2025 is here… its been very cold and dry. The biggest update is that I
completed WeeklyBeats 2024! I’m
shocked I was able to do it, and I’m proud of the music I was able to
make. It wasn’t the most amazing music; but it was in interesting way to
get into the habit of doing something creative, and it helped me build a
flow and familiarity with the synths and tools I used to make all the
songs. It was nice to not have a deadline for the first two weeks of the
year, but I do plan to make more music in 2025. I’ll likely revisit a
few of the tracks that I made in 2024, and might put my favorites
(remixed and refreshed) into an album. I’m also working on some
industrial music, but no ETA on when that will actually be published
anywhere. I need to look at platforms like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and
others to figure out how/when I would release music. And since
WeeklyBeats is over, I’ll share one last song that I made - the final
track, FINO.
Since it was my last song (and inspired by OrangeDrink),
I made a video for it using ffmpeg and shotcut:
Since that was such an important experience for 2024, I want to eventually do a full write up about it; but I’ll need some more time to reflect on it. Maybe it’ll be later this year, preparing for WeeklyBeats 2026.
Speaking of music, I recently joined a cooperative alternative to Bandcamp, Subvert. Its an interesting idea, and one that I hope succeeds. If you know me and my music habits, you probably know that I’m a heavy user of Bandcamp - my collection as of today has 1423 albums in it. I picked up heavily during COVID when they started doing Bandcamp Friday, a day when 100% of purchases went to the artists. I continued growing my library to what it is today, and I still continue to buy albums there because its still my platform of choice. It hasn’t gotten to the point where I’d abandon it, but in 2022 they were bought by Epic (the game developer/publisher), and then in late 2023 they were bought again by Songtradr. It’s not clear what their plans for it will be; but it does feel like things are up in the air, so a cooperative platform alternative could be interesting. It will be soft launched later this year, so I look forward to seeing how it plays out.
Outside of music, I’m planning some travel. Last year, I did the same thing I’ve done most years and planned vacation poorly; using most of my vacation time in the last two months of the year. This year, I’m planning to (hopefully) go to Tuscany for a six day cycling tour with inGamba. The only place I’ve traveled outside of the United States is Japan, so I’m excited to visit another new country. The cycling tour is six days, but I will likely plan another ~week to visit the area after cycling, if it makes sense. This will also be the first time doing international solo travel… should be fun!
I’m also planning group travel… back to Japan 😅. This will be my third trip; but unlike the last two times, this will be with a relatively large group of friends instead of just one other person. We’re planning to go in Spring 2026, but we met up this month to start planning. With a group this size (six to nine people), we definitely need a bit more coordination. I also want to look at some places that are a bit more off the beaten track. Having been to a lot of the major tourist attractions, I want to try to dive a bit deeper and force myself to be a bit more immersed. Because of this trip, I’ve stopped learning Esperanto for the time indefinitely so that I can put a stronger focus back on my Japanese studies. I’ve picked up the pace using (Duolingo)[https://www.duolingo.com/course/ja/en/Learn-Japanese], WaniKani, and https://bunpro.jp/ to refresh my existing knowledge and start on some new grammar and kanji. Duolingo is notoriously bad for Japanese; however, I will likely use it just for some supplementary studying in addition to everything else. I also plan to continue my lessons from university, using the Eleanor Harz Jorden book Japanese: The Spoken Language, along with Genki. I do not even expect to be at N5 level by the time we go on the trip, but I do want to feel a bit more confident than I did in my 2022 trip.
2024 was great, and 2025 has started off good so far - I’m hoping that the rest of the year goes well!
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