I'd like to thank everyone who reached out to me or spared a thought in passing. It means a lot, and I'm grateful to know so many wonderful people. It's been a difficult month. Dealing with the death of someone close is never easy, but the hole after my father's passing is something I can't seem to get through. He was only sixty. We weren't on good terms, but at least there was always some minuscule potential for improvement. To this day I receive condolences from his more distant friends, acquaintances, collaborators, coworkers etc. There's a degree of dissonance between what they say about him and my own memory, but I suppose it's normal. I dialled his number from memory one time, and it took me a few moments to realise what I just did. I know that I'm not over it, but life has to go onwards. In that way, I'm still not completely over the fact I had two brothers, even though it's been fourteen years. They aren't here, and I know it on an intellectual level, but I sometimes stop to think about what they might be doing now. Despite my manner of writing, I'm not nearly as much of a mess as this post. And there's good news too. First, very late this Monday, I became an uncle, and to a first girl born in our direct line in at least four generations. It was premature birth, but she's as good and healthy as a 7th-month delivery could possibly be. Second, I got into my first choice PhD programme and already went through orientation, TAship stuff etc. Whatever comes next, I'll at least be busy.
Thanks for coming in and sharing. If you consider this post a mess, then I'm impressed with your messes. The adage of 'seeing grief more like waves that come and go, rather than a hill to pass over.' has been useful for me looking back (and forward). Congrats on becoming an uncle! Exciting times. I'll be joining you in November - unless its a surprise set of fraternal twins, we're in a similar all-boy trend. Good luck with the PhD program.
Hey y'all. Sheesh, been a while. Let me think, what's new... - Was back home for some time and really, really enjoyed it. Instead of being overcome with homesickness, though, I came to the conclusion that I just really enjoy being on vacation at home. But really enjoying vacation at home is, of course, predicated on the fact that my day-to-day isn't at home. And I really like my day-to-day in Freiburg. So that was a nice feeling. I also decided, for about the fourth time this year, that I'm really okay just studying part-time, working part-time, and generally having time to relax and figure things out, even if I don't eventually wanna become an English professor or whatever. It's a process. - I started working out regularly for the second time in my life and this time I'm following through. It's been about two months of regular at-home body-weight training and hOly moly, y'all, working out is... fun? I enjoy the feeling of consistent personal improvement, and I look good, and I just feel more... at home in my body. It's also become a kind of meditation for me, a reflection on the fact that our intellectual and spiritual life, although in some ways separate from immediate physical constraints, is nevertheless dependent on our "life in three dimensions," as Chad Harbach puts it. While I was at home I played basketball while the family was at church and it was kind of the shit. - I should really be writing a paper right now. I'm gradually knocking out what will eventually be 20 pages about Shakespeare's As You Like It, and holy shit guys, I feel like a Real Scholar. I have a pretty good view of the critical consensus on the character I'm focusing on (Jaques), have an original and interesting idea that I haven't seen anywhere else in the literature, and I think my arguments are solid. It's obviously work to get it all on paper, but I really like it, even despite my usual insane levels of procrastination. I just kinda wish the topic wasn't so niche--almost everyone I'd want to share my work with wouldn't really know enough about the play to "get" it. Oh well. How've y'all been?
Oh! Hey! Totally forgot because I've been spending all of my time writing this damn paper--I brought back my Maschine Mikro from home, finally bought Ableton Live and a MIDI keyboard, and started producing! I still suck hardcore, and I can't seem to find a decent straightforward course-type-internet-thing, so if anyone has tips please let me know! Otherwise I'll continue stumbling around in the hip-hop-tinted darkness until I find my way ;)
I don't know any particular course to follow, but start hanging around some audio production communities and then you'll start hearing about the stuff you should be learning about. r/wearethemusicmakers is not bad. I'm sure there are countless forums. Also, at a certain point, share and look for feedback. Hubski has a few people floating around that know their stuff in this regard too.
Yoyo. Are you trying to make hip hop beats? I have experience here. Watch a lot of YouTube tutorials (even the bad ones) on how to make "rapper"-type beat. You'll get a sense of the main features and how producers screw around with them. After that it's just adding your own spin to it. At least that's how me and my brother made our... err.. tape in FL Studio.
Uni life is treating me well so far. I have enjoyed the more "student-life" side of it way more than I thought I would. Swedish Uni student-life, or at least student life at LiU is in parts very, very, silly. And especially Nolle-p, which is the name of the introduction period. And i thought I would find that silliness very hard to take, but I ended up really enjoying the showmanship of it all. I have found myself being nostalgic about it (yes, it was less than a month ago, but when it is an experience you aren't going to have again it feels like it's more cemented in the past). I am probably going to involve myself in it for the benefit of next years freshers, which is definetly not something i thought I would be interested in. I ended up having a really rough week where the prospect of manageing to finish any course let alone a whole degree seemed impossible but i have thankfully gotten over that and I feel like I'm doing fairly well. Everything so far has been turned in on time and hopefully I'll be able to keep that up. Living alone has also turned out to be fine. I can't say I see it as huge improvement, but I do love my apartment and it does feel like home.
Well... looks like I'm going to the Netherlands for 2 months to help film videos at this recycling project called precious plastic! I'm not paid, but i get to live with 40 awesome people doing cool stuff rent free with 3 meal/day provided :) And I might stay a couple weeks after to explore (or just head straight to Berlin and party? still undecided) It's kind of random how it came to be, I just applied on a whim but now I need to look up cheap ways to get to Amsterdam. I'll probably buy a ticket from Boston since i'm going there soon anyway for my friend's clown-themed birthday party. My life's really all over the place right now. Ever since I graduated university 3 years ago honestly. I kind of get anxious sometimes, because it's not going in any specific direction, and now I'm 25, pretty poor and never had a real life job. And my degree in marketing is getting more useless every year. But on the other hand I make enough to survive, have lots of fun and free time and interesting experiences. And in the last 3 years I've travelled a bunch, sold beard oil to Urban Outfitters, worked as an architecture photographer, started my own tour company and helped organise a bunch of burning man stuff including a 600 people party. I guess while I'm only responsible for myself, it's fine. It's just hard to to compare myself to my sister sometimes. She just got married a week ago, has a good stable job with potential and almost 100k in savings.
Don't worry too much about this. Comparisons with family members can be awful sometimes; even if they aren't judging it can be a kind of ever-present reminder of what could be different. The most important thing is doing what you're passionate about. I'm certain you'll come out on top.I kind of get anxious sometimes, because it's not going in any specific direction, and now I'm 25, pretty poor and never had a real life job.
Might be able to count me in an European meetup!
I recently discovered that the Trilobite Beetle exist and I think they're pretty nifty. This one is a lady and from what I understand, even though it's technically mature, it's technically not because in this species, females never leave the larval stage. Nature's interesting like that sometimes.
You got me interested, and I was all caught up in the alien beauty of these things until... The long neck and the baby cheeks on these guys is actually too much for me, I can't stop laughing OR seeing those weird baby-faced aliens from Dr. Who! It's like someone had a perfectly good mix of bug and armor, and decided "What if we minimize the bug to spec into armor?" Now we just have pretty pieces of walking chitin. Thanks for existing, trilobite beetle!
Giraffe Weevil Hercules Beetle Tortoise Beetle Rhinoceros Beetle Beetles tend to take on some very interesting designs. Sometimes I forget how crazy they can get.
Dude. I once wrote to someone about spiders and this past year I emailed a botanist from a local university. Both got back to me in like, a week. It's kind of awesome that some researchers go out of their way to make themselves so accessible.
I've watched every match of the Rugby World Cup so far - my poor partner is dealing with it so well. The whistle blows must echo in her dreams now.. But last night Uruguay beat Fiji! Fiji! Who a week ago pushed the previous World Cup finalist, Australia, for most of their match. Uruguay! It was fantastic, up there with Japan beating South Africa in 2015 - a truly monumental occasion for the sport. Japan had a 100% win ratio with one of the powerhouses of the sport, as that was the only time they had ever met (until this year and South Africa soundly beat them, but shh). Uruguay may have won the final with the tears on display. So nice. Tweaked my back warming up for deadlifts. The hardest part is explaining the weight being used at the time - the gym regulars assumed it was something heavy and monstrous but nay, 120kg. I have a habit of slacking off throughout the warm up sets and not taking them seriously.. Hopefully this recent tweak beats that mindset back a bit more cause only once I have my physical ability hampered do I appreciate how easy moving was before. NZ has it's Bird of the Year Competition coming up and I'd sorely like Kererū to go back to back. If you haven't seen this critter before, They are plump, gorgeous, make a delightful 'Wooshwooshwoosh' sound when they take off and are known to get drunk from eating fermented berries and falling out of their trees. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/15/new-zealand-bird-of-the-year-drunk-gluttonous-kereru-pigeon-wins Described by the our very own conservation group as gluttonous and glamourous - how could you not crown them once more?
Just realized I'm turning 51 next week. Working from home all week because my dog's Vestibular Disease has returned, and she can't stand up to go outside and pee without falling over, and she doesn't want to eat because the dizziness makes her queasy. Well, technically working from a coffee shop for about 2-3 hours in the morning while my dog is asleep, and then I bunk off the rest of the day and focus on the dog. I keep the laptop open and Outlook and Slack refreshing, so I know if anyone needs me. Right now my job is mostly documenting processes. So nobody cares where I work from... just that I get the work done. Lost all my armor to a crash in Fallout 76. Have since rebuilt everything - armor, weapons, CAMP, etc. - and am enjoying the heck out of the game again. (See: "bunking off" above.) I have Tennis Elbow from all the heavy work I have been doing (motorcycle repair, garden, writing, construction project for the neighbor), and need to get Physical Therapy. But... can't get a call back from the physical therapy center near me. So... I'm mostly ignoring it. Like ya do. Impeachment has begun, for good reason. (Note: Anyone who says it's "just one call" is parroting Republican talking points and doesn't know shit about what they are talking about. There were multiple calls and an explicit "promise" made that caused the original whistleblower to speak up. The Republicans are doing the same thing they did with the Muller Report, by constructing a strawman - "no obstruction" vs "one phone transcript" - that they can debunk in the media.) The weather in Seattle is beautiful. The Seattle Seawolves schedule came out, and it looks like I might be traveling to away games in Washington DC and Atlanta, this year. I'm volunteering for a Seattle Slam wheelchair rugby event this weekend. No, I have no idea how you play rugby in a wheelchair, and I have purposefully not researched it. I want to see it in person, first. I had a realization: Most people only use 5% of the capabilities of any piece of software. I am surprised every day at the utterly simple and basic functions in generic software - MS Outlook, Word, Excel, Chrome, Slack, email - that people have NO CLUE about. And inevitably I find out about their lack of knowledge by watching them do something horribly convoluted and ... I ask ... what the heck are you doing?!? Click the thingie there. See? Their eyes open wide... the angels sing, the clouds part... and they think I'm some kind of software guru. I mean... it's a button on the screen you use every single day!?!? OK. Brain is empty. Now I get to go write a training for salespeople, training them on the basics of how to follow up after an initial call with a customer, and what questions you need to ask when you talk to them. It's like ... how does a salesperson not know this already, instinctively?!? Who are we hiring?!?
Most software melts into a puddle if you use 10% of the capabilities. Theoretically, Logic Pro can be used to mix surround audio for film. Practically, you have to do it in 7 minute chunks, it's got quarter-frame accuracy, and it handles its automation on 16 channels of MIDI and 128 levels of control so really, you can automate about five parameters a time across your entire timeline before the thing dumps. I've broken Excel before. I've broken Word. I've broken Pro Tools. Many features are little-known because they were added as afterthoughts, are poorly documented and break the shit out of things when you use them. But yeah, the Excel flight simulator was hilarious.Most people only use 5% of the capabilities of any piece of software. I am surprised every day at the utterly simple and basic functions in generic software - MS Outlook, Word, Excel, Chrome, Slack, email - that people have NO CLUE about.
Urgh this is giving me terrible flashbacks to the time I had to write/format a 25 page book (with timeline graphics, bunch of icons and text) on goddamn powerpoint because the company didn't have a decent software like InDesign or anything. You better know I learned all the ways to layer, group and center every asset. It worked... but damn it SUCKED and took waaay longer than needed. Because once you decide you want that timeline 3 pixels to the left, you gotta go change it on every page and re-align every little detail. But at least now I have a good answer if someone ever asks me for a weakness in an interview.
"why don't you just do it in Gimp/Audacity?" "Because I don't hate myself. Why do you hate yourself? Why do you hate me? Why do you think i should spend twelve times as long as it should normally take just so you can support 'free' software? Why don't you understand that professionals are willing to pay for professional tools and that if anyone other than Youtubers showing you how you can spend fifteen hours doing a fifteen minute job used this shit, you wouldn't have to bring it up in conversation we'd already be doing it?"
Sure, there are those of us who can wring the unholy shit out of software and processors, and make anything break. But even rudimentary things - like basic list formatting a Word doc (one of the few things it does well) - is beyond many users. They just poke and prod at it, and finally just hit the spacebar nine times in a row to indent... and then don't get why it prints out like shit. Derf. So done.
Yeah no. We have this fight every year or so and you're still very wrong. Word SUCKS ASS at formatting a basic list. Word wants your basic list to be a very-not-basic list, and it's going to try and guess what the fuck your list should look like, and it will take your first input to that list not as what you want to do, but as some secret gnostic keyboard macro of some list that an engineer back in 1985 wanted to do, and getting the list that you want is never going to fucking happen because Microsoft definitely knows lists better than you do so fucking suck it up, buttercup, because this is your list and if it doesn't match your expectations it's because you don't know lists and Microsoft does. Clippy happened because Microsoft sucks so hard at understanding customer input that they fucking auto-launched a wizard to create text documents. And that wizard has no more clue what you're trying to do, has no more interest in determining your desires, has no more utility at aiding you in your quest for a fucking list than the dropdown menu does, which by the way is now three different menus two of which are context-sensitive. I use TD Ameritrade. Know what TD Ameritrade does? It launches a goddamn plaintext AI to get you where you want to go. They recognize that what they're doing is byzantine, ridiculous and subject to categorization that makes sense to financial professionals but is goddamn Sumerian to the average retail investor so they created "Ted" to sit there and parse your angry confusion into useful instruction. But TD Ameritrade is trying to help me self-build a Coverdell for my kid, not format a fucking list. You know why people hit the spacebar nine times? Because IT LOOKS RIGHT. You know what a decent coder would do? ASK IF NINE SPACES IS WHAT YOUR LIST WANTS TO LOOK LIKE. Microsoft? Microsoft adds bullets, adjusts the tabs for the rest of your document, discards your Undo history so you can't revert and alters your format styles such that your report has now become a grocery list because fuck you, that's why. Google Docs is abject crippleware in many, many ways. It spies on every character you type. But people use Google Docs instead of Word because when you make a list in Google Docs, you end up with a mutherfucking LIST. Your argument, simply put, is that software can do a whole lot more if you're willing to sink your life into learning how to squint your eyes, hold it with three fingers and hit it sideways in order to drive the nail without recognizing that most people just want a goddamn hammer. And you act as if no one has ever picked up a goddamn hammer before. Ghastly fucking UI is not something to scorn people for failing to overcome, it's something that needs to be pilloried and expunged with vehemence and hatred. Ghastly fucking UI is not a side effect of fast design, it's the core issue preventing the usage of most software. And because it prevents the usage, it prevents the testing, and in turn leads to software that melts into a puddle if you use ten percent of it. Logic Pro Audio (in Emagic parlance, Logic Platinum 6) was the last version of Logic to ship with a written manual. In the "surround" section of the manual, the Apple engineers had written "although Logic has the facilities to create surround mixes, we recommend that you leave this task to professionals." In something with "Pro Audio" in the goddamn name of the software. That's Apple, admitting that they weren't interested in supporting what they bought. Mostly they wanted to gut it to bring you GarageBand. Imagine what music production would look like if they were willing to make their shit usable.
I'm mulling over the idea of what my next car will be. The Saab still runs, but its days are clearly numbered. It leaks a bit of oil, coolant, power steering fluid, wiper fluid... count my blessings it doesn't leak gas. Various sensors are starting to fail (like those really important ones that let you know the side door dingy light has gone out). The suspension bushings are worn and it makes some god-awful noises if the street needs repaving (and you can bet CalTrans it does). The passenger-side airbag has persistent sensor malfunctions where I need to keep the passenger-side seatbelt plugged-in to shut it up. This persisted even after I had a dealer replace the Takata anti-personnel airbags. One of the spark plugs got burped up in oil a while back. One set of gaskets and plugs later, it had a moment where it did it again, but not since? It's been months and I don't know if that problem is gone or sleeping. It's a good chunk into the 200k mileage club, and I put a lot of miles on it for my daily commute. Part of me wants a more eco-friendly car, something with good mileage that doesn't leave a Deepwater Horizon-esque wake of fluids behind it. At the same time, I don't want to downgrade the fun-ness of my car, so Prius et al are off the table. There's a Volt or a Model 3, but I'm not super into having a car payment. And even though I'm doing pretty alright financially right now, both those are on the far side of feasible. I'm still not convinced that I shouldn't just get another Craigslist buy for a few grand and drive it into the ground over the next few years.
A used Volt is that cheap? I could handle that out of pocket. I may have to look into that. One thing about used electrics and hybrids that gives me pause is I don't know how well the batteries age. I've heard some stories of faster-than-normal depreciation due to battery death.
Yeah. Battery-age is a common concern... and yet people buy gas-powered cars without oil change records or service records at all. And that is seen as fine and normal. The fact is, you few colossal battery failures/expenses you hear about are the ones that are exciting and colossal... you don't hear about the batteries doing fine at 300k-miles because they don't fit the narrative that hybrids/electrics are "risky". And the Volt has a gas generator anyway. I drove mine for 2 months without plugging it in once - only on gas - before I got the outlet installed at my house for the high-powered charging. (I weirdly didn't have any outlets on the front side of my house!) So even if your battery dies completely, you just have a really fucking heavy gas-powered car. :-)