# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 475
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://hecanjog.com/twtxt.txt&offset=275
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://hecanjog.com/twtxt.txt&offset=375
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://hecanjog.com/twtxt.txt&offset=175
It's social media break time for me. See you all later. :)
Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what is going on.
Do I actually have thoughts and desires of my own, or do I go through life chasing what I assume is expected of me? It's unclear.
I'm reconsidering if I should be making cassettes at all in 2022 at the same time I'm about to release a double cassette project I've been working on for a number of years. Fun. Basically: plastic, less of it would be good. Tapes probably find their way to the trash heap a lot more slowly but... next tape project should probably at least used recycled tapes. :-/
I open my mouth and something unrecognizable comes out. Keep it shut.
Hey little squirrel chilling in the sun on the ledge by my window, eyes half-shut, having a nice nap. We're both enjoying this lovely day.
It's nice living within earshot of the train. The honks remind me both of coming home and arriving somewhere new. It sounds like the amtrak is running a little ahead of schedule tonight.
Dropped off some books at the used book store (exchanged them for a cool looking thing about underground comics and a couple crusaders records) and spent some quality minutes with the very friendly bookstore kitty. 🐱
Books are windows and sculptures.
Making mono prints is super fun and easy. I don't have a retarder for the ink yet, that will be useful to slow the drying time but beyond water based inks and a rolling pin I did a couple prints without any special tools, just crap laying around the apartment. There's a transfer method I've seen folks do that I think would work well with the plotter -- where you lay the paper into a field of ink on the transfer surface and just apply pressure to make the print. If there's something heavy enough (a kitchen knife to start?) in the plotter I'd think it would make an OK mark. Will be fun to try.
I'm reading my first issue of Hartley Lin's Pope Hats -- actually, it's Pope Hats #2 since I haven't tracked down the first one yet -- and I'm just blown away by it. Also makes me excited to return to Love & Rockets for some reason. The (hyper)realness of it encourages that maybe?
10 point 3.4 inch columns seem like a good place to start for the text-dense interview bits of Letters on Sounds.
It's a magical and fun thing to go from a pile of paper to a little book. Every time, all the ways.
Next week we're getting spring weather. ❤
I need to get out of the habit of using the royal we when I talk about LuvSound. We were a two person operation for just a few years but I still tend to say *we* in correspondence out of habit or something.
Got templates for my originals put together tonight: ready to make some test run copies at the copy shop down the street tomorrow!
@prologic right on, looks interesting but I don't think I need those things!
@prologic ah! cloudflare security was being triggered. I added a user agent that looks like a browser and I can read your feed again. Yay!
RIP Bandcamp. It was a good run while it lasted.
@prologic I post via a bash script and read the timeline with a python script. That was just a typo, because I never use mentions. I think I got it right this time.
Aw, seems like the local comic shop is locked into a cabal of major distributors and can't carry any of the small press stuff I'm discovering now. Fuck you capitalism. The folks at the shop seemed bummed out by the situation, too...
Aw, seems like the local comic shop is locked into a cabal of major distributors and can't carry any of the small press stuff I'm discovering now. Stupid capitalism. The folks at the shop seemed bummed out by the situation, too...
@prologic I just noticed fetching your feed with python's urllib is returning a 403 for me. Should I be sending a user agent or some other header?
I guess I had to go through a kinda similar thing with eurorack that I did with MIDI back when. I would bend over backward to avoid using MIDI for all its pitfalls for a long while, and at some point realized that supporting / interoping with MIDI made it easier to play music together with my friends, it's become just another tool in the studio instead of The Enemy. Anyway, I think the chip has fallen off my shoulder about eurorack finally. The future version (which I'm working on now) of Astrid is going to support MIDI and CV I/O as first class citizens so I can go play with my friends sometimes.
I keep writing a table of contents over and over as I continue to work on a new zine. It's fun to see it evolve from a collection of my hairbrained ideas to a collection of really exciting contributions from folks I admire. I'll have a score in there, but I'm very happy to feel like I'm close to the tipping point where the zine isn't just going to be me ranting into a xerox machine. ;-)
Aw, the plotter motor died again partway through making this gift for my sister. I've got replacements on the way already, seems like they burn out about once a year. It's just the little pen-lift motor... a bummer but I guess having to replace an $8 motor once a year isn't so bad considering how useful the thing is. :-)
I'm making a trading card set for my sister's birthday. I have the most difficult time coming up with the backside goodies when I make cards like this for members of my family. I'd like them to feel whimsical, not be some kinda weird attempt at distilling their lives into stats like a baseball card or something. I'm finding this a much easier thing to do with close friends, stangers and pets weirdly. Family is hard to... abstract, or something?
I'm really enjoying dipping into printmaking. Just discovered there is literally a public print house of sorts in town at the art center where they teach intro printmaking stuff, and just let the public use the facilities. Super cool.
Oh wait, exciters and cardboard would be good for the fragmentation amp...
Maybe a secondary clean feedback path -- one amp close for resonance, one far for fragmentation...
This might be nice: let the acoustic sound of the mini M float above a quiet expansion & fragmentation... reinforce with clean resonance (tracked? signaled?) ...
The best genre of literature is farce. Let us discuss.
That feeling of seeing the edges of your understanding reveal themselves and then fall to the ground, uncovering a vast horizon of the unknown & leaving you standing on a small island that once felt like the entire known universe. This is a wonderful thing to happen in life.
:drake does not want: playback / :drake wants: performance (thinking about how dead streaming platform are compared to, say, how alive radio platforms are...)
So it goes. & on & on...
Life in 2022 is very textual.
the beatings will continue until morale improves
Sorry if I'm bumming anyone out. I'll stop venting here.
"There is no normal life that is free of pain." -- Fred Rogers
A few days before I threw my rock into the river, I walked out into the snow drifts with that in mind. Someone had written something... emotionally distressing... onto a white plate in various colors of paint. Then smashed the plate onto the concrete by the river. I wasn't ready to throw Louis' stone anyway, but I felt a kinship with that person.
A week after Louis died, I threw a rock out onto the semi-frozen river. It was a crystal in the shape of a heart I picked up at the rock shop while I was waiting for the internist to diagnose him finally. I imagined it had all of his pain. Next week if the river is frozen enough I'll see if it's still there and put it deeper into the river, maybe on the old bridge. Otherwise if it sank, then it sank.
I don't think I can do this
Sadness became horror tonight. Not expecting that.
Made the mistake of looking at the news.
One of Louis' squirrel friends scaled sheer brick up to my second floor window looking for him again today, covered in snow.
I still see him in the corners. I expect him to come out.
Carrying him from the litter box to his comfort zones spread twinkling bits of grey clay litter around the apartment. I find them and I touch them and I feel nearer to him.
Carrying him from the litter box to his comfort zones spread twinkling bits of grey clay litter around the apartment. I find them and I feel nearer to him.
Carrying him from the litter box to his comfort zones spread twinkling bits of white-grey clay litter around the apartment. I find them and I feel a little nearer to him.
Finishing things is surprisingly depressing.
For me 2021 has been all about slowing down, embracing failure as a part of life, and getting the *@^% offline.*
Organizing my apartment a little bit more feels nice. I have a spot for all the plotter and LuvSound related junk now! I can find more things than usual! This is nice.
Computer music on the train <3 <3 <3
I'm feeling spoiled by these perfect weather days. Cold enough that the park is basically empty in the morning, warm enough to spend most of the day working there in a jacket.
I'm on day two of what is looking like it'll be a four day plot. It's... muddy and kinda ugly right now, but we'll see what happens. :)
Those that work in the mills should own them
lol a bird just pooped on my laptop screen.
I'm almost out of pages in the notebook I use for work meeting notes. This means I get to stitch a new notebook together this weekend. :-)
My cat's new water fountain (a hand-me-down from my sister whose cats were freaked out by it) makes this fun grinding noise now and then. I think it's going to drive me nuts eventually, but for now I'm reaching for my induction and contact microphones.
Is soundexchange a good thing?
The leaves are turning here in Winona. Hanging out with a firey one while I work in my outer office. :)
I really think bandcamp is great, but I'm getting prompted to enter a confirmation code from an email that never arrives when trying to login as of a couple days ago... this would be a bit frustrating if my entire music collection was in the cloud. :)
Just updated my little now page: finger hecanjog@hecanjog.com or printf "hecanjog\r
I'm thinking about maybe doing an online concert & workshop series from my studio in Milwaukee... I won't be back again until November so we'll see, but it could be a fun thing to do. I'm starting to feel like performing again, a little bit.
I'm thinking about maybe doing an online concert & workshop series from my studio in Milwaukee... I won't be back again until November so we'll see, but it could be a fun thing to do. I'm starting to feel like performing again, a little bit.
Park office hours are the best
I think it's kinda funny when my musical errors go from literal crashes, to obvious mangled audio, to strangely behaving audio... to silence. This is about the time for a patient refactor.
The feeling of horror and wonder when being confronted with the reality of a half-imagined dream.
Train graffiti is extra good.
A story where cyberspace plays the same role as the dark forest in old literature.
I ordered some information about trails in Minnesota from the state... there are some interesting things in here for sure, but it's sad how much of this is just a crapload of ads and a list of websites with the actual information...
Ooo cgdb is a pretty nice curses UI for gdb...
Two-AM sounds: my cat loudly munching on the spider plant
For a computer musician I can't say I'm all that interested in computers per se... they're a wonderful tool, but ultimately a means to an end.
I don't really like programming honestly. I mean it's fine. I just have very specific ideas and programming is the only reasonable recourse at the moment.
Always making the same mistakes
The fish were jumping this morning and a huge bald eagle swooped right in front of me on the hunt for some breakfast. I was half worried it would try to eat me. :)
I <3 my plotter. My first love in computers was LOGO on the Apple II, telling the turtle how to move around... feels a little like coming full circle. :-)
@jlj the rest of the building is mostly college students, I honestly don't know if anyone else has had the same experience honestly. this most recent flub turned out to be a misunderstanding thankfully. I can tell he's trying.
@jlj the rest of the building is mostly college students, I don't know if anyone else has had the same experience honestly. this most recent flub turned out to be a misunderstanding thankfully. I can tell he's trying.
Someone was in my apartment while I was gone again. This is starting to get old. I figured my landlord had finally learned how to send a text message or leave a note, but it was probably just the pandemic that kept people from randomly letting themselves in. I think they were checking for a leak, or that's my best guess anyway. Totally cool, check away, I appreciate it... just... maybe take 10 seconds to give me a heads up? Please? We've spoken at length, I've written him letters... it's not malicious, he's just not super competent I think... and it's annoying.
I'm not a guitarist but now and then I record with them, basically as percussion instruments. Intonation is always hard. Probably doesn't help I always tune the strings to some arbitrary chord far from the general pitches they're meant to be tuned to... I'm thinking maybe I should try to build a dulcimer-type thing that's more setup the way I like to use plucked strings...