27 years old, about 5 months left of that before turning 28. I see myself as a pretty resilient person, but it’s starting to be a bit long. My roommate met someone after the first lockdown (march-may), and decided to move in with her in September, so I’ve been living by myself in an awesome (lucky) apartment since. I’ve played a crazy amount of time of World of Warcraft between April and December, as I’ve been out of work to do between April and July, and out of work with no job between Aug. and November. I’ve since found a job that I really like so that’s the silver lining of the past few months. But it’s entirely remote for now, I only met one time my manager, otherwise its mostly work and the occasional Teams meeting. It’s hard to date. Picked it up again when I found a job because I didn’t had the desire before. Met 4 people, but I feel like its really hard to connect with someone if you can’t do anything outside because of a curfew/lockdown… So yeah, I do the occasional bending the rules, otherwise the only exit strategy is to go insane. I don’t know how to feel about the strategy. A part of me wants to say that everyone under 50 or something like that should be able to live life as usual as the upsides seems to exceed the downsides of covid19, but I guess we can’t politically act that ; so everybody has to get hurt? I don’t know. How can Israel be at 33.93% of its population vaccinated, but we are only at 0.90% ? It’s insanely slow. I send you all kisses from France, and hope you are holding everything up. Otherwise, you can always shoot me a dm <3
Sweden did basically that for the longest time, only it was people under 70 who where able to live their lives quite like usual. I mean of course not all the way as usual, my uni was distanced, people were encouraged to work remotely, not go to malls, large gatherings were banned and so on. But I went swimming, started climbing, met up with friends all while being pretty firmly within the recommendations. And my uni had a partially in person introduction for new students. Now restrictions are harder, my climbing gym has closed, so has the pool and no one should gather in a group larger than 8 legally (and not really meet anyone outside of their household). But I can go outside as much as I want, and I'm meeting up with a friend who lives in the same building as me. And visiting my parents occasionally. I have mixed feelings about it. I am very thankful i got to swim and climb and all of those things, and I think I'd have suffered mentally from the lack of it. In a way it feels easier to not have it now since I'm kind of used to the pandemic in a way. Frog in boiling water style. At the same time over 10 000 people have died. But would me staying at home have helped that? Many of those deaths were in nursing homes due to structural problems like under-staffing and a too high rotation of staff. But if the level of covid-19 in the general population was lower maybe that staff wouldn't have gotten sick? But countries with hard lockdowns also seem to be suffering. It doesn't seem to have solved the corona problem there, and it probably wouldn't have here either. Would it have helped? Would it have helped enough to be worth it?
Allow me, if you will, to nerd out for a minute. I hunkered down this long weekend with "Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins" and HOOOOOLY MOOOOOOLEY did I have fun. Can't recommend this book enough for anyone who likes tinkering. I especially loved the section on 40106 chip oscillator circuits. It's insane to me how expressive such a simple circuit can be. Just got some cheapo solar panels yesterday, planning on making some audio automatons this weekend. Here's my attempt at making a "digital fire" by making a bunch of lfo-rate oscillators, controlled by photosensitive resistors, and playing them through Piezo pickups taped to pieces of wood: And here's a track I made last night using the circuit pictured and a couple FX: I am absolutely blown away by this shit. This would have made my gig scoring a horror movie a few years back infinitely easier! And all for like $2 worth of materials (ignoring the effects, all of which could pretty easily be emulated using free VST plugins or a Pi running Pure Data). No programming, no automating effects in my DAW, just putting my hand in front of a flashlight for a few minutes and seeing what happens. If anyone's interested in the specifics of that track: Two oscillator voices, both running into separate FX units on my Koma Field Kit FX. The first one is run into a frequency shifter which changes frequency every second or so, the other run into a resonant band pass filter. Both run together into a ping pong delay and harmonizer (set to a perfect fifth) on my Raspberry Pi. The circuit is powered by a 5V solar panel, which in turn is powered by the flashlight in that picture. When it receives full power, you hear a little rhythmic "ping" sound. When I cover it partially, the circuit is "starved" and starts making the whiny rumbling sounds. goobster I definitely recommend checking out that book if you're ever looking to play around with your own custom synthesizers! It's very clearly explained, and assumes no prior understanding of electronics. It's all geared towards tinkering and exploration rather than mastery, and I've found it incredibly fun to work through.
Man... I LOVE that audio track... I can totally see using that as some inspiration for some deep Solar Fields / BladeRunner 2049 kind of synth explorations! And yeah... I might need to get that book. I've soldered ICs and guitar pickups and amplifiers and all kinds of things in the past... so assembling some weirdo device like this is totally up my alley. In other news, in my music production class, he is using Helm as the synth to demonstrate how synthesis works! His demo is EXCELLENT, and I didn't realize how many of the on-screen elements are adjustments... practically every dot and line on the screen is used to modify some parameter! Looking forward to this class finishing up at th end of the month, and continuing the Syntorial program...
It's a weird time. I have lots to be thankful for, my family and I live in a big comfortable house in a small Irish village, we have a garden and all the conveniences of modern life. I work remotely from a quiet home office, and my wife is a homemaker which is wonderful, but is extra great in lockdown as she can help the kids with schoolwork. It's a nice simple life and we are very lucky, and we acknowledge it regularly. For the last 12 months my days have pretty much a fixed routine. I get up, make a coffee, go to work, spend the morning answering emails and working on system designs, I eat lunch and chill out for 30 minutes, then back to work for an afternoon of meetings. After work I eat dinner, play with the kids for an hour or two, do some cleaning up, put kids to bed, and then sit on the couch reading, scrolling, or watching something for a while before going to bed. That's it, wash rinse repeat for 12 months. I used to walk each day but can't really be bothered recently due to bad weather. To some extent life was always this monotonous but it was camouflaged by commutes, by different lunch locations, by different faces in different places. But now there is no colour to wash out the grey, no random variation to make the plain appear interesting. I don't think I'm depressed, but I am fucking bored.
Life's never been as isolated as now. We're almost not seeing any people, only a few we walk with in the park. Afraid that February and March will be the darkest part of this crisis. Finding solace and escape in books, in what we watch, in video games, and most of all in each other. I cannot imagine how life must be for the lonely out there. We also had a bit of a medical scare recently, and my work prospects suddenly changed last week. We'll be fine, but both put me off balance - I feel like my buffers are at critically low levels. I'm debating whether I should take my concerns about how to move forward professionaly the coming months to my colleagues, or get someone outside of it to guide me.
I married a woman that owns a house. Otherwise I would never have been able to buy a home where I live. And it has been a sanctuary for 2020. I can sit in my fenced back yard, under my 100-foot tall Douglas Fir tree (named, "Doug", of course) and work in my shop, underneath Doug's shading branches. I know many people who live in apartments. I know many single people who live in apartments. I'm not sure I would be ok, if I did not have my house. And that privilege is very much front-of-mind for me, every single day.
My life has become a combination of sports and renovations. A good friend is moving and I'm helping him out with some apartment painting. I have more friends moving in February, and I told them I'll help them paint too. I'm also removing an ugly textured wall in my Dad's new apartment purchase this week - I've never done it before but I've watched a youtube video about and it seems easy, just lots of steps. I think the annoying part is behind me, I spent 5h sanding yesterday so I can put the first layer of gypse on today. In the sports part of my life, winter sports are the only activity that are not affected too much by the pandemic. I've Ice skated with friends and realized I'm not too good compared to my hockey playing buddies. I think I'll attempt to improve this year, add a couple moves to my repertoire. i'm pretty stable and can go fast, but my braking is shoddy and I can't do any of the backwards stuff. Already getting better at turning where you put a foot in front of the other. There was a big snowfall this weekend, and we drove up north to a friends cabin. Went cross country skiing, and just walked around. It was really beautiful, I love the pine forest there. We've been going to this spot for 8 years, and never explored the area like we did this year! I want to go back later this year and ski until I find the rapids, maybe 10km north. Photo does not do it justice at all: Also went snowboarding on Monday and the conditions were awesome. The snowfall provided a good coverage, and I caught amazing sunny views of the mountain. I've also picked up this book "Trick Mirror" that consists of essays about today's world, centered around topics of social media, feminism, capitalism and such and it's been not too bad so far. It's not the kind of book that I expect to age well, and it's not extremely insightful but it's nice to see in writing some thoughts I've been having packaged in a fun to read way. The essay I read last night had a lot about the success of Barre classes, a world I was unaware of somehow. Maybe this is a first step of breaking my curse of choosing only terrible books to read in the past few months.
What a day. Some months ago, when Trump and Biden were debating I was texting with mk and ecib. I said, "if Biden wins we should all get Mohawks." I'll admit it, I was inebriated. mk was quickly in. ecib took some convincing but soon, we all agreed we would do it. Today, Biden took office and all three of us now have Mohawks. Onward!
