Project Crimson Update

With the end of my four month free trial looming, I am once again returning to reflecting on the successes and failures of Project Crimson, that is, my scheme to phase out buying MP3s in favor of using Google’s paid music subscription service. The rationale behind this was that it costs more to buy a single CD each month than it does to pay for a one month subscription to download however much music I feel like.

I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t actually use this on a day to day basis. I was wrong. I immensely enjoy having music to listen to while going about other tasks, and I especially enjoy having the ability to pull from a vast database in order to create a soundtrack for a specific task, such as being able to create a playlist of running cadences for my exercise routine, or what have you.

I have somewhere in the ballpark of three hundred songs currently compiled in one form or another on my various devices among the various google music applications. To claim that each of these is a song that I would otherwise purchase, and therefore another dollar saved, is slightly duplicitous, as my standards for downloading a song for free are understandably lower than my standards for spending money directly on individual songs.

As I said during the opening of this project, my purchasing of music is heavily biased towards those times when I am about to travel, because that is when I will be unable to access free online streaming, and hence when I will need to have whatever music I want to have be downloaded. At the beginning of summer I was looking at a shortlist that included somewhere in the ballpark of $100 worth of music; hence why I was willing to bend my rules against spending money on “Internet luxuries” like a premium account.

And for the record: Google’s music subscription is undoubtedly a luxury. Despite how much I have come to enjoy it, is not like paying for broadband or a cell phone, which, although strictly speaking, remain optional, are made effectively compulsory because of the way society now organizes itself. It is a luxury, like cable, or Netflix, or a newspaper subscription. All nice things to have, but also things that can, in most circumstances, be axed from a tight budget without life-changing implications.

Perhaps this is why I have such trouble coming to terms with Google’s music subscription service, even though I unreservedly enjoy it and think it improves my day to day life. I have always been taught to be scrupulous about expenses, particularly luxuries. I learnt from a young age that money is a finite and scarce resource, and squandering it is not just irresponsible, but morally repugnant.

On the other hand, I have never hesitated to spend when I felt there was an articulable need, and I have relatively few qualms about spending a little extra for a better product after I have been convinced to buy in the first place. I am content to pay extra, for example, for a better fitting or looking pair of jeans provided that they serve my purpose. At restaurants, once I have decided to eat, I am seldom bothered by the relative costs of menu items unless it comes down to a tie on taste. I am able to accept that life has expenses, and that in these expenses there are inevitable tradeoffs that involve the choice between a better experience and a better price.

Which brings me to the price point. Ten dollars a month is I think an interesting price point. It is just enough that I would consider it non-negligible. Ten dollars a month translates to a coffee every two or three weeks depending on the specifics of the order, which is just often enough that I can see it in concrete terms as a regular habit. It also translates to a hundred and twenty a year, which is just enough that I feel uncomfortable carrying around the cash in person and would probably make an extra trip to the bank, if I didn’t spend it on a nice Lego set as a Christmas gift. So, although the expense certainly doesn’t break the bank, it is just large enough to be awkward.

There is one metric I haven’t mentioned that probably plays a larger role in determining both the price offered, and whether or not individuals choose to purchase Google’s music subscription: the monetary value of my time otherwise lost to advertising. This is supposed to be the core feature of their subscription model, and I’m sure is the thing that most informs their pricing. There is a number somewhere that says how many hours of video I watch or listen (but mostly for my purposes listen), and there is a number that says exactly how many advertisements I would have been subjected to during this time. I don’t know whether it is possible for me as a consumer to find this number, at least in the United States.

In any case, using some very wild ballpark guesses, I come up with somewhere around three hours a month. This does assume that every time I could get an advertisement, I do, and that it’s one of the ones that takes up time when I’m listening rather than merely popping up somewhere on my screen. Then again, Google seems to have gotten it in their server that I’m one of those demographics that advertisers want to target, so there are times when I end up seeing more ads than video. Ten dollars to reclaim three hours of good, usable, first-world time is a shockingly good deal. It’s better than minimum wage anywhere I’ve ever lived.

Except there’s that troublesome word “usable”. The economics of opportunity cost assume that I’d be doing, or want to be doing, something else that’s worth that ten dollars. Comparing the cost per hour to minimum wage only works if I have a job that makes at least minimum wage (I don’t) and that I’d be doing it during the time saved (I wouldn’t). Moreover it assumes that these tasks are mutually exclusive. This is true sometimes, but not always, depending on precisely how annoying and distracting the advertisement is. But for the most part, I am free to work with my hands, eyes, and most of my brain on another tab on my computer while advertisements play in the background. This is, after all, what I already do with music.

Since I have already gone over most of the arguments in favor of Google’s subscription service, I will also mention one more that is somewhat compelling in my case: supporting the creative economy. For the people who make the online content, including both music and videos, that my enjoyment depends on, the new subscription model provides a boost in both income and stability that is, while not massive, certainly noticeable. It adds money to the pot. And while there are far better ways of supporting individual creators (like Patreon, hint hint), knowing that my consumer spending is economically enabling and incentivizing the kind of free, accessible, and diverse content that I most enjoy.

After all of this wavering, my inclination is to probably just keep paying for my subscription. After all, I enjoy it. I enjoy having it. I don’t have a particularly pressing need for those ten dollars a month, and I can always cancel if that changes. I am still on the fence about this conclusion. But for the time being, I have come to the tentative conclusion to keep using it.

Song of Myself

Music has always played an important role in my life, and I have always found comfort in it during some of my darkest hours. In particular, I have often listened to songs that I feel reflect me as a person, regardless of whether I like them a great deal as songs, during times of crisis, as a means to remind myself who I am and what I fight for. This has led me to what I think is an interesting artistic experiment: putting together a playlist that represents, not necessarily my tastes for listening to today, but me as a person through my personal history.

To put it another way: if I was hosting an Olympics, what would the opening ceremony look, and more importantly, sound, like? Or, if I were designing a Voyager probe record to give a person I’ve never met a taste of what me means, what would it focus on?

I could easily spend a great deal of time compiling, editing, and rearranging a truly epic playlist that would last several hours. But that misses the point of this exercise. Because, while my interest in listening to my own soundtrack bight be effectively infinite, that of other people is not. The goal here is not to compile a soundtrack, but to gather a few selections that convey the zeitgeist of my past.

This is my first attempt at this. I have chosen four songs, each of which represents roughly five years of my life. I have compiled a playlist available for listening here (Yes, I have a YouTube account/channel; I use it to make my own playlists for listening. Nothing special). The songs and my takeaway from them are described below.


1997-2002: Rhapsody in Blue

If I had to pick a single piece to represent my life, it would probably have to be Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin. This piece was my favorite musical piece for a long time, and I remember during our visits with my grandparents when my grandfather would put on his classical records, and I would be thrilled when this song came on.

Rhapsody in Blue is perhaps best known as the United jingle, which is part of why I loved it so much. It represented flying, travel, adventure, and being treated like a member of high society as we flew in business class. I also reveled in knowing the name of a song that everyone else knew merely as a jingle. The energy and strong melody of the piece still captivate me to this day, and remind me of the feeling of childhood delight with each new adventure and horizon.

2002 – 2007: Pack all Your Troubles Arr. Mark Northfield

Aside from being one of my favorite arrangements of any song, this particular arrangement captures many of the conflicting feelings I have towards the first part of my schooling. I was indeed happy to be in a learning environment where I could soak up knowledge, but at the same time I often found the classes themselves dreadfully dull. Additionally, while I was initially quite happy with my social group, within a couple of years I had gone from being at the center of all playground affairs to being a frequently bullied pariah.

This song juxtaposes the cheerful, upbeat World War I song with a musical soundscape of a battlefield of the same time period, becoming more chaotic and pessimistic as time goes on. This also reflects my general experience in primary school, as my social life, my overall happiness, and my physical health all deteriorated over this time from a point of relative contentment to a point of absolute crisis. (2007 was the first year in which I genuinely remember nearly dying, and the first time I was confronted with a bona-fide disability.)

2007-2012: Time, Forward!

If 2007 was a breaking point in my life, then the years following were a period of picking up the pieces, and learning how to adapt to my new reality. Time, Forward, by Georgy Sviridov, captures much the same feeling, which makes sense considering it is frequently used to represent, the Soviet 20s, including at the Sochi games. This period in my life was chaotic and turbulent, and of the things I have come to regret saying, doing, or believing, most of them happened during this period. Yet it was also a formative time, cementing the medical habits that would ensure my survival, and meeting several new friends.

During this time was when my family moved back to the United States. With a fresh start in a new hemisphere, and several new disabilities and diagnoses to juggle, I was determined above all not to allow myself to be bullied and victimized the way I had been during primary school. I threw myself into schoolwork, and tried to avoid any display of vulnerability whatsoever. This, I discovered, did not make me any more popular or liked than I had been during primary school, which yielded a great deal of angst and conflict.

2012 – 2017: Dance of the Knights

You’ll notice that this song is both pseudo-classical, in the same vein as Rhapsody in Blue, while still being known as a work of Prokofiev, a Russian, and later Soviet, composer. In this respect, it is somewhere between the 2007-2012 period, and the 1997-2002 period, which I reckon is a reasonably accurate assessment of the past five years. The great highs and lows between late primary and early high school, which often involved grave medical threats to my life, have thankfully (hopefully) given way to a more predictably unpredictable set of obstacles; not only medically, but socially and psychologically, as my friends and I have grown up and learned to handle drama better.

The commonalities between the earlier pieces also reflect the change in priorities that I have worked very hard to (re)cultivate after seeing the distress that my existentialist focus on schoolwork brought me. I have in the past few years, begun to reprioritize those things that I believe are more likely to bring me happiness over mere success, harkening back to the things I held dear, and found so intriguing in Rhapsody in Blue in early childhood. At the same time, the piece, partly as a result of its context in Romeo and Juliet, has a distinctly mature, adult air to it; something which I struggle with internally, but which I am nevertheless thrust into regularly as I age.


If anyone else is interested in trying this project/challenge, please, go ahead and let me know. I can imagine that this could make a good group prompt, and I would be very interested to compare others’ playlists with my own.

A Few Short Points

1: Project Crimson Update

Look, let’s get this out of the way: I’m pretty easy to excite and amuse. Give me something for free, and it’ll make my day. Give me some item that I can use in my normal routine, and it will make my week. So far, my free trial of YouTube Red/ Google Play music has hit all of these buttons, which is good, because it goes a long way towards assuaging my parentally-instilled aversion to ever parting with my credit card number for any reason whatsoever.

Last week, I mentioned that this had been something that I had been considering. Today, after receiving my new iPhone SE in the mail, I decided to pull the trigger. In my research, I actually managed to find a slightly better deal; four months’ free trial instead of three, with the same terms and conditions, through a referral code from another tech blog. Technically my trial is with Google Play Music, but seeing as it has the same price as YouTube Red, and gets YouTube Red thrown in for free (it also works the same way the other way around; Red subscribers get Google Play Music for free as part of their subscription), the distinction is academic in my case, and only matters in other countries where different laws govern music and video services, forcing the split.

With about six hours of experience behind me, I can say that so far I am quite pleased with the results so far. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a universal necessity, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone trying to keep an especially tight budget. Ten dollars a month isn’t nothing, and the way things seem to be set up to be automated makes it deceptively easy to simply keep paying. Moreover, because purchasing YouTube Red requires a Google payment account, it removes one more psychological barrier from spending more in the future.

In my case, I determined that the cost, at least over the short and medium term, would be justified, because without being able to download my YouTube playlists to my devices for offline consumption, I would wind up spending more purchasing the same songs for downloads. But unless you really listen to a wide variety of songs, or particularly obscure songs, on a daily basis, this will probably be a wash.

There is another reason why I expect this cost to be financially justified. Because I have fallen into the habit of needing a soundtrack for all of my activities, my data usage rates have gone through the roof. I maintain that much of this is a result of the iPhone’s use of cellular data to supplement egregiously slow wifi (the only kind of wifi that exists in my household, and at hotspots around town), and hence, not really my fault. I can’t disable this setting, because my phone is used to send life support data to and from the cloud to help support me alive.

Financial details aside, I am enjoying my trial so far. Being able to listen to music while using other apps, and without advertisements, has been a great convenience, and is already doing things to help my battery life. I have briefly perused the selection of exclusive subscriber content, and most of it falls into the category of “vaguely interesting, and probably amusing, but mostly not the kind of thing I’d set aside time to watch”. This is, perhaps interestingly, the same category into which most television series and movies also fall.

2: Give me money, maybe.

In tangentially related news, I am giving serious thought to starting a patreon page, which would allow people to give me money for creating stuff. It’s basically an internet tip jar. Not because I feel that I need money to continue inflicting my opinions on the world. Rather, because I’ve been working on a “short” (in the sense that eighty thousand words is short) story, which my friends have been trying to convince me to serialize and post here. It’s and interesting idea, and one that has a certain lure to it.

Even with my notions of someday writing a novel, this story isn’t the kind of thing that I’d seek to publish in book format, at least not until after I’ve already I’ve broken into publishing. I’m already writing this story, so the alternative is it sitting on my hard drive until something happens to it. Even if the number of people who like it is in the single digits, it costs me nothing (except maybe a bit of bruised ego that my first creation isn’t a runaway hit). And there’s always the outside chance that I might exceed my own expectations.

So me branching into fiction on this blog is looking more and more like a serious possibility. But, if I’m going to do this, I want to do this right. Committing to writing a serial story online means committing to following through with plots and characters to a satisfactory conclusion. On the sliding scale of “writing for personal entertainment” and “writing as a career”, writing a web serial inches closer to the second part than I’ve really had to think about until now. This means having the long term infrastructure in place so that I can write sustainably and regularly.

In my case, because I still aim to create things for fun, for free to the public, and on my own terms, this means having the infrastructure to accept crowdfunding donations. I wouldn’t expect to make a living this way. In fact, I’d be amazed if the site hosting would pay for itself. But it would ensure that, on the off chance that, by the time I finished this first story, a large number of people had found and enjoyed my stuff, or a small but dedicated group had decided they enjoyed my writing enough to support me, that I would have all the infrastructure in place to, first of all, gauge what was happening, and second of all, be able to double down on what works.

All of this is, of course, purely hypothetical at this point. Were it to happen, it would require a level of organization that I don’t see happening imminently. Given my summer travel plans, progress on this likely wouldn’t happen until at least mid to late July.

3: Expect Chaos

On a related note, this week starts off my much anticipated summer travels. I expect that this will be a major test of my more or less weekly plus of minus a few hours upload schedule. As a result, it is quite possible that new updates will be chaotic in when they come.

Note that I don’t know whether that means more or fewer posts than usual. Sometimes these events leave me with lots of things to say, and so inspire me to write more and release more. On the other hand, as we saw in April, sometimes I come back tired, or even sick, and have to take a few days off.

It is also possible that I will be motivated, but busy, and so may wind up posting pieces that were written a long time ago that haven’t been published for one reason or another. If this last one happens, I will endeavor to leave a note on the post to explain any chronological discrepancies.

Ode to the Immune System

Context: I’m sick. When I’m sick, I get bored without being able to write properly. Consequently, I tend to write shorter things, like songs. Here’s a about how certain parts of the immune system work. To the tune of “The Red Army is Strongest” AKA “Red Army, Black Baron”, AKA “That song from the Comintern faction in Hearts of Iron IV“. Enjoy.

The deadly virus and the harmful germ
Are gathering a great dark storm
But without regard for the the malady
The immune cells defend the body

So see the macrophage, begin the war to wage
Take its enemies hand to hand
Then it engulfs them with its deadly rage
As it makes the body’s first stand

Hear great cry of the brave neutrophils
As they charge forth into great trouble
As without regard for the the malady
The immune cells defend the body

So see Dendritic Cells, ring out their warning bells
Awaking the nearest lymph gland
And activating the T and B cells
As it prepares the final stand

Watch the B lymphocytes turning the tide
Making antibodies well supplied
As without regard for the the malady
The immune cells defend the body

Now the new mem’ry Cells, in the lymph nodes shall dwell
As others die by their own hand
The body stands down, as now all is well
As it survived the final stand