Or the things I do for fun.

“first”, “second”, “third”, et cetera is a naming convention I’ve picked up whenever I am experimenting with new software or projects. Its noncommittal enough that I can blast thru the first few days of learning a new program with just making a new folder when I want to start fresh. I think it’s a very awful naming convention for anything software related because the words “first”, “second”, “third” do not list in any sort of friendly or meaningful way in a directory. It would make a lot more sense to name them “001_learning”, “002_learningmore”, “003_nextidea” or whatever but something about this peculiar naming convention tickles me and lets me focus on whatever I am making instead of the name of the thing.

Here is an anime recommendation,

Gunbuster is great, directed by Hideaki Anno a few years before he worked on Evangelion its full of all the 80s Japan economic bubble anime boom I love. Go check it out

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Speaking of this naming convention you can see it in some of the ambient music I made last year. I’ve experimented with learning Digital Audio Workstation’s briefly in college but when I started making these tracks in January of 2021, I was starting fresh and learning a new DAW (reaper). I initially intended to just take some field recordings with an old zoom recorder I had and slow the heck out of them then add a bunch of reverb. I did do that and then also sort of fell down a hole of Weird Noise Making.

I don’t think I am any good at this but honestly that is the draw. As a professional with the word “artist” in their title I get stressed out whenever I am working on anything visual, I spent a lot of years and money going to school for being an “artist” I better be half good at it by now. When making music I don’t feel any need to be good at it. I also love listening to dark ambient music late at night when fiddling on whatever project I’ve hyper focused on. I just love exploring that sonic space, man.


I spent over an hour today looking into plugins for Jekyll that would spit out images of different sizes with media queries. I spent many hours last night installing command line software that could do operations on said images as part of the build process for Jekyll. I was having issues running it on windows since the directions were primarily for Linux, then I remembered I set up an Ubuntu VM a few weeks ago and jumped in there, finally a use for having a VM on my machine! I did get it all working but, in the process, had remove the CI step that GitHub pages nicely takes care of and would have to build the website local. Not a problem, and it was slick, but it didn’t work with animated gifs and in the process of learning this all I realized I could just link images the old-fashioned way. So, if you are reading this on an iPhone 3G I am sorry for making you download large images that probably hold up the entire page load.


I partook in a game jam with Tim Rodgers actionbutton goblin-bunker discord sometime last year and took the weekend to learn Pico-8. It is never a good idea to try to learn a new tool for a game jam but in this case the game jam was the motivator to learn Pico-8. I probably bit off way more than I could chew because I followed a tutorial for a Mode 7 style camera with a lot of complex vector math that went over my head. In the end I was able to learn the basics of Pico-8, follow a tutorial largely over my head and made this, it was fun.



That’s all for today! I have no intention of updating this regularly, but I do want to archive some of my older work from college and I will probably write that up in a post or two in the weeks or months to come. I will also try to just write something slightly more long form here next time I have the urge to tweet a 15-tweet thread.

thx,

-braebrae