There are a lot of things that are said about the nature of interstellar travel. But there’s one thing that hardly anyone talks about. And that’s the sheer tedium of the whole thing. I mean, sure, being in outer space is pretty incredible. At first. You can just sit there for days and stare out the window. You are blown away by all the trippy shit you see and you are just overwhelmed with the sense of awe. But eventually that starts to fade away.
So maybe you have a quick lick of the lucytoad you got from that belter a few months back. And it’s back on again. All that trippy shit is now trippy for real and you are back to staring out the window for days, melting your mind. And things are good again. For a while. But eventually even that starts to lose its appeal. Not to mention the build up of tolerance to that shit. Or the fact that the lucytoad dies in a totally accidental garbage disposal incident (fuck you, Randy). The days start to blend together. The walls begin to close in. You feel trapped. You don’t know where is up or down or how long you’ve been out here or who you really are.
And then it happens. It might be a sound. Or a smell. But something triggers it and you completely lose your shit. You start bouncing off those walls that were closing in on you. One moment you are angry. Then you are manic next. Everything is fucking absurd. You start to suspect that you might be a clown. This insanity continues for months. And right when you reach that point where you might just off yourself, you realize you just reached your destination. The instincts suddenly kick in, all that training that has been drilled into you takes over, and you go off and colonize the fuck out of some poor 3rd world exoplanet.
Triumphantly.
Then you go right back to the tedium of it all on your return journey.
And that’s something they don’t tell you about the nature of interstellar travel.
I totally missed the 6am bit…but still in time so it is all good. Someone re-posted the deadline as “the 17th” so I figured I had until tonight.
Reverse sounds-a-plenty…lets go with the guitar turned intot he mellow string lead and the vocal chop. Only one added synth: I used Bazille to make the simple lead line.
Space of the interior kind is hard to come by in the confines of what boils down to a solar-wind sailboat more than slightly resembling a large VW Bus. Think Spaceballs with less Barf. On the 9.5 year long migration out of our solar system to the Kuiper belt settlements just beyond there is no room for personal space bubbles. (Except of course the personal space bubble escape pods, but of course we are not talking about those at the moment. Different kind of space.) You need to do a suprisingly large amount of damage control when there are no corners to send people to, and for reasons of ship design and a clearly misunderstood implementation of Fung-Shui there is only one bathroom per ship, so even brushing teeth becomes a matter of either tight scheduling or learning to share the mirror with 4 other people in varying axis of orientation.To survive the journey, the crews of the Trans-Neptunian Express migration caravan have adapted some firm traditions to relieve tension and harmonize the crews. Since Twister is not an option in low-G, other, newer ideas began to emerge, the most popular being the Friday Night Jam.
Each Friday night the auto pilots were set (flying straight for 100000 miles does not require much of the on-board computer systems) and comms were opened throughout the fleet. Instruments were initialy scarce, but the ships crews were inventive. A looped comm recording, shakers made of dry icecream (nobody was going to eat the shit anyway) and even a set of bells scrounged from the jet nozzles of some seemingly unnecessary correctional air rockets (time will tell). That, along with banging on everything within reach with airhoses and wrenches, and over the years the crews developed quite a collective rhythm. Since Comms were hot, some of these sessions were picked up by communication arrays as far back as Mars…and every once in a while a recording was in such good shape, it would find it’s way onto MP3 players that eventually returned to Earth. There has even been talk of collecting some of these tracks into an album… I present one of these jam sessions to you now, for your consideration:
I cleared up what I thought I was unable to last night. Also the left channel of my amp decided to completely die last night as well. So I ended up mixing the remainder on headphones.
Here is an explanation concerning the audio pack required. It will also show you how unqualified this track is. https://imgur.com/a/wJFGEj9
Now I want to see to diagnosing my amp so I don’t need to blow $200 for no reason.
as life on earth sputters out in an anticlimactic fashion, the last of us look towards the horizon as the machine we cobbled together blasts off, our last hope of living on as a species.
Mac coffee is its fuel. I have to admit I’m impressed we were able to pull it off. The spacecraft is endearing in its rickety form. But what does it matter- surely it will not make it past Jupiter.
No more entries, the voting period now commences! Mind you, this is for the Beat Battle winner, namely who gets bragging rights and a BRAND NEW POCKET OPERATOR RHYTHM OP-12!!!
So here’s my thing, made it last night + today. Didn’t initially plan on participating but what the hey, why not? Hope the mix is ok, didn’t do the car test. I also opt out of the voting pool for winning the prize, but would still like to be on the compilation.
Tesla|Phobos is proud to announce our first ever luxury Interstellar Sports Vehicle, the Model 100. Never before has racing between systems been so incredibly fast, or so incredibly stylish. Equipped with patented Twin Accelerated Ion Emitter Manifolds for nominal space-time propulsion, Infinity-Argument Collapser Drive for FTL straightaways, state-of-the-art Gravity Well Negotiator Pylons for unbelievably nimble cornering , and the all-new ‘GluonSpear’ proprietary debris disintegrator system to negate hull damage from void particulate, the Model 100 is the most advanced ISV available to Galactic Commonwealth consumers. Sporting an art deco-inspired gold-platinum-titanium interior with seating for four and plenty of storage space, you can impress your friends as you travel from Earth orbit to Vega orbit and back in a record-breaking five minutes and eight seconds, all while hauling four tons of compressed osmium.
Don’t miss out on owning the finest, fastest luxury vehicle ever produced.
WARNING: Do not operate without using proper safety equipment. Operating vehicle without functioning Dimensional Aberration Dampener exosuit and ‘Cornerstone ST Tether’ will result in FTL-related time loss, potential ST tearing, and potentially fatal FTL-related psyche distortion.
Damn, so many quality submissions, this is going to be a hard one to vote on for people, I’m sure.
But after much deliberation, my vote goes to Joshua Kim/@theusername24 for his v1 track. I mean, I like the actual submission too (it’s my 2nd choice, so the vote would still be the same) and it is superior sonically and melodically. But that “just fucking around” playfulness of the first one is really appealing to me.
Forgot to include the unmastered link for mine, so here it is:
Really stoked at the turn out from everyone’s tracks in here. A lot of dynamic stuff!! My lazy ass couldn’t pull together a track, so I’m not sure I can actually vote, but if I can, my vote goes for @theusername24’s piece. That really had some tight nit sections in it that dialed in the theme for me.
A reminder votes here will be for the beat battle and pocket operator winner only, votes cast here are not tied to the tracks to be included on the comp.
Voting will end and the winner shall be displayed at midnight on July 31st (MST, -7 UTC).
Please vote for ONE track:
_ms/sole massif
7asid
Balafonman
bfk/XVF
Creepr
InDefianceOfGravity
IO_Madness
MFXxx
mnkvolcno
theusername24/Joshua Kim
Vulpes
White_Noise
0voters
Here are the TRACKS (note, Tsachi has opted out of the voting, so please find another candidate):
damn… i have no idea who to vote for. So much good shit here. uh lol man, I feel like I should’ve been more serious or something. some people got real chops around here.
Tsachi. nice track. that intro melted my phace. love it.
also, Defiance of Gravity, you have some real chops, dayum.
i have to think about all of this. Not seeing the results for 2 weeks is pretty intense.
You guys make it really hard to vote! Awesome work you all!
The second sub by theusername24 reminds me of the Deus Ex OST, specifically The Synapse (I think that’s what it’s called, I mean the track playing in Hong Kong)