The Great Joe Bivins: CONDENSED

Bowing to the pressures of common sense, in my ongoing mission to conquer the world through writing and singing snarky songs about my depression and about how I think most people are blithering asshole idiots, I have painstakingly combed through the four albums in my Acoustafuckit series and put as many of the least awful songs as would fit onto one CD-R.

For posterity's sake, here is the tracklist of the resultant 22-track compilation, with links to the Bandcamp pages for the individual tracks, which include full lyrics:

"The Great Joe Bivins: CONDENSED"

1. I'm Gonna Die
2. Vegetable
3. Haven't Felt Alright
4. Everyone is Special Except You
5. The Continuing Adventures of Captain Pathetic
6. Captain Pathetic Rides Again
7. the Death of Captain Pathetic
8. The Natural Way
9. Your Wasted Life
10. Paul the Psychic Octopus
11. Everything That You Believe is Stupid
12. Why Are All the Stupid People So Happy?
13. Two-Dimensional Blues
14. It's My Own Fault
15. Nobody Loves You
16. Sty
17. My Psychiatrist is Trying to Melt My Brain
18. God is a T.V.
19. The Pain of Doubt
20. Tinfoil Helmet
21. Solid Ground
22. Nothing

The Acoustafuckit Tetralogy

Okay some months of dragging ass (also my computer was broken for a while in there) I finished re-encoding the first three Acoustafuckit albums to put them on Bandcamp, so now all four albums are available for free easy downloads from my Bandcamp site via the following links.

Acoustafuckit

Acoustafuckit Part Deux

Acoustafuckit Parte Tres

Acousta4kit

So Acousta4kit has been out for A LONG-ASS TIME, GUYS.

And I meant to do a blog post about it when I finished the album last month but I never did. You can go to my new Bandcamp page to download it, or there's a player widget right there in the sidebar of THIS VERY BLOG. (Eerie, right?) It comes in a nice package with the album art and an unrelated drawing of a dinosaur.

I haven't uploaded the first three albums to Bandcamp yet for a variety of reasons, for now you can still get them on my old Soundclick page.

VIDEO: Paul the Psychic Octopus music video

This took longer to put together than it should have because my computer is terminally ill, but I made a music video for my song about Paul the Psychic Octopus. Because I don't have a camera that works and I find videos of people playing and singing kind of pointless anyway I doodled a bunch of octopii and threw them into a slideshow. The result is pretty great I think.

LISTEN TO THIS

Listen to this for me real quick:

If that player's not working you can go to the song page and play it from there.

It's the chorus of a song I wrote for the music movie I'm writing (it will also probably be on Acoustafourkit when I get around to that) and I'm trying to decide if I can replicate the sound of a choir by layering my own vocal tracks one on top of the other even though I don't really know how to arrange harmonies. Also it's been stuck in my head for a month and I need to get it out of there.

There is an album and his name is Acoustafuckit Parte Tres.

I feel like I had all kinds of great things I wanted to say about this but I'm pooped from spending the last four days dealing with technical and mix issues. PLUM TUCKERED OUT, FELLAS.






The tracklist:

Theme from Man From Caucasia
Emergence
I'm Gonna Die
Everything That You Believe is Stupid
Enlarge That Penis Right Now!
God is a T.V.
The Continuing Adventures of Captain Pathetic
Tinfoil Helmet
One More Grain of Sand
The Pain of Doubt
Why Are All the Stupid People So Happy?
Stumbling
Paul the Psychic Octopus

I was planning to break up my formula with this one, and to some extent I did: the opening track is a multitracked instrumental made by layering guitar tracks, every sound on that track is made on one acoustic guitar; "One More Grain of Sand" is performed on my mini chord organ (as seen on the back cover), and two songs feature EPIC KAZOO SOLOS.

You can download all the songs for free from my Soundclick page, you can also stream them from the handy little Soundclick player widget right there in the side column.

Okay I'm going to go unwind watching some vintage Doctor Who now.

COMIC: Joe Bivins: Man Genius in "Planet of the Squirrels"

SPOILER ALERT! READ THE ISSUE BEFORE YOU READ THIS! I'M TOTALLY GOING TO GIVE AWAY ALL THE BIG HUGE TWISTS AND TELL YOU WHO THE FATHER OF TED'S BABY IS!

When issue #2 ended I observed it was only four pages shorter than my book, WHICH SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS. At sixty-three pages, issue #4 of Joe Bivins: Man Genius, "Planet of the Squirrels", is actually two pages LONGER than my book. But I don't want to talk about my book anymore. I want to talk about happy things.

This issue takes some pot-shots at religion and abuses conjugations of the word squirrel throughout, but mainly ends up being constructed around a time paradox. I love a good time travel story, and there are two kinds of time travel stories, the kind that are about visiting the past or future and appreciating the progress that mankind has made or will make or illustrating the mistakes of the past or possible mistakes of possible futures, and the good kind, which are about accidentally screwing up history and having to deal with the fallout from that.

While nerds (and I am no exception) abhor remakes, the time paradox in this story is loosely based on the central plot twist in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes, which was better fodder for a parody than the original because I wanted to do a time paradox story and also the remake actually almost makes sense. But not quite.

I started writing "Planet of the Squirrels" in 2008, just after I finished writing "Vampires at Ford's Theatre". I came up with the basic concept of a time paradox and my original, non-suicidal, solution to it (which I realized later is actually the same solution Data keeps trying in TNG: "Cause and Effect" that keeps getting the Enterprise exploded.), and wrote about a quarter of a script before abandoning it. When I got near the end of actually posting VAFT I picked it back up and devised the current ending, a parody of time travel logic, which I thought would be more interesting and a better twist. The ending also, I'm quite proud to say, eradicates this whole issue from continuity! DIDN'T HAPPEN!

So the question now is, when is the comic coming back? No idea. I don't think I'm going to go back to the page-a-day five-days-a-week updates again, but I haven't come to a decision of if I'm going to switch to some other regular update schedule or just play it fast and loose (as I seem to get out more pages that way anyway.) I'm hoping to do an issue this Fall, and if I have time I still want to do one for Christmas. At any rate I have to write both those issues before I get to actually making them. Stay tuned to the Twitter for updates (if you can wade through my rambling incoherence) or just wait for your RSS reader to tell you there's new pages.

As always, here's a bunch of random bonus pictures: