Sorry that I don’t use WP more. I wonder if you even remember who I am. Let alone, what I’m like. In any case, I am evolving my blogging style.
A while back, I believe I encountered a bug, where after I changed my subdomain, I no longer showed up in people’s subscriptions, and people who were subscribed to me had to unsubscribe and resubscribe …
Maybe I imagined the bug, and instead, people who had been reading me all happened to stop reading blogs in general around the same time.
So, if you read this *at all*, it might be helpful if you leave a comment, just so I can see if I am still bugged.
It doesn’t matter.
I’m still alive. I sometimes do things that I enjoy doing. I have a few friends. But whatever the next part of my life is, the next chapter, it hasn’t started yet. I think that I can find it. I will never stop looking for my life. I will never stop finding pieces of what my life will be.
I wanted to save the “workflow” I used for my last video.
Video? Oh yeah, I started a new Youtube channel. It’s just for practice. I want to get a cam-audio guitar practice vid up as close to daily as possible.
The first video I put up I used my full-featured nonlinear video-editing software of choice, cinelerra. But all I even *used* it for was to crop the beginning and end!
I’m practicing an acoustic version of “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire. I feel like the world is going to come to an end in a few days or weeks or months or years and in that mindset I am beginning to reinterpret some of the lyrics to this song in new ways.
For the second video, I was smarter, and did everything in the command line.
I’m practicing “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen. I’m pretty torn up about his passing and I want to learn his songs because I respect him so much.
My instructions for how to make simple videos:
Record the video on your Flip cam.
Get the file into a linux or mac computer with ffmpeg installed.
Use the following command to take the audio out of the video: ffmpeg -i videofile.MP4 audiofile.wav
Open the audio file in audacity. Apply noise reduction, then very light compression, then very light equalization (roll off extreme lows). Export to newaudio.wav
Use the following command to remux the old video with the new audio AND trim the video: ffmpeg -i videofile.MP4 -i newaudio.wav -map 0:v -map 1:a -codec copy -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:04:00 remuxedvid.mkv
Take note that one should replace “00:00:00” with the intended start time. Everything before that will be trimmed. “00:04:00” should be replaced with the total time. Everything after [start + total] time will be trimmed as well.
Compared to the first time around, I avoided 15 minutes of rendering and 15 minutes of reencoding. So using ffmpeg as much as possible and cinelerra as little as possible is usually the most time-optimal solution.
Also, by being sneaky I did all of this using the flip cam’s space. No need to delete temp files from two locations.
My new rule for doing video work: Do you need to composit something? Then use cinelerra. If you do not, then do not use cinelerra.
A few years ago I tried out the Bazz Fuss and was very disappointed. Being careful with transistor and resistor choice seems to be much more crucial than People on the Internet imply.
I actually fried one transistor by using a variable resistor that was allowed to vary down to zero. Was quite amusing to turn it down, then up again, only to find the tone was drastically different. Somewhere in the middle of this process I made an instagram video. Bazz Fuss fried video.
The “best” version I created consisted of a clean boost followed by a standard BF with high gain, then a tone stack, then a BF with lower gain and emitter degeneration added. This allowed bizarre octave-up effects with tone high and big muff-esque tones when low.
Chance that I’m develop this further? It *was* pretty high before I built the next Thing. Now, slightly less.
Harmonic Percolator
The Interfax Harmonic Percolator is an legendary (or at least notorious) fuzzbox mostly associated nowadays with the music of Steve Albini. Albini has several youtube videos on the subject. There’s some info here.
Tried out a Harmonic Jerkulator, an all silicon Percolator clone developed by Tim Escobedo. Details available here. It sounds amazing. It doesn’t sound Albini, but neither do “faithful” clones or any other variant I’ve heard, so whatever. Sounds like a germanium fuzz-face to me except despite being boomier it never gets muddy enough to where you can’t hear all the notes.
Chance that I’ll develop further? 100% chance I’ll youtube it, 50% I’ll box it up, 20% I’ll try and market it.
Built this LM386-based 0.25W amplifier. It sounds suspiciously good. Even when plugged into my upcycled computer subwoofer. I’m definitely gonna box this up. This is an extremely high-margin Thing if it were ever to be Etsy’d.
100% chance it’ll get boxed up. I’ve never sold on Etsy before so … if I ever decide to this’ll probably be the first thing I do.
Anyway, those are the three ideas I’ve been monkeying around with over the past week.
it’s even harder to write about. Usually Intry and write about how hard it is.
That hasn’t been going so well, but today I promised to post a bit about guitar effect tone stacks. So maybe that’ll happen today.
I’m back on klonopin after missing some work. Finals is next wrek. I may, sort of, graduate, if the klonopin and ativan and viibryd and nuvigil and caffeine/theanine/tyrosine/ALA/folate/synephrine/beta-alanine/D3/B12/B6/inositol do what they’re supposed to.
By “sort of” I mean “pass all the classess. I didn’t apply for graduation just in case I don’t. So if I do, next semester I can take nothing and then graduate.
Having a hard time because I’m thinking about what happened today when I was in meditation. I’m starting to understand the purpose of some of the “fluff”, if you will, in a few of the styles you see in Zen.
There are a few concepts I feel like I have to go into. They are new to me so I’m probably getting them wrong.
First, I’ve started thinking about time as divided into meditation and “post-meditation”. If you are not currently meditating, then you are obviously in the post-meditation state. (Unless, of course, you have never meditated).
The purpose of meditation was to prepare you for right now. But did it? What should happen so that next time you meditate it will better prepare you for your next post-meditation?
I have had a hard time incorporating “thoughts of goodwill towards others” into my practice because it feels more like something to include in a prayer. Who is responsible for putting this goodwill into place if your thoughts aren’t aimed at something with power? Compared to teaching myself to be more aware of my own body and mind, thinking happy thoughts about people seems like a waste of time and effort.
But the concept of thinking about your life as alternating periods of meditation and post-meditation draws an arrow through time between positive thoughts in the meditation phase with positive action later on. Without understanding everyday life as post-meditative, there’s no arrow–no connection. Without a connection this gap in time makes me feel powerless and stupid during meditation, and I guess this is what makes some people choose to either not bother, or to pray (or otherwise delegate) instead.
Brains are terrible with short term memory–this is why we try to enact systems we can trust to make sure things get done. I’m talking about calendars and lists. (This is the way David Allen describes things in the GTD book. I’m starting to get why he mentions Zen in passing in the prologue.) So is meditation practice the system we can entrust our goodwill into, because otherwise our terrible brains will simply forget to be kind?
I know that this is wishy-washy. (It’s getting kind of dangerously close to total bullshit woo like “the secret”.) My point in posting this is to communicate that I’m finally starting to at least be capable of brainstorming about the subject of mettā at all.
This post is too long, so I’ll stop here and write about further concepts I’ve been starting to think about later. Including what I hope to gain from koan study, why I’m spending a single second doing anything besides koan study, and what actually inspired this post, which is a set of guided meditations for anapanasati, or “breathing mindfulness” which included a bit of mettā.
(I wonder what thoughts of goodwill my cats have for all the beings in the universe. Do cats understand the idea of even having mettā towards mice?)
How do I stop the sound of that distant temple bell?
For all of the hard but actually easy answers, the most useless I’ve found by now is “the bell is actually me”.
Because then I thought, if it’s me, why isn’t it actually my cats? And how can I stop the ringing of that distant temple bell when I can’t even get my cat to stop shredding paper at 4AM?
Or maybe there is a preliminary answer, and it’s that if I’m the bell and the cats are the bell then I have about as much discipline as they do.
[How can this post possibly have a title.?]
[I am trying to do something along the lines of koan study. IDK if this is a “real” koan that would actually be assigned by a Rinzai teacher, it was from some “how to meditate” website of questionable autenticity. But despite it being much simpler and shorter than any koan I’ve heard it’s still presented me with a struggle, I guess.]
is something that I try to convince myself to do when I’m having a hard time getting the things I want done accomplished at all. It’s not quite the same, but sort of the same, as breaking up a large task into smaller task, or in GTD-speak, it’s not quite the same as recognizing that some tasks are actionable but some are actually projects that contain their own actions. Whatever.
The idea is that I’ve taken a goal or project or plan and I’ve decided to do it, so I’ve inserted it into my system, broken it up into actionable items, etc. but for some reason I’m still not doing it.
One thing I want to be doing is daily meditation. I tried out Headspace and found it useful but difficult. Once the free part ran out I didn’t feel like paying for it because even the easiest level was kind of difficult. But what I noticed is that while ten minutes of meditation is obviously more useful than five minutes, I’m more likely to actually convince myself to do it if it’s five minutes.
For about a month now I’ve had “five minutes meditation” in Omnifocus as a daily repeating task and I think I’ve checked it off, instead of leaving it for the next day, a total of twice. So I thought about how much more likely I was to do five minute than ten minutes, and I thought about how the meditative practice in the way I’m seeking to actually practice it is really about reminding yourself to be more aware of all things by having a special time just to focus on that awareness. So, you know, thirty seconds of this kind of meditation per day is actually still going to be providing a benefit.
In practice I’ve found that I can give myself a 100% guarantee that if I tell myself “you should meditate for 60 seconds”, then I will actually do it. I’ve decided to think that this is a lot more valuable than a 90% guarantee that I’ll do it for any other space of time.
And the part that makes me not want to do it is that it’s difficult. I can keep my mind from wandering for a minute easily. I cannot easily keep my mind from wandering for two minutes. The frustration of attempting to meditate every day and “catching myself” failing is what convinces someone with my personality that it’s not worth doing at all.
So Do An Easier Version Of It.
Everyone I’ve read has suggested to me that starting for shorter times is the way to go about this, but their ideas of “short” times are usually ten minutes. I don’t want to do a slightly easier version of it, I want to do a version of it so easy that I will succeed almost accidentally.
This post wasn’t supposed to be about meditation, it was supposed to be about Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, of which “do an easier version of it” could be one. I was thinking about taking OS and trying to apply it to productivity. But I’m not going to rewrite this post because “posting a hastily-written unedited post” is my easier version of “post a post”.
I’m using an app called Due to time my meditations. I started at one minute, and I’ve been adding one second every day. One minute is so easy I can’t fail. One second added per day is so easy I can’t not laugh. I won’t be up to the ten-minute-long Headspace-sized sessions for over two years from now, which is hilarious, but I don’t care, and I can already feel how good it is for me to tell myself to do something and then actually get to watch myself do it.
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Thinking about revamping this post series and using the Day One app to make it work better. Been trying to use Field Notes to take notes daily about what should go here but the analog-digital divide there is a little too much. Field Notes works best for me for having one page per activity, rather than one page per day. But Day One is specifically designed for one post per day.
Anyway.
Supplements:
Started taking coluracetam at TID 9mg. The only obvious effect is that my dreams are SO MUCH more memorable and vivid. It doesn’t seem to have any of the excess acetylcholine negative symptoms that I experienced with the other racetams I’ve tried, but I have noticed that I’ve been a little more tired than usual.
My tinnitus has improved significantly, which is probably due to the tianeptine, which I highly recommend everyone ever take.
Started using sulbutiamine more often as an alternate to caffeine, and that works well too, as long as I don’t overdo it.
So right now that’s my stack: tianeptine, coluracetam, NALT, caffeine, theanine, NAC. Occasional sulbutiamine and ALCAR.
Books:
I finished reading Reamde, and posted about it last post. I started Seveneves and it is absolutely amazing. I’m on about page 50 of about 600 or so. It reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke in that it’s got a lot of hard science in it, but the readability is really great. In fact, it’s probably Neal Stephenson’s easiest to read novel so far, despite all of the hard science.
Pens:
Been using Pilot Juice almost exclusively, but that’s because I haven’t been doing much analog note-taking. Juice is by far the easiest to carry around all the time, so that’s that.
Content creation:
Uploaded a video of me making a bookmark for Kelsi. I spent a lot of time on the audio track for it and I’m pretty proud of it. Probably one of the best “in the box” MIDI sequencer-based compositions I’ve done.
Also found a nice ffmpeg incantation for turning an audio file into a video with visualizations, so I’m doing that to all the And Stuff podcast episodes and putting them on youtube. The audio quality is actually better than the actual podcast because youtube gives you infinite space and the free podcast host we’re using only gives you 50MB per month. So on youtube I’m using 384kbps aac for audio, and on podbean I’m using V9 mp3 (which is about 38kbps).
Two of the episodes are up so far:
School:
Class is almost over, I hate it so much. Final is on thursday. I need to cram basically starting now, oops.
Cycling:
Did 9.0 miles, which is an improvement over the last few weeks. I’m loving cycling so, so much.
Adventures in Thing Making 