I like the idea of process music. I like it a lot. Something about the idea appeals to me. I suppose it’s the fact that I’ve always wanted to be an artist, but have lacked a sense of mastery over any form of tools. I don’t know how to paint, how to draw, how to sculpt. I only barely know how to create music, and even then I am not able to write down or record what I do, so it tends to be lost to the ether. Continue reading “It’s all a game (piece)”
Category: Musings
Considering my classical history
I am sitting in a room listening to piano music. It is the music of Charles-Valentin Alkan, a man who – perhaps with a nod to musical history hyperbole – apparently died trapped beneath a bookcase. He was an older man, so I assume an bookcase hitting you would be a terrible thing. I wouldn’t like to be hit with a bookcase now, I guess, and I’m a lot younger than seventysomething.
It’s a musical death that has parallels with Jean-Baptiste Lully. I don’t mean that they died from the same thing – I mean more that their deaths are funny. I mean, who dies from gangrene resulting from a forceful beating of time? (So forceful that his staff pierced his shoe,and his foot, delivering an infection that would end him, because he decided he wouldn’t have an amputation because it would hinder his ability to dance. Being dead does too, guy.) It’s such a laughable death – laughable until it happens to you, I imagine – that when in Paris with my then-partner, we made an effort to snap a photo with his likeness in the Opéra Garnier. Continue reading “Considering my classical history”
Perambulating and podcasting
I like podcasts. I try to make them part of my daily routine. There’s a couple of reasons for doing this, and the most important one is that they enable me to lose focus on difficulties of tasks and get on with the job with a less-than-superfine attention to detail. Continue reading “Perambulating and podcasting”
Revelations.
Discipline is a word and a practice I’d never really been comfortable with, and could never really explain. I’d never really been disciplined about much until recently – the past couple of years at a stretch. And compared to others, I’m still pretty undisciplined. I am aware of it and I try to improve, which is something. But today it occurred to me that discipline, the thing that makes me keep on keeping on with something I’m crap at when I don’t want to, is best described as this song leaping into my animal brain at exactly the point it needs to.
Go forward! Move ahead! Try to detect it! It’s not too late!
Blogging and me, right.
So I’m writing a non-music, non-books, non-gaming post. Shocking, right? Right. But it’s because of the date, as today is the 15th anniversary of the first GBlogs blogmeet, and I was there. See?
So I thought I’d write a little bit about blogging, which is something I never really thought would become as ubiquitous as it has. But then again, I always thought we’d get online using 33.6k modems, so obviously I know fuck-all about technological trends. Continue reading “Blogging and me, right.”
2014 consumption: a look at some stuff I liked
It’s a new year, and for me that’s as good a time as any to look at what I did last year. More specifically, to look at my consumption of books, music, games and stuff over the past year. I’m not certain it’s interesting to anyone other than myself, but given that I’m a stats nerd – odd for someone who was definitively crap at them during my university years – and because I’m into recording stuff. What I’ve listened to. What I’ve read. What movies I’ve seen. Et cetera. Some of the data’s incomplete but it’s a reasonable portrait I suppose. This’ll be a long one.
Music
I record most of my listening on last.fm, as I have done for years now. For ten years, this year. Basically, any time I play something on my computer – which, at work, is where I listen to most of my music anyway – or now, on my iPhone, it’ll send a record of it to my profile. I try to record the stuff I listen to at home – usually with this thing – but far less reliably. Given it’s been running for the longest of any recording I’ve done, there’ll be more data here to work from.
It’s a useful source of information – the sidebar listing what I’m listening to comes from last.fm data – and provides enough statistics to keep me happy. For example, the counter on my profile tells me that since 2005, I’ve listened to 132,000 tracks, more or less.
But how did I fare last year? Well, here’s a graphical representation of my top artists for 2014:
As to how those listens were distributed, there’s this helpful chart – which you’ll have to click to read, undoubtedly.
Continue reading “2014 consumption: a look at some stuff I liked”Write what you know and read what you like
A story on Slate has sparked a bit of commentary about reading and snobbery. I suppose it’s easy clickbait – nobody wants to feel inferior about their choice of pastime – but once you read the sell, there’s really not a lot more to it:
Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.
Hm. Throughout there’s more of this looking-down-the-nose kind of thing, somehow suggesting that eye-rolling and enjoyment of what may be crap-lit are mutually exclusive. What I don’t understand is where speculation like this
These are the books that could plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers. And that’s a shame.
or
But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.
comes from. I mean, aside from hanging the whole thing on what adults might be doing.
Continue reading “Write what you know and read what you like”I think I can I think I can
On Sunday, I spent a couple of hours playing shakuhachi in a group session organised by the Australian Shakuhachi Association. I’d been to one earlier this year, after some time away. This one featured the same teacher (Riley Lee) and a couple of new faces I hadn’t seen. I was excited to take part, partially because I like any excuse to use the Association’s abbreviated name (an ASS meeting, natch) but also because in the previous week I’d seen a concert of largely shakuhachi music, and was feeling inspired to play.
So of course it would be the case that Sunday was one of those days where sound decided to absent itself. Continue reading “I think I can I think I can”
Written in the WordStars
“I actually like it, it does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else. I don’t want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don’t want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.”
I was pleased to note that George R. R. Martin (whose mammoth tomes I’ve just begun to read) is fervent about something other than wearing that cap. He is one of a dying breed – the DOS user! More particularly, he uses WordStar to crank out his lengthy bestsellers. Not for him the (now Clippy-free) white screens of Microsoft Word or its free replacements. He eschews the fancy writer-friendly face of Scrivener. Instead, he spends hours facing this:
Nice. Of course, this isn’t the first time he’s mentioned this method of working. This LJ update provides more information on his working process, most notably this:
Continue reading “Written in the WordStars”A sobering thought?
This website turned 14 yesterday.
Well, not quite. That’s the date I first registered this domain, many moons ago while living in London. There was a whole other weblog here for a long time – called |lukelog| – which was my first introduction to the public eye, I suppose. It didn’t always look as it does on the left, mind.
I set it up after seeing my flatmate Meg’s blog, and it pretty much consumed me. I wrote a lot, much of it terrible, and much of it presenting a pretty ropey portrait of my mental health and self-confidence levels than I ever would have thought at the time. It’s probably a hint as to why the archives for |lukelog| aren’t to be found here: it’s a little like reading diaries from your teens. It all seems a bit facile and innocent now, somehow.
It was fun, don’t get me wrong: being the kind of odd addition to the GBlogs stable, knowing some people who’ve since gone on to work in Important Web Things And Organisations. Hell, I was even nominated for the best European weblog in the inaugural Bloggies! (I didn’t win, though I should add it’s an honour just have been nominated and gee, shucks, I don’t know what to say.)
But at the same time, I was sort of beholden to the thing. I continually picked at it. And I ended up hating the sound of my own (typed) voice, as well as feeling weird about the whole concept. (Though I must admit, it was particularly great when people I’d never really met bought me replacement albums after I’d had my bag ransacked by some fuckhead at the Green Park Hotel on a trip back to Sydney.)
So I stopped. And now I’ve started again, though for slightly different reasons. It took a couple of false starts to arrive where we are, and I’m still unconvinced it’s a wholly worthwhile idea, but as long as I have reviews to add (or to save from the digital dustbin) I suspect I’ll keep going.
Anyway. 14 years. Cripes. Happy birthday, CaptainFez.
Yeah nah. 