Today I started my morning with a very unhealthy breakfast of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. Very comforting food, but it grows prohibitively expensive year after year. Anyway, I was sitting and listening to this album called "Black Foliage" by this band called The Olivia Tremor Control. This album is one that I have only listened to in parts, and never the whole way through (it is 27 tracks long!!!!!!) but every time I relisten to it, I always find something new to gnaw on. I think what I like about this album is the soundscape it creates. The band said they wrote this album based on cassettes sent to them of people describing their dreams. If you listen to this album, it has a very dream-like quality to it. I really adore when a song or album just takes you to a new world, it gives you a space to live in that you can feel more than describe. A Sleepy Company is one such song for me. The introduction reminds me of the sort of thing that repeats in your mind as you straddle the zone between wakefulness and true slumber; the distortion interrupting the guitar riff almost like the sound of one's breath or snore, with its clockwork punctuation. The whole track is like a wintery darkness, and I LOVE IT.
The warbling introduction of I Have Been Floated combined with the muffled, garbly quality of the vocals lends itself to an otherworldly affect. Its almost like attending an outdoor concert sometime in the 1960s that never existed. An impossibly dim day, though the sun is still in the sky. The added touch of a theremin "oooo-oooo"-ing in the background is also a lovely addition, and adds to this feeling. The song eventually decides to take a turn with an instrumental break that is disconencted from the rest of the tune, before the tune comes back in, with so many added layers its kind of silly. It reminds me of the ambitious creations of progressive 1960s rockers, who always went just a *touch* overboard with their creative layering. The out of tune strings, variety of bitrates, delayed voices, its all just-- so cool!
Anyway, I could keep going. This is an album that works really well as an LP or on shuffle. If you have some time and just wanna kick back and exist in a song for a little, give this one a spin.
So, after following some more tutorials and politely borrowing code from all around the internet, I made even more updates to my web page. As you can see, I have already knocked a few things off of the NATI'S CSS TO DO: list, except for No. 2. My page is still pretty barebones, and I think that is solely because I want to retain some anonymity. Though, I would also wager that the bones are there to now begin to add content and share things on this page. The next blog post will NOT be CSS related, it will be something cool and epic, probably. (probably not)
I write to you all tipsy off gin and fancy drinkmixer (Thank you, JM.) as I finish up the very first implementation of CSS styling for this web site. It is still EXCRUCIATINGLY UGLY, but less so than it was previous. I hope my choice of colors does not make your eyes bleed, for whatever it is worth. I still have some plans to do the following:
I hope you enjoy the website just a little bit more because of the styling. This is a very fun project, and I look forward to adding more things that you can interact with :3
I have been very busy as of late, and it has been hard to knock down my tasks one at a time. I think I function better when all my work stuff is done at one computer, and for me that computer is my 2015 14 inch MacBook Pro. I struggle to stay on task, usually, so when I have my big shiny desktop computer in front of me I invariably get distracted with a game or go down any number of rabbit holes at my leisure. I love my gaming pc, don't get me wrong, but I just cannot do work as effectively on it. There is also the issue of my files not being shared across the Win11/MacOS divide, and this can be a headache. MacOS makes pdf editing VERY easy with the free tools that are pre-installed, but my Win11 gaming pc is better at video editing and holding my legally obtained videos and music safely. It is admittedly very tempting to use what is oestensibly a jet turbine to drive to school and back, but sometimes you don't need something that extravangant. I had to type up some essays tonight and send emails, and my MacBook gets the job done far better than anything else I own. The keyboard is spacious and useful, the screen is plenty big, and since I replaced the battery it usually lasts me for quite some time without worry if I *need* to charge it from one day to the next. I also rock an iPhone 13 mini that is delightfully compact, so using the macbook for big girl tasks-- emails, essays, sheet music assembly-- and leaving the monster tasks like video editing to the desktop keeps me focused and on-task. It is very satisfying to use a device without distraction, because ultimately that is what it is there to do, get the job done and make life a liiitle easier.
Welp, here is the very first post I am making here. I hopefully will find a way to really update this in a manner that isnt clunky or cumbersome. I really do not know what I am doing, but I think that is ok, so long as you get the idea. I really do wanna keep this page updated, I like sharing things I have to say, whatever its worth (probably not a whole lot).
I am thinking of just spouting on about stuff I enjoy-- Maybe an Album I really liked listening to, or documenting a project I recently worked on. I am open to suggestions-- I'd put my email here but I'd rather not get bombed sooooo maybe a proxy email to drop your suggestions. Thanks.