I’m going to have a crack at doing a monthly blog post. I have had enough things happening recently (gonna cheat and include some stuff that happened in June as well) to write a decently long post, so here goes. Some of the stuff here will overlap with what I’ve already posted to cohost or elsewhere, but bear with me.
We have a new baby! He was born rather early, so he’s been in the NICU for a while, but he’s almost ready to come home now—looking forward to that!! It was very painful to see him with an IV and a tube in his nose in the incubator, but that is all gone now.
He has a specific condition that may manifest itself in a wide range of ways later on. He has no immediate issues right now, so once he’s home we will just be taking care of him like his elder siblings when they were his age and see how things go. From what I’ve read, the way the condition manifests at a young age is not necessarily predictive of what may happen later. After hearing the news, I gathered what information I could and felt driven to do something but the fact is that there is no One Thing to do—it is a matter of taking one day at a time and addressing any issues if and when they arise.
I’m not quite sure how much I want to talk about this subject online really, but I will also figure that out as I go. I’m just looking forward to him finally coming home! Might not have much energy to keep up a monthly pace in this blog much once he does come home, but I’ll give it a try at least.
I did a new stream in nanoloop two a few weeks ago. Give it a listen!! The first 10 minutes or so have all the good stuff, with all the patterns I had created on and off for a few months. The rest is me making some new patterns on the fly. I did make some nice patterns in the remaining 30 minutes but the pace is a lot slower than all the stuff at the start.
I enjoy streaming my jams because they leave a record of my process making the patterns, and because I am encouraged to keep things going, which helps me actually make stuff instead of struggling with the wide range of possible options available when trying to create music. I’m not sure if they’re that interesting for other people to listen to, but I really like doing them, and I listen to my own jams for quite a while after recording them, so I’ll keep doing more when I can. I like starting with existing material in the first part of the stream and then improvising some new patterns afterwards, but it might take me a while to make enough material for the first half of the stream. I’ll chip away at it or just start a completely improvised stream—we’ll see.
First of all, I’m pouring one out for the Tom Ravenscroft show on BBC Radio 6 in all its 3-hour glory, because it seems to have been cut to just one hour now (it’s called The Ravers Hour now, based on the name of the show’s final 1-hour segment). I really enjoyed listening to his show because his taste is really up my alley, and his playlists help me find a lot of cool new music. I will keep listening to The Ravers Hour but from now on, I think I’ll try looking through bandcamp myself now and then to find some new albums to listen to.
One recent find is Could We Be More from a band called Kokoroko. It’s very nice with a wide range of styles throughout the album. I’ve added it to my “202304” playlist to join the handful of albums that I bought in that month.
I like doing long playlists like this every few months. Each playlist is vaguely in the range of 10 hours, so it's almost like having a Hi-MD again except all the music is now in flac format!
I got a clear in Tetris the Grand Master the other month, and I got myself a 4-way gate and some new buttons for my arcade stick to celebrate. I was hoping to try working to clear the game in a shorter time with this new gate (the 4-way restrictor only lets the lever move in the cardinal directions, which helps prevent unintended inputs that can happen with the stock 8-way gate that I had) but I haven’t played that much of either TGM or TGM2 recently—Tetris ends up sucking up all my free time once I start it up! I will get back to these two games eventually though, I’m sure. TGM is just too much fun to shelve indefinitely.
I was playing the Umihara Kawase series the other week though. I managed to get to the easiest ending (ending 0) in a full run from start to finish in Sayonara Umihara Kawase—I had been tackling the harder stages for a long while and I was surprised to find that I could manage the earlier stages much more easily now. This series is also very challenging and rather addictive with a “just one more try” element to it. I say this every time I speak about Umihara Kawase, but the movement is so satisfying, particularly once you get used to the finer nuances of controlling your momentum.
I’ve not been able to go swimming as much as I’d like to, owing to the new arrival and quite a heavy workload, but my lessons are going quite well. I’m able to do full lengths in front crawl without too much hassle, and the instructor is showing us how to do it more efficiently than before. This new method might take me a bit of time to get used to, but I can already feel the difference compared to how I used to swim. I’m finding front crawl a lot more fun now—about as much fun as backstroke.
Haven’t done much of that outside of gathering information related to my son’s condition, but I want to get back to John Berger’s Portraits soon. It’s a really compelling read, because he’s clearly had so much life experience and he draws from it in every essay included in the book.
That’s about it for this month. Hope to see you again next month!
By mojilove on 2023-07-18