blog – verb (Merriam-Webster)
1: intransitive : to write or have a blog.
2: transitive : to write or write about (something) on a blog.
Early in the morning last week, I made a cup of coffee and opened this up:
After having a quick listen and scrolling through the tracks I realized that other than strumming my guitar here and there, I haven’t touched anything music-wise since around this time last year.
Before music took over my life, the Visual Arts were my thing.
I can’t remember exactly when (who can) but there was a point in my childhood, somewhere around grade four or five, where I realized that, yes I could draw, but also that I could draw really, really well.
I worked to learn what I could from elementary teachers who were good at encouragement but for whom arts and crafts was a minor concern in the curricula they had to teach. Past that, I fumbled around trying to teach myself what I could; copying comics (I got really good at drawing Garfield) and flipping through the “How to draw…” books I’d check out from the school library.
At first, I never really focused on painting. Sure, I did a little here and there but colour for me was pencil crayons and, sometimes, cheap, water based tempera.
Then there were two things that changed all of this.
Steve Albini 1962 – 2024
While I’m not a fan of a good chunk of the bands he’s recorded, I admire them for what they were (and still are) and I greatly admired Albini’s outlook on recording and music in general. The Problem With Music is still one of the most important things you can read if you’re a musician of any kind.
(There’s also this gem on his studio’s website)
I was digging through my pic folder the other day and came across a screenshot I took of a couple of years ago of a Humans Of New York post 1 :
Funny enough, it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently.
Just read this Rolling Stone article about Suno, and wow.
I knew what I was getting into. All AI articles these days seem to follow the same template: People amazed/shocked at how real this AI generated thing is. Covering the backgrounds of the people who created the AI thing. Going over the difficulty getting AI to make this particular thing as opposed to that particular thing while in the end it’s all scraping large amounts of data to try and come up with something that could potentially be deemed original.
In short it’s just more techowanking over a recent AI breakthrough. As always, there is a lot of back patting and corporate-speak-rabble-babble about being creative and empowering the people and whatnot.
And it’s that bullshit that drives me nuts.
You know, I was writing a huge rant about how Apple has lived long enough to become the enemy 1 but fuck it. There’s plenty of reasons to steer clear of Apple these days so I decided to delete the whole thing and just post a couple of pics of one of the PC’s I built at the end of last year.
1: Yes, I’m referring to the petty bullshit Apple is pulling with the recent EU decision. While Apple has done me dirty over the past few years, this new shit makes me glad I’ve stepped away They’re now showing themselves to be the petulant, greedy fucks that they are.
Back in June, I wrote:
At the end of last year I decided to post about the books I’d read in 2022. In that post I said: “… for 2023, I plan to read even more.” Six months in and I’ve already surpassed last years count, so why not do two entries for 2023?
I didn’t get lazy with my reading in the second half of the year I just got busy and only managed to finish four books (compared to the sixteen I read from January to June).
Shit got real in the second half of 2023. We had major issues with a family member and that led to the issues with the condo (which we’re still dealing with). That whole scenario sucked the goodwill right out of us and left us feeling angry, hurt, and used. Mrs. Tucker broke her foot which halted our plans of backyard hangouts (which we were looking forward to because we were not travelling this year). She also had two surgeries; one in the late summer and one in the fall. My job became increasingly… weird. I’m not sure how I feel about how things are unfolding on that front. Time was in short supply.
Continue reading “2023 Books, Part 2 And An End Of Year Update”
Every once and awhile, just for fun, I’m going to listen to some music I enjoyed when I was a teenager and and post about what I think of it now.
Today’s entry is Sacrifice: “Forward to Termination“
We have nothing to worry about when it comes to AI.
Microsoft should rename their AI to Cletus.
Fedora was was real fun but, in the end, after a year, I gave up and moved on.
A couple of things happened:
A few weeks ago, I was installing Linux updates on this here laptop and on a restart things started acting weird. My audio interface was nowhere to be found. My mouse started acting real janky. And apps (mostly DAW) were just crashing randomly.
JFC
