Whoah. Have you considered switching to decaf? ;) Seriously, I make music on Linux because I like Linux/FOSS, and I like to make music. I also love having access to great FREE tools, even if I have to work a little harder to put it all together. I personally don't feel that the tools used to create are all that relevant to someone listening to the finished product.

... and why that's relevant to any of us here who are smart enough not to care! Well I don't know about you guys, but to me when I was a kid, 'cool' was always a mystery. I had a friend who gave himself a 'cool' image and I kind of liked my intelligent philosopher image (that's not what I thought of it at the time but I think it discribes it quite well) so we eventually drifted apart. He also tried to kind of 'lift' me onboard to hang with the cool kids, but you know... For one thing, this involved starting to spend massive amounts of money on alcohol, and for another, it seemed kind of hard to me to actually do something interesting and be cool at the same time. But I still knew there was something there. Being kind of a geek loner dude, I knew I didn't want to go around and 'be' cool then and there and pay the price, namely let go of my values, as I would call it today. But 'cool' had something. What was this mysterious cool? I had to know. Today I have found out many things that are uniquely relevant to 'cool'. For one thing, I realized a lot of cool kids of the time are on WELFARE now. Not to say that's a sign of failure, I went through the same thing for a short while when I dropped out of university to start my first business. It's not failure, but it is a sign that 'coolness' did not seem to have a lot of relevance when it came to survival. In school, that was grades. Here in the world where people who make food, shelter and clothing all expect money in return, we're at the mercy of the cold, hard cash. But we're certainly not at the mercy of the 'cool' hard cash, that's for sure! Ask any engineer. But then there were all of these marketing types who appeared to actually be able to convert 'cool' to payments. And there were the 'stars' and the 'media phenomenons', who all appeared to do the same thing. My emphasis is on 'appeared', because according to musicians who broke free the music industry is all about who slept with whom and who owes whom a favor, much more so even than who is cool. But then they somehow usurped the authority of what 'cool' is. And then it hit me. 'Cool' has absolutely nothing to do with desirable, even though it pretends to be that way. Anything that happens to be desirable isn't really, it's only there to lure you into believing there is. 'Cool' essentially means 'approved by an external authority'. Cool can be anything specific that authority assigns to be cool. Tomorrow, 'cool' can mean 'carries a tracking microchip under his skin which also functions as a member card to certain elitist dance clubs'. This is REALITY TODAY in certain circles in Spain, as foolish as that is. (I'm sorry I don't have sources for that right now, I WILL do better at citing in future articles). But that's only an illustration on how ludicrous 'cool' can be. In a lot of circles, stealing is 'cool'. Guns are 'cool'. Violence is 'cool'. Even rape can be 'cool'. It's all up to who is making up the rools of what cool means. But, regardless of who is making the rules, it is all about one thing: 'Cool' is about someone else validating you. Saying you are 'all right', 'accepted', and 'have a right to live'. Of course, these things can also take other forms (like deriving that approval from a job and productivity) but, essentially, it is all the same thing, and in pop culture, where survival is already taken care of by a job and entertainment is key, external approval takes the form 'cool'. This is a tremendous control device. When someone is so afraid of being rejected he or she needs an external source of validation, absolutely anything will do. ANYTHING. And when there is more than one source, the source that is the most impressive to the subconscious mind wins. The cool kids do not dress shiny because that's part of being cool. Cool kids dress shiny because their 'leader' (where there is 'cool' there is also a 'leader', or 'sociopath' if you prefer that term) has used superficial attractiveness and impressiveness, superficial because it only deals with the 'animal' aspects of us and hence has nothing to do with values, sustainability or love, but only with: "Is it shiny? Is it symmetric? Is it aesthetic in some way? Does it seem mysterious and special if I don't dig too deep?" Hence, we have the typical behaviours of that insane bunch of idiots (I'm sorry about the term, but yes, I would say cool kids qualify as idiots, for the most part, according to most definitions of sanity, certainly of mine) who call themselves 'cool kids' explained quite neatly. And, of course, since there is now no growth to seek because anything outside of the boundaries of 'cool' is out of bounds, enter competition as a superficial struggle to give life meaning. Hence we have football, baseball, ping pong, but also chess, street behavior, gangs, and, ultimately, armies, secret services, and war. Ever notice how 'cool kids' seem drawn to James Bond? Guess why. The answer is in who gets to be the official authority of designation in 'what cool is'. Yes, that's right! To be dictator of coolness you must fight for it... anyone who realizes what WE just realized and sets out to be one of the 'leaders' to profit from the sheep's ignorance has competition. There are only so many sheep, and to feed one wolf it takes many sheep, so the wolves fight to the death (literally) for who gets to control the sheep... By defining cool and punishing the un-cool. Yep... The only condition for 'cool' is it must be specific enough so the un-cool can be punished, excluded, even persecuted. This has happened over and over again through history. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN PRINCIPLE BETWEEN THE COOL KIDS IN HIGH SCHOOL AND THE SPANISH INQUISITION. All right... now where are we going with this? I am writing here because I want to make linux audio POPULAR with the masses. Why? Linux audio embodies free spirit. It is very difficult to work with linux audio if you are not a free spirited person, because if you're not a free spirited person using linux audio is a very difficult thing to do because it violates the way you think. ("It's too complicated" "So many distributions... what is a distribution, anyway? It's way too confusing..." "There's so much choice I don't know what to do") much in the same way using Windows violates the way you think if you ARE free spirited ("Microsoft is trying to control me and limit my freedom"). In other words, music produced with linux audio is bound to be free spirited in nature. It is INHERENTLY free spirited. You don't get any freer today than linux audio. And I want to make the free spirit the way the world works. I want no less than to end hierarchy, to end competition, to end war, to end any nonsense talk of 'natural selection' (don't worry not to replace it with 'God created us all but hates some of us', another manifestation of the 'cool' scenario, but to replace it with 'God created us all, and there happens not to be a distinction between God and me, since the only sane definition of God is "The Collective of all beings", so God created itself in a collaborative process, and Free Software is part of that process. So is, in fact, proprietary software, but on a lower level of evolution') In other word, I intend to replace the 'cool' paradigm of 'be cool and adhere to my specific requirements' to 'you're already cool, there's nothing specific you need to do to be 'cool'. So there goes 'cool' out the Window. If you don't give any specifics of coolness, there is no longer such a thing as 'cool', simply because there no longer is such a thing as 'uncool'. So I decided to learn from the experience and find an expression that I can use to make the new thought of 'anything goes' more attractive to sheep. After all, the thing 'cool kids' do to lure victims into their cobwebs is to use shiny stuff, sweet stuff, intoxicating stuff, addicting stuff. Smart cool kids (yeah, not the way we're smart, but there ARE a few reasonably intelligent cool kids, although they usually hide it quite well. I'm not saying wise, just intelligent.) all use this to hide the fact that 'coolness' is a very unwise place to be, simply because it leads to emotional breakdown and dullness and uniformity, much like fascist regimes, in fact the cool kids in school ARE small fascist regimes, so they lure the kids in with all kinds of monuments and ritual and stuff that makes the animal mind, which controls the emotions, go 'Oooooh, wow!'. According to a Hawaiian Shaman, Serge Kahili King, who has rightfully earned my respect, there are two ways to be impressive to the subconscious mind. One: Sensory detail like high-detail image, touch, sound, smell and taste, and two, repitition. This is, by the way, the process that I use on my OWN subconscious mind to control my own behavior. I have a small notepad on which I wrote my intentions as if they were already here, like: "I am a famous musician." "I am a technology innovator" "I am a famous sex symbol." "I love people and I show it." "It easy for me to make friends" and so on and so forth. So I read these every day, and because I read it so often, my subconscious mind starts to believe it and my so called 'affirmations' become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's using the 'repitition' concept. The second thing I do is I think about myself on stage, with my stage outfit and nice little linux audio box sitting next to me, performing like crazy, again, as if it were already here (which, to my subconscious mind, it is). Here I am using the 'detail and shinyness' concept. These are the only two ways our subconscious mind can tell important from unimportant stuff. Of course, some shrewd people have used this knowledge to create 'mental prisons', where people think they are powerless and dependant, but that is simply not true. You can start writing your linux software project and making a living off your GPL licensed software TODAY... If you decide that you can do it. All it takes, is that you use these two techniques, impressiveness and repition, until you BELIEVE FULLY that you can do it, at which point it will happen pretty much automatically. Our space isn't as dense as one might have thought, on the contrary; it's all just subconscious minds mingling with each other on various frequencies, which is the same thing as objects, concepts, ideas, and emotion. These four things are the same thing, at various levels of density! Think about the implications of that. So these 'cool' people use this knowledge to 'impress' other people's subconscious minds into perceiving them as important without exactly knowing why, but nonetheless acting on these impulses as 'God given', sometimes literally, sometimes more metaphorically ("Look at that Guitar God!"). So I finally realized why I was so intrigued with cool people: I was, essentially, looking for techniques to impress my subconscious with stuff *I* (my conscious mind, where my values and long-term benefits thinking is) found right for *me*, and hence, one might say, run my own brain, finally. Stuart Lichtman, another man I respect a lot, had phrased it this way: Your brain is like a massively parallel computer, that is both analogue and digital at the same time. Now paraphrasing: You program it by making the analogue part (your subconscious) impressive enough until your 'digital' instructions (conscious instructions) are impressed on it. You program digital, but you transfer the digital using analogue techniques. This is exactly the same as with a hard drive: You have binary data on it, but to get the binary data on the disk, you use various, analogue methods of, for example, magnetism, which you at an arbitrary point separate into zeros and ones. This programming process is absolutely no different to computers, which explains why we, as a species, were able to invent them in the first place. So right now, what's happening, essentially, is that we're running someone else's software. Again, that is absolutely no different than Microsoft making sure they're the only operating system that you can get on the market. They force you to update when *they* want, even force you to connect to a wireless network when *they* want, simply because if they would not do this their authoritarian programming style would break down. That is exactly like the programs most of us inherited from our parents: go to school, join the cool kids, get a job, play the same game with your boss, make babies, pass on what you know (which is hardly different from what your parents knew and taught you), wither, and die. Depressing? Yep. That's why we're all here in the linux audio community, to change all that. Linux really IS changing the world, because embedded in the way it works are principles that can change EVERYTHING when they are applied to the rest of the world. Think of bazaar style supermarkets! Farms! Heck, governments! (They would cease to be governments, more like 'recommendation centers', much like the W3C consortium, saying this cautiously and not knowing much about it). That's the REAL reason why we're all here on the web forums in our free time when we could be somewhere else. It's this great opportunity to change the world to be a free, loving place. So where does that leave us with 'cool'? Well, the cool kids know how to program minds. They are using it for stupid purposes, however, we, the 'smart' kids, are too awquard with our programming tools, our subconscious minds, that a lot of us cannot really implement our intelligence with any sort of confidence. So what we need to do is merge the two worlds: We 'smart' kids must apply our intelligence for it to become wisdom, and learn to speak the language of our emotions (which is the same thing as our subconscious language, repetition and sensory detail), and the 'cool' kids must learn to be more open to their thoughtful and intelligent aspects, which, among most 'cool kid' cliques, is pretty much a crime to do, which I perceive as simply because if all 'cool' peasants keep each other dumb it is easier for the street smart lord to exploit them. So 'cool' kids learn that being 'cool' is a prison, and exploiters, left without anyone to exploit, learn that they can actually produce value to survive instead of competing at various arbitrary contests. And we, the educated, stop whining about being excluded and stop trying to find ways to out-smart each other (just another 'cool' trap, if we use our intelligence to compete at some contest or to build weapons we will earn the approval form the same source the 'cool' kids get it but it will only help us realize how futile relying on external approval is), and start using our intelligence for *constructive* purposes, and using our knowledge we have learned from the 'cool kids' to actually convince people to follow our recommendations and earn the greatest benefits. I'm gonna do that with song. I'm gonna be so cool I'm gonna be blazing. I'm also going to be laughed at because I'm going to be very sexy, and as a man, you get called 'gay' and laughed at if you're sexy, mostly to pressure men into defining their value on the sex market by how well they compete. But I'm brave, I don't care. And I'm going to be immensily impressive by any standards (of subconscious minds), and I'm going to lure immense amounts of people into taking me for an authoritative figure, much the same way any cool kid does. And then I will brainwash the fuckers into believing the actually have CHOICE in life, and that it is a good thing to take INITIATIVE and create whatever the hell they WANT in their life. Just like I'm doing now. And much like, after finding out and having been tought that I can CREATE ANYTHING I WANT IN LIFE I'm not creating myself playing more video games, an attractive option as long as I believed I was powerless to accomplish stuff in REAL life, but I'm going out attempting to help people in a way no one has before, I believe those empowered people will find a way to help me back, and hoping there will be at least some vegetable farmers among them, that they will start sustaining people for free. Or, as an interim, give me money as donations, but I like the vegetable gift thing better, somehow :) So this is what I wanted to share with you, my message to you given everything I have learned about how the world works, and probably the reason why silicon valley firms exist, because we read the same books; (Look for "The Master Key System" by Charles F Haanel, this is supposedly what Bill Gates read to build his empire, only he used it less constructively than we will) and what I want us to accomplish is that we will have more impact on the world than any company ever could. This is already happening, but the more 'enlightened' developers we have, in other words, developers who are aware of how the mind can be programmed and are hence incredibly effective, even at the stuff they are ALREADY good at, the stuff YOU are already good at, we can become even MORE effective at producing excellent software... ... AND MAKING THE TIME TO DO SO by getting our asses out of any sorry job we might have. That is playing with our survival instincts for sure, and is not an *easy* thing to do, although it is a *simple* thing to do. Just go out, get your affirmation card, and write one it something along the lines of: "I am a free software developer and I can sustain myself." The rest, my friend, will be history. And why am I writing all this stuff to you? I'm a musician! I want more free software to play with. Code it now! ;) I love you guys. All of you. Carlo