I’ve got something recorded for the next album project. It’s been a while — the previous album went out on April 19. Since then:
- I got Dawesome Myth & Madrona Sumu & Harmony Bloom & Lair.
- I got Ana 2 and RYK Algo, and did a case rearrange.
- I did studies of Akemie’s Castle & Xaoc Drezno.
- Superbooth happened. Even not going, there was a lot to take in via the internet…
- Drone Day was my one actual bit of music-making.
- Guild Wars 2. I’ve been keeping up with the daily and weekly PVE Astral Acclaim rewards. Not always all of the tasks — I’ve been skipping Cantha (I haven’t been there yet, though I bought the expansion) and fractals and some of the more annoying jumping puzzles — but enough of them to always get the daily and weekly bonus rewards. To be honest, the daily rewards probably aren’t worth much effort so I’ll be taking a more relaxed attitude toward them from now on.
- Soulstone Survivors. They released another new class, and I caught up on all of the unlocks for all of the classes. It’s kind of a regular go-to game.
- Instruments of Destruction. A physics-based vehicle building and demolition game, like an erector set + Red Faction: Guerilla + a bit of Battlebots. There’s a campaign with prebuilt vehicles, a “Build & Destroy” campaign where you build your own (although most of them could be easily finished by loading an existing campaign or bonus vehicle, it’s usually more fun to make something from scratch or modify designs for the specific task at hand), and a Sandbox mode for doing your own mad engineering. In the latter, it’s very easy to lose hours just coming up with weird designs, tweaking them, and smashing buildings to smithereens in very satisfying ways.
- Visiting my parents! We took them to the farmer’s market and bought some native wildflowers, pulled weeds and cut out some invasive Japanese honeysuckle, dug through layers of rocks to plant flowers in the area in front of their front sidewalk, anchored bookcases to the walls and set up their big TV (and then the replacement because the screen got messed up during the move). And we just went for meals and to hang out, several times. I really don’t love yard work, but it’s good to be able to visit them without the round trip requiring 22+ hours of driving.
As a side note, back in January I got that big fantasy Lego set and the cases to organize things, and I honestly haven’t done anything with them since. They’re sitting there waiting for a day when I want to get away from the computer and do something more directly with my hands (aside from making music). It’s just that I don’t often feel a need to do that, I guess! It was diverting for a few hours during a period of a few weeks. If I don’t end up getting back to it, I guess I can always give them to my nephew once he’s ready for Legos.