🎸

I’ve been getting my right-hand chops back (mainly by playing along with Lamb of God’s “Ruin” over and over again) in preparation for recording some more of the album my band (still unnamed) is hoping to release later this year.

I’ve also been planning a release of a weird ambient/dubstep/black metal piece as part of my La Petite Mort project - I’m hoping to have that out by the end of June.

🎧

Mizmor & Thou’s Myopia is most definitely my album of the month:

I missed the performance of this at Roadburn (it clashed with Amnesia Scanner and HEALTH), so I can now add that to my list of Roadburn regrets along with Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle, Thou and The Body and pretty much any other Thou set that I stupidly didn’t go to.

👨‍💻

I’ve been cleaning up some code I wrote in ODK Collect that added a new Select one from map widget. I ended up getting COVID while working on the feature in March and de-prioritized some refactoring of older mapping code that I’m now tackling. Collect is interesting in many ways, but one highlight is that users can choose the underlying mapping framework used in the app (Google, Mapbox or OSM). All the interactions with these frameworks are mostly hidden behind a single interface, and the next step is to restructure it so that each mapping framework’s implementation of that interface lives in its own isolated Gradle module.

I also rediscovered a gem I wrote almost a decade ago after someone randomly liked it. I’m pretty happy with how this is simultaneously useful and stupid.

🍷

Not a lot of wine this month. However, I did end up drinking a whole load of great whisky on a belated 30th birthday trip to Campbeltown. The highlight was probably one of the casks we had the chance to try as part of Glen Scotia’s warehouse tasting.

🎲

I managed to pick up one of the older Arkham Horror LCG scenario packs “Murder at the Excelsior Hotel” at Dice Saloon in Brighton while I was there teching for my sister’s show “Yolk”. It’s probably one of the tighter (and hopefully more re-playable) experiences with that game. I’d definitely recommend it if you can find a copy.