frozen octopus

I am starting a one month animation class tomorrow. Thought it would a cool self present for my upcoming birthday. At first I thought I would start it on my actual birthday but why wait to start learning. I am very curious to see if my skill levels up. 

A couple of things that always bring me joy are:

The "you can do this with Javascript" person on a CSS thread. It's like someone going to a thread about speaking French and saying "you can say this in Spanish".

When a podcast DJ plays an album at the wrong speed, fixes the speed, and leaves it on the recording. It is a signal to me that this is a show that I need to keep listening to.

I wasn't expecting to be so happy from an iOS update but this last one fixes something huge for me. Before the update everytime my partner or bandmate or friend sent me a message, Siri would say...

"So-and-so sent you a message that I can't read"

Yesterday after the update, Siri read all the Japanese messages in Japanese. It was such a relief. All that info that I usually had to pull the phone out to read was "magically" in my ear.

You don't notice a lot of updates but when they get around to one that affect you, it feels amazing.

Woke up today to find the veranda covered in snow. I told my partner yesterday that it was snow temperature. Growing up in a place with snowy winters, you develop that skill.

I really need to note where I am finding music along with the music I am listening to. It's easy to forget the spots and really frustrating when I want to go back to them. Sometimes you can go back with an Internet search but often the source fades into the distance.

Spent some time yesterday making an animation in Rough Animator for a flyer coming up. I found an old dance step illustration from the 1960s and created panels from them. There are only six panels so I created a transition panel to try and smooth things out. Turned out pretty good but I need to practice hands and faces a lot more.

I woke up today with a note night me wrote that "it is ok to not make titles for blog posts". Morning me is thinking "have a title but make some challenge like try to boil the post down to two words".

I am able to write titles or I could get lazy and let the robots write them. Two (or three) words seems more fun. I'm also kinda curious what a list of them would look like over time.

Very thankful for the medicine that is keeping the cough that started last Wednesday night. I am so zonked from it though that I made zero progress on the video I need to finish before the cherry trees start blooming in Tokyo. I have about three weeks to get it done. Spent the whole weekend practicing animation in Rough Animator. Nothing but false starts though. I do thing each false start was one better than the last though...so progress?

Don't wait until the last minute to get registered to vote if you are living outside the US. I made sure my info is up to date today. Felt good getting it done.

Link

I gave a music industry podcast a try today with some interesting results. Going into it my head was at even if it doesn't apply to me, I should really know about things. After one episode, I can't tell if I should keep listening to it or not. The two people talking were bringing up some things I hadn't thought/cared about. I even started to get sucked in for a second.

Then I realized at a point that they both weren't saying any of my personal keywords for why I play music. The web designer side of me wanted to take notes, the punk/indie drummer side of me wanted to change to another podcast.

I am going to try some other episodes to see if it was just the guest this week that was rubbing me the wrong way. If you want to know the podcast, send me a message dave@frozen-octopus.com.

My throat and eyes have been burning for a week.
Allergy season plus days and days of howling wind.
Sounds like a haunted house in our place.

I have a bunch of things to make and write.
None of it is happening due to arid brain conditions.
Cactus are growing inside my skull.

There was a weird amount of streetcar riding in my dream last night. Enough that I looked up "trolley" on a dream meaning website ^*.

Looks like it means that I am open-minded, starting to take a new journey in life, and are taking little steps toward your goals and pacing yourself.

Wonder where I am headed to?

^{* For fun}

Scraps of paper are RAM and notebooks are ROM. I had a bunch of small notebooks that sat on a shelf unused for a couple years. I tore them up into scrap paper and now it's almost all used up. For me, putting something into book form is really inhibiting. When I switched to scraps of paper, ideas started flowing like water.

I got to the end of all the 1950s Blue Note albums today. Each morning I’d start with an album.

It was an awesome way to start the day but I am a little fried on that era for a while. Once you get past the famous names, there is a lot of cool stuff that I never heard before that I am stoked to revisit someday.

Time to find a new morning ritual. That one was a good one.

I made a new shortcut in Apple Shortcuts to help me get on top of posting our shows online. We have about ten spots we need to update with each show.

With the shortcut, I answer a series of questions about the event. the shortcut then sets up to dos in Things 3 for each spot I need to post on.

It sets multiple to-dos actually. For a show, I am going with a post two weeks before, one week before, three days before,
day before, and day of.

It rules having a steal post schedule and getting all of that out of my mind.
The next step will be to start writing basic content in advance. ay It will be super basic content with room to customize it.

Show tomorrow and I have a setlist to write. I was trying to think of a way to describe my setlist pacing philosophy and then realized there is an emoji for it.

✨📈✨

Ideas seem to be flowing a little faster when I start writing them down on a notecard with a 6B pencil. Even though a 6B pencil is the arch enemy of a left-handed person, the line it makes is a thing of beauty. It's like if writing with a pencil felt like writing with a Sharpie marker.

Getting ideas off the notecard and to the posted stage has a couple extra steps. After the first time I tried it though, I am seeing how valuable they are.

The first is scanning the notecard with the camera app and getting the thought to the laptop. I thought I would hate this step by I am now seeing the light about it. This barrier of entry is keeping a lot of mental clutter out of my laptop. Some people keep every thought as a trigger to make connections for new ideas. I tend to find the old ideas distracting and having them around makes me tidy files instead of generate ideas.

The next step is cleaning the borked text after I scan it. This step forces me to read what I wrote. Self-editing is the least fun thing for me so this dreaded step actually happens when I use analog and digital together instead of one or the other.

This is a work in progress but hopefully it will help with the trouble I was having yesterday.

I am supposed to be promoting our show on Saturday. Don't know why but I'm just not feeling talkative or creative this week. Add to that three more shows coming up in three weeks. It's daunting (for me).

It might be the multiple spots to post on. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least nine places that I need to post show info.

Not posting is not an option so I am trying to brainstorm a way that will make doing all this feel like more magical. Clearly some sort of automation is needed.

A tomato seed from our veranda compost bucket is going crazy. We now, unintentionally, have a two foot tall, healthy tomato plant growing in our apartment.

If you touch it, your hands smell like tomato. It's starting to flower so next is hopefully a tomato.

The power of compost.

I was thinking about what is the one sentence I would use to summarize January 2024 while watching bands at a show last night. This drum pattern kept coming up in my mind:

R L Both Both

This simple drum pattern blew my mind in January. It's a runway to get off the ground and reach other drum patterns.