What's New

• Two new pages: presenting two new test conversations I've run with ChatGPT to demonstrate the extent of its astonishingly human-like responses that I'm now getting from it:

  • Test 5: Challenging hitch-hiking situation challenge

  • Test 6: Challenging 'pinnacle' poem comprehension ultra-challenge!

    
    

• New Blog post: Update to previous post — my eyesight's got better still! (another winner from my deepest aspects).

• New Blog post: Eureka! — An interesting eyesight issue much belatedly self-diagnosed.

• New entry in the Clarity of Being Blog: Cumulative update on my own self-actualization progress — deeper consciousness dumbfounded!.
  The Clarity of Being site has its own What's New page, but as this update really belongs on both sites but search engines don't like pages giving duplicate content, this site's equivalent Blog post just links to the full post on the Clarity of Being site.

• Update 5 to My 'lights-out' time approaches…. A further deferment of my 'exit-point', for a very good reason…

• A third section added to The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session alone in the wilds — Quest for my scary holy grail — a thunderstorm from high up in the Teign Gorge.

• Since late August last, when I first stumbled into my pioneering Nature-Symphonies project, I'm now up to Nature-Symphony 51 (The fundamental pinnacle examining the source of inspiration itself). This itself is a 'pinnacle' work, though its scale and its extensive 'creative dissonance' would no doubt be alien to the vast majority.

• What's that — 'Neptune the Mystic' indeed?
  You read right. I've added a new site to my extant five — Philip Goddard's 'Neptune the Mystic' site revisited.

  It's a tiny, one-page site set up amazingly belatedly to provide a re-connection for those who got to know me or at least my sites back in the very early days of my involvement in 'spirituality', when my website domain was, yes, neptunethemystic.co.uk, as part of my misguidedly seeking at that time to project an image of myself as a mystic. I dropped that domain in late 2004, and it got taken up by a domain-parking site — but very recently I was reminded that even now there was a thin scattering of very long-dead links to that early incarnation of my web presence.

  So, finding that that domain name was available, I re-owned it and used it to 'resurrect' all those dead links and give a friendly little 'bridge' for anyone who made some positive connection with me or the original site at that time.

• Update / addition to Fun with AI-generated images. Much improved images produced by the DALL-E 3 AI 'engine', via Bing Image Creator. Excellent for images of distressed cats! Also is mightily confused between the painters Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Goch! I'm using some of its results now as background images on my YouTube videos of my Nature-Symphonies (as from No. 25).

General (forms)

• Apologies for non-functioning of all forms on my sites (internal server error), likely from late October till the issue was reported to me today. I took it up with my site hosting provider, and they located the issue, caused presumably by an update of their cPanel site management software. It just took one small change in two places in the NMS Formmail script for it all to be working again.

  So, if you'd recently run into that problem in trying to sign up for the Newsletter, make a Visitors' Book entry or simply contact me, please try again now.

• New Blog post — WOT — "Web of Trust" — is disreputable, dishonest and signally untrustworthy. Please help my sites!. — Two of my sites now hit by 'false positive' poor safety ratings and WOT's contemptuous stonewalling against correcting those errors and indeed the same sort of rating errors on many other people's sites. As I explain, we all need WOT like a great big hole in the head.

• New Blog post — "More beautiful than any palace!" — finally recognising a powerful relatively new genre of musical creation that I've been producing. — Starting to discover the deeper potential of my Wind Chimes in the Wild series of recordings.

• Update 4 to My 'lights-out' time approaches…. A further deferment of my 'exit-point', for a very good reason…

• I've transferred the contents of my last three Blog posts (last 3 entries here) to a new page here: My 'lights-out' time approaches…. At this point I've added no significant further update, though have made various minor corrections / revisions. Further updates are expected in time.

• New Blog post — Update 2 on my previous post, about my 'lights-out' time.

• New Blog post — Update on my previous post, about my 'lights-out' time.

• New Blog post — My 'lights-out' time coming very close, apparently…. Yup, you read that right!

• New Blog post — Workable solution for sending out my quarterly Newsletter. This explains my workaround to avoid the trouble I had in sending the December Newsletter, so that this month's one should have no problems at all.

• New Blog post — Something's gone missing! — One nice little turnaround for me…. This is potentially great news for a lot of people…

• At last I've made good after my long-standing neglect on the chronological list of my natural soundscape recordings (including wind chimes in the wild), and have overhauled both parts, stripping out all the references to the now discontinued availability of my recordings from my Downloads Store, and adding links to the recordings recently uploaded to Freesound.

  Further Freesound links will appear there as I upload more recordings to Freesound.

• 

  The natural soundscapes Digital Downloads Store is starting to undergo a transformation. All the downloads for sale will progressively disappear, and in their place will steadily appear links to new pages on Freesound, where you can listen to or download CD-quality versions of the recordings.

  I'll be retaining the current structure of that 'Store', to help people searching for different categories of soundscape, and keep the newer, better-quality recordings almost completely separate from the older ones. 'Store' in its name will become 'Catalogue'.

  Those downloads are notionally free, BUT I do ask everyone who downloads items or does extensive streaming of them to consider making a donation to support my work.

• New page added — Fun with AI-generated images.

• New Blog post — Another pointer to 'the astral' having possibly been closed off from our ordinary minds. — And the ex-'astral' creativity scratchpad just beginning to take on its proper function…

• New Blog post — An absolutely jaw-dropping recording — from the crater edge of an erupting volcano…. No, not mine, but by one of my Facebook friends, Felix Blume…

• Belatedly, I've added an update to Recording natural soundscapes — Some experience-based tips (Late 2022 update — a more balanced outlook on the M10, and some welcome reprieves), which explains about my quite recently replacing all my 'still accepted' PCM-M10 recordings with copies taken from an archive of a pre-widening version of them all, and widening them somewhat less aggressively, and with the treble de-emphasized to a suitable extent. The improved results led me to restore some discarded thrilling recordings and apply the more effective level of stereo widening and 'tilt' EQ, so they're now available to appear on Freesound in due course.

• Following on from the previous announcement, I've now completed a new page on my Broad Horizon site, The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session alone in the wilds. In that, I've featured two particular all-night natural soundscape recording projects that each are part of a respective educational and, hopefully, inspiring personal narrative. Those happen to be my first-ever all-night session, and then my last so far — though in the latter case the narrative covers a series of sessions that led up to the culminating mega-session. The page includes links to the relevant recordings, primarily of birds' evening and dawn choruses, now on Freesound.

• I've reluctantly chosen to give up trying to sell download copies of my natural soundscape recordings, for nobody was buying them, despite people now and again sounding so excited about them and saying they'd definitely buy some. I've now started an ongoing 'drip-feed' programme of uploading the best of my recordings to Freesound.

  So, gradually Freesound links will replace any 'buy download' links.

  It rather mortifies me to have cause to make this change, because of all the time and hard work I've put into producing those recordings, and the way that people would time and time again express enthusiastic interest and say they'd be buying but then not doing so. I will put 'donate' requests in appropriate places on my sites where I link to or otherwise promote my Freesound-exposed recordings.

• New Blog post — Two thunderstorm nights in October here? — Pull the other one, Celia!
  Two new thunderstorm recordings, at a decidedly unlikely time of year, including my first aggressive-sounding one (mostly ground strikes) — I've put it on Freesound, with due warning about the huge dynamic range…

• Yesterday I uploaded another batch of photos (102 of them) to Flickr.

  You can see all my photos at https://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_goddard/, and if you want to restrict your viewing to this year's photos, go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_goddard/albums/72177720300142494.

  
  

• For a little while I've been beavering my way through coarse-screening, processing, adding metadata, and final-selecting, ending up with 372 photos to upload to Flickr. I did that upload yesterday, then spending the rest of the day putting those photos into the relevant albums (subject- or time-related albums). There's a distinct overall improvement in photo clarity from where I switched from my old Fuji S9600 to my current little Panasonic DMC-TZ70 camera which is much more versatile as well as being much smaller and lighter.

  You can see the lot at https://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_goddard/, and if you want to restrict your viewing to the current new upload, go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_goddard/albums/72177720300142494.

  
  

• New Blog post — Project Fix the Human Condition — Update on progress
  

• A volte face! — Having had a period of Arial being the default body text typeface for all my sites instead of Times New Roman (see 29 April entry), I finally decided that the latter was the more readable, and changed back. In the case of Arial and other similar sans-serif fonts, there is often confusion, owing to a capital 'I' looking like a lower case 'l', and the exclamation mark has such a tiny dot that it looks almost like an I or an l! Times New Roman and other serif fonts are unambiguous about which character is which. Also I find the brash utilitarianism of the appearance of sans-serif fonts ugly and rather abrasive to my sensibility — especially in the italics style.

• New Blog post — Inspiring encounters — Apparently a real hotting-up trend…
  >>> Hot Topic

• Today I've notionally completed a task that's taken most of my computer time so far this year — to make the HTML code of all pages much more usefully readable for screen readers for sight-impaired people and of course search engine spiders. This not only improves accessibility but theoretically ought to improve search engine page ranking a little — except that it would presumably make negligible difference in the case of Google for my Clarity of Being site because it's apparently keeping that site severely down-ranked because of its openly countering a range of widely accepted orthodoxies regarding so-called 'mental health', religion and spirituality, on the false premise that the vastly majority view is necessarily the correct one, and therefore Clarity of Being is misinformational and thus of low quality / reliability.

  This has been quite a tedious task for me, though it has given me the satisfaction of knowing that I've brought order to a lot of chaos and inconsistency that had been hiding there in the HTML markup. Through the course of that I also had the satisfaction of finding many small errors and bits that needed updating or additions, so there's been a lot of detail improvement for visitors just looking at their screens too.

  Indeed, to that end I finally changed the default body text font from Times New Roman (and 'family' equivalents) to Arial / Helvetica / sans-serif, increasing overall readability. I tried Verdana, which is more readable still, but it presented me with various scaling issues, so I abandoned it.

  Actually I still dislike such sans-serif typefaces altogether because it's impossible to distinguish between an I (upper-case i) and an l (lower-case L). That can force the reader to stop in places to be sure what a particular word is. Also, the exclamation mark doesn't stand out properly and just looks confusing when following a word like will! — See what I mean. Illusion rules the show, until it doesn't says I! — Also sans-serif italics are ugly and less conspicuously different from the regular upright font style, and less readable, than in serif typefaces such as Times New Roman.

  So, I don't see use of a sans-serif font now as being an unqualified improvement, and I can't promise that I won't change back to Times New Roman in the future. At least its serifs make all alphanumeric characters fully unambiguous.

• I've at last woken up to and corrected a silly error I made in the instrumentation of my organ and tuba work The Unknown. I'd originally got the idea from somebody or somewhere that a standard orchestral tuba can play the A above middle C — albeit with difficulty —, and so specified that as the preferred instrument. In fact that's rubbish, and the note range of the tuba part nicely fits that of the euphonium or tenor tuba instead. I've therefore changed the specification accordingly. The work should now present no real difficulty for the tuba player, though, sure, there are a few particularly difficult short passages to nicely challenge the organist!

• I've now added two recordings of my reading of the new poem, out in Fernworthy Forest on Dartmoor, Devon, UK. Those two differ in perspective, one being relatively close and the other more distant from the recorder (and so with more prominent ambience). For Ukraine… — A new and topical poem

• A number of improvements in the new poem presented in For Ukraine… — A new and topical poem, including a 'prologue' and 'epilogue' natural sound, which would be dovetailed into beginning and end when I (hopefully very soon) make a recording of it.

• New page added, presenting my first poem for some 27 years — For Ukraine… — A new and topical poem, with some introductory notes. The poem's, as distinct from the page's, title is For Ukraine — A New Painting On My Wall, In Which… , and, unsurprisingly it's a message for and about the Ukrainian people in their current desperate situation. It's one of inspiration, not doom and gloom!

• New Blog post — Project 'Fix the Human Condition' — Update on apparent lack of progress.

• Update to Blog post of 1 March (Vladimir Putin — Explaining the true nature of his serious 'mental health' problem (Poor guy — seriously!)) — with link to an interesting apparently highly corroborative personal account of Putin in the early 1980s.

• New Blog posts — Deep consciousness sticky cache fix is allegedly here — now, already! and
  Vladimir Putin — Explaining the true nature of his serious 'mental health' problem (Poor guy — seriously!)

• New Blog post — A snippet of creativity — my first using the 'ex-astral'?
  

• New Blog post — Astral closure, etc. — a very slow drip-feed of evidence… — A progress report, and a very interesting 'find' for me — little bits of evidence, but still no real clinchers, and no sign of obvious widespread change.
  

• New Blog post — Garbage dissolution and astral closure — Why are we waiting? — a new and even more fundamental fix is now allegedly in the pipeline…
  

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

  — And if you're new to my sites, yes, that extremely unlikely-looking title of the post and indeed the previous one really are both meant! This clown here does get up to some rather surprising and potent things! That's why they call him a bogeyman clown!
  

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

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

• Further updates and composers added to Musical Influences on Philip Goddard's Music & Literary Works. This essay is now even more of a magnum opus!

• A short new section added to Musical Influences on Philip Goddard's Music & Literary Works — "Postmodernism (and other 'isms') — Kindly hang up now and don't call again!" — and further revisions and additions made in various places over about the last week, including a few further composers added. This essay has become quite a magnum opus!

• Having found that the Facebook Like / Share buttons on my main content pages were not displaying on many mobile phones, on consideration of various factors I chose to replace those buttons with a different, home-made Facebook Share button, which should display on ALL devices.

  However, I found that although the button displays just fine, its Facebook link doesn't work on mobiles. On those, Facebook for some arcane reason redirects the visitor to an ordinary FB page, not to a direct sharing facility. An online search has shown that other people have had this sort of experience with FB Share buttons on mobiles, and it appears that there's nothing I can do about it.

  At least, it's good to have got rid of the standard FB Like / Share buttons, because (a) they cause a huge pile of FB code to be loaded during page loading, and (b) that code ensures that any FB user who isn't logged out from FB would be tracked. My home-made FB buttons use a straight URL, not a pile of Javascript deviousness as FB's own buttons use.

• To facilitate 'sharing' of my main content pages by people with smartphones, I've added a QR code link for the respective site alongside the Facebook Like / Share buttons almost at top of page. If you want to share the particular site with others around you, just tap on the link, which will show the QR code, and then your friends, or whoever, can scan that with their phones. — Just doing my best to be helpful!

• New Blog post — Sound recordings — I'm in some pretty dubious company — having done a U-turn! — Yes, I'd been unwittingly compensating most of my PCM-D100 natural soundscape recordings for a nonexistent deficiency in that recorder's sound quality! — And what I'm doing about that now that I realize what I've been doing…

• I'm in the process of going through each of the programme notes pages for my compositions, adding a (hopefully) usefully meaningful headline to each respective page's body text. In the course of that, on some pages I'm making some revisions / updates to said body text.

• Also in the course of doing that, I'm finding prompts to make additions / updates to Musical Influences on Philip Goddard's Music & Literary Works. Among the additions are a subsection on fog horns in the section on non-musical influences, and I've added the odd further composers to the list.

• New Blog post — New recordings of my compositions — I've run into a major obstacle.

• New Blog post — Gobsmacked by my new 'toy' camera — Panasonic DMC-TZ70. Some interesting illustrative photos.

4 June 2021

• Amazon Media on Demand — my produce-on-demand provider of CDs of my recordings — closes down today. Therefore, all CDs are now removed from my catalogues (Natural Soundscapes and Music Compositions).
  

  From now on only CD-quality digital downloads (lossless FLAC format) are listed. Wherever possible I supply any relevant original CD artwork (including brief notes and location photos) with any download purchases, and in a fair proportion of cases the download versions are significantly longer than the CD versions.

30 May 2021

• New Blog post - …And therefore today is thrilling… #1 — First Cornwall hike since February 2020 — with a difference!

• Exciting update — First step in my new project to make completely new MIDI renderings and recordings thereof, of all my compositions. I've just uploaded a preview video of the new rendering of Sunrise on Ama Dablam at YouTube. A full stereo choir and the most accurate and lively virtual timpani I've yet come across make for not only much more realism than previously, but also a sense of ruggedness and drama that I never thought I'd hear in my music without live performance.
  

  That is a cathedral performance, but I'm about to produce a large concert-hall version (less spaciousness, but more clarity of detail, which may or may not appear on YouTube.

  A lot of work goes into setting up each work for its new rendering, so I expect new recordings to appear every few weeks initially, though most likely preparation time would reduce over time, because of so much of the groundwork already being covered, and of course a small proportion of the works would take relatively little time to prepare.

• Major update — fairly extensive rewriting — of programme note for my Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness). This relates to my having at last established that the previously baffling origin of some musical elements in my works — particularly Symphony 4 — simply has to be ghosts, of all things, because that's the one explanation that truly 'adds up' for the particular musical elements and the circumstances of their coming to me. In particular, the choral section in the middle movement of the symphony now has a new and compelling significance that I'd never considered before. Just listen to the opening of that choral section and consider why that unison men's chorus might come to me weirdly strongly within my mind at a particular spot on Dartmoor and nowhere else, late on a long hike in c.1982, which just a couple of days ago I remembered was close alongside the well-known Lich Way there — a historical pallbearers' track…
  

  Before anyone concludes I've fallen off my trolley about that, please carefully read my glossary explanation of the true nature of ghosts, linked to above.

• Major addition to Musical Influences on Philip Goddard's Music & Literary Works to explain about ghosts as sources of musical elements in certain of my compositions. This is the final list item, at the bottom of the page.