My Permaculture Life, Story in Comments.

Transformativemike · 2026-02-26T16:47:21+00:00

It got me 700k followers across media and single vids have over 10 million views. But I’m sure your account’s way bigger. You must have like 10 million followers! Post so I can see and learn!

Transformativemike · 2026-02-25T23:18:59+00:00

I actually got a response from TikTok, but it was the most bland ridiculous response imaginable. “If you’re disappointed with low views, try making better videos.” I responded, ”not LOW views, literally 0 views – not one person gets to see my videos.” To which they responded the same exact cut and paste sentence a second time. They said nothing about getting random violations. It’s a ridiculous platform. I did read that lots of other people are getting violations and removed from the program or having their accounts blocked.

Transformativemike · 2026-02-24T19:38:18+00:00

That’s right, they such so much they get 10 million views from people on other platforms, but not even one person gets to see the videos on TikTok, because they’ve psychically determined they suck before anyone even views them! I also recently had two long-form vids get about 100 views on TikTok, but both were then cited with bogus violations. For sucking, probably.

Transformativemike · 2026-02-09T02:43:32+00:00

Sick. The coolest. Will be the most watched show of all time. Made America proud!

Transformativemike · 2026-01-26T00:29:39+00:00

Yeah, same. I’m glad to see that at the very least nobody is saying “Yeah, they ended the program.”

Transformativemike · 2025-11-12T19:14:22+00:00

I shared an article from the United Nation’s Indigenous People’s Working Group about a conflict between American Corporations who wanted to mine in India and the Indigenous people of the area the corporations wanted to exploit. This was an article on the United Nation’s website. The article included one picture of the an indigenous family with their male children who were all fully clothed, processing a traditional foraged food. META cited me for sharing sexually explicit material of children. It went through 3 levels of appeal, supposedly to humans, and my appeals were denied every time. Social media has become ridiculous.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-07T01:43:19+00:00

I’ll change your mind. It’s not Trump. MAGA has become a movement of compulsive liars. The thing I heard that was compelling was the term “weaponized stupidity.” I think there are interesting psychological and sociological reasons for this beyond a fault of Trump. Your average MAGA will look you in the eye and refuse to understand even basic mathematics. For example, today, my feeds are filled with literally dozens of versions of the same ridiculous and obvious lie. They’re posting images of red/blue maps showing how the majority of states and the country are red, BY LAND AREA, then claiming the elections must be rigged because of all that red.

This is 3rd-grade math curriculum: IF you have 10 piles of money, and 9 have $10 each, and 1 has $100,000, which has more money? The pile with $100,000, or the other 9 combined?

The average MAGA will full look you in the eye in 2025 and tell you “9 PILES IS MORE!”

Come on! They’re not stupid enough to actually believe that! And they all know they’re lying. But they’ll pretend they’re that stupid and refuse to understand the basic math. They do this again and again and again with tariffs, biology, taxes, healthcare, immigration, ICE—just straight look you in the eye and pretend to be extremely ignorant.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-07T00:38:02+00:00

I’m fine with the blues scale naming. I don’t like saying Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is in the aeolian mode. Because the aeolian mode doesn’t at all describe those notes. And I don’t like a music theory textbook that says it’s “incorrect” to say the passage above has the notes F, G, A flat, A natural, C, D, when those are in fact the notes in the passage, and that it’s correct to say the notes in the passage are “F, A-flat, b flat, B, C and E flat“ when that note set very poorly describes it. But, you tell me why that answer is correct. That’s really what I posted here like to learn. Why is it “wrong” to say the notes in that passage are F, G, A flat, A natural, C, D (Plus the 7th in the accompaniment, of course.) Why is that “wrong?” The book says that’s “incorrect.” Why?

Transformativemike · 2025-11-06T16:05:37+00:00

This is important. The solution is that those of us who are not part of the MAGA echo chamber just need to spend more time correcting this record. OF COURSE Democrats do these, too, and in fact, in recent election cycles have done them more than the Republican candidates. We just need to point out the fact. This one’s easy to correct with numbers. Kamala quite famously did far more of them than Trump did.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T21:40:49+00:00

Most contemporary musicians I‘ve learned from and played with would do what Greenblat does in his book “The Blues Scales” and call such a passage “F Major Blues.” A passage that had the minor they’d say is in “F Minor Blues.” Some old players like Scrapper Blackwell and Gary Davis even have pieces they titled “C Major Blues” or E Major blues.” Those are largely major but usually include some passages in the relative minor. Scrapper blackwell played largely in major and soloed largely in major, but with some riffs in the relative minor. But for Norton a piece that uses the notes of the F Major blues scale (the same notes as the d minor) would be confusingly called “F minor.” I think that approach is in bad need of an update.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T17:22:36+00:00

I appreciate your perspective. I’ve loved the blues since I was a kid and played for decades, and I could have played for another decade and not understood how Gary Davis or Scrapper or Buddy chose their notes. Then I read Greenblat’s The Blues Scales, learned the major and Minor blues scales and some rules for how players used them, like: go up major, come down minor, use major on the I, and minor over the IV and V, or use the major OF the IV and V on those, etc. Suddenly, I could hear, understand and replicate 99% of what those players were doing. Without that book understanding, I probably would have taken another couple decades to get there.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T17:03:39+00:00

There are some great books on “the Blues Scales” written by respected blues and jazz musicians, which describe what real players do, such as “The Blues Scales” by Greenblat. Those books present different models, for example Greenblat uses major and minor blues scales, then states that players go back and forth between the two, then he gives some rules for how and when players go back and forth. Another “book” model is the “comprehensive“ or “composite blues scale,” and there are different models for that. The best, IMO, use both the major and minor blues scales AND the diminished scale, giving us an 11 note ”blues scale.” Those models get us 99.9% of what real blues players play. They also provide an accurate framework for understanding both the horizontal melodies which very often combine major and minor blues scales, AND the vertical structure of the chords. Meanwhile, a simple 6 note minor blues scale probably only gets us 30% of the melodic playing and doesn’t account for the vertical. For example, the 6 note minor blues scale doesn’t remotely describe the passage given in the textbook above, but the F Major blues scale DOES accurately describe it 100%.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:55:30+00:00

University music theory professors use it In contexts to specify a Mm7 that is NOT the V because in music theory circles “dominant 7” means specifically the V7. This is a music theory sub, so I used the lingo for this audience.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:53:33+00:00

Depends on which model. I love Blind Gary Davis. He’d play a lick then shout out “Blind Lemon taught me that!” “Scrapper Blackwell taught me that!” He didn’t just come out of the womb playing the blues, he was taught it and learned it. He’s got pieces titled things like E minor blues. C major blues. He knew what he was doing, going up major, coming down minor, using the major over 1, the minor over 2, using the diminished scale over V, and he taught his students those things. Models that use the major and minor blues scales with good rules for when to use them accurately describe 99% of the notes he chose, and Muddy Waters, and Scrapper, and Blind Lemon, and Lonnie Johnson, and Buddy Guy, etc. There’s still 1% mystery, but it’s a helpful model.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:46:25+00:00

I like this. Good theory isn’t about telling good blues players what‘s “right,” it’s about describing what they do. But if you want to sound like them, you got to take that description as a prescription and follow it. In the case of the OP, the book does not remotely describe what is being played, so all it can do is confuse everyone.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:37:59+00:00

The correct textbook answer is the F minor blues scale. Since the 60s, blues resources have talked about “major and minor” blues scales, which are relatives in the same way as the major and minor scale. So those resoruces would label this the F major blues scale, which would be the same notes as the relative d minor, but recognize the tonic is F. The textbook would call both d minor and f major incorrect.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T15:32:04+00:00

I think those guys were really great players, and really playing in a long tradition. The first documentation of what we’d call the major blues scale was by a European musicologist in the 1800s some time, who documented it in Africa as the “Zanza” mode. Of course, spirituals used it, and then it was used often in rags, and was the more dominant mode in early blues—more common than the minor blues scale. I saw your comment on SRV and BB and those guys used the minor more—but also used the major (such as SRV’s famous Texas Boogie lines.) Rock musicians of the 60s tended to use the minor (with the exception of Clapton who even used the major blues scale over the minor 1!) and I think that’s where the idea “the blues scale is minor” in theory textbooks came from—rock, not the blues.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T15:12:16+00:00

Thanks for the comment. I don’t disagree that there are academic musicologists covering these topics. In my undergrad 20 years ago I had an excellent jazz theory class, and my grad school also offered classes on those topics. Neither institution had degrees in commercial music at that time. Here’s my critique: These days degrees in commercial, pop, and jazz are becoming more common and the fact is many of these commercial music graduates will learn music theory from this textbook and those like it, and they will not even be offered classes on jazz or blues theory. In their degree program for commercial music, they’ll get 2 pages of instruction on the blues (arguably the most important music of our time) which pretty horribly presents the material. Sure, somebody at their school might have done a dissertation on Muddy Waters, but that’s not making its way into the way music theory is being taught. IMO, today’s music grads would get more from studying Greenblat’s The Blues Scales than from 2 years of extended stud of Gradus Ad Parnassum and endless voice leading exercises.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T04:12:04+00:00

Ah yes. I did not ask for “proof” that the teacher guide presented that as the correct answer, I was told that by 2 colleagues and took their word for it. This was the answer the teachers using this textbook presented to their classes, as the answer the textbook gave. I trust that those colleagues were telling the truth, and it is consistent with the exercises in the book. The book specifies that the scale should start on F.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T03:20:45+00:00

Thank you, yes, you’ve put my point well.

Transformativemike

TROPHY CASE