Studio Notes #34
Greetings, my friends. Here's Issue #34 of Studio Notes—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. This one coming to you from a brand new publishing and membership engine. More on that later.
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It's always nice to stumble on a website filled with interesting, webby things. Clocks Made by Vasilis is a collection of web-based clocks with clever, programmatic implementations. Like showing the exact time from a collection of photographs of real-world clocks, or mimicking a typewriter typing out the time every second on paper, etc. There are some fascinating ways to think about time in here.
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Admittedly, I fell asleep during PBS's, The Gilded Age documentary about the end of the nineteenth century in America. I'll have to finish it, but the first half got me thinking about what profession I would've had in the 1890s. Steel baron, Andrew Carnegie, apparently called himself a "smooth operator" in his early career, which meant he was an expert telegraph messenger, wielding Morse code like a prodigy. (Perhaps Sade's inspiration for her 80s hit song?) Anyhow, it got me wondering: Would I have been into the telegraph like AC since it was essentially the internet of its time? Or maybe typesetting, or book printing—or maybe something less obvious like newspaper columnist or shoemaker. Fun to think about how we might've evolved in a different era.
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I've long admired Dolly Parton's songwriting. My daughter, Tenley, has been playing one of my all-time favorites lately in the car, Here I Am, from her Coat of Many Colors album from 1971. I love this particular recording of it: Drummer only plays the hi-hat during the verse, killer guitar hook, pedal steel, gospel-esque backing vocals, almost-off-time, gunshot snare fills before the chorus—all the things that make a great track in the 1970s (the Golden Age of pop/rock music production).
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I recently added Bracket City to my daily puzzle lineup. It's like a crossword, but the clues are nested within brackets that, when solved, form a sentence that's a historical fact. So far, it's been challenging enough to keep me trying each day. You don't have to know historical facts to play, that part just sort of reveals itself at the end.
What are you working on?
I've soft-launched our new Gold membership system and will write about it more detail next week, but it feels like a positive, new era for this tiny enterprise. I finally feel good about the backend publishing engine (Ghost) and it'll hopefully enable some fun stuff going forward. Once this is all 100% done, I'm back to making things like imperfect alphabets and arguably-fashionable merch!
Thanks for following along, as always, and have a great weekend. See you back here next Friday.
Cheers,
