The Buddha’s ancient advice for becoming an enlightened being (aka: becoming a kind, compassionate, mindful, wise, non-attached & content person) seems to be designed around doing the personal work needed to start helping dismantle the exploitive capitalist system currently destroying our planet. Which feels timelessly timely, no?

Hi! Here’s FIVE reason FOR why you should really consider getting a FREE local library card (especially if you also live in Kimberley, BC and can get special discounts at participating local stores for showing your KPL library card during Canadian Library Month)!

Because, like, WTF even is a music blahg, amirite? ESPECIALLY if they stop accepting music submissions.

If, like me, you happen to live in the charming little mountain town of Kimberley, British Columbia, the hot local topic lately has been the proposed ‘Marysville McDonalds’ — SO — not only does this post gather some extra info/context in one place, but City Councillor Sue Cairns also drops by for an informative 5-question Q&A!

If there ever was a year for putting together my first VISION board… it’d have to have been in 2020, right? Right.

Today is April 5th, which, in some parts of the world, is also known as ‘Hi! It’s 5/4 Day!’ — and to “celebrate” this made-up holiday, I spent some time blogging with a one-eyed cat named Maple, which includes a ‘Hi! Here’s FIVE things FOR…’ on the topic of better programming our brains for dealing with late-stage capitalism grifters + other high 5/4 brain dumpings.

“It's almost as if fractionally improving on each of the moving parts that come with running a blog—the writing, the designing, the networking, the collaborating, the editing, the creating, the strategizing, the putting yourself out there, the thinking and all the et ceteraing—well, it's almost as if those are some pretty useful skills to routinely work on.”

If I were in a pub or coffee shop with the person/people responsible for the excellent music currently filling my headphones, would I offer to buy them a pint or coffee? If they asked me if I could spot them a couple bucks, would I do that?

I've been thinking a lot about how I should maybe just unplug from social media for awhile, especially over these last couple months, soooo… I decided to take that as a sign that I should probably just unplug from social media for awhile.

“Whether you’re trying to get a daily meditating, reading, and/or writing habit going as well, or whether your interests lie in learning an instrument, or painting, or PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING you can want to get better at — I highly recommend the practice of setting a timer for 20 minutes each day and doing that thing you want to improve at / do more of until the chimes start chiming.”

“Speaking of stretches, I recently started getting into a daily yoga routine. And since I am a total newbie that can barely hold any proper poses, I’ve found it really helpful to just embrace the fact that I am a total newbie that can barely hold any of the proper poses.”

The HI54 Submithub queue had switched to only being open for new submissions on Mondays, but… at the moment, I’m actually just on a total music submission break in general (extended until April 2022). Read this blog post for more info if you’re interested in the whys & hows.

After watching the Leaders Debate, I figured this weekend would be a good time to officially work out where my head was at with this HOPEFULLY pivotal election… and what better way to work out where my head is at than by running it thru a blog post that other people might read so I’ll have to overthink things even more than usual?

“If you want to try and have a rational conversation about Submithub, which is no easy task, there are two important things that need to be kept in mind right from the beginning, otherwise the discussion quickly heads down illogical ego-driven roads that are near impossible to turn around from. So let’s start there…”

“Whether in person or on the blog, whenever the topic of books comes up—and, yes, sometimes it will be me bringing up the topic—there are some decent odds that I have segued into talking about how much of a bang for your buck having a Scribd subscription is.”

“Unfortunately, the thought of that puts most egos off, so, here we are, the same place we always end up going back to after the newness of a tragedy temporarily pulls us all a little bit closer together — sharing theories on why we should hurry up back to thinking more about ourselves and not worrying about people we don’t know again.”

As of right now, I have 118 Sega games loaded + 17 NES games + 17 SNES games — and I probably have enough internal storage on the Sega Mini left for adding another 50+ games. In other words, hacking a Sega Mini is a pretty perfect project if you’re an old millennial trying to get through a global pandemic.

The long story short is that if you’re looking for a good self-quarantine project to take on, as it seems like society is going to be doing the opposite of our parents telling us to “turn off that video game and go play outside” for the next few weeks/months at least— I HI54LOFI-LY RECOMMEND that you look into hacking a Sega Mini.

“In a way, meditating is kinda like micro-dosing the red pill everyday—so just think of sitting down to meditate as how you take your most important daily vitamin.”

“I guess what I am getting at is that I feel more ready for this End-Of-Year than any other EOY yet. So of course this year would throw a curveball by also being an End-Of-Decade, but you know what? I also feel pretty prepared for that.”

Near the end of 2019, I started experimenting with closing my Submithub queue for a full ten days before opening it again for another four… and I’ll be damned if the blog/work/life balance hasn’t felt a whole lot more balanced ever since.

Because, after all, that's the nice thing about living in Canada: we have more than two parties to pick from. And this year, more than ever, it really feels like we need to collectively exercise our other options.

“So even if you’re not ready to retire your ‘so much for global warming’ bit for a few more winters, at the very least, we all have to be ready to agree on no longer wanting to be a pushover minion for the extremely wealthy. We need to stop arguing amongst each other on their behalf. Against our own interests.”

It was February, 2018 and I had recently started fielding music submissions from a service that promised the rarest of rare music industry promises: music blog haz income stream?

“Take it from me —a guy who has spent more than a normal amount of time continually trying to discover fresh tunes— finding new music becomes completely pointless if you don't actually stop and listen to what you've found.”

“A music service has never so brilliantly propositioned us to put our money where our mouths are. You can "like" something all you want (or scrobble, heart, whatever), but if you want an album to show up in your collection, you'll need to actually get out your wallet and support the people who made it. With money. And that's a great thing for artists.”

“How come so many bands of the mid-to-high-level of ‘made it or making it’ range are not currently using Bandcamp?”

Welp, the time has come to officially pull the plug and start packing up all my music blogging stuff :(

"No Englishman could speak this Language adequately unless he were drunk and had no roof to his mouth"

Forever in the search of “I can haz blahg monetization”, I recently started rolling out an idea called ‘Mutually Beneficial Employment’ as a way for local businesses/organizations to do a combination of ‘support the work that goes into running The 95EH Events Calendar’ + ‘work directly with me on work we agree to’ — and this blog post explains more!

Since we’re coming up to the June 27th/28th deadline for having public comments made a part of the public record in regards to the ‘Marysville McDonalds’ proposal, I figured I’d take a break from blogging about this local issue and put my thoughts down in a letter to council — and since I have a blog, I figured I’d share my letter on here too :)

Here’s a rundown summary of all the parts of last night’s council meeting that touched on the ‘Marysville McDonalds’ proposal (spoiler alert: it’s going to a public hearing near the end of June).

Because something tells me that we’ve got the numbers on our side, we just need that one common thread to connect all the different solutions we’re gonna need for all the different problems they’ve laid out for us to get overwhelmed by.

High five for getting High Fidelity’d into making a Hi54 ‘Top 5’ list about my “Do’s & Don’ts” of making a mix tape/cd playlist!

You'll probably find that you're ignoring other people's stuff just as hard as it feels like they are ignoring your stuff. And that's pretty hard.

The path I took to realizing I could just play any old retro video game right here on my old 2009 iMac was a bit more convoluted than it needed to be, but, hey, sometimes life is a bit more convoluted than it needs to be.

If we stop trying to think of streaming as a replacement for buying/owning music, and instead focus on making streaming a much better replacement for what FM radio used to provide (ie. finite music discovery that leads to music purchasing) maybe we could get away from trying to figure out how many fractions of a penny every listen should be worth?

An updated guide on how to hack your Sega Mini to play games on: Atari 2600 / 7800, Nintendo, Master System, Game Boy Color, Genesis/Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, Turbo Grafx-16, Sega CD / 32x, Arcade, Neo Geo, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, and Playstation 1.

“Submithub is like my ears Firewall, so once a track I like gets past that, it ends up in my regular rotations— because what’s the point of finding stuff you like if all you do is just keep looking for more stuff?”

I got my 2nd vaccine shot and I guess one of the side-effects was feeling the urge to write an Instagram post that used up all 2200 characters that Instagram allows — which made me think: might as well also make it a blog post!

“If we don’t individually start taking time out of our busy days to practice tuning out all the outside noise, we’re never going to collectively see the same forest from the trees, and they’re going to keep on grifting us until we’ve got nothing left to grift.”

Because finding & adding retro consoles/games to your hacked Sega Mini is sometimes more enticing than actually playing the games — I started looking into whether I could add Sega Master System and Turbo Grafx-16 / PC Engine titles to my collection of nostalgia (spoiler: I could).

“So the next time you're reading another depressing article about how everything is fucked, just remember that isn't totally true. Sure, A LOT of things are fucked — but A LOT of things are less fucked than before. And the tools for unfucking even more shit are sitting right in front of us.”

“When someone says something like "I’ve been trying to become enlightened" it sounds goofy. I get it. I even cringed a bit when writing it myself. But hear me out…”

“If "free download" is the only option available to someone visiting your album page, then you have not only taken away that fans choice of showing you a little financial appreciation, but you have also taken from that fan the possibility of being able to add your release to their Bandcamp Collection.”

“So Here Is The Thing (SHITT) about the current 'unfinished-until-it-is-finished' status of the HIGH FIVE FOR re-whatever that was started back in January 2018.”

“HI, here’s FIVE counterpoints FOR those people out there who think Submithub is an example of everything that is wrong with the music industry (it’s not).”

The Canadian election is October 21st, and since HI54 is a Canadian blog, I figured I'd break down our 🇨🇦 political parties by their best American comparisons.

“Life doesn’t need to work as stupidly as we keep letting a very small percentage at the top continue to sell it to us. Please vote accordingly.”

“But with the timely connection between what I wrote on the 10th and what David Byrne wrote on the 11th fresh in my mind, something jumped out at me.”

“But this post isn't another rant about how little streaming pays and whether or not Spotify and the like are evil/killing independent music. This post is about how all of those other posts almost never mention Bandcamp.”

“Piracy is happening because everybody is broke and we’re never going to fix anything if we keep shaking the wrong people upside down and hoping money can keep falling out of empty pockets.”