live at all here on Earth at the current time.

The bottom line is — get off your arse, get rational at last, and socially responsible, and get your vaccinations as soon as available! Then, in that much more sensible and harmonious mindset you'd find a happiness in life that you've so far been denying yourself through all your ungrounded belief and paranoia.

Take a leaf from my own book, be bold, take sensibly chosen and socially responsible risks, and make your life happier and more worthwhile for yourself and for everyone else who you engage with in everyday life! Do dangerous things, sensibly — subject to them being genuinely beneficial! That's the way to be a healthy inspiration to others — not polluting our life experience with paranoia-distorted negative beliefs and behaviours!

I myself am still very much alive and kicking at age 78, and giving the middle finger to all those silly mindless exhortations to 'take care'! That must have something to do with why so many people I encounter in everyday life find me so confoundedly inspiring!

— And of course, for goodness' sake turn right away from ALL conspiracy theories and theorists! — even ditch your up-to-now partner or supposed best friend if (s)he is one of those conspiracy theorists — for such people are truly toxic, and help make you toxic too as long as you continue to engage with them!

That confounded Google issue — I've now taken action

28 December 2020

Well, at least I've done what I reasonably can for the time being. Since the 18 December post I've been intensively busy, gradually creating the About Philip Goddard page on my Clarity of Being site, plus How this site stands out from the crowd….

I found that really difficult to do — especially the former page —, because I really didn't know how best to start or to organise the information, and to do it in sufficiently concise and sensitive manner. I still don't really know about that, but broke my initial mental logjam over that by pragmatically settling on an outline-style set of rough notes for the About… page and not attempting to do anything really slick and tidy. Putting the new section into that site's homepage meant having to boot out from there the Why 'self-actualization' / 'self-realization'? section, which is now a separate page.

The changes are all online now, and I've uploaded a fresh Google XML sitemap to make all search engines aware of the new pages. Because of all the new links, the About Philip Goddard page is listed as high priority in that sitemap, so it would very quickly get attention — though any change in Google behaviour resulting from that would most likely take at least a month before any change in traffic level showed up.

I still didn't, and don't, feel fully comfortable about having there in public view what is really meant just for search engines*, and indeed may well not achieve anything with them anyway, or at least with Google, my main target. On the other hand, that could enable the odd ordinary human visitors who are very circumspect or dismissive on first arrival at that site to quickly get a better idea of the site's real integrity, even while others would no doubt be made all the more outspoken against it!

And again, if any of the other search engines, which have that site still highly ranked, start using the sort of ranking criteria that have all but killed my Google-mediated traffic for that site, there's at least a possibility that any of them may respond much more favourably than Google to the new informative material about me and the site.

Actually, having cleaned up the inevitable initial various errors and omissions and got all the cross-referring links set up, I do feel a bit more comfortable about it all, as it all seems to hang together pretty well. — And of course also, through simply having taken quite a substantial last-ditch measure in my bid to get Google to 'wake up' about the uniqueness, quality and integrity of that site, I feel somewhat relieved to have taken quite a major measure that does give a chance, however small, for an eventual really big positive effect on that site's traffic.

In the meantime, on Christmas Day the expected lowest-on-record traffic figure for that site did indeed happen. It was a mere 37 human visits — which is roughly 5.7% the average human visits per day during the site's traffic heyday in 2014/15 (in the mid-600s then).

…And now, lots of patience while I await some eventual sort of change in the site's traffic — remembering that such big traffic deficit as exists at the moment means lots of lives wrecked or lost in suicides because of people not finding this site when they were in crisis and most in need…

More on Google suppression of my Clarity of Being site

18 December 2020

This really cultivates despondency. I've done so much SEO on all my sites, and improved the visitor experience enormously, yet the number of click-throughs from Google, to pages on my Self-Realization (SR) site continue to fall. There's always a Christmas dip in figures, but this fall is before when that normally happens. Stats for yesterday showed a princely 48 human visits, which is my second lowest (the lowest was 47 in April 2019 — i.e., since the heady heights of 2014/15, when for a fair while the average was in the 600s per day.), and the number of Google.com referrers listed was a mere 11, which is now, appallingly, above the new average, which is in single figures, sometimes dipping below the DuckDuckGo referrers (lowest so far: 4).

This is anguishing for me, in my apparent powerlessness to do anything about that wrong, wrong, wrong situation, which is costing many wrecked lives and suicides because of people in crisis situations not finding the relevant pages on my SR site.

Prompted by a search string, hearing voices self help listed in yesterday's stats for the site, I tried that search string in Google, and unsurprisingly my powerfully helpful 'Hearing Voices': How to Stop Them — The REAL Self-Help Way! page wasn't in the 250 entries in the results at all. Yet it came well up (ranging from top to 5th) in the first page of the listings for that search term in DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, Bing and Yahoo!. But of course almost everyone uses Google at least mostly. — Mortifying!

In a despondent doodling moment I tried a search string I'd not tried before to see if I could throw more light on what's going on at Google and perhaps even something I could do about it, arising from any further understanding — google is suppressing my site.

A reasonably short scroll down the results page for that found this page, and this one, which I think give me some useful handle on understanding and maybe somewhat ameliorating my SR site's dire situation. Note particularly that apparently Google is penalizing sites that are contradicting 'scientific consensus' on a subject, on the basis that such sites must therefore be disseminating misinformation.

Unfortunately, some of that 'scientific consensus' isn't (at least wholly) scientific because of particular beliefs and orthodoxies — surely nowhere more so than in the arena of psychology, psychiatry and so-called 'mental health', which is a real disaster area, largely lacking in genuine scientific basis because of its distortion / perversion by the pervasive materialist-reductionist belief system, which screws everything up nicely when it's applied to matters of the 'mind'.

The reality is that nowhere do I contradict genuine scientific consensus, but what I DO do is to contradict and blow the whistle about consensus of false / distorted science, which is what our current psychiatry / 'mental health' modality is. — but would the Google behemoth come to its senses and recognise such a thing? Somehow I doubt very much whether it ever would. It's so much simpler for them to stay with superficial appearances, and interpret any major contradiction of what they see as 'scientific consensus' as (likely) dissemination of misinformation, and thus to suppress it.

— Yet I really do want all search engines to down-rank genuine misinformation — but first they need to delve more deeply to work out whether a particular site is really misinforming or seeking to blow the whistle on and put right some of the murkier areas / aspects of the scientific community that really do need sorting out.

By the look of it, there's no way that I'd now be able to get a high ranking for any of my SR site pages in Google — and I have to assume that at some point, with so much real misinformation now flooding the Internet, it must surely be only a matter of time before most or all the other search engines likewise apply similar criteria to their search results, leaving my SR site all but dead, no matter what its quality and life-saving potential.

I'll put on that site a replacement About Philip Goddard page, which would outline more clearly than previously my authority and expertise in the subject of that site — but I doubt very much whether it would pull much weight with the likes of Google, which latter would be looking for clear information about professional training in the site's subject area, and citations in reputable sources, and all that — none of which I can provide, for in that arena I'm a lone pioneer, simply sharing the insights, working model and methods that have got me myself out of a hell of a pickle and enabled me to turn my life around in grand style.

A workaround for assisting navigation on my sites

28 November 2020

I spent the time since 25th November intensively busy, thinking up and trying different means of having some sort of navigation aid in a fixed position at the top of the browser window, but everything I tried had unwanted issues.

A fixed navigation bar at the top proved to be troublesome because URLs of any of my pages that were suffixed with a name anchor name (e.g. '#What_I_really_do_in_bed') landed one a couple of text lines lower than one should be, so one doesn't see the heading one was aiming for unless one scrolls up two lines. Not a good visitor experience!

Then I tried reducing that bar at the top to just a narrow 'hamburger' button at top right that would display a dropdown list of relevant links. But it still seemed to me to be rather a distraction, and also in the midst of struggling to put together the code to create that dropdown, I took time to read some advice about the pros and cons of dropdown lists. The pros are obvious, and they (can) look really 'pro' and 'cool', but the stated cons rang a strong bell for me, for they were voicing misgivings I'd always had about using dropdowns. So, with relief I provisionally set that idea aside. — But what then?

My next lightbulb moment was when I thought, this is silly because, generally speaking, the pages already have all the navigation aids that are needed — except that they're stuck in particular places. Why not then simply have my fixed-position bar or mini-bar display linking to the on-page navigation aids?

I was sure a bit slow on the uptake because it was only then that I thought at all about having a mini-bar at the bottom of the window. So I fiddled about with having it on the left and the on the right, and neither seemed quite right — but if I had it at centre, it was more distracting, and very much so in mobile phone view.

Only two links were needed in fact, and one of those was needed only for some pages. The latter was to the top of the page's table of contents, and the other (potentially helpful for most pages) was a link to the page's footer space, including the respective site's main navigation bar, links to my other four sites, and the page's Google Search This Site facility.

You can see right here what I came up with. Gone is the mini-bar. This full-width bar, even though mostly empty, looks much more agreeable than the much more styled mini-bar versions I was trying to set up — and it notionally has more space for me to add further links if needs be. However, I doubt if I'd go beyond the two links, because the two just fit into 320 pixels — the minimum mobile device screen width that I cater for, and anything more would go out of sight.

While writing this note I've found an annoying downside of the bar at the bottom, in that it hides any page content in that position, so that when my typing gets past the end of the line at visible bottom, it goes out of sight and I have to scroll up to bring it back into sight to ensure that I'm not typing gibberish.

On the other hand a very useful result of that effect is that at the absolute bottom of any page any text is overlaid by the bar. That means that the bottom-of page bot trap is now hidden from all human visitors (unless they look at the page's source code) and thus they can't inadvertently click or tap on it and thus drop themselves into the trap and immediately be banned from all my sites.

— Well, that is, the bot trap is hidden for all visitors apart from sight-impaired people who are using appropriate screen readers. At least the latter people would get plenty of warning not to click / tap there at the extreme bottom right of the page.

I had to use a quite convoluted series of global search-and-replace operations to ensure that the bar went onto the right pages, and with the right links. No point in having a Table of Contents link on a page without table of contents!

There will thus undoubtedly be the odd errors. I'll be on the lookout for any such errors to fix, and if you spot any, please do let's know so I can do the honours. — Many thanks!

My programme of dramatic web page improvements — I'll have to abandon and revert!

24 November 2020

This is a dreadful realization! Over the last several days, on my Clarity of Being site I'd been working intensively on putting each section of the main text into a summary / details element pair, so creating a series of expandable items that enormously reduce the amount of scrolling needed to find one's way around on the page. By this evening I'd got through a handful of middling-long to seriously long pages, and was really pleased and excited about the transformation of those pages.

Just now, this evening, I suddenly had a horrible thought: surely the browser's text search facility wouldn't search within the 'collapsed' text as well as the visible headline / summary text for each section!

I checked that, and, yes, that's true. Only the visible 'summary' text is searched. —Yeowww!

So, either I continue to make the pages a much better scrolling experience, especially for mobile phones, OR I retain searchability. I cannot provide both!

It's not workable to haul out a whole mass of keywords from the 'collapsed' text and string them around somewhere always visible for people to find, for search engines would then assume I'm spamming them and would heavily penalize the pages in terms of page ranking.

So, tomorrow I'll have to restore the particular Clarity of Being site pages from the relevant backups. That would also lose a host of mostly small updates — many quite important — that I'd made in the course of streamlining those pages. That means another intensive task — going through every section of the relevant pages looking for the bits that needed updating, and copying over the respective updated sections into the restored backup pages. Oh b*gger!, as they say!

That's all a great disappointment and frustration, because I'd seemed so near to making my sites a much better visitor experience, and probably to get better search engine page ranking, but it turns out now that that was just a mirage.

I'm not sure about the CD catalogues and the chronological list of my natural soundscape recordings; maybe they would still be best in the current 'streamlined' format, but on the Clarity of Being site it's crucially important that a visitor can use text search in their browser to find any text on the page, which they can't do with this new 'streamlined' format.

Update the following day…

While the issue is definitely real, thank goodness that overnight I worked out that it would be altogether more efficient for me to forget about restoring from backups and instead use appropriate regular-expression search / replace actions in PowerGrep to clear out the <details> and <summary> tags from the affected pages on my Clarity of Being site, and then go methodically through each of those files, skimming through to each header and then where necessary readjusting the ex-'summary' text so that it all reads as before I made the hopeful 'improvements'. That way I'd be keeping all the text updates I'd made.

Also, my feelings of frustration / disappointment were remarkably superficial, and getting rather drowned out by a sense that nonetheless that little aborted venture was leading me to another possible way to address the issue of the longer pages being hideously tedious to scroll and navigate, especially in mobile phones.

What I worked out, which was actually something that was already on my to-do list, was that my next move after sorting out the small number of pages processed so far would be to experiment with having three buttons in a fixed position respectively at top left, top centre and top right of the screen. The left one would display a drop-down box containing the Google search box that currently is at the bottom of each page — which was never a good place for a search box to be. — The centre one would give the general site navigation bar as a drop-down list, and the right-hand would give a drop-down menu containing the page's table of contents, so that one could quick-navigate to any section on the page from any point on that page, while all the text remains searchable by the browser.

I'll try that first for one of the very long pages with a horrendously long table of contents, because I've doubts as to whether that arrangement would be workable on a small device — but then, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I'll try it shortly anyway, but just keep an open mind and be prepared to drop the idea if I can't make it work well enough…

A spot to remember — a little basal cell carcinoma!

12 November 2020

I'd had a little raised thing on the right side of my neck for years, which seemed to be like a half-way house between a small mole and a polyp. In fact I've had the odd ones in other positions, typically on my lower neck or just below that. One or two had eventually dwindled to nothing over long periods of being alternately turgid and being rather shrivelled, while the odd other ones had gradually developed. Their behaviour didn't seem threatening, as none of them developed beyond a small size and then either seemed stable or declining / mildly fluctuating.

This little one on the lower right side of my neck came to my notice some years ago as something I wanted to avoid cutting when I did my quarterly haircut, in the process of which I'd shave off the back and sides neck hair. Despite my best efforts I did sometimes nick it — a trace of bleeding following, and then a little scab would form and soon slough off to leave a healed little 'mole-polyp' little thing again

As I was finishing off my quarterly haircut last August, I succeeded in nicking it again, but this time it retained a crust on it, which often got knocked off, wholly or in part, and so I took extra care not to knock more off. …But it doggedly failed to heal, so I got myself referred to the Dermatology department of the local hospital, and today at last I saw a very together doctor there who said it was definitely a basal cell carcinoma. He's now putting in for a surgery appointment to remove it.

He warned that because of the COVID-19 situation I'd have to wait at least six months for that — but assured me that this cancer type is slow-growing and relatively non-invasive, so there shouldn't be any problem about that wait (which I assume is likely to be a year or more in reality).

Although such a wait could be quite worrisome, there is something I can do to mitigate the issue, even though the doctor didn't suggest it. I have some Efudix (5% Fluorouracil) cream that I was just about to start using on my scalp anyway, to reduce / eliminate solar keratoses. This is also a recognised treatment for early basal cell carcinoma. I can at least use it to lessen the growth during the wait, and indeed if it were superficial enough it might just possibly be more or less eliminated by the time any surgery was due. — So, I've started using that on the lesion.

…And this from Ostereo is even weirder!

5 October 2020

I really thought I'd heard the last of the (apparently rogue) music distributor Ostereo. See my posts here for:

28 April 2018 — Signed up with a record label — about to become a Superstar?

and 15 March 2019 — Unsigned up with a record label — Ostereo treats me with contempt

— in which I explained how it was appearing pretty convincingly that they'd scammed me — getting me to send them a pile of my earlier natural soundscape recordings that they were supposedly going to post on all the major streaming / download outlets for music, and send me a fair proportion of the proceeds, and then claiming that my stuff hadn't been doing well enough online and cancelling their contract with me. All the evidence I could find pointed to their never having put my stuff online at all, at least in any legitimate fashion, and there was masses of very obvious evasion and conflicting evasive explanations from different people there, so I was glad to get clear of them.

Although it wasn't ideal that they were presumably covertly using my stuff in violation of my copyright, as background in various mixes, at least it wasn't actually costing me money, not to be getting any proceeds from that, so any financial loss from that would be only notional, and I could just draw a line under it all. Indeed, I drew that line with quite a degree of smirky smugness, because soon after I'd drawn that line I got means to dramatically enhance the atrocious stereo imaging of those earlier recordings (made with the Sony PCM-M10 recorder), and so it was clear that in terms of sound quality Ostereo had had rubbish from me (relatively speaking), and I'd now got much better and more life-like versions of the recordings, which they couldn't get their hands upon at all.

Then sometime during late spring this year I received an email purportedly from Ostereo, asking me to give them my bank details or PayPal email address so they could make a royalty payment to me.

After a couple of days' deliberation and sleeping over that, I concluded that on balance it must be a phishing email from somebody who'd got some details of mine from Ostereo and spoofed their email address, and so ignored it, seeing that it was now quite some time since my contract was dissolved.

Then on 21 July this year I got this, again purportedly from Ostereo:

Hi Philip,

We hope this email finds you well.

Ostereo recently attempted to make a payment to you relating to your latest royalty statement however that payment failed.

Please can you confirm your payment details to us by responding to this email?

Bank details or PayPal email addresses are required but PayPal email addresses are preferred for non-UK based artists.

Many thanks,

Reporting Team

This time, after further deliberation I decided to respond, albeit with considerable circumspection. I replied as follows:

Hi there.

My apologies for not responding before. To be honest, I took the previous email from your quarter to be a phishing scam message, because I'd been treated in a seriously underhand manner by Ostereo, who claimed that my material had done too poorly in terms of online streams and therefore they were effectively dissolving their contract with me — whereas all the signs were that, at least at that time, they'd never put any of my stuff online to start with, which strongly implied that I was being scammed by Ostereo in a manner that is widely being reported relating to many other supposedly reputable music distribution companies. That is, having then cancelled the contract, they still had my material, and the circumstantial evidence being highly suggestive that they would then have been regarding themselves as owners of all the recordings of which I'd sent them copies, and using them without further reference to me.

As there was no longer an existing contract, and apparently none of my work had been put online by Ostereo while that contract was live, I'm surprised to hear that there's a royalty payment due to me now! :-) Not complaining, but I'm puzzled by this discrepancy, and would most appreciate an explanation — including an indication of from exactly which date period the royalties had accrued.

Regardless of that anyway, I see no harm in your having my PayPal email address, which is […].

Thank you for your patience.

Philip Goddard

That brought a prompt response:

Hi Philip,

I must thank you for your candid and considered response to our email, as reading about the experience that you've had was understandably not pleasant reading.

My name is Alan Cox and I work as a royalty analyst at Ostereo. I firstly want to say that as an Ostereo employee I'm deeply sorry for what you have experienced here. As you would expect that's definitely not how we wish to be seen to operate.

Given my role within Ostereo I'm unable to comment on the contractual situation and unfortunately also the status of the distribution of your material with Ostereo. I will however be forwarding this correspondence to my colleagues and management for their consideration.

Within my role in the company I can purely report on the sales data that is contained within the reports that we receive from our distribution partners. I can confirm that the values reported on your royalty statements from us relate to sales data from June 2019 to March 2020.

In closing, I will add your payment details to our system to enable this payout to you. I will also escalate your query so we can ensure that your material isn't further being exploited by Ostereo. On that point, once your revenue from us dries up, our policy is to wait 3 months where no new royalties have been received for your account before issuing final payout and closing your account. After this we will of course continue to monitor sales reports to see if any further sales are received relating to your catalogue (as some DSPs have quite delayed reporting timelines) to ensure that any revenue relating to your catalogue is communicated to you.

Thank you again for your considered approach to this query and I hope my feedback can go some way to helping resolve this matter.

Many thanks,

Reporting Team

In a further brief exchange the Ostereo guy said he would now put my details through for the payment to be made. I was still struck by the lack of transparency, even though he was sounding as though his department in Ostereo might be 100% genuine / bona-fide.

And then there was silence, and as time passed I was increasingly doubtful that any payment really was going to come my way — until this evening, when I got notification from PayPal of a £143.13 payment from Ostereo! — Okay, not a world-shaking amount, but still welcome!

And of course I'm still mystified as to what was really going on. If their dealings with me had actually not been a scam at all, which that payment suggests could conceivably be the case, all I can say is that their dealings with me (i.e., on the contractual side) were breathtakingly shambolic and incompetent and lacking in transparency (so they appeared to be on a scam trip), and I'm still very glad indeed to be clear of them.

Something very wrong at Google — Ongoing issue with poor traffic for my Clarity of Being site

18 September 2020

My Clarity of Being () site's traffic (number of real human visits), which had been averaging in the 600s per day in about 2014–15, had dropped in stages, eventually to a dismaying low level of upper double figures per day in spring 2019, and then in June that year had sharply risen to low 100s and then in the following October sharply again to the low to mid 200s, which seemed more encouraging, but then had sharply dropped back to the dismaying low level in May this year.

The number of Google referrer strings from page requests (i.e., reflecting click-throughs from Google search results) varied proportionally, while referrer strings from other search engines, which were very few to start with, didn't significantly change, so the implication straightaway was that the issue was something to do with Google's ranking of pages on that site of mine. Also, there was only a much smaller proportional decrease of the always very low traffic for my four other sites, and that was easily accounted for by far fewer click-throughs to them from my clarity-of-being.org site.

Thus the issue appears to be specifically related to Google and clarity-of-being.org.

Frustratingly, this low traffic level persists, and appears to be nudging just a little bit lower still. Considering that the site has unique and indeed uniquely important and positively life-changing contents, and that I've applied round upon round of 100% legitimate and ethical search engine optimization (SEO) measures to all my sites, this seriously low level of traffic, and its persistence, is truly baffling.

Then fairly recently I read in Web User magazine that Google has come out with a new user-experience rating system (weighted towards mobile phone users) that they call Core Web Vitals, which is experimental currently, but is intended to be used as a factor in page ranking as from the beginning of next year.

I was able to go into my Google Search Console account and see how compliant my Clarity of Being site pages were with the Core Web Vitals requirements.

Actually I was pleasantly surprised to find that NONE of my pages were graded as Poor, despite the considerable length of certain of them, and they'd all for a time been graded as 'need improvement' but more recently had flipped to 'Good', with only 6 (out of 62) still saying 'need improvement'. That implies that the vast majority of the pages were borderline between 'need improvement' and 'Good', and so big-looking changes in scores would be readily caused by Google's small algorithm adjustments as they tune their rating system.

I see that during this week those somewhat lower-scoring pages have been re-scored as Good — and those were particularly long pages, as were a few others that were already rated 'Good'. I find that amazing and encouraging, because I myself still regard mobile phones as being unsuitable devices for reading pages of such a length.

This week's exoneration of the remaining six pages may well be primarily a result of the intensive web page optimization work I'd done during the last few weeks on all my five sites — as described below.

Anyway, allegedly for all the pages it had been only one issue reported — the 'Largest Contentful Paint' (How's that for jargon!), which means the time it takes for the largest element of actual content in the opening screenful to be fully displayed. So, one improvement I could and did make was to spend the last several weeks intensively going through all pages on all my sites, ensuring that every single image tag has width and height specified, and in the right manner, so that nothing is delayed or goes shifting around as a result of browsers not being able to reserve space for the images before they get downloaded, and it might help subjectively to speed the apparent page-loading time.

Some of this work I was able to speed up by using complex regular expressions in PowerGrep to do global search and replace actions on certain categories of images. That task is almost complete now, for all the sites. However, I don't yet have any clear sign that my site traffic or page ranking is being significantly benefited yet, but then Core Web Vitals are allegedly not being used for page ranking yet. Presumably it'll get really interesting, come the New Year, but of course not necessarily in the site's favour.

In the course of that work, to improve readability especially in smartphones (narrow screens) I also looked at EVERY paragraph on every page, and split every one that looked to be above a certain length, and split up some over-long sentences (though quite a lot of those remain to be attended to on the figurative 'rainy day').

Thankfully, Google claims (and has claimed for quite a long while now) that ALL pages on my Self-Realization site are already 'mobile-friendly'. — But that makes it all the more baffling that I'm getting such low traffic and numbers of Google search query click-throughs for that site. Originally I'd assumed that the declining traffic issue was caused by my pages getting penalized for not being 'mobile-friendly', but I fixed that in late 2017, and to my dismay there was no corresponding increase in the site's traffic or Google referrer strings. So clearly there was some other, much more potent cause of the issue.

Trying (yet again — sigh!) to understand that low traffic level…

Perhaps one pointer to the underlying cause is that when I've occasionally tried experimental relevant search queries in Google for important topics on that site, most of those didn't get any pages of mine showing anywhere high in the listing (though a very few did for a limited range of search queries), whereas some of the other search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Bing often listed my most relevant page (i.e., to the search query) at or close to top of their list, so in those search engines' view, the relevant pages of mine stood out from the crowd.

It's almost as though there's a human team at Google, checking to what extent a site's content is unique and of high quality (which indeed is claimed to be a big criterion used by Google), and there is an individual or group there who are considerably down-rating my site because they strongly disagree with its uniquely challenging contents (which cut straight through all the world's belief systems and traditions, pointing instead to a rationally based approach to addressing human dysfunction and quality of life issues).

Of course, if Google is using an algorithm to try to assess the quality and importance of sites, then their page ranking would be seriously dysfunctional anyway for lots of websites, because no algorithm could recognise what is uniquely special about the site, and indeed wouldn't be able to recognise the life-changing and life-saving nature of my site's contents.

I did a check on search results from different search engines just now, with the search string stop hearing voices, to see where my uniquely helpful Hearing Voices: How to Stop Them page came in their listings. Results were as follows:

• Google — Not listed AT ALL (in 200 entries)!!!!
  
• Ecosia — First entry!
  
• Qwant — First entry!
  
• Bing and Yahoo and DuckDuckGo — Second in list.
  
• Yandex — Not in first few results pages, and then I gave up because Yandex kept identifying my clicking for the next page as automated, and requiring me to enter a CAPTCHA to prove I was a real human before I could continue. Useless — perhaps it had twigged that I'm really Donald Trump in disguise!

Similarly, a search for crisis self help got the following results for my Crisis Emergency Self-Help page:

• Google — Not listed AT ALL (in 250 entries)
• Ecosia — 16th
• Qwant — 20th
• Bing and DuckDuckGo — 12th
• Yahoo — 5th
  

This suggests that my main Clarity of Being pages are generally more or less highly ranked by most reasonably well-known Western search engines, but not by Google (and Yandex is a mess and best ignored anyway).

Of course the trouble is that the vast majority of people here in the English-speaking West use Google in preference to any other. I can only surmise that actual humans are most likely involved in some part of the pages' evaluation, and in the case of Ecosia, Qwant, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo they'd presumably recognised that those pages of mine had something special that made them stand out from the crowd.

Clearly, if Google (or at least particular key employees there) have taken a dim view of the content of clarity-of-being.org, then no SEO or other site improvement work at all could do much to improve that site's miserable traffic figures — which indeed currently appears to be the case. Most frustrating and demoralizing!

Need for a means by which genuinely wronged site-owners could gain rectification and even redress…

How I wish there were some system for reporting, and having enforced rectification of, gross search engine bias against particular outstanding websites that are of major community benefit, on the basis of either a badly written algorithm or beliefs held by search engine staff who unethically covertly impose their beliefs by down-ranking* pages or sites whose contents clash with their beliefs!

We need a global Search Engine and Site-Rating Services Ombudsman, who then could start nailing the monolithic excesses of the likes of Google, TripAdvisor, TrustPilot and WOT, which claim to be objective and impartial in ranking pages / sites, but in some cases appear to be holding down or indeed crushing those sites / businesses that certain employees or members happen to disagree with (or maybe even simply they don't like the site-owner's face!).

At the moment the likes of me appear to have no means to get anything rectified through direct personal approaches, and there must be many other owners of great and genuinely beneficial sites that are being held down by wrongfully low search engine or WOT ratings.

Whoopee — at last, my first hike since February!

21 July 2020

Following from last week's announcement by our wonderful, wonderful Prime Minister Uncle Boris (), that with immediate effect anyone could use public transport here in England (i.e., no longer just 'key workers'), today I took a bus to close to Dogmarsh Bridge on the Whiddon Down to Moretonhampstead road (north-eastern outskirts of Dartmoor National Park), to have my first strenuous walk since Portreath to Perranporth (Cornwall) back in February.

My aim was to do what I sensibly could of the route from Dogmarsh Bridge, along the River Teign to the so-called Teign Gorge (a deep, steep-sided valley, not actually a gorge) and then up along the Hunter's Path high on the north side of the valley, down to Fingle Bridge and then up the other side to the ancient hill-fort known as Cranbrook Castle, then back down to Fingle Bridge, then up to Prestonbury Castle, a hill fort on the north side above Fingle Bridge, then back down to near Fingle Bridge to return up and along the Hunter's Path again and back to Dogmarsh Bridge — a total of 9 miles and a very respectable amount of steep up and down for southern England.

During lockdown I'd been having plenty of vigorous 9-mile half-day walks on the flat from Exeter down by River Exe and canal down to the Topsham Ferry and back, but I knew my 9-mile Teign Gorge route was much more demanding, with all the gradients and mostly rougher ground, and my legs needed that to start rebuilding my strength for extended steep gradients, both up and down. On this first occasion it was a reasonable expectation to have to cut out a bit, depending on how stressed my leg muscles were getting.

In the event, yes, I did have to cut out a bit, but not that much. I got about halfway up the steep road rounding the flank of the Prestonbury Castle hill before deciding to gracefully turn tail and complete the route without that hilltop.

That in itself was a very encouraging start to my building up for more demanding hikes again — but there was something else too: I'd been very uncertain about the workability of hitch-hiking yet — but for the return to Exeter my Helpfulness Testing was indicating clearly for trying hitch-hiking from Dogmarsh Bridge — and it worked, in two stages, just as easily as if there wasn't an effing virus pandemic to reckon with!

So, next time I go there, to build up further, I'm going to try hitch-hiking out as well as back. If that works reasonably well, that would encourage me to hitch-hike rather than take the bus to Exmouth or Sidmouth for coast path walks there — and if all that works more or less as well as previously, then it would be time for me to consider starting to go for Cornwall coast path routes once more.

One thing I'm doing for the hitch-hiking to help my prospects is to be wearing a face mask (conspicuous light blue), but pushed down to be over my chin, so motorists can see my face while also hopefully getting the message that I'm a responsible guy and would wear the mask properly in the vehicle — and I recommend to any driver who does stop for me, for us to have somewhat open windows to ensure some air current.

It feels so good at last to be starting the build-up to full hiking capacity / ability. I'm nearly 79 now, so I did have some concern about the extent to which I'd be able to recover my strength after such a hiatus.

In fact, for decades it's been an ambition of mine to walk up Ben Nevis on or close to my 80th birthday — though actually the Scottish Highlands wouldn't be a practical area for me to go to then because of the normally very rainy conditions at that time of year. A similar-scale mountain ascent (with about 1300–1500m ascent, say in the Alps or some other mountain region with better weather in August would be a more practical proposition — though it presumably won't happen just because of the financial resources needed for such a trip (and no, with my physical issues / weaknesses, I'm not disposed to go camping!).

A new, challenging page on my Music Compositions site, examining the true nature of artistic 'influence'

15 July 2020

Musical Influences on Philip Goddard's Music & Literary Works
— Including a challenging examination of the nature of supposed artistic 'influences' and indeed the very nature of the creative process

This has taken me several weeks to produce, and I finally uploaded it to my Music Compositions site today. I started off really just with the notion of a few notes and a pretty short list of composers and specific works of theirs that would likely appear to some music reviewers / critics to have influenced me in my compositions.

That rapidly morphed into a deeply probing and challenging essay examining the true nature of what is widely regarded as musical (or indeed artistic) influences — unsurprisingly (seeing that it's this 'arrogant' crackpot authoring it) finding the whole field of musical reviewing and criticism 'weighed in the balance and found significantly wanting', thanks to the mass of held opinion, belief and a certain sense of their own superiority (the flip side of their covert inferiority feelings) that is typically carried by reviewers and critics! ("Those who can, do; those who can't, teach / review / criticise" — sort-of thing!)

In that essay I explain in some detail about how composition work, and artistic creativity generally, is often at least to some extent (depending on awareness level of the composer or other artist) derived from and driven by templates residing in deep and to some extent universal aspects of consciousness — basing this firmly upon my observations of how my own literary writing and music composition work operated, and seeing signs of similar modus operandi in the works of a fair number of other composers.

After the body text of the essay there follows a quite long list of composers, highlighting selected works of each, many with specific comments about ways in which they could at least be interpreted as relating to particular works of mine or of course my music more generally.

Almost all of those 'other composer' works are hyperlinked to painstakingly-selected YouTube video presentations of the respective works. One result of that is that even somebody not interested in the nominal subject of that essay may well find it still a valuable educational resource just for seeking out distinctly worthwhile unfamiliar composers and works to explore. And in any case, to explore those 'other composer' works enables one to have a much fuller and more context-aware understanding / appreciation of my own works.

A potential windfall from that project
While I was working on that project it came to my attention that there's some sort of major music work nudging at me to compose it — i.e., from a strong deep-level template that the Danish composer Rued Langgaard unawarely got partially in touch with to compose his strange and quirky church opera Antikrist. His input from that template appears to have got distorted by his religious beliefs in his composing that work — a crudely mystical sort of Christianity. Without such beliefs getting in the way, that template apparently has the potential to produce a much more inspiring and liberating work, which wouldn't be any sort of religious / 'spiritual' statement of faith but a liberation from all those belief-bound mindsets.

The only catch about that is that at the moment at least it's not possible for me to do that work, because for that I need a MIDI sequencer program that is at least as easy and effective to work with as my old long-obsolete MIDI sequencer, Voyetra Digital Orchestrator Pro, which doesn't run on anything later than Windows 98. I've been searching and searching online, and so far all the candidates I've looked at are either sufficiently uncluttered but insufficiently featured (e.g., too limited number of tracks and only limited editing features / functionality) or horrendously over-featured with a whole lot of functions that I'd never use, and consequently with little attention put upon ease of use for MIDI editing, especially in a piano-roll display. Even the highly-reputed FL Studio turned out to be rubbish for my purposes.

I'll keep looking, but it does appear that nothing close to the usability of Digital Orchestrator Pro for straight classical music MIDI composing / editing on a piano-roll display has been available since that program bit the dust — and I'm not going even to try using a program that's all the time going to be a struggle to use, and which can't even do various basic things I could do easily in DOP.

If I do eventually find a MIDI sequencer program that does the job satisfactorily for me, and I then get to work on the potential new composition, the working title (but not the eventual one) would be the key-phrase i larmens kirke-øde (in the din of the emptiness [|desolation|desert] of the church [|Church]), taken from Langgaard's Antikrist, because for me that phrase seems to have a particularly strong connection or 'resonance' with the particular musical template.

New, much enhanced versions of my 10 'extracted shortie' music 'lollipop' videos on YouTube

18 May 2020

It appears that I've now completed the overhaul of my music composition videos gallery at YouTube. Having put up enhanced versions of the videos of my main compositions and linked to them from the older (2019) versions, I've now done the same for the ten miniature works that are actually just adapted short extracts from certain of the main compositions — just taster 'lollipops' to get a few more people interested.

Indeed, the sound quality of those 'lollipops' is still better because I decided to upload them with full CD-quality sound for a change.

As part of the overhaul I've deleted all the (much earlier) videos just using preview excerpts that I was then hosting on my own music compositions website. That removes a lot of clutter, so now the gallery is much better focused — the latter also being much helped by my at last having got a whole set of playlists set up to aid navigation / browsing.

Done! 'Cathedral' versions of 11 of my music compositions now on YouTube!

12 May 2020

I took a lot of time fine-tuning the processing of the recordings with the VST plugin OrilRiver, but thankfully it really has paid off. See the relevant YouTube playlist and enjoy the listen!

I'd actually selected 10 recordings to be given this treatment, and the 11th work was a crazy-seeming afterthought — Nordic Wilderness Journey (in three movements), of all things! I'd never associated that with a cathedral sound at all, but thought the souped-up-Beethoven type of nervously pugnacious brittleness of much of the music might show off the reverberation particularly well. In the event, I found that the reverberant cathedral ambience — provided one lets go of the religious associations of that fabulous architectural masterpiece and just regards it as a most prestigious hyper-concert-hall — really made the work sound more compelling this way, as though it really were being performed live.

Indeed, I'm very pleased with the way all those 'cathedral' versions have turned out, and now others can hear them too.

YouTube videos of my music compositions: a bonus extra to come — complete with cathedral!

 6 May 2020

Actually, before I started uploading the videos of the enhanced versions of the recordings of my compositions, I selected ten of those recordings to be rendered additionally with a very carefully worked-out and tailored cathedral-like acoustic.

I'd dug out 'cathedral' recordings of a few of my works that I'd made at the same time as I made the main 'official' recordings, back in the early 2000s. Those 'cathedral' ones sounded impressive and really beautiful, but a lot of detail of denser textures was lost in the mush of reverberation. It wasn't a genuine cathedral acoustic, but used a 'plate' reverb setting that was available on the cheap reverb unit that I had at that time. Indeed, they sounded tremendously clearer after getting the enhancement I'd given all the other recordings, and at first I thought I'd just make videos of them and post those.

But then I thought about how they didn't sound like music being performed in any real cathedral I'd been in — and I'd often sung in large choral works in Exeter Cathedral and occasionally in Truro Cathedral, so I had a fair idea about this. This, then, led to my searching online for a free VST plugin program that would give me a good semblance of a genuine cathedral acoustic. This took a lot of work, because there turned out to be plenty of free VST plugins that had at least one Cathedral preset, but out of quite a number I found only one (OrilRiver) that enabled me to arrive at an acceptable approximation.

One thing I particularly wanted was for all the foreground sound (i.e., the instruments and choir) to be relatively 'dry', as though they were well-removed from walls, so that their reverb was clearly a background feature — and also I needed control over how much treble attenuation there was in the reverb, and the reverb decay time.

Although no configuration of that reverb could be exactly the same as in a real cathedral, I do think I've arrived at a very reasonable likeness. Inevitably still some detail still gets lost in the louder denser textures — but nothing like as much as with my original 'plate' reverb.

So, having now made pretty impressive 'cathedral' versions of ten of my music composition recordings, I'll very shortly be making videos of those and posting them on YouTube. That would take longer than the set of videos I've just uploaded, because they wouldn't be upgraded versions of extant videos, and each one would have to be made from scratch with regard to the visual material. For those none of my CD art would be relevant, and I guess I'd need to find some genuinely public domain or possibly 'free permission given' cathedral photos — both exterior and interior.

I do have a rather nice exterior one of Exeter Cathedral (which would definitely be relevant), but no interior ones — and in any case even without the Cathedral being closed at the moment because of the pandemic, I think I'd be required to pay a fee for interior photography there, not to mention my probably needing a better camera to get an even half-decent photo of that interior in that sort of lighting (my camera is approaching 13 years old now, and so surely an equivalent current model would perform much better).

Anyway, 'Watch this [cathedral] space', as they say! …

Completion of posting of the enhanced recordings of my Music Compositions on YouTube

 6 May 2020

Yes, I've just this evening completed that task, and linked each of the earlier video versions of my music recordings (posted around a year before) to the respective current ones. Take a listen to a few on my channel at YouTube.

I did a lot of careful comparative listening to establish how much sound quality is noticeably lost by using MP3 versions of the recordings in the videos, for many people claim that few people would notice significant difference between the 128 bitrate MP3s and the originals (basically CD-quality — 16-bit 44.1kHz). And although I expected I'd hear the difference reasonably clearly with high-quality recorded sound, in my case the sound quality of the MIDI renderings had seemed to be not brilliant to start with, so quite likely I'd not hear much difference.

Right? — No, wrong! The new enhancement to all the recordings has brought out an amazing level of clarity and 'liveness' even of most of the instrument and choir sounds that I'd assumed were already at their rather shaky best!

Of course, that's why I went ahead with upgrading all those recordings in the first place, but when I did comparative auditioning tests between CD-quality, 128 bpm MP3 and maximum resolution MP3 the results were illuminating.

After the CD-quality, the 128 MP3 sounded sort-of okay, but was dull and lacklustre, lacking the vibrant sense of 'liveness' and 'presence' — the 'wow' factor — that the CD-quality one had. So, I wondered whether to use a higher-quality MP3 resolution, and so tried maximum resolution for an audition. Certainly I've read claims by various supposedly really authoritative audio buffs that for practical purposes high-end MP3, although still losing some data in each recording, is near-indistinguishable from CD-quality.

Well, sorry, you posturing audio buffs whose views on the matter I'd read but would ignore in future, this decrepit 78-year-old geriatric can hear a clear difference! Indeed, for me the difference between the 128 MP3 and the top-end one was undoubtedly an improvement, but in my books it still sounded dull and lacklustre — just a bit less so. The real jump in quality was that to CD-quality, where 'wow' factor definitely resided.

So that's why I settled for sticking to 128bps MP3 for the new videos, in order to keep file size down. It also means that if you purchase CDs of any of those recordings (which are already all upgraded) you'd get distinctly more vibrant and 'real'-sounding rendition, subject to your having high-grade playback equipment and having hearing no worse than my own. The difference isn't just academic — it really shows!

The only catch about hearing, however, is that the quality of one's hearing is only partly dependent on the frequency range and spectrum that one is physically able to hear. It also depends on how effectively the sounds and overall soundscape are processed in the brain — and that varies a lot between different people even who have a similar basic hearing range. I assume that it would be primarily the more 'open' and aware people who would naturally perceive more detail and subtlety in what they're hearing, and thus could be more discriminating with regard to comparing sound quality of different recordings.

Open rebellion against one particular COVID-19 lockdown stipulation — age discrimination!

 30 April 2020

Yes, this Bad Boy is in open rebellion, but NO, he's being MORE responsible — NOT reckless or irresponsible! Indeed, he's applying actual good sense to the matter, which so far the UK Government has not been doing.

I'm at the tender age of 77, and here in the UK, even just before the overall lockdown officially commenced, an order was issued by our Government for all people with particular vulnerabilities and underlying issues, AND ALL people over 70 to stay at home for probably three or four months, without going out shopping or for any other purpose, to protect themselves and thus to minimize the overwhelming burden to the National Health Service (NHS) that the crisis peak was threatening to bring about.

As stated, that spelled something of a pending health disaster for me and presumably huge numbers of other people in the upper age range. How do you maintain your health while staying indoors for months on end — particularly in a small single flat with no room for proper indoor exercise facilities?

Answer — For the most part, you don't, and indeed you progressively and to a fair extent irretrievably atrophy, both physically and mentally.

Old people were being treated as an extremely inconvenient bunch of geriatric cattle who just had to be swept under the carpet while the Government scrambles to deal with the wayward behaviour of the rest of us!

Okay, after a few very anxious days, at last I established that the culpably negligent Government spokespeople had needlessly caused a huge amount of worry and stress by failing to state clearly at the outset in their public announcements that there were exceptions to that requirement for the supposedly vulnerable people to stay indoors, and what those were.

It turned out that going outdoors for one period of 'one form of' exercise per day was allowable, even for oldies, and that indeed it was a Good Thing, which people needed to do (Hooray!). The downside was that we were getting and still get a confusion of mixed messages about how much such exercise was / is allowable, both in terms of duration and distance walked / run / cycled.

My general impression from various media interviews with relevant Government Ministers was that they did really mean to apply a humane approach to the difficult situation and really wanted a flexible approach to make the most of one's daily exercise slot, as long as it didn't put one or others at infection risk — so I was able to start taking heart about this.

That was where I, for one, started grabbing back a bit of common sense for myself. I nervously tried going out for the four-mile out-and-back walk down by the River Exe and Exeter Canal to Double Locks. But then I realized that there was no police monitoring along there, and extended my walks often to the canal bridge by Topsham Ferry, making it a nine-mile walk there and back by a mostly different route (taking 2¾-3 hours including various pauses).

There was no material risk of infection because I was being scrupulous about distancing — to an extent that I quickly learnt to restrict my walks to first thing after breakfast (setting out c. 8.00 a.m.), when a minimum of the Antisocial Brigade (the socializing or simply moronic non-distancers) were out and about.

So, on that score, although I was missing out on strenuous hiking, at least I was getting vigorous exercise for a tolerable distance, weather permitting.

But nonetheless there was still a significant issue. I was supposedly obliged not to do any shopping, but to get other people to do that for me. Although I'd accepted shopping offers from two individuals who I'd got to know from respective restaurants where they worked, there were still elements of inconvenience about having such arrangements — and indeed I quite soon cut the odd corners because I knew that, as a fit and healthy person, I wasn't endangering myself by doing so (in a sensible manner, of course, paying careful attention to distancing).

Over the last few days I became increasingly aware of a subtle inner clamouring to the effect that I had a real need to break out into full rebellion about the shopping and indeed my being covered by the 'shielding' rules at all. Lockdown, yes, but 'shielding', no. That wasn't just a matter of petulant little me getting frustrated — even though petulant little me certainly was feeling some frustration! No, it was something important that the Government has so far been too mentally hidebound to recognise.

Just think — you're a healthy and fit person with no recognised relevant underlying health issues, with healthy lifestyle and food choices, no smoking or alcohol or confectionery, or indeed any mind-affecting substances from 1974 onwards — and just because of your age you're deemed to be frail and vulnerable!! Okay, so you try to avoid strife with other people's expectations of you, and so you comply, just quietly recognising that you're still a fit and healthy person.

However, it's not that simple. Even if you know bloody well that the 'people over 70' stipulation is rubbish, and that you're a fit and healthy person with no obvious vulnerability, the mere fact of complying with this particular rule and living largely as though you are frail and vulnerable, you're unawarely sending signals into your system that are telling it that indeed you really are frail and vulnerable! Over time that impacts increasingly on both your mental and physical health, so you become, yes, more frail and vulnerable!

What's more, where age does count is that in such a situation a good bit of the physical and mental atrophy that is brought about by living in that sort of mindset for an extended period is not recoverable. That's more so, the older one is. So, in the name of 'shielding' and 'protection', one is actually being made MORE likely to die of the dratted virus when restrictions are lifted and the virus is still around to some degree — and indeed also more likely to die of all sorts of other alternative things because of one's generally poorer state. How clever these politicians are!

Okay, so yesterday I broke into full rebellion on that point. I emailed dear Tony and Grace to thank them for their shopping assistance so far and to cancel the shopping lists I'd sent them earlier that day, explaining my liberating change of tack.

From now on I do all my own shopping until / unless I have cause to be in self-isolation, when of course for just 7 days or so I'd have to call upon my friends' assistance again — but of course that would only be very temporary and would cover a period when one would probably need a few days' rest anyway while the main symptoms worked through.

Bottom line:
I encourage ALL genuinely fit and healthy people without relevant underlying health issues, who are under 'shielding' measures simply because of their age, to disobey the shielding measures that go beyond the general lockdown measures that apply to everyone — subject of course to a rational rather than fear-based consideration of possible repercussions from their own country's Administration if they took such a course of action.

A new overhaul of my music composition recordings — real 'shivers up the spine' stuff!

 25 April 2020

A few days ago, prompted by my sending to a friend a link to one of my works on YouTube, for the first time in quite a while I was moved to follow that link myself and listen to it on YouTube — and, as always, was somewhat bugged by the lack of clarity and detail in all the denser textures. I went on to listen to my own local copy of my 5th Symphony (Magritte Gallery) — a marvellous piece quite unlike anything else I'd done, and again was bugged by that lack of clarity where it was most needed — and suddenly I got a hunch.

I thought first about my stereo-widening software (the A1StereoControl VST plugin), which has so wonderfully transformed many of my natural soundscapes recorded with the Sony PCM-M10 recorder, which latter gives very poor stereo imaging. Although my music recordings didn't need widening of their soundstage, there were other aspects of that processing that I thought might in some way improve the clarity. But then I thought also of the way I'd considerably improved the clarity and detail of my later natural soundscape recordings, made with the Sony PCM-D100, by simply applying a modest 'tilt' to each recording's frequency spectrum — a straight-line equalization curve rising by just 2dB from 100Hz to 8kHz.

My experimentation then showed that although the stereo imaging processing did improve the sound for some purposes (but not mine currently) in that it made the sound much more spacious and reverberant, detail tended to get dwarfed by the exaggerated ambience, so I could drop that idea and not spend further time on it.

But the simple 'tilt' EQ? — Bloody hell, what I'd been missing over the best part of two decades since I made those recordings back in the early 2000s!!

I found that a stiff rise of 6dB on that tilt was required for best overall performance, but I'm now in the throes of working through all my music composition recordings, applying the tilt to each one and then auditioning specimen sections of each and adjusting the recording's overall level as needed (with the greater clarity comes a rather different subjective impression of loudness).

I'm finding the results of each such processing quite thrilling. It's as though a very thick curtain has at last been removed from each soundstage. The organ sounds much more now as though it's a real one in a real church / cathedral (necessarily ignoring the odd quirks that I can't do anything about nowadays), and similarly orchestra and choir all sound much more real and 'live', despite various sound quality limitations caused by hardware / software constraints I had back then in the early 2000s. I can now hear much more detail in dense orchestral / choral textures, and am at last getting a real 'Wow!' impression from each, instead of my previous regular 'Oooh dear!' impression.

Once I've completed this transformation on all those recordings, I intend to update my local copies of the YouTube videos of them, and then upload those as new videos. Frustratingly I have to mess around rather because YouTube gives no means to update the audio in a video in situ on the YouTube site. What I'll have to do for each recording is to upload the new video, then put a suitable comment on the earlier version, linking to the new version. That'll no doubt take some time.

As soon as I can get round to it, I'll also upgrade the audio content of the CDs of those recordings — which, thankfully, I can do directly on the Amazon Media on Demand site.

Anyway, all that's a short way off yet, for first I want to finish the transformation of all the relevant recordings. — Watch this space…

Coming to terms with the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions…

2 April 2020

I have to say, the start of it all was pretty stressful for me, with sudden cessation of facilities I'd been taking so much for granted. It wouldn't have been so bad if I were below age 70, but there is an official requirement here in the UK that ALL people over 70 stay at home for probably at least three months — and I'm 77 — and to have all shopping done for them. What wasn't openly stated initially was that it was still regarded as okay and indeed good for people even in that category to go out of their home for one period of unspecified duration per day for some form of outdoor exercise, provided they're careful to keep at least 2m distance from other people.

I've been making good use of that exception by taking a vigorous walk each day when the weather invites, down the River Exe and Exeter Canal to Double Locks, and back a partly different way (4 miles total) and sometimes extending to the canal bridge by the Topsham Ferry and back the other side of the canal (9 miles total). It's been no great problem keeping distance from other people, especially when doing the walks first thing in the morning, when the more stupid people (i.e., who still don't respect the social distancing rule) aren't yet out and about. Particularly during the morning walks I get a really nice sense of camaraderie about all the distance-keeping while passing other people. 'Lockdown' doesn't feel so bad this way!

I was concerned about getting essential provisions, as I live on my own, with no social life that people would recognise as such, but in the event I got offers of shopping from two rather surprising sources — some of the laid-off staff at the now-closed Pho Vietnamese restaurant that I'd been frequenting in central Exeter, and from the owner of Herbie's vegetarian restaurant, which I'd also been frequenting (indeed, since 2005). In both cases they're lovely people with whom I'd quickly developed a friendly relationship.

In the event I'm regarding the Pho people's offer as my Plan B option, and haven't had cause to call on them yet, but I'm intending to keep in touch with them anyway as friends.

In addition I found an excellent Spanish restaurant called Tapitapa close to where I live, in Exeter centre, which has naturally now closed its eat-in service but is still continuing as a takeaway, and operates their own delivery service. Their prices are low and portions large. Their range is pretty small for vegetarians and especially vegans, but for me that's less of an issue as I'm neither (rather, a flexibly healthy eater), and so can benefit from a modest number of their menu items. For more variety I'd really like to find the odd additional reasonably healthy takeaway meal services that are still running in Exeter, but haven't yet found any.

It also turns out that my local fresh fish shop and a wholefoods shop are still going strong and doing deliveries, so I can get certain things that most likely wouldn't be available for my weekly Sainsbury's shopping assistance, and my local launderette (Kenjo) is being very helpful with regard to collecting and delivering my three-weekly laundry loads — so for the moment I seem pretty well covered without having to call upon the community support schemes that have been set up to assist people who are required to be staying indoors during this crisis.

Also, I've come to realize that it's not materially contravening the spirit of the 'stay at home' rule for the over-70s if just for some very occasional special purpose I nip out to buy some required item when there would be minimum people around (read 'first thing in the morning') — of course well distancing myself from any people who are around. Thank goodness we're not yet in a police state here in the UK, and application of plain common sense is still allowed and indeed actually encouraged, at least in some quarters!

It's still pretty horrible, and a nagging frustration for me, that there's no way I could get out on any of my proper hikes or any worthwhile locations for natural soundscape recording sessions — seeing that such outings require hitch-hiking out and return. I'm now resigned to probably at least a whole year lost for such purposes — but at least to a reasonable extent I can keep up some leg muscle strength and general fitness / good health by keeping on doing my vigorous walks by the river and canal.

I did consider sometimes making the latter a full-day c. 16-mile walk, by continuing to the outskirts of Starcross and then returning partly the same way. But then when I thought more carefully about that, it turned out not to be such a good idea. The trouble is, with a walk of that sort of length, there need to be escape routes (which there are), for use in the event of, for example, strain injuries or blisters — and those escape routes need to be genuinely usable in the current situation, which in fact they wouldn't be.

Reason? — Because when I get to the main road I'd need to hitch-hike or catch a bus back to Exeter — both of which options are no-go during this crisis period.

Finally, I want to express my deep appreciation not only to all the medical workers who are helping combat the pandemic, but also to the huge number of other key workers who are keeping us and our infrastructure going despite all the difficulties. For example, let's give a thought to all the transport drivers, who rarely get much of a thought at the moment, and the hard-working and I think normally hard-pressed delivery drivers who are doing such a great job in bringing essentials to us while we're under lockdown or self-isolation.

In that respect I've been greatly impressed by the much maligned Amazon delivery service, which has still brought me goods as speedily as ever this week, so helping free me (for the moment, of course) of concerns about delivery services getting overwhelmed by the increased demand for online trading and thus it becoming very difficult to get essential supplies when actually needed. Good on all those great workers out there — the refuse collectors and street cleaners very much included, and the whole lot of those great people out there working their backs off to help bring us through the current crisis!

(Update to previous post)

16 Mar 2020

I've now incorporated the 9 March post (below), somewhat augmented and updated, into a new page on my Clarity of Being site — Project Fix the Human Condition That page briefly outlines my three (so far) ventures towards possibly clearing us all of Humanity's #1 scourge, in a more coherent and meaningful way than hitherto, showing the different ventures as not being just wayward delusional fantasy trips but parts of a coherent fully rationally based experimental approach based on various aspects of my working model of 'reality' and the methodology I've based on that.

Another saucy little venture maybe to abolish the garbage…

9 Mar 2020

No doubt prompted by all the kerfuffle about the gathering COVID-19 pandemic, soon before getting-up time today I got a funny Why didn't I think of this before? hunch with regard to another, so-far unexplored possible avenue for, yes, abolishing the sweet little garbage (mistakenly equated with 'dark force', 'forces of darkness', 'forces of evil', 'demonic forces').

Just as a vaccine is developed through a process of finding out what particular structural or chemical characteristics or configurations of the particular pathogen could be exploited to cause the body's immune system to produce antibodies to zap any future infection by that pathogen, so, why not look at recognisable characteristics of the garbage's own programming, to see what might be exploited to disrupt or otherwise disable its functioning and enable people's intrinsic immunity to rule the show at long last?

"Ooooh dear, there he goes again!" — Yes, I know, many eyes would roll up at any such suggestion — particularly from this particular recalcitrant crackpot! — But of course those groans and rolled eyes are all from the 'sheep' of this world, and therefore less than useless! — What have any of those billions of 'sheep' ever genuinely achieved towards clearing Humanity from the scourge of the garbage? — As far as I can tell, all they've achieved in that direction is far less than nothing!

Meanwhile, at least there's method in this particular funny little man's madness. While neither I nor anyone else can absolutely, objectively know the true nature of the garbage, my regarding it as a complex of thought forms (quasi-autonomous programming in 'thought energy') has been a very important aspect of my extremely effective and successful working model upon which my life-upturn and life-saving self-actualization methodology is based.

One particular thing about the garbage's programming is that the latter presumably includes a notional module that directs it all the time to go interfering with people in order to cause them to keep re-creating / reinforcing the thought forms that constitute the garbage; otherwise the latter would dissolve over a remarkably short time-scale. Although that's not something we could ever know in absolute terms, if we assumed that the garbage had no such programming, then we'd be leaving completely unanswered in any helpful way the pressing question as to why the garbage is constantly doing people so much harm.

To say it's simply intrinsically evil or malevolent, as people so widely do, is just to express subjective judgement and belief on the subject, which would be nonsensical and serve no helpful purpose. Do we say a malarial mosquito feeding on you and giving you malaria is doing that because it's evil or malevolent? — Hopefully you have the sense to understand that all the little mozzie is doing is ensuring the survival of its genes over further generations of the same species of mozzie!

And similarly, it makes great sense in all sorts of ways to take it as a useful working assumption that the garbage's troublesome behaviour really is all similarly driven by inherent programming to ensure its own ongoing survival.

So, what if deeper consciousness itself had the ability, if necessary with a little assistance from one or more of its most open and aware incarnations, within a useful time-scale to identify some core aspect of the garbage's self-perpetuation programming that could be targeted by means of injecting into the astral non-reality a little piece of code to act just like a dose of gene therapy?

At the very least that could theoretically disable the garbage's self-perpetuation module and even conceivably change the function of the latter so that it starts actually causing people to feel disenchanted with all their previous garbage-perpetuating behaviours (including all the religion / spirituality / New Age stuff), and at long last to start opening up their full potential for rational thought and behaviour.

After the various shenanigans I'd dropped myself into when previously seeking to take measures towards dissolving / disabling the garbage, I didn't want to get into a pile of story about the matter this time, but I did use inner inquiry on it and got a 'strengthening' response to my actually using a variant of my procedure for initiating corrective physical change, to produce a very strong alignment of my conscious intent with that of my deepest aspects for enabling the beginnings of a very active inner research to work out a 'gene therapy' thought form to then inject into the astral and, with any luck, thus to initiate the beginning of the end of the garbage.

I used that procedure today, and I now draw a line under it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and if it's really a red herring or simply takes too long for us to notice over the next few weeks / months / millennia, it's still been worth a try!

There would still need to be closure of the astral to our conscious 'minds' as soon as possible, however, for the astral would always be a problem for us until such closure has occurred — even without the garbage any longer.

Considering switching from CDs to digital downloads for my sound recordings

7 Feb 2020

I currently have a queue of exquisite new natural soundscape CDs waiting for me to set them up and submit them — but now I think that's not going to happen.

It's been an ongoing nagging slight stress for me, that my natural soundscape CDs get vanishingly few sales (most titles have had no sales at all) — but I've valiantly or bone-headedly been continuing to issue new recordings in that format regardless.

I greatly dislike the idea of distributing my recordings as digital streaming or downloads, for my sort of material really needs to be accompanied by proper photographic artwork, with some notes about the recording(s) — and in the CD format I'm able to provide that. It's satisfying for me, and provides the customer with an engaging and informative package. So, I've been continuing to 'do' CDs despite it being against all the odds sales-wise.

However, spectre-wise, another factor has been bugging me increasingly over this last year, and I now consider it to be action time to step out of my untenable position in continuing with CDs. The point is, of course, the consumption of plastic for manufacture of the finished product — both the discs and the inevitable plastic cases that are required for proper storage. I can no longer turn a blind eye to the consequences of my actions, and causing still more avoidable plastic waste can't continue to be on my agenda.

So, with considerable feeling of reluctance, I recognise it's time for me to change over to some means of distribution of my recordings as downloaded files. At the moment the only way appearing to be workable for me would be to do just informal on-demand sales from my Broad Horizon Nature site, probably using a fairly minimal subscription to Google Drive for me to place ordered recordings for people to download via links that I give them on completion of their order.

So far, I've not found any of the regular music distribution channels that are suitable for my material and compatible with my lack of resources to pay up-front or recurrent fees for the respective service, and distribution. I had been thinking of using CD Baby Free (which doesn't distribute one's material, only offering it on their site), but CD Baby appears to have a very murky reputation over various issues, including Content ID scam, and my detailed investigation of how that service would work for me appeared to be showing a whole lot of incompatibilities with my sort of material anyway.

I also looked carefully at SoundCloud. There, not only would I have at least a £90 per year recurrent fee to fork out but also my material wouldn't even start earning me anything until such time as I was achieving at least 5,000 streams / downloads in a month. That would no doubt be easy for creators peddling pop, folk or dance music, but it would be a dead loss for me with my 'serious' natural soundscapes.

Another issue I have with the music distribution channels is their lack of an appropriate category with which to tag my material to enable customer searches to find it. The much-needed categories 'natural soundscape' and 'nature' or 'nature sounds' simply don't exist in the standard list of categories for audio content, which latter is assumed by all the channels I know, to be some sort of music. Just 'New Age', 'Meditative', 'Sound clip' or 'Other' really doesn't cut it — especially as one can choose only one category / subcategory anyway.

All these services are set up primarily for music, and especially non-classical music, where an album is a collection of tracks, whereas really my material is most commonly nowadays a single recording per CD — split up on each disc only to aid navigation, not because the tracks are meant to be regarded or used as separate entities.

At least, if I just put up with doing the occasional informal download sales from my own site, that would save me a lot of work in preparing each title for a distribution service, for I could then prepare and upload titles only for each paid order that I actually received. I could of course seek to switch to using a commercial distribution channel if I ever got a level of sales that justified my doing that, but at the moment such a sales level is something I can't expect without some specific cause of which I'm unaware at the moment.

One plus side of doing things this way would be that I could offer individual whole recordings of shorter and longer than CD length, and could offer a choice of MP3 or FLAC compression — with a price differential of course because the FLAC files are lossless and so, to people with acute hearing and excellent playback equipment, the FLAC files would sound clearer and more detailed. Also, in some rather special circumstances I may agree to a FLAC file being supplied at the original 24-bit 48KHz resolution (at a somewhat higher price of course) for a declared clearly specified purpose.

I'm still in the 'thinking and sleeping over it' stage about this. At the moment I expect to leave my extant CD titles active on my Digital Download Catalogue and Amazon.com, but most or all of those recordings would most likely additionally become available as downloads sold directly by me, while my currently queued CD titles would be morphed into just download titles.

Bellever Tor (Dartmoor) all-night recording session — success at last!

8 Jun 2019

Cuckoo and nightjar spectaculars as you've (probably) never heard them before!

On my night recording session of 31 May / 1 June 2019 at last I succeeded in getting a bunch of excellent recordings of the birds' evening chorus and dawn chorus (plus!) at Bellever Tor, on Dartmoor, complete with many beautiful and often haunting echo and reverberation effects of the cuckoo sounds in the forestry (and even the odd moos from cattle on the open moor getting in on the echo / reverb act too!).

Last year, on the night of 8/9 June I thought initially that I'd already hit the jackpot and got tremendous recordings, with excellent nightjar choruses and cuckoo activity. However, I eventually came to recognise that they were all blighted with prominent microphone self-noise, caused by two main factors:

• the soundscapes being all fairly distant and too quiet, so exposing the relatively very low level of mic self-noise;
• my use of three furry windshields per recorder, and the very strong correction required for the consequent muffling of the recordings' treble — this in turn boosting the hiss aspect of the mic self-noise.

So, this season I had a series of prospecting and then test daytime sessions at Bellever Tor to find my way to getting really usable great recordings without being plagued by all that internal noise. Those efforts have clearly paid off handsomely. Instead of placing recorders for getting distant panoramas, I placed them close to or just within the edge of the forestry, and in all cases sheltered by young Sitka spruce trees, which gave excellent wind shelter. I was thus able to get away with using only one furry windshield per recorder, so requiring much less subsequent treble boost.

Also, any breeze was then producing some background continuity sound so as to help mask the self-noise. And again, being closer to trees, each recorder was much closer to a fair bit of the birds' 'action' and therefore the whole soundscape wasn't so deathly quiet anyway.

However, in this most recent session I did become a bit dubious about the success of that session because the wind gradually dropped right down by dawn chorus time. In the event, although the mic self-noise was audible in the pre- and early-dawn period, even then it was at a very acceptably low and unobtrusive level, with its hiss aspect quiet enough to be inaudible to me when any of the recordings were played back at a realistic (i.e., not exaggerated) level.

In my view therefore the recordings are eminently usable, and I've added two of the dawn ones to my list of CDs to be set up shortly. One is to be a 2-CD album while the other is to be a single CD containing a condensed 'Cuckoo Special' version of another of the four concurrent dawn recordings.

It's still frustrating that I can't record distant all-round panoramas at night without a mic noise problem, but that's the lie of the land for me because I haven't resources to buy or indeed cart around the much more expensive recording equipment that has low-enough self-noise for that sort of use.

For details of the recordings, please see my Chronological List of Recordings.

My sound recordings — Further progress and simplification

19 Apr 2019

Examination of a pair of long side-by-side PCM-M10 and PCM-D100 recordings in Branscombe Landslip — after each had been given its respective initial processing — demonstrated clearly to me that the seemingly spectacular improvement I'd made to the stereo imaging of my old M10 recordings was still only a partial job.

I established that I could further improve each of those recordings by applying a further small increment of stereo widening, but by now I realized that my best option was to abandon the Proximity plugin for stereo processing, because even the top end of its slider control doesn't give a strong enough processing — so I switched over to the excellent A1 Stereo Control plugin for all stereo processing.

In truth, even its strongest setting was still not quite enough for processing a new file, but for adding the requisite final increment to the already stereo-processed recordings I set up an additional preset in the plugin to give a notional 120% width. Although that's only a 20% increase, the effect was generally dramatic, because it brought about the change from a still very slightly blurred soundstage to a pin-sharp one, with much better differentiation and 3D quality of the soundstage, and normally a loss of any sense of it being a recording — just being back there in the recording session!

For new M10 recordings, I've established that best results are coming from using two passes of A1 Stereo Control — the first at maximum (200%) width and the second much smaller, at 110%. I'm finding that the best prior tilt EQ to use (see previous post) is -9dB at 8K. Without that EQ the stereo processing makes the recordings far too bright and loses much of the soundstage depth.

I've contacted the A1 Stereo Control developer, asking him to consider increasing the maximum width available, so that one can fully process recordings like these M10 ones in one pass.

It really is exciting now to be able to make any M10 recording have the same superb stereo imaging as the D100 after its recordings have been tweaked with a small tilt (-2dB at 400Hz, so gently emphasizing higher frequencies and sharpening detail). In other words, I'm easily able to make M10 recordings sound better than D100 recordings that haven't been tweaked. Also, I've not been able to detect any adverse effects of such processing, such as artefacts or increased self-noise showing up in very quiet soundscapes.

I'm thus particularly keen to get hold of one or indeed two PCM-M10 recorders that people have declared redundant and are still in full working order — though won't pay silly collectors'-item prices for what is required as a workhorse rather than a museum piece!

My sound recordings — Further progress report

9 Apr 2019

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since my last update, of just a week ago! I've just completed going through all my PCM-M10 recordings, that is, all my recordings up to 15 March 2016, to transform the stereo imaging of each (apart from a small proportion that I'm sure I wouldn't use now anyway) to bring it on a par with the lifelike reproduction that I get from the D100. It's continued to amaze me how recordings originally delivering such vague and lacklustre soundstages could be transformed into such vivid and lifelike representations of what I actually heard, and with so little effort and time expenditure — and indeed using free plugin programs.

I found that for best results it was necessary to follow this procedure:

• Reduce the recording's level by a modest amount — say 3dB, because the stereo processing increases the 'side' channel level, and we don't want to risk any clipping being caused.

• Assuming the recording has already had treble correction for the use of any windshield, do a simple EQ on it, applying a tilt (straight-line 'curve') from 400Hz (0dB — no change) to 8kHz (-3dB), adding a further node (again -3dB) at your top frequency, thus gently de-emphasizing the higher frequencies in a way that wouldn't introduce troublesome colorations and wouldn't over-emphasize the frequencies beyond what most people wouldn't hear anyway.

  (I have a set of custom tilt presets saved in Audacity, and the aforementioned -3dB one also available in WavePad.)

• Stereo processing:

• For most recordings use the already mentioned Proximity plugin, using a custom preset with the following parameters set:

• Slider at about +3.33 (set one's own preference of course by trial and error)

• True Delay: A

• Stereo Width: A

• Reflections: A

• All other switches: Off

• (The only essential switch is Stereo Width; I'm not altogether sure that the True Delay or Reflections settings are having a significant effect for my recordings.)

• (Other settings left at their defaults)

• In recordings with the 'action' too limited to one side, instead I use the A1 Stereo Control plugin, from a different source. That has built-in control for pan as well as stereo width.

• Restore the recording level if necessary (using Amplify or Normalize function as appropriate), being aware that in many cases the upgraded recordings will sound subjectively somewhat louder and 'in your face' for a given level, so may need to be at a slightly lower level now for the most accurate rendition of the original soundscape.

For new M10 recordings I wouldn't have to give them their tilt EQ as a separate stage, for I've now incorporated that into the choice of macros in Audacity that I use for batch-processing of new M10 recordings — but the stereo processing would still need to be done afterwards, individually on each file, so that any need for pan adjustment or further tilt adjustment is noticed and addressed.

All this faces me with some challenge as to what to do with all these amazingly transformed new versions of my M10 recordings. On the face of it, I have the huge task of uploading revised audio content for all my CDs that use M10 recordings. I think in practice I'd delete a fair proportion of those CDs, which are less relevant now that I have so many more outstanding recordings.

That would sharpen up my catalogue in favour of the more outstanding material, and I'd then upload the updated audio content for the remaining relevant CDs. I want to keep that work to a sensible minimum because I also want to put future attention more on making the recordings available as downloads rather than CDs. That would presumably mean less preparation work for me, and most likely more public attention and even sales!

But before I do even that I want to finish cleaning up my recordings of my MIDI realizations of my music compositions, and then to make downloads available of the entire works. So far hardly anyone has heard any of my compositions as the complete works as distinct from the excerpts that I've so far made available (the CDs of my music having had almost no sales), and it's clear that there's a real need for the works to be more actively showcased. I expect presently to have them on YouTube and most likely SoundCloud, and of course would have links to them at least from my Music Compositions site and presumably my Music Digital Download Catalogue on this site.

My sound recordings — Update and an amusing about-turn…

2 Apr 2019

Things have moved on, and some long field recordings have put TDR Nova to the test and led me to another plugin from the same source. Here's the state of play with regard to improvements resulting from my getting put onto TDR software:

• Mic wind noise reduction — Actually such interference, if strong, cannot be made altogether inaudible, but at least it really is more effectively reduced than I'd achieved before (i.e., using static EQ in Audacity) — and I was able to configure that reduction so that it sounds relatively smooth and friendly rather than an unwanted intrusion (i.e., provided it isn't at all persistent). This extra degree of reduction does appear to enable me to record usefully in somewhat more situations than previously without my having to resort to using a third furry windshield — so meaning a bit less correction for the resultant muffling of the sound, and thus less boost to microphone hiss.

• Mic self-noise — I've not yet found any way to significantly reduce it in extant recordings without seriously degrading the recordings, though am prospecting in particular very quiet recording locations to establish placements that are likely to provide enough background sound to hide that self-noise.

• Sharpening up and widening the rather deficient stereo image of the PCM-M10 recordings — surely an unachievable 'holy grail'! — Except that I found that it's easily doable (Alleluia!)! It can be done in TDR Nova, but I found that the same source also offers a free plugin called Proximity, which, among its various settings for adjusting the proximity / distance impression given by a recording, enables one to adjust the stereo width, including a sharpening-up of the definition. And it works brilliantly, transforming my PCM-M10 recordings.

  Although their soundstage is thus made as wide as I want, with sharply defined detail, it cannot add additional detail at the sides, so in practical terms that widening is a zooming-in, expanding the soundstage and bringing it subjectively closer. Although that would be undesirable for some recordings, actually it works brilliantly as an alternative perspective for many, and for some recordings a somewhat zoomed-in soundstage would be my first choice anyway.

Wanted!
- Sudden re-evaluation of the PCM-M10

So, yes, it's the last list item above that relates to a certain amusing about-turn. Suddenly I realized that I had good reason to remove my original M10 from my For Sale page here, and actually to bring it back into active use in addition to the D100s — and indeed to seek an additional one or even two M10s. The latter model is now so long-discontinued that it's available only second-hand, and often at eye-wateringly high prices, but I'd definitely like to buy up one or two redundant M10s, provided they're working properly and a friendly, non-eye-watering price is being asked!

Not only does the M10 enable me now to get recordings of remarkably similar quality to those I get from the D100 (albeit a little more zoomed-in), but it's significantly less wind-sensitive, so there would be occasions where the M10 would be the only recorder that could get me a useful recording at all. — And it's much smaller than the D100, and lighter, which is a big plus-point for me carrying my gear on hikes and having to pack everything in my rucksack!

My sound recordings — big breakthrough over issues with mastering?

26 Mar 2019

The term 'mastering' here means processing recordings so that they are in the best possible shape for use, and can involve a multitude of adjustments to the sound, both in its details and the overall soundstage.

Just a few days ago, Troye Lilley, one of the people benefiting from my Clarity of Being site, recommended to me a free program (actually a VST plugin) called TDR Nova for possibly addressing certain issues my recordings have, which I'd regarded as largely or wholly intractable and vastly limiting the range of situations and conditions in which I could make usable natural soundscape recordings.

This opened up a very large can, not of worms but of exciting possibilities for me, and some sighs of relief. TDR Nova, and even more so its fuller-featured paid-for Gentleman's Edition (which I paid out for), is an amazingly comprehensively featured 'Swiss Army knife' for EQ (i.e., equalization, aka frequency spectrum adjustment)-related adjustment of sound files.

Not only does it give you an exceptionally well-implemented parametric equalizer, but it has a whole very fully-featured dynamic EQ setup, so any particular adjustment can be set to be dynamically applied only to those details or elements in a recording that meet specific criteria. Dynamic range compression and (in the Gentleman's Edition) expansion is a major part of the functionality available.

Although initially my expectations were considerably inflated as to what it could usefully do for me, it has enabled me to do certain things I'd not been able to do before, even though not being able to sort out every single issue of my recordings (I guess they'd be more or less impossible for any software to correct).

Let's list what I've found so far.

• In my recordings of my MIDI realizations of my music compositions I've been able at last significantly to tame the embarrassingly overdone and undamped bass drum sound, without negative impact on bass frequencies of other instruments such as double bass and low organ pedal.

• In my recording of my MIDI realization of my chamber work 'Autumn Leaves and Spring Blossoms' I was easily able to increase its dynamic range, so all the quieter passages could be quieter, with the effect that the whole (virtual) performance sounds not only more humanly expressive, but also the overall soundstage is now more set-back and natural-sounding (i.e., less up-front and 'in your face').

• As a very severe test of minimizing microphone wind noise, I took a new unprocessed copy of my 8 May 2016 recording of blackbirds and other birds in quite windy conditions in Branscombe Landslip. The wind had died down for the last hour and I'd made a wonderful CD of that, but I was a bit gutted that the even more wonderful sound of the birds and especially blackbirds among all the wind sounds couldn't be used because of the masses of overpowering microphone wind noise (because back then I was using only one furry windshield, of very limited effectiveness).

  I've succeeded in rendering the wind disturbance quieter and of innocuous sound — except for all the many peaks where clipping or other system overload distortion had occurred. The latter I knew couldn't be EQ'd out. I can now edit that new version and salvage a fair amount of the thrilling soundscape that, before, I just had to leave out.

  Amazingly, I couldn't detect any artefacts or other unwanted side-effects of that processing — but then low frequencies were not a prominent part of that soundscape anyway, so it was left to other recordings to demonstrate the problematical side of this processing.

  - And that problematical side I found, as rather expected, in recordings of the sea booming and rumbling in caves. There, the low-frequency booms and rumbles were actually more effectively 'zapped' than the mic wind noise, so it was clear that mic wind noise will still be a major issue for me, which normally couldn't be circumvented by post-recording processing.

• Possible very significant reduction of mic self-noise (over whole frequency range — not just hiss) in very quiet soundscapes. I doubt to what extent and with what effectiveness I'll be able to do that (i.e., without unacceptably degrading the recordings), but it's a potential that I'll be investigating soon. If that does work out well, I'd be able after all to use the recordings from last year's two Dartmoor night sessions, and to record further such very quiet soundscapes without the self-noise being enough to be a problem.

• Possibly, reprocessing potentially all of my earlier, PCM-M10, recordings to widen their soundstage and, where appropriate, to add a bit more sense of distance, so the particular soundscapes are not so 'in your face'. Actually that is easily doable, but if I were to do that I'd want an easy means to increase the definition of the stereo image first — i.e., to make each detail more precisely located. I suspect this may be achievable in TDR Nova or some other VST plugin with related functions, but I have yet to establish whether it really would be possible, at least to any extent that would be useful for me. If I could do all that, I'd effectively be upgrading each PCM-M10 recording to a quality level more like that of the D100.

• Minimizing the aggressive sound of heavy rain and drips falling on my umbrella while out in the wild recording showers or thunderstorms. In the case of thunderstorms that dynamic EQ would have to leave all the thunder sound intact — quite a challenge! But if that were to work, at least to a reasonable extent, it would mean I don't have to worry any more about finding some material to put on my umbrella to deaden the drumming of raindrops on it.

  Unfortunately my test with that showed that the processing removed much important midrange from the overall sound, and so, as far as I can tell, this isn't a workable option and I still need to find some sort of very light and non-absorbent material to clip over the umbrella to deaden the sound of rain impacts on it.

…No doubt I'll identify various other issues in my recordings that can possibly be fixed by this amazing piece of software — especially as I gain more experience of using TDR Nova.

 

Unsigned up with a record label — Ostereo treats me with contempt

A revealing silence and lame excuses point to a SCAM in operation

15 Mar 2019
with a series of revisions over the following few days

At long last, an update on my post Signed up with a record label — about to become a Superstar? (28 April 2018)!

Well, even assuming that the project was genuine in the first place, I was always very doubtful about its viability because the splitting up of my long recordings into short tracks would require experienced naturalists to identify what is and isn't in each of those tracks, for the overall title and description of each whole long recording wouldn't tell one that — at least for recordings featuring birds or other wildlife.

I expressed doubts about that right at the beginning when I was first approached by Ostereo, and periodically raised that issue in my ongoing email correspondence with their A&R man Tom Mullock, but he always insisted that work on splitting the recordings (contracted out to some third party, which would have been extremely unlikely to have naturalists on the job) was going just fine, and he'd not had any problems reported. I last heard from him on 22 June, after which things went silent, but I was too busy with higher-priority tasks to concern myself about that.

Then in late August I had an email from another Ostereo executive, Tim Butler, who told me that he'd taken over as my Ostereo contact as Mullock had left the company — which I thought didn't bode well. Anyway, he promised that he'd be giving me a report on progress with my material at the end of each month, and started doing so at the end of August, with the report:

"We will be looking to rebrand your content next month, as well as placing your tracks into relevant playlists. We should see an increase in your stream count as a result of these efforts. Currently there is no revenue to report."

Now, that sounded inconsistent. If the first sentence were true, that would imply that my material had not at that point been put online — in which case of course there couldn't be an increase in my stream count, for at that point I didn't have a stream count to increase, as my material wasn't online yet! And for the same reason, the final sentence would be redundant.

So, although I couldn't absolutely know what the real situation was, it looked suspiciously to me as though my material still hadn't gone online and he was seeking to cover up and give me the impression that everything was going fine. I did do an Internet search at that point, and found no signs of anything of mine being associated with Ostereo, so my suspicions were somewhat reinforced even though nothing was proved.

But then I heard nothing more from him. So much for the promised monthly reports! I was pretty sure that the project had been dropped, not least because they'd come to realize that splitting up my recordings into short tracks wasn't workable, just as I'd cautioned over and over would be the case.

Anyway, I got through my queue of higher priority tasks (i.e., before being ready to prepare the second big batch of my recordings for them) in February this year, and emailed Tim Butler on 23 February, explaining that I thought the long silence was most likely because they'd dropped the project because they'd found it unworkable just as I'd warned it would be, and that I'd need clear evidence that my work so far submitted was online and gaining income before I prepared anything more for them.

The reply? — None, of course.

So, after 2+ weeks I emailed Howard Murphy, their CEO, actually not expecting a reply from him either — but in the event he did respond immediately, in a strongly concerned and apologetic manner with an initial acknowledgement, and after his having a meeting with '[his] team' the following day, this is the 'explanation' that came back to me from a guy who I take to be Murphy's assistant:

We are extremely disappointed with the results we have achieved since setting this deal in place and we can only apologise for this.

A number of factors have been an issue in this process:

Since we put our agreement in place there have been a number of limitations placed on Production Music / Real World Recordings by the DSPs, and, as such, we are not able to achieve a profitable amount of streams for the content.

Our team think its best for both parties to dissolve the agreement, as we feel we cant currently provide the best for your catalogue at this time.

— And from Murphy himself, some rather platitudinous expressions of apology and sympathy, including:

I can see that your catalogue has not performed at DSP which is a real shame as we were also anticipating it would perform better — please accept my apology for not delving up to your expectations on this.

Those explanations may sound convincing initially, except that, as I've explained, there was clearly another reason that comes before all those, whether or not anything in the above quotes is true — and neither response had acknowledged that issue in the slightest — so scared these people are of the very thought of putting their hands up and 'coming clean'!

In any case those 'explanations' show inconsistencies. Murphy's assistant gives changes in the distribution system as being the primary cause, while Murphy himself just says my work had not performed in the various outlets. Well, sure my work couldn't have 'performed' there because, no doubt at all, it had never been put up there in the first place! Even the world's fastest car drives at a staggering zero km/h unless some clever Dick actually goes and switches it on and drives it!

Indeed, another pointer to the 'explanations' given being nothing more than cover-up excuses is the complete absence of mention of the long silence from Ostereo or any hint of apology for it or explanation as to why I'd got no communications at all until I'd emailed their CEO! That, and the timing and duration of that silence speaks volumes more than the lame excuses that were dished out to me. There clearly had to be something major that they didn't want me to know about, at least during that long silence (indeed, if not right from their first approach to me!).

Not only that, but even if no 'explanations' had been forthcoming at all, the long silence was telling me all along that my work couldn't yet be online, at least in any legitimate manner — any of it at all.

Just think. If Ostereo had got my first bits of material online in any legitimate manner, would they have kept me in the dark about that? — Eff, no, of course they wouldn't have! Surely, if their motivations were all they were cracked up to be, they'd have been eagerly informing me at once, complete with links, at least to example locations where they'd now posted my work! This whole aspect of the situation makes the dished-up 'explanations' look particularly hollow and lame, and frankly dishonest. I'm not that much of a fool that I can't gather up the clear evidence and recognise their evasions and lies for what they are!

Also, my online searches still completely failed to reveal any hint of my name being associated with Ostereo, except in my own posts on this site and Facebook — and neither could I find any hint anywhere of Ostereo being associated with nature or natural soundscape recordings.

So, in a nutshell, I can conclude with reasonable security (albeit still with a very open mind about the real situation) that in reality my material had NEVER been put online, at least legitimately, because either the project had been abandoned at some stage during the preparation of the streaming / download tracks, OR they had never in the first place intended to carry out the project as they had described it to me. So, if that is the case, the 'explanations' given by Murphy and his assistant are clearly false — and deliberately so.

— And they hadn't the basic decency to keep me in touch with the real situation (which of course would be too much to expect if indeed it related to illegal use of my material), preferring to keep their little 'secret' to themselves and treat this funny little man as though he were just an embarrassing bit of 'waste' to be quietly dumped and forgotten, just so they could 'save face' and continue presenting an all-round image of glitzy corporate perfection! There was a contract of course, though like promises they are like pie-crusts — made to be broken, at least by music distribution companies! Anyway, Ostereo's 'abandonment of' (i.e., non-procedure with) the project as officially described to me had effectively voided the contract.

That silly performance has left me out of pocket financially, albeit not a huge sum, and it's meant just over a whole month's intensive work of mine early last year had been a complete waste of time. Clearly one of my lessons learnt isn't to allow myself to get swayed by any further business opportunities being proposed to me, so I simply won't get involved in such ventures at all, at least without some exceptionally good reason beyond any assurances that I might be given. Last year, if I'd just stuck to my guns about the proposition as being unworkable and simply refused to get involved, I could have saved myself all that time and financial waste. I won't be fooled like that another time — I've better things to do with my time, haven't I!

Comments (in response to this post before I got revising it):

• Phil, you got scammed!

  You shouldn't have sent them anything. Ostereo is probably one of those companies that register sound recordings on the youtube/twitch content id system to claim copyright on content creators.

  A lot of these scumbags doing that crap these days. Google Youtube false content id claims to get the scoop, even original music producers, who mostly put up their recordings for free download got claimed.

   regards, stan.

• Hmmm — I've looked up about that, and, yes, what Ostereo were seeking to do with my material, and might still be doing, looks, shall we say, fishy. Yes, it could indeed be that I've been deliberately scammed. At least it's not going to happen a second time in a hurry! I wonder if anyone else out there has had issues with Ostereo. Upon the first contact from Ostereo I did some Google searching for Ostereo AND scam and Ostereo AND problems, and didn't come up with anything at that time.
  — Philip

  Stan's comment led me to examine the whole affair more closely, with the result that I've updated and annotated the body of the above post of mine, for it's now as clear to me as can be that it was a scam operation. I'm no longer giving Ostereo any benefit of the doubt about this.

  Let's look at a potential weasel clause in my Ostereo contract:

  2.4) The Owner waives any legal right to the re-brand associated to the Master recording which is solely created, owned and marketed by Ostereo and accepts that the brand associated cannot be used in any form by the Producer or any other third party.
  

  So, according to that, if Ostereo had indeed got as far as making short tracks from some or all of my recordings, as long as those tracks were rebranded by Ostereo, maybe they could be used for evermore and earn money for Ostereo even though the contract is terminated and so they presumably wouldn't pay me anything. Also they would presumably regard the rebrands as being their own copyright and could theoretically then make absurd copyright infringement claims against me if I put copies of the particular recordings online myself.
  

  However, before one gets carried away with a worst-case scenario, there are other points to consider.

  1. If they rebranded the tracks from my recordings, presumably their name would be somewhere on or associated with those tracks, so an online search for such material associated with Ostereo should indicate whether or not they are or at least might be distributing my work as streams / downloads.

  2. They could get round that by using the tracks only as backgrounds for other artists' work, in which case probably no search of mine would pick them up — but on the other hand it would then be almost impossible for anyone to identify any of my recordings as being in small part what Ostereo is using for such background sounds, so, unlike with that sort of abuse with music content, it would be extremely unlikely that Ostereo would play the silly fool and make any copyright infringement claims against me, as various music distribution companies are widely reported to have been doing with music content.

  3. If Ostereo were to find congruence between one of their background tracks and a section of any recordings that I'd put online and even was earning me money, they would surely not try to make a claim against me even if they wanted to, for it would be so obvious that I was the copyright owner of the original recording and so Ostereo would be exposed as the criminal if they so much as lifted a finger against me — and I'd make any such behaviour of theirs as public as I could, to warn others.

  4. Even if Ostereo were ripping me off by using my tracks criminally for their own and not my financial benefit, at least that would be stealing only notional, not real, money from me, because it would be money that I wouldn't have been getting otherwise from my work. I don't at all mean to condone or seek to legitimize such criminal behaviour, but I'm just being a practical old sod with a life to get on with, without a whole mass of stress and hassle. I simply draw a line under the silly Ostereo performance and move forward that bit wiser. Maybe in time I'll put whole recordings myself online somewhere as downloads behind a paywall — NOT on such widely abused (or indeed abusing) platforms as YouTube or Twitch, I think!

Further follow-up from Creepy Encounter #2 below

30 Jan 2019

Please note that this won't make much sense without one's reading the previous two posts first.

I freely admit that my posting in public about the problems I've observed with Wim Hof and his super-duper selling-a-dream 'Method' had left me feeling a little nervous about putting my head above the parapets thus, possibly being the only person publicly pointing out such a serious issue of a named person who is quite widely very much looked up to. Wouldn't my being the only one to come out with such observations and warnings about him discredit me in the public eye, and even land me with a threat of defamation proceedings?

However, yesterday I got an email from somebody who I'll just call X, and has been using the methods I give on my Clarity of Being site for a little while now, but had not come across anything I'd written about Wim Hof and his 'Method'. About certain local friends / neighbours she writes (edited here for clarity):

It turns out they are doing Wim Hof techniques (which I had never heard of). I went and viewed one of his videos and it was creepy. I also watched some testimonials and saw that they were using hyperventilation and some experiencing euphoria and even hallucinating. I then went and searched on your site and found that you confirmed my feelings. I have had or [indeed, still] have [a] strong connection [that] I bet would be the [cacoprotean] network considering my grandfather was a medium and in my quest for freedom I went down all avenues (Vortex healing included) to end suffering.

I seem to be surrounded by very many ungrounded and compromised people in the village I live in. Anyway, thank you once again for providing information and help. I soldier on trying to find a safe place to live and be clear.

Yes, my raising this issue isn't just me being funny-peculiar and getting onto some sort of paranoid delusional trip, but really is a result of my looking with clarity at what people generally are hiding from themselves with all their confounded beliefs — 'sheep' that they are!

Follow-up from Creepy Encounter #2 below
- good things arising indirectly from something a bit sinister

7 Oct 2018

Please note that this won't make much sense without one's reading the previous post first.

Well, indeed my transient engagement with Wim Hof through visiting his site and watching a few short videos about his methods and very briefly just once trying his harmful breathing method had indeed initiated some important and indeed positive changes for me 'within'.

However, that happened in a bizarrely indirect way, because, according to my retrospective inner inquiry, the positive changes were initiated by an inner non-physical 'immune response' to something indeed most untoward that had started to happen then. Through the opened primary archetype connection, the cacoprotean network itself had actually succeeded in making a very tenuous and weak connection with me. It couldn't have got much further with that because a proper working connection requires for some reason a partial walk-in to be installed first, and I'm far too grounded for that ever to happen to me now. Nonetheless, technically a trace of me had actually become a very faint and tiny bit of the garbage itself! Yuck!

Indeed, although the connection is dissolving, that's a slow process, so even today I still have a trace of it and so am still very, very slightly a part of the garbage!

I understand that the garbage macro-attack that started when that connection was made, and hasn't yet completely finished at the time of writing this, wasn't a result of my significantly engaging with my 'sticky layer' material, as had happened for the previous two macro-attacks, but was being caused by that cacoprotean network connection.

Fortunately this macro-attack has proved to be very weak compared with the previous ones. I had a few nights with little sleep, but never quite got to the point of taking a sleeping tablet or calling the local friendly crisis team, and now the only signs are just the very occasional faint 'whiff' of attack by day, though with the odd brief rather more distracting one when I'm in bed, necessitating my setting up what I call 'Supportive Surroundings' — a little bit of discreet indirect lighting and almost inaudible BBC Radio 3 (mostly classical music) —, but then being able to get an almost normal amount of sleep.

Okay, that, then, is the notionally untoward side of things, but the other side is some very positive changes that were triggered by my inner 'immune response' to that intrusion. At and immediately after that happening I found I was observing many things more sharply and awarely, and suddenly being dissatisfied with a number of things in my life that I'd just been letting drift.

This is what led to my at last taking the plunge and making the change in my methodology to render the Clarity-Sphere and all external aids redundant. Then, having made that change, and implemented it on my Clarity of Being site, I was getting bugged by a number of styling quirks in the 'house style' of all my web pages — so I set about simplifying the visual effects and limiting the use of different colours wherever there were elements or aspects that were weakening focus on the text.

That task on the websites is now completed, though no doubt I'd still find the odd other things to change. I myself certainly find the sites' pages mostly significantly more effective, with important text such as headings now standing out more clearly while drawing attention much more to the text rather than any fancy styling.

And I'm putting more things on my For Sale page on this site to clear a bit of space, and there are some other things now on my to-do list…

Addendum, 8 October
Trust me, I omitted yesterday to include in the flurry of positive changes arising from the 10 September events something that particularly pleased me. Among the 'amiss' things that I noticed after I got that kick up the butt was that my lower leg muscles were shortening because over the last few years I'd been gradually reducing my stride when walking. My only concern about seeking to rectify that was that in the past when I'd tried leg muscle stretching exercises — especially the 'lunge position' one for stretching the rear calf muscles, I consistently got muscle / tendon strains, or at least what seemed to be strains — so I gave up even trying to use those exercises. And this year my leg muscles / tendons seemed to have become gradually more injury-prone still.

My inner inquiry on the matter, however, pointed me first to start extending my stride once more on my short and mostly level after-lunch walks. That stride extension, however, was different from what most people would imagine, because my more efficient walking mode gained from the Alexander Technique allows each leg to swing forward to take up one's constant gentle 'falling forward'. That means that the leading leg doesn't reach forward any further, but the trailing leg trails more behind me and serves an increased reflex propulsive function from behind. My stride extension therefore extended at the rear, and of course at once started stretching those calf muscles a bit more than they'd got used to.

That resulted in some muscle aches over the following day or so, but those were the aches of the muscles' healing response to being used in unfamiliar ways, so this was an encouragement. Also initially I got some transient cramp-like feelings in the rear calf muscles, which I'd had before and tended to interpret as signs of slight strain (injury), but now my inner inquiry pointed to their being the result of stress and not actual strain.

That latter point was underlined as I continued walking in this restored better way, and those crampy-feeling twinges ceased to occur. All the more remarkable because my further inner inquiry suggested that my muscles should be strong enough now for me to carefully and gently start regular use of the lunge-position calf-muscle stretching exercise. To my surprise, this produced no untoward effects, and over a few days I cranked that up to just short of actual pain at held maximum stretch, also doing the other popular standing stretch exercise for the quadriceps (holding a leg up behind one with a hand). Still no signs of injury or even 'warning-level' stress.

To what extent my main leg muscle groups really had become rapidly stronger recently or I had persistently mistaken stress discomforts before for injury, I don't know for sure, but at least my suddenly greater awareness and sharper observation now has enabled me to restore a pretty crucial aspect of my leg functioning, which should impact positively on my future hiking as well as about-town walking.

Later note (30 January 2019)
The various exercises, and hikes on strenuous and often steep and uneven ground, continue almost all the time nowadays not to give me significant muscle or tendon or ligament stresses, let alone strains, so it's clear that my leg muscles really had become stronger and less injury-prone, and are at least maintaining if not still building strength.

Creepy encounters — and a Red Warning!

14 Sep 2018

Last Sunday (9 September) I had the second of two really creepy and seriously unwholesome but at least pretty educational hitch-hiking lifts. Let's take those two occasions in chronological order, so you can get the clearest impression of the weirdness and indeed sinister nature of what I'm recounting.

Creepy Encounter #1 — opportunity for a baptism to give me miraculous powers!

First, then on 9th May 2009, on my early evening return hitch-hike form Perranporth (Cornwall) to Exeter, at the Carland Cross roundabout on the A30, after a little wait there I was picked up by a family / friends group of five, who all were apparently very welcoming as I got into their minibus.

Soon after I had settled down in the minibus, the driver told me that they were members of a church group that carries out many miraculous healings through prayer to 'the Lord'. An elderly woman with a fair degree of dementia sitting next to me told me, with a little prompting from the driver, that she'd had rheumatoid arthritis and it had gone virtually immediately after she had prayed to the 'Lord' to have it taken away*. The driver and the man in the front passenger seat also told me of 'miraculous' more or less instant healings that they'd allegedly witnessed upon the use of prayer by members of their group.

Most unsportingly, I was thoroughly underwhelmed. This was all about physical healings, and these were being seen as something extremely impressive and, supposedly, PROOF of this Lord God and His good and merciful works, whereas the reality was that they proved nothing except that they had happened — i.e., if people really had clearly observed them outside of astral realms.

These people had no inkling that there was a whole more aware and happy, positive and free mode of living, free from beliefs, that is opened up by genuine, fully comprehensive healing and self-actualization as we get from our own deepest aspects. I was also already aware that the garbage uses seemingly miraculous physical healings as one of its lures to impress people and get them involved with it*. Unfortunately most people have soul programming that prevents them from looking more deeply at what's really going on, and indeed it predisposes those people to being mighty impressed by those actually most shady 'miraculous' physical healings.

Indeed those people in the car gave the game away even further, because the driver told me how he and two others in the car had been complete sceptics and even disbelievers in God and all that, but the car driver had got talked by a very persuasive promoter of the latter's particular 'faith' (which latter, as I shall point out in a moment was very likely something much more sinister than just a 'faith') into going to a baptism service.

So, the good guy was duly baptised by total immersion in water, and, like all the others who underwent that process, he emerged from the water spontaneously exclaiming aloud Alleluia! three times and then finding himself talking in tongues (by which he apparently meant some unfamiliar foreign language). This, he told me, was proof of God and His works. Impressive, hey?! Why didn't I promptly abandon all the life-saving rubbish that I have been going on about on my Clarity of Being site and get myself baptised quickly and be able to speak 'in tongues' and do miracle physical healings instead?

— Well, quite apart from all the signs of the work of the garbage — which were there to be seen by anyone who had 'eyes to see' — there was the little matter of the results of my discreet inner inquiry / Helpfulness Testing while briefly connecting with the successive deepest aspects of each of the five people in that car.

Although inner inquiry like that couldn't tell me categorically that any particular 'hunch' or hypothesis was objectively true, so it would need to be regarded as just potentially useful speculative pointers, its results in this case indicated that it was 'strengthening' for me to assume that the three who had had those baptisms just happened each to be (completely unawarely) members of the cacoprotean network, and indeed had become members at the time of the baptism. THAT is what is very likely indeed to happen to YOU if you undergo such an initiation.

So, if the necessarily somewhat speculative results of my inner inquiry ('on the scene of the crime', so to speak) were correct, their 'church group' was actually one of the front organisations of the cacoprotean network — the primary aspect of the garbage! That would explain neatly just why people who had been baptised in their organisation had certain 'special powers'! That is all garbage stuff through and through. Indeed, it appears that anyone who is a member of that network would themselves be in effect a part of the garbage.

Creepy Encounter #2 — opportunity for gaining seemingly miraculous inner healing powers by outlandish but 'scientifically proven' methods!

On Sunday 9 September 2018 on my early evening return hitch-hike from Gwennap Head near Land's End (Cornwall) to Exeter, at my usual hitch-hiking spot by the Tesco roundabout in Penzance, I had a weird déjà vu experience, for not only did a family / friends group (this time of four) in a minibus (this time smaller) pick me up, but even as I started to get into the vehicle I was getting exactly the same impression of these people as on that other occasion, though when I Helpfulness-Tested to check whether any of them were the same as before, and whether they were in the cacoprotean network, my indications (always liable to garbage interference, however) were that they were all new to me, and were okay. Nonetheless, the whole 'atmosphere' of the group seemed weirdly like that of the other group.

I thus still felt very circumspect about them, and was a bit careful about what I said about myself because I could do without a gutful of evangelistic religion-speak. Anyway, it seemed increasingly that they were not significantly into religion, thank goodness. Then, in the course of telling them what I'd been doing that day, I explained that I'd walked the very hard route from Mousehole to Gwennap Head and then finishing on the Porthgwarra road — a total of about 9 miles, which for me is small measure for a day's hike - and that I hadn't been able sensibly to go further because of a persistent virus or other issue causing my muscles to stress and fatigue prematurely on my hikes this season. My preferred hiking distance in a day is actually 12–21 miles.

At once, the woman sitting next to me piped up in an unsettlingly forthright and self-confident manner. I know what you want! Have you heard of the Wim Hof methods? — No, I hadn't heard of them, and really wasn't interested in following up supposedly super-duper methods that people recommend to me to try and point me anywhere but to the source of the genuinely healthy and safe methods that come from deeper consciousness itself (such as I present on my Clarity of Being site).

Anyway, having some disinclination to mention my own methodology to them, I learned from them that all four of them were all using the Wim Hof methods, and all spoke with a disturbingly evangelistic conviction about how those methods brought about all sorts of physical healings that had baffled the medics, but which were now, allegedly 'scientifically proven' to work. The methods included regularly subjecting one's body to cold stress (cold shower or even ice-water bath) and also using particular breathing exercises. Two of the four said with a categorical conviction that the methods had rapidly healed particular physical conditions / illnesses of theirs that one wouldn't expect to clear.

I Helpfulness-Tested on that, and was surprised to get a qualified 'strengthening' response to all that as something very much worth my following up, despite my feeling a certain disquiet and resistance against pointing in that direction at all.

The following day, with mounting feelings of resistance and unease, I made myself visit the Wim Hof website (and no, I'm not linking to it, and indeed recommend to keep well clear of it!). I was at once hit by the blasting 'energy' of this disturbingly charismatic individual and the slick commercial presentation of him as being some sort of superman, sitting or lying around almost naked in a variety of seriously cold and icy conditions (yes, I do mean icy / snowy). Indeed, he makes a point of presenting himself as 'the Ice Man', with an implicit message that if we take up his methods we can become like this strapping 'superman'. Not healthy at all.

On that site he sells video courses, one each for the cold water method(s), the breathing method(s), and 'commitment' — the mental discipline to tie up the other two. Those courses are not cheap, and, fortunately for me, I was quite clear that I wouldn't buy them. However, he does offer a free video mini-course in three parts, which I take to be a set of trailers for the paid-for main course videos. With great and increasing unease about what I was feeling about this guy and what he was into, I did sign up for the free course, which comes in three successive emails, each with a link to the respective video.

In the meantime I watched an introductory video on his site, and I found the blasting 'energy' and intensity of his particular 'ego-trip' quite shocking and debilitating, beating me down into feeling week, flawed and 'broken' against his 'evident' superiority. Thoughts were in my mindspace that it was all okay really, and the problem was simply my own personal status issues getting challenged by this guy facing me in the video, but I also realized that it was very much more than any such (relatively minor) issue of mine.

Indeed, the whole thing of him being in a state of near-nakedness in icy conditions and making a public 'thing' of that was opening up for me some primary archetype that involves such experiences, and which I understand directs some people, already into 'dark' practices, actually to go out naked or partly so into icy cold conditions prior to having sexual orgies involving a lot of violent shivering and hyperventilating, supposedly to increase the 'thrill' of it all — but of course really ungrounding themselves so much that the garbage can do all sorts of extremely harmful things to them, such as making them members of the cacoprotean network if they aren't already so.

I got the same effect from another short video of his on YouTube. Superficially he seemed to be saying all the right things and to have a rational rather than belief-driven approach to life improvement, so his methods should key in just fine with mine — yet what he was presenting, and his mode of doing so, together with the image of himself that he was projecting, all seemed to be too slick-looking, and too-good-to-be-true, to be representing anything genuinely wholesome. Also ringing alarm bells for me was the fact that his breathing method involves strongly hyperventilating, then holding one's breath for a while. He even cautions (sensibly!) that it be done only in a situation where you wouldn't fall and be hurt if you faint.

That is just asking to get so ungrounded that you'd get landed with a partial walk-in and indeed then get incorporated into the cacoprotean network. And I noted that with regard to the mental discipline to be used with the cold water and breathing methods, he says that you can at last 'live your ideal life' — without saying anything about what would be an ideal life. In other words, it appeared to be about living the sort of life you'd always wanted to live. In short, he's 'selling a dream' to lure you. That isn't about genuine self-actualization at all but about 'ego-trip' and naive wish-fulfilment, lacking in sound basis.

Anyway, rather bizarrely, my Helpfulness Testing was still supporting the notion that the methods were basically okay, at least for some people, and supported my trying right then (late Monday evening) a small bout of the breathing practice — for at least I could then get a better idea of whether it really would do anything helpful, and I could pretty swiftly put a stop to any harm that came from that. So, I did so.

Almost immediately after that short bit of the breathing practice I got an impression and feelings indicating that even that very short session had initiated some very special and important inner changes towards healing of various of my physical issues — except that I recognised all that as nothing of the kind, and something untoward that had started. Particularly in the face of acommencing feeling of garbage attack with 'Satanistic' sexual arousal feelings, I started going through using Grounding Point to initiate dissolution of a succession of related illusory realities that were likely enabling all that to be happening.

Nonetheless, I had a fairly disturbed night without much sleep, and the garbage's continual attempts to get me sexually aroused and mentally 'doing it' with (you can guess who) out in his icy domain. Unsportingly, I kept diverting attention elsewhere, because I didn't at all want to be driven to 'do it' then, and in any case could at least 'do it' mentally in healthier or at least less unhealthy ways if I couldn't avoid the act altogether (i.e., so I could then get a little bit of sleep). Also, reassuringly, I was already in the process of completely disconnecting myself from that guy and his harmful 'energy', so I was viewing him and everything to do with him as a complete irrelevance to me.

I've already mostly cleared myself of that shit, fortunately, though it will take a bit longer before it's all clear. I've worked out now that Wim Hof does appear to be part of the cacoprotean network, sort-of. The point is, what he's connected into appears to be a semi-autonomous evolutionary 'fork' of that network, which specializes in connecting people with particular primary archetypes to give them to some extent an apparently superhuman ability in certain areas of their life, but without any genuine self-actualization (of course!), so they remain garbage-captive and controlled. Currently I have no idea how many other primary archetypes may feature in this 'fork' network's operations. It could be that the total-immersion baptism people were also in this network rather than the mainstream one.

Also, I'm reminded that in one or more of the supposedly 'high' (i.e., sadly, 'dark') versions of Tibetan Buddhism there is a secret practice called Tummo, which apparently involves the practitioners going out into the ice / snow insufficiently or not at all clothed, and doing some sort of breathing meditation practice (I can only guess it's again one involving hyperventilation), which, when practised well, causes them to produce considerable amounts of heat and thus to keep warm even when wrapped in wet sheets out there in the cold for hours on end — even overnight. Ugh! All those poor innocent fools, paying an invisible price far beyond any worst imaginings of theirs, as they all unawarely get incorporated into a branch of the cacoprotean network, each with partial walk-in for good measure!

Meanwhile — surprise, surprise! — this miserable old b*gger has deleted each of the free video course emails without even opening them! Talk of not looking a gift horse in the mouth!

As to why I was getting apparently wrong Helpfulness Testing / inner inquiry results, I doubt very much whether all of that was a result of garbage interference or indeed any incompetence of mine. Rather, it appears that this was one of the occasions where my own deepest aspects were encouraging me to 'test the water' just slightly as an educational experience, bearing in mind that I wouldn't go far enough to get landed with any really significant problem that couldn't be very quickly cleared. That has happened for me as a rarity in the past, always with valuable observations and understandings resulting.

As to whether people really have had various medically unexpected healings through using WH's methods, I'm pretty sure that for the most part those would have happened, though, as with all 'healings' of any type, you can never know categorically that a particular healing hasn't occurred for some other reason. However, my understanding is that the healing power that people are gaining through use of those methods is dependent on their astral connections and very likely cacoprotean network membership to make happen. If that's the case, it would be a particularly unhealthy situation — a bit like the proverbial 'selling one's soul to the devil'. One very good reason for me or anyone else to forgo seeking to achieve supposedly unlikely healings through such means.

I shall presently put somewhere on my Clarity of Being site a note warning about WH and what his so-persuasive 'dream'-selling and methods are really about.

It's necessary to add, of course, that, as with at least most cacoprotean network members, it's extremely unlikely that at a conscious level WH is aware of having anything other than positive intent for his customers, apart from his strong and persuasive commercialization of what he has to offer, and his 'selling a dream' and all that, which may be normal business practice but is never fully honest.

 

Surprising insights regarding my developing cataracts

Hope for other people with developing cataract…?

27 Aug 2018

It was decades ago that I first noticed a slight halo around street lamps at night, and put two and two together quite sensibly and correctly, getting my eyes checked at the one-time West of England Eye Infirmary (now a hotel!). Indeed, although the specialist assured me that there was nothing to worry about, and my eyes were still in very good shape, there was indeed the very beginning of cataract development in both eyes — she described the then current condition not as cataract but as 'precursory changes towards cataract' — though in my books, for even a small halo to be seen around small light sources in the dark would suggest actual cataract, even though at a very low level.

Anyway, considering that even then I knew that repeated exposure of the eyes to significant amounts of UV light causes eventual cataracts, I was then, right up to just a few weeks ago, hideously negligent, for of course I was exposing my eyes to quite strong UV regularly on my hikes on coast path, with the particularly high UV levels there caused by reflection of that wavelength light off the sea, and further intensified if there is a lot of cirrus cloud, which tends to reflect UV reflected from the sea back down, adding to the overall invisible 'fug' of UV.

Back in the 1980s, after having experienced incipient snow-blindness on one of my Scottish Highlands spring visits, I'd tried having prescription Reactolite sunglasses, but found that (a) their darkness didn't change quickly enough as I moved to darker or brighter places, (b) they never became really clear, even in really low light, and (c) I found that even in bright sunshine, except for when really needed (primarily on mountain snow), my darkened vision was having a chilling and depressing effect on my emotional state — so I gave up on those and stayed with clear lenses after that, never thinking to have them with a UV-block coating.

Over the years and indeed decades since then I was gradually increasingly noticing glare effects of sunshine falling on my eyes from any angle, but still wasn't taking that as a significant warning. Then just a few years ago, on winter afternoons with low sun shining in my face out in the High Street, I was rather alarmed to find myself feeling almost blinded by the glare effect, and was sure that this must be the developing cataract at work. Yet I still did nothing about that!! During each subsequent winter that debilitating glare effect with the low sun was just a bit stronger still, and I was becoming a bit more aware of generally decreased contrast in my vision when looking at high-contrast things.

Finally, late last year I had to have my eyes urgently checked at the hospital because of a slightly alarming posterior vitreous detachment (PVD) event (flashes and markedly increased floaters), hoping the ophthalmologist would notice my developing cataracts, but actually in that particular situation, with focus on the PVD issue, I forgot to mention the cataracts. She simply told me that my eyes appeared to be in excellent condition, and fortunately it looked as though the PVD had occurred without mishap (i.e., torn or detached retina), and so, apart from vigilance for more PVD activity and any sign of possible retinal detachment, she said there was nothing requiring action.

The next day I went to my regular opticians to have a fairly overdue eye test, and despite various eye health checks, using really posh modern equipment, including taking a whole-retina photograph, my eyes were passed with flying colours, with just a tiny change in my glasses prescription. This time I asked the optometrist to check for cataract development, and in fact then he did say that, sure, there was indeed cataract in both eyes, but it was at a very low level, and I was doing particularly well for my age (75 then), and it would be a very long time before I'd be sufficiently sight-impaired for the NHS to be willing to accept me for cataract surgery.

This summer, I was finding it increasingly difficult and stressful working at my computer because of the sunlight or bright sky light coming in the window facing me then. So, finally, for starters, I had new prescription glasses made, at last with UV coating, at least to minimize further progress of the cataracts. I also used a simple procedure using my Clarity-Sphere setup to focus my deepest healing intent on my eyes, to enable any possible recovery or at least help minimize further progress of the cataracts. My inner inquiry indicated that my using that procedure twice daily would help minimize or arrest the cataract progress, but probably not be able to bring about significant recovery — the lenses being particularly difficult from a healing perspective.

Then, about a week ago, while working at the computer I transiently noticed something very surprising. Quite apart from the cataracts, I was also aware that, particularly in recent years my eyes had masses of floater material in the back of the eyes, which was also increasingly impairing my vision, so that when working at the computer I had to keep flicking my eyes to move such debris away from the centre of my field of view so I could very temporarily see things sharply and with acceptable contrast.

On this particular occasion, however, on one occasion when I flicked my eyes, just for about a second I saw the web page text in front of me with a sharpness and depth of contrast that I'd surely not seen for decades! I couldn't repeat that level of visual clarity then, so thought it best to withhold jumping to any conclusions until I perhaps had similar experiences again.

Then just three days ago it happened again. Then the penny dropped, and I started examining properly what I was experiencing in all my sight impairment experiences. It became clear that all along the primary issue had NOT been cataract at all, even though I do have very low-level cataracts. All along it has been this mass of floater debris, which of course has increased greatly over the last few years as I had PVD events, during which more of the so-called 'vitreous' jelly in the back of the eye shrinks further and pulls away from the back of the eye, leaving translucent mostly stringy or cobwebby bits and pieces in a fairly thick fluid, which constitute this load of floater material.

Just a couple of days before the first of the momentary glimpses of real visual clarity, as a result of a bit of inner inquiry I'd added something to my procedure that was intended to help minimize progress of the cataracts — the new and experimental Intensifier Tapping procedure to use before the final 'end of practice' procedure. My indications are now that although that addition couldn't do much more for the cataracts, it had enabled my twice-daily use of that overall eye-healing procedure to enable a progressive clearance of the floater material to get under way.

That gunge is apparently more accessible to the body's healing processes than is the interior of the lens. Allegedly, the couple of momentary 'gasp' glimpses of real central high-contrast and sharpness had appeared so early not because this alleged clearance is all that rapid, but because it just happened that a few atypical bits of the debris happened to fall apart almost at once, so that occasionally as I flicked my eyes around, the components of the debris would fleetingly get aligned so that I was looking through a hole right through all that stuff.

Whatever the truth about this really is, the explanation I've come up with will be getting a good test over the following weeks and months, because if there really is a clearance process afoot now, those wonderful glimpses of real visual clarity would become progressively more frequent. Just a very gradual overall improvement would be difficult to recognise, but an increase in the frequency of my experiencing those actual holes in the crud would be a pretty clear indicator.

Regardless of the uncertainties at this stage as to whether my indications of a clearance process are just a bit of wish-fulfilment fantasy sourced from my 'sticky layer' or really are correct, at least it's clear that all of the issue that is really significant for me is this floater stuff and not the cataracts. I can tell this not only by having had those transient glimpses of really high contrast but also from my careful inspection of all the glare halos that I see, which are all full of floater material, all visibly floating around.

I experimented today staring at my thick black window frames, observing the glare from the sky filling the black areas of the frames, with floater material moving around clearly visible in it all, and then moving my head and flicking my eyes in various ways. Although I don't think I found another proper hole in the gunge then, I was able several times to almost eliminate the glare halo for the odd second or two, several times. Glare effects caused by the cataract would never behave like that, being a relatively uniform and smooth misting-up, albeit usually stronger in the centre of one's field of view, and couldn't move about within the eye and certainly couldn't be flicked out of the way, even for a second or so.

By the looks of things in my online research so far, there are no acceptably safe surgical procedures for removing floater material, that are available from the National Health Service here in the UK (vitrectomy isn't acceptably safe as far as I'm concerned), so, the alleged current clearance process that my inner inquiry has been pointing to had bloody well better be genuine, or, well, I shan't be very pleased!

At least, it's most likely now that the PVD process is more or less complete, so that no significant further floater material should be accumulating, and according to some sources floater material usually tends to dissolve over a fair period anyway — so as long as I keep my eyes reasonably protected from UV, barring other underlying medical conditions, the cataracts wouldn't be progressing further, so that overall, even in the worst-case scenario it's most likely that I'd not get any further noticeable deterioration.

So, if you're getting sight impairment that is supposedly due to developing cataracts, it would be well worthwhile bearing my observations in mind and examining your own sight-impairing effects and see to what extent they are really being caused by floater material rather than cataract.

'A posturing of Presidents'

18 Jul 2018

We talk of a herd of cows, a murmuration of starlings, a gaggle of geese, so it makes perfect sense that we have a collective noun for politicians and indeed State Presidents or at least Heads of State. I respectfully put forward 'a posturing' as particularly appropriate both for politicians in general and Prime Ministers, Presidents and any other Heads of State in particular.

Sometimes it seems there isn't an ounce of honesty or common sense anywhere in government — at least, where it catches any attention of the news media. — And the gullibility of the people who vote those noxious agenda-driven posing liars into governing roles repeatedly takes my breath away. It was always perfectly clear to anyone with some common sense that Trump was completely unfit to be in any sort of government anywhere in the world — let alone President of the USA. What a great statement of the bone-headed stupidity of the USA electorate that such an unsuitable person ever gets even remotely near to becoming President!

Similarly, Vladimir Putin repeatedly and brazenly announces to those who understand even just a little human psychology (i.e., genuine understanding) that he is a dyed-in-the-wool crook, and, like Trump, completely unsuitable ever to be in government anywhere in the world. You have only to look at the nature of his immediate aggressive public denials whenever he or Russia is implicated in some new criminal act outside Russia.

If you want to convince anyone that you haven't carried out a particular crime, one great way NOT to go about it, because it tells any intelligent and worldly-wise person that you are the, or a, guilty party, is at once to go aggressively denying any involvement, especially when you go pronouncing THERE IS NO EVIDENCE! and variants thereof, and making completely spurious counter-accusations to distract attention away from one's misdeeds, and even at once talking of taking reprisals.

Putin's 'magnanimous' offers to help any government investigate crimes allegedly carried out at Putin's direction or at least with his connivance are contemptible, and at least we can be thankful that so far (I think…?) no Government has accepted his 'gracious' offers in that respect. If you are investigating a crime, it makes great sense to have the accused 'helping' you, when it's clearly part of their ploy of brazen denial of their alleged misdeed — right?

Putin behaves that way because he has learnt again and again that he can get away with it because, for the most part, the people intelligent enough to see him with his pants down (so to speak) when he makes his aggressive denials and counter-accusations, don't get elected into high Government positions.

Trump does the same stupid things, but just looks more bumbling and incompetent against the 'iron-fist' face of Putin's authoritarianism.

Those appalling individuals Trump and Putin, both of whom the world needs like a great hole in the head, are one of the many reminders of how democracy, whatever its plus points, cannot work to all that great benefit for populations as a whole as long as the people constituting any particular democracy are themselves largely irrational and pattern-driven. So far, we have not so much democracies of rational humans, as democracies of rigid patterns and factions! — A sure recipe for disaster upon disaster!

— Which of course is why it's so pressingly important that every single one of us needs to be doing what we can to dissolve the patterns that we are carrying, and so to become more rational and flexible in our thought processes and outlooks. Then we could think issues through properly instead of just reacting out of beliefs and attachments, and then gradually more rationality would get into governance, and democracy could actually be leading us away from rather than into disaster.

An amazing 'peak experience' Dartmoor night recording session

11 Jun 2018

On Wednesday 6 June I retried the recording session of the 4th (mentioned below), this time with the recorder better placed, and so getting a much better panorama, plus an afternoon 3-hour recording from by the Hunter's Path below Castle Drogo, which was full of blackbirds. That was great in itself of course, but also, the woman who gave me my final lift on my hitch-hike to get the Teign Gorge in the first place, in response to my bemoaning my lack of opportunities so far to get cuckoos in my recordings (at least satisfactory ones), tipped me off that the Bellever Tor area near Postbridge, in the middle of Dartmoor, was great for cuckoos and also for excellent nightjar choruses.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I made Bellever Tor top priority, and the requisite forecast conditions offered themselves a princely two days later — the night of Friday 9th to Saturday 10th June. I therefore hitch-hiked out to Postbridge on the Friday morning, first calling in at the excellent East Dart Hotel bar to arrange a booking for evening meal (so keeping weight of food carried to a minimum), and then set out to Bellever Tor, taking the route right up through the full length of the slightly 'S'-shaped forestry clearing that extends more or less southwards to the hill with its complex of granite outcrops on top.

That route enabled me to spy out possible best recording points for recording the nightjars (the cuckoos, if indeed they were still much active vocally, would pop up pretty well anywhere where there were trees and a fair amount of open moorland).

Actually a whole range of issues made significant success seem pretty unlikely, my two recorders — one by the decrepit low stone wall running across the southernmost narrow point of the strip of clearing, and the other sheltered from the easterly breeze, down a bit among crags on the west side of the hilltop — surely not going to pick up sufficient from the seemingly too-distant forestry edges where most of the 'action' would be.

A wild and definitely boaring night vigil!

In the event, and helped by a drop in the wind mid-evening, the results went beyond expectations, though with one weird let-down. I'd expected the dawn chorus captured by at least one recorder position to be full of skylarks. And was it, hell! — I, and the recorders, heard not one skylark through the whole afternoon to early morning session!

The dusk-to-early-night nightjar chorus was everything I'd wishfully imagined to hear there — though I was wondering to what extent the quietest (most distant) churring would be picked up by the recorders, especially behind them. It even included the odd cuckoo calls after all the songbirds had packed up for the night.

After that, I couldn't be more than very slightly disappointed to find that the pre-dawn nightjar chorus was, relatively speaking, a non-event, with only the odd quiet pocket of churring, just occasionally. And in the by then cloudy conditions once more, with cloud base progressively descending again onto the hilltop, it seemed that there was little dawn chorus sound for the hilltop recorder to pick up — but at least apparently I'd got two potentially brilliant recordings of the dusk nightjar chorus, plus some really nice mostly distant general birds' evening chorus.

Indeed, there was one unexpected bonus during the evening recordings, for, from mid-evening and during the night occasionally I heard from the forestry quite near to the lower recorder location some loud weird and aggressive-sounding mammal barks or bellows that sent shivers up my spine — something I'd not heard anywhere before. Then, when I'd gone down there to check the recorder I'd heard the sounds much closer, and from there they sounded weirder and more menacing still — but this time I could hear them clearly enough to work out what the animal must be — later confirmed by listening to sound clips online. — Wild boar! As far as I can remember, that's the first time I've had terrestrial wild mammal sounds in any recording of mine (I say 'terrestrial' to exclude seals).

So, I returned to Exeter with a certain elation and some 21 hours' total of recordings, but also with a sense of unfinished business and a need to have a repeat session there in still more favourable conditions. However, as I gave each recording its preliminary examination after initial processing, my eyes were lighting up and jaw dropping. Even the pre-dusk evening bird chorus was quite excellent, and the nightjar chorus had come out a treat on both recorders — indeed seemingly even more clearly than for me when I was there, gobsmacked at my good fortune to be there in the midst of that weird sound spectacle.

But then I had to check through the presumably largely uneventful pre-dawn part of the recordings that had run on into whatever there was of a dawn chorus, and to my astonishment I found that after a fitful and patchy start, both recorders had captured just as magnificent and widespread a nightjar chorus as the dusk one. I cannot understand why I failed to hear more than the odd quiet pocket of churring. Indeed, the recorder on the tor, just below where I made my base for the later part of the night (wanting to be away from possible wild boar encounters!) captured a quite spectacular sequence of a cuckoo calling out really strongly and reverberating beautifully in the forestry over quite a period, in the midst of the nightjar chorus. Spellbinding!

— And also, in both recordings, that nightjar chorus ran on for quite a while and petered out only slowly, while the main songbird chorus was starting to build up. — And yet again, while, just a little back from the recorder there on the tor, I heard very little worthwhile for the recorder to be picking up in that apology for a dawn chorus, the recording itself picked up a wonderful dawn chorus. Not hugely profuse, and mostly distant, but very much a chorus, and delightful to listen to. Okay, no skylarks but at least the meadow pipits gave it all very much an open moorland feel.

At the moment I'm in the process of editing the first of the session's recordings — the afternoon one made at the lower position. I hadn't expected anything of that apart from there being some cuckoo sections that I was wanting to extract, but even that is turning out to have in it more interest than I was aware of when I was there. One thing in particular was giving a lot of foreground interest, which was great in the face of extremely little foreground bird sound, was the intense buzzing of lots of bees and flies of various types. I don't know for sure yet whether I'll make a CD of that, but I might well do so after all.

A surprise encounter with an amazing artist (painter)

5 Jun 2018

On 5 Apr 2017, during my guarding my wind chimes recording session by the highest point on the Hunter's Path on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, as usual I got into the odd whispered conversation with individuals or small groups who I was shushing as they came along the path, to help minimize disturbance to the recording. One particular man who I thus got chatting with seemed different from the others — gentle and quietly spoken and giving me an immediate impression of one who wasn't only more genuinely friendly than the others, but had about him an air of being much 'deeper', more thoughtful and aware — something most agreeable to me!

It then transpired that he was Benedict Rubbra, son of the celebrated composer Edmund Rubbra. We briefly talked about my wind chimes recording work and his father's music, and he mentioned that he himself wasn't a composer but was a painter. I can't remember what he said about his painting, though I think he didn't say much, but probably something about his painting in a 'different' manner that was following up his own creative thinking processes, and he mentioned that he had it on a website of his.

Afterwards, out of curiosity I visited that website, and was really amazed at what I saw of his work. I had not seen creations like those before, and his explanations of the paintings showed how he was effectively creating a sort of 'meta-art', which reminded me of the way Iannis Xenakis regarded many of his (at least earlier) compositions as being a sort of 'meta-music' — though, in keeping with Benedict's quietly spoken and rather self-effacing manner, his paintings don't jump out at you and provoke as Xenakis' music does. Indeed, the end-results of Benedict's creativity remind me more of Jean Sibelius' much-quoted comment about his offering (in his 6th Symphony) just pure spring water while others proffer variously coloured cocktails.

I was enthusiastic, and was going to 'share' on Facebook and give him a little promotion somewhere on this site — but, with so many tasks all lined up, I kept putting that off, feeling a little guilty when over a year had passed and it looked as though I'd never get round to giving him a bit of much-earned publicity.

Then yesterday, while trying to work out where to place my sound recorder on or close to the Hunter's Path to record the forecast thundery showers if they materialized, there was this quiet gentle man coming through Hunting Gate again! So, we had a better and more focused chat this time, and this was the necessary stronger nudge for me to make amends on last year's omission of mine, and publicly draw attention to him and his work.

His overall modus operandi in his paintings appears to be to study a scene, object, experience or idea carefully, mentally extracting a visual 'essence' of it, and then, using his own sharp intellect beautifully coupled with his strong aesthetic sense, he rebuilds the item from that 'essence', but this time in a sort-of symbolic form. Each work is thus carefully and often intricately thought-through, in a way that few people have the mental capacity to do, so these works are quite different from the generally hasty and crude creations that weigh upon the popular designation of 'modernism'.

Other painters have done this at a very rudimentary and superficial, more impressionistic or romantic level, such as Pablo Picasso. But here, just as in, say, J.S. Bach's Art of Fugue or Well-Tempered Clavier, the complex intellectual working-out helps dispel limiting influences from the crude, superficial expression of the artist's own emotional quirks and issues, instead pointing to something deeper, and deeply rewarding to contemplate. These are all works that take the aware viewer beyond their own issues, to experience a satisfying beauty that is timeless and also completely, probably uniquely, original — each new painting coming up with surprises.

Yet, as I say, his works don't jump out at one, at least unless one is already attuned to his remarkable artistic 'idiom'. I expect that only people of considerable depth of awareness and intellectual clarity themselves would 'get' these paintings and give them more than a passing 'How interesting!' glance — though it would be so nice to think I'm wrong about that, and that a much wider range of people would become riveted and intrigued by Benedict's extraordinary pioneering work.

If any artist is to be labelled 'great', then Benedict Rubbra belongs in the upper reaches of any list of them.

His website is at http://www.benedictrubbra.co.uk/, 'and now I commend it to the House!', so to speak.

Signed up with a record label — about to become a Superstar?

28 Apr 2018

Well, er, yes and no. The 'signed-up' bit is true, but less sure about the other thing, and this isn't about music anyway — at least, as normally understood!

The sordid truth is that recently I was contacted by an A&R exec from the Ostereo record label, who was interested in my natural soundscape recordings, which he or somebody there had discovered apparently through online search, for they had recently decided to branch out into natural soundscapes to widen their scope. They aren't thinking of making CDs of my recordings but of splitting the recordings into bite-size tracks (yuck!) for download on all the main streaming channels.

As I didn't know the name Ostereo, at first I assumed that this was some sort of scam contact, but, no, it does indeed appear to be genuine*. A week ago, having been intensely busy for several weeks preparing material for them, I signed a contract with them and submitted my initial batch of material.

This arrangement appears to suite me well, because I haven't had time to do anything about purchasable online downloads of my recordings, and this could actually get me some revenue as the distribution would be backed by Ostereo's promotion machinery. However, Ostereo isn't contemplating distributing full- or album-length tracks, which would be more my own interest, but I well understand that there is a major financial incentive not to do so, which is one reason why I gave up at an early stage any idea of doing my CD albums in downloadable form.

Unfortunately most download outlets have (or at least did have) a fixed price structure, with a fixed tiny price per track, clearly based on the notion that all 'tracks' are short pop music ones — inevitably aimed at the bird-brained mass market of individuals of very short attention span. Selling long recordings like mine as single long tracks would be almost giving them away, and thus would gain far too little revenue to make the operation sustainable.

I did find that apparently I could do album-length downloads on CD Baby Free, setting appropriate prices myself — BUT I have still had other time priorities, so that that still hasn't even begun to happen — and their free service would get me no distribution, so any sales would be minimal through that service.

Ostereo now have copies of all my suitable / worthwhile recordings made with the Sony PCM-M10 recorder model (up to April 2016), and shortly I shall embark on doing similarly for my superior PCM-D100 recordings (from April 2016).

To avoid conflicts and possible copyright convolutions, yesterday I deleted my YouTube account presenting preview excerpts of my natural soundscape recordings (my apologies to my followers there!). I was wondering about the preview excerpts on my own Digital Download Catalogue, but when I asked Ostereo about this I was assured that there shouldn't be any problem about that — though I think that over time I shall reduce many or all of my excerpts from 3 minutes to 90 seconds, and more or less all new excerpts there will be 90 seconds.

A bit too short really for my sort of material, but at least then people would be less likely to stay with downloaded copies of my previews instead of downloading purchased (and probably better quality) downloads. Looking at patterns of requests for my preview excerpts in my daily website statistics, I'd come to recognise that occasionally individuals downloaded for their own free entertainment stash rather than just to find out what my CDs would sound like, and, not living on air alone, I'd be glad not to continue supporting such socially irresponsible freeloaders.

None of this affects the recordings of my music compositions. The latter are virtually universally ignored — to such an extent that I haven't seen in my website statistics even one click-through from my publisher's website for something like a year now(!!), and my publisher hasn't even bothered to send me my annual accounts for two years now, no doubt because there were no sales / hires / performances, and sending an 'empty' annual account would be a tad embarrassing for them as they're supposed to be promoting my music but apparently are too busy with other things.

For that reason, and with no public performances, at least that I've been aware of, I couldn't expect any record company to have anything to do with my music, never mind how engaging or gripping it may be. So, I still have my YouTube presence introducing my music — for whatever good that is doing!

An exciting experiment with half-speed recordings

6 Apr 2018

Recently, on having another look at a 2015 dawn chorus recording of mine, which contains some bat flyabouts, I thought to make the bat squeaks just audible to me by making a half-speed copy of that recording (a whole octave lower in pitch). Not only did that work nicely for the bats, but actually the sound of the whole lot was a quite thrilling revelation, for I could hear all sorts of previously unnoticed details and nuances in the bird sounds. I was going to make a CD of that, but then decided against that because parts of the recording were too slow-moving (i.e., in the sense of changes / developments in the whole dawn chorus soundscape) to sustain my interest.

However, I also tried making half-speed versions of a total of 14 carefully selected wind chimes recordings of mine, and these all came out brilliantly. I chose recordings of particularly large ensembles, so that the reduced speed / pitch would be particularly revealing. Most though not all of those recordings had at least some bird sounds, and those also come out wonderfully and intriguingly. In places particular birds sound as though they are actual protagonists in the music of the half-speed chimes — the blue tit doing so particularly effectively.

I planned a total of 7 CDs to present those fascinating and powerful-sounding half-speed versions, and I have completed the first, which is awaiting approval at the moment. You can hear excerpts from it in my Digital Download Catalogue (go to the bottom of the listing). Over the next month or two I expect to get the rest of those CDs set up. Every one of those CDs is a quite mind-boggling listening experience — even though I'm sure that some people would dismiss the whole lot as rubbish!

I have no plans to do further half-speed versions — apart, possibly from a few new chimes recordings that I want to make but the persistently unsuitable weather has prevented me from doing so far this season. The way things are going so far, it's beginning to look as though those recordings won't get done till next spring.

Update on the 'fake' virus

6 Apr 2018

Actually it became clear that I did have an ongoing persistent virus infection, which was causing a range of symptoms, including exaggerated tiredness, vague general malaise and 'going down with a virus' feelings, a certain degree of muscle weakness, and various non-critical gut / stomach disturbances — and I finally twigged to that being almost certainly the shingles virus (i.e., chicken pox virus remaining from my very troublesome childhood bout of chicken pox). No doubt the garbage exaggerated and hyped-up the stomach disturbances initially to try and convince me I'd got norovirus or something similar, but then it couldn't keep doing that, at least to the same extent, once I'd recognised what was really going on.

Why do I think it's shingles? — Because I'd noticed an odd little line of a rough rash on the underside of my left buttock, which led to a line of numbness extending down the outer side of my left thigh. I've had shingles at least twice before, and both times the painful blisters were limited to a very inconspicuous line of a few little raised sore spots on upper right or left thigh, associated with a line of numbness along the nerve along which those spots lay.

I was concerned that this seemed to be so persistent and looked like very much cutting down my ability to get out on hikes and natural soundscape recording sessions — but my inner inquiry indicated that the need was for me to push against my apparent constraints (sensibly!), because by getting out on at least some semblance of a hike I'd be actually helping my immune system to get on top of the infection once more. And so, I've been pushing the barrier back, and the symptoms, while fluctuating and not yet fully gone, are distinctly less.

A weird norovirus event — fake from top to bottom!

16 Jan 2018

Before midnight on Thursday 21 December 2017, I got up for a pee and noticed that I was unusually wobbly on my feet, which in the past has been a precursor for various stomach virus attacks, and soon after I'd got back into bed I started quite rapidly feeling unwell, with shivering and sweating — my inner inquiry indicating that this was norovirus and that I urgently needed to get myself sat on the bog (WC) with a bucket for my top-end dramatics.

That I did, soon being set for the 'action', and really with a pretty intense sense of 'This is it this time!'. Within just a minute or two I had a strong wave of nausea and a general feeling of a fearful urgent intensity as though I were just about to throw up in the all-too-well-known norovirus manner. And then I kept going close to falling off the bog, as I felt to be falling asleep — though my inner inquiry indicated that I was actually half-fainting and needed to get down on the floor to avoid falling off the bog and hurting myself. That made sense, so I did get down, lying there on the bathroom floor, greatly concerned that at any moment I was going to flood the floor there with my 'projectile' vomit and equally spectacular diarrhoea ejections.

Every so often, as the half-fainting, if that was what it really was, eased off I'd get back onto the bog, and then another wave of nausea and sense of 'this is really it this time' — and then I was half-fainting again, even with my head held as low as possible, so I got down onto the floor again, spending more time there, expecting at any moment to foul my bathroom floor most spectacularly. Again nothing really happened.

This repeated over about two hours, though with the peaks clearly very gradually decreasing. I stayed on the bog longer though, as I wasn't sure as to whether there might be further strong peaks and real dramatics, so it wasn't until 5.0 a.m. that I finally got up from the bog, close to my normal getting-up time.

Well, that was really odd. In some ways it had seemed to be real norovirus, but yet I had not vomited nor had diarrhoea, nor had stomach or abdominal pains or violent churnings around. Indeed at times even during the main peak period I'd had the odd small burp come out perfectly normally, almost as though there was really no problem at all for my stomach!

Over the next few days I felt progressively better, though did have a problem with faecal impaction, and quite a struggle to get one hard knobbly turd out of my back end.

Then in the small hours of Wednesday 27 December, in the small hours 'it' happened again — but was much milder, not necessitating any lying down on the floor. Again, no vomit, no diarrhoea and no stomach or gut pains.

Similar happened again in the small hours of Tuesday 2 January 2018 and Wed 10th and Sat 13th (each time a bit milder than the last), then with a much stronger bout on the night of 13/14 January. But still not one vomit or hint of diarrhoea or stomach / gut pains.

I was really troubled by this because I was wondering how and when I'd get out of the presumed loop of reinfection, and wondering how it was that I wasn't developing the standard 14-weeks' temporary immunity to the infection (i.e., 14 weeks if it were indeed norovirus, but could be longer, depending what the virus really was).

On the evening of Monday 16 January my concern about all this was feeding into a mounting major attack from the garbage, which was making my whole life prospect look intimidating and hopeless — something I'd experienced the garbage doing many times previously.

My response to the impossible-seeming situation was to examine it more carefully and see if I could come up with a better interpretation of my situation than I had so far done.

On the face of it, I was getting a series of bouts of a virus infection that was coming on each time as norovirus would, though I wasn't getting the most dramatic symptoms — though I understood from my Internet searches that at least vomiting didn't always occur with norovirus. But, whatever the exact virus I had was, why was it keeping recurring, and at such close intervals? Was I really failing to gain the normal full (albeit only about 14-week) immunity from the infection, so that the odd bits of contamination in my flat (e.g., perhaps from my coughing or sneezing on the odd occasion)? Or indeed, was this just one long-lasting virus infection that periodically had flare-ups separated by short quiescent periods?

Either way, it appeared to be a troublesome situation. Right from the start, of course, I was aware of one conceivable scenario — that the whole 'virus infection' was just a simulation from the garbage, but I had never known the latter to simulate such infections in any convincing way, so had been keeping that hypothesis right at arm's length as being conceivable (like getting splatted by a meteorite) rather than being a practical possibility.

But now, with nowhere else sensible to look, I revisited that hypothesis and considered, just supposing the garbage actually could achieve such a simulation sufficiently to fool me, would that hypothesis then make sense of this whole situation?

When I ran through all the details it all started looking pretty obvious. It removed straightaway the weirdness of my having effectively 'norovirus without the norovirus' to start with, for the missing symptoms were clearly the ones that the garbage couldn't mimic, at least at that time. I already knew well that it could attack me with various aspects of fear, producing trembling, and where appropriate, sweating, to convince me I was getting feverish, and it could attack me with nausea. But in the past it had attacked me with nausea, but had never managed to make me vomit, nor to have diarrhoea, nor major gut cramping pains.

Also, the frequent recurrences simply didn't make sense, and two doctors who I spoke to about this issue both expressed puzzlement, not having heard of such a case — which added weight to this just not making sense as a real infection. Also, ALL six of the recurrences were during the night. Now, apart from just a fluke occurrence, I can think of only one reason — and a very good one — why that would suggest that this was all a garbage simulation all along. To carry out a simulation of such an illness even only partially, it would generally need the person's awareness to be more weakly grounded than it would normally be in the daytime. So, of course, if it was going to succeed in that aim at all, it would generally be at night only.

Then, when I did inner inquiry on this matter I got the clearest response for some time, indicating that at last I was bang-on. Because I'd unwittingly got engaging with a bit of 'story' from the garbage, the latter also had a hold on my inner communication pathway for my Helpfulness Testing / inner inquiry, and so of course the garbage had been able to interfere with my attempts at that and give me wrong responses that supported the 'norovirus' scenario that it was seeking to build up.

As usual, no doubt the garbage's ultimate aim was to drive me to suicide, but as in previous situations of that sort, there came a point where it would blow its cover by forcing me to hold the situation up to closer scrutiny and work out what was really going on.

The likely correctness of the 'garbage-simulated illness' hypothesis soon became apparent on that Monday evening, as the attack slowly but steadily declined then, to almost nothing by bedtime — though as I was very sleep-deprived by then I took no chances and took a Zopiclone tablet in order to have a full night's sleep, even though that wouldn't be perfect sleep (moderately deficient in REM sleep).

So, one great sigh of relief.

The situation is a striking parallel to the scenario recounted in Plantar fasciitis — My own weird experience.

How people can 'donate' without paying anything…

9 Nov 2017

Once in a while people writing in, usually in response to my Clarity of Being site, say they are benefiting considerably from that site's contents and would really like to donate but don't have the money to do so at the moment — or, have donated, but are apologizing because they think their benefits from the site are worth much more than they feel they can afford to give.

So, this is a great one for those people as well as anyone else who would like to support me and my projects, all of which in their different ways are aimed at improving the lot of people in general, whether directly or indirectly.

Because the 'Buy now' links in my Digital Download Catalogues and Bookstore are Amazon affiliate ones (new, October 2017), there is now a brilliant way that some people can 'donate' and assist me and my sites, time and time again, if they are finding any of the sites helpful / beneficial, and without paying a single dime extra for the privilege!

All they need to remember to do is, anytime they intend to shop at either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, first to go to one of my Digital Download Catalogues or Bookstore (the latter if they want to shop at Amazon UK) and click on one of the Amazon links there. That would take them to the respective Amazon product page, and then from there they could search / navigate to wherever they wanted on the Amazon site and do whatever shopping they were going to do. Amazon does have a cap on affiliate payments for very expensive purchases, so if, for example, anyone bought their own private jet airliner from Amazon after clicking on one of my links I wouldn't see more than some $200 from that — but I'd still be very happy at receiving that much out of their purchase! 

N.B. Currently this applies only to people ordering from the USA or UK. The Amazon affiliate programs are not Amazon-wide but country-specific. I have enrolled in the USA and UK affiliate programs, and unfortunately anyone in any other country who orders anything through my affiliate links wouldn't generate me any affiliate income, though of course I'd still get due royalty payments from their purchases of anything that I'm offering in my stores. I see it as really not being practical for me to enrol in additional affiliate programs because that would require too many links to work well in my page design — especially for mobile devices — though I'm keeping the matter under review and might just possibly include Canada at some point.

Update on my unorthodox use of Bazuka wart-removal gel

9 Nov 2017

Yes, thumbs up — it really does work, remarkably successfully! I've continued periodically to select anything from one to five or six unwanted skin blemishes that I reckoned could be usefully zapped by this method, and most have more or less succumbed, at least after a second spell of treatment. A minority of them still remain, though for the moment smaller, after two or even three treatments, and I think usually I'd have to accept then that those ones, if any of them did ever really need to be removed, would need other methods such as cryosurgery.

I've zapped apparently completely several 'seborrhoeic keratoses' that were on my temples or slightly further back, just in the hair sideburns, which were enlarging rather suspiciously quickly — especially the ones rather hidden in the sideburns. The ones in the latter situation were also anomalous through having a whitish rather powdery surface, though in the past no doctor has recognised them as either suspicious or even anything with a recognised name (just remarking that the spot was 'just a roughened little patch of skin') — which strikes me as very odd indeed!

I had one very small polyp disappear in a single day with this treatment, and I'd expect Bazuka to be extremely effective for polyps generally if it's carefully applied. Amazing that a quick search online shows all manner of authorities pooh-poohing various home remedies for polyps while completely ignoring Bazuka or other salicylic acid treatments and saying the only sensible course of action is to go to your doctor or a professional dermatologist and have the polyp removed by surgery. As in other fields of life, tunnel vision and 'sheep' mentality prevails — though somewhat less in this bad guy's abode! 

Unorthodox treatment for solar keratoses and some other skin blemishes

16 Aug 2017

Some readers will no doubt be familiar with the gel called Bazuka, which is intended for use on verrucas, warts and callouses. I'd been using some of this quite recently for a long-standing and gradually growing verruca under the basal joint of my left little toe. The printed leaflet that comes with each tube of the gel gives profuse warnings to take various precautions when using it, because the active constituent is salicylic acid, which quite rapidly kills skin cells, and so it's necessary not to get the gel onto skin that isn't being treated, though in practice a little 'spread' around the exact bit that needs zapping doesn't seem to be too big a problem. The leaflet warns the user not to apply the gel on or even near the face and various other parts of the body that have soft and more or less delicate skin.

Well, bad boy Philip is now very successfully (so far) experimentally using Bazuka, yes, to zap some things that he's not supposed to be zapping, and without reference to his doctor about this! For quite a few years now I'd had a small wart on my forehead, and, with fluctuations, it was tending overall still to be increasing, and medics weren't interested in doing anything about it and seemed to think that it was perfectly okay for the wart to remain there as long as it didn't become large enough to be a real nuisance / disfigurement.

Thought me, that didn't make full sense, as surely it's better to zap such a wart while it's small, so that it never becomes a real nuisance! Also, I was coming rather to suspect that very carefully applied Bazuka could be just as effective as cryosurgery (freezing with liquid nitrogen) on those facial and scalp solar keratoses that I was thinking of getting my doctor to refer me for, yes, cryosurgery in the next month or so. Solar keratoses are an ongoing thing for me, and they do need zapping because of their potentiality to eventually develop into a type of skin cancer.

Online research to see if salicylic acid was known to be effective on solar keratoses proved positive, though for some reason it wasn't mentioned in most information sources on solar keratosis treatments. So I bit the bullet and initially treated the forehead wart and a tiny little wart-like growth close beside my left eye, plus a couple of fairly prominent solar keratoses on my forehead.

That may sound reckless and rather dangerous — particularly the little spot beside my eye — but actually Bazuka is a particularly useful preparation in that when applied it rapidly dries to a chalky-white tough skin-like material (I think from its smell that it contains methacrylate). That meant that extreme care was needed only during application and for several minutes afterwards, beyond which the salicylic acid was firmly locked down and there was no material danger of its getting spread around and getting into eyes, mouth and so forth. The treatment is only once a day, so this is very convenient.

Whereas the standard-strength Bazuka typically takes weeks to bring about removal of verrucas, my forehead wart was gone after a princely three days' treatment (i.e., three applications). Brilliant! I stopped the treatment after just two days for the tiny wart beside my eye, because the skin was reddening there and getting sore, and I didn't want to cause scarring if I could avoid it. Most of that spot was gone after another few days (i.e., with no further treatment). The two solar keratoses were amazing — it was just as though I'd done cryosurgery, but a little slower action and giving me more control over the process. Small scabs formed and sloughed off after a few more days, leaving smooth skin.

I'm now similarly treating one to four keratoses at a time, and so far this has continued to work brilliantly — though during treatment I must get some odd looks when out among people, because it looks as though I've been weirdly careless and got some spots of yoghurt on my face / scalp!

Currently I'm experimentally including a few facial seborrhoeic keratoses in the treatments. I don't expect them to be fully removed, and they're most likely not something that's threatening to cause problems, but I'm still interested to see to what extent they do go. The situation is complicated by the fact that the term 'seborrhoeic keratosis' actually covers a fair number of types of benign more or less hard skin growth, and I expect some to be less susceptible than others to Bazuka treatment. So far, one of the first two I zapped does appear to have gone completely, though of course it may come back. Others are 'in process' at the moment, including a tiny dark-pigmented one beside my left eye.

Generally optimal treatment time for me in this experiment is two or three days, depending on how the particular areas of skin are responding. It's necessary to recognise when the treated skin is starting to go red and sore, and to stop treatment of that spot at once, for that would go further in the 'burn' process, and of course the aim is to get the greatest effectiveness possible without actual scarring. The skin at certain positions may need just a single (fairly thick) application and nothing more.

Incidentally, I've followed the official instructions in peeling off the previous day's treatment each time, allowing just a few minutes for the rather moist area of uncovered skin to dry out somewhat before the new application.

A note of caution here, however. I'm happy to be carrying out this experiment because I know what I'm doing, and have long-standing experience of self-applied treatments (with doctor's approval) for facial / scalp solar keratoses. I'm extremely careful in applying the gel, and apply it only on those keratoses (etc.), that I can see sufficiently clearly in my shaving mirror, so I can apply the little dobs of gel reasonably precisely where they're required to be. Also I'm used to cryosurgery (applied by a nurse or doctor), and am well-used to the rather hit-and-miss nature of the intensity of the treatment, which quite often does lead to little bits of minor scarring.

I do NOT recommend doing this sort of thing unless you have reasonable medical knowledge and have a long-standing outlook and policy of having overall command over your own well-being — in other words, unless you are properly self-sufficient in looking after yourself and applying various medical treatments to yourself, not necessarily with official 'medical' supervision.

Also, I warn that for some people the stronger versions of Bazuka may be too strong for use on face / scalp, and have much more potential to cause 'burns' and scarring before you've seriously thought that it's already time to stop the treatment.

Certain visitors to my sites getting inexplicably blocked — a bit of detective work reveals all!

5 Aug 2017

I could understand the rare website visitor falling into my bot trap system if they inadvertently clicked / tapped on the bot trap that was at the bottom of each page, or they used some program or browser add-on to auto-fill contact or Visitors' Book new entry forms on my sites, because those forms incorporate a dedicated bot trap field. But even after I'd recently made the bottom-of-page bot traps invisible I still had the odd individuals getting blocked from my sites after having inexplicably fallen into the bot trap system.

Very recently I investigated another such case, and at last found what was happening. It turned out that anyone who used the Ecosia search engine to reach any of my pages would immediately drop into the bot trap, for a funny-silly reason. I'd had some dubious, probably referrer-spamming, accesses to certain pages, with Ecosia given in their 'referrer' header string, at a time when I was getting a significant assault of referrer spamming from a wide range of IP addresses — I think actually a bot net of hacked and fake sites.

So, getting exasperated with trying to work out how best to block or at least minimize that pollution in my website statistics, I was a bit hasty and didn't check Ecosia carefully enough and included the keyword 'Ecosia' in the long list of keywords and regular expressions in my referrer-spammers ban list. — And I have referrer spamming accesses configured to be redirected into the bot trap and thus be immediately blocked from all my sites. So, the solution was simply to remove Ecosia from that referrer spammers list, and to refresh all the sites' htaccess files, and the problem was fully resolved.

Well, except that then just yesterday I had another very nice and generously forbearing site visitor contact me via an unban-me form, saying he'd just got locked out when he'd been reading my page on creationism and 'intelligent design' and had clicked on a link on that page to another page on the same site. That reminded me that several times over the last year or so the odd individual had got inexplicably blocked when on that page, and I'd never understood what was odd about that page to make such a thing happen.

This time I extracted from the relevant access log a chronological list of that visitor's accesses, and found the point at which he'd got redirected into the bot trap and so started getting 'forbidden' responses to his further attempts to access the Clarity of Being site. On the face of it, again there was no obvious reason for his getting bot-trapped at that point. However, with the embarrassing Ecosia gaffe in mind, I looked at the referrer string of each page or file request of his, just in case the answer was there again. Indeed, he'd got blocked as soon as he'd clicked on a link to another page — and of course the request for that page, which was immediately redirected to the bot trap, then was correctly giving https://www.clarity-of-being.org/creationism-intelligent-design.htm as the referrer.

Suddenly I twigged. The offending keyword this time was 'design'! Yes, years ago, maybe even before I'd produced that particular page, I'd put the keyword 'design' into my referrer-spammer ban list because a number of referrer-spamming companies had 'Design' in their names and thus in their spamming referrer strings.

So, in that case the solution was exactly the same as with 'Ecosia'. I only hope that when further referrer spammers with 'Design' in their names come my way I remember that I can't use that particular keyword!

An exciting recent recording, and a mass of computer shenanigans!

5 Aug 2017

It's been a mass of computer shenanigans and my struggling through the process of resolving all that, which has prevented me from commenting earlier here on a wonderful long sound recording that I gained on the night of 18–19 July.

An eerily spacious and majestic thunderstorm faithfully captured

Exeter rarely gets thunderstorms, and indeed several years ago there was one year in which I heard thunder at all on only two days in the whole year — followed by a whole year in which I heard no thunder at all, and, if I remember correctly, the following year saw only three days on which I heard the odd bit of thunder. In 2014 it was a little better, and I did manage to get tolerable recordings of a very leisurely small-hours thunderstorm in June (finishing with blackbirds starting to sing) and another in September that year, with the odd robins singing at times.

Those made pleasant CDs, and for the moment they remain on my catalogue, but they were not what I'd call major storms, with not very frequent lightning, so in the editing process I'd had to shorten many of the gaps between peals of thunder. So I was still rather forlornly awaiting that blue moon in a month of Sundays in a year that never comes anyway, when a really proper thunderstorm would come over Exeter, and not just come over but do it in the small hours, when city noise disturbances would be minimal, and mid-week, when generally city noise disturbances in the small hours would be least — and the wind would have to be light enough and not significantly coming from the south-west half. Rather a tall order!

In the afternoon of 18 July a thundery shower did partially come over, with a few exquisite-sounding peals of thunder, but wasn't worth recording because of the daytime city traffic noise, but then during the evening the cloud remnants were generally melting away, but I was aware of three different indications that there was at least a possibility that more thundery showers, if not a proper organised 'meso-system' storm might come up from the south sometime during the night — so before I went to bed I set up one of my recorders on my second-floor bedroom window sill as on previous occasions, with window open and this time the mini-tripod tethered by a piece of string in case the curtains blew outwards in a sudden wind squall, knocking the recorder out of the window and crashing onto the paving stones down below (which actually did happen to that very recorder on 27 May!).

Thank goodness I'd taken that trouble, because the quite major thunderstorm that did come over during that night ticked all the boxes for what I'd most been wanting in a really satisfying thunderstorm recording. It was the first time since about year 2000 that I'd experienced a really active major thunderstorm come right over.

It wasn't spectacular in the way that some weather recordists tend to want it, for it had only two even moderately close earth strikes, and even those didn't come as startling sudden bangs, but much of the lightning was playing about in the very extensive anvil-top of the stormcloud system, which had been drawn out a considerable distance forward of the base of the actually quite narrow band of convective towers, so each peal of thunder crept and danced around in the sky as though exploring its every nook and cranny, giving an awe-inspiring sense of spaciousness of the overall soundscape — especially as one could often hear the sound of two or three lightning discharges in fairly quick succession in different parts of the sky overlapping each other from different directions.

Prior to editing, the whole storm, from first to last audible murmurs, lasted 2h 20', and after editing out all the disturbances, it was still 1h 55'. I've made two CDs (not a sequential 2-CD set) of the storm — one containing the main part of the storm, missing out some quiet lead-in and quite a bit more of the lead-out, while the other contains the whole storm minus about 37' of the loudest thunder, so giving the experience of a distant storm passing by and not coming fully over. Both make a really beautiful experience in their different ways. Those CDs are now on my queue for setting up as soon as I can get round to it.

Computer shenanigans and oodles of stress!

As for computer shenanigans, ugh! I started getting system freezes and blue screen crashes, and suspected that the cause was most likely my system BIOS needing a long-overdue firmware update — so I managed to update the BIOS, but then sweet little Microsoft decided it was time for me to get the Windows 10 Creators Update. After a day or two's freedom from freezes and BSODs, it all started again, and after a whole lot of confusion and disarray, partly thanks to a sort-of well-meaning but very abrupt and opinionated support person at my PC's supplier (Quiet PC Co.) complicating things for me and drawing out the saga as well as increasing my stress level.

So my computer was away for a few days for supposed fixing, but then I was faced with a clean reinstall of Windows, which meant that I had to spend days on end rebuilding my quite elaborate software setup. And then on Thursday last week, when I fired the computer up after lunch I found that my Internet connection had gone, and it became clear that this was some problem within Windows, which neither I nor the excellent computer-fixing technician Phil Bonser ('The Friendly Computer Man Ltd', in Exeter) could fathom. I ended up doing another Windows reinstall, dammit, and am now in the late stages of rebuilding my software setup yet again.

This time I've learnt from all this faffing about, and for the time being am doing a daily backup of my system partition, so if anything goes pear-shaped again I needn't reinstall Windows but can simply restore the system backup from the previous day. I do mean proper backups, not the Windows System Restore function, which has a poor track record with me, usually leaving things more broken than before the attempted restore. Of course my data all gets backed up at least daily anyway.

I've also ordered a Chuwi Hi10 Pro 2 tablet to enable me to still have Internet access and do a limited amount of work in the event of future problems with my desktop PC. But then again I'm also poised to order the new desktop PC, which will be the current more powerful update of the model that I have now — another completely silent one from the Quiet PC Company. So I'll soon have the current PC system unit up for sale to some person who can collect it locally, paying in up-front cash (I suggest £50, with DVD/CD writer but without system or data disks because I'd remove those and put them into the new machine. More about that soon on my 'For Sale' page.

Making the world and all of 'Existence' a better place? — Here's something YOU can do…

28 June 2017

My rather mind-boggly report 'The astral' about to be closed down? has gradually lost people's interest through the second half of last year and into this year, because nice clear-cut signs of the astral non-reality genuinely getting closed off from everyone's 'ordinary minds' haven't become evident, notwithstanding a few individuals reporting the odd positive changes in their own life experience, and so I haven't been able to update it with interesting or indeed exciting 'story'. I myself have had progressive positive changes, yet still with signs of ongoing garbage interferences, through attempts at standard attacks (which I quickly nip in the bud), phantom physical pains (which I've so far usually been much less successful in clearing), and ongoing interference in my use of Helpfulness Testing.

I still have clear evidence of my having at least a certain degree of connection to the primary archetypes — another clear sign of the astral and garbage interference still being with me. That, together with all the general continuing human dysfunction suggests that the astral is still very much with me (and us) at the moment, never mind what process may be under way to change that at some point.

I've recently been doing further inner inquiry to try to make more sense of the situation, and the suggestion that I'm picking up is that this apparent hiatus or non-happening is actually just a temporary delay in an actually very advanced stage of the overall closure process. Apparently, at the moment the process is held up by the fixed patterns in people's brains, because in our physical life experience our mental functioning is limited by the nature and state of its physical vehicle or container, which is the brain. I'm not clear as to what sort of time-scale would be involved for getting round this issue, but it looks as though this could take some time.

However, I'm picking up strong indications that there is something very helpful that I and you and indeed as many people as possible could do to assist the process in this more difficult phase. It's a very simple thing to do, as follows:

While keeping much or your awareness on your physical surroundings, also focus on your awareness as a smooth gradation from your conceptual 'ordinary mind' to your deepest, non-dual aspects, and think into that continuum the deepest possible meaning of the words Astral — closing! a few times, for no more than about half a minute. that isn't a command or prayer but simply a sort of 'visualization by intent', without any actual visual details. This can be effective only if you have a proper understanding from my Clarity of Being site of the true nature of the astral.

If you're not experienced in using my methods or have some soul programming, then you would need to use a declaration of intent first to help get you in touch with your deeper intent for the closure of the astral.

If you have a mini Clarity-Sphere or indeed a notionally non-programmed suitable small polished stone sphere, carry out the procedure holding the sphere gently onto your crown with the palm of your dominant hand.

Ideally, carry out this brief practice from one to three times a day, and in any case also try using it sometimes as an initial first attempt at zapping any garbage attack that you notice has started. If the attack is still coming on after a minute or two, repeat this practice, and if it still doesn't clear the attack, use the standard procedures I give for zapping such attacks. In that event, such time as you get the garbage starting another attack or other interference, it's best that you carry out the 'astral — closing' procedure again first.

Although it may appear to fail to stop that attack itself, what you are doing with that procedure is beginning to retrain your 'mind' and thus your brain, to whatever extent the latter can reconfigure, to make it easier for the astral closure process to proceed at brain level. I'm getting some indication over this, that the facilitation of the brain-level astral closure process that results from using that very simple 'projection of intent' procedure isn't limited to the person using that procedure, and, in some small degree is making it easier for the closure to occur for ALL people. Therefore, the more of us who regularly use this 'astral closure' projection of intent procedure, the sooner would general astral closure become a 'physical' reality.

If the procedure does directly stop any attacks for you, that of course would be additional and excellent cause to continue using it on a regular basis, even in lieu of my established procedures for zapping illusory realities and emotional button-pushing if it's at least as effective.

As always with this sort of thing, this isn't something that I can know to be objectively true and correct, so what I'm reporting here needs to be treated sensibly — as a speculative pointer to what is worth trying in the absence of any more helpful view of the situation. If it appears to work we continue to use it, at least until we find a better way or some genuine contra-indication (i.e., aside from the vast majority's held opinions and beliefs, which are not a basis for anything worthwhile).

This is very new for me, but I did remember to use it when I got some hell periphery visuals come up one time recently when I was in bed, and those visuals dissipated within a matter of seconds as I used this simple procedure. That saved me from having to use any slightly more involved procedure; it was minimally disturbing for me lying in bed and aiming to return to sleep as soon as possible.

Do please see what you can make of it yourself — though please no-one waste their time writing to me telling me what a lot of rubbish I've written here or elsewhere; I know all about that already , and am working to the best of my ability, and encouraging others to do likewise, with 'What Is' rather than perpetuate the twisted 'sanity' of those whose outlook is based in held opinion and belief!

 Increased security on my computer system

28 June 2017

A couple of months ago I decided to change from the truly excellent Kaspersky Internet Security to Avast Antivirus Pro, which although also excellent, generally gets slightly lower ratings in major reviews than Kaspersky. My reasons were twofold, though primarily the first:

• Kaspersky is based in Russia. I've little doubt that the Kaspersky people are great guys, but there is an intrinsic security question-mark over any system-critical software that comes from countries that overall are hives of cyber-criminality where State interference with otherwise legitimate software firms looks to be a real possibility. I think particularly about countries such as Russia, China, Ukraine, North Korea, and to some extent various other Eastern and Middle-Eastern countries with authoritarian or otherwise badly-behaved regimes.

• I was never completely happy with Kaspersky Internet Security precisely because of something many people love about it — its requiring extremely little user interaction and having all its settings well hidden under the bonnet. I wanted to have more awareness and control of what the firewall was allowing or silently blocking. I also found that on the occasion of its very rare false positives it would tend to immediately delete or quarantine things and make it rather a long-winded process for me to make exclusions for them.

So, the change I made was to replace it with Avast Antivirus Pro, and use the Windows 10 Firewall, with GlassWire Basic as a really helpful front end for it. That meant that through GlassWire I'd get firewall alerts and so have control over what was allowed or blocked, and of course, through GlassWire I could easily and quickly remove any 'allow' or 'block' rule that I didn't want to be on the list.

I also found that Avast's alerts, when its scans or behaviour monitoring (rarely) came up with false positives, were much more helpful than Kaspersky's. They give me the proper options, including to immediately put the untrusted item onto the exclusions list as well as sending a copy of it to Avast for immediate checking, with notification of the result of that check returned and displayed as soon as received (a matter of minutes).

I'm thus very pleased with Avast. However, today Avast updated itself to a new version, and I found that it was sporting two new modules, which, when I sought to activate one of them ('Ransomware Shield'), it informed me that that module wasn't available for my (paid-for) version, and if I wanted it I'd have to pay more for one of the two more expensive versions. — Cheeky!

That prompted me to research online for other programs that would carry out a similar function to that 'Ransomware Shield', which apparently is simply a well-implemented program whitelister. I ended up installing SecureAPlus, which does just what I want there, so making my system considerably more resistant to any ransomware or indeed most other malware. If a program tries to launch, which isn't recognised as a trusted program, then it's blocked unless I choose to allow it. What can't run can't encrypt or delete your files or do any other nasties on your computer. Simple!

I also found that SecureAPlus carried out a very thorough initial scan on first running it, which whitelisted almost all the program files on my computer, leaving me to tell it what to do with the 13 false positives that it found. Since then it has been superbly 'silent', though it has popped up just one alert, which at least reassured me that it really was working.

If you want to increase your own computer security with a whitelisting program, there are others to choose from. In particular, for Windows computers VoodoShield is a highly regarded alternative to SecureAPlus.