Chuck Grimmett’s post on recapturing the magic of the early blogging days describes a lot of my intentions with the latest changes to my website. The one thing I would add from my philosophy is: ‘spend less time building, more time using and maintaining’
After reading a number of thought provoking articles on sharing work and connecting with people, I’ve decided to become more intentional with this website and share more of what I’m doing, what I’m reading, and what I’m thinking about.
This necessitates a bit of a redesign of the website so apologies in advance, this website is probably going to get worse before it gets better.
Suzy and I are in the process of purchasing a new home and selling our existing house. This month the focus is basically on the paperwork, whether legal, finance, or insurance. The practical matters of moving will become a concern in January.
This is putting a lot of other priorities on hold temporarily (all my synth building gear is already tucked away in boxes), so this list is going to be a bit shorter for the next few months than it otherwise would be.
Back in the early days of fire insurance, when you wanted to insure a building, the insurance company would send a underwriter to view the building and gain a first hand appreciation of the risk. As cities began to expand at the turn of the century, this became less practical and a new solution came in to widespread usage: fire insurance maps.
Speaker Grills of the World is a single topic website, which is exactly what it sounds like, a collection of different speaker grill designs. A great source for examples and inspiration when designing patterns of holes in things.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a new album this fall, and it’s already playing on continuous repeat in my office. This album is surprisingly positive in tone, covering a range between melancholy and upbeat. While still the kings of crescendo-core, this album feels a bit more fast paced with transitions flowing faster than previous albums and more time spent on triumphant riffs.
My favourite song so far is BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD, which starts with some simple guitar and reverb washes before picking up to their trademark guitar, bass, and string based chamber rock. From there it quickly settles into a reflective interlude before building up to a stronger riff then coming back down. This song feels like an encapsulation of Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their finest.
If we are truly praying this prayer to God’s honour, we can never simply pray for food for ourselves. We must pray for the needs of the whole world, where millions go hungry and many starve. And already we may sense, bubbling up out of the prayer, the realization that if we truly pray it we might also have to do something about it, to become part of God’s answer to our praying.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1
The whole concept of self-care puts the onus of stress management on the individual when the problem is living in a stressful world … Self-care can be a sort of social gaslighting, where we blame humans for struggling in the midst of inhumane conditions. Sometimes, the problem isn’t our inability to measure up to life’s demands: often, it’s the demands of society that should be changed.
Bryan Jarrell, Help Beyond Self Care
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done – it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. “Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you.” No wonder everyone’s depressed.
Don Hertzfeldt, interview with Slate
Status: Built
The key to making great ambient music appears to be drenching the sound in reverb. Based on this, reverb ranked highly for effects modules that I want to build. The design I settled on is Music Thing Modulars Reverb, although I omitted the analog spring reverb circuit and simply built the digital circuit.