Blog entry #6, 27/11/27
Alright. Back on the grind. Been hella tired recently, been lacking motivation. But now it's time to kick some butt I tell you what! I've been wrangling some friends to come watch my gig on the 12th of december. Would really like to record it with some proper sound. I have a condensator mic somewhere, but no sound card. I have about two weeks to figure it out. If I don't, it'll be the phone mic. It's unfortunate, but it hasn't failed me before.
Anyways, this entry will be a little shorter. I'd rather let my actions speak. So here I sit, my serious hat on. My flowery moccasins on my shoes. And I'm working hard. See y'all later.
Blog entry #5, 24/11/25
Hello everyone. Took the weekend off as I was busy with things, as I described in the entry prior. Did all the things I was going to do, so now I have a huge backlog of CDs to rip, so I'll be good for a long while. So instead of documenting my progress, let's do some introspection instead.
One thing I've been struggling with for a long time is motivation. I don't know if I'm just built like that, or if I'm a product of my upbringing and environment. What I do know however is that I've always been kind of an outcast among my peers, apart from a select few friends. Always a weirdo, you know? It got a little better as I got older and my social circles tightened, but you become trained in a way to always analyze your own behaviours and compare them to what everone else is doing, as a way to prove to yourself that you're not so weird anymore. Of course it's still not a good thing to be doing. I definitely overthink pretty much everything I do, and I'm self critical to a fault. But the way some other people can take self criticism and turn it into ambition, I cannot. I look inward, and am met by nothing. No fire, no ambition. I look back and forth, wondering where my soul has gone. It's nowhere to be found. And suddenly, darkness. I'm alone.
Except, I'm not alone. I never am, barely anyone really is. But it can sure feel like it. The reality is that I almost always excell at the things I care about, like cooking and music, and I am proud of myself. It's just that in a world like this, skill doesn't really get you anywhere. You have to be ruthless, ambitious. The qualities I never had. Honestly, would I even want them? What kind of person would I be? Would I still be kind? I don't know. I've met people like that, in all kind of situations, and they're more often than not kind of unbearable. So maybe it's for the best, to just remain a weirdo.
Blog entry #4, 21/11/25
Lol I'm writing this from my phone. Like I'm in the neocities dashboard, editing the html file. It's pretty awesome. I'm on a train home, gonna spend the weekend with my family. Got some work to do as well. Firstly: play some music with my dad and a friend of ours. We have a gig due christmas. I feel good about it. Just a little rusty. Secondly: gonna pick up some more CDs. With some quick maths I can conclude I rip like two or three CDs a day on average, meaning I have like two more weeks worth of material if I don't get some more. so that's what I'm gonna do. Get some more.
Another thing I've been thinking about is, what am I even going to do with all these albums once they're digitized? Should I really just let them sit there, in a folder on my desktop? The answer is no. I'd love to buy a lossless media player, ones that can play .flac files, but they're really expensive and I feel it's kinda hard to actually get some conclusive, well researched and majorative opinion on which ones are actually worth buying. The HiFi scene is really quite full of people without formal training with lots of money, so I don't know what else I would expect apart from people just trying to sound smart on reddit.
Oh well. I might just buy a flip phone instead. There might be some that have an audio jack and are capable of playing .flac files, and have a slot for a MicroSD that's at least 128GB. IF I can find a phone that does all three, I WOULD BE A HAPPY CRITTER!!! Assuming it's not ludicrously expensive of course. A lot of flip/dumbphones are weirdly expensive, or maybe I'm just really stingy. I just remember when I was a kid how you could buy one for like the price of a pack of gum... different times man.
Blog entry #3, 20/11/25
Todays topic is on passion, and what that word means to me, what passion really is.
A little over a year ago I finished my two year long education in jazz at a community college. I had already studied jazz for three years directly before that at a high school, and the years before that I had been playing and studying music since the age of eight. It's really all I know. After finishing I was hit with the devastating reality that I now have to grow up and get a job. And getting a job was surprisingly difficult. I had worked before but never more than summer jobs or part-time. So after a few months littered with countless ignored job applications and rejection e-mails, I grew tired, and enrolled yet again into education, since that's all I seem to be able to do. Though this time it was focused on cooking, more specifically it's a state mandated program to get people work in the fields that need people. And the first few months were great! I even thought I might have found my new passion! That was a year ago. I now have a few more moths left before I graduate, and I'm so sick of it all.
This morning I woke up with a thought. What is my passion? To what do I owe my life? And my answer was this: Passion is not what you are currently engrossed in, in my case cooking. It is not what you spend the most time on. Nay, your passion is the thing that never leaves the back of your mind, regardless of how little you partake in it. I've barely had any gigs this past year, barely practiced my instrument. Yet music is all I can really look forward to. I like videogames, but I don't really play them anymore. But the music...it never leaves me. That's the difference.
If you ever find yourself wondering, what is my passion? Simply look inwards, and think about the things you rarely do anymore. The things you don't have time for, or energy for, and in time you shall see that if it is important to you, you will never stop thinking about it. No matter how long you've deprived yourself.
Blog entry #2, 18/11/25
Goddamn I'm really fucking tired. A good kind of tired though. Body tired, not head tired. If I had the energy I would sit up all night and do a lot of things, like working on this site, and ripping cds. Maybe not practice on my electric drumset since I'm fortunate enough to share a fairly small apartment with my significant other, and it's late at night. But I'll just finish up this entry then I'll go to sleep. I checked what the CD was that I forgot yesterday tho, which is Speak No Evil with Wayne Shorter. It's really quite good. I have some personal ties to it as well, I associate the songs with a friend I got to know during my years of studying music. She wasn't the one to introduce the album to me per se, but she really did get me to listen to it more closely as I was comping her on one of the songs from the album, the song from which the album got its name (or vice versa), Speak No Evil. We were recording for an audition, to a school which she was accepted into, and is now happily studying. I'm really proud of her, and envious. She managed what I couldn't. I sometimes feel that I gave up, in a way she never did, or ever could.
I'm sort of surprised I could even forget such an album since it's got that sort of an emotional weight to it. Nevertheless, it does get me a little nostalgic. Yeah, I miss those days. It's easy to forget how fortunate you are, to have the opportunity to be wholly and completely engulfed in creative expression 24/7 (Nevermind the parties as well). We were poor, yes, but we had eachother, and eachother was all we needed. But at the same time, I refuse to be the person whose glory days are long past. No, there must be more to me. I cannot have reached my peak yet...right? No, if I decide it to be so then so it will be. I'm my own master.
Blog entry #1, 17/11/25
Well, got this up and running. Wanted to embed some sort of external blogging service to make the process easier, so I don't have to go prodding in the code every time I want to write something. But then I realized, what the fuck am I even on this site for if I'm just going to outsource all my work to some data-scraper? So yeah, it's really jank for the time being, but whatever. It's mine at least.
I'm going through all the old CDs my dad gave me, and ripping them to my PC. So far I've ripped The Diva Series starring Carmen McRae, Inception by McCoy Tyner (More on this one later), Captain Marvel by Stan Getz, a fourth one I can't remember so far, as well as a practice CD I got included in a book for drum excercises starring famous RUSH songs. I'm probably never going to play those songs myself, but if I'm ever going to teach anyone they're good to have on hand, and escpecially good backing tracks are worth their metaphorical weight in gold.
Now, usually I've got Exact Audio Copy tuned to Burst mode so I can get the rips going faster. I've not got all day after all. Unfortunately that isn't always the right choice. As I was ripping Inception the second track just simply did not want to correct. A few errors is fine, but it just kept churning indefinitely trying to course correct. I even got a timing error. Alas, I had to redo it. Pulled out the CD, wiped it down with my sleeve, and changed to Safe mode. It seemed to work, but it added an extra twenty minutes to the process. Went to bed a bit later than I should have. Oh well. Vad är en bal på slottet...