I was messing around with Adobe’s ability to add grain to digital images. This is an interesting concept to me, because why other than for reasons of texture/aesthetic, fidelity, masking a filter, or technological nostalgia. For this image, I rode the grain right up to where I thought I started to notice it and then backed off.¹ While I know how to color correct film and video, I don’t really know the best practices for correcting a photograph in Adobe Raw. I hit auto correct and then move the sliders around until things feel good. I did recalibrate my monitor before working on the image. I typically do not recalibrate my monitor because I fear it’s out of whack, but because I too often accidentally hit the brightness keys on F1 and F2.

This image is a little dark, but I liked that. I shot the photo with a GH5, 25mm lens at f/1.4 and ISO of 200.

I’ve always wanted a cichlid, and this is my first. It is a gold ram cichlid named Evil-Lyn. I realize this isn’t the best picture, but I’ll hopefully get a better one at some point.

An orange rubber duck in a tub.

This song is about a meeting.

Another sound/music-scape.

It’s May, and time has gotten ahead of me. I’ve been doing stuff, mostly tinkering with a written story, and also planning to shoot a short film this summer. We will see how that goes.

Here is something I recorded yesterday. There is a melody I guess, though I programed it very haphazardly. The piece is more noise textures. I feel like a lot of the things I’ve recorded lately are unintentional (I say unintentional because I’m not that good to actually intentionally do this) attempts to recapture my early experiences playing Metroid on the NES.

I have been doing these for a while with my friend; he produces them. We agreed that if we hit episode 30 we would start promoting them. Here is episode 31. Caveat, I am not a dad of a human child; I am only a dog owner.

Five years ago – give or take – I had some changes in my life, amongst them one was drifting into a career that was far more stable and rewarding than a lot of other things I’d done previously. With these changes (the career was not the only one), a lot of my creative endeavors took the back seat as I focused on my profession and new life. I did make a short film during this time of which I am extremely proud. Currently, I’m submitting it to fests. In a year or so, I’ll post it here and elsewhere. The film was a proper film in the sense that it involved a lot of people, time, resources, and effort. Films like this can also be draining, because they take so long to make. I guess I should also mention that there was 2020-21, a pandemic, and a world of bad shit. I used to joke that the worst year(s) of my life was when I was in middle school, ages 13-14. I won’t anymore. It was 2020-21.

Recently though, I’ve found myself making again, but a lot less directed than previously. Over the past summer I’d toyed with the idea of making another website for this stuff to live on, but I’m not sure that’s the right move for now. Perhaps later down the road. There’s also the time and energy that it takes to make a site. Then it hit me like an epiphany, why not just start posting again to Protozoic?

I have Tim to thank for this. In December, he posted about The Wheel of Time novels. The post had depth, had reflection, was bloggy, and was an end unto itself. It was inspiring. Following Tim’s lead, I thought I’d try to do one to two creative posts a month for 2022.

I had another goal to write for 5-7 hours a week, creatively. I’ve already hit this goal for the first week of January, and I intend to keep it up. I figure some of that will wind up here, in various forms. The posts I anticipate doing here will relate to music and sound, animation, short stories, and exploring the screenplay form in a more experimental manner. The first of my posts for January is up, which is a video of a fish tank I inherited, and then some electronic sounds. Next week, I’m hoping to have a short story posted, which is loosely inspired by a conversation I had with the D&D crew. My hope is that the posts will vary in that way, sometimes writing, sometimes video, sometimes sound – sometimes a little bit of everything.

If at the end of 2022 I hit the above goal, and/or come close, I’ll do a follow-up to this one. Till then, I hope you have a good year.