busybee fluffy rambles

I had my release party for Transitions today. It went pretty well! Around a dozen folks attended in VRChat, and another half-dozen tuned in to the stream. Everyone who came enjoyed it and had nice things to say.

I hope that over time I can get more attendance to things, but the time of day for this particular show wasn’t great, as a lot of people wanted to come but had other obligations (such as, you know, sleep). The time I chose was based on trying to split the difference between a lot of peoples' needs. But this is why I also record my shows for posting on YouTube.

This show was also really big and took a lot of work to put on and I am so freaking tired. What I’d like to do is to just start doing more frequent, smaller shows, instead of trying to do these big all-out things on a monthly basis. I should experiment with different times on day on both Saturday and Sunday (which is consistently the least-bad day for everyone) and see if I can get regular attendance going. These shows could just be for funs instead of having to be a big rigmarole.

Right now I’m super tired and I having finished the album I can at least take a break from music production for a while.

I’m also a bit disappointed with the world of indie music and the marketing thereof. I have a whole rant brewing about the asinine way that music marketing works, but tl;dr¹: people only care about stuff that is coming out soon, nobody cares about stuff that’s already out. I hope I’m wrong about this. At least Transitions seems to have a bit more legs than my previous releases. (But my previous releases still exist! They’re still totally viable albums that you can buy and/or listen to!)

Anyway, I’ve submitted Transitions to a few different promo things but I’m not expecting a lot because they only care about stuff that’s upcoming or Brand New, and having been out for a few days it’s no longer Brand New. Which is just… dumb.

As part of the Fediwave Artists Streaming Series, I have a concert scheduled for Tuesday, August 13 at 3 PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-0700). To watch, join my personal Owncast server. I’ll be playing acoustic versions of a bunch of my songs, and answering some Q&A as we go! And maybe sharing previews from my upcoming album!

First off, I am a dummy and completely failed to notice that there are in fact two USB-A ports on the Mini itself. The dock was completely unncessary for my initial setup. Oops!

Also, I just played some test content in HDR and holy heck it looks pretty amazing. Conveniently enough, Safari supports HDR in YouTube while Firefox doesn’t, so I was able to play some videos side-by-side to see the difference, and it was pretty immense, especially in the extremes. Which is, of course, the whole point to HDR.

I’ll probably keep using Firefox for usual video stuff, though, because I’m not a fan of not having a decent ad blocker. Hopefully Firefox adds HDR support soon!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I ended up force-quitting the NI installer so that I could finish installing some system updates and the Wacom driver and so on. What’s really cool is that even though the Wacom driver is still x86, Rosetta still emulates it. Holy cow. Also the Silicon Macs use a new driver signing thing that’s a little onerous but also exposes a nicer way of going into the startup disk selector (now you just hold down the power button while booting, no need to remember an awkward keyboard combination that doesn’t always map right to whatever weird keyboard you’re using at the time).

Also, I had meant to do some disk speed tests as well. See below!