It's Wednesday so I'm back on schedule! The last update was just a couple days ago but I kind of stagger the things I talk about week-to-week (strategically?) so there's plenty to fill in another entry in this old blog. Specifically, today I want to recap what I've got in progress. I'm constantly bouncing between projects and they rarely overlap at all, so it's easy to lose track of something that was all I could think about days earlier.
I should give this thing a name. I talk about it a lot, almost every week, and it's taking up most of my idle imagination time. I think that's because it's so open-ended, which is fun, but I'm also kind of running out of patience for just idly thinking about what this could be. I need to focus it down a little, probably specifically on the music performance part.
There was a time a few years ago where I was improvising live music on YouTube for an hour almost every week! I miss that a lot. This could be a natural evolution of that practice if I steer it that way. Let's say that blogging about it like this is me setting an intention to do so. In fact, let's say that next weekend, some time in the range of April 17–19, I'll make music live on the internet! Yeah!!! See you there!
I usually think of this as "The Kid," which is nice because it reminds me of the Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith album of the same name. You've seen the 3D mockup for this. I could just start building it. I think it won't be my favorite piece of installation art in my portfolio but since I started doing this kind of thing in 2016, I've been aching to make more than than one thing a year. I'm committed to Halloween in the yard annually, so this could be number two. (Technically last year I did actually do two things if you count the window displays I made for my friends' shop, and I think you should.)
This has a light deadline associated with it. If it's going up this year, ideally it happens at the end of April, which is halfway to Halloween. I wouldn't want to be working on this past the end of May at the very latest, because I've got some other plans this Summer and then that starts to dig in to Halloween production time!
I don't talk about this much but it's ever-present, not least because I'm logging into it at least once a week to update my blog. This is my CMS, which has been pretty stable for a while and at least one person who isn't me is regularly using it to update his website without my assistance, which totally rules. Because the project is pretty mature, my work on it has slowed down, but I can't really say it's "launched" because it's not open to the public. There are fewer things to do and the things that are left are pretty big and challenging and need a lot of thinking.
My vision for this project also changes from time to time and I know that once I invite a lot of people in, I'm going to need to be a lot more careful. I upended things with a pretty big transformation a few months ago that was a big improvement, and I think it's due for one more big disruptive change. No timeline for this, but it would be satisfying to finish it. (If you want to try Clear Label, email me! I'll let you in. Just know it's still rough.)
There are lots of other projects that are technically "in progress," but these are the ones that seem to stick from week-to-week. Surely this list will change at some point before I know it, and it likely won't be because one of these things is finished, but that's okay.
I didn't plan it this way but it's neat that these three ongoing projects map to my big three areas of interest—music, themed entertainment, and websites. That's nice.
Here's hoping I don't forget that I committed to streaming music next weekend!