I have not received any! I was bummed you never responded to my original one but I guess you did respond and I just didn’t get it. I am guessing you got the one I sent recently… I’ll dm ya my email or something, not sure what’s going on…

Week is going good!
Having a random Tuesday off always screws up the vibe, though.
My brother recently convinced me to start playing WarThunder, so I’ve been spending a bit more time than I would want playing that… It is fun so far, though! I have another friend who has played for a long time and we’re trying to find a time when all 3 of us can squad up. I’ve stayed up way past my bedtime every day this week, oops.

I got my flu shot yesterday, and it always makes me super drowsy and sore and lethargic the next couple days, so I’m dealing with that, too.

I recently made some caramel from scratch to make a warm caramel apple dip, and it wasn’t quite as hard as I imagined, and was super tasty, so I’m thinking I might try and make some homemade candy this year.
My immediate family isn’t big on gifts, but one of the things I do every year is find the most unhinged or weird mugs at thrift shops and give everyone a mug with some hot chocolate, candy canes, and other treats. Having some home-made treats in there for a change would be fun!

It’s amazing how often this series is relevant even all these years later.

Maybe they have indeed been dead for several minutes and it’s a sign they need to be brought back to life

Thank you! Yeah, I always love checking out new things, I was excited to take over these weekly posts. Music for me is like what movies or TV shows are to some others, I spend a lot of time listening and reflecting. If you haven’t found it already, there’s a user over at !obscuremusic@piefed.social who religiously posts things every single day. For the most part they tend to lean on the heavier side, which I very much appreciate as that’s where my main interests lie, but there’s a decent mix if you dig through. I’ve discovered quite a few things over there!

See that’s the thing, I don’t… In college I played the bass in a joke band, but I don’t actually know “how” to play the bass (or the guitar), properly at least, don’t know anything about music, production, etc. I’m really excited to just completely wing it. I have really good rhythm and was able to learn songs by ear on bass with basic trial-and-error and memorization in the past, interested to see how this translates. A big draw has been the thought of making my own homemade microphones out of random trash and sampling interesting sounds with them. I’ve got a few ideas to run with.

I was instantly intrigued by the name “Ancient Infinity Orchestra”, and I really really like this. I’m a sucker for lots of wind instruments.

John Harvey Kellogg is that you?

Sorry for being absent from the past couple threads, I was traveling and busy and it’s just been crazy.

The song Universal Flame by Devin Townsend passed through to say hi while shuffling my entire library the other day and I always forget how much I absolutely love this song.
https://devintownsend.bandcamp.com/track/universal-flame

I have suddenly developed the urge to make experimental/noise music… so I’ve been acquiring weird old equipment, like an old Korg Microkorg, a bunch of guitar pedals, and the sketchiest guitar I’ve ever seen. Turns out a friend I’ve started hanging out with regularly already has his own experimental/noise project, so we’re definitely going to share some ideas. He told me the name of his project but we were really high so of course I forgot lol. I’ll be back to plug his stuff next week it sounded pretty cool.

I sent 2 letters and received 0 in return, so I’m down to try again! I’ll DM you

I leave for Paris tomorrow and while I’ve been planning the trip I had the strangest urge to smoke a cigarette at a streetside cafe sipping some coffee… and I have never smoked in my life. Feels like a real deep cultural meme has gripped me.

I just learned that the band Flake is playing near me soon… I stumbled across their stuff when a particular instagram reel went viral a while back and love their sound. Very excited to go to that show, and I am hoping I can convince some friends to come with me since it’s definitely way WAY mellower than my usual stuff lol.

Also in other news I might be going to a goth/darkwave club next month so that will be interesting.

Syncatto mentioned!! I stumbled across his stuff in 2021 with the album A Place to Breathe and instantly fell in love. I really like the blend of more “traditional” guitar sound with the prog side of things.

I’m guessing you’re also in the USA? As irresponsible as it is, I have been pulling back from the news, trying to not pay as much attention to it. It’s not like I can do anything about it myself, anyway, so why spend so much effort and go through so much turmoil to keep up? Occasionally I will listen to NPR in the car, but everything is just so upsetting…

Over the past couple years I have deleted all my social media, stopped using reddit, and switched to a “dumbphone” so I can’t scroll endlessly when I am bored. I spend my free time reading, playing old Pokemon games (currently playing Crystal), and have been spending a lot of time hiking, just print out a map and set off into the woods, turn my phone off, enjoy nature… Even yesterday, it was raining, I still went for a 2 hour hike. It’s been really healing for me to pull back like this.

There’s never really anything I habitually return to, I am pretty much just always reading some different sci-fi of some kind. Currently working on the Zones of Thought trilogy by Vernor Vinge. I finished the first book and was so absolutely ready to plow straight into the second book and follow the same characters and alien species through some new crazy adventure, but was met with a completely different set of characters and completely different aliens, which was a bit surprising. Still enjoying it, though!

I’m a massive fan of stringing a hammock somewhere quiet and reading for a couple hours.

I also really enjoy flying kites. I live by the ocean, so there’s usually enough wind. Over the last couple years I have really gotten into quad-line stunt kites like the Revolution, I have a bunch of them and one just always lives in the trunk of my car for when I want to swing by and have a fly after work.

I visit that rocket a lot, it’s always the perfect rest stop to stretch the legs, grab a snack, marvel at such a crazy machine just perched on a concrete slab kind of in the middle of nowhere… Rt 118 is such a nice drive from there up to 112/Lincoln, it’s one of my favorite roads to drive or ride. It was my brother’s first time riding 118, and he agreed that it is one of the better roads up in the mountains!

My brother and I spent some quality time one-on-one. We went motorcycle camping.
Just like a similar post I made 2 weeks ago in the cheerful tuesday when I spent some one-on-one time with my dad for the first time in a long time, I haven’t done anything with just my brother in almost as many years. He even mentioned how weird it felt to not be with his husband, because they are just always together. His husband is super dependent on him and they’ve been inseparable for the ~5 years they’ve been married.

We rode almost 450 miles up through the mountains, stopped at some roadside oddities, somehow found an excellent first-come-first-served campsite right on the river on one of the busiest camping holidays of the year, cooked over the fire, and had an amazing time.

The only downside seemed to be that my brother has a propensity for vintage bikes, and modern vintage bike reproductions… so even his most comfortable ride out of the 3 bikes he has was still a bit of a pain in the ass (literally) compared to my cushy little adventure cruiser.

Someone blew up a car at my brother’s neighbor’s house. Like a targeted attack. We were watching some security cam footage my brother was given by his other neighbor, and some guy dressed in all black with a balaclava casually walked down the street at like 3am, checking the license plate of every car in the area (down a back alley, cars parked everywhere), then apparently found the one he was looking for, put something under the car then ran away, and it just fucking blew up in a big fireball and was engulfed in massive flames. It trashed 2 other nearby cars and melted all the vinyl siding up the building.

Like what kind of fuckery could someone get into that would piss someone off enough to call a hit on their car? I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation why he would have been checking license plates… What kind of life must these people live.

It is weird how sometimes dreams are remembered, and other times not. I mostly remember mine for at least a day or two, but have had some weird ones that I can recall weeks later when someone mentions something that brings it back to the surface, even if I hadn’t really acknowledged or thought about the dream after having it.

I have two specific dreams that I remember from my childhood about 20 years ago… Both were encountered chronically while I was shuffling between multiple different ADHD medications (that I didn’t really need, but that’s a whole other story) to find one that didn’t make me horrendously ill…

The first was an abstract synesthetic dream where the world consisted entirely of a solid beige that felt like hot rough asphalt under your bare feet, and every person or thing I encountered (including myself) were just multi-dimensional jumbles of thick solid black lines and geometric shapes. There was a constant sound that smelled and tasted like burnt microwaved peanut butter. There was never any plot to these it was just the same color/feel and sound/taste.

The other one was I was supposed to be mopping the floor, which was an endless white plane in all directions. I had a small mop and bucket, and would move around and try to clean up various colored stains on the ground, and every once in a while, one of the stains would slither across the ground, climb up my legs, then pull back and slap some part of my body really hard.

FYI Don’t microwave peanut butter for too long it’s really unpleasant. My brother had microwaved some for like 3 minutes trying to make that soft reese’s peanut butter ice-cream topping, thinking it was just melted peanut butter, I think that’s where my brain picked up that smell/taste from.