smol noodle on a big synth. I have spent actual hours with this combination of 2 x Enso, 1 x ODC, 1 x Crumar DP-50. It is a very pleasing grouping, and I can just set up three loops and listen to them go in and out of phase for quite a while.
My wife decided she wanted to make an online boutique of retro gaming and 80s-inspired stuff (a direct quote: “none of these assholes selling this shit were even alive in the 80s.”). So Day 7 of 2024 was spent creating products and making product shots and what-not. This was pretty fun, to be honest. All those YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels about getting rich in 24 hours notwithstanding, there is quite a bit of moving parts to setting up an online business, especially if you don’t want to waste your money.
I was taking photos of my own collection of 80s ephemera for content, and one I took really caught my eye; above is a selection of the Atari 2600 carts I have. I have quite a few (don’t know the total) but this is the stack of games I actually play on the actual machine. This photo makes me happy.
Just a lazy Saturday evening, faffing about with things we made. In this short video, one Axon is playing melodic content, and the other is doing drums. One of the mildly cool things about my job is that I’ve been at it long enough that Adam and I have created an entire product line, and I can easily make music using only our products (and often do.) This is incredibly pleasing.
Today started out with Audio Damage coding (making a new beta build of Axon 3 for our testers to break); right when I got that done, my new 3D printer I bought myself for Christmas showed up. Assembling and debugging it took me right up to dinner. After dinner, it was straight downtown for First Friday.
Long story short: I didn’t have time to do a bespoke Thing for today. I was going to put up a photo of Benchy (the “Hello, World” of 3D printing) but that seemed entirely too prosaic. Then I remembered that I had taken a bunch of photos at First Friday, including the one above. First Friday in Phoenix is something you have to experience. It is _easily_ one of the largest in the nation, if not the largest.
This young fellow was, well… I’m just gonna go ahead and say “not gifted.” But the absolute brass it takes to stand on a street corner with a distorted guitar, and sing your heart out with no backing band… I literally can’t even, and I’ve played thousands of shows, many of which were to thousands of people. The level of comfort you get from having three or four other people on stage that know your mind and are pulling on the same rope is something one can take for granted. This was at the very beginning; they had just closed the streets, so there weren’t too many people out yet. But even so, my hat’s off to him; I couldn’t do that.
Abstract painting is the form of creative expression I enjoy most here in the latter half of my life; it is, in my opinion, the thing I am least skilled at. My imposter syndrome with painting is fairly extreme, and the few pieces I have sold have actually left me feeling a bit guilty.
But can’t stop, won’t stop. Abstract painting, like jazz soloing or poetry or improvisational dance, is a direct recording of a person’s mood and feelings, unfiltered by “rules” (which are, of course, only guidelines) and restricted only by the medium’s capabilities to capture those moods and feelings, and the artist’s ability to express themself.
I find it very meditative, and it is probably more therapeutic than I am aware. I try to empty my mind when I do it; as a result, I don’t have a story to tell for my paintings like some artists I’ve spoken to. I’m quite jealous when one can say “this is a painting of the water of a fast moving creek as a metaphor for a relationship” or some shit like that, and you can look at the painting and say “yep, I see it. You captured that.” Mine are just a snapshot inside the bag of cats that is my brain at any given moment.
I do make larger paintings on canvas, but most of my painting is done in ‘multi-media’ notebooks like the above. I have stacks of them.