April 2020

There were 14 posts published in April 2020 (this is page 1 of 2).

Ghost Signals

Been watching a lot of YouTube about EuroRack. If you don’t know, EuroRack is a modular synth setup. I’ve always wanted to get into synth but for years I was so ignorant of it, that I didn’t even know the right terms to plug into Google for a proper search.

Most people see the word synth as a dark shibboleth used only by the most arcane of music producers and not for faint of heart hobbyist such as myself. Truth is is the kind of electronics that are simple for me to wrap my head around. I grew up with this kind of low voltage wiring as that is the kind of electrician my dad is. The circuitry of a EuroRack module is not dissimilar at all from a fire alarm.

There’s something romantic about how a synth takes the same current that we live with every day and sculpts if into – not only sounds – but entire songs. As if it was always there. It’s like sculpting. The sounds are there and always have been, you just have to use the knobs to tune them in. Like an antenna, picking up ghost signals from dead radio stations.

I’m Back

The last week as been a mess. I have been trying to use the Internet a lot less the last few days, and thus my posting on here has suffered. I’m back and the posts will resume.

Sleep

I haven’t been sleeping worth a damn the last few weeks. It has finally ended up with today where I’m running on four hours of sleep. I’m hoping I can stay up a little longer and reset my sleep schedule to something like a normal person.

So that’s been my day.

Friday Evening

Started back up on a Web Dev class I’d taken a break from to build this blog. Now that this is running “smoothly.” I can learn some more stuff to really mess this thing up. Will report back in more detail once I have some more of the class under my belt.

Read a few more volumes of Alita: Last Order. As it turns out, after book one, I never read the rest of the volumes I owned and forgot I still hadn’t read them. I’m usually pretty good a remembering my “To Read” pile, but I had packed those books so many times over so many moves that I guess it just slipped my mind. Anyway, I’m reading them now. The story has not go the places I feared it would from the first volume, so that’s good. But I do miss the post apocalyptic stories from the first volume.

Reading Day, Part 2

Read a few more trades of Battle Angel Alita. I’ve now moved onto Last Order. It’s better than I remember, and the end of Battle Angel was even more of a let down.

“Let down” is a little harsh. I heard the first cycle had to head early due to health reason on behalf of the author. Of course, doing some quick research for this post has yielded nothing, so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyway. I’m quickly burning through my cache of trades and will have to do something once I run out of the books I have for this series. Probably going to get serious about buying digital comics.

Reading Books

Most of today has been spent in books. I’ve plowed through two deluxe hardcovers of Battle Angel Alita. I’ve read the series before. In fact, Alita was one of the first comics I ever read. I even have old trades of it that are read the western left to right instead of the eastern right to left. Yes, Grandpa Millennial is older than you thought. It was quite on fleek.

Not all posts are long

Today was a complete blur. Really getting stuck in with the quarantine mindset. Not sure which end is up or what day of the week it is. Almost forgot to post today, but I am still here.

Just Enough Blogging

Popped back into my Tumblr account the other day. I open it up in fits and starts, and every time I do, I’m always pleasantly surprised by what I find there.

I can always find some art or some kind of mood setter that makes me want to create art. And the tool set for the Tumblr blog is perfectly suited to create the the kind of blog I want without paying for extra features.

While you can create just about any kind of content you wanted on the platform, the tool set and audience have this nice synergy that creates a cerise of conventions that don’t get too bogged down in elaborate pieces of content. Medium style posts don’t work on their due to their length. Bitter, Facebook-style social engineering posts don’t work due to the audience and lack of algorithmic support.

Micro communities burbble up from the electric aether for a few hours and then collapse back down. Every post is judged on its own merits. If it’s good enough, it won’t just be “liked”, it will be re-blogged to other’s pages and added back into the data-stream. Keeping it alive and vital for a few more minutes or hours.

Not everyone needs sometime like what I’ve built for self-expression. Sometimes the simple remix quality of the “reblog” button is just enough blogging.

Star Trek: Voyager Re-watch Part 3

Still making my way through this show. Season three was really uneventful. I kept reading episode synopsis and it just didn’t look like anything I wanted at all. So I moved to season 4 pretty quickly. Turns out, that I have watched every episode so far.

While I should be happy about that, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We’ll see.