What an interesting day. Dry, oppressively hot, and a lot going on.
In case you weren’t aware, today is the (most recent) day that Twitter imploded like an ill-designed submarine. Mr. Musk decided that he didn’t want to pay Google for hosting but failed to plan accordingly thus things went pear-shaped in a hurry. He decided to frame it as a conscious decision to limit user access to tweets, which is sort of Twitter’s core functionality, as an effort to combat “data scraping.” No one believed him because, among other things, it obviously wasn’t true.
To make matters worse, the Twitter app, which is now the only mobile app for Twitter since they nuked the API, didn’t handle the new limitations gracefully. Instead of just failing, it failed and retried…infinitely. The net of this is a self-induced DDOS which is hilarious and wholly in keeping with the way the site is being run these days.
By the way, I’m on Mastodon. I may give Bluesky a spin because but I’m skeptical. While it is owned and run by someone who understands the microblogging space, the biggest difference between Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk is competence. They’re both right-wing billionaires and thus not to be trusted. Not that left-wing billionaires are great, but you get the idea. Maybe I don’t need that kind of social media in my life anymore.
My creativity failed to fire today. A lovely day off and I just didn’t have anything. Instead, I went through my old Reaper projects to see if there was anything salvageable in there. I (almost) never delete the projects because, if I got far enough to record something, then maybe there was an idea there that I could use or that would at least inspire me.
It was a, being generous, a mixed bag. There were more good bits than I expected, but their cringe quotient was pretty high. This may sound weird, but there was more cringe in the projects I completed than the ones I abandoned. I spent months doing a glitch cover of Genesis’ “Afterglow” using samples recorded at an empty, decaying warehouse. Conceptually, I love the idea, but my reach exceeded my grasp by several miles. I leaned waaaaaay too hard into the glitchiness and the weird percussion samples and the result was plodding, dull, and deeply disappointing.
Nicole made a suggestion: “What if you back off the glitch by, say, 50, make it less sparse (i.e. more musical), and sped it up a bit?” So, OK, can’t hurt to try, right? It’s already a failure, so what do I have to lose? What’s the most important element of the original? It’s got to be the swirling organ pad, right? So, I dial up a convincing organ sound (Tony used a Prophet 5; I ain’t got a Prophet 5), and got a decent take on the first try. And, suddenly? The whole thing works a zillion times better. I’m going to remix the whole thing and I feel confident something decent will come out of it.
The lesson? Oh, there are several:
-If something isn’t working, maybe set it aside for a long while and come back to it.
-Listen to feedback. If it isn’t working the way I originally did it, then maybe I don’t have all the answers.
-Unless you really know what you’re doing, carving out the core of a song is probably not a great idea.
Oh, and another lesson is “keep your notebooks.” When I’m writing, I’m not nearly as good about keeping the failed bits around to reference at a later date. So, even a day when my imagination is busted can be productive and fun.
And speaking of learning, I may have some new insight into Why My Back Turned Into A Giant Burning Red Wasteland – The Musical! I’m on blood pressure meds and water pills to mitigate the blood pressure meds and potassium pills to mitigate the water pills. My back broke out in a rash right at the end of the last refill of my prescriptions, which was a pretty lousy thing.
The urgent care doctor and the local dermo put me on prednisone, which makes sense given the symptoms. But, being on prednisone meant that I couldn’t get any meaningful bloodwork done, which meant my GP didn’t want to refill the blood pressure scrips. After almost three weeks, my back calmed down enough to go off the prednisone, get the bloodwork, talk to my doctor, and refill my scrips. I started back on the meds again today and…my back immediately reverted to the hot, prickly awfulness of three weeks ago.
So, unless I’m missing something, what we have here is a reaction to one of the three meds. My money is on the potassium pills. I should talk to my doctor about it, but I’m incredibly uncomfortable and he’s not going to be around until the middle of next week, so I’m going to stop the potassium pill and see if that gets me back to normal. This is probably loosely related to the scientific method, or at least my misunderstanding of it, right?
Wish me luck on this one. This is a cruddy thing to deal with in the middle of a heatwave (and a heatwave that’s a heatwave by Texas standards is a Heatwave). Also, I am afraid that this is a glimpse of the future: A lot of medication that may or may not play nicely with my other meds. Everything will be a compromise from here on out which I don’t look forward to but, you know, beats the alternative.
That’s it for tonight. Nicole made popcorn and I don’t want to get it on the keyboard of this laptop. My beloved Chromebook is still kaput, so I’m using an ancient Dell E5530 that I threw Linux on to extend its life. This thing has the best keyboard of any laptop I’ve ever used, but it’s 11 years old and it feels it. Its battery life can be measured with a stopwatch and it’s portable in a largely hypothetical sense as opposed to a practical one. But, it works and it’s great to type on, so let’s see if we can make it work.
Hope y’all have a great weekend,
-RK