Re-engagements

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5 minutes

I have found myself this week re-engaging with a bunch of old interests and threads from diffrent engagements I’ve had in the past.

For the first time ever I’m playing bass scales. Just picking them at random from a Tab book and playing them before and after I play along with my bands practice room recordings. I’ve never been one to practice anything. I’ve always coasted by, doing the thing I want to do in a more than mediocre way, was always enough.

Like, I’ve put 1000’s of hours into diabolo. 20 years on from circus school and long beach summers I’m still pretty good. But I’ve never practiced it – I’ve always just done.

Yesterday with the house to myself I played guitar for hours. The doing of playing.

I haven’t really played any guitar – not regularly – for years. The bass is a different thing. I was saddened and kind of shocked that I couldn’t play any of the midwestern style emo riffs I wrote about 10 years ago – the last time I spent any serious time with my guitar (I was also single lol). My right hand isn’t coordinated enough to pick out the patterns and my left hand just couldn’t hold and switch between all the weird shapes without cramping.

So I ended up just playing one chord Ama9no3#11 for hours. It’s in E and implies Lydian so you can just float and iterate around the tonal centre like its the midwest in 1997.

After about an hour of floating around the chord, I realised the full implications of the chord and the key, and the obvious melodic progressions. Because I’ve been practicing the bass scales! Lydian is three whole tones, a semitone, two more whole tones, and a final semitone. My undergraduate harmony and grade 7 music theory came flooding back to contextualise the chord and the notes I was playing in an instant.

It’s not often that the realisation who I am today is the further unfolding of life experiences thus far can be grasped or so clearly pointed at.

Anyways. Turns out I’m a lousy guitarist at 36. I need to get some oil in my joints. The teenager who could play Embryonic Journey by Jefferson Airplane seems very far away right now.

Photo 365

036/365

Permanently Moved

Rock Fandom

What subject I wondered, could potentially be more entertaining than Twitter? Without thinking, I typed the words Rock Polishing into Youtube.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • Still sorting contract for a cool talk
  • Some good calls this week, I love going super in depth down a weird niche
  • Discussions around maybe designing a series of workshops
  • Unity/Python learnin’ continues
    • My knowledge of python has reached the point where I can actually grasp the .py in google colab notebooks.

Dipping the Stacks

Why doesn’t every big box store have rooftop solar?

when the owners of these large flat rooftops fail to take advantage of their solar potential, they should forfeit their rights to do so to the community or municipality. Hughes bases his argument on a law from the 1800s called the Homestead Act

Venture Capital is Dead. Here is what killed it. | by JP Popham | Jan, 2022 | Medium

Fifty years ago, if I told you that venture capital funds would replace traditional banks, you would not have believed me. And yet, here we are.
Venture capital is dead. There, I said it. 

Google AI Blog: Separating Birdsong in the Wild for Classification

To address the general challenge of training ML models to automatically separate audio recordings without access to examples of isolated sounds, we recently proposed a new unsupervised method called mixture invariant training (MixIT) in our paper

An Oral History of Soap Shoes, the Only Sneaker to Ever Come with a Warning Label

I remember immediately thinking: I need to get myself a pair of those things. And if you were a boy of a certain age in the 1990s and saw someone Soap, you probably thought the same.

Decision-Forcing Cases: Gaining experience without the hurt | by Chris Butler | Agile Insider | Jan, 2022 | Medium

When running a DFC, you are a combination of a dungeon master (from Dungeons & Dragons) and a facilitator for a workshop. There is no right answer for people to give even if what happened already happened. The goal is to explore people’s mindsets and considerations when applying process/technique/framework/etc.

Reading

I just this minute finished Dawn of Everything before I sat down to post this post. Wow. what a book.

I’m still listening to Adam Savage’s Every Tool’s a Hammer, I started reading the 40k novel Grim Repast on my kindle as I needed some fiction before bed. Still reading Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta in the mornings when I wake up.

I realise I currently have 9 unfinished books on the go. Some effort is required next week to bring this number down to a more acceptable/sane number!

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Pinegrove – 11:11

I’ve mostly been listening to Pinegrove’s new album 11:11. I have tickets to see them at the Roundhouse next month with the lads in my band, so I assume they’ll be touring this rather than last years masterpiece the double LP Amperland.

Because of my priors (Amperland is a masterpiece), 11:11 is more Pinegrove! I’m looking froward to seeing them play songs from it live.

Evan Stephens Hall’s song writing still shines though on the LP. The whole album circles tackles climate change and ‘being in the world at a time like this’. The LPs final track 11th hour feels like a piece of music written and performed under the condition of ’emergency’g.

Pinegrove have always been in my alt-country / midwest emo sweet spot – this is more of it. If they make music, I’m happy to listen to to it.

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