A Musical Cartoonist, but for the longest time also did REALLY technical stuff before retiring.
Audio and electronic musical instrument design were been very significant in our work at both Fairlight Instruments in Sydney Australia (where the Sampler originated with the Computer Musical Instrument or CMI ) and Roland Corporation in Hamamatsu Japan.
Devices used by the likes of Peter Gabriel, ZZ Top, James Horner, Hans Zimmer, Jan Hammer, John Farnham (You're the Voice), Iva Davies (Great Southern Land) and many others.
But also worked in other industries involving Medical Devices, Industrial, Training Systems and Financial Software.
We had our artandtechnology.com.au website for 20 years, only closing it in October 2026 when we couldn't renew the DNS anymore as not an Australian resident running a small business any more.
This is Where The Smoke Comes Out. Inspired by the Historical/Autobiographical work SHOWA, by Shigeru Mizuki. Historical and personal memories of art, tech and music in Australia & Japan.
So went to the local Mall and had breakfast at GUSTO yesterday morning.
GUSTO is one of the great value Family Restaurants in Japan. Part of the Skylark Chain. You get unlimited refills from the drink bar with breakfast. The blend coffee comes out of a machine and it isn't great, but the tables, chairs and environment at GUSTO is just nicer for me than Komeda or Starbucks. While there, took DJI ACTION4 video of the sky, street and me writing in the small notebook I now take out with me.
I did this song originally during the months my wife suffered SHINGLES and was in constant pain and I was doing the food preparation and caring. I have no pretenses of rock star-ism. Just a grandfather who is feeling his age more and more.
Much more than I would have expected, Marty Friedman's book has much about him "being a rock star". Not catching public transport and fussing muchly about the right hair and fashion.
My song here is very much the opposite of that stuff.
Did a variation of the NOT A ROCK STAR music video using actual video of me, rather than the animated cartoon me I did in the original video. YouTube has recently been dramatically reducing animation viewability and thought I should redo some of the videos I like most to not get them confused with AI or for kids.
The MOHO pro V12.5 animated titles are a variation on those in the original video, but with the character and background removed and replaced by 100% green. I choma keyed that over the video of me here.
I just took my glasses off during the singing to get a different look. I can't see anything without my glasses.
The video isn't particularly exciting, but goes with the theme of I am no rockstar.😀
The Studio. The ultimate solo creative space for me.
No compromises with anyone else, just the internal battle of how long do I want to spend doing THAT, and is it more worthwhile and fun than THIS.
Doing those creative thing that keeps me a Happy Camper. Personnel philosophy in a minute? I have seen so many 15~35 minute plus vlogs now where people say so much less than I do in 60 seconds here. To me, a minute is probably about as long as I want to talk, but I have edited out all the pauses in this. This, of course, is exactly what YouTube doesn't want for its advertising based video system.
Last weeks 3 things SHORT got 16 views, and 2 likes. Seems an impossibly small number without the algorithm actively working against you. Expected that was the case.
Have since found out about YouTube animation channels being demonetized/blocked/reach reduced due to their new "kids/Family values/AI slop" requirements. Animation is being heavily discouraged, unless it is AI SLOP produced by business interests of the YouTube management, presumably.
It is also really weird how on the YouTube HOME page now it recommends my own videos & playlists to me! 😒
Automated Idiocy.
The take away to me is making an animation and putting it on YouTube means it will not be seen by any one, so don't bother.
Other Things
US Midterms blue wave, is reassuring to see for us in the rest of the world. It isn't over though. The genie has been let out of the bottle as far as abuse of presidential position power is concerned, and that will just attract even worse presidents in the future, no mater their political leaning. The system that created frump hasn't changed, and that needs to happen for any anything to really improve.
Americans don't see that compared to places like Canada and Australia, their Democrats are a right-wing party, just not as far-right as their Republicans. They have no center or left. Except Bernie Sanders, who the rest of the would sees as center, center-left.
Is Social Media , like the Internet itself, really dead now? Mostly seems that way to me.
X has had the best ROI the last 3 years or so, but only as I got out and met people at a festival first.
Think Bluesky is pretty much dead to me.
Facebook is only useful for two Facebook groups I am in, and messenger. I only talk with 3~4 people there though. Posting anything with links in it is a complete waste of time now. I feel it is rapidly going the way of MySpace to me. Log in less frequently, then I just stop going back at all.
One FB group is about the 50th High School Re-union that is on this Saturday. I am not going though. I went to the 30th, and none that went to that one were actually friends of mine. I kept in touch with 3 people from High School over the years and none of them went to the re-unions. I shouldn't have either.
It isn't that this Blog gets any more interaction. I have nothing to indicate it isn't just all bots reading it.
I keep coming back to Barry's Economics. The research papers and examples are fascinating.
Much of what gets talked about appeals to me. Humans: You can't believe anything they say, or believe to be true! So many of them think they have found the one true truth...
It is November 2026 already! The older you get, the faster the years just rush by. So very aware of this now, and what time we have left. The last 20 went in a flash! Don't know how much we actually have left at all, but know it will go in a flash too, and don't want to waste any of it, particularly around tedious people and issues I have no agency over.
Wife and I have had the blues since our mid 30s daughter went back to her life in Australia after staying with us for 2 months. I may have it worse than my wife. In the local shopping mall, I just walked past MUJI and LoFt, places spent time with a her in the last weeks, and teared up. She helped me buy trousers at UNIQLO and IZUMYA too.
Memories of her as a small child and ordinary home life come rushing back. Such as in this family restaurant with me, her older brother center, and her right. He brothers live and work in Japan after we retired back in Japan. She wanted to keep the career she built in Australia, so that is where she stayed.
I have tears in my eyes again. Happy tears.
Looking on my Facebook feed and Amazon was advertising this prepainted figure/model of Dick Dastardly's THE MEAN MACHINE from the 1968 TV show Wacky Races. I still have a much worse broken MPC kit of the car and figures that I just haven't been able to throw away.
I really loved Wacky Races in 1968. But I was 9! I would rush home from school and Skeeter's Cartoon Corner showed cartoons and had a segment were viewers could send in an envelope with their name and phone number on the back, one would get picked out of a barrel, and he would ring the kid live on TV and they would try and guess who would win that weeks race, and get a prize.
Australian TV was innocent back then.
We went back to Australia in 2001 when digital TV was starting there. A few years after I bought a TOPFIELD PVR Digital set top box and around that time all the TV stations suddenly had 4 SD channels each.
So many TV programs on at once. I recorded an episode of Wacky Races sometime. It was so unbelievably stupid and was unwatchable! That was a shock. How could it be so badly written?! So much of the animation was being recycled, again and again. You could watch other kids shows and there was something for adults in them as well, like Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet. Not Wacky Races.
Can only put that down to a cultural difference, and what American Saturday Morning Cartoons were for.
Bought a Mac Performa 630 around 1995 to be able to do something with the amazing Mutli Media Tools of the time. I added CREATIVE/ YAMAHA Speakers with a Subwoofer to it.
Meant the kids could play the wonderful Brøderbund Living Book CD-ROMs, and they did use them a lot. All 3 kids at once. Our daughter's visit has triggered a lot of old memories of such happy times.
Also had MYST and IRON HELIX, butI never did anything with them but play the introductions.
Looked wonderful. I discovered getting anywhere with them at all just wasn't my idea of fun. Same thing with HOMEWORLD. Loved the opening, the design, music and look, but could never bother to do the opening tutorial to do anything in the game.
I don't play computer games. Just a big don't care to spend my time that way. Just seemed unproductive. Still does.
Finished Neagley this week. She is a great character in Reacher and does just as well in her own series, set in Chicago.
Made me remember my own interactions with Australian NSW Police. Absolutely nothing positive about them.
After I retired during the months involved with selling our house and downsizing 2019, I went by bus into downtown Sydney around Town Hall station to visit Kinokuniya and the Language Bookshops. After buying a couple of textbooks I set out south along George Street, on the left hand side of the footpath to the World Food court for lunch.
That day school kids were at Town Hall for their 2019 school environmental protests. I was walking on the street furthest from the protests, past a group of some 5 police, with others watching the protest, and one of them, on purpose stepped backward and pushed/bumped me against the wall as I was going past. Just so I knew I was helpless. What a dick.
I had nothing to do with the protests, was not involved in anyway, was carrying a language bookshop bag. Seeing I could read probably enough to piss him off. Just a bully.
That kind of thing, some 3 times, has been my experience with NSW Police. A bunch of bullies, for many, the reason they joined the forces, rather than go into the army or navy. 😡
My current favorite guitar. Even more than my 6 string locking nut and tremolo Ibanez RG350, which is just great the way it came and on paper "my best guitar".
Even a GIO cheap plastic nut is so much better after having the slots worked like this:
Made the guitar playable. Without it, bend a note, the nut would go "ping" and the guitar would be out of tune again. And again, and again.
A bit on how I am recording zero latency guitars at the moment in Reaper DAW and using the free Neural DSP Modeller vst.
The guitar tone you hear in the video is the NAM vst processed from the recorded DI. I added it back into the video during editing. Awesome sound. The FREE files I used for Rhythm and Lead tones here:
The similar SHORT on our 8 string:
Other Things
Casey Bean has made a website and put his creative things there, including a BLOG. Singer Song Writer, farmer, hockey fan and English teacher. His podcast often has a live performance of him singing and playing acoustic guitar.
I found his blog particularly interesting, and more concise than his podcast. Particularly a bit about the peaks and dips of "creative energy" we all go through. His site is him coming out of a year or so dip.
Feeling that dip myself at the moment, after writing singing and recording 14 songs in the first part of the year, and zero interest in doing any more.
This is a midweek post. Seeing if it gets any visibility at all at 8:00AM Wednesday Japan time. It seems those posting "Life In Japan" videos mid week are actually doing it for a U.S.A audience, and posting hours earlier.
The last 3 animated Music + Comics SHORTS I did only got single digit views, whereas previously and DJ Remix and other SHORTS got 3 digit views. It seemed the only algorithmic reason I could find were they were "animated" to the AI.
It seems in the last few weeks a few hundred YouTube animation channels have received demonetization notifications as the YouTube AI has determined they are "animation for kids", where that is not true at all. Animation does not automatically mean "for kids", unless you are a stupid Google AI.
That reinforces my theory that my complete lack of reach was due to the visuals being animated. Something the AI considers "risky", due to recent kids content related fines they received.
Just more stupid Google management. Their business relied on selling advertising on websites, and they have destroyed that with their search AI summaries killing websites. The Google CEO can't see that?
How come all these once great tech companies are doing such dumb things now?
My social media feeds had dramatically started showing me so much anti-Indian propaganda. A quick google AI says on X it went up 240% indicating it is a campaign by someone. Musk? Don't know as he was in favor of getting people to America with H-1B visas. One of the things he fell out with Frump over.
I don't have a Indians box on my 2026 BINGO CARD at all.
But take a look at what tech companies currently have Indian CEOs:
• Google and Alphabet: Sundar Pichai (CEO) • Microsoft: Satya Nadella (Chairman and CEO) • Adobe: Shantanu Narayen (CEO) • IBM: Arvind Krishna (CEO) • YouTube: Neal Mohan (CEO) • Palo Alto Networks: Nikesh Arora (CEO) • Arista Networks: Jayshree Ullal (President and CEO) • Micron Technology: Sanjay Mehrotra (President and CEO) • Cognizant: Ravi Kumar S (CEO) • Zscaler: Jay Chaudhry (Founder and CEO) • Cadence Design Systems: Anirudh Devgan (CEO) • NetApp: George Kurian (CEO)
Other Global & Enterprise Companies
• Honeywell: Vimal Kapur (CEO) • Flex: Revathi Advaithi (CEO) • Wayfair: Niraj Shah (Co-founder and CEO) • Chanel: Leena Nair (Global CEO) • Starbucks: Laxman Narasimhan (former/recent CEO context) • World Bank Group: Ajay Banga (President)
One part of the propaganda I saw indicated Indians, when they get into a company, employ other Indians at every opportunity, and that many of those Indians have fake qualifications. It also said Microsoft has been banned from using H-1B visas to get Indians into America. Reality is Microsoft hasn't been banned, but some other program suspended. A related issue.
I don't know, but it does look like Indians have taken over a significant part control of the tech industry that is doing shitty, really bad in the long term things.
At the start of, a kind of long-ish weekend with Tuesday a public holiday, 3 Things I Wish I had Known At The Start Of My Working Life in 1981.
1) The Dunning-Krieger Effect 2000 2) How to make friends and influence people 1936 3) How To Master the Art of Selling 1980
In 101 seconds. I get so tired of YouTube that encourages creators to take 10 minutes before they say anything at all worthwhile... then proceed to make a 30 minute video that should have been just a paragraph in a blog. "lowest common denominator" is their goal, and so stupid for the most part.
I have a lot of issues with the education system I passed through. Too much was childminding, and at university it seemed to be about making middle managers for Australian Government positions, rather than developing the future I wanted to be involved with. Except solar cells. The university I attended was really into solar cells R&D, but that was about it.
Using a taller tripod here gives a less distorted STANDARD image in these at my desk talking head videos with the DJI ACTION 4. I have been recording these at 1080x1920, but releasing it at 720x1280 and zooming in on bits of the image. The camera does 4k, but I couldn't be bothered waiting to render the big images, as the sound is really the main thing in these and only going to be seen by AI BOTs anyway.
People, like school teachers, have an easier time doing a talk to camera video than I do. Talking hasn't been much of any part of my working life. I have to edit out all the too long pauses and fumbled lines, but you watch others just go on and on without any edits. I sometimes ask myself how can some talk so much but have little worth hearing?
And NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE A MASTERPIECE came up again:
And feel very much, the internet is now dead for artists. AI (and a few humans) are making slop to be viewed by mostly other AI.
Put anything on it and it will be stolen and recycled by the AI. Closed our own website a month now, even though paying for the next years hosting aren't using, and can't get a refund on. Don't miss it. Seems little point to me in posting to Facebook or Instagram, Bluesky and X. Get more interaction on X than other platforms, but not as "an artist".
Other Things
Sir Patrick Stewart passed away during the week at 86. That seems young to me now.
After a 2 month stay, our adult daughter has gone back to Australia. Has been a wonderful time, even though we didn't do much. Tea and cake at Starbucks was the big thing Thursday with the three of us, for example.
It was wonderful to have her here again, some 18 months since her last visit.
She caught a 3:14 train from Kyoto JR and we got home around 4:30PM. Then the very heavy thunderstorm started and we read they stopped the Keihan train line from 5:30 ~ 7:00 PM due to the lightening strikes. Luck to have missed all that.
We have thoughts of how many time we will see her before our end, enters our minds. Watching a neighbor change very quickly with dementia. Had a fall and broke his jaw, but that starts other things.
You just don't know, and we are very aware of that.
Our oldest son, his wife and our grandson will visit for the end of year break. In under 2 months now!
For the second time this year I have been contacted about how come I was the first person to put this on the Internet in 2011.
I found out about DKE from a young colleague at the Engineering Consultancy I was at that was doing a part time MBA. He had just had a lecture on it.
It immediately struck a nerve with me as I had seen this since being a young kid in school in my classmates and everywhere since. Just because someone is filled with confidence and speaks well, does not validate what they are saying, and I hated that was encouraged in school. It was always just wrong to me. And someone had proved it was a great relief to me. I then just had to do a graphic and cartoons about it.
Many customers we had at the consultancy displayed this too. The (idiot bully) accountant that had stabbed someone in the back at the biomedical startup to become CEO, and then wanted to ride shot gun over how many hours ***curing cancer should take, and that it should be done by close of business this Friday.
***curing cancer wasn't actually the issue, but something else that took months to produce a manufacturable design for, that included a custom designed and manufactured KYOCERA hi-tech ceramic component.
An EXPERT in what ever field is never as CONFIDENT as an IDIOT who knows nothing about it.
Just finished British Bake Off Season 12 from 2021. Done during the covid lock downs.
Covid is still around in 2026, but vaccinations and treatments means it isn't deadly anymore and the last vaccination I had made us ill, so not doing that any more. Had covid once a couple of years ago, but was just an annoying cough for us. Got it as son brought it home when he stayed with us between jobs. 😧 In Japan you wear a mask when visiting a Doctor's Clinic or Hospital anyway, but mask wearing by the general population at other times is way down now. Maybe just 10~20% of people. A nasty flu from south-east-Asia being the main reason to wear a mask here recently.
Bake Off still hasn't encouraged me to try baking anything, even though I have cooked dinner much more this year. Enough that I don't have any trouble looking after myself when required. A possibility in the future.
Have seen all 4 season of Reacher and really liked it. Hoping for more.
Finished The Ballad of Buster Scruggs last night. A 2018 anthology of 6 short stories. An interesting format, and the writing was good. Meal Ticket was maybe just a little more disturbing to me than the others...
