Beautiful, short orchestral pieces, with lots to hear. I originally knew Ann Annie through this album, which is much more ambient.
After about four months since writing this post, I'm still typing away in Helix and using Zellij. Overall, it's been great. I don't miss emacs too much these days. The speed of Helix is pretty lovely. Lazygit has replaced Magit (begrudgingly) when combined with Zellij's floating panes.
Today, I stumbled onto a Mac application called Antinote. It's pretty delightful in a few ways: a charming in-application introduction, simple features, does the job well, and I can happily pay the creator $5 to support them and now own the application.
I've got Every Single Little Piece on repeat. The entire album that it comes from, We're All Down The Rabbit Hole is excellent. But start with this one. I can't get over how beautiful it is.
On Tuesday, my Music Nerds group got together to discuss Frank Zappa's "Apostrophe" from 1974. It's really quite something. I won't go into a ton of detail, but I was interested how composer-oriented it seemed for me. At times it even reminded me of Dan Deacon, a favourite musican of mine. I'll leave you with this quote from Zappa:
Question: As a man with a sense of history, though, do you have any idea of how you'd like to be remembered?
Zappa: I don't care whether I'm remembered. As a matter of fact, there's a lot of people who would like to forget about me as soon as possible, and I'm on their side! You know? Just ... hurry up and get it over with. I do what I do because I like doing it, I do it for my amusement first, if it amuses you ... that's fine. I'm happy that you'll participate in it. But, uh, after I am dead and gone, there is no need to deal with any of this stuff, because it is not written for future generations, it is not performed for future generations. It is performed for now. Get it while it's hot, you know? That's it.
Over the last two days I've read all of "Maus". I had tried to read it when I was younger but couldn't. Maybe I was too afraid of how horrific it would be; how disturbed and sad I would feel. There is no shortage of that and it is brutal. I have had dreams about it for two nights in a row, now. It's not an easy, fun read, but it is a must read. Sad to hear it has been banned at times (but am I surprised?). Go read it, if you can.
Listening to PORCHES' 2024 album shirt. It's good, but I will always love Pool.
Take a look at this short film. It's beautiful, striking, thoughtful.
A little update. What's been happening?
Go in peace, now. Try not to get up too fast.
I thought I was going to take a break from depressing non-fiction but instead I've started Naomi Klein's "On Fire" today. Haven't even finished the introduction and oh dear, there needs to be an emotion to name the conflation of riled up and despair.
I did another Music Nerd Listening club, this time - Chick Corea's Return to Forever. 1972. Not an album that is 100% for me, but really worth a listen.
I found mise this morning while searching for answers for something related to zola for the building of this site. Mise looks really cool!
After watching Your Name recently, I figured I should try more anime. I started Ping Pong: The Animation yesterday. Really enjoying it: excellent music and foley and I love that it is animated in a similar style to Taiyō Matsumoto's work.
Business idea: take any social networking type feed - reddit, bsky, mastadon - and create summary emails of posts that can be delivered weekly or monthly. This way, a person can still be looped in, but don't get sucked into the platform and start scrolling. This was what was able to get me out of checking hackernews daily; now I get a summary email every week from some service.
Finally watched "Your Name" and it was excellent.
I've gotten into the habit of creating project.kdl files in project root directories. Then, it's a matter of running zellij --layout project.kdl to launch everything I need to hack on something. It is somewhat unnecessary; most of the time Zellij stays open, but I like it.
To do it, you can set up your Zellij layout as you like, and then run zellij action dump-layout > project.kdl to creata layout.
Taking a vacation is nice. Here are some nice things from this niceness:
Working toward believing I can replace the time I default to on the internet to... just reading books.
Candidates up for next book are:
I'm wanting to lean back into more fiction and take a break from being depressed by the non-fiction I'm choosing.
I see less of actual function declarations in js codebases these days, and fat arrows stored to constants are more the norm. I still don't know why. Is this just a react-ism from the change to using hooks? This declaring of functions inside components also means that on each re-render the functions get re-declared, instead of once if those functions were at the top level.
In some codebases I've seen, you end up with many of these anonymous functions stored in constants, all of which rely on the scope of the react component, sort of as if it was a class (which it isn't, to confirm). This makes reading the actual component kind of tricky; I'd rather have top level, functional functions, outside of the react component, take in data, do something with it, and return data, but I hardly ever see this.
On a more petty note, it seems worth it alone to declare functions over constants to cut down on the visual noise while searching for symbols in my editor.
This book is depressing me.
Actually, I didn't find it, but my partner did, hidden behind some clothes in the back of the closet.
Note to self:
Fun night at the bike co-op tonight. Thursdays are for volunteers to go in, work on donated bikes, so that they can be sold to self-support the space. Tonight I met some new folks, and worked on an evo aluminum bike, replaced the brakes, and tried to unbend a derailleur that gets way to close to the spokes of the back wheel.
People were coming in to test ride bikes to buy. Spring is coming, folks.
I put up a new video on my bike youtube channel. This one was fun to make and involved much (delightful) trudging through a foot of snow in a beautiful park.
Last night, my nascent music club discussed Palace Music (Bonnie Prince Billy's) Arise Therefore. I wasn't super into this album at first. My listens felt like the album was marching along in the background (possibly the drum machine), and with moer warbling than I'm used to. Then, I listened to it while drawing and doing nothing else and I really liked it.
Just published a new video for Loud World Quiet Hour. An hour of walking in the woods.