Octofacto

Eight random facts, coming right up.

Sometimes in drum classes or drum circles I hear what sounds like voices coming through the seams in the music. Not, like, spooky voices in my head telling me to serve Zod, more like ambient crowd noise. I’ve always assumed it’s my brain trying to translate all the complexity of the sound into something more recognizable, but what’s interesting is that it mostly seems to happen when we’re playing a real rhythm, correctly. If someone’s off-tempo, it stops happening.

They mostly sound like children’s voices.
I’ve started an absurdly ambitious painting, which when finished will consist of two dozen large masonite panels, depicting a pair of twenty-foot long fish swimming in front of a red floral wallpaper. So far I’ve done a reasonably successful small-scale test run on the wallpaper pattern and on one of the fish’s mouths, gessoed half of the panels, though they could probably use another layer or two, and done five different photoshop mockups of the finished piece including one in which I mapped the whole thing in perspective into a panoramic photo of the room they’ll be hanging in. (The swimming pool room, of course.) Any day now I’ll actually start painting the thing.
Getting started is the hardest part of a project for me. Once I get going I usually get carried along for hours, even forgetting to eat, but I can spend literally weeks staring at a thing kicking myself for not being able to start working on it. I don’t know why this is. Strategies I have found sometimes successful for this: i) Don’t get started, just tidy up in preparation for getting started. ii) get started on something else. iii) get high. iv) leave loose ends instead of working to a stopping place, so there’s something to grab onto the next morning. v) external deadlines. Strategies which I have not found the least little bit successful: i) money ii) pride iii) ambition iv) self-imposed deadlines.
The evil geniuses at Blizzard just mailed me, unsolicited, a copy of the World of Warcraft expansion. The first taste is free. Crack-pushing bastards.
At some point within the last year, I stopped feeling like a young person and started feeling like an old, or at least older, person. If I walked into a college classroom today I think I’d be a lot more likely to identify with the teacher than with the students. This is a major U-turn for me, and I have real mixed feelings about it.
There’s a cartoon posted over my desk which I printed out from a website I’ve lost track of. It’s titled “First day at the Pharma Agency”, and in it the guy on the left points to a large circular cutout through the middle of his chest and says, “Hey! There’s a hole forming where my creativity should be!” Two guys on the right have big grins and similar cutouts which are stuffed with dollar bills; one of them responds “You won’t miss it once it fills with money!” I don’t remember exactly when I posted this, but can narrow it down to three clients.

It’s a total bummer of a cartoon and I really should take it down, but it’s still too true for me to be able to yet.
Stapled to the cartoon is a fortune cookie fortune, which reads “Behavior is a mirror in which everyone shows his own image.” This seems true enough as well, but I don’t remember what prompted me to make it the other of the two items posted over my desk.
I have notebooks full of sketches, diagrams, brief descriptions of projects to do, software to write, games or webapps to build, art objects to make, etc. These rarely make any sense to me if I read them more than about three days later, and I’ve never turned any of them from sketch to finished product. But I keep writing them down anyway.

This is the part where I’m supposed to propagate the meme, but while I like being tagged, I don’t like the responsibility of having to tag others, which probably says something deepset about my personality that’s obvious to everyone but me. Anyway. So I’ll as usual lazily wave my hands and say if you haven’t been tagged yet, now you have been. If you want.