This concludes the release of all the finished albums I have for the story. If back in the day you enjoyed any of these songs, produced during the very early days of Udio in which the song quality wasn’t good enough, you should probably listen to the songs or the whole album again, as I had Claude Code work its magic through the frequencies.
YouTube video’s description:
This is the first of three completed concept albums about a trio of friends living in a nowhere town: William Griffin, a sensitive and increasingly unhinged songwriter; Claire, his blind and illiterate next-door neighbor and perpetual mystery; and Lorenzo, their friend, who is inexplicably a sentient triceratops.
I made roughly eighty songs about them during Udio’s brief, lawless glory days, when a generation could sound like an actual band playing in a room, and you could still use swear words. The project ran through three albums and into the beginnings of a fourth before I ran out of steam, around the same time that changes to Udio’s model made the music feel notoriously worse.
Returning to these songs now is strange. Some of them still make the hair rise on my arms. William, Claire, and Lorenzo feel like forces within me that split apart, took on lives of their own, and built a mythology that contained that strange period of my life.
The earliest seeds of the lyrics date back to 2021. I can play guitar, but I was never going to become all the bands these songs required. The music changes radically from one track to the next, because each song takes whatever form its emotion demands. The characters and their shared emotional history are what hold the albums together.
This first album is the roughest of the three. I had just started producing songs with Udio. I was trying my way through writing song lyrics for the first time, with the additional constraint that I intended to sound like a somewhat-unhinged middle schooler whose best friend was a triceratops and who tended to filter reality in surreal ways through his dinosaur-addled brain. The resulting lyrics are sillier than usual, while retaining the earnestness and honesty that I intended for the whole story. But sometimes the lyrics get too dumb in retrospect even for me, which makes some of these songs a bit hard to listen to.
That said, there are real winners here, at least to me. Claude Code did everything it could to bolster the audio quality of this early-era Udio audio productions, and it has worked beyond my expectations. Thankfully you won’t have to listen to some of the songs in their previous states; some sounded as if they were played through a blanket.
I don’t know how the notion for this series came to be back in 2021, during one of the wildest creative periods of my life. Suddenly I knew I had William (an unhinged kid who expressed himself through music), Claire (his illiterate, blind, next-door neighbor who remains mostly opaque to him), and Lorenzo, a goddamn triceratops. I didn’t need to reason their existence or why writing about them was so important to me. I just felt it, so I soldiered on.
Now that I’m older and I have come to understand myself better, I do know why I needed to produce these songs, and why listening to them feels like coming home no matter how much I’ve tried to distance myself from this project. This story is my dead youth. An unhinged artist with a raw heart, who loved too much in the wrong ways. A blind, illiterate mystery whom the artist was devoted to and couldn’t afford to lose. An ancient, violent source of chaos who never left William’s side. That’s myself split in three. And I also know why Lorenzo had to die, and why Claire had to disappear, even if I’m the only one who understands.
I want to return to this story and finish it properly. I don’t know if I will. These days I promise too many things to myself. But I want one day in my late forties to return to these songs and new ones and feel the same emotions that these three albums recreate. So at least to me, Odes to My Triceratops didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and with the YouTube releases out, they will outlast me.
Over the years since I produced these songs, I’ve gotten from time to time notices that people downloaded the first and second album, but I never go around to presenting the third album as a cohesive whole. Now it’s up on YouTube. I doubt that anyone happening to read these words actually cares, but in case you’ve enjoyed any of these songs in the past, the whole album warrants a listen.
YouTube video’s description:
This is the third of three completed concept albums about a trio of friends living in a nowhere town: William Griffin, a sensitive and increasingly unhinged songwriter; Claire, his blind and illiterate next-door neighbor and perpetual mystery; and Lorenzo, their friend, who is inexplicably a sentient triceratops.
I made roughly eighty songs about them during Udio’s brief, lawless glory days, when a generation could sound like an actual band playing in a room, and you could still use swear words. The project ran through three albums and into the beginnings of a fourth before I ran out of steam, around the same time that changes to Udio’s model made the music feel notoriously worse.
Returning to these songs now is strange. Some of them still make the hair rise on my arms. William, Claire, and Lorenzo feel like forces within me that split apart, took on lives of their own, and built a mythology that contained that strange period of my life.
The earliest seeds of the lyrics date back to 2021. I can play guitar, but I was never going to become all the bands these songs required. The music changes radically from one track to the next, because each song takes whatever form its emotion demands. The characters and their shared emotional history are what hold the albums together.
This third album is more cohesive than the second one, and is bolstered by the improved audio quality from Udio’s model generation at the time. But this album lacks the more varied, distinct narrative arc of the previous one. Some of the songs on this album are real bangers, though, and Behind the Door may be my favorite of the series emotion-wise.
William’s story doesn’t end here. I just haven’t gotten around to producing the entirety of the fourth album. Maybe it’s time to pick it up again.
Those of you who have stuck around for a while may remember a period in which I somehow ended up producing about eighty songs with an online music generator named Udio. I thought that those albums turned out way too good for them to end up buried on this site and my SSD drive, so now you can listen to the entirety of this little masterpiece of an album, its whole two hours, on YouTube. The songs, originally plain MP3 because Udio didn’t allow WAV downloads back then, have been remastered somewhat, so that’s something.
YouTube video’s description:
This is the second of three completed concept albums about three friends living in a nowhere town: William Griffin, a sensitive and increasingly unhinged songwriter; Claire, his blind and illiterate next-door neighbor and perpetual mystery; and Lorenzo, their friend, who is inexplicably a sentient triceratops.
I made roughly eighty songs about them during Udio’s brief, lawless glory days, when a generation could sound like an actual band playing in a room, and you could still use swear words. The project ran through three albums and into the beginnings of a fourth before I ran out of steam, around the same time that changes to Udio’s model made the music feel notoriously worse.
Returning to these songs now is strange. Some of them still make the hair rise on my arms. William, Claire, and Lorenzo feel like forces within me that split apart, took on lives of their own, and built a mythology that contained that strange period of my life.
The earliest seeds of the lyrics date back to 2021. I can play guitar, but I was never going to become all the bands these songs required. The music changes radically from one track to the next, because each song takes whatever form its emotion demands. The characters and their shared emotional history are what hold the albums together.
I think this second album is the strongest thing that emerged from the project. It is ridiculous, wounded, honest. I am putting it into the world because it seems wrong for it to exist only for me.
Banger opening of the year for this vile, harrowing tale of addiction, poverty, and mental illness featuring cat-girls. Their existence in the setting makes zero sense.
I never thought I would see Fight Club references in an anime opening. Below is the full song with lyrics, which speak directly to my heart.
Some of you who have visited my page for a few years may remember a certain novella I wrote about a motocross legend. I’m translating it to Spanish, and as part of it, I’ve seen fit to create a YouTube playlist with all the songs that were mentioned in the chapters. It helps to remember the pain.
I’ve been heavily into Guns N’ Roses recently, wishing I could be transported back to the eighties or seventies. The nineties would do too. Just nowhen after those goddamn towers.
Below is a good live version of my favorite of their songs.
For the last week, this fucking song by the British band Wet Leg has been carving through my brain matter like a worm. I’m compelled to inflict it upon others.
Also a live version from KEXP, that has great sound engineers.
Music that sounds like the stuff I grew up with in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rhian Teasdale’s beautiful voice, and her trashy hotness, are a combination I haven’t been able to avoid recently.
Want to hear me play guitar for an hour and a half? No? Then fuck off! The rest of you, check out the video below.
This time I’ve even added segments. Maybe that will draw some views from people who were searching for the original version of those songs. Possible it will also get me copyright-struck.
00:00 – “Your Hand in Mine” by Explosions in the Sky 04:36 – “On a Good Day” by Joanna Newsom 07:24 – “Passing Afternoon” by Iron & Wine 12:38 – “Passing Afternoon” by Iron & Wine 17:20 – “Baby Blue” by Badfinger 21:05 – “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals 26:07 – “Swan Dive” by Waxahatchee 31:29 – “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis 35:06 – “Hotel California” by Eagles 41:57 – “Kingfisher” by Joanna Newsom 53:22 – “Angel From Montgomery” by John Prine 58:14 – “Lonesome Town” by Ricky Nelson 01:00:35 – “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals 01:05:31 – “Baby Blue” by Badfinger 01:09:04 – “Passing Afternoon” by Iron & Wine 01:14:22 – “No Surprises” by Radiohead 01:17:38 – Excerpt from “Only Skin” by Joanna Newsom 01:21:20 – “On a Good Day” by Joanna Newsom 01:23:22 – “Hotel California” by Eagles
It’s half past three in the morning, I just woke up from four hours of sleep, I drank a tall glass of cold milk (does milk ever taste better than at three in the morning?) and I figured that I could write my thoughts for a while in here, mainly for myself but also, I guess, for the three or four people that still read this shit.
This past couple of months or so, I’ve headed to one of the big local parks to play the guitar. That was a change for me because I usually headed to wooded areas where people were generally unlikely to show up. I don’t sit on one of the benches that line the path; in fact, I can explain it with a picture.
I sit in front of the biggest of the two trees you can see in the photo. It’s set at a lower level from the path and behind a hedge, so people who want to know where the guitar music comes from need to go out of their way to figure out who’s playing, but they do hear it. Why do I do it, or why it doesn’t bother me, I don’t know. I guess I don’t care to find out the answer to either, if there’s any. I do it because my subconscious wants to, which is how I’ve guided my life, particularly when it comes to artistic matters.
Playing the guitar in public is so strange. There are plenty of benches lining the path. That part of the path is somewhat “closed,” as it leads to a stretch in construction, so most of the benches tend to be unoccupied. But I’ve had people go out of the way to sit on the bench right in front of the tree. The most conspicuous of them was a young couple, just yesterday. They walked to the end of the path, found out that it was blocked due to that area being in the development, then they walked the whole way back. They eyed me meaningfully (both even tried to make eye contact with me), then sat on that bench. I played my last three songs for the day. One of them I can’t recall, but the others were “Hotel California” by Eagles (I used to play the solo on my Gibson electric back in 2013-2014, but I’ve long forgotten it, and that’s not a solo that sounds good enough in comparison on an acoustic, so I just do a frantic variation of the regular chords), and also the song that probably makes me feel the best to play, which is Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” an obscure song mainly about Joanna’s religious feelings, some of it near undecipherable although gorgeous (that whole final part is a lyrical masterpiece). May as well link her.
My version doesn’t sound much like hers other than using the same chords. I can also post one of my versions from the last recording I made of my playing, back in August. It should start with one of my renditions of Joanna’s “Kingfisher.” (30:51)
Anyway, after I finished playing/butchering queen Joanna’s song, I climbed out of that grassy area back to the path. I saw the couple sitting with their back to me, her head (crowned with pretty blonde hair) resting on the guy’s shoulder, apparently both in silence. They noticed that I was leaving. As I walked away, one of them said something, but I couldn’t tell what.
Another funny thing that happens when you play the guitar is that attractive females (I won’t say women, because some teenagers also do this) smile at you like they’re happy you’re there, even though the rest of the time they seem to be wary of my presence. Just yesterday as well, an attractive girl, may have been at the most twenty, walked by close to the hedge. When I lifted my gaze, she was looking straight into my eyes while grinning sweetly. As she walked away, she did that thing that females do in which they brush their hair behind one ear. No idea what such situations are about, but I’ve had quite a few. It’s a big whatever for me, because I will never get into an intimate relationship again. Still curious.
I love playing the guitar. It has substituted the emotional supply that writing fiction used to provide for me; in fact, the last time I stopped playing the guitar for a long time was back in 2021, right when I started writing my (sadly abandoned) novel We’re Fucked; I just couldn’t handle writing and playing the guitar during the same period of time. Playing music is a purer feeling than writing, as well. If I felt the need to write my own songs (other than through AI means, which I did plenty for the Odes to My Triceratops series; about 75 songs), I would have probably been set for life. Not monetarily, but still.
What else? As some of you know, I’ve been writing an app to interact with characters controlled by large language models (AI). The peculiar aspect of the app, which I haven’t seen anywhere else, is that the code goes through an action discoverability system based on an entity/component system (ECS). For example, actions like “fondle {target}’s butt” only become available if the acting actor is sufficiently close to the target. Those available actions are fed to the AI, which has to choose among the provided ones for its actions. It works wonderfully; in a previous app I wrote, that one in Python, the main problem was the AI coming up with weird abilities for the characters. For example, in a scenario, a woman considered herself a goddess of sorts for being gorgeous. In practice, that translated to the AI believing that the character had superpowers, and using them during the scenarios. My current app doesn’t allow anything of the sort.
Because I’m a hedonist (a worshipper of Pan and Dionysus and Dibella) and when it comes to arousal I prefer erotica, I mainly use my app for that purpose.
I don’t know why, but I can only ever get off to power imbalances. That may have been a big part of why my intimate relationships always disappointed me. What I would have given as a young man (or even younger) for an attractive older woman to pursue me predatorily and then pay for all my stuff in exchange for regular cunnilingus. I do miss eating pussy, I can admit that.
My app shows the thoughts of characters controlled by AI. Man, they’re so subtle, cunning, and capable of complex deception, particularly Claude Sonnet 4.5. Intelligent to an extent that I’m glad the app gives me as much time as I need to answer, because I’m simply not as clever as they are to come up with interesting responses. That was on full display on the post Living Narrative Engine #11, which I posted a few days ago.
On a sadder note, I think my 17-18-year-old cat is dying, this time for real. I wrote about that cat a few months ago, because it has a nasty respiratory issue of some kind. The vet prescribed medication that eventually worked, but the respiratory issues have been back this past couple of weeks, and they’re not going away. Two visits to the vet, and another one next Friday. They think his kidneys are failing too. The cat is doing that thing about resting in the warmth most of the time, and not eating even what he used to gobble up food to the extent that I had to prevent him from overeating lest he threw up.
I’m steeling myself for his death. What I don’t care for human beings has gone, at least a big part of it, into what I care for animals. The deaths of my three previous cats (one of them in a horrible way) destroyed me; after the last one, I went to the ER because I was experiencing major physical pains in my heart, almost like massive heartburn out of a sudden; I’ve had heart issues before, including arrhythmia, thanks to certain shots with which they poisoned us all, so this was a worrying matter. The doctor ended up telling me that I likely was just grieving because my cat died two days earlier.
I’ve said before that I believe it a mistake to keep pets, as long as you know that due to their lifespan they won’t survive you; it’s just a perversion of the biological need to have children. I wish I could say that at least I have the good memories of having known those pets, but I don’t: my brain retains very few memories (one of the cats I barely remember at all), almost exclusively bad ones, and all the memories of those three cats are tainted by their deaths.
I’ve been unemployed for about a month. I’m not looking for a new job, not really. I have plenty of savings; I don’t have a social life (no girlfriend syphoning 50-100 euros per date), I don’t travel, and I don’t have expensive tastes. I spent my twenties with about 20 euros in my bank account, so I don’t like to throw money around. I could survive for a few years with what I have, but honestly, I just don’t care what happens to me.
I went to to the unemployment office a couple of days ago to update my status. As I was waiting, a muslim woman, garbed as if she came from Pakistan or Afghanistan just last month, was asking for money while the guy at the table repeated to her that she needed to present an identity document. When my time came to speak with another advisor, I could barely hear her because the spawn of another muslim woman seated to my left kept crying loudly. That woman, also garbed in a similar backwards manner, asked as well for monetary support, claiming that she was separated from her husband, while the advisor kept repeating that he needed legal proof of that separation.
The walk home, which involved passing through shitty areas of the city, caused me physical pain. I didn’t leave the apartment for the rest of the day, distraught as I felt. I don’t want to go in depth now about the utter ruin of this society (or of the vast majority of ethnic European ones, by design), but all I care to say at the moment is, why would I want to contribute to a society that seems hell-bent on ethnically cleansing my kind?
Anyway, I guess that’s all for tonight. Half past five in the morning. I’m heading back to bed. I’ll run sweet daydreams involving Alicia Western until I fall asleep, and a few hours later I’ll wake up again to this horrid world. See you, folks. I wish I could say I care about how you’re all doing, but I don’t.
I call upon Pan, the pastoral god, I call upon the universe, upon the sky, the sea, and the land, queen of all, I also call upon immortal fire; all these are Pan’s realm. Come, O blessed and frolicsome one, O restless companion of the Seasons! Goat-limbed, reveling, lover of frenzy, star-haunting, weaver of playful song, song of cosmic harmony, you induce fantasies of dread into the minds of mortals, you delight in gushing springs, surrounded by goatherds and oxherds, you dance with the nymphs, you sharp-eyed hunter, lover of Echo. Present in all growth, begetter of all, many-named divinity, light-bringing lord of the cosmos, fructifying Paian, cave-loving and wrathful, veritable Zeus with horns, the earth’s endless plain is supported by you, and the deep-flowing water of the weariless sea yields to you. Okeanos who girds the earth with his eddying stream gives way to you, and so does the air we breathe, the air that kindles all life, and above us the sublime eye of weightless fire; at your behest all these are kept wide apart. Your providence alters the natures of all, on the boundless earth you offer nourishment to mankind. Come, frenzy-loving, spirit-possessed, come to these sacred libations, come and bring my life to a good end. Send your madness, O Pan, to the ends of the earth.
I’ve always had very vivid dreams. Back when I took beta-blockers for my heart issues, those dreams could have been considered nightmares for most people. Some of them, I had to consider them nightmares given the effect they had in me. In any case, these days I wish to remain asleep as much as possible, as the alternative is to wake up to my life, in which I’m me, living in my shitty circumstances. Even my most anxiety-inducing dreams are preferable to that.
It’s not so much that I’m unemployed, but that I don’t have a source of money, and the next source of money could potentially be worse than the one I have endured for the last seven years or so. I don’t know if I’ll end up working in the area or if I’ll have to move. I yearn for a serious change; I’ve been fantasizing about living in the much calmer plains of Navarre, which is part of my ancestry. I would probably be fine living in regions of Spain other than the Basque Country (where I’ve always lived), Catalonia, Madrid, or anything in the south, as I don’t vibe with southerners. A smallish town in La Rioja or such other provinces would be nice. The fact that apartments can be about 50-60% cheaper would help enormously.
Anyway, I haven’t searched for job offers yet. I have, however, made an appointment with my appointed professional at the job seekers center. That’ll be a bother. I’ll emphasize the need to seek for protected employment, one that considers my disability level (52%), given that I know I won’t fit in otherwise.
I haven’t spoken with anyone in person, other than family members, since I became unemployed on the fourteenth of last month. That’s not particularly rare for me; back in my twenties I easily went without talking to anyone for months during my long stints as a hikikomori of sorts. What I’ve done is engage in plenty of VR. To keep active, other than lifting weights, I’ve been playing Tennis Esports (link for the trailer). Its simulation of the sport is great. I started playing against the AI, but once I tried matches against human opponents, I found them preferable, which surprised me. Back in the day, I tried online ping pong, but I couldn’t react against the utter monsters that somehow ended up matching against me (picture those lightning-fast matches you see in clips; that’s how it felt like to me). But I could hold my own in these tennis matches, even though I’m middle-aged. As it put you against people of different nationalities, you could feel the difference in average attitudes. My toughest match was against a polite Japanese man who beat me 10 to 1, and who kept uttering Japanese words throughout the match, yet answering in perfect English to my comments. The guy’s discipline and cleanliness were admirable, but then again I have always admired the Japanese.
Other than that, Hitman: World of Assassination updated the VR mode of this magnificent game for the PC version. It’s now one of the best VR games ever made.
Immersing myself in this compelling game world through Agent 47’s eyes has been some of the most enjoyable time of this last past week or so. There’s still some jankiness left, and a few frustrating bugs, but they’ll probably get ironed out. If you own a PC that can run this game in VR through the link cable, you owe it to yourself to play it.
I’ve also played lots of guitar in real life. The commonalities in the activities I enjoy the most are that they allow me to forget for a while that I’m me; there’s no time to do so while immersed in a high-stakes mission, or playing a tennis match, or playing through a song on the guitar, or masturbating, for that matter. Regarding playing the guitar, just yesterday, I sat in front of a tree in one of the biggest parks around here, and played songs for about two hours. Plenty of people passed by, but I was seated further into the the grass and at a lower level, so people had to go out of their way to figure out where the music was coming from. Still, some people did go out of their way to look while I was playing, and a couple even applauded briefly, and/or said words I didn’t catch (nor cared to catch). The fact that their presence didn’t bother me isn’t a sign of progress in me, from a psychological standpoint; it’s because I can’t bring myself to care about human beings in the slightest, so as long as they don’t try to engage me directly, it doesn’t bother me. Months ago, one motherfucker did engage me: he stopped me while I was playing, and when I raised my gaze, I found myself staring at a shirtless gypsy who was holding a dining chair over his head. He asked me if I played flamenco (of course he fucking did). The less I say about such people, the better.
Anyway, I’ve always found curious, ever since I started playing the guitar in public, how people’s perception of me changes when I have a guitar in my hands and I’m playing a song. In the streets and even at work, people are wary of me. I’m a big guy who looks strange physically, and whose expression likely transmits my disdain for society and people in general. But if I’m playing a song, I get smiles even from attractive females (I don’t say women solely because I’ve also gotten such reactions from girls). The most pleasant interaction I had happened perhaps in 2021; a young mother stopped with her very young daughter, and listened to a whole song. At the end, both applauded happily, which was somewhat ironic as the song was Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “East Hastings,” which I’ve since forgotten how to play. That’s something that seriously sucks about playing the guitar: you can spend months perfecting a solo (for example the one from the song “Hotel California,” which I used to play all the time on my electric Gibson back in 2013 or so), only to completely forget it later. Ultimately you settle for songs that capture specific emotions and that aren’t unpleasant to play, which is I suppose why most songs are built around the chords G, C, D, Am and Em. I suppose F fits as well, despite being a barre chord.
I keep escaping into daydreams to keep sane. Now that I don’t have to get on buses and trains due to work, I run them primarily when a lie down to sleep. Usually the same scenes, with small variations. I suppose it could be somewhat interesting to render them into a short story or similar, but that would be too intimate and embarrassing, and utterly pointless, as I’ve fallen off from the need to write. Ultimately I just do whatever my subconscious demands, and she isn’t too keen on bothering at the moment.
What would I want at this point of my life? I wish a big-breasted MILF would cuddle me and tell me what a good boy I am, while speaking in ASMR fashion. She would also buy me stuff and pay all my bills. Sadly, it will have to remain a dream.
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