busybee fluffy rambles

Basement progress

Things are progressing on the basement. Mostly I did some clearing out of garbage and a bunch of sweeping and figuring out what I think is the Forever Location for things like instrument cases and such. The space is starting to feel really good, and I’m happy with how it’s turning out. I still have a long ways to go before I feel like it’ll be “done,” though.

I also set up the drum kit and its microphones, and did some dinking around with it. The sound I’m getting out of it is surprisingly good! There’s a lot of improvements to make too, though. I put some dampening material inside the kick drum but I think I put in too much for the sound I’m going for.

For micing the drums I have a snare and kick mic from this drum mic set and two CAD CM217s as overheads. All of those mics are things I got from the Musician’s Friend Stupid Deal of the Day. The CM217s are amazing and it’s a shame that they appear to have been discontinued. CAD doesn’t seem to make any microphones of that type at all anymore, even.

Honestly, the CM217 overheads carry most of the sound on their own. The kick and snare mics add a bit more punch, though, and it’ll be nice to get it all mixed together nicely.

Music listening

Good music that came up today:

• Estradasphere - It’s Understood
• Tyler Childers - Purgatory
• Fuck Buttons - Colours Move
• Kissing Contest - Kissing Contest (especially great for their rerecording of their Song Fight! classic, “Standing in the Death Car”)
• Song Fight - Mr. Sandwich (a fight from 2008 I’d not heard before and somehow didn’t even know about, some real bangers in this one though)

Anxiety stuff

Today was choir practice, as is usual for Wednesdays, and I had a lot of meta-anxiety about the drive, although the drive itself was fine. Someday I’ll convince myself that I am actually a competent driver and that I don’t have to worry about losing control of my vehicle.

Baby steps.

Also after my way-over-doing-it on cannabis the other day (where I purposefully got high as fuck because it’d been a while since it felt particularly effective on me) I’ve decided that maybe I should go on a tolerance break for a little while. I feel like the detachment I was experiencing with cannabis has maybe been an influence on my state of affairs lately and I’m just gonna like. Go without it for, say, a week.

Also in yet another attempt to stop biting my nails, I’m using this nail cream which I ordered, like, a month ago (on the advice of someone at Song Fight!), and it finally arrived the other day. Of course the name of this stuff is likely to cause a bunch of TF fiction writers to get Ideas.

TV

Last night I tried watching more of season 5 of Cobra Kai, and I came to realize that I do not give a shit about that show at all. Seasons 1-3 were pretty good, but 4 started to get tedious, and in 5 I just plain do not care about any of the characters. They all suck.

Tonight I’m finally watching The Wild Wild West, which I’d never seen any of before. It’s interesting. Very different than the 1999 movie, of course. Also full of casual racism but that’s the 60s for you (and of course it’s depicting a highly fictionalized version of a time in US history which was also, y'know, even more extremely racist).

Car stuff

Today I noticed that my Leaf finally lost one bar of battery capacity. I’m not sure when that happened. Given the age and mileage of it I’m actually surprised that it still had all 12 bars when I bought it a year and a half ago.

It still has exceptional range, that said.