A lot happened this week in some sense, and nothing happened in this week in another sense, which is that all the Halloween stuff is still cluttering up the covered area in our backyard rather than being packed up in neat storage in the garage. Sorry to Amy who has to keep seeing that shit all the time!
I'm looking through my notes and it appears that I have been feeling sick for like a whole week. I'm mainly just waking up congested every morning. It is annoying. Almost as annoying as having a huge mess of scrap wood and stuff in the covered area in the backyard.
All the photos and one kind-of-secret video are published on this year's Halloween project's page. I have a lot of coverage of the little puppet band that I want to edit together at some point as well.
On Saturday I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain for the very last day of this year's Fright Fest. Six Flags did something interesting this year where all the "scare zones" and areas around the mazes are open to anyone with park admission, and access to the mazes specifically is an extra charge. I think this is very cool and makes the whole event more accessible. It seemed like a lot of local teens with season passes were just there to hang out and watch the cringey slider shows. More people should hang out at amusement parks and amusement parks should make it easier for more people to hang out!
I bought some kind of deluxe season pass to Knott's Berry Farm last year that also included access to all the other west coast parks owned by Six Flags, so I just spent an additional $25 to walk through six mazes, and there was basically no wait for any of them. The flipside of this is that they were all mostly devoid of actors, presumably because a lot of the park's contracts for scare actors had ended on Halloween weekend? The emptiness also meant that the few actors that were in there tended to just sort of watch and follow me through the maze, which was funny. I am an easy more for a fright but I find it entertaining so everybody wins. Good time.
On Sunday we saw Lungs at Huron Station Playhouse, a new theater in Cypress Park built in a disused trolley substation. It was great! I'm very excited to see what they do next. I love puppets and clowns but it's very cool to see a serious venue for straight theater on the east side of Los Angeles. Go see Lungs!
I bought my first record player: a Victrola Harmony. We don't have many records—we have like three records—but it also supports Bluetooth and has an aux input. The first thing I play on new speakers or headphones is Feel Good Lost by Broken Social Scene (over Bluetooth in this case although I should buy this album on vinyl), and it sounded pretty good if you are wondering.
Can't remember if I blogged about this but post-Halloween, through the end of 2026, my creative goals are to refocus on music and try to deepen my experience in 3D animation. On the music side I want to get back into my weekly practice of recording and releasing twenty minutes of music every week, but the thing I've generally struggled with there is how to decide what genre or feeling or style I'd like to approach in that piece of music. While I was listening to Feel Good Lost, "Passport Radio" caught my ear. I tried recreating it in Ableton Live and quickly realized I could not tease out hardly any of the actual melodic information in this very reverby song, but it's still the one I want to keep in mind as I remember how all my synthesizers work.
That's one radio but the title promised two. Here's the second:
I took an old Raspberry Pi that I bought nearly nine years ago (mentioned here on this very same old blog) and some assorted electronics and a couple guides to reading GPIO in Python and made this device! When you press the top button, the Pi wakes up; when you press any of the others, the script tunes in to a predefined Icecast internet radio station. Press the top button again and it goes to sleep. Wow! This took more Linux fuckery than I would have liked to get everything working properly, but it works. I want to make a prettier interface and a proper enclosure; I'm picturing a big chunky slider beside a hand-written station directory on a nice wooden box. But for now I can just put on the radio in the dining room and enjoy!
Ableton announced Live 13 yesterday and it's got some very cool new stuff. I've been using Live 10 since I started making music in 2020, so it was worth upgrading. I'm now on Live 12 and will get 13 for free when it launches early next year. Lots of new stuff to play with!
Finally, there was a big AI kerfuffle over the last couple days that I don't want to bother explaining—Laura's overview is good if you need to know about it—but it inspired me to put my own AI usage into writing. I don't touch the damn stuff! That's that!
This blog post felt more like a laundry list than a piece of prose but that's okay. I've been doing this weekly for almost a year now! I am feeling pretty aimless and trying to stay focused on anything at all, but with the end of Halloween, a lot of upcoming travel (Cincinnati, Japan, Seattle—more on some of these later), and this head cold, I find that I am mostly just sitting on the sofa and watching my favorite guy solve extremely complicated Sudoku puzzles. I think I might go do that right about now.