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I literally can't talk about where I'm at (in exact terms) or what I'm doing (in exact terms) right now; I'm under NDA. However, it feels so good to have people acknowledge that I'm good at something. And, don't get me wrong; there's lots I'm not good at. I don't do well with the "layer one" part of the job (that's an OSI model joke), and I have to get better at it. But the fact that I have a niche at all makes me so happy.

I was handed a piece of software yesterday that runs on one of our virtual machines and told that I needed to do a Teams call with the guy who had been setting up visualizations using it so that I could take over for this gig. That's intimidating, right? But I was able to parse the information easily, talk through the problems I was having, get things working, and even discover enough about how the backend worked to look up the stuff I didn't know.

Ah, this is a GUI with a different service that's polling our hardware in the background? Cool. It's got a query language to interface with that background service. Ok. It's a SQL-like thing that isn't quite SQL? I'm not a database engineer, but I did take a week-long one-on-one intensive with my bestie who's a senior SQL analyst. Let's do it.

I'm getting some duplicate data after doing an inner join between two wonky-looking queries inside a WYSIWYG interface, but you know what? For the most part, I'm keeping up with my teammate who's had access to the software for a heck of a lot longer than 48 hours, so I'm counting it as a "win."

( if i had kept walking past the ticket gate without stopping back then )

This job necessitates travel, and I'm here for it. Please send me away from my normal, everyday life and have me work two straight weeks of 10-12 hour days. I need the money, first of all, and I am severely enamored of the experience of having hotel services clean my room every other day while I wrangle networking switches from sunrise to sundown. I don't need the sun. I can get my vitamin D from a pill.

Oh god, is this what touring is like if you're a rock star? I keep thinking about my middle-aged faves and the times they must have had as wild, carefree 20-somethings throwing CRT TVs out of hotel windows and getting banned from life from every single Hilton-owned hotel. Not me, ossan-tachi yo! I've got a Hilton Rewards membership now! Take that!

My coworkers are very sweet, teaching me how to navigate the various methods of acquiring frequent flier miles and urging me to set up TSA Pre and telling me it'll be no time at all until I have access to airport lounges. Actually, I'm a total gremlin who's been traveling cheaply, eating cheaply, and economizing every aspect of my life from a young age, so I don't know what I'd do with all that luxury, but they're excited on my behalf for me to find out. It's a contagious kind of excitement. If this continues, I might actually find out what it's like to be middle-class.

It's too early for me to get carried away, though. For now, let's enjoy the hotel. I heard two conflicting reports as to whether there's working air conditioning back at the apartment, so who knows what's awaiting me after this sojourn ends. I might be Urashima Taro, and when I unzip my suitcase after getting home, I just get heatstroke and age 100 years.

Feeling: hopeful
At: Hilton
Grooves: plazma - Kenshi Yonezu

For no particularly good reason, I'm doing a deep dive into David Bowie and his various stage personas, concept albums, and lyrical elements. I'm a product of American radio, just as much as the next person, so it isn't as if I have had no exposure to the man. In fact, I remember precisely where I was when I first heard his very last single.

At the time, I thought only, "just like the rest of his work, my religious schoolteachers would all have a field day whispering in corners about the decline of society," and secretly enshrined in my heart a small shard of solidarity. I think that's the core of rock music. It isn't anti-establishment sentiment, so much as it is the small knowledge that you've made them sweat a bit.

I've got to say, though, the entire experience of watching Bowie's final performance as Ziggy Stardust has been an interesting time for me, in my present circumstances. I'm sitting here — watching him, then later typing this — at a computer with more power than any I've set my hands to before, researching how to packetize audio and video and send it over network switches that would have made my child self blush at their sheer speed — and there he is, across time and space, performing at a level I can't even imagine reaching, every analogue sine wave traveling down a dedicated cable, getting a dedicated fader, being manipulated by human hands alone, traveling to a recording medium unmitigated by ones and zeroes at all… It's the world that built the world that I live in. My hair is bright red because of glam rock. My job was built on the back of those camera operators and lighting engineers, sweaty in a control room, with monitor mixers sitting near wedge speakers, losing their hearing bit by bit, while spotlight operators track movements onstage.

My first ever gig that I got any credit for, in any meaningful way, was doing spotlights at a rodeo. I got so motion sick I had to leave straight after. There's a physicality to that job. And now I'm bruising my knees on the concrete warehouse floor zip-tieing in fiber cables between switches so that, at point of show, a single Ethernet cable could carry more digitized sine waves than surrounded Ziggy during his Rock 'n' Roll Suicide by some exponential number; fader groups abstracted away, preprogrammed in their paths by osc signals, recorded here and sent there as a series of packets arranged by committees of electrical engineers… Ziggy Stardust is dead! They took pieces of him and became real, traveling down the wire!!

And I will sit, knees bruised, sweaty in a control room, and if I get motion sickness it will be from staring into a monitoring application too hard, surely.

I ended up becoming more of a computer monkey than a rock star, despite the color of my hair. Still, I hold onto that shard of solidarity. Maybe I'm a blackstar.

Feeling: contemplative
At: Cubicle
Grooves: Starman - David Bowie

Hoo, boy.

I've been an audio engineer with some IT responsibilities for about a decade now on and off, but suddenly I'm transitioning to a position that's more like being an IT engineer with some video engineering responsibilities… and let me tell you, I do not know video.

I briefly tried to run my own streaming server once. I can use ffmpeg with a guide open in front of me. I am aware of many ways to configure VLC. I gave myself many a virus back in the Windows XP days thanks to infected uploads of ACE's Mega Codecs Pack. This is the extent of my video knowledge. Or it was until a week and a half ago.

Now I'm studying SMPTE ST 2110 as if my life depended on it. I'm considering whether or not to get a SMPTE membership so I can read their magazine and take their training courses. I'm furiously typing "chrominance and luminance in digital broadcast video" into the Youtube search bar.

I know more about how color works than I ever needed to. (The red cones in my eyes are mildly deformed; I gave up on understanding color so long ago, and yet.)

(But you know, the compression scheme for JPEG images is pretty neat! I finally understood a little bit about why we studied all those discrete mathematics structures in undergrad!)

(As to why video broadcasting led me to research JPEGs, it's because fundamentally all video compression is either MPEG or JPEG. The two static image formats of the early web. Poor GIFs, sad, alone, lonely, and unpronounceable — you were the first moving standard, but you never had much luck.)

And I know I'm complaining, but it's actually pretty fun. It'd be pretty fun, anyway, if I were getting proper sleep, and therefore were able to properly encode new memories. (The air conditioner at my apartment has been out for two weeks. No word from the roommates on whether today's the day I go home to air that has been conditioned, so I'm betting I'm in for another sweaty night of barely sleeping, followed by another long day of trying to figure out how light becomes pixels becomes light again.)

But hey… I have a work trip coming up very shortly, and the hotel I'll be staying at will surely be air conditioned…! (I'm abandoning you, my roommates! Farewell! I'll never forget you…!)

Don't worry. I'll probably succumb to some kind of video engineering madness as my comeuppance for leaving you to bake in the hot apartment while I run off to shadow someone with actual experience…

Feeling: exhausted
At: Cubicle
Grooves: Air Conditioning(!), Flourescent Lighting

It's impossible to be jet-lagged from an hour-and-a-half flight that doesn't even result in changing time zones, but that's how I feel. It was a rough flight, and I ended up pretty sick by the end of it. I survived, but I still feel pretty "off."

I got to meet my new team, though, in-person! I got a better feeling of what the job entails. I hope I'm a good fit for the position. I'll actually have some guidance and training, but I worry that I'll be dragging everyone down while I get my bearings, so I feel a great sense of responsibility not to mess things up… It's impossible to be great at everything you do from the beginning, so that's an unrealistic expectation, but I don't want to be too much of a burden. I want to get better at doing all of this as quickly as possible.

( there's really no reason to be anxious, you know )

I looked up at the sky on my commute back into the city from work the other day, and there were radioactive pink clouds, unusual in that they existed at all in the Los Angeles sky, reflecting the sunset, in a sky that hadn't yet started shifting away from bright blue.

Ah, a pink cloud is floating across the sky…

For a while now, I've been wondering about the connection in hide's later works to his experiences of LA. I know he spent time here both as a kid and then as an adult when X Japan entered their International Era. But the way he describes the sky in this city — this endless blue sky, this unchanging sky that never reflects anything of the seasons or weather — those descriptors seem to perfectly encapsulate the madness I felt living here for the first two years of my own California Era.

Every day feels the same. Sameness stretching into infinity. Only the people, only the man-made structures change beneath an unchanging sky. The city decays, breathes, heaves sighs, and seems to consume the youth of its constituents. Only the palm trees grow taller while all of us humans hunker under the blue dome of the heavens.

I don't hate LA, but I remember overhearing someone say that this is a city people live in so that they can accomplish something, and then once they've done whatever that is, they leave. No one tries to build a life here. Not really. It's too expensive for that. It's not real. It's somewhere between hyperreality and unreality. Surely, there's something real underneath all of it, but to find that, you'd have to scratch open the surface of that blue sky, like taking a coin to a scratch-off card at the gas station.

But I don't want the kind of "life" that other people try to "build." I know what that person was talking about. Marriage and family and all of those things. That's what common sense tells us we're meant to want. I'm completely uninterested. So it's fine if I try to live, rather than just accomplish something, in this strange city with its endless blue sky. I just have to accept that I will be consumed by this city, decaying under an unchanging sky.

I'm gonna have fun while I rot. I'm gonna rot in style.

Runnin' through, under the sun…

Something like that.

Feeling: groggy
At: Boba Tea
Grooves: Blue Sky Complex - hide

Surely it's just that I've spent too long staring too hard at historical accounts of the situation framing the 1960s student protests, and, much like the main character of The Crying of Lot 49, I find myself in a state somewhere between fictionalizing real events in a state of near-paranoia and denying reality itself in favor of remaining a cynic. Surely this book isn't actually trying to tie together the concepts of the universal nature of the human spirit and progressive movements, casting the conservative ideal of America as some sort of corpse of a concept that never existed. It's easier to think that I'm misinterpreting this.

It's a good book. It's not what I expected when I set out to find the roots of a black-and-white flash animation art film about a punk cat from space.

Well, I, too, inherited the task from a dead man. In a sense.

At: Cubicle
Grooves: Air Conditioning, Flourescent Lighting

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makz survives the apocalypse

one millennial; no plan

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Hotelsville and a Break from the Apocalypse

Ziggy Stardust and the Fall and Rise of the Sine Wave

Video Killed the Audio Engineer

Scratch-and-Sniff Reality and A Wider World

The Crying of Lot 49

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September 2025

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