weeknotes #6: peace lily

a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that

i have a studio space

on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there’s an iceland. above the iceland is this 70’s pebbledash concrete box. i don’t know what it used to be, it’s a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.

i’ve put all my music gear (really just a midi keyboard and an ableton push) in there, and my big eurorack, and my soldering stuff and large collection of electronics parts, and a large peace lily, and i cycle there and make things. it’s really just an expensive way of tricking my brain into hyperfocusing but god damn does it work, i actually get stuff done there.

it’s a fucking mess at the moment though so no pics for you.

some of the things i’m making there

i finally got my act together and learnt PCB design. did you know you can design something and give the files to a company in Shenzhen and they’ll just frickin make it for you for less than a fiver? it’s so easy that a problem i have is i keep sending off for things then having a new idea and having to eat the extra delivery charge when i could have just put them all in one order.

from left to right, top to bottom that’s:

• Parakeets: a noise synth based around a 4093 schmitt trigger NAND chip. it goes WUB and ZHUZH ZHUZH ZHUZH and screeeeeee
• Mallards: a eurorack 1U switched mixer/multiple. which means you have four inputs; each of those inputs has an A/B switch; all of the As get mixed together and all the Bs get mixed together. and four outputs with A/B switches; switch an output to A to have it output the mixed A inputs. you’re either going “why is that useful”, to which i’ll say if you’re live-performing eurorack, it lets you send stuff places without movinng patch cables around; or you’re going “holy shit i want one” in which case hmu
• Ants: (probably) the world’s smallest eurorack power supply. spits out 0.8 amps on both rails which is actually really impressive because it’s tiny, it’s like 1×1.2 inches. designed to sit through a hole in a wooden case.
• a bootleg black panel for Pamela’s New Workout: everybody has a Pam. it comes with a silver aluminium panel. all my other panels are black. “rectangular thing with holes in it and screen printing on the face” also describes a PCB
• a eurorack power bus: there are lots of eurorack buses out there; but none of them have a pale slim ghost on them

this is the year i get serious about making things people want to buy and then selling them to those people. which probably means making a Rails storefront app, yay

i have a new line manager

and it’s Alice! hello Alice. you’re fantastic already