It’s the 100πth day of the year.

I watched Persepolis (2007). What a film, it’s one of my favourite movies now. Gorgeous. Gonna take a while to fully digest. I deeply appreciate France for being one of the strongholds of animations in the world, because the world deserves for this film to be made, and we don’t see films like this come out of Japan — both graphically and thematically.

Feels like I’m largely just running around doing chores again today. At least it’s less of a backlog and more of a matter of lifting things to a higher standard; the house is nice and clean again as well now and so is the PC. This website is also getting a lot of TLC bit-by-bit.

Tomorrow’s the anniversary of the end of WWI which is a national holiday here, so my partner’s taken today off as well for the long weekend. We were neutral in WWI where I’m from, but we do celebrate St. Martin’s Day on 11/11. I was hoping to spend the long weekend focusing on music production, but we’re 2.5 days into running chores instead so far; at least the end of that is in sight.

I’m gonna start sending out job applications today; I’m also still available for contracting and will be reaching out to more people for that as well, but finding gigs is hard and some financial stability would be very welcome right now. I’m looking for parttime and/or full-remote positions, preferably both. I’m pretty anxious about the job search… I’m plenty confident in my skills as an engineer, but I have a pretty irregular employment history and a language barrier with the country I reside in, with parttime/full-remote being yet another constraint on top of that. At least we don’t need very much extra income at all, but conversely we are also capital-B Broke right now. End of year bonuses and rebates will take some of the pressure off; that’s another ~2 months out, but will presumably arrive before stable employment regardless.

I want to start writing my Summer 2025 Anime Retrospective soon. I have my thoughts worked out, so it’s just a matter of finding the time to sit down and write it (I haven’t yet finished Bad Girl either).

Happy St. Martin’s/End of WWI!

Trying to sell our dry herb vaporizer — cutting down weed consumption to once-every-few-months tier, and I notice I get much less full-spectrum effects vaporizing vs just smoking leading me to consume more — but leboncoin took down our listing because something something drug paraphernalia. Nevermind that the product is legally for sale here, nevermind that there’s legitimate non-drug uses for it, nevermind that the exact same product is for sale in other listings on leboncoin… of course contacting support for this kind of thing is pointless. Solveable problem but so much ado about nothing. On the flipside, we managed to sell our Roland GI-10 that we got for our Premier Impact show. We bought it for €100 and sold it for €50, which I guess is alright for such an obsolete low-volume item.

This website now runs off Redbean (formerly lighttpd) — one reason being that lighttpd’s documentation is an unworkable mess (we were configuring caching) and another reason being that redbean is awesome. Justine is awesome. On that note, CSS/JS should now be cached for a day while HTML should be uncached, I hope (HTTP caching is confusing).

Starting to get serious about practicing the electronic drum kit that’s been standing in the corner for the past year and a half

I’ve started looking into the Linux FOSS music production stack again… provisional conclusions:

• Zrythm looks promising and afaict the backend is good, but the V1 frontend is unusably slow, with V2 in active development with a full GUI rewrite (GTK→QT) but still far from production-ready;
  • Side note: seems like almost nobody is writing major GUIs in GTK anymore, which is understandable given how dogshit GTK has become…
• Ardour is still Ardour, as far as I can tell it’s a good DAW but just not designed for a MIDI-heavy workflow;
• LMMS seems to be under very active development (26 PRs last month according to their forums) but they haven’t cut so much as an alpha release since 2020… Very strange, though I get the impression they are working towards a release;
• Right now a primarily No-DAW stack still seems the most viable.

I’m gonna give Ubuntu Studio another whirl tomorrow.

Still getting less-than-ideal sleep with a lot of nightmares, though it feels like things are starting to normalize a bit again, and at least my circadian rhythm is fine.

Been pretty dead for a couple days… sleep issues. I’ll try and be a bit more dilligent about always adding the journal entries, at least.

Started making a lot of refactors to the website.

Good gym session today. Worked on formatting my Anki cards. Read about the Three Kingdoms period. Not much else to say.

Two hours of drums practice today! Started feeling somewhat lethargic after that. Did a bunch of work reorganizing Hydrus.