Log 6 - Pushing Through

     Hi all! It's been an odd couple weeks. I really haven't gotten much done, comparatively, to what I usually would. This is for a couple primary reasons, but also that I just haven't been feeling up to much. It feels like I just have no motivation to do much, so as a result I've mostly just been playing a lot of Minecraft and sleeping a lot. That means that I've expanded my base on Reborn Survival, the Minecraft Java server I usually play on, by quite a lot, and it also means I've caught up on much needed sleep.

    Early on, it was mainly that I went to the Starset Demonstration I'd been anticipating for a very long time and it really didn't go the way I'd hoped. The month wasn't going particularly well before and I was hoping it would save the month for me, but it seems my luck just isn't here this month. My best friend who was going to go with me, wasn't able to. I rushed to maybe find someone else, but no one was able to. So I had an extra ticket I couldn't refund. During the VIP we were far away for the acoustic set, so I couldn't even see them, then we got photos.I told them after the photo that I hoped to get to talk to them later...that never happened. My photo also turned out to be blurry. Later when we made it out to the main area, we hung out for awhile and then the shows started. The first band that played was the loudest that played all night I think, and almost immediately I realized, we forgot earplugs. And it was WAY too loud not to have those. Not wanting to actually literally go deaf, we moved further back, almost as far back as possible with still being able to see the stage. Even there it was annoyingly loud but have to just deal with that, I suppose. Turned out that the sound was also just really poor, I think it was designed for the upper parts of the venue with the seating rather than general admission, because it was far too loud and mixed really weirdly. We were also in prime "being blasted with light" type of area, and as a bit of a photosensitive person that was difficult for me. The bands put on great shows with what they had, but it certainly didn't seem to be ideal. After the show we waited around for a bit to see if we could catch the band then, but by then we were just tired that we left. Plus, the after show signing was only for people who had bought specific merch, most of which I had already had, was too expensive, or just wasn't there when we got to the table, so even though I had stuff for them to sign I never got a chance to get them to do so. I also had a lot to talk to them about this time, which obviously didn't happen. It's a lot to pile onto the next AE, since I'll probably have even more by then, and I already have too much...

    After that, I was kinda deaf for a couple days. Like I said, the venue was way too loud. I didn't feel like doing much even of the things that I could. 

    And right when I got back into the swing of things...my headphones broke. I started using my speakers, and I realized how impractical that was to do 100% of the time. So I've been using my speakers when I can and wearing broken headphones when I need to. broken in the sense that something about one of the cups' holding mechanisms broke, so now it doesn't sit on the ear at all. I looked into getting it repaired, but it involves getting a quote for the repair, and just declining costs you $30, which tells me the price of repair is near if not higher than just buying a new pair. That's probably what they would have done anyway. There's a DIY solution but it requires soldering which I don't know how to do. My dad does, maybe he can teach me, it's something I want to know how to do for other things as well, but it's not an immediate solution. So I bought a new pair. If I can get the old one fixed, cool, I've got two now. I've still been using the broken pair, as I need to break in the new headphones before I can really use them, which I haven't done since they came in only a couple days ago. 

    I also was having some massive headaches for a bit there, so that definitely didn't help.

    Despite all of this, I have in fact done some things. For one, I released the first single from my next album, the single being Frozen Worlds. It's on basically every music platform. Spotify, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, anywhere you prefer really. I'm going to be posting a YouTube video for it soon, a visualizer type thing that I've been making for a lot of songs. I've completed two songs, and have worked on many more, including a 3 hour long ambient track...not sure how I'm going to handle that. I've been getting more and more extreme time lengths. I've got songs that are only like a minute long, and I've got monstrosities like that, haha. 

    I ought to be able to do a lot more recording now, I've got a mic that I can both use for music and things like streeaming and discord calls because of how I've got things set up! I've had the mic for a bit now but haven't been able to use it because my cable was terrible. I got a better (and shorter) cable and did a bunch of stuff to get OBS and Discord to recognize it but it's working now and I'm very glad! This opens up many opportunities I haven't had in a long time. 

    Honestly I should be able to get a lot more done in general now. I've added quite a lot of tasks and dates to my To-Do, which should make it a lot easier to keep track of things. 

    A couple days ago was particularly productive, really. I did three major things, those being that:
    1) I started the 3 hour long track. That was the day I worked on it most.
    2) I created an image with krita for the first time in awhile, a proper by-hand art, even if it was done by mouse. I've been looking into getting a digital drawing tablet so it doesn't have to be by mouse anymore. This image is, apparently, up to interpretation. I intended it to be a planet being dragged into its red gient sun, falling apart as its consumed. My dad took it to be a protostar just as its starting to do fusion, or perhaps an explosion seen from above. I posted it in a couple discord servers, I got everything from our interpretations to a supernova or a protoplanet. I didn't expect nearly this much variation of interpretation for this, but apparently yeah. 
    3) I wrote a story, based on a writing prompt I found on Reddit. Definitely not my usual style of story and I almost never actually write anything for the prompts I see, I mostly like to see other's responses, but something in this and the music I was listening to when I wrote it really worked together and it ended up being a very long, very interesting story. At least, to myself and those who have read it. 

    Speaking of writing, I've worked on A Sophon's Cosmos a lot lately. Especially when it comes to tags, though I'v worked on a couple pages too. I made a chart to organize how I want tags to be. It's nowhere near finished, it's mostly a map of how tags are right now. Also, because tags get their own pages, I decided I'd make those as well as some others into "glossary" pages, for definitions of terms (since they will always be singular) and there will be other pages which actually have instances of things with those tags. This is a way to get around pages with a tag linking to themselves. It also just helps differentiate the meanings of terms from how they actually are in the setting. For instance the "Faction" page will tell you what a faction is, while "Factions" will talk about the actual factions in ASC. It may seem like a minor difference, and perhaps it is, but it does make things cleaner and generally nicer. 

    That's about all I can think of to mention, which is good because this has been pretty long. Life's been throwing me a lot of curveballs and it's gotten me down, but I've been doing my best to push through. That's all we can do. 

Iris Celestialis, signing off. 

Log 5 - A Mixed Bag | Visuals, Music, Writing

    Hi all! Stuff has been a weird sort of mixed bag lately. I've gotten a lot done, as usual, but I've also been having more issues and generally haven't been feeling well. I got my second covid vaccine a few days ago, so that certainly doesn't help with that either. I've had a massive headache ever since, not entirely sure if it's to do with the vaccine or just a fairly normal neck issue.

    Luckily I was able to get that done after my birthday which was recent! Really wouldn't have liked to have been out of it that day. Really didn't do much anyway but still would've sucked. 

Recently I've been doing a lot of visual stuff. For instance, I've done a couple music videos based on an effects software I got awhile back focused on glitchy visuals, which I really like the style of. Even did a couple of which for Starset songs. I did some visuals for stuff surrounding The Message, so I was glad to be useful in that way. I've kept on working on the ship based on the schematics thing I made, it's slow going because it's pretty complex. I've also been trying to secure my ability to do some more hand-drawn visual stuff since using a mouse for that is terrible by looking for a digital drawing tablet to buy. Because of my vision issues, I'm likely going to need to buy a rather more expensive one and I'm really not liking that, which is why I haven't just gone ahead and bought one yet. I do have one in mind, it's just more expensive than I'd prefer so I've been holding off...

    What I haven't been holding off on buying (or at least I was, but stopped since the last log) is music! I figured I'd buy some of the music I usually listen to for free on YouTube and stuff. One artist (Or record label? seems kind of unclear) seemed to have all (or at least most) their music for free anyway when I looked, so unsurprisingly, I got that. There, however, were many others I did actually buy from. I've tried to put all this new music in my iTunes library and it just doesn't like it. For instance, for some stuff the album cover just, doesn't work. I've had this problem with my own music too. I try to add album artwork and it just refuses to acknowledge I've added any artwork and if I tell it to go fetch the artwork online it gives the wrong one. So, I'm not entirely sure what to do about that.

    Speaking of my own music, I've been working on that recently, I've built the basics of some songs but it seems hard to complete them. I have completed at least one though. I've also come pretty close to finishing my Die for You cover. It's mostly just the vocals and minor tweaks left unless I find I want to add another instrument or something, but that's unlikely. I'm trying to keep it fairly simple and not too busy.
    Making music has just become rather difficult though, as my headphones broke. Sending them back for repair looks like it'll be expensive, and the DIY fix involves stuff I don't know how to do, it's a bit of a predicament. Really bad timing too as I just got a headphone stand for my birthday :-/

    Also my Starset hype has only been growing, they released their new album Horizons on the 22nd, just a few days before my birthday, and I got my CD the day before it, so that was pretty cool! I'm going to be going to a demonstration (their name for their concerts) in a couple days, and I'm going to the associated VIP. Very excited!

    I've also been doing some writing. I wrote a poem, and I also had an idea for an SCP based on a very, very old concept I've had rolling around in my brain inspired by some Starset lyrics. I figure it'd probably work pretty well in an SCP format, so I might try to write it as one. It's a bit too big of an idea for a short story, it'd at least need novella length to really play out of normal prose, but SCP format may allow me to condense a big idea into a smaller amount of actual reading. I've also worked on A Sophon's Cosmos a bit, primarily adding some stuff into the timeline that I still need to flesh out but wanted to at least put in there to remind myself I want it to be a thing, haha. 

    Most of today specifically was spent on Dune. I watched the original movie from 1984 for comparison and then went to the theater (pretty much immediately after) to watch the new one. They are both VERY good, I definitely see where the hype is coming from. I can't really say which I prefer as, although they're based on the same story, they're rather different so they're hard to compare in that way.

    I've been having a lot of headache and eye-related issues, so that's really all I've got, that I can think of anyway. I recently got MS To-Do, and it's been helping me to get things done by making it easier to just look through and see what stuff I want to do, go do it, and check it off the list. I'm still not great at it but I hope that improves. Hope I've got more to report next time! See you all then!