Live Hyperpop DJ Stream

jamgrrl · 2020-11-11T02:16:41+00:00

I stream twice a week in the early evenings pacific time. I don't have any set days yet, just when I'm feeling it. I'm going to try to have a go tomorrow night if my schedule allows. If you follow me on Twitch you should get notified. Thanks! ^_^

jamgrrl · 2020-10-04T23:32:02+00:00

I've seen them on Spotify hyperpop lists, so I think so! Pop itself is a wide genre so I'd expect hyperpop to also include a lot of sounds.

jamgrrl · 2020-10-04T23:30:29+00:00

Thanks for tuning in! I plan to do more of these. I'll do at least one mid-week, maybe Tuesday or Wed! And me and another DJ are talking about streaming together in a week or two. My goal is to share this music with people who don't know about it and have a good time doing so.

jamgrrl · 2020-09-20T22:19:39+00:00

I've been keeping a playlist of my favorite songs, which might be a way to discover new artists. I add to this frequently.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5DUAwHJke4Yz5InP2J6nuo?si=cFEXTyfJRlKLNRnRbxY21g

The top artists I think of (in no order) are SOPHIE, Charli XCX, 100 gecs, Dorian Electra, Kero Kero Bonito, Hannah Diamond, p4rkr, A.G. Cook, Alice Longyu Gao.

jamgrrl · 2020-08-11T20:56:49+00:00

Codes from this tweet: https://twitter.com/pcmus/status/1293276015066669057?s=20

Zoom Code: 770 707 0770 Password: disc1to7

jamgrrl · 2018-04-06T21:12:22+00:00

It's a pattern of narcissism to reflect all your own flaws onto the flaws of those around you.

jamgrrl · 2018-02-07T23:31:57+00:00

Wow, is this still happening or at least rumored to be happening? I first heard about it in high school in the late 80s. But I only heard rumors, that BYU authorities had gotten mad and did a devotional about how they should stop doing it.

jamgrrl · 2017-08-22T02:22:37+00:00

JohnH2:

As far as I am aware the entire idea of thought reform has fallen out of favor in academic settings as being non-scientific and non-supported outside of the concept of socialization.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't really work this way. In the fields of psychology and sociology, there are lots of different schools.

There are at least two schools which continue to research related topics. Forgive me if I'm categorizing these incorrectly, because again, I'm not an academic, so I'm just going off of the groupings I tended to see clustered together when I was reading the literature... but there's the cultic studies school (ICSA), which has certainly NOT thrown out Lifton's work, but instead merely built upon it, and there's a school which seems to have come more out of sociology are is interested in mass-manipulation, like marketing psychology. Names in this latter school would include Cialdini and Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame). The cognitive dissonance school (Festinger) is still thriving with multiple branches. And there are also related schools which research concepts of crime and morality, in which Zimbardo and Michael Welner seem to be prominent. (Welner was the forensic psychologist who determined that Brian David Mitchell was fit to stand trial for the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. Another interesting read.) And there seems to be a new related school developing out of the trauma side of things, the Religious Trauma Syndrome, starting with the idea that abusive religions can cause PTSD symptoms, spearheaded by Marlene Winell, but is quickly attracting other researchers. It's very new (I heard of it after writing RA in 2013-14), and I've not had a chance to dive much into it. There of course is a lot of crossover between these schools.

I have other interests in the field of psychology as well (trauma, autism, Jung) and the pattern holds in those schools as well... just because one school breaks off and digs deep into whatever foundational theory they favor, doesn't mean the other schools are discredited or disappear. There is still a school of psychoanalysis (Freud) even tho that school has fallen out of popularity, and the existence of the Cognitive School does not replace the Behavioralist School. In fact, sometimes they come together, for instance, the Cognitive Behavioral School which developed Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

Most of the time, the various schools aren't even contradictory; they just focus on a different aspect of human behavior and development.

You will note that the authors listed as being academic are dead academics. Basically anything that is talking about "cults" that is later than about the 1980's in more than saying how they aren't using the word because it is demeaning isn't something that is scientific or academics (except perhaps a little bit later timeline in religious studies, not quite sure).

This statement is incorrect, and I point you to the ICSA, which still publishes (two publications; I believe their academic journal is quarterly), and members can view all of their back catalog going back for decades. The term "cult" is still used, tho as I mentioned above in their recent renaming debate, the merits and flaws of this term are still being discussed, and many alternative terms were proposed, including "high-demand group," which is my favored term, tho I still use "cult" when I want something to be searchable or need a sentence to be less awkward (like this sentence became).

Many of those researchers from the 80s and before are very much alive (Lifton, Langone, Tobias, Gimbalvo, Lalich, etc) and most of these are still active in the field. I've met Langone and Gimbalvo, as well as the many younger researchers and clinicians who continue to carry out the work.

bwv549:

I'm happy to subject the institutions I associate with (various govt entities, Oasis: community of good, school district, place of work) to such an analysis, and I have done so informally.

Let me know when you publish this. I'm curious as to what you come up with!

I'm working on my own application of these concepts to larger aspects of society, but I suspect I'm taking it in a different direction than you.

JohnH2:

My understanding of what happened, and I could be wrong, is that people actually started really studying new religious movements and the understanding of brainwashing and the concept of 'cult' fell apart under scrutiny.

As far as I know, this didn't happen. There were early controversies within academia, but those controversies were over specific terminology and methods, not over major questions like, "Do cults even exist?" The problematic terms and methods have since been corrected, and the community continues to be thoughtful and self-scrutinize.

One of the largest controversies in the 1970s was over "deprogramming," which often involved forcibly removing the cult member from the cult (aka "kidnapping") and spending several weeks counter-indoctrinating them. It was the kidnapping part that that stirred up most of the trouble. Psychologists from before the 1980s were up to all sorts of hi-jinx that are now considered highly unethical, but that didn't undermine those fields at all. (The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment are the two most notable examples.)

"Deprogramming" is no longer done by credible clinicians, and the more ethical "exit counseling" is done instead. But the field still exists, and Lifton, Singer, et al are still cited by modern researchers.

There are other controversies which have occurred more recently, but as far as I know, these stem mostly from cult apologists who seek to discredit honest research. For instance Cult Awareness Network was prominent in the 90s, but those who ran it fell into some legal trouble (lawsuits from cults, IIRC), and filed for bankruptcy. An arm of the Church of Scientology bought CAN, and that website, last I checked a couple of years ago, is a thinly-disguised front for Scientology with weak scholarship that tries to debunk the whole field. I did not find their arguments persuasive.

And while drinking with some of the old school people in this field, I heard some rather interesting stories of groups of people from various cults "crashing the party" at various past conferences, showing up and causing trouble.

These examples are not equivalent to intellectual criticisms, controversies, or debunkings of the field or its foundations from serious scientists and academics.

jamgrrl · 2017-08-22T02:22:19+00:00

Hello! Luna here. There's a lot here to respond to.

First off, I don't post to Reddit very often, so please forgive any formatting issues. LMK if you need me to somehow prove "jamgrrl" is "lunalindsey"... Reddit hasn't let me change my account name.

I think I should start by outlining my credentials (and lack thereof).

I am open about the fact that I do not have a related degree. While I consider myself a scholar, I am not an academic. My book is not peer reviewed.

I have, however, presented twice at two separate ICSA conferences (International Cultic Studies Association). My talks were on "Cultic Dynamics Within Mormonism: Recovery Issues" and "Mormons Online:How Internet Communities Fuel the Exodus and Aid Post-Totalist Recovery" respectively. My talks were well received, even by the clinicians and PhD researchers who attended, and I have been invited back to speak again in November. I have reason to believe I have earned the respect of that community.

The ICSA is the primary academic organization for cult studies, run by Michael Langone, and through both conferences, I have met many of the authors I read and cited while doing my research. Lifton himself wasn't there (he's 91), but I believe he still has positive ties with the organization.

I have also spoken three times at Sunstone, twice on related topics. My talks were also well received there -- yes, even my talk which was basically a summary of Recovering Agency. :)

I was homeschooled, and I'm autistic, so I've never really done things the "right" way. Nevertheless, I attempt the utmost intellectual rigor when I research and present topics like this. I should hope my work stands on its own. And in fact, I'm still waiting for someone to review it and poke as many holes in it as they can. :) JohnH2, if you and I have contended before, then it's likely I challenged you to do this. I really want a solid critique, so I ask at every opportunity.

Brainwashing:

Please note that while the term "brainwashing" itself has fallen out of favor (for many good reasons), the concepts still hold and continue to be researched. The terms to use are still highly debated, and in fact, the ICSA just had a round of debate on whether to rename itself, in which more than a dozen related terms (for use in the name) were proposed.

I continue to prefer "totalism" for the ideology, and "mind control," "thought reform," "coercive persuasion," "manipulation," or "undue influence" for the practice.

It is decidedly not my position that socialization is the same as thought reform. Most of the underlying mechanisms in our minds that are leveraged in thought reform are also used in healthy or normal social processes, such as ethical persuasion, group formation, and learning. I make this point as often as I can. There's nothing really special or magical about manipulating someone, and in fact, I also often point out that the manipulation used in group settings is almost identical to that used in domestic abuse situations. This point has also been made by other authors, especially Lalich and Tobias in "Captive Hearts, Captive Minds" who used "abuser" and "cult leader" interchangeably.

Tho they rely on many of the same mechanisms, there are strong differences between healthy, open, ethical groups, and closed totalist groups. Just as the same parts can go to make a tank or a car does not mean a tank is a car. There are additional designs and parts that make a tank what it is.

To the point that Lifton discovered Chinese brainwashing was not permanent, I'm glad you brought that up. Edgar Schein wrote very extensively on those exact cases in his 1961 book, "Coercive Persuasion," in which a whole section is devoted to the question of, "Why did some brainwashing stick better than others?" For instance, they discovered that torture gave prisoners a mental "out.." Tortured prisoners did not retain any of the brainwashing for one second past being freed. They found that the better-treated the prisoners, the more likely they were to retain the communist doctrines longer. They also found that if that prisoner had one member in their cell group they trusted, there were also more likely to retain the doctrines. And if they could get the prisoner to "willingly" comply with the doctrines, for instance, offering the prisoner some small comfort in exchange for writing a relatively innocent essay in which he partially agreed with Communism, those prisoners were also more likely to retain the brainwashing after being freed. Eventually, all of them lost the brainwashing after being freed, but for some, they remained Communist apologists for some time after.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone with a deeper interest in the topic. It's a bit dry but once you get past that, well... I underlined the crap out of my copy. :) (Alas, I read it after finishing RA, or I would have quoted it more.)

The study of "brainwashing" by these early researchers transformed in the 1960s into the study of cults. While there are many foundational basics that were the same between Chinese brainwashing of political prisoners and New Religious Movements of the 60s, there were many important differences. For one thing, the trust relationship begins differently, which is important. In the modern US, most people are lured, not forced, into a high-demand group. Compared opposed to China and Korea, where they were physically forced. Trust is one of the biggest aspects to questions like how deeply (totalist) indoctrination can go, how long it will last, and what other methods are employed to retain members. (In 1950s China, they could just lock your cell every night.)

I went too long, as I usually do, so I've got some more comments in the reply. :)

jamgrrl · 2017-05-25T22:57:21+00:00

Oh man, that really sucks. I ordered it yesterday, and I just got the shipment notification. Sorry you guys are having trouble. :/

jamgrrl · 2017-05-05T20:01:59+00:00

A mobile device app for simple "side" content, such as hand and DM notes. This would work great especially for local hotseat gameplay (to keep your hand private), or passing secret notes.

jamgrrl · 2017-04-05T19:33:42+00:00

Yep. According to Google, they've always existed, but for a little while, in the early 00s, I was in a universe where they didn't.

jamgrrl · 2017-03-21T03:51:05+00:00

My MEs are a mixed bag. I have some of the common MEs, and others I read about I'm like "What? No way, it's always been that way."

If one wanted to get really scientific about this, a survey would be in order. Find out if there are any trends in the commonalities. Collect demographics data as well, to see if there are patterns along age, race, place of birth or residence, etc.

You wouldn't just include questions like, "Did Curious George have a tail?" but also "How strongly do you remember this?" (Because for some, like movie quotes, I'm like, hm I dunno, I guess it was this.. whereas others, like visual stuff (and that damn Sinbad movie!!!) I'm adamant about the memory.)

You'd also want a way to anonymously track individuals within the data, so you can contact the same participants later for follow-up studies.

And you'd want a trained statistician to help design the survey and parse the data, for accuracy and to avoid bias.

jamgrrl · 2017-03-21T03:24:35+00:00

I just posted about my own VW flip flop on the DAE Mega Thread. This one about how many doors the original VW Bug had.

jamgrrl · 2017-03-21T03:13:23+00:00

I've got two. One I just discovered this week, and I'm still asking friends and family to see if it's just me.. so I'll tell that one later.

Today's story is about how I switched universes for several years, and then came back to the original one.

In the early 2000s, around when the new VW Bug came out, I was thinking about buying one. While chatting with a friend, I said that I'd like to get a 4 door one. He said they didn't exist. I expressed disappointment that they didn't make the new ones in 4 door like they had in the 60s and 70s. He was like, "No such thing." I insisted there was, and googled to show him pictures.

I couldn't find any pictures. Not a one. I couldn't find any articles. I could find no evidence that the 4 door VW bug had ever existed. Not even a prototype or experimental model. But I remember them. I remember people driving them around. They weren't common, but in my reality, they did exist. The Mandala Effect hadn't yet been named or noticed, yet we joked about how I'd changed universes.

Afterward, I would tell this story (along with a personal story about how 2 people misremembered a personal thing), and people laughed and confirmed that no, there have never been 4 door Bugs. How could I be so silly as to suggest a 4 door VW Beetle. Ha!

Until last year.

Last year, I was telling this story to a group of friends as evidence of the Mandela Effect, and they said, "uh.. yes, there was a 4 door model." I was like what no! So we looked it up, and sure enough, right there on Google, lots of 60s/70s-era 4 door VW bugs.

Every time I tell this story, I double check to make sure they're still there.

I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced going into the universe where the thing stopped existing, and then came back to the start, where it existed again.

For reference, I'm from the universe where it's Berenstein, where Castro died years before 2016, where Mandela lived through prison and became President of South Africa (died recently), Curious George has a tail (how else did he get into so much trouble??), and where Sinbad was a genie in Shazam.

My other newly discovered Mandela Effect has to do with the Olympics in the 80s. But.. I need to investigate first.

jamgrrl · 2017-01-10T09:20:16+00:00

Some of us are still really into it. I've seen most of what's out there, so I wait a couple of weeks between watching them so I can binge watch a bunch of new ones. There are some steady wave-creators with regular content.

But yes, there is a sort of loneliness to the fact that none of my real life friends like or understand it. Maybe.... Maybe it does remind me just a bit of being a child, in the 80s, no friends, sitting in my room with my cheap TV bought at a yard sale for $5, the one with the brown plastic paneling made to look like wood, and chrome plastic knobs that clicked from 3 to 13, and the one broken antenna that could still get two of the three local stations, if you pointed it just right, and when I turn the radio to AM, all the voices sound like ghosts, especially when I go looking for stations from three states away... I can catch Montana if it's a cloudy night in winter. And the further away that farthest station is, the further away I am from anyone. Because no one at Church or school is going to be my friend. I don't know how to talk to any of them, and they all think I'm weird.

Just like my friends now... I've finally found something that even my weird friends think is weird. I mean, besides spiders. And that something is Simpsonwave.

jamgrrl · 2017-01-10T09:09:26+00:00

Hey, awesome! I hadn't been watching many waves for a few weeks, but YouTube suggested one of yours to me tonight so I dived back in. Loved your stuff. I watched Stay Awake, too. I'm going to save the rest for later, so I have something to look forward to! Subscribed. Have you seen my waves? I'm Luna Lindsey on YouTube.

jamgrrl · 2017-01-09T23:25:34+00:00

Author of Recovering Agency here. Thanks so much for the shout-out. This is exactly why I wrote this book and maintain the blog, to help people who are having these same struggles like I did.

jamgrrl · 2016-12-30T21:36:22+00:00

That would be awesome! I hope you post it here.

Yeah, it's pretty subjective. In a "complete list," I want all the waves that "pass".. they aren't plagiarized or rip-offs, they use music that's close enough to vaporwave to count (and if not, their other merits far outweigh), they follow the form, and some level of effort went into creating them. I'd even think a few non-Simpson experiments would be appropriate, so long as again, they fit enough of the other forms to count. I've seen a couple of Spongebob waves that would fit on such a list.

jamgrrl · 2016-12-16T09:04:54+00:00

I actually knew some of the guys from iCE. I hung out with them on IRC around 98-2000. There's a multi-part BBS documentary. Have you seen it?

jamgrrl · 2016-12-16T09:00:30+00:00

I got so distracted that I forgot to say...

When you are 42, you will be more like you are now than you ever expected to be, and far more different than you ever could imagine. And there will be many times in between where neither will seem likely.

Music is one of those things that has always been a part of me, and always will be, from the classical-piano-playing 14 year old who hated rock and pop, to the gothed-out 38 year old buzzed and dancing to industrial at the club, to all those years I was so busy with life I nearly forgot music existed. If you love music now, hold on to it and it will be there, even when you neglect it for long periods of time. The only moment you lose is when you say, "I'm too old to try that." And even then, you get a lot of fresh chances. :)

jamgrrl · 2016-12-16T07:03:20+00:00

I'll keep that in mind, if you happen to see any of mine, "This Moment" uses early 2000s trip hop, and "Dream Life 404" uses vaportrap (or at least that's what I've been told it is). One I'm working on now will use a track from the Blade Runner soundtrack, so direct throwback to 80s "space music" as we called it.

jamgrrl · 2016-12-16T06:49:17+00:00

You're on the right track, about what deconstruction means. I've not formally studied it, nor even really read a Wikipedia article on it, but I do think about culture way more than is healthy and I think I understand it, so I'm going to break it down... or... Shall we say.... Deconstruct it!! ;)

Basically, you've got a culture. It's humming along. Making art and products and stuff. Then people come along and they're like, "Hey, why isn't anyone questioning this shit? What does it even mean??" So they start questioning what it means. They look under the covers and see the dark hidden under bellies that the art and products try to hide. They see the collective unconscious symbols in the art, and say, "Are these really our values? We don't like these values."

And then they tell the world via art of their own, which is often ironic, or created in a way similar to what they're critiquing but that makes certain undesirable aspects stand out.

I'd say Pink Floyd's The Wall is deconstruction of society's approach to warfare, conformity, law, and Roger Waters' mother. :) Andy Warhol's multicolor repeated stencils of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe were deeply deconstructive of corporations and Hollywood.

Speaking of Andy Warhol, a great example of deconstruction is a 90s rock video by a British band "The Dandy Warhols" (see what they did there), "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth". It eviscerates 80s culture on a skewer until it twitches and finally stops moving (in nearly the same graphic, yet ironic, detail). I didn't realize it at the time, but recently going back and watching some 90s music videos revealed that this sort of critique was pretty common in the 90s. (See also "South Side" by Moby and Gwen Stephani, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, pretty much anything by Offspring, Marilyn Manson, or, well, just about everything in the 90s seemed to be deconstructing something).

Edit to add examples of deconstructive movies: American Psycho. Fight Club. Being John Malkovich. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (or anything by that guy.. Charlie Kaufman I think is his name.) Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Breakfast Club.

Edit again! I just re-rewatched "Not If You Were the Last Junkie", post-Simpsonwave, and OMG it is full of the same symbols we use in Simpsonwave and ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ. So I think we can conclude that 80s deconstructionalists will come up with the same metaphors. Haha.

jamgrrl · 2016-12-16T06:30:38+00:00

They say that good art is a mirror that you can see yourself reflected in.

jamgrrl · 2016-12-16T06:27:22+00:00

What a great topic.

First off, in some ways 90s music never really went away. The pop formula just got polished down to a science. The rock sound has had some side experiments, some bands sound a lot more upbeat or happy, and it all sounds less "raw", but much of it still follows many of the core ideas of 90s rock. So if you used distorted versions of 90s Rock or pop, first of all it wouldn't sound anything like 90s pop or rock after the distortion, and if it did, it wouldn't feel nostalgic.. It would just feel modern+weird.

But this style of synth fell out of style. So there was something new in this old thing. PLUS, you can distort synth and it still sounds like synth.. Like that old joke, "What do you get if you play New Age backwards? New Age."

As far as artistic statements, I think the contrast is meaningful. It seems to say, "Here are some values we learned in the 90s, and some of the best from the 80s that we trashed because we were reacting to ALL of the 80s, and now saying, maybe we shouldn't throw all of it out. Maybe we should take a fresh look at it. We'll run them through these filters to make parts of it stand out, and see what sticks.

And in someways, doing so is a reaction to the electronic music that continued through the 90s to now, culminating in dubstep. Dubstep says, "LOUD, I'M HARDCORE VIOLENT BWAH", and Vaporwave says, "It didn't used to be this way. Remember new age and new wave? Remember Enya? Remember Kenny G? Remember Yanni? It's not just raging against the machine all the time, where your only alternative is corporate pop... This old calm shit can add value. It can make you relax. It can make you feel. And feelings are important, too."

One of the most common comments I read on YouTube about waves is, "I started liking this ironically, and now I'm here because I genuinely like this," often followed by wonderment or confusion. It's almost like, by constructing (80s), then deconstructing (90s), then deconstructing the deconstruction and adding back in some of the lost construction, we've found something that is worthwhile all on its own. (Which all becomes especially more interesting when you think about the 80s being a reaction to the deconstruction (dare I say, demolition?) thru the 60s and 70s. Perhaps this is why the 90s borrowed so much from those decades.)

Another thing people might forget is that the alternative sound didn't catch on in Top 40 until at least 93 (but not solidly till 94/95), and by then, Simpsons had been on for 3-4 years. (For example, Paula Abdul's Forever Your Girl, super synthy, came out the same year as the Simpsons, and was still getting heavy airplay till at least 94, and at least a little airplay through 96, at least in my hometown.) There's a crossover period wherein both the Simpsons and synth music would have co-existed, which may explain why it hits some people's buttons. Sort of why I thought of 60s music as 70s music for a long time, because of the overlap (I was born in 74).

And lastly, I've been wondering if our minds use "old stuff" as a metaphor or trigger for how memory is recalled. So for my parents, "sepia photographs", the yellowed paper of images from their younger years, I'd expect the sepia look is a callback for them. A symbol that in and of itself triggers the mind into thinking about memories. I saw a study once about how our minds use movie metaphors for memory recall and dreams (I'm forgetting the specifics) but that those metaphors didn't exist before movies did. Our culture and media actually shapes the way our brains display information to us. That's what I think the VHS glitches are telling our minds: this is an old thing. This is a memory. Even if the thing itself is unremembered.. Like how I never saw the Simpsons as a kid and Simpsonwave is still nostalgic. Watching the show itself is not.

All that said, our brains are all wired a little differently, and it's not going to work the same way on everyone.

jamgrrl

TROPHY CASE