#SkylineFestival
#Vrchat
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#SkylineFestival
#Vrchat
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The big one is that now all of my albums are available for sale on Ko-Fi, and I’ve also restructured the “buy box” under the player preview to better show what the various icons even are.
I’ve also refreshed the website stylesheets to hopefully make them more maintainable, but in doing so it’s possible I broke something. Please let me know if you come across any issues like that!
#Meta #Sales #Website ]]>All of my reasons for not being on Spotify aside from The War Machine are explained in The War Machine.
If you want a bit more detail, read this older blog post.
I actually am on Tidal, but their artist management is currently broken in such a way that most of my releases don’t appear on my actual artist page. Hopefully this gets fixed at some point, but in the meantime you can check this dumping ground where most of my stuff seems to end up (along with a few other artists who also release as “Sockpuppet”).
I try to keep my stuff on as many streaming providers as possible (except Spotify, for the reasons explained above), but not all of them accept my music for various reasons. If there’s a specific one that you’d like to see it on, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do!
I’ve been slowly rebuilding my streaming catalog after having an issue with a previous distributor. I’m focusing just on making releases available that I think people will actually listen to; if there’s something I’ve released that you want to hear on your streaming provider of choice and which isn’t there, please let me know!
I’m a critter!
It’s an anthropomorphic human.
Don’t worry about it.
Unless otherwise specified, yep! Most of my music is my own original work, with a small handful of covers and collaborations.
Over on the releases page you can filter by genre, instrument, and topic, which might help.
For music I mostly use Logic Pro, which I started using in 2004 and has been my main DAW since 2005. I also make somewhat heavy use of Native Instruments instruments.
For video editing I mostly use DaVinci Resolve although for some things I still use Final Cut Pro.
For artwork I generally use Affinity Studio although I’m not super thrilled with the direction it’s going in so I’m likely to switch back to Krita, especially now that 6.0 is out.
Piano, cello, violin, viola, drums, guitar, bass, hand percussion, and a few other things to varying levels of proficiency.
I have a whole article on that.
I try to keep my live performance calendar up-to-date (and there’s also a calendar you can subscribe to via Google Calendar/iCloud/etc. if you’re so inclined), and also try to remember to post upcoming shows to my VRChat group. Past recordings usually show up on my YouTube channel.
I’m also sometimes found doing karaoke or open mics with VRelium and Moonlit with Trans Academy.
You could always join my Discord community. This site also has feeds you can subscribe to via your favorite feed reader, via Mastodon/Fediverse/etc. at @sockpuppet.band@sockpuppet.band or at @fluffy@plush.city, and via Bluesky at @bsky.sockpuppet.band.
After one too many times being mistaken for a cow in VRChat I was late-night ranting about it on Mastodon (as one does), during which I said I should write a song about this except it would probably make things worse.
I shared the thread with my friend Jax, who is a fox, and she told me that she is always somehow getting mistaken for a wolf or a jackal, and she’d love to hear a song about all the different ways that people get confused about species in VRChat.
So that made this song pop into my head, and I decided I’d record it for my upcoming album, Misfits.
I tested it as new material at a couple of shows and the response was overwhelming, and several people asked me where they could get it right now. I told them it was going to be on my next album and I didn’t know when that’d be done, and they were very disappointed by this.
Anyway, after a bit more time and thinking I realized that maybe this song didn’t really go with Misfits (ironically), and that it could be released as a single. So here it is.
Subvert is getting a lot of hype because it’s new but I don’t see it as my long-term solution for music sales. I’m not sure what I’d consider to be my primary platform right now (probably Mirlo), but in the long term I think the future is self-hosting and self-distributing.
So, right now there are a whole bunch of indie music stores. The ones I currently have a presence on include:
And additionally when I want to put stuff into streaming I have to also upload it to
That’s a lot of things to have to upload my stuff to, each one requiring separate metadata setups and agreements and so on, and frankly, it’s super tiring.
What I really want is a future where people can self-host their stuff with their publishing engine of choice (Faircamp or Publ or whatever), trivially sell their downloads, and from their own site also get their stuff circulated in the various discovery feeds out there.
This idea was the impetus behind Canimus, a protocol for sharing collection metadata in a lightweight, platform-agnostic manner.
Basically, the idea of Canimus is the following:
And all of this just lives natively on the web.
Right now, Fairplayer is a thing that’s in development that shares many of the same goals as me. They’re working on specifically supporting Faircamp websites as a streaming music source, but I’ve also been in communication with them regarding Canimus, and similarly the folks behind Mirlo also share these goals. We’ve been talking a lot about some of the ways that things can move forward.
This website already has a Canimus feed. I also added one to Song Fight!. At some point I want to make a plugin thingy so that FairCamp users can easily add a Canimus feed to their sites (although maybe the Fairplayer folks are already working on that? I need to touch base with them).
Whenever I talk about this stuff I always get people insisting that I should really be looking into ActivityPub and specifically Funkwhale. The promise is always that ActivityPub is somehow a magical protocol that solves all these issues, but only with a lot of hand-waving. The thing is that ActivityPub doesn’t actually solve any issues; it just pushes them down the stack, in ways that are even less approachable for everyday people.
ActivityPub things don’t just naturally interoperate. Heck, Funkwhale 2.0 won’t even talk to Funkwhale 1.0!
In order to actually build interoperability between things, the process involves building a FEP, a process that is arduous and results in a specification at the end that is very difficult to navigate or even find. Supposedly there are existing FEPs for music sharing and discovery, but damned if I can find any of them myself! They’re all just opaque numbers.
And everything ActivityPub seems to really want to use push-based notifications for all data exchange. Forget about backfilling, as well. It turns everything into a stream of ephemera, and requires two-way handshakes and peering relationships and, in many cases, PGP key exchanges. It’s a mess and trying to support anything in ActivityPub on a static website is pretty much a lost cause. Also the idea of being able to move to a new domain, or host the same site on multiple domains, is a lost cause. And every single means of interacting with ActivityPub stuff requires building yet another identity on whatever single-purpose service consumes it. Like, it’s not like it makes any sense to follow a Funkwhale user from a PeerTube user. You can do it but what information gets exchanged?
Basically, ActivityPub is full of a bunch of empty promises, and in order to fulfill the promise you have to write another protocol on top of it, get everyone to agree to that protocol, and fit it into a shape that might not work for things to begin with.
I just really don’t see what it brings to the table, in any practical terms.
Right now things are such a mess. Fragmentation of streaming services, the downplaying and outright dismissal of the idea of owning music, myriad platforms that want to be the only platform that anyone uses for all the things, and everything being funded by the endless churn of venture capital and rent-seeking.
And musicians end up needing to spend so much time trying to feed these platforms.
We each only have so much time to spend here on this Earth, and personally I’d rather not be spending it on repetitive tedium like having to re-upload and re-format my music based on the historical artifacts of a dying industry.
My vision for the future of how people publish music:
There is no need in this world for investors or rent-seeking platforms that exist to be The One And Only Thing. Protocols emerge and evolve and change and adapt based on the actual needs as they shift. People can focus on being creative and finding things they love, and not have to worry about where they’re doing it.
The web itself can be a perfectly good platform for all this stuff. Let’s try to make it happen.
#Subvert #Marketplaces #IndieMusic #Canimus #Distribution ]]>Hey y'all! I took April off from performing to work on some projects, but in May I was ready to be back on stage.
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Hey y'all! I took April off from performing to work on some projects, but in May I was ready to be back on stage.
I performed an hour-long set with Tune Together to help celebrate the birthday of Star, one of their members! The show was 18+ and cozy.
I also streamed it over on Owncast.
#TuneTogether #Birthday #FullSet #VRChat ]]>
VRelium and Trans Academy, two of my very favorite VRChat-based organizations, put on a joint show for Trans Day of Visibility 2026! I performed a set with them on what turned out to be an exceptionally busy weekend for me, oh gosh.
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VRelium and Trans Academy, two of my very favorite VRChat-based organizations, put on a joint show for Trans Day of Visibility 2026! I performed a set with them on what turned out to be an exceptionally busy weekend for me, oh gosh.
For the weekend preceding Trans Day of Visibility I was absolutely honored to be selected to perform a solo show with The Virtual Realty Show (TVRS.0429)!
For the weekend preceding Trans Day of Visibility I was absolutely honored to be selected to perform a solo show with The Virtual Realty Show (TVRS.0429)!
Show links:
Fortunately, it’s all just data, so I was able to scrape the interface in order to get their current (as of March 19, 2026) genre and subgenre list.
This is subject to change, of course.
I am not interested in discussing the merits of these genres (or anything missing from the list) or how they’ve opted to categorize them; I’m just the messenger.
Here’s a quick review of the experience so far.
The price is pretty good. $20/year, similar to many of the other distributors.
They care a lot about metadata, and allow you to enter existing ISRCs and UPCs if you have them. (Which I technically do but I can’t be bothered to look them up or deal with their bad user interface, but more on that in a bit.)
They also allow people to declare their use of generative AI, so if people are insisting on using that stuff, they can be filed appropriately. (And hopefully those of us who have nothing to lie about won’t be penalized for the quagmire that techbros with deep pockets and shallow thoughts1 have unleashed upon us.)
The UX on the uploader is pretty terrible. It tries way too hard to be “app-like,” but also has so much negative space and no visibility into the item you’re working on, so the UI has a lot of scrolling and clicking.
You also need to individually specify a lot of metadata on a per-track basis; there’s no way to just, like, apply the same performer/writer credits to all the tracks on a release, or things like recording year, recording country, etc., and a lot of the UI elements have these awful custom controls with a very slow/annoying search mechanism and piss-poor defaults. (Why does it default to Aaron Copeland for every credit?! Aside from him being alphabetically first in their database, of course. You’d think they’d only be drawing from names that I’ve already submitted things with. You’d think.)
The actual upload flow is also a bit confusing and weird, and of course it doesn’t try to take in the existing metadata from my FLAC files, even though they’re all already perfectly tagged with the majority of the information they are looking for.
Every single track edit is its own little tiny usability nightmare, and it makes my chronic pain flare up very quickly. And I have a lot of tracks to get through if I’m going to make all my stuff available again.
Ideally I could just upload, like, a bunch of .flac files and a JSON/CSV/whatever file with my metadata. I can handle that just fine. Let me write a trivial bandcrash-to-whatever converter and call it a day. But no, everything has to be built the long way around.
Of the points on my classic rant about web usability, they have violated at least seven of those principles, although at least they provide some amount of keyboard accessibility. Not enough, mind you, but at least an effort was made.
When you first sign up you have to declare your label name up front, and the UI for it makes it very easy to make a mistake. And it can’t be changed once you’ve signed up.
Also, the way referral links work are kinda bad from a privacy standpoint. Let’s just say I wish things would let you use a preferred name and leave it at that.
As an independent musician with accessibility needs, I would absolutely love it if AI could help me with the parts of the process that are physically painful for me to do. The tedious, mechanial parts, like formatting my upload metadata and submitting it to the system (with my oversight, of course).
But no, all of the AI bullshit out there is working on replacing the parts that I enjoy doing, and the parts that make my stuff unique.
Music/AI tech people, do better. Focus on solving the problems that need to be solved, please.
Anyway. I sent them a support request asking them to make a better bulk-editing interface, because as things are it’s kind of untenable from a usability standpoint. But nobody ever gives a shit about people with chronic pain disabilities or motor issues, I’ve found, and that’s a bigger rant about the usability of the web itself at this point.
It’s a bit sad that of all the distributors I’ve used, Distrokid with its straight-from-1998 Extremely Web 1.0 interface is the only one that doesn’t make me want to gnaw my own foot off while using it. (But then again, I feel like Web 1.0 actually had pretty good usability from the get-go.)
But anyway. If you don’t care about (or are willing to deal with) the UX issues, it might be worth a try. Also, if you sign up with my affiliate link you get 25% off your first year (a savings of $5), and I get $10.
(And please, if you run into a site which is difficult for you to use, please let the people who run it know. So much of the modern web was built by people who have never heard the first thing about accessibility.)
Of course, if you’d prefer to support me on a platform other than Bandcamp, the same discography is available for about the same price over on Mirlo, and also my artist page on Subvert has recently been activated as well, although my entire discography is not up there just yet.
And if you prefer physical media that can be arranged, and if you want to go a bit more analog, there’s a place for that too.
Anyway, this month I actually do have a new release, although it isn’t much of one, and it’s also pay-what-you-want-including-$0.
As far as other stuff goes, I unfortunately haven’t made any progress on the next album due to some ongoing health issues, but those seem to be resolving (or at least abating) so hopefully I can spend some time in the studio again.
#BandcampFriday #FairTradeMusic #Mirlo #Subvert #Bandcamp ]]>
Music made for a game jam that didn’t go super well.
I will be performing a full one-hour set with Skyline Festival on February 28, to celebrate the three-year anniversary of Wolfie’s Hangout. It is also being streamed to Twitch.
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I will be performing a full one-hour set with Skyline Festival on February 28, to celebrate the three-year anniversary of Wolfie’s Hangout. It is also being streamed to Twitch.
Briefly, here’s what’s going on:
Anyway. No idea when Misfits will be done (Strawberry Jam 10 has the time-based priority, of course), but it’s been a long time coming. If you want to track its progress, feel free to follow the Patreon or whatever.
#Status #Updates #Misfits #Production #StrawberryJam ]]>I performed a short set of songs at Trans Academy’s' Moonlit gathering! Join group TRANS.7885 to join future events like these, or watch on twitch.
I performed a short set of songs at Trans Academy’s' Moonlit gathering! Join group TRANS.7885 to join future events like these, or watch on twitch.
I performed at VRelium Arcadia, their special show celebrating the second anniversary of VRelium’s formation! Join group RELIUM.8220 for access to future shows.
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I performed at VRelium Arcadia, their special show celebrating the second anniversary of VRelium’s formation! Join group RELIUM.8220 for access to future shows.
As is typical, this show was a benefit fundraiser; this time the charity was Shatterproof, an organization that’s working to stop the addiction fatality epidemic through evidence-based efforts. Please consider making a donation!
PHOHEA.2927 for access to thr group!]]>I performed at a show celebrating the growth of Phoenix Haven, a VRChat group about giving people second chances. Join VRChat group PHOHEA.2927 for access to thr group!