Some OK Things (first half 2023)

This is just some stuff I liked, not an exhaustive list of everything I experienced.

Media Stuff

Books:

  • The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor (2022)
  • Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman (2021)
  • The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (1002)
  • Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009)
  • OK I haven’t read a lot of books so far this year lbr

Podcasts:

I mostly just listen to movie podcasts lately so:

  • The Big Picture
  • The Midnight Boys
  • The Rewatchables

Movies:

  • Time Trap (2017)
  • Dungeons & Dragons (2023)
  • The Brothers Bloom (2008) (rewatch, they were showing it in the local theater for some reason)
  • Barbarian (2022)
  • Are You There God It’s Me Margaret (2023)

TV:

  • Keep Breathing (favorite thing on this list)
  • The Recruit
  • Single Drunk Female S2
  • Will Trent S1
  • The Night Agent S1
  • The Diplomat S1
  • The Great S3

Project Stuff

  • Still having fun with making my dumb little songs for my podcast
  • Also still having fun trying to do drawings

Life Stuff

  • TILLY
  • Family doing good, kids no longer annoying teens, back to being a fun/interesting age
  • Feeling better than last year, healthwise (physical & mental)
  • Getting back into running

THE END….or is it? (It’s not.)

Tilly / Lounge / Podcast / Receipts

Here is a bunch of updates on a variety of topics:

NEW CAT

Please meet Tilly, aka Ensign Sylvia Tilly. She’s about 6 months old and perfect in every way.

OLD MUSIC

I got a really nice email the other day asking if I was the same person who used to post mp3s of lounge covers, and were they still on the internet somewhere. Yes I am and NO they were not. So I made a little website for them so they could download the one they wanted. Here is the whygodwhy lounge. I would like to give a shout-out to backing up one’s files, it’ll only took me about 10 minutes to go from “Jesus fuck, do I even have those files anymore” to “Yay let’s make a lil website for them.” I haven’t gone back and listened to any of these but I’m wondering if it might be fun to record new versions of a few of them, now that I have actual music recording ability.

NEW MUSIC

Speaking of which still uploading episodes of the podcast. Experimenting with not just uploading the music but also talking about my ~process in the episodes. Still tinkering with the format; not sure how successful it is. Still fun for me, in any case.

MORE RECEIPTS

Would you like to see some more recent drawings, OK here you go.

The end.

literally how is a podcast

Last year I recorded and released 3 EPs and I learned a lot about making & producing music but the whole time I kept getting frustrated by how much I don’t know/didn’t understand about mixing & EQ’ing music. (My experience has been that it’s the kind of thing that is easy to do mediocre but difficult to do even slightly better than mediocre.)

So this year I was like: I’m gonna learn and I’m gonna get better, but because of how my brain works I knew that I had to have a framework/set of constraints in place to force myself to accomplish mini-goals, or I wouldn’t make good progress on the main goal. This is a VERY normal way to go through life.

the cover image for the literally how podcast

So I have this podcast called literally how, in which I post a new song every week, but the podcast is not the point. The point is that I am writing, recording, and mixing 1 new song every week, (and also doing a lot of reading/tutorial-watching along the way) and then releasing the song as a podcast episode as a form of accountability. And there’s an attendant blog where I talk through what I think worked, didn’t work, where I got frustrated, where I learned something, etc.

And so hopefully at some point in the future it’ll be possible to see that I’ve made progress, or at least trained my ear so that when I listen to older stuff I can hear the things I would do differently with all knowledge I have (hopefully) accumulated by that point. Again, all very normal.

So that’s like that. I have a podcast, but really I have a framework for learning things.

Hopefully I have undersold this enough. If for some reason this sounds interesting, you can find it in many of the usual podcasts places, such as apple, google, pocketcasts, and stitcher. (Not spotify though! They said this podcast is “in violation of their content policies”, which I think is code for “you have to upload music as an album because podcasts are for talking.” So, whatever, they suck, everyone knows it, who cares, not me.)

Reasons to listenReasons to not listen
Short episodes (<5 minutes)Who cares
Love 2 support the artsAlready so many podcasts
Absolutely fascinated by this processWow good luck with your lil “project”
Bored while waiting in line at bankOnly like bad music, sorry

Here are the receipts

jfc Kevin stop starting drafts of blog posts and then never actually pressing publish on them. it’s just the internet! who cares.

Plus I am getting deep into my next project and it would be nice to update/tie off the previous one first.

Anyways one of my things this year has been LEARN HOW TO DRAW. I decided I would draw something every day and hopefully at some point feel like I’m getting better at it. I watch youtube videos here and there. I just draw whatever is handy. bottles, silverware, the tv. At some point I started drawing receipts and I really liked the challenge of drawing them so I kept at it and that is what I mainly draw at this point. Here are some pictures.

I have always thought of myself as A Person Who Cannot Draw. I took a figure drawing class at Cambridge Adult Ed (charcoal) in my 20s and felt like a failure. So I just went on my way, identifying as a person who can’t draw. But forcing myself to draw every day immediately flooded me with memories from elementary school, lying on my bedroom floor, drawing guitars and the MTV and Van Halen logos over and over. Drawing was a huge part of my life, my identity, my free time. Why did I completely forget about that? I understand the idea of youth being braver/less terrified of creative failure, but at some point I completely mentally rewrote my history to fit this narrative of me not being able to draw. How did I learn to think that I can’t draw, and how do I learn to unlearn it?

One other random thing, not sure why drawing receipts appeals to me so much but recently I was visiting my mom’s house and noticed receipts everywhere. Every room I went into, every drawer I opened, she had receipts tucked away. Like anything she ever purchased may be subject to return at some distant point in the future. I’m not going to dig into that any deeper, just noting it and moving on.

2022 (year-end errata)

I decided I’m allowed to post some thoughts/ideas from the previous year in JANUARY if I feel like it. Sorry to all the media corporations that post their year-end lists in November, my brain doesn’t work like that.

Also errata isn’t at all the correct word here I just like the sound of it.

I don’t remember if 2022 was the year I started digging into/getting serious about mantra meditation. Maybe? Anyways it was a big thing for me this year. Cultivating non-effort. Strengthening the tools to clear my mind, to be able to sit and think about nothing. Still a work in progress but one that I find immensely rewarding & helpful.

I sort of learned to use Garageband this year but I’m still so bad at creating & editing music. Sort of feels like I’m on a plateau with it, not sure what to do about it. Absolutely do not feel like (nor am capable of) spending hundreds of dollars on “better” software.

Definitely the year of annoying health problems. I wrote an email newsletter about it and completely forgot to mention my arthritis and anemia. How’s THAT for continued brain fog due to (probably, if my doctor ever writes me back, healthcare in the U.S. SUCKS A LARGE AND LEAKY BAG OF CORPSE BUTTS) long covid.

Speaking of which hang on I’m off to get some blood drawn for yet more tests that will prove nothing.

OK I’m back and only slightly woozy.

Books I read, another good topic. I deleted Goodreads a while back and have been using Storygraph for at least a full year now so I’m fairly qualified to say that Storygraph is kind of the worst, and I hate using it. Why is it so hard to see what I’ve read in the past year? They do nothing interesting with your data, and the social features are non-existent. GR was never great but it did some things well. Anyways after a lot of frustrated tapping I found a list of books I read in the past year nothing really jumped out as super memorable, that’s all I have to say about that topic. Congratuations to Storygraph for winning the yearly award for Worst App I Begrudgingly Support Financially.

I started volunteering at the food pantry in my neighborhood. I go every week and it’s the best. Fun & interesting people, hard work, doing something actually in my community. Not a lot of men working there so it’s unlikely I’ll make a new IRL friend there, which is a desperate ongoing need in my life, but other than that it ticks just about every box.

I thought my favorite song that I Shazam’d from a TV show or movie would be a good end of year list topic, and I think it was Judee Sill’s Jesus Was a Cross Maker, which was used in an episode of Minx, but I can’t find any evidence that I actually Shazam’d it, so whatever. Another one in the memory >>> data pile. Wait I found it in the app but not the linked auto-generated Spotify playlist. *jazz hands* The Internet.

But if I think about the music I listened to this year and had to describe my favorite song without the use of devices/lists/internets/etc the only song that would definitely come to mind with no external prompting is Barbra Streisand’s version of “Much More” from The Fantasticks, which was a on very early pre-fame recording of hers that finally got released in the past year. Whatever that says about me I’m fine with.

OK wait I’ll go through my Spotify list for 2022 and pick out some good songs:

  • Yeah definitely Jesus Was a Cross Maker and Much More*
  • SMiLE by DOMi & JD BECK
  • Andor Main Title themes obvs (esp Episodes 2, 4, 7)
  • Clouded Yellow by Michael Gordon*
  • SAOKO by ROSALÍA
  • Why I Came to California by Leon Ware*
  • What’ll I Do by The New Birth*
  • Chubb Rock Can You Please Pay Paul The $2200 You Owe Him by Prince Paul et al* & **

* Putting older songs that I heard for the first time in the previous year on the best songs of the year list is me being very true to me

** As of this writing Chubb Rock still owes Prince Paul $2200

I think I heard about the Chubb Rock being a grifter thing on a podcast (likely What Had Happened Was) so I’ll say something else about podcasts here: I like Pot Psychology and Fun City. I listened a lot less to Questlove Supreme because he doesn’t let Phonte & Laiya ask enough of the questions and I get frustrated. Also (and once you hear this you can’t unhear it) he starts every single sentence with “I’ll say…” Just say what you’re saying. I’ve asked Anil to mention this directly to Questlove.

This got me thinking about apps which got me thinking about Brands so here are some things I value: Protonmail, Mastodon, 1Password, DuckDuckGo, Duolingo, MorseMania, Oak, Overcast, TV Time, Spyderco knives, FXD workwear, Burton jackets, Sertraline, Aveeno, Vaseline lip therapy, Native plastic-free deodorant, using the Target app to navigate the store, Apple Notes.

Definitely a big theme of the past year was Continued Serious Interest in the Career of David Boreanaz. We did a full watch of Bones back in the first year of the pandemic, and this year started watching Angel for the first time (I like it) and I also got very serious about Seal Team. We won’t probe too deeply into the enthusiasm with which I have devoured 5+ seasons of Seal Team and instead we’ll just say I’m driven to be a David Boreanaz Completist. I will say that as a heavy drama Seal Team is not his best work, because he’s pretty under-rated as a comedic actor, and he got to stretch those muscles more in Bones (and Angel, here and there). Could I go on and on and on with Well-Considered Opinions About David Boreanaz? Email a bitch and find out.

What else. Favorite things I drank would be a good topic, but that would involve going back through photos and trying to jog my memory about all the random locally-sourced kombuchas and probiotic sodas and low-orbit energy drinks and whatever. Definitely I continued to enjoy Gatorade Zero this year.

Finally the big theme of 2022 as we all know was Experimenting with Gluten-Free Grains. Buckwheat was the run-away favorite, with sorghum trailing in last. Sorry, sorghum. Still: watch your back quinoa. Nothing is sacred.

I can’t think of anything else. I could easily do some linking to past projects to be like Look What I Did but I get so bored of it. I miss my cat.

bye, c u l8r