So I’m trying out something new, short little title-less text posts in between bigger pieces. You can’t link to them and they only live here on the home page. Think of them as notes in the margin. An experiment! You’re welcome ☺️

1. Played at Transgenre festival

I was extremely lucky this year to play at a number of amazing queer events, including Gaytimes, Minus18’s Wear It Purple Day event, Bonez Queer Party, and supporting Brendan Maclean at his Melbourne show — but the highlight by far was going to Sydney to perform at the first Transgenre festival!

Organized by my friends Ellie and Tim, it was an incredibly special show, and I felt very fortunate to be a part of it.

“Wolfjay is glorious. Hyperpop doesn’t do it justice, this just plain soars, live autotuned vocals over truly magnificent beats and pads, it’s enough to put a roar in the quietest of throats. Absolutely brilliant.” — The Underground Stage

2. Worked on my debut album

It’s not ready yet, but I spent heaps of time this year on my debut album. As of today, the 23rd of December, I’ve made 134 iterations across the 10 songs on the album’s tracklist, and I’m awfully close to 1,000 hours in total. Yikes.

I don’t have a release date yet, but rest assured I want this record to be really great and am giving it the time it needs to be the best thing I could possibly make.

3. Need, Want, Will.

I was able to take a few weeks off work in April and planted myself in the dining room of my house with a little recording setup and decided to work on some new music! And for extra fun (aka stress) I decided to throw a listening party/house show at the end of it 🙃

I got into a good swing of things each day, and the night of the 14th came around very quickly! About 30 friends packed into my little cottage home to hear the record, while my friend DJ aka @bright_garbage accompanied with some incredible live projection visuals.

I published my performance of 6 of my favourites on Youtube and Bandcamp as ‘Need, Want Will’, a Wolfjay live performance project. It’s the first little preview of songs that’ll be on the debut wolfjay album 💖

→ Buy Need, Want, Will on Bandcamp

4. Worked on my live sets

Around a year ago I decided to make the move from playing guitar and synth live to just focussing on live vocals + vocal manipulation. I kept working on that this year, and am really happy with how that setup has been going. It feels super fun embelishing my vocals with guitar pedals live. It’s a lot more fun than trying to balance an instrument as well, plus it’s so much easier to travel with for shows!

5. Was easy on myself

I think a lot about all the things I want to do with music, and the toll that music has taken on my health in the past. I want to be prolific, but I also want to survive. I felt for a long time that I hadn’t earned the right to take a break with music. It was essential to always be releasing something, hyping people up, doing more, and seeming like you were building and growing and increasing. But most of the artists I love don’t do that. They’ll release something, promote it, perform it or tour it, then go back to a quiet place and slowly start making something new again.

I’m not sure where I got the impression that I had to be at every stage of the process at all times, but it’s definitely why I’ve rushed things in the past and not allowed myself to rest.

Realistically, I don’t have much interest in an endless cycle of single, promo, hype every few months. I would much rather aim to put out a great record every 3-4 years and just take my time with it.

I realise that the timing might not be great, and there might not be much of an audience to come back to once I get around to the first cycle of that process, but I’d rather start building towards a cadence that feels comfortable now than keep investing in something that doesn’t suit me knowing I’m just kicking the can down the road.

In conclusion — 2023 was quiet and fun 📫 and I’m excited to keep working on things in 2024! 💖 🏡 thank you for all your support, xoxo jackie / wolfjay

Yesterday it was 37 degrees. Today it is 23. I try not to think about what the temperature dropping 24 degrees in as many hours means for the health of the planet I live on.

I head into my little office and sit at my desk and wait to see if any bright idea pops into my head to investigate or interogate for a while.

I open Facebook for some reason. It shows me something I posted six years ago for some reason. It is a list of things I wanted to accomplish in 2017. I scan the list. I start to unpack each item.

I remember the person who wrote this post, but they are not who I am now. As glad as I am that I am not that person I cringe realising I was them once. I wonder if I am who I am now because of who I was then? Tracing the paths back feels like a bigger task than I am looking for today.

1. Visit Philadelphia

I only wrote this because I’d been listening to Modern Baseball for years and the songs felt comfortable. Maybe the songs feel comfortable because of some trait of where they were written? Maybe that feeling of comfort would extend past the songs if I visited the place they were written? I did not visit Philadelphia in 2017.

2. Make stuff without asking for permission first

After years of volunteering on the creative team of a large pentecostal megachurch and two years of extraordinarily strenuous study at university, I was desperate for opportunities to use my technical and creative skills that weren’t qualified by practical outcomes.

After struggling to find projects to contribute to in Adelaide, I created Wolfjay to give myself an opportunity to do whatever I wanted. I made an EP, played some shows, put on an art exhibition, and created a new identity to inhabit.

Now in 2023 I’m glad I learned a framework for taking skills learned on my own on the internet and using them to solve problems for communities. I learned the hard way, and often out of frustration at my intentions being misconstrued, but eventually learned how to listen and suggest and contribute and negotiate.

My work day to day now is at least 85% acknowledging or identifying problems, making plans, suggesting solutions, and implementing plans.

The things I occupy my time with outside of work hours though are almost entirely around self-expression. Constantly trying to learn and understand things so I can build new things to share a perspective. Sometimes songs, sometimes layouts for a house I might live in one day, sometimes a shoot schedule for a film I might never make.

And this balance definitely started in 2017 when I finally gave myself room to balance both.

3. Learn how to make a good coffee

Could I have learned how to make a good coffee in 2017? Yes. Did I? No.

This was a shallow, surface level goal.

I did not learn how to make a good coffee. In 2017 I was living in the cheapest room in the cheapest house in one of the most expensive suburbs in Adelaide. The only furniture I owned was a broken mattress with springs sticking out of it, a disgusting sofa that didn’t sit level, and an unassembled desk. There were three other bedrooms, and no living room. Five other people lived in that house while I was there. I never met two of them. I never knew any of their last names, except the one I would transfer my $440 of rent to on the 14th of the month.

My then undiagnosed ADHD made it exceptionally plan more than 12 hours ahead for anything other than employment, bills, and making music. Spending $5 a day on coffee was infinitely easier to justify than the various paraphernalia required to prepare a coffee, and that’s before considering I never had reliable access to a kitchen other than when at a coworking space at night.

After 5 years, and investing at least $10,000 into various cafe’s, I shifted to shitty home job freeze dried coffees with a splash of chocolate powder in an effort to save some money. I still do now know how to make a good coffee.

4. Start a podcast

I did not start a podcast. I did release a few episodes of a mixtape-esque thing on Soundcloud, but an episode got flagged for copyright infringement and I stopped making them. It’s something I’ve kept thinking about in the years since, but I wonder what the function of it would be. What problem is it solving for me? The biggest ache for me creatively for years has been lack of community, and for years I’ve thought the only option is to build a community around myself, to position myself as a central point people can congregate around. Maybe that also is a hangover from my time at a pentecostal church, where any suggestion of participating in a community outside of the church, for any reason other than to glean members of it away and to the church, was discouraged. But the idea of being so self-important that people are following me or around me or anything like that has always made me very very anxious!

My goal now is to just be a part of other communities, not try and make a community around myself. So no, I still have not started a podcast.

5. Not talk about how busy I am when people ask how I’m doing

I can’t remember how I responded when people asked me this in 2017. I think when I used to say that I was busy, the mental image in my head when I’d say it was that I was treading water, out in the ocean, with massive waves crashing around me. So yeah I was fucking busy trying not to drown! I don’t think I was ever proud about being busy. I just didn’t have an option and was working hard to stay alive!

I’m still busy, but with fewer things. I don’t say “i’m busy” as some bizarre linkedin badge of honour clickbait bullshit. I just have a bunch of things I like doing and spread my time between them. Am still busy!

6. Meet people in person that I only know on the internet

Fuck yeah I did this! I went on a bunch of little trips around AUS in 2017, met up and hung out with some cool people in NSW and VIC. Was nice! I still try hang out with people from the internet IRL when I can.

7. Keep a better record of how I spend my time

Eh I think this was the “i’m busy trying to survive” thing again, who cares. I survived. No need to keep a score so I can compare myself with the shit other people are doing. Who cares. Maybe I got a little better at recording key events, it’s not hard to go back and find photos and notes on what I did in 2017, but also eh fuck it, it takes an hour to record something you spent two hours on. You don’t have to document everything if it gets in the way. I over documented for a while and stopped because it was distorting what I was doing and how I’d participate in things. It’s nice to just experience things sometimes.

8. Visit Tokyo again

I did not visit Tokyo again. I spent a couple weeks there during my degree and really loved it. I bought flights really cheap to go over, but work leading up to the trip was really inconsistent and I couldn’t make it happen. I was working at a shitty camera store and the boss didn’t give me the time off I asked for, and I couldn’t get a refund on the flights, so I just let it go. Was fired from the job a few weeks later and in a financial pickle, so am glad I didn’t put that extra strain on myself. I told friends at the time that I bailed on the trip because my Grandma was unwell. I still haven’t been back to Tokyo.

9. Read less clickbait posts

Eh who cares, clickbait sucks and I still read it lmao.

10. Collaborate with beautiful, hardworking, honest people.

Yeah look I know this is cringe lol. Not sure how to measure this but I did work with some nice people on launching wolfjay stuff who became long term friends from then on. I think this idea went on to inform my approach to working/hiring/collaborating with people though. I try to only work with people who are kind, who do good work, and who have good work ethic. If anyone of those is missing shit will fall apart eventually. If their work rocks and they’re consistent, but they’re a cunt, it won’t work long term. If they’re lovely and do amazing work but don’t get stuff over on time or take days to respond to messages, it’s not gonna work long term. If they’re lovely, and super consistent, but their work just fuckin sucks, it’s not gonna work long term.

This has saved me a lot of time and stress and emotional energy, and everytime something hasn’t worked out it’s because one of these things were lacking and I tried to pretend it wasn’t a big deal.

It also massively applies to me and my work and my relationships as well! If I’m doing something and it’s good, and I enjoy it, but I’m not consistent with it, it won’t work. Or I’m consistent and it’s good but I have a bad attitude or am not excited for it, it won’t work. Or if I’m consistent and keen but the thing just sucks, it won’t work. I try to pay attention to those things in projects I’m working on, or in jobs I’m in, or in relationships with other people; romantic or platonic. It’s just always the best indicator of things.

11. Remember to feed the fish twice a week.

Didn’t own any fish. Must have thought it was a cute funny relatable thing to drop on a list. Isn’t cute funny or relatable. Just shows I wasn’t a very good editor. Maybe I’m still not.

12. Practice resting.

This almost definitely came from some bullshit linkedin entrepeneur influencer bullshit. I’m glad I didn’t rest then. If I rested I probably wouldn’t have survived. I did what I had to to make something of a very fucking shit situation. The fire consuming your house won’t stop so you can rest. Put that shit out!

13. Be more generous.

Eh idk, I’ve always been keen to help where I can. This is some bullshit “holier than thou” shit, fuck off.

14. Read a few more books.

Again, another undiagonosed ADHD moment. Reading books means focusing, focusing means sitting still, sitting still is really hard. Didn’t read many books then, and only read a few more now. Audiobooks are a bit better, but the circumstances have to be fucking perfect for it to work. Not a big deal.

15. Play a gig in every state in Australia.

I’ve set this goal every year since then, until this year. It’s a pointless goal that isn’t grounded in anything other than being able to say I did it. Still haven’t played in TAS, WA, or NT. Played SA, VIC, NSW, and QLD in 2019 and it put me in massive amounts of debt and almost killed me. Vanity metrics can fuck off. I could blow $5k and play shows to empty rooms across the country tomorrow. Wouldn’t prove anything other than the fact than that I had $5k to blow.

16. Go to Portugal

Ahhh another pentecostal hangover. I dated someone in the last 9 months I was at the church and we’d say that one day we’d go to Portugal together. After we broke up around when I left the church I wanted to go to Portugal on my own purely out of spite. Another pointless goal grounded in nothing except being able to say that I did it.

17. Move into my own apartment

There was no way this was going to happen in 2017. It didn’t didn’t happen until 2021, and even then not because I planned for it or could afford it. I just couldn’t find another housemate and spent all my savings on paying double rent and it was easier to my still undiagnosed ADHD brain to apply for higher paying jobs so I could afford the rent than find another housemate.

The end of 2016 was maybe the first time though that I really started thinking about what kind of situation I wanted to work towards. I thought about it a lot. I dreamed of a little apartment, on a third or fourth floor in the Adelaide CBD, with a view of the Jacaranda trees on Wakefield st when they bloom in the last few months of the year. I’d have a small dog who’d sleep on the couch while I worked on music, and who’d come with me when I’d run errands during the day. Maybe a Jack Russel, or a Schnauzer, or a West Highland White.

I moved from Adelaide in 2019 when I was fired while still on probation for a job I took almost 6 months to interview and apply for. I moved to Melbourne and spent a year subletting rooms and small apartments and doing whatever work I could find. I eventually moved into a small cottage in Abbotsford and a few months later took over the lease. I adopted a small dog, a beagle x pug named Cora.

I work from home, and have a small study with a big window and some instruments and computers. Cora sleeps behind me on a brown leather couch while I’m working. It’s rare that I’m in the study and she isn’t. Sometimes her big little brother Ringo Starr joins us, but most of the time he lies on the bed looking out the window.

It didn’t happen until 5 years later, but I’m also surprised it happened as quickly as it did. I love my little house, and my little job, my little activities, and my little dogs.

wanna swap stems with more music pals this year, demos, WIPs, 4 bar ideas, riffs, beats, prod ideas, im keen :)

— wolfjay (@wo1fjay) December 31, 2022

A few friends replied and DM’d me so I thought I’d put something together ✨

I realised that that working out an approach for sharing little bits of ideas could have a lot of overlap with another idea I’ve wanted to try for ages… making little bits of ideas!

One of my favourite artists, Masakatsu Takagi, has an ongoing series of small compositions called ‘Marginalia’. They are daily piano recordings at Takagi’s private studio surrounded by mountains in Hyogo, Japan.

As per his Bandcamp, “open all the windows, welcome sounds from the nature, playing the Piano without preparing, no overdubbing, no fixing, just as it is.”

I think this is very beautiful! It’s very interesting how ideas in these short recordings echo throughout his larger, more prepared works. I would definitely reccomend spending some time with them.

I’m going to try something similar, spending time each day recording little ideas on synth, guitar, and sampler. No more than half an hour. Uploaded as soon as I make them.

I’m going to call it ‘WJ23 Dailies’, a shared Dropbox folder that I’m going to upload little ideas to. Am going to try do it everyday 🐉 The first one is up now 💗

link: WJ23 dailies

I’m releasing them under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which basically means you can:

• adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the recordings
• copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

As long as you:

• give appropriate credit to me (tag me on whatever platforms you’re sharing it on, and send me a link, I’m excited to hear what you make!)
• don’t use it for commercial purposes
• share whatever you make under the same Creative Commons license that I’ve used

Made something you love that you want to release on streaming platforms, sell, or use commercially? Get in touch with me!. Would love to chat <3

I’m super excited to make more little things more regularly, and super keen to hear any ideas of yours that these little recordings might spark ⛈

xoxo gossip wolfjay 🌸🍾✈️

(You can also listen on Soundcloud if that is your jam 😌)

I’m trying to find new ways of sharing music outside of big traditiional releases because they take a lot of time and can be very expensive. Playing live is my favourite way of sharing works in progress, but live shows are inaccessible for a lot of people, so I thought this might be another fun option! This release won’t go on streaming, but the songs on it will all get official big releases one day hopefully ✨

Liner Notes

1. In Realtime

“take a deep breathe and forget about all that, you’re here in the present now, for now, for now”

In Realtime came out of nowhere. I sat down at my desk one Saturday, opened a new Logic session, and just made it. It happened so quickly. I started it at 10am and submitted the mastered track to streaming at 11pm. One of the rare times I just get in the zone and every new idea builds perfectly on the last. It feels like a perfect evolution of what I’ve done before and what new attitudes I want to draw out from my music going forward. A blessing. 🙏

2. I Hope It Makes Me Feel Better (Demo)

I wrote I Hope It Makes Me Feel Better in the months waiting for my ADHD screening session, trying to plan ahead but not really being sure what was going to happen. During that time I also decided to leave the label I had been signed to for the last few years, which was really the last thing holding me to a dream I’d had an unhealthy obsession with since starting Wolfjay. Of moving to NYC and being a part of the music community there. It all fell apart at the start of COVID but has been hard to let go off.

This song is about time moving very fast, and the future running at you at full speed, but also about understanding that this moment will feel like it happened a long time ago in the very near future. I’m trying to do my best, despite everything.

“i’ll do things when i’m ready to, album was due on the third of june. 2023’s getting closer, 2023’s going quickly, 2023 was so long ago.”

3. Personality ft. Ella Stik (Demo)

This song fucking rips. It’s very silly and very fun. I’ve played it at a few shows lately and just lands so well every time. Maybe the most fun wolfjay song? Also features someone from the internet that I’m a big fan of <3 long live ella stik 💗

photo by Dave McCarthy from my last show of the year. the file corrupted when I tried to save it from ig but I like it :)

4. All Along ft. Crook & Shahrae (Slowed and Reverbed Edit)

“and i’ll pass you in the street, pretend I don’t recognise your face, anymore, anymore, anymore — remember a memory of me, and realise it was a lie, all along, all along, all along”

An edit, of a remix, of one of my own songs, featuring my friends Crook & Shahrae. A silly idea executed with complete sincerity and conviction. Dropping early 2023 alongside the standard edit. Stay tuned 🦋

5. Damned (Demo)

Wolfjay brutalist pop mode? A song about how soul wrenching it can be to get romantically involved with a friend, deliberately blurring lines and then struggling to get a clear view of the situation.

It’s not perfect, yet, but I’m super proud of the lyrics and production on this song. I wrote it with naarm/melb nb angel Guthrie who breathed so much life into it.

“feels like I’ve lived this night before, backroom of a share house that I used to know, my chem on the boom, all our friends are gone, i’m making eyes at you, you’re making eyes at me as well”

“damned if we do, damned if we don’t, we can take it slow, we can take it anywhere, said you don’t know how to keep this cool, it’s all new for you, but it’s all new for me as well”

“i just wanna hang out all night, fuck around, make you laugh, get high, try not to think about the way this feels, i’m just happy to feel comfortable around someone else at last”

5. Pretty (Demo)

This one is very early on in development still but fuck it—I think it rips. If people are dancing to it at shows there’s no reason you can’t dance to it at home now as well 🧡 will likely change a bunch and I have no idea when it’ll officially drop so here it is, in it’s current beautiful and unfinished form. Pretty.

“i’m sick of waiting, it’s debilitating, when the features of your face, don’t match your heart”

thank u for checking out my little demo cd! I hope it’s made you smile and dance and process feelings and thoughts like it’s done for me while making it.

🫶 tysm 💗

I tried out a few text prompt based AI art generators a few months ago when they first started making waves online. It was possible to make some visually interesting images if you found a sweet spot in the text prompt system, but for the most part their images generated were careless, smeary messes.

What I was seeing now was different. Using an image based prompt system where the user uploads photos of themselves, the images I’ve seen from this new system are, despite being heavily stylised, distinctly recogniseable. They retain key details that make the user look like themselves. I recognised them instantly. They looked like my friends. They looked like my family.

Caught off guard by how far these tools had come in only a few months, I decided to take another look.

Part 1:

Tool, or thief?

From my basic understanding and unscientific research, artificial intelligence systems work by analysing a data set, identifying patterns, then using that data to create rules to follow. A user gives it a prompt, either a word or a phrase or an image, and it generates something based on the prompt following the rules it’s created.

The more data the system has to work with, the more intricate the rules it can create, and the more detailed the result it generates will be.

I’ve read about cases where someone will feed an AI system with samples of their work, and use the system to augment and automate parts of their workflow. It seems like a very powerful and positive development. But what happens when your work is included in a data set without your consent, and used to generate things against your best interests?

Just yesterday I opened Instagram to see @Carlosbob, an artist I follow, posting about discovering that their work was in the latest release of LAION’s image-text dataset.

So what is AI? Is it a useful tool? Or a faceless thief? Will it make things better? Or way way way fucking worse. Does it even matter? I tried to find out.

Part 2:

Unstable Diffusion.

🚨 ❶ Common Crawl

Common Crawl is where it all starts, a non-profit with the aim of “democratizing access to web information by producing and maintaining an open repository of web crawl data that is universally accessible and analyzable”.

Basically, they look at billions of sites and records that content in a big database, which is free for anyone to access.

🚨 ❷ LAION

The next step in the chain is LAION (Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network), another non-profit that looks up all the content that Common Crawl lists in its database. In particular, it looks at images and their descriptions and adds them to something called a ‘dataset’.

In September 2022, visual artist Lapine shared on Twitter that they had found photos of themself taken privately for clinical documentation by a Doctor in 2013 on ‘Have I Been Trained’, a tool created to help artists see if their art had been included in an AI system dataset.

🚩My face is in the #LAION dataset. In 2013 a doctor photographed my face as part of clinical documentation. He died in 2018 and somehow that image ended up somewhere online and then ended up in the dataset- the image that I signed a consent form for my doctor- not for a dataset. pic.twitter.com/TrvjdZtyjD

— Lapine (@LapineDeLaTerre) September 16, 2022

After the Doctors death in 2018, these images were stolen and published online, making them accessible by Common Crawl, which in turn meant they ended up in LAION’s dataset.

That dataset currently contains 5 billion entries of images and text descriptions. It’s LAION’s belief that if it is publicly accessible, it is appropriate to catalogue, regardless of the content, it’s copyright status, or any privacy concerns.

They have no moderation process for what is entered into their dataset, and while they do accept requests to remove content, they only action requests if the content in question explicitly includes personally identifiable information like someones name, phone number, or address.

It is trivially easy to take content from LAION’s dataset, which they make available for free for anyone, and cross reference it with other online services to quickly find someones personally identifiable information off just a photograph.

Feeling anxious yet?

🚨 ❸ Stability.ai

Stability.ai is the company resonsible for Stable Diffusion, currently one of the main image generating AI systems. They’re currently valued at over $1 billion, and distribute Stable Diffusion for free.

They use LAION’s dataset to generate images, with no restrictions on what content can be created using their tools. This includes applying their tool to image of people without their knowledge or consent to create pornographic or violent imagery.

Their founder, Emad Mostaque, told The Verge in September 22 that “ultimately, it’s peoples’ responsibility as to whether they are ethical, moral, and legal in how they operate this technology”.

They acknowldged when releasing the system to the public that it could be used to create unsafe content, but they hoped “everyone will use this in an ethical, moral and legal manner”.

They recently raised $101 million in their latest funding round to extend the scope of their tool to also include video and audio.

🚨 ❹ Prisma Labs and their peers

While heaps companies have been able to build AI image generation tools that use Stable Diffusion due to its open source distribution, Prisma Labs’ Lensa.ai is currently the most popular option.

Though Prisma Labs say they delete all user data after 24 hours, they also say that they own the images you create. Forever. In perpetuity. With no way to opt out.

In the past, Prisma labs received $2m in investment from Mail.ru, which was founded by Yuri Milner, who acted as an intermediary for Vladimir Putin to make large investments in Facebook and Twitter between 2009 and 2011. They now claim on social media that Mail.ru stopped investing in Prisma Labs in 2019, and that the company has no involvement in Russia.

Another tool that offers this functionality, Different Diffusion Me, looks like a basic web front end for Stable Diffusion, but is actually run by Tencent, the Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate also responsible for TikTok. Tencent last made facial recognition news in 2021 when it used it’s tech to detect when underage users in China were attempting to avoid a state mandated digital curfew of 10pm.

Part 3:

Bleak shit.

AI generated content is going to affect us all significantly in the very near future. This is so much more than stylised avatars. This is about what makes us ourselves.

For decades, we’ve been told to be active on platforms. To share our work, our process, our private lives, ourselves. And in return we’ll be granted visibility. An audience. Attention. Maybe a career, or oppurtunities, or income, or fame.

But what happens when all of that content, all of that imagery, all of those private details find their way into a dataset like LAION’s?

What happens when someone uses Spotify’s vast database of music and metadata to extend your listening preferences with AI generated content? Maybe an AI won’t create the song you open Spotify to listen to, but what about the song that plays automatically after that?

What happens when TikTok or Youtube start serving you supplementary content in the style of your favourite creator? Maybe they don’t try to pretend it’s them, but the avatar on your screen shares their face, or their voice?

source: La Meme Young on Instagram

What happens when you start getting served ads that feature a model who shares physical traits with people you’ve swiped right on on dating apps, or someone wearing an item of clothing you’ve been looking at online, while music plays that sounds almost like your current favourite song?

What happens to your privacy if someone can impersonate you almost perfectly online? Or can post content that you’re not even sure you didn’t post yourself?

What happens to the content we do post, if people become so used to their feeds being full of AI generated content? Will creators have to start emulating trends created by an AI system? What if AI generated content doesn’t replace human created art, but people are happy enough with this new category of simplified and personalised content that they just aren’t bothered with the extra messiness of something made by a human?

What will our art be worth then?

Part 4:

Being online.

We aren’t at that point yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that future, and it’ll be enabled by the way we act online now.

What does it mean to “be online” if any action you take, or content you share, just helps an AI to become a better impersonation of you?

If any participation you have in a platform just strengthens a system designed to impede a users ability to act in their own best interest?

In his talk ‘How Designers Ruined The World’, Mike Monteiro talks about the effect creating things without also taking responsibility for them can have on the world. “When designers disregard the effect their work has on our environment they are best negligible, and at worst culpable”. When design is practiced without forethought to consequences, without responsibility, what we get is not creation - but destruction.”

I see very little difference in this context between designers and anyone who is active online.

What responsibility do we have? To each other, and to ourselves?

Part 5:

Where’s the brain?

I have memories of visiting my Grandma as a child, having recently gotten a new gizmo or gadget. Maybe a Gameboy, or an iPod, or a digital camera. Every single time her reaction to these toys was the same. Caution, verging on disdain.

After several years of being aware of this, she gave a justification. “If you can’t see where it’s brain is, don’t trust it.”

I realised that while, to me, it made sense how these pieces of technology functioned, and what allowed them to perform their functions, it must have been a mystery to my elderly Ukrainian grandmother.

But I now realise that while those memories are still vivid, I have not remembered that lesson while growing up. I am surrounded by and beholden to things that I absolutely do not understand. Systems and processes that I’ve put blind faith in. Either to make money, or participate in a community, or just because it’s what everyone else around me is doing.

My privacy conscious friends have warned me of certain products or fads, but my reaction has often been “oh well, if it goes bad I guess we’ll all go down together”. A fool. What I hadn’t considered are the specific things in my life that are meaningful to me, and how quickly those things could be torn away from me using data I’ve handed over online without a second thought.

I started this post wanting to better understand the mechanisms that are a part of AI systems, but upon finishing it I realise that I need to better understand the systems I’m apart of.

I started writing and researching yesterday morning, around 10:18am. I sat in my lounge room, next to my dog, with some music on. I moved to the kitchen in the afternoon. Today, I finished it off in my study. What have tech companies learned about me during that time? What data points of mine have been added to a dataset that may one day inform an AI system?

Maybe they know from the ambient sensors in my tablet that I’ve had the lights off, but the curtains open.

Maybe they know from the white noise coming through the microphone in my smartphone that I’ve had the air conditioner on./

Maybe they know from the photo I sent a friend this morning that I’m wearing activewear, despite my smartwatch showing I’ve barely made any progress on my activitiy goals for the day.

How will this information be used? Will I see more Nike products in my timelines this week? Will I be shown different jobs from recruiters to apply for? Will my utility premiums increase because my provider can see I’m spending more time at home? Maybe my health insurance premiums will go up because I’ve been less active than normal.

Of all of these systems, I can definitely start saying no to the obviously superflous ones; the ones asking for my personal data in exchange for some anime avatars.

I can practice being more critical. I can begin to question if the systems around me are actually serving me, or the communities I’m a part of, or the art I want to create and surround myself with.

And if not?

Fuck off.

In primary school, I was just undisciplined, lazy, a “gifted student” who lacked the dedication to fulfil my potential.

In high school, I was just depressed, anxious, and “emo” - to the point of breaking the school’s record for absentee days (91 in a single year) while still being near the top of most of my classes.

As an adult, I was just unfocused, inconsistent, and unreliable.

This led to really poor mental health, which led to mental health care plans, which led to counsellors trying to give me new ways of framing the same shitty situations. I felt like an alien. I didn’t feel like I was incredibly isolated from people around me, other than the people I bonded with specifically over our shared struggles with undiagnosed ADHD symptoms - particularly members of the queer community.

But with everyone I looked up to growing up telling me I just needed to work harder, I kept pushing and struggling and burning out.

I thought it might just be anxious about money, so slowly got better-paying jobs. I thought it might be stress from turbulent living situations, so I moved out on my own. I thought it might be an addiction to work, so adopted a few dogs to keep me active and distract me from constantly working.

But even after all of those things, I was still struggling all of the time. And a lot of my friends haven’t made it that far. A few of my friends didn’t make it that far.

For a while, I thought I was just clever enough to keep my head above water despite everything. But now I realise it’s because despite undiagnosed ADHD I was given opportunities, flexibility, and the benefit of the doubt that isn’t given to everyone. I’m a young, 28-year-old, mostly healthy, white person, with a western name, who can easily pass as a straight white cis man in most situations.

My friends who were only diagnosed with ADHD as adults didn’t grow up wealthy. I do not think that’s a coincidence. My friends who didn’t make it to 28 weren’t given the same benefit of the doubt I have been afforded. I do not think that’s a coincidence. Health does not exist in a vacuum, and privilege seeps into every crevice and influences everything it touches.

Unlike a lot of my friends, and at any other point in my adult life, I was able to afford the upfront $950 fee and wait for my Medicare rebate. What happens for people who can’t afford that?

waiting to join a $1000 zoom call

I waited four months for my telehealth session. It went well. I saw Dr Steven Chau at The Melbourne Clinic who had been recommended to me by a lovely queer friend around my age who had recently been diagnosed with ADHD. It lasted a few hours. Dr Chau asked me about my experiences growing up, at school, and at work. What things are like for me socially. I told him as much as I could. Most of it was very hard to recall. A lot of memories I’d tried to forget.

I received my report in an email. ADHD, social anxiety, and maybe somewhere on the Autism spectrum as well. I thought of my queer friends who hadn’t managed to get an appointment with someone sympathetic to queer experiences and spent so much money only to not be treated fairly.

I went to my GP, did a blood test and an ECG, waited a few days, and got my Ritalin prescription. I slowly increased my dosage over a few weeks until I felt I reached a comfortable balance. Made an appointment for an Autism screening session.

Ritalin is helping me tap into that hyper-focus mode more easily now. Is this what day-to-day life is like for other people? It feels strange to be just able to be productive like this. I’m trying to cherish it. Other than that though I have a lot of homework to do. I still don’t understand why my brain is the way it is, what stimulates it and what makes it struggle. But knowing that some of those feelings have a name now has helped me finally feel like less of an alien. Less of an outlier. More human.

I’m trying hard not to revisit memories of having difficulty managing my workload in jobs, getting fired, and struggling to find employment again. Wondering what my life would be like if I had been diagnosed as a kid. When I told my mum that I had been diagnosed she said she had always had a hunch that I might have something. I wonder what life would have been like.

I’m trying hard to think about all the times my inconsistency and missed deadlines and lack of focus were met with opportunities and chances and grace. I wonder what life would have been like if I looked different or sounded different or was born in a different place. I wonder would life would have been like.

I’m moving forward with more of an understanding of my brain than I’ve ever had before, and I hope as many people as possible can have that same experience.

If you’re a queer person who hasn’t been able to afford to go through the process of an ADHD screening, please reach out. My email is contact at wolfjay dot com. I don’t have much money, but I do have a small community of people who care. I’d like to help if I can, in whatever way is useful to you. Thank you for reading this, and if you’re ever in doubt - please know that you are human and that you aren’t alone.

some context 4 u 🫶 👨‍❤️‍💋‍👨

Hello! my name is jackie, nice to meet you / nice to see you again. This is the first installment of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: an annual report for my wolfjay project. I’ve wanted to do an annual report-ish thing for years, but turns out I’m really good at thinking of reasons why I simply can’t do one. But fuck all of them! This might be imperfect, but I’m gonna give it a red hot go 🥵

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the impact I want to have on the community around me, and one of the things that felt important to me was wanting to make things easier for others than they were for me. Especially young queer artists. Marginalised groups don’t have the same support networks that their priveleged peers do. We need to stick together! 💗 I don’t know how much of this will be useful, but I’m hoping that the transparency will maybe help a little.

To me, wolfjay is a chance to:

• make friends with a bunch of cool people doing cool shit
• be sincere about shit that isn’t too cringe
• think big and think small
• do fun shit with computers + music tech + socials + marketing
• also super low risk so I can fuck around with shit I’m interested in without impacting if I can pay rent or not

@ other artists, the priorities I have for this project might not match what you want out of yours, so please bear that in mind 😌

income 💰 💸 😩

In 2021-2022 I made $3368.75 off of music, with most of that coming from live performance and physical bandcamp sales. This is a bunch more than previous years! Mostly because I’m playing solo now so don’t have to pay for rehearsal rooms and someone’s fee, and only have to cover transport / food / drink / other shit for one person. Also put my rate up a bit and for the most part played shows that were paid at least a $250 performance fee, often closer to $400.

This is also the first time that I’ve been able to do merch, after just paralysing anxiety around ever making my money back in the past. BUT I met super cool lovely angel @sicknasty.xyz who helped me plan out a preorder only merch drop. People’s preorders paid for the merch run, the shirts were printed SUPER fast, and people got their orders within a month of ordering. Fucking sick. And made a bit of money :)

I did two different designs, both based on art my pal @picapsso made for my EP artwork :) I also tried out A5 lino prints printed by tree paper gallery here in Naarm, but they didn’t sell very well. If anyone wants one please buy one, I have a drawer full of them still lol.

The next biggest source of income for me was APRA AMCOS royalties, mostly because two of my songs got synced for an SBS show The Heights. They found my music after looking on Triple J Unearthed, and the show has been broadcast internationally which led to several larger than normal payments from APRA.

Lastly, and somewhat unsurprisingly, streaming made up less than 1% of my income. I had to round it up for the graph in order for it to be visible. This is only made by my releases up to She Calls To Me, all of my releases after that were released on ‘Sleep Well Records’. The deal I have with them is a 50/50 split for 5 years, and I only start getting paid after the costs recoup. I haven’t gotten anything off streaming from these tracks yet.

expenses 🤑 🤡 😭

My expenses all up were $8118.99. This is broken down to contributing to my utilities bills at home, mixing and mastering costs associated with finishing songs, putting on/playing shows, making merch, and purchasing equipment to make music.

Normally this would be much more balanced, but due to lockdowns and being anxious around being in venues due to COVID the money I spent was much further weighted towards buying gear. Around 30% of this equipment were basic studio tools like speakers and cables so that I could make use of my spare room as a production space, with the remaining 70% being buying components for my live setup so that I can easily and reliably play solo shows with live guitar and backing tracks.

This included getting my pedalboard professionally built by Nick Smethurst aka @pedalboring, local legend who taught me SO much about gear selection, board development, and best practices for reliability. I’ve not had a single issue with my live setup at the several shows I’ve played since completing it, and it also doubles as having a reliable way to track great sounding guitars at home, and a really flexible effects chain to route audio through for reamping meaning I can use all of my gear for way more applications, without having to rewire anything. I’ve been able to get much more done during sessions than I previously would, because I’m no longer having to stop to address technical issues. I expect this to pay even further dividends next financial year when I’m able to perform more frequently.

Merch production was my next biggest expense, which is great because they were my second largest source of income. This covered blank t-shirt purchasing, printing with Sick Nasty, compostable shipping packaging, and shipment.

some shit I wanna try 🫵 🌯 🧘‍♂️

better reporting

So that I can have better data for next years report I should definitely track my budgets a lot better! would be sick to have per project budgets as well as year total income/expenses so I can suss the viability of projects.

publishing + sync

I’m not interesting in playing the publishing game of endless soul destroying cowriting sessions churning out hearless songs that are mid at best just for a publisher to try hype up and drop the second you don’t get thos streams BUT I do want to reach out to some sync agents and see if they want to rep my stuff so I can try and get some sync spots :)

production skills

Want to get way better at production! Happy with how my guitar production work sounds after spending a bunch of time on it and investing in my setup and workflow, but want to be better at the electronic side of things. I’ve had a bunch of false starts in this over the last year or so, trying to buy and learn gear to help flesh out my understanding in this area (fucked around but didn’t click with the waldorf blofeld, elektron digitakt, poly beebo) but want to have another run at things! I’ve been invited to be a part of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio’s 12 week advanced professional development course which will definitely help with this!

(side note: I started writing this months ago and just had the final week of the advanced PD course at Mess and ugh yeah I’m way fucking better at elec production now lol BUT ALAS I NEED TO KEEP UP THE FACADE THAT I PUBLISHED THIS AT THE START OF THE FINANCIAL YEAR DESPITE IT NOW BEING OCTOBER)

my live set

My live setup at the moment is a bit of a hangover from when I was playing live with a drummer, just playing along to a backing track without much interaction. I try augment it with some cool guitar stuff and manipulation with pedals but it doesn’t feel right yet. I used to have an octatrack that i had to sell to pay rent when I first moved to Naarm (fuckin rip) and really want to grab a mk1 if one pops up at a decent price! Also I reckon the guitar live is a bit of a crutch for me, can’t move around much when I’m playing and have had way more fun in rehearsals when I’m just singing. Want to try out using the octa for playback + sampling, and running my vocals through some of my pedals. Maybe have a little synth as well who knows hehe!

changing up my release process

I’ve been releasing stuff for the last few years through Sleep Well Records, run by Alyse Vellturo aka pronoun who’s been the fuckin best. I’ve learned so much from her and become really good friends. Hanging out with her in NYC in march 2020 was fuckin surreal and made me real happy. I’ve started thinking about all the cool shit I could do if I cough maybe started my own label cough (thinking out loud here let’s see how things go) 😬

apply for some fuckin grants you grub

moneys sick, would love to have some money to do some things

establish the wolfjay cinematic universe

Just want to do more shit! Like, idk, a blog! or some videos about shit I think is cool shit! wolfjay is a frame of mind, time isn’t linear, etc, ie.

smaller slices more frequently

A friend was telling me about this shit they do, eating heaps of small meals a day instead of big meals, sounds like something that could be cool with making stuff. I like to have ideas for big things but folks I simply do not have the time or money or attention span to see it through, gonna try doing little things every few weeks instead and see how that shit goes. 🤡

Made a little spreadsheet situation to see the average time between releases of wolfjay music and golly it was simply too much time between releases. Since I started wolfjay in 2017 on average i’ve put something out every 5 months. Since I signed with sleep well it crept up to every 7 months. I just passed a year since I put anything out! Don’t like that at all! More shit more often please!

I know there’s a lot of goals there! let’s see how I go! thanks for checking this out and I hope there was something in there for you :) ty for reading! love u! ciao ciao gossip wolfjay xoxo

💸 📆 🛩 🍄

my name is jackie ☺️ i’ve been doing stuff as wolfjay since 2017 ☺️

This is a little blog for me to drop down thoughts about things. I’ve tried having a website in the past bdsut I don’t think many people looked at it and it made me anxious about writing things on it because it looked so fancy and the writing wasn’t fancy.

i’ve wanted a little blog for so long!

My friends talk about their ‘tumblr phases’ and pull up their archives of posts and have beautiful imperfect records of what they were into at different times. I do not ☺️ my online existence has been scattered across platforms and phases and friendship groups and communities. From the outside I think it would look like I’m just really inconsistent and non-committal, but I don’t think that’s fair. I’m so ready to commit to something, I’m just trying to find something that feels nice.

I like forums, they’re cool, but sometimes I just forget they exist and disappear.

I like twitter, but there’s so much going on there. Are my tweets still cool if no one else thinks they’re cool?

Facebook sucks

Instagram sucks

Close friends is ehhhhhhh, but I feel shitty if I share something and no one responds

so here’s a little blog ☺️ I fought with the command line on my computer for a solid 2 hours today to get it to compile properly.

It looks shitty at the moment ☺️

am going to keep fucking around with things and build up a nice little custom theme for myself maybe!

I learned about Jekyll during university and setup my first site with the help of someone in my class for a journal while I was in bangkok on a month long study trip. It sucked! I overcooked it too much and made it not fun.

I have a few ideas for things I want to write about.

• annual report each year on my income from music and what I spent money on
• breakdowns of projects and go into all the nitty gritty detail that gets glossed over when just publishing shit
• try and breakdown my thought processes around new things I want to do
• forget this exists for a while and disappear while I do fun things then pop back when I want to talk about those things ☺️

Anyways I think I’m all done for now, I want to publish this tonight then get something to eat and hang out with my dogs. lol first blog post hehe

xoxo gossip wolfjay