I retract my reservations about The Wizard Hunters. One of the early chapters may have seemed a bit awkward at the time, but in retrospect I’m not sure I was giving it my full attention in a decent mood. The other main character as well as the adversaries are fascinating and things started really building up a little further along. Now I’m thoroughly hooked and definitely want to read the rest of that series. Also, it ties in more than I thought with other books from earlier in that setting. I should have known Martha Wells wouldn’t fail me! 🙂
I have 55 minutes of material for the next album already… so I think I’m done. Time for some test listening to make sure, then mastering and art and release and on to something else. There’s just a one-month span between the file timestamps on the first and last track, and that was during the holidays and still dealing with anxiety. I tended to do the tracks in bursts when I felt up for it, and that’s worked out well.
It didn’t turn out to be purely a “soothing ambient” thing, and in fact it’s not at all stereotypically soothing music but I think it works as a mood lift for me. In reading that book on the history of Zen, I accidentally found a theme along the way: the idea of breaking out of conscious and rational thought (or at least expectations) and all the filters and illusions they bring, and being more intuitive and perceptive. I’m not going to claim that the songs are koans, but I was thinking of the surprising things Zen masters do to jolt their students into sudden enlightenment… combined with similar ideas from Chaos Magic, surrealism and just general trickster stuff. That said, I didn’t just want to be totally random and pointless with it; there’s a flow.
Some time back I posted about pen needle clipper woes. I’m happy to say that, when the ugly, Dremel-hacked Medi-Clip wore out recently, I found at least two alternatives online. One seems to be a fairly direct clone of the sorely missed BD SafeClip, but the generically named Needle Clipper got higher reviews so I decided to try that. It’s a bit bulkier, which is a factor when carrying it in a pocket, but so far so good. These are all more expensive than the original SafeClip, but not excessively so and it’s worth it to not have to carry a clunky, and frankly unreliable and dangerous sharps container around.
Order your cookies online from trans/nonbinary kids in Girl Scouts! You can also donate cookies (and not pay shipping) if you don’t eat them yourself. I’m happy to say I bought enough from one to get her to her goal, and if we manage to finish them all off I’ll gladly help another — let’s face it, Tagalongs and Samoas and Thin Mints don’t last long around here.