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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I don’t buy it, personally. There were plenty of older folks in my college program who thrived in their studies. Plenty of older folks at work who adapt to new training just fine.

    Personally I feel more focussed and capable of picking up new skills now than I ever did in my twenties. I just can’t believe your capacity for learning necessarily decreases with age.

    Yeah I’m aware that we observe a correlation. You know what I think actually happens? You remember back in school, teachers would always complain about the “summer vacation effect”? Kids would come back to school after break and it would be a huge slog getting them habituated back into productive learning. Year after year, affecting children at every age. The effect is noticeable after they disengage for only a couple of months.

    Now what happens if you go years or even decades without really challenging your adaptability? How hard would it be to get back into things, then? And because this effect required the passage of time to take hold, would most people not just assume it’s an inevitable part of getting older? What if it isn’t, and nearly everyone has the capacity to claw their way back?

    That’s my view. Ultimately it’s up to each of us how we want to handle our own journey of aging. I would recommend against believing your “ship has already sailed” at thirty years old, considering the success people find when they refuse to accept that.

    My apologies for making such a rant, and with such emotion haha. Your short comment didn’t really justify it, and this isn’t really directed at you. Just some stuff that’s been on my mind a lot as it is a very common sentiment.

    But to close out my train of thought, I would also add that most people consider sarcopenia to be inevitable as they get older. However, we now know that the effects are completely reversed in virtually everyone who engages with strength training into their old age, enabling them to walk around in their eighties with the same strength as an average 30 year old. But in order to receive these proven benefits, you need to believe that it is possible for you personally, and you need to try.








  • I would add that the sentiment is also wrong in the other direction. I’ve personally encountered multiple parents and grandparents who hit me with the “well it won’t affect me, I’ll be long gone” reasoning regarding climate change.

    So yeah. What a stupid and offensively self centered thing to say. If you personally didn’t give a shit about other people before, that’s actually a character flaw, not a rite of passage you complete by roping children into this mess













  • Oh yeah so I was engaged with lots of smaller in-person events and house shows, focussed on more experimental and improvised music. A mix of electronic and instrumental. Lots of groovebox and synth syncing. I got pretty into ableton, and purchased an interface with 5 pin midi so I could control older synths and also record the midi outs to possibly reuse later.

    Some notable highlights include one occasion when we had four korg electribes synced up and did a set that way. We joked that perhaps this was the most that had ever been used together anywhere in the world lol.

    Everyone was addicted to vaping at this point in time, back when the massive cloud producing box mods were still more popular than the smaller cartridge vapes. I mention this just because I have so many fond memories of sitting in these dimmed rooms, with the lights from all of our machines flashing and diffusing through the fruity smelling cloud we were sitting in.

    That’s how small and irrelevant my “scene” was btw lol, that we could sit and fill these indoor spaces with vapor without issue. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that my experience is a part of something much larger than it is, if it were to in any way affect your research. As an experimental artist I believe in delivering music to the people in front of me, and bearing witness to experience of others no matter how radical their expression. Along the way I’ve been to and thoroughly enjoyed performances of circuit bending as well as both ambient and harsh noise, some of which I credit as being the most important and moving artistic experiences of my life. But a crowd of 30 people was something I considered “ultramassive” haha, like selling out a stadium for us. More often there would be only three or four people present who were not making music themselves.

    A group of open minded and charitably-thinking people to say the least, so when the virus was getting going there was an immediate agreement not to risk any in-person events. Then we began experimenting with the process itself, via primarily online means. We developed a file-sharing structure for snippets to be uploaded and processed by others automatically, created a discord server where we met weekly to keep the element of socialization, did weekly themed events where we all worked on small projects to listen to. Many people used the time to invest in furthering their music knowledge beyond what they had grown accustomed to.

    I myself during this time found a renewed passion for the guitar, and began writing and singing some more folk inspired things. It became somewhat spirit crushing to sit at my computer all day at work, then come home and do it again all night. So sinking into my couch with the guitar and closing my eyes and getting wrapped into the moment became a very powerfully relaxing and meditative experience. I found myself singing about things that were very therapeutic for me to process and put into words, and propelled me into a process of joy and healing.

    A difficult point to make without sounding insecure to some haha, but for me, having access to this experience is the payment for my art. I can tell, because I am not delusional, that my 90 minute meandering soundscapes are not going to make a big influence on the wider world of music, nor frankly will my attempts at more traditional music. But they have changed me, for the better by far, and by extension they have in many small ways benefited and will continue to benefit the lives of the people who come to know me.

    Anyway, apologies for so much rambling, the last few days have been very stressful and I’ve been reminiscing a lot. TL;DR: we would get together often to jam, transitioned to bouncing stems and producing more planned recordings during the pandemic, and have now basically continued on with that procedural shift while also bringing in the different styles people explored during that period of isolation we all experienced