Month: January 2024

Pages, Workflow, and MOC

Created a MOC (Map of Content) page for the various tools that I use for research, data analysis, and content creation.

It’s available here: Workflow MOC, even though it isn’t fully accessible from the menu yet, as right now it is mostly a list.

This will be an evergreen page to help with document the tools I use, any helpful tips, and challenges (and solutions?) that I encounter or discover along the way.

I’ll admit that with some of these tools, I’m still just a beginner, but others I feel more confident with, so hopefully this will grow over time, and perhaps shift too.

A lot of this may simply be a “note to self” so I can track down what steps I’ve taken or used in the past.

The specific tools I use may also end up here, or in a different MOC page, but I’ll see how that goes.

And debating on turning comments back on for these, as feedback is welcome.

Missing audiences; working on words

A couple unrelated observations from the weekend, though perhaps so far apart as is the way of these things:

First: had a good conversation with a colleague from University about the importance of working through words. It’s a language game, and sometimes you need to sit down and do the work and get your reps in, as mentioned a few posts ago. And in works the same in comedy as it does in academia or in writing. This conversation was with respect to the Echanger episode, so… more to come there.

And speaking of comedy, that brings us to point the

Second: that part about honing the jokes through touring was also mentioned by Katt Williams in his interview on Club Shay Shay (at about the 48:30 mark):

and the timing is impeccable. (The above episode came out a day or so before I made the last post. I hadn’t seen it yet, but it aligns perfectly with the Jeselnik comment too.)

Gotta get the reps in.

Which leads us to our third point, about missing audiences.

Because, while I’ve been seeing bits from the interview all over social media (well, YouTube and TikTok), it’s been completely absent from Mastodon and the Fediverse.

It speaks to a massive hole in the Mastodon and the Fediverse more generally.

And the clip’s absence here is very telling.

Now, the most charitable argument one could make – perhaps – is that the Fediverse isn’t obsessed with celebrity culture, and isn’t interested with the beefs that actors and comedians may be having with one another.

Fair.

But we know there is some celebrity and/or Hollywood discussion does exist there, if not a ton.

The audiences that are talking about the clip: Gen Z and Millenials, young people and people of colour, aren’t there having that discussion. They’re in other places.

Why are they staying away from Mastodon?

I’m curious to find out…

Snow day! Let’s make a little music

Temperature dropped and it got snowy out, so rather than risk the roads, I sat down and made a concerted effort to transform a section of the basement into the music area. After a bit of cleaning, and a lot of re-wiring, by 7pm I had most everything reconnected and working together.

The Arturia Keystep Pro is the control centre, with the other gear connected via MIDI, mostly hidden under some jury-rigged risers. It was working weird, until I dropped the chained synth into MIDI Out 2, and sent MIDI Out 1 to just the Drumbrute. Putting all three synths into the mixer allowed them to play nicely together. Drums, base, and keys (another synth is off to the right).

There’s room on the mixer for a mic, if I want to sing, but I’m mostly just excited that I can run everything together.

The only downside is that I’m still short a couple cables, for the guitar, and for doing some more advanced patches too.

Can’t wait to play the guitar along with the backing section here. Loads of fun!

Back to the tunes…

Cellphone, (2004), Paul Levinson

Currently on the reading pile, for some upcoming work, and this one is kinda interesting, especially coming at it in (early) 2024.

Because this book was published in 2004, twenty years ago, and the entire history of the smartphone hadn’t even happened yet.

This is a history of the cellphone, the ubiquitous pocket device, as it appeared in the era of Y2K and The Matrix movies. Of Nokia bricks, and flip phones and Razrs and maybe even a Blackberry or 3.

And it’s fascinating because of it.

I can’t go into too much detail about the current project, but the short version is that it’s about what changed with the arrival of the iPhone, and how our culture shifted.

But in order to figure that out, we need to know what it was like in the before times. And here Paul Levinson’s book does a wonderful job.

The most interesting part (for me) is Chapter 11, Future Calls, the speculative chapter about where the cellphone might be headed. But even in doing so, he shows how much of the current use of the phone showed up as early as 19`14, in various texts and comics, and it was only through some historical accidents that we didn’t get videophone development until much later. The picturephone has been floating around as an idea for nearly 100 years, even though now we take it for granted.

Much of the reason for the lack of development was the lack of interest: people couldn’t imagine them using it, and feared being seen on camera. It took half a century of television as passive entertainment, and the audience being accustomed to talking naturally on the phone to being comfortable with talking “face-to-face” as well.

So, I think this is a keeper, and I might have to track down a personal copy. This one was a serendipitous find at the local public library, and I grabbed a few others I’ll need to talk about soon too.

Levinson, P. (2004). Cellphone: The story of the world’s most mobile medium and how it has transformed everything! New York, N.Y. : Palgrave Macmillan.

Comedy

Went to a comedy show in town, first time in quite a few months, and while it wasn’t bad, it was the okay kind of pandering that you often get at these shows. Nothing super offensive, but more like hanging with a funny guy you knew from back in the day tell some stories.

Which is okay, but I’ve seen better

Case in point: Anthony Jeselnik.

We saw him here on like the second or third date of a tour, where he was just working out some new material, which, unbeknownst to us at the time, would end up being a Netflix special in about 18 months.

He was up there, working through the material in his notebook, testing out jokes, sometimes for the first time, and seeing how they would land. There was a lot of attention to the craft of telling jokes, of writing one, and then working on it, editing it, telling it over and over so you had it down, so when you had to do it in front of a huge crowd, on camera, every joke would hit.

This is what I’m not seeing (usually) with these local shows, even in front of a small crowd on a weekday.

It’s a good reminder too, of putting in the work, and getting in your reps.

To that end, maybe I start need to counting my reps: not just working out, but also words typed, minutes recorded, posts made, something like that.

Just to record the progress.

I’ll think about this, see how I can incorporate them.