What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

They’re releasing an HD remaster of the first 2 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games in september. THPS 3 was the best one in my opinion, but it also still plays just fine and it’s not that hard to get GCs or PS2s running on modern setups. This is pretty cool. The announcement says that “many songs from the original soundtrack” will be featured. This seems like it would be the hardest part of doing this and probably the reason it hasn’t been done before now. It would be a nightmare trying to license all that music again. I just hope they got Superman by Goldfinger.

My brother brought to my attention this unused song from the SNES Flintstones game this morning. (There’s a sentence for you). Holy shit, it is a banger.

Currently Playing: That fucking Flintstones jam.
Currently Reading: still 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, Jules Verne

Went to sleep at 9:15 last night and I feel positively… ENERGIZED. Let’s see how long before I feel like shit again.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

I read Murakami’s book about running (and writing) WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING and suddenly feel like I want to start running? I’m in… poor physical condition? My knees and back are… not good? Yet, I still think running might be a thing I’d like to try to get into? My saying this here is sort of a way to force my hand a little. Public declarations of intent (even wishy-washy ones like this) are more likely to cause me to act than just telling the bride my plans. I’ve long since gotten used to disappointing her so it’s less of a motivating factor than it could be.

Watching archival Phish and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead concerts on youtube has been a great source of background music the last few days. JRAD is something of a new discovery for me. I have been aware of Joe Russo and the band itself but hadn’t listened to them until recently. Some really great playing on these renditions of the Grateful Dead songs I know so well. There’s a ton of free concert footage on the nugs.net youtube channel.

Currently Playing: Joe Hisaishi – “Laputa: Castle in the Sky Original Score”
Currently Reading: HAYAO MIYAZAKI: MASTER OF JAPANESE ANIMATION, Helen McCarthy

You know how most kids animated movies just cut to dance parties in lieu of endings? Well, Trolls World Tour is just 90 minutes of that. Good tunes though.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow

Bit of a day off today. Felt good not to be sitting in this chair all day AND all night, I even toyed with the idea of not sitting in this chair at all today, but then I remembered that I could play the Final Fantasy VII remake, so here I sit, awaiting a download to finish.

Watching Dave Matthews play a quarantine solo acoustic show in his house and I’m reminded how much I like Dave Matthews Band. He’s got a really cool voice and if there’s one thing in this world I love it’s excessive, self-indulgent jamming. So for fans of long, live, excessive jamming there’s never been a better time as dozens of jambands are streaming old concerts basically every night. It’s prettay prettay prettay good.

Currently Playing: Dave Matthews Band – “American Baby”
Currently Reading: WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, Haruki Murakami

It’s so cold in here today. From hell’s cold basement I type at thee..

Greetings from my frozen hovel on the shores of the Bow.

I must be slipping in my old age or else my social media feeds are tuned TOO much because I only just learned that my favorite band of all time PHISH surprise-released a new studio album last week. It’s called Sigma Oasis and it’s excellent. I get tears in my eyes when I hear new Phish music. I am a strange boy.

Speaking of being a strange boy, I binge-watched the entirety of BEASTARS on Netflix yesterday and… I’m a furry now? I thought it was a very good show, the character designs and animation are both excellent and will likely be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. I was expecting the show to be more of a noir murder-mystery, but it’s not really. Perhaps I was connecting it in my head with BLACKSAD, but it’s really more of a high-school drama. It’s about how confusing, scary and horny everyone is in high-school… plus in this instance there’s the whole “half the students are carnivorous and the other half are like, sheeps and rabbits and whatnot” thing. It’s a good time.

I started another series today: “Ascendance of a Bookworm”. It’s a very “cozy” anime series about a girl who finds herself in a fantasy world (this is the premise of all anime now) where books are only available to the very very rich. She makes it her mission to create books for the world and the series follows her as she is cute and does cute things while bringing new technology to the primitive fantasy world she now lives in and pursues her goal of creating a bookstore. It’s extremely nice.

Currently Playing: Phish – “Sigma Oasis”
Currently Reading: WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, Haruki Murakami

I fear the confinement is getting to the bride. From the safety of the basement this made me laugh so hard it hurt.

Greetings from my hovel on the banks of the Bow!

If you don’t follow the My Analog Journal youtube channel, I highly recommend it. Really amazing sets of music from all over the world. I think he’s got a patreon too that I’ve been meaning to check out…

WHAT ELSE. WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?…

Hoping to spend some time later this evening messing with the Korg Monologue. Yesterday was a complete write-off creativity-wise, and frankly this week has been largely consumed by work and familial obligations (the latter barely count since they’re the best) and I could do with an hour or two to just mess around making something. Even just an hour sitting in a comfier chair with a notebook and my earbuds sounds like it would be a good use of time tonight.

Currently Playing: Sonologyst – “PHANTOMS”

Currently Reading: SHIVERING SANDS: SEVEN YEARS OF STORIES, DRINKING AND THE WORLD, Warren Ellis

My brain still wouldn’t stop shouting at me about the DAY business in the titles of these posts. There. Happy now, brain? Can you shut up for 5 seconds so I can think?

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow River.

Despite being at home it really feels like things are NOISY right now. I could do with a bit of quiet. Switching off most of the news feeds again for at least the rest of the day. If something important happens I know the information will get to me.

Discovered some really incredible music yesterday. In the early 80s, Ivan Coaquette & Ananka Raghel formed the experimental/electronic space-rock duo Fondation and three cassette only releases (1, 2, 3) they made have been posted to the Internet Archive and I’ve been listening to them all morning. Just outstanding stuff. One of the best things about discovering obscure music is it usually opens up a rabbit hole in which one can find many other obscure delights. I suspect I shall spend some time in this particular burrow today.

One of my oldest and dearest friends observed me idly tweeting about how I was thinking about getting my hands on some kind of synthesizer and making some ambient type music. This fine, young lad swung into action and today delivered to me (while maintaining physical distance, I said he was a good lad!) a KORG Monologue monophonic analogue synthesizer! I am so excited to start messing with this thing. Make some #loops.

Currently Playing: Fondation – “Metamorphoses”
Currently Reading: THE WEIRD AND THE EERIE, Mark Fisher