Author Archive
Six patterns from Whatever Happened To Green Valley?
Monday, September 21st, 2020
native-land.ca
Monday, September 14th, 2020Native Land is an online map of Indigenous territories, language groups, and treaties.
I remember seeing this a couple of years ago, but since then they’ve added Australian locations. This’s something I’d wanted to do myself using Open Street Map, but hey!, here it is already.
? native-land.ca ?
m~u~s~u~c
Friday, July 31st, 2020I forgot to mention that I salvaged what I could of my old music blog, after the Tumblr mistake, and put it up at musuc.ryliejamesthomas.net.
It’s using a blogging tool called TextPattern, which I’d never used before, but I like it a lot more than WordPress. Feels really simple, gotta get your hands in and customise it, nice and DIY. More work (and the reason I took so long to mention it is that I wanted to get it setup right), but not to hard to tailor it to what you want to use it for.
I’ve been thinking about tying it to a wiki—either its own or my regular one—so artists and songs would have pages with bits of other info.—or even making it entirely wiki-based. But happy enough with it as it is now.
Roland TR-8 Pattern Sheet
Monday, July 27th, 2020I made a simple template for recording patterns made with my Roland TR-8 drum machine.
Might add a section for recording the knobs (empty circles you mark?), as hand-doing those is a bit of a pain, and so-far that’s been most of the what I use the note space for anyway.
Example Short 23.976
Saturday, February 1st, 2020An example of a film using a frame rate of 23.976, from Netflix.
A Drawing A Day
Wednesday, January 15th, 2020Midish last year I thought it would be a good idea to try doing a drawing each day, with no others rules.
That didn’t last long, but I did enjoy drawing in Tux Paint on a tablet I’d found. Tux Paint’s an open-source drawing program aimed at kids for touch-screen things and PCs. Seemingly inspired by Kid Pix, there are lots of fun brushes and effects, and silly sounds. I like drawing with my fingers, and smudging things and using the toothpaste brush, and just playing round. I ended up using the toothpaste brush on a CHAI fansite I made too.
Here’s everything I done, in chronological order.
Looking at them together now, they remind me a lot of paintings I did between TAFE and Uni.
Nine videos found through Default Filename TV
Tuesday, July 16th, 2019Default Filename TV is a website by Everest Pipkin for browsing videos on Youtube that use the camera’s default file naming convention. I used to like browsing these kinds of videos; I guess because my videos are framed in such a careful, cold way, I like seeing photos and videos whose composition is a product of different motivations.
(edit: turns out there’s a similar site called Astronaut that does a similar thing, though it plays videos only for a short time.)
Knowing that these, often mostly unwatched, videos are out there somewhere makes me feel good things about the world.
Clean Up Efforts Underway
Tuesday, May 28th, 2019I made a little piece of music for a film, and it’s currently up on Recess:
Clean Up Efforts Underway, by Erin Crouch, with text by Ainslee Meredith.
The music’s a cover of a song from an Ian Thorpe documentary. Making it was a nice little test of my fresh music-making setup. Nothing extravagant, just LMMS and a little MIDI keyboard, but it was nice to see it all working together, and to have an excuse to play with the software synths. People like to bang-on about the difficulty of making music in Linux, but I just ignored all that JACK stuff ’cause I wasn’t really relying on anything real-time. Hopefully I’ll have more music to post soon :)