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Blogging?

So, I think this is a diary entry? A blog entry? I wanted to write about the things I’ve been doing, what I’ve been listening to, stuff I’ve been thinking about. Pretty directionless and maybe boring and irrelevant, but who cares! This is my website and I can do what I want.

Let’s start with music.

MUSICAL MOMENT

Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of vaporwave, so much that I even started thinking about getting Ableton Live and messing around with it myself. Very tempting, but may be quite time-consuming, so I’ve got to temper that urge for now. The semester is almost over, so I’ll have more free time soon… hopefully.

While I’ve been semestering and working and moving stuff and cleaning and attempting to relax, I’ve been particularly enjoying my recent Bandcamp label discovery — Library of the Occult. They’ve released an album, a collaboration with various artists under the label, inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. You can find it here. It’s gloriously spooky and really well arranged.

I’ve also discovered Quest Master, who apparently played a show in my city earlier this year — damn! My favourite so far is Swords & Circuitry, which is honestly a perfect album. Finally, I bought two cassettes of a new favourite ‘artist’ — River Master. This is one of the projects of Equip, and these two albums are made entirely from samples of music from fishing video games, which is really awesome.

WEB THINGS

I’ve been considering adding a changelog of some kind to the site, but I’ve got no clue where to put it. Might be useful, might not be — who knows? We’ll see if I can be bothered.

I also haven’t finished collecting buttons. I went through a brief phase of adding a bunch of stuff and exploring other people’s sites, but then I got super busy. The buttons that I made are also… not so good, so I might give that another shot.

I also really need to do something with my error page on this site, which I’m sure looks boring as all hell.

FILM & TELEVISION

Somehow, I’m not that motivated to write about what I’ve been watching lately. I’m just going to list some things that have been good: Severance, Killer Klowns from Outer Space (a win for polyamorous people everywhere), Roger Corman’s The Intruder (yikes!). I was lucky enough to catch that last one at a cinema, which was an interesting experience.

Looking forward to seeing some more of Corman’s stuff, and rewatching Twin Peaks, which I have been pleading with my partners to watch because I miss Dale Cooper.

HOBBIES?

After all, I’m not just a beast made for “consuming media”.

I’ve almost finished stitching together a blanket I’ve spent the last several months knitting in front of the television, so that’s exciting. I wish I’d finished it sooner, because it’s really cold here at the moment.

I recently read Master of Reality by John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats), which was of course brilliant. I recommend his writing as well as his music — I found Devil House particularly compelling, if you’re into fiction about true crime and the nature of ‘truth’, and teenagers, and cults.

I’ve been trying to remember to water my plants and do laundry and just exist around the house in a nice, domestic kind of way. This has been good — I like having clean and intentional space to actually think and breathe and enjoy existing in.

Not much else going on, really. Hoping to finish the second issue of my silent film zine, Kingdom of Shadows, over the next few weeks. You can get the first one here, by the way.

Oh, I also jailbroke my old Kindle Paperwhite a few days ago. I'll find the link to the guide I used (very helpful!). And before you say anything, it was a gift from someone many, many years ago, and my parents have been the only ones using it for the last, I don't know, decade? So no, I haven't been giving Amazon any money, and my parents have decided to cease funding that monstrous empire as well — hooray! I have now remembered why I let them take it in the first place, though. I don't have much time to read for pleasure, and I generally prefer physical books... but I'm sure my partners will be relieved that I can get digital copies more conveniently now, rather than having to cram more stuff onto our unfortunately limited shelf space.

Seems like a weird note to end on. I guess I'll confess something down here in the depths of my blog post: I've been looking at my childhood home on Google Maps. Most of the pictures are from more than 15 years ago now. At my house, you can see my aunt's car, and a figure I think is my mother. You can see my dad, and my cousin; he's still a teenager in board shorts. Now he's a real estate agent, married, with a kid.

In the driveway is the car we had before my mum crashed it on the highway (she was fine; the car was not). The white van my dad had for his business, the subject of some private jokes about how creepy it was. Next door, the neighbour's pristine garden and bright red sportscar (owner now dead). Along the street is the house of a childhood friend, possibly before she even moved there. The house of the retired priest who used to yell at us for climbing his trees, not because he was concerned about the height, but because pine needles would fall into his pool. He's gone too.

At the end of the street is my grandparents' house. The photos are from before my grandfather died. I'm not much of a photographer, and I don't have any photos of him, digital or printed. The way the camera jumps back and forth obscures the front door, angled wrong or covered by trees. I know it's not true, but part of me believes he's standing there, his thin frame and Google-blurred face, waiting for me to catch a glimpse of him. How strange that something so important is preserved on Google Maps. How terrible that one day soon, it will be gone forever, as the car with the camera mounted on top makes its way around my old neighbourhood.

That's all I have to say, I think.