Issue 3 – another drawing app, scream therapy, a demonstration of my inability to understand lyrics, and more.

Update: Jen's 40th birthday was awesome! Here's me dressed up as a wish.com interview with a vampire type of thing:

And here's Jen looking fabulous as a moon goddess with a tasty margarita and Lebanese food:

Personal Socrates – I heard about this from the Bookworm podcast. I was intrigued as it seemed to present an interesting way of thinking about things by providing profiles of folks and then asking relatively simple, yet difficult-to-answer, questions. The format of the book is kinda unique, and I bought the hardcover purposefully to get the Full Experience. It's published by Baron Fig, which makes a whole bunch of nice journals and pens and whatnot. The podcast mentioned that the hardcover version had a cool feature where each segment's right hand page indicated how many pages were left. That's something I love about reading on the Kindle, and it works well in a physical copy as well. In addition to the niceties of the design, it also comes in a hardcover sleeve that also includes a bookmark.

The book isn't a linear thing, it's supposed to be a choose your own adventure type of thing where you can look at the section topics and read whatever resonates with you at the moment. Personally, I've been just reading them one after the other. Each section is really short, usually 3-5 pages, and start with a bullet list of facts about the person the section is about. Then there's a short essay about the person and their experiences and a general question that is intended to get you thinking about how you'd answer it in your own life. (The Socratic Method... get it?)

Concepts – as mentioned in the last issue, I've been checking out a bunch of drawing/painting apps for the ipad and pencil. While Procreate is definitely the king of the hill when it comes to "natural" media emulation and community, Concepts is worth a look and has some really nice advantages.

First off, it's a vector based app as opposed to pretty much every other painting/sketching app being raster. Event though it's vector, it does an amazing job of emulating natural media, which is pretty wild. It doesn't have quite the same feel as something like Procreate, especially when it comes to things like blending and watercolor styles, but for pencil and ink sketching it's pretty great.

Being vector comes with some pretty subtle but powerful benefits. First off, you don't really have to worry about the size of things since vectors are inherently scalable. One of the things I don't particularly like about using Procreate after having started with Concepts is the whole need to have to think about what size canvas you want, and what resolution it should be. Having worked pretty much exclusively on building for the web the last 20 years or so, that's not really something my brain has had to calculate for a long time. It's not really that big of a deal, but since I'm using these apps to actually draw things like portraits and whatnot, there's a chance I might actually want to… print them out 😮 When printing gets involved, then you really have to think about resolution and size and all that.

Along those lines, while Procreate starts out any project with selecting a canvas size and resolution, Concepts has an infinite canvas, which means there's just a viewport that you can draw on and then simply drag it over to draw some more next to it, pretty much as much as you want. This is pretty freeing. I've been using apps like Fireworks, Sketch, and, most recently, Figma to design web app interfaces. All of them have an infinite canvas paradigm as well, where you can have as many screens within the canvas as you want (as well as multiple pages of infinite canvas), and I've taken advantage of that to a somewhat absurd degree. For me, designing things is an exercise in constant iteration, making something I'm somewhat happy with and then duplicating it to make some tweaks and improvements over and over and over. It's not uncommon for me to have a file that has hundreds of variations on one canvas. Heres' an actual image of me designing a website:

Having an infinite canvas in a drawing app is pretty neat, and the vector aspect has some other really cool advantages as well, like being able to just select strokes and delete or resize them without losing quality. It's also got some weirdness as well, like "erasing" actually just masking the shapes, and a little bit of uncanny valley syndrome when it comes to the natural media. But, it's also super great if you're doing more industrial, landscape, or product design oriented stuff.

Here's a drawing I did in Concepts:

It also has a pretty unique UI that is optimized for stylus interaction that I miss whenever I use a different app, and a cool color palette system based on those expensive COPIC markers. Give it a try.

Growing up we were pretty damn poor. Most of my childhood, my jeans were of the Toughskins variety if I was lucky, but usually whatever they had at Kmart or thrift stores. In my teens I did the whole ridiculously baggy pants thing when I skated, and that usually meant getting one or two pairs and wearing them every day. As I got older I maybe got stock Levis or Gap jeans. They were always pretty thin and distressed and "relaxed" fit or whatever. I didn't really care or know any difference.

When I got into my late 30s I decided to maybe think about the clothes I bought a little bit. I had a bit more money, and wanted something higher quality that would last. The whole workwear thing was big and jeans (I mean denim, sorry) were a Big Thing. I dipped my toes into the water by buying some that cost over $100, which freaked me out. But, I ended up loving them. The quality was really apparent, they fit way better, and they were made in America 🦅. I was hooked.

So after wearing that first pair to death, I got a pair that was made in Japan (where they do everything better) and were a bit heavier. Something like 17oz instead of 14oz. I liked these even more. Wore the shit out of them. Had to buy a new pair.

I decided to try out the big dogs — the 21 Ouncers. They're absurdly thick, stiff, and heavy. When you first get them they're downright silly. But, living in Portland, and growing up mostly wearing pants or jeans even when it was hot socal weather, they're just right. Like lots of things that are worth it, they have an uncomfortable breaking in period where you question why you're putting yourself through it. But once they break in and conform to your body, they soften up and feel like butter. They're thick enough that they almost take on a flannel type of texture when they loosen up. And, of course, they last a long time since they're so well made. They're expensive, but capable of being worn pretty much every day for super long stretches of time, and when they inevitably get a crotch blowout or whatever, they're able to be repaired and worn for another long stretch of time.

It took me almost 40 years to learn, but yeah, I guess paying a bit more for better stuff is pretty worth it.

As mentioned in the last issue, I've been trying to do the interstitial journaling thing throughout the day, and I've landed on a system that seems ok for now. I use Obsidian for all my writing and notes, which I really love, but, as a cross platform Electron app made by two people, it's not super native feeling on a mac. With the right themes and plugins I've been able to make it feel really great. But, it's still pretty much a single window to type into. After years of using native apps like Things that are super tightly integrated into macOS and have quick entry palettes that an be accessed from anywhere, I really wished Obsidian had something like that so I could quickly send off whatever was on my mind at that time and log it into my daily notes page with a timestamp. Yes, I could switch over to Obsidian relatively easily and type it in and then switch back to whatever I was doing, but that really takes me out of the flow and feels kind of counter to the whole idea of interstitial journaling. It's just enough friction that it would prevent me from doing it at all.

So, I cobbled something together with Drafts and the advanced URI Obsidian plugin. Essentially, all I do is use the cmd-shift-2 quick entry window command for Drafts, which brings up a small window that I can type some markdown into when I want to log something, and then hit cmd-enter to send it off to the Drafts inbox and continue on with whatever I was doing. I occasionally go to the Drafts window to see what I've logged and then send it off to my Obsidian daily note with a quick action that appends the content of the draft as a timestamped bullet item under a "Rapid Log" header on my daily notes page.

It's not perfect, but it works. I'll probably try doing it with Raycast at some point too for even faster entry and directly sending it to Obsidian without having to process it later, but this is pretty ok for now. If you use Drafts and want the action, let me know.

Robert Bray on the "Scream Therapy" podcast — the drummer for The Locust (Gabe Serbian) passed away a few days ago. I've never really been into The Locust. I think I was at their first show back in like 1994 at Cafe Mesotopamia. That's when Dylan from Struggle was in the band, and they had some long hair singing. It was pretty much a Crossed Out tribute at that point and they weren't wearing the wacky costumes and shit. Anyways, Bobby has always played guitar for them. While I was looking around for stuff on them after learning Gabe died I came across this podcast episode Bobby was a guest on. I've only listened to this episode, but it's a really interesting premise of "scream therapy" wherein the act of screaming is a form of getting your anger and frustrations out.

I suppose it's just primal scream stuff, but I never really thought about it in that way much. Like Bobby, I've been in bands that scream for vocals since the mid 90s. It just works with the style of music we always played. Beyond that, though, it's always been cathartic. Screaming your head off to ultra heavy, pissed off music has always felt natural.

I was always a pretty tightly wound kid. First born of my entire generation of cousins within an evangelical Mexican family, I always had the feeling of responsibility, of being a Good Kid. This of course led to me being straight edgebecause it mixed being a Good Kid who doesn't do drugs with heavy music, which I loved since I first heard Metallica in the late 80s.

And a key component of the straight edge music was screaming.

Well, I suppose much of the early days of straight edge hardcore had vocals more along the lines of "aggressively yelling," but as things got more evolved and extreme, much of the hardcore scene embraced straight up screaming. Rorschach, who is probably my favorite hardcore band of all time, broke things wide open. When I first dropped the needle on their Protestant album and heard Mandible, everything clicked. This is what I'd been looking for.

Now, most folks will listen to that song and be like what the fuck is this guy screaming about and why is the music so ugly sounding? In fact, a Rorschach song was used in Zero Dark Thirty in a scene where they were torturing someone. To me, though, it's beautiful. Instead of making me angry or aggressive, it energizes me. I could listen to this stuff pretty much any time of day and be into it.

My first Real Band was called Enewetak and we definitely screamed. I even did some backup screams in a few songs, and even did the main vocals on one. I loved it. There was nothing more energizing and liberating than just playing extremely loud and ugly music while we screamed our fucking heads off. And while most folks would assume the shows were super violent and everyone involved was aggressive, it was pretty much the exact opposite. We played shows in tiny coffee shop like venues while people stood around in baggy pants and oversized shirts with their backback on, nodding their heads up and down. Most of the lyrics were entered around vegetarianism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism, etc.

So yeah. Life is full of paradoxes I guess. Screaming your damn head off as therapy. The shit works.

This is another dish I made during that Middle Eastern dinner party we had a while back, and it's super good. It's deceptively simple, as it's just sweet potatoes with garlic sauce, but it's super good.

Like I mentioned in the last issue, no shows coming up until the Opeth and Mastodon show next week. But, I thought I'd go through the archives and see the last show photos I had before the Unprecedented Times of Covid-19. I went to see Blackwater Holylight, Earthless, and Yob show at Bossanova Ballroom in December 2019. It was pretty awesome, of course.

And then I saw Thrice at Roseland on Jan 24, 2020. I guess that was probably the last show I saw before … well, you know.

I'm going to Opeth and Mastodon on Tuesday, so I'll have a writeup in the next issue!

I came across a photographer names Joseph Wyman and instantly fell in love with his work. I'm still getting used to drawing portraits, and high contrast black and white photos are the best for practicing at this stage since it makes the image really pop. He does old school tintype portraits, and they're all beautiful. I drew this dude with a huge beard and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'll definitely be drawing more of his stuff.

The Paper app that was (I think) the first really nice natural media style drawing app for the iPad turned 10 years old, and one of the founders wrote a pretty neat history of how it came together.

Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol – some of you may know that I have a complete inability to understand lyrics when listening to songs with vocals. Like, I can't understand them at all. I remember being at work when we were trying to determine the most depressing album of all time and someone nominated Beck's Sea Change. I listened to it and was like what the hell, this isn't depressing at all, it just sounds like Beck. And someone was like "but didn't you listen to the lyrics?" and I was like "Ohhhhh." Vocals are pretty much just another instrument in the soundscape for me, I just can't discern what they're actually saying. Maybe I have some sort of auditory processing disorder or something, I dunno. But either way, I got a link to this video from Bob Doto's High Pony newsletter and I was shocked that I could finally explain to people how all music sounds to me. Also, the song slaps.

– Toby