SOTU 750 wrap!
Sorry that I didn't even get this in on time for SOTU 751. I can at least claim I put in some (too much) effort.Sorry it is so long winded. I just had a lot to say. I won't be hurt nor expect anybody to actually read the whole thing through, but here goes ...
Hey everybody and I am so sorry this has taken me so long. I have been working on a project to collect and organize the songs, seasons, and seasonistas and create a searchable database.
It is nowhere near a finished project, but I do now have an active list of seasons, seasonistas and songs that covers the life of SOTU on the Flarum server. Yes, I know there are 8 more years or so, and I just might get to those too. But for the Flarum lifetime... Anyway, I could talk about this for a while, but let's talk about the season since that is what I am here to do. Please indulge me, while I utilize some of the data driven insights I gleaned. That's how I roll.
- 18 participants plus supportive comments from @CeeJay and @dr_mitch
- 48 songs in spite of only 1 combined between canadajim and alandp
- @jon rules!! His 13(!!!) songs destroyed the previous record of 10 achieved on five separate occasions by three seasonistas; @CanadaJim @AlanDP Paul (dr mitch) twice and twice by your humble narrator. How do I know this? Data.
- Three of those five ten-song-seasons occured in the same season, the awesome season which @Nearsighted-Lemon-McKay hosted, SOTU 735, "The Twentieth Century". Paul, alan and myself couldn't resist going for the cycle. I then followed up with another ten-ball the very next season with Paul's alcohol induced season 736.
- Wendy, @UkeCan1 is far and away the most prolific seasonista in total songs be it via multi-song seasons or otherwise. 337 as of this writing!
- @DelGriff crossed the 100 song threshold.
- Your humble narrator is on a torrid pace with 165 songs.
Needless to say, sometimes less is more. One need only look at this seasons' single song contributors to see this. An impartial observer would rather have Jim's one song over all 9 of mine. I certainly would.
With that said, Wendy, Alan, Jim and Jon don't seem to lose any quality while they are being prolific. Wendy was talking about working on songs and them not working out etc. When I watch her perform it looks like she just glanlced at something and got it perfect, but that's where we differ. I work on it. It sucks. I post anyway. I will try to be better.
Some other highlights:
- new/ fresh blood
- @Aviva, My other sister! She already is showing great playing technique and of course she took the rest of the vocal genes from the family. It was fun to see them both choose the same song albeit kind of an obvious choice but they both channeled Janis extremely well.
- @KKimura great performance of a great song, "Poncho & Lefty". Hope you stick around a while. Sorry I don't know your name!
- I've seen Chris , @hands_on_lanzon a few times at open mic, but it was fun to have him join the forum. Nice performance too.
- It is good to see and hear Ylle, @kolibri . I know she is actually an OG, having joined this server on day 1. She tends to come in bursts (how do I know this? Data baby data). She will do several weeks and then disappear for a while, but she is hosting as i write this and hopefully we sill see another burst!
- Wendy and @joo were in top form, each earning a yellow flag but both really added so much to the season. Wendy's tormented opening twofer was fun and then I just loved the bicycle song at the end although it seemed a bit of a stretch theme-wise.
Sidebar: I am not a sports fan and when I don't follow the news I tend to find life much more tolerable so when Sabine, @MsBean was talking about rooting for Belgium, I had no clue that the US was playing them. (Edit: OK she is from Belgium!) I also know vaguely that in soccer (indulge me my yankiness please, I just can't call it "football") that sometimes the referee or umpire or judge or whatever they call it gives someone a yellow flag as a warning and then the next one is red. So that was why i was saying yellow flag. Can you get more than one yellow flag? Is red what comes after or is it jsut a different degree of penalty? I could ask chat gpt i guess.
At some point in a youtube thread Joo was trying to figure out why I said that she is sweet. So this is getting long so I wil have to limit my answer but here is a partial list:
- combine sound and visual
- convey deep emotional feelings lightened up with surreal humor
- you exemplify the combination of technical perfectionism and pouring your soul into your performances
- so many different ukuleles!
- always view everyone's songs and make a point to comment on them.
- your support for Jon and vice versa.
- outspoken about choices and behaviors but you only say nice things about people.
- fantastic song writer and you own the songs you cover as if you wrote them or at least that the song writer wrote it for you.
- fantastic voice and uke style
Tamar, @Xamar25 came back in full force with 3-6 songs depending on how you count the freedom medley. Team Enoch kicked ass, let's face it.
I was talking about multi-song seasons, but the single song seasonistas are awesome. Some of them have lives and some of them put everything in to one song and the quality shows.
@LimousinLil has a certain Je ne sais quoi. I love her voice and her attention to the visual.
Brian, @UkeFoote is always delivering amazing stuff and this week might have been one of his best and is certainly one of my favorites. I think his cover beat Steve Miller's original handily. Very cool rhythm section with the uke as drum and the Ubase.
I am really glad that Canada Jim didn't read my "instructions" carefully and gave us Joni Mitchell's "For Free", before abandoning us to go to Montreal. I am hoping a wedding, graduation, or music festival.
Same goes for Del – you can tell that he puts a lot of effort into each of his performances and it shoes. I loved the original and I also think he trumped Tears for Fears.
I am a huge Clash and Ralph, @OnlyUkeThatMatters fan. I loved this week's "Dictator" – perfect for the season and the attempt at angry young man look at the end was priceless.
I learned a new great Kris kristofferson song from the other Australia John @johnpoole. I always like your song selection and your whole performances. This season was no exception.
I always imagine Sabine toiling over her song and waiting til the last minute to get it as perfect as possible and sometimes she probably doesnt think the song meets her standards. All I know is that when I go to bed on Sunday night and wake up to see Sabine's smiling face it gives me a little extra kick in my step.
Can someone tell me what to call Nearsighted-lemon-mckay? Lemon? Mckay? Near? NLM? He is like the only one here almost that I haven't matched an actual name to. His attempted yellow flag failed. A fine contribution in true multi-track multi-hat form. Your song actually had the plus of being one of the few from someone other than potmo that chose one of the alternate themes.
Berni provided an original showing his love for my home country. Another classic.
I loved all the originals this week including those by joo (another happy yellow flag), delgrif and jon.
Alandp had an excellent excuse for missing this season. A certain ukulele forum that shall remain unmentioned had a "Tin Pan Alley" topic. Imagine you are Alandp and get to choose amongst all the songs you have mastered and can pick your favorites? I can't say I blame him and am very pleased to have taken the time to find his submissions...
Hard-Hearted Hanna
I'd Like to Dunk You in my Coffee
(Give Me the) Moon Over Brooklyn
"Ev'rything's Made For Love"
A quick look at some data and a USA rant follow so the rest of this post is not related to the season.
Here are a couple of "highlights".
Wendy, as I suspected, is not just our cover girl and twofer goddess, but is also just the #1 superstar with 337 submissions as of this writing. Here is the top 20:
Total songs:
rank Name total_songs
1 UkeCan1 337
2 CanadaJim 265
3 AlanDP 220
4 dr_mitch 173
5 potmo 162
6 jon 147
7 joo 134
8 LimousinLil 128
9 YorkSteve 125
10 Joko 105
10 Nearsighted-Lemon-McKay 105
12 Barbablanca 104
13 johnpoole 102
14 DelGriff 99
15 OnlyUkeThatMatters 93
16 uke4ia 83
17 UkeFoote 82
18 MsBean 66
19 Bystander 40
19 OneManAndHisPGUke 40
One might note that a certain potmo character has half this total in a period of less 10 months so this could turn into a serious crisis. Like I said, this is not really any kind of badge of honor when it is me and I need to take a little more time on my songs and wait til they reach a higher standard.
While I tackled the burning question as to whether Jon's 13 song total was a record, I had a little fun with the whole n-song season (i like referring to them as 5 balls or 8 balls meaning 5 or 8 submissions in a season) thang. So I have stacked bar charts which show users and their multi-song prowess divided into "number of songs" boxes.
on the actual site you can hover over the bars to see the numbers, can click on the little colored boxes in the legend to add or remove filters and you can sort table columns as well as download the csv yourself if you do that spreadsheet thang (and if you don't you don't know what you are missing!!)
There are 62 official "Seasonistas". Again I have to restate that this is only for the last 86 seasons, i.e the Flarum server. There are a little over 100 user accounts.
We have cracked 3000 songs! We are at 3,058!
I also looked at trends. There was an initial drop of posters per season following the start of the new forum. Since then, there has been a remarkably steady rate right around 20 participants (19.56 but who's counting? I am.). The 10 season moving average(average over last ten seasons) ranges between 17 and 22.
Meanwhile, as far as total songs per season goes, there was also the same initial drop from the very beginning buoyed by the 60 song season 669 but unlike total participants there has been a definite long term upward trend. The 60-song record was broken on season 739, Del's "Together" season with 62 songs.
Again less can be more. I need to simplify my seasons when and if I am graced with another opportunity to host.
Season 744 (Jon's Pinball) gave us a record ten day moving average (a great way to smooth out noise and see trends) hitting 48 songs an all-time high.
- The data doesnt have song data mapped to their users for the very first season on this server as @YorkSteve was taking credit for songs others did before kinks were worked out. There were 21 posters and 37 songs
- I do include Jon in seasons from where he had a previous username. I can't revive the vids, but we can see what song he did in which season for historical purposes.
Finally, I just want to say that just because a large chunk of the population are clueless morons, doesn't mean America is a bad place. We have a lot going for us and we shouldn't be judged on what is pretty much a global phenomenon which people don't really have much control over.
Val shared a video where some British apologist mused at how cute it is that we are so concerned with the disproportionate wealth and power of the elite. So, yeah no thanks y'all can keep your monarchy and I am happy that there aren't any arbitrary red coats breaking into my house and holding my family (ok just me) at gun point.
Part of the reason we have a reputation of being so hateful and racist is because it is backlash from a country that pretty much kicks the worlds ass when it comes to a diverse melting pot of cultures. How many countries would elect Barack Obama?
He was a huge disappointment to me, but the point is he showed that those supposedly radical ideas have a lot of traction, and I am still waiting to see any black faces leading their parties in other countries.
We have also faced worse adversity than what we do now and have risen to the occasion. Slavery, civil war, trail of tears, McCarthyism, Nixon, Vietnam, etc etc. Hell, read some of the crap that Lincoln said about blacks. He lifted habeus corpus. The slave states that didn't secede got to keep their slaves.
We always make progress it just is with two steps forward and 1.9 steps backward.
So don't confuse my disgust for the government with hate of America and its people.
And, as Jon Stewart said, when we finally repudiate this regime, "...there will be a joyful noise from the bowels of this great country that will make Hungary's repudiation of Orban look like an Amish Sabbath."
Sorry this is so long, but I really felt a need to mention everyone, couldnt help but geek out on the data, and felt a rant coming on so I didnt want it to go to waste. Besides, you are free to skip this just as you skip through my songs and I won't know that you only read the first sentence, unlike when I look at the analytics from my YouTube channel.
Did you really get this far? Your prize is a preview of my SOTU app! You can download a complete list of season seasonista and songs can look at all my pretty charts, and soon you will be able to search for a season by its number (very handy if you are writing a rap, to see all the people who are right there...yeah yeah i know there's a playlist but trust me it will come in handy)
My app https://app.hex.tech/fa81bd22-7d6a-43d1-927e-f4d12d0ce543/app/0317vBgxj9gl3bGc1TvEw6/latest
Please realize that this is not really in presentable form, but there is some useful stuff on it like being able to download the csv files and there are some other tidbits of info you might find useful... and if you are still there, thank you for indulging me my indulgences.
