frozen octopus

I've folded in tidying up my reminders and events in to my morning writing. It's turning out to be a thing that I look forward to which rules while the brain is halfway awake. Basically I've been adding why and how to tasks as a writing exercise.

With each task I have, I am supposed to be including what the outcome will look like and the next action(s). I can through about five to seven of them done within the 200 word goal. It is extra work for task creation for sure.

As I slowly get through them all, each task is becoming like a mini-story. It reads like...

• Do this
• Because you need things to be like this
• So do this first

I don't know why but reading the first two lines build up momentum. Then when I get to the third one, I have some speed built up and seem to do the thing more then when I don't include the "why" and "how". It's like every time my brain wants to act like a misbehaving child, the retort is in the next line.

Reminders: "Do this task"

Brain: "Why the eff should I?"

Reminders: "Because this is what success will look like."

Brain: "I don't know how."

Reminders: "Do this first."

New moon time coming up and that means a fresh cycle for the blog posts. Originally, I was going to be strict using the moon as a writing prompt. I had themes for each one, but that waned a bit. I do use the moon as the trigger to write the post still, but it is more fun to write about things exciting or interesting instead of the rigid schedule.

Using the moon as the schedule has made me more interested in the less famous phases of it as well. So, this is still a good way to blog for me.

The new moon is the recent phase, and that was supposed to be writing about things I am starting in on. Probably the most recent thing is that I am practicing drawing from a book called The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. There is a drawing practice schedule in it that I am following loosely.

I bring some random paper in some form with me and do the exercise while killing time somewhere. Cafe time is good. Waiting for someone shopping or whatever is good. Waiting for some band to start is good.

Also, my favorite thing so far with the book is that the author is s.｡oO particular about pencils. I laughed out loud when the first exercise called for a 3B pencil on newsprint-level paper. I proudly have those on my desk.

I use an application I love called Hazel on my Mac. It watches files and folders for almost anything you want and then applies rules to them that you set up.

One thing I use the most is rules that react to tags. When I tag files in Downloads, they magically move themselves where they need to be. You can burn through a long list of files, tag them up, and then move on while they sort themselves.

This rules except suddenly the keyboard shortcut I had set up for tagging files and folders stopped working. I seriously couldn't figure out why it wasn't working for a couple of weeks. I switched to right-clicking on files and tagging that way.

This morning I did a little more digging and finally figured out what was wrong with the shortcut. It is kind of maddening.

For my shortcut's menu title, I had "Tags...". I was using three periods. This is incorrect. It needs to be an actual ellipsis, which is made by pressing Option-semicolon.

After that, you might need to relaunch Finder, then tagging with a keyboard shortcut should be back.

Sometimes you just need to put headphones in and drum along with music you like. I did it for two hours yesterday. It is very rare for me to do. Usually I do things like repeat something forever to see where it evolves to or use some sort of randomness generator to make patterns.

Out of the blue yesterday I decided to just play along with stuff. I wasn't trying to play all the things perfectly. I wasn't trying to learn someone's style. It was more like punk music loving me before I knew how to play drums checking to see what level I am at now. Out of all the stuff yesterday, I really enjoyed playing Buzzcocks.

I am not anti playing along to other people's music for fun, by the way. If I do learn someone else's drumming, it is usually a measure or two I find interesting.

My current obsession is learning the drum beat at the beginning of Dave Brubeck Take Five. It is fascinating to me that a song in 5/4 was a hit. I am guessing but 99.9% of all hits are in 4/4. So I am trying to get my head around why this beat is pleasing to people's even loving ears yet it is an odd number.

My colors for this blog are white, black, grey, and light blue. For quite a while I’ve been trying to find a couple shades of blue for the link colors and things like vignettes. Sitting at a desk trying to conjure colors was a bust.

On our trip to the mountains last weekend, I decided to add “find a couple shades of blue” to the stuff to do list.

We were up on a mountain right above the cloud line and the sky was so blue. I sampled the color with an app. It got a little darker a couple hours later and I sampled that sky as well.

Added the two blues to the CSS and crossed my fingers. They look so good. Very stoked about them.

We are going to Nagano and Hokkaido this month. There is chances of snow for both places. If there is, I am going to sample white and black.