Whoops.

Turns out we both overslept by 5 hours. The alarms clearly weren't effective enough. Well I've buggered that up so no more weird sleep for me.

I'm pretty disappointed I could only last one day basically, but never mind - I'm more relieved than anything to sleep. It was so nice!

The Long Stretch!

This long stretch between my last nap and my proper sleep is really rather extensive. We considered changing the timing so we wouldn't have this problem but hey, it's ok. I haven't dropped off yet, just been very tired - I'll make it till 02:00 easily and fall asleep quickly.

Funny thing - I've been ravenous virtually all day. Stomach's been rumbling constantly when I haven't had a meal in about an hour or so, weird! Only one thing for that... food!

We're going to meet and head to Tesco tomorrow morning when it opens for a fried breakfast - that'll kick so much arse/ass you wouldn't believe. Anyway, goodnight and till 5am, peace.

24 Hours Complete

It's just after my 17:00 sleep and once again, I didn't really want to get up. I did though, and am now feeling alright! I've been yawning and zoning out all afternoon, which appears to be continuing now. I also felt a little bit queasy in the car but otherwise I feel nothing bad apart from being tired.

So after 24 hours I can safely say I haven't at all adjusted, although I'm tired enough that I fall asleep within 5 minutes of lying down each time - this is useful!

Time for seven hours of total balls before my core three hour sleep... here we go!

Slummin' It

It's the afternoon and I'm pretty happy with life. I've got that tired feeling behind my eyes that you get when you've had a really late night and not much sleep a couple of nights before, but otherwise I feel fine! This is all well and good... but I think the stretch from 17:00 to 02:00 is going to be a bitch.

Thank god for food! Felt so hungry before I ate breakfast and lunch - I wonder if my metabolism is rising...

Good Morning Birdlife!

Well I had a nice nap from 8:00 till 8:20 - just began to drift off half way through I reckon, so I need to work on falling asleep more quickly.

Between 5:00 and 8:00 I went out for a walk along the canal just behind my house, saw what the bird life was like at dawn (6:45). Saw loads of birds, including a Kingfisher, Kestrel, Blackcaps, and a Chiffchaff. There was also a heron sitting on a house which always makes me chuckle.

Time for a shower and breakfast (I assume it's still breakfast on this sleep pattern?)

Day 1

Yaaaaaay, 5am! Was so confused as to why the hell my alarm was going off in the dark after what had clearly not been anywhere near enough sleep, but got up and feel fairly ok now. Going to go and watch the sun rise and see if I can see any owls in the beginnings of the light in an hour or two - lovely!

Here's till 8am!

Edit: This feels a lot like getting up for Marks and Spencer in the early morning...

Post-gig tiredness

After a gig I usually feel a bit fatigued... I'd like nothing more than to go to bed for several hours but alas, it'll only be three! It'll feel nice lying down though I guess. Plan tomorrow is to get up at 5am of course, and to go outside for a nice long walk, spot some owls if I'm lucky, and watch the sun rise.

At least I'll be able to get to sleep pretty fast tonight.

On a vaguely related note - what does everyone think about Derren Brown and his supposed 'making you sit in your chair' subliminalities? The film he showed us was clearly a complete distraction from what he was actually doing (a rotating notepad and something that sounds like Radiohead's late-mid years, I mean come on!) In my opinion, the people who found themselves genuinely stuck (if anyone) had listened to what he said - "you will find yourself getting heavier and heavier, feel the heavy stuck places of your body next to the chair and let them not be able to move" etc - and believed that they were unable to stand. Nothing hugely subliminal, just a lot of hype and intensity anxiously worked up by his words and the idea of it happening!

Much like his lottery trick, this one did something quite clever (if it actually did to anyone and all these people weren't lying) but he made a grand illusionary cover story to explain how he did it - similar to his lottery trick which must have used camera trickery or insane sleight-of-hand, but he passed it off as something grandiose. Fair enough, you've got a large number of people on your side, Derren!

Day 0

I have just had my first nap. It was the 17:00 nap, and I actually slept for about 10 minutes which is awesome news (although my ~5 hours last night probably meant I was tired anyway). Now it's the longish stint to 02:00 before I can have my nice 3 hours of core sleep!

Off to play a gig in Cublington (jazz bass in a quartet in a pub). Not looking forward to it as I haven't played in frikkin' ages but we'll see how it goes - £110 can't be bad!

Polyphasic Sleep Incoming

I have decided that, in the need for something new, interesting, exciting and fun to do with my time, I would like to have a shot at 'polyphasic sleeping'. I've read mixed opinions on it, and am perfectly aware that there is no real psychological data supporting it.

Essentially, polyphasic sleep is where instead of one big chunk of sleep (6-10 hours usually) in the night time, one would sleep for only 4 hours, but split them up over the day (3 hours at night, then three 20 minute naps at equal intervals throughout the day). There is a more hardcore method of this, but I think that it would be best to try the softer one!

I don't necessarily believe that this will work, but I am interested in seeing what its effects are, and if it is at all possible. Sleep deprivation will be inevitable, but once again that's quite interesting - and I'll blog as much as I can of it on here!

Another reason this will be quite interesting is that I have an element of competition, and therefore more motive, involved. I'll be doing this in conjunction with a friend of mine, Stan, who has attempted the more hardcore version before but didn't successfully adapt.

Anyhoo - I've started as of now.

My sleep cycle is going to be 02:00-05:00, then a 20-minute nap at 8:00, a 20-minute nap at 12:00, and a 20-minute nap at 17:00. I'll try to post as near to these times as possible, and let you know how it's all going!

YouTube Music Copyright

Here's what I wanted to put in my video description but didn't have enough space for:

First off - this is a video of four guildmates and myself in World of Warcraft failing doing a 5v5 arena in fun ways, with terrible music and soundbites laid over the top. If you don't like it, I don't care - it's more for our posterity than anything.

The other reason for this video is as follows.

Essentially this video has had two versions. The first one I uploaded a couple of nights before this current video, and it had been up for about 5 minutes before I got two e-mails from YouTube telling me "not to worry! It's ok! There's nothing you need to do, even though both Universal and WMG have claimed rights to the audio track on your video. But everything's fine, don't worry. Oh by the way we've muted the entire audio track. But don't fret; we have a large selection of terrible, DRM-free, sound effect-free music that you can put into your video instead! But you don't have to, because everything's fine."

At this point I decided that everything was not fucking fine.

Here's the original music listing from that first video, some has changed, some has stayed the same:

W - W no Theme
A Hawk and a Hacksaw - Wicky Pocky
Skindred - Cause Ah Riot
Eiffel 65 - I DJ With the Fire
Danny Kay - I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts
Daft Punk - The Brainwasher
HALCALI - Peek-a-boo
Monty Python - Traffic Lights

So not your orthodox music list full of big names and classic titles. I can imagine Daft Punk would be a cause for concern for the overly-doting music companies, but the others!? Really?!

Therefore I immediately removed the video (thanks DevilShroom for your sympathies!) and got very cross so went to kill some unicorns to make myself feel better. I had spent over a whole hour (!!!!!!!) making this video, choosing its music, its sound, and then two hours uploading it to my YouTube account. This is my time wasted and my bandwidth just thrown into the toilet.

Now why do the music companies do this? Of course the music companies are feeling very sorry for themselves. With the introduction of p2p networking and newsgroups, fewer people are buying CDs and just downloading music illegally. Who hasn't done it? I feel for their loss, as it must be annoying and money must be lost along the line somewhere. However, TOUGH BALLS! It has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen as long as the internet is around. Yes, by all means, throw the threat around of prison sentences, fines and bans! That's how you'll get a few people to stop illegally downloading, but in reality, nothing short of a) stopping the release of all music from now on or b) destroying teh interwebs will keep this from happening.

And that's not even my main point!

That is where people can download music onto their computer/mp3 player/entertainment system and enjoy it without handing over the cash. However, my video chopped little bits of each song up so horribly and badly that no-one at all would hop onto YouTube, think "Oh I fancy listening to a bit of Wicky Pocky, I think I'll load up Steve's video and skip to that tune. It's not the whole thing, but never mind, I only like listening to each song in 45-second stints." So no-one is going to be able to salvage much from this video as it is.

Yes I know, the point is that I'm infringing copyright just by having them in my video and that I'm claiming that I actually created absolutely everything in it. Bollocks! I would estimate that well over half of all videos on YouTube have something that infringes copyright (in the literal sense) one way or another. Either by having a particular piece of music (like I have here), or a recording of a game (like World of Warcraft here), or a TV clip, or someone else's video on YouTube. I agree, YouTube do claim this:

'By clicking "Upload Video", you are representing that this video does not violate YouTube's Terms of Use and that you own all copyrights in this video or have authorisation to upload it.'

That's what they say. But come ON. I'm not using this video for profit. I've made it as a joke video for people to watch, enjoy the silly sounds and music, and see me fail at a game I've played for five years. If I was planning on making some money off the fact that loads of people were watching this and that I was expecting the music to help me make that money, and wasn't planning on giving it all straight to the music companies (WMG and Universal by the way), then fair enough! It should be removed post haste! I did not, however, wish such a thing. I really think it's time for people to stop blindly yelling "witch" whenever anyone uses something creatively (that's a metaphor for plagiarism disputes; I was quite pleased with it!)

I'm not going to go on about how corporate policies are ruining our lives and their capitalist schemes are tied in with the government who are wanting to control us for no apparent reason, and that they make too much money anyway that it doesn't matter if people all download and use music without permission or authorisation. I'd just sound like a mediocre punk album. However, I think there is some logic in that WMG and Universal (who have actually muted another video of mine - In Old Ironforge - for certain countries, because I used one piece of music in it that belonged to them) should just step back for a second, let the red rage fade away, take a breath, and think about the whole situation for a few minutes.
a) If people are using their music in videos on YouTube or Metacafe or anything like that, does it really matter? These videos are non-profit, mostly harmless, and by punishing the majority, they hurt the innocent.
b) Could this not be good advertising for the music companies? Many a time I've seen people ask in comments: "What song is playing at 0:46?", "Man that song is awesome, I need to check them out" etc. Lots of people (myself included) actually list these songs in credits or 'More Info', giving credit to the artists who created them. If not, they almost always get revealed in other comments on videos anyway. It's just like hearing a song on the radio, or indeed Spotify! These people will then be likely to go and look into purchasing this music (or illegally downloading it, but that's their choice), which is basically a free sale made for WMG or Universal. YouTube is one of the biggest sites on the internet - everyone has heard about it, and millions of people view videos daily. Even my videos have quite a few views!
c) YouTube is run by one of the world's top companies - Google. They have, to the best of my knowledge, never charged any money directly to their customers for using their services. Google Web Search, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Checkout, YouTube, Chrome, Google Mail, Google Videos (pre YouTube), iGoogle, Google Scholar, Google Translations, and the list goes on. One has to assume that virtually all their profit comes from advertising. Why not try and convince Google to advertise on YouTube some of the music label's acts and so on? Instead of tearing music out and punishing people for it, why not leave it in but request acknowledgement of whom it belongs to? Why not convince Google to put in a 'credits' box, in which people can select artists, songs, and record companies, and give credit where credit is due?

I'm sure there has to be a better solution for everybody here. The likelihood is that this video will get muted too, although I have chosen some extremely obscure music to put in it, and have given full credit to the artists in the list below. Thanks for reading guys, I hope you feel the same way as I do.

I'm going to keep uploading this video with slightly changed music each time until I get to a formula where I'm not punished.

Music used in this video:

W - W no Theme
A Hawk and a Hacksaw - Wicky Pocky
Tokyo/Mew Mew Power - Barbie Girl
Danny Kay - I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts
Michael Torpey - Breathe/Banjo Kazooie Remix
HALCALI - Peek-A-Boo
Yumi Matsuzawa - ありのままで
Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra - Tetris Theme

Video used in this video:

Gameplay from World of Warcraft (Wrath of the Lich King)
A video by storpey (myself) called "Steve Plays FEAR Alone in the Dark".

All created on Cyberlink PowerDirector 6.

Also, sorry for not updating this blog in a long-ass time. I really couldn't be bothered!

Hercules

Hercules the Caterpillar munching away on some fuchsias!



(Ignore the date - for purpose of archiving video only).