is the fact that i've never made i dime from blogging or vlogging, and something like $500 total from selling music over the last 25 years, shocking to you?

i seem to be confusing some powerful people that just don't understand what i am or what i'm doing....maybe the narrative is fragmented.....

let's rewind. i'll tell you the short story, right here.

i started posting comments on youtube in early 2014, initially when my computer was in a state of disrepair. the story is partially up here, now - click 2014 on the side. first, i lost a hard drive, and then i lost a bios. so, i had to wait for a bus pirate to arrive in the mail before i could get back to recording (in april, 2014), and found myself with a lot of time to blow.

i started uploading music to this site, first, in dec 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/user/deathtokoalas

from that account, i found myself commenting on a lot of music.

years before that, starting around 2010, i also had a facebook page set up that was essentially a link dump for political analysis that came out of my facebook feed, which was full of sites like the real news. i also found myself commenting on general youtube videos from that account, as they came to me in my facebook feed. this itself was continuation of prominent commenting on the cbc site over roughly 2006-2010, and posting in various places under different pseudonyms years before that.

it wasn't long before i realized that i was directing traffic to my music site by commenting on youtube videos, so i recognized an opportunity to market my music and jumped at it. i started purposefully trolling high traffic sites to draw attention to myself, and try to direct random viewers to my own site instead of the site they were at. while i come from a left-wing activist background, the ultimate purpose of this was always really solely to sell my own music; i was a musician long before i was ever an activist.

once i started realizing i was directing hundreds or sometimes even thousands of people to my youtube site a day, i had to ask myself a question: did i want to put ads on my music? i grappled with this pretty thoroughly, as i would consider that a form of prostitution, which i'm morally opposed to. i'm not like these young people that are willing to sell whatever they can to get by; i'm a gen xer, i have values, and i didn't want to whore myself out to some fucking youtube ad revenue. the premise revolted me, truly. on top of that, i realized that i'd be unlikely to make any kind of significant revenue that way. putting an ad on my youtube videos (which were all music at this point, like exists at bandcamp, and like still exists at the deathtokoalas site) would just give somebody an opportunity to steal the attention of potential listeners; it struck me as counterproductive to go through so much effort to get people's attention, only to let some advertiser co-opt me. the video was an ad for my own product, available at bandcamp; i didn't want to put an ad for something else in the way and risk sending people off to watch some vacuous movie or something.

so, over 2014 and 2015, i made thousands of youtube posts on hundreds of videos about everything, and developed somewhat of a following amongst youtube addicts, who would sometimes go to my music site but really cared mostly about my comments.

after the 2015 canadian election, i started a vlog and kept at it until mid 2017:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCinQSeEtF0vSN1XVhQGfwKA/

i decided that i would feel ok about monetizing the vlog, but not the music, and i did. i still hoped to direct people to my music through commenting, but i allowed for ads in that space as a kind of compromise to myself.

because, you only get that chance once, and, if you blow it you're potentially throwing away a life of true freedom. i've always said i'd give the music away for free if i wasn't so desperately fucking poor.

i guess it was in late 2016 or early 2017 - not long after the last election - that i started noticing i'd been shadow-banned on youtube. they went after me on google+ first, delaying a few posts (i don't think anything was deleted permanently, but some things sort of disappeared for a bit before reappearing). so, i launched a project to get everything i could off of youtube as fast as i could, and migrated here instead.

the technical reason i stopped publishing the vlog was that i got into a fight with my landlord that eventually led to me getting evicted. i didn't want to put vlogs up while in a legal dispute, as i was going to present some of them as evidence.

but, i eventually mostly dropped it because i wasn't directing anything to the bandcamp site; it wasn't working as the portal that i hoped it would.

rather, i just drew a lot of attention to myself by people that seem to think i'm some kind of spy, which sounds like the plot to a fucking jim carrey movie.

i think i sort of get that these commenting systems are basically run by psychologists in the employ of the state that use it to measure the effectiveness of propaganda. i'm absolutely beyond their reach, and they don't know what to do, or how to react, so they just target me and try to shut me down.

*shrug*

why am i doing this now?

i'm generating documentation for my life, essentially. if i can ever get back on top of this, this vlog will be a front-end that documents my life as a composer. the political views are a part of that, and my analysis and deconstruction exists in the context of my works as an artist, but it's all just a front-end, a way into the discography.

you can believe me or not, or use it as an excuse to continue to try to repress me.

but, this is what i am, why i exist and what i'm doing.

....in between choking on drugs being smoked by the undercover police officers upstairs.