Statuses
I’ve got stuff going on, figured I’d ramble a bit for those who care.
Clarifying what I mean by “projects”
The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.
Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.
However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.
February plans
Hey y'all! February is here! Oh gosh!
My big thing this month will be making as much music as I can for Strawberry Jam. February and November are my two big music-making months (November being when I do Novembeat normally, although this year it was taken up with other things).
I’m also hoping to do a second season of Transformative Meditations, also for Strawberry Jam.
I also have a couple of concerts lined up, one tomorrow and one next Friday.
Sockpuppet website updates!
I finally got a bunch of stuff working on the new Sockpuppet website, including the music browser. Now people will have the ability to actually find something in my vast sea of content!
I still need to finish tagging a bunch of stuff to make it useful but having the functionality in place gives me motivation to do so.
I’ve also improved the “buy box” and added way more streaming providers to the sources (which of course requires more content to be filled out, too), and there’s a bunch of other functionality like being able to browse lyrics and song notes and such from album pages.
The really neat thing is that most of this stuff, even the dynamic stuff, is done using pure CSS! There’s a little bit of Javascript for a couple of things but I have some ideas about how I can remove that stuff, and it’s not like the javascript is particularly heavyweight anyway.
At some point I should release the templates as Publ samples, so that others can use this as a basis for building their own music sites too. Or something. I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s really taking advantage of Publ functionality under the hood.
Anyway, for those who follow me via a feed reader but haven’t added that site yet, it’s definitely ready to be added at this point, and I’ll be posting most of my music-related blogging over there from now on.
Tech wrangling
Just some random stuff about the state of media management in my life.
New music site!
Over the past few days I’ve been pushing myself to finally get a usable new music site and it’s finally at the point where I’m ready to have the tires kicked. There’s a bunch of stuff that needs to still be done on it but that can come later. For now it at least has vague parity with my Bandcamp page, and my wrists need a rest.
Good show
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.
The ongoing miasma that is life
Today I somehow managed to tweak my back, right before I was going to do some gardening. I ended up doing the gardening anyway. This was, as it turns out, not a greaet way to help my back to feel better.
I got yet another letter from Social Security today, which I was expecting to be one of:
- Outright denial
- Yet another “adult function report” to be filled out by hand at great length/pain
- Yet another “work history report” to be filled out by hand at great length/pain
Instead it was a notice of yet another “psychological function evaluation.” On the plus side, at least this one is going to be done via telehealth, which is at least an improvement over the last time. On the minus side, it means they’re still trying to deny me based on ADHD as my sole disability, an given how the last one went I’m guessing that the ADHD screening is also going to be incredibly reductive and not actually reflective of what ADHD actually is or how it interacts with my other disabilities.
Transitions promo
Upcoming music projects
Now that I’m able to come up for air because the album is finally done I think I’ll talk about my next few intended album and music-related projects.