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2023-02-13 (Week 2254): Future Paths Unfold
I read an article from Derek Sivers (who published music for me through his previous company, CD Baby) about how explorers are bad leaders. His points are valid, and his descriptions of explorers drew my interest.
He writes that explorers try many different things, meander through whimsy, and are hard to follow. I recognize the explorer instinct in me, and whenever I try to stifle or demand something from it, I have a terrible time.
That's not to say I'm bereft of the leader aspect, but it's the lesser of the two. I drop links and programs in these updates or link songs that resonate with me and hope people can find fulfillment in them.
In any event, the explorer instinct seems to be blasting forth, as I have many projects I want to approach. My worst problem is focusing on finishing projects.
Thankfully, I took the time last week to complete the "Gifts of Faith" EP. It clocks in at nine tracks and 27 minutes, and it's sort of vaporwave, but not really. It will release on the same day as "Frozen in Time" (February 24th).
As for what's next, I've got a few things in front of me. I have a project I want to try with some cassette tapes that a neighbor left for freecycle and my Tascam Porta 02 4-track. There are five tapes, and their titles suggest they are of east Asian origin, as the characters are Japanese and a language I don't recognize. I haven't listened to them yet, but that's half the fun of the project.
I also want to go through the entirety of the SPC library available at snesmusic.org and find the SPC samples that will work best for me for making SNES chiptunes that I want to have as a feature for this site. I have a copy of SPCTool set up on a 32-bit laptop, so I'll use that or spc2it to extract the samples if SPCTool doesn't work for me.
The laptop I just mentioned also has Mordor installed, which I've been playing off and on since 1995. I have a party close to beating the game, so it might be time to pull the trigger and get that done.
My Linux experiments can wait a bit since I've got all these old projects to complete. Ultimately, I want to create a rolling build from my oldest laptop to the newest since I can flash the OS to ISO through antiX. I'm not sure it works that way, but I'll find out eventually.
I also have my eyes on an old Lenovo Thinkpad, 32-bit, topped out at 4GB of RAM (which is tiny, but is the most 32-bit architecture can process), has a pre-Intel Management Engine processor, and is dirt cheap. It has Windows 7, which can run all of my music software. I may stick with my Windows 10 laptop for music, but we'll see. As I've stated, whimsy is my muse.
I think that's enough mental exploration and exposition for one week, so I'll be back next week to see where I've gone. Hopefully, you'll join me as well.
Until next week!
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