As someone who would almost certainly have been put ‘on the spectrum’ as a youth under today’s practices — I had profound OCD symptoms/compulsions/behavioral ‘tics’ that caused near complete social isolation from my peers for some years as an adolescent; when I first saw a diagnostic framework for Asperger Syndrome in the early 1990’s, it was one of those moments of snap recognition: the obsessive interests (model cars when I was young, audio as a young teen), odd patterns of communication (you couldn’t get me to shut up, particularly about audio), other monomaniacal behaviors.

I muddled my way through my middle and high school years on my own, managed to start reconnecting with other young people — but didn’t really feel good until I got into college, away from the repressive and muddle-headed school district I’d miserably spent my teen years in.

So, I was never formally diagnosed (or treated) but I’ve spent some up close personal time with a couple of the psychological diagnostic manuals through the years (and sometimes it seems like pretty much all my old friends who are not lawyers seem to be clinical psychologists and counsellors) and I feel confident that under current practices, I likely would have received a diagnosis placing me on what we today think of as the autism spectrum.

I just want to say that a psychological diagnosis is intended to be helpful, to possibly help explain previously misunderstood personal behaviors, and hopefully to lead to tools by which we can address our current psychological and emotional state and effect positive change.

But it’s NOT intended (by sensible folks, anyhow) to be some kind of trap or prison — OR an excuse not to ask more from yourself in your own, personal quest for what we used to sometimes call ‘personhood’ or self-actualization — bringing the qualities you want to see in yourself forward, engaging in the process of becoming the person you want and feel you should be. (And I emphasize process, because, as I near my 70s, I see that, as Bob Dylan said so long ago: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”)

I believe it’s well-observed that these ‘spectrum’ diagnoses can, in some senses, be almost all-inclusive.

I also have had mercurial mood shift issues at some points in my life… more extreme, perhaps, than the average person, but doesn’t just about everyone graced with emotions have fluxes and changes? Sometimes those shifts are related to identifiable real world events… but there are times when ‘normal’ folks find themselves beset by mood issues whose provenance escapes them, too.

As a number of folks have pointed out, we are, indeed, all human. And there’s a certain amount of baggage that tends to come along with that…

Originally Posted by Desire Inspires 

Wow, did you ever go back to school and finish your degree?

tl;dr: no. 

I actually took some general requirements at the local community college while I was working at the gas station and then went back to school at the state 4 year school I’d previously been attending full time, that while I was still working at the station. But the year I didn’t take classes was pretty much the only time I’d been ‘out of school’ since I was 4 and a half…

FWIW, I never matriculated — I called it the ‘Steinbeck plan’ (Steinbeck went to Stanford, I think, for 5 years, taking what he wanted, never graduating, and ended up with a Nobel Prize for literature).

But it wasn’t entirely free form; I was in a 4 year experimental interdisciplinary studies program that mostly got the gen grad requirements out of the way. It was a great program, in many ways, created in large part by the late August Coppola, brother of Francis Ford C (and father of ‘Little Nicky’ as we knew him around the department office). It wasn’t so much the general knowledge I acquired in those classes — as learning a multi-faceted approach to understanding specific subjects in the context of other subjects — and how they interrelate in human culture through history.

I took other survey/first-second year courses outside that program, but they were typically boring, so after the first semester or two, I concentrated on only taking upper division classes when possible. The height of my ability to talk my way into classes I wasn’t technically qualified to take was when I talked the head of the Psych department into letting me into the major-seniors-and-grad-students-only Cognitive Psychology class she taught — though I wasn’t a psych major nor had ever matriculated in any major. (Got an ‘A.’)

I had been taking writing courses out of the journalism department when I heard that the community college I’d taken classes at in my ‘hiatus’ from the uni had a then-pioneering commercial music production program (which closed down about a decade ago when the state mandated a certain percentage of professional uptake of students from vocational programs for funding, IIRC). In the middle of that, I got knocked out of school by a nasty motorcycle wreck but went back the next term on crutches, because, well… I was hooked. 

[And, in fact, I did matriculate for that, but it was more to secure the now super-modest-seeming student loan that supported me after disability ran out. But I do have that certificate… somewhere. I’d already been freelancing for a while when I got it. Basically, I went to school to get my hands on the gear, learn and, a bit laughably, to record my old band — which I did, eventually — but it was after I’d dropped out of it.]

This may be the closest thing I have to a coherent bio on the web. 

tl;dr: maybe I should just start another blog… ‘spillover content’ originally posted on Gearslutz…

Inspired by your enthusiasm, I downloaded the Amazon music streaming app (unlike GPM, it’s got a dedicated desktop app) and — I have to say, at very first blush, I think I could stand this.

In particular, the queue is very much to my liking! You can bloc-select multiple items and move them around in bloc, there’s a play-next option in lookups, and add to faves/playlist options right there in the queue.

Since Google Play Music is threatened with imminent extinction (to make more room for YT Music), Amazon should consider creating an IMPORT tool for favorites library and playlists. I’ve spent five years building a library of 40,000 favorite tracks… leaving that behind is going to be like starting fresh… something I’ve done before (I’ve been on seven subscription stream platforms) and I really hate it… I always ‘lose’ (forget) some obscure favorites… since I use my faves/library to spur my memory for listening (like flipping through LPs), that’s kind of a big deal.

Anyhow, while the music included in basic Prime is pretty limited (only ONE blues album by Fleetwood Mac  — and that was a multi-artist collection), I imagine the premium Prime music services have most of what everyone else has. (I did see one of my songs, lonely, locked up behind the ‘Music Unlimited’ barrier. Waiting to make me money, I suppose, I should look at it… )

Anyhow, yeah… I think I will probably start preparing for that life-altering event of changing streamers — right up there with moving residences, changing jobs, divorcing, I figure.

I was wondering where I’d go (I mean, every time I check YouTube Music, it seems more disappointing; it’s included in my monthly fee but… who cares?)… now I have a landing place — and it don’t look too bad at all. And the ‘upgrade’ to lossless will only cost me an extra three clams a month.

[EDIT: Went with the free 90 day trial. One minor bit about the queue — I’m really used to the convention of clicking an artist or album name in the queue and being taken to the artist or album page — and though that doesn’t work in Amazon’s player, I’d at least expected those options on the right-click/context menu. =( Minor-ish point, but… [b]UPDATE: OK, weird: after not functioning in that fashion for my first two or three loads of the app, NOW clicking on the artist or album title DOES take you to the appropriate place. Just plain weird.]

[EDIT 2: I was feeling like the audio quality wasn’t up to snuff — and then I noticed that the player’s volume control defaults to only ‘halfway’ up. I turned it up and now things seem a bit better.]

[EDIT 3: It’s weird; when I first used it, I swear there was an ‘add to my music’ option on the three dot menus from songs or albums — but now, all I can do is ‘add to my music’ ONE BLINKIN SONG AT A TIME from the play bar menu, which now appears to be the only place that option exists… WTF??? That seems really weird. Why wouldn’t you let people add an album at a time to ‘their music’ faves? SERIOUS WTF?]

[EDIT 4: Now the link/buttons on the left sidebar have stopped working. Two of them are ‘lit up’ but when I click on any of the options, nothing happens. This app is the bunk.]

[EDIT 5: Ah! The ‘plus‘ sign I originally thought added something to the queue is actually an add to library button! I started realizing that I must be misunderstanding at least some aspects of this thing — but have been unable to find any meaningful help or how to for the thing at all. I probably should have explored the ‘plus’ thing more. A basic explainer for the UI functions would have been nice, though. I mean, I kind of have a feel for subscription streamers after having been on 8 of them now (as well as a brief, informal trial of Tidal)… perhaps that made me ‘arrogant’ about assuming I could figure this mess out. UPDATE: LOL, all the albums I THOUGHT I just added apparently didn’t get added because of an unspecified system error. LOFL2KFC]

To sum up [for now]: Maybe it’s all just roll-out blues? Whatever, it DOES sound good and I seem to be getting things to a usable point. Now all I gotta do is recreate my faves library from GPM… only about 2600 more albums to go. 

UDATE / ADDENDUM

tl;dr: maybe I should just start another blog…  (Well… not exactly, but I moved the mess that was here because… it was a mess. I have a lot of thoughts about streamers — this will be the eighth I’ve subscribed to — and, while the sound is mostly great (not everything’s HD — some of it is apparently ‘up to 320’ [!]), and there’s a lot I like about the user interface — there are some things that strike me as really nutty in the design/function.)

They mostly get the queue right (or my idea of right) but, bizarrely, when a queue is done playing — the player doesn’t clear the queue or leave the playhead at the end — [I]it repositions the play head back to the top of the songs [/I]– so if you try to play more with play-next, the new track is added right below the first track IN THE OLD QUEUE LIST and plays the previously played tracks after the new stuff!!! If you try to add-to-queue and hit play — it just plays the ENTIRE OLD QUEUE before it gets to the new tracks.

That and a few other behaviors are just so perversely bizarre that I feel like I must be missing or misunderstanding something. So I’m going to keep playing with it and try to figure out WTF these guys were thinking…

UPDATE: I just spent almost an hour on chat with a nice fella (I think) from SE Asia trying to figure out how the heck one is supposed to play a specific song or set of songs next after a queue has ended without first manually clearing the queue. He had to consult his leadership team a couple times and he ended up agreeing with me that the behavior makes no sense and said he’d send my concerns to the dev team. Maybe if the dev team had ever used a music player before? :heh:

But… the sound. After a day with the service, it would feel dark and dim going back to Google’s rather dull (even for 320s) 320s. When I tried Tidal, I couldn’t get over the very limited user interface (good for playing an album or playlist at a time and not much else). The sound was enticing — but it was such a pain to use. A few quirks (and the gamer-dark looks) notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure I can live with Amazon HD.

[I]One last thing I miss: the ability to upload my own files[/I] or play files off my local machine/device — there are just a few (for me) significant things missing (to be fair, some are missing from GPM and Spot, too, though some, like Trio Mandili, are just plain azz not on Amazon (except in remix!) though they’re on the others.

 ADDENDUM 2:

What I had written on Gearslutz.com over two long posts (one replacing the other) was a mess, a jumble of first, second, and third impressions, a lot of minor kvetches, but probably not enough praise for the new service.

I have to say, since this is my 8th subscriptions stream service since around 2005/6, Amazon HD’s lossless service would be pretty much impossible for abandon at this point.

I guess I’d done a pretty good job of convincing myself I could live with my soon-to-be-former service (Google Play Music) and its not very competitive fidelity (their 320s — presumably Fraunhofer codec in super-fast mode — are noticeably inferior to properly made 320s using LAME, including the content on the old, lamented MOG service).

I still prefer Google’s overall service — but it’s on the gangplank to make way for the eventual ‘flagship’ YouTube Music [which has so far completely failed to engage me on any level except maybe a marginally better integration between streamed audio and videos than in GPM. And I really don’t care much about videos. (Good ones are great, but…)

But… the sound is so noticeably better than Google Play content (no ABX testing required here — even though I HAVE been unable to differentiate quality 320 rips I’ve done with LAME from full lossless — so good 320s ARE possible) that, really, even if I wasn’t a Prime subscriber already, I’d almost certainly go from the $10/mo GPM to the full $15/mo for Amazon HD for non-Prime subscribers. I’d rolled around a move to Tidal — and it’s $20/mo and I HATE the user interface. So, you know… sound.

Consciousness, evolution, nature, and resonant systems…

That’s a mouthful, huh? A big bite and more than any reasonable man should try to chew in one sitting, maybe… but back in January of 2016, I had sort of a mini-revelation, a satori, maybe… here is what I wrote off the top of my head then:

So I had this satori…

It was while playing guitar. I was working on ‘casting’ my attention to different ‘snapshot’ patterns of strings (a dexterity and diversification practice strategy) and at one point my conscious direction seemed to ‘descend’ out of the range of consciousness — I was still aware, but my awareness was so abstract as to be fugue-like. During that period, my playing went off the rails — but that’s not the point.

What was interesting was that it was almost as though the ideas/concepts I was trying to hold in my head were so ‘out of focus’ to my normal consciousness as to be sort of vague and abstract in that consciousness. Almost as though they were ‘out of range’ — like tuning.

Like a filter…

And that starts me thinking, like a resonance filter — and the more you crank it, the narrower the Q gets — the higher the amplitude, narrower the range.  The narrower the range of reception/perception, arena-of-consciousness concept-manipulability.

And why would you want to do that? To ‘reinforce the signal,’ make it cut through system noise.

Maybe consciousness is simply the evolution of feedback control.

I would be suspect of a direct correlation, but it’s tempting to think of the psychedelic ‘feedback effect ‘– visual echo — in these terms.

[My brainstorm fever-spew starts getting a bit wooly here… I’ve also included (below) my more or less unedited subsequent ramblings transcribed that day.]

Maybe our human consciousness is system resonance overcranked and focused (in shifting, sequential, time-shared fashion — so one wonders what that mechanism would be — counter feedback? LFO modulation/disruption via counter-feedback — that then allows — in effect forces  a shift* to the next   ‘loudest’ resonance component… (oh my)]

* or at least a sort of de facto queue evaluation  — if, even after ‘reverse feedback’ the most-recent resonance/conceptual stream is still that with the greatest amplitude.

Seems like I’ve come across the notion of consciousness as a form of feedback — I’ll bet if I google I will find…

Addendum [essentially unedited; a tour of my messy and discursive mental airballing process; read at your own risk]

I’ve got NO problem with folks musing on the unexplainable, talking about it, questioning it, trying to be one with it…

But when they start trying to ‘explain’ the unexplainable… c’mon, grow up.

There’s nothing wrong with faith.

But there’s plenty wrong with a ‘faith’ that demands the ‘certainty’ of dogma and pat doctrine.

And the impulse to impose those explanations on others is, seems to me, one of the most profound crimes man can commit against the unexplainable.

— TK Major

(From a comment on a Facebook post from Jim Washburn.  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1354170688019807)

1. Go to Settings
2. Go to Accounts & sync
   – make sure Background data and Auto-sync are checked
   — same page, down under Manage accounts locate your email
   — below the email name is the sync status (even if it’s ‘on,’ your phone might not be syncing)
   — to the right is a circlular Sync button with two arrows ‘chasing themselves’; should be green if sync is supposedly ‘on’ — grey if not (and they will be turning if it’s actively syncing)
   — tap the Sync button and you will go to the Data & synchronization details page
   —- locate Sync Gmail and uncheck it, count to five or ten and check the checkbox once again
   —- use the ‘back button’ (physical, hardware buttons at bottom of phone below screen, second from right with ‘up left’ icon on it*), tapping it twice to exit Settings and return to home screen.
3. Find your Gmail icon on your home screen and tap it to open the Gmail app
   – use the hardware Menu Button at the bottom of the phone (below the screen, second from left, four tiny squares*) to open the Gmail menu which will cover the bottom of the Gmail screen. First panel-button will be REFRESH (with two arrows ‘chasing’ each other). TAP THAT.
   -Use the hardware ‘back button’* to exit Gmail.
4. WAIT… It can take 15, 20 minutes or more for sync to kick in and start refreshing your email on your phone. Best to do something else and come back in a half hour or so to check to see if things are updating.
   (You can use your phone’s ‘clock’ app to set an alarm if you like. 😉 )

*Refresher course: the hardware buttons on your phone are:

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