Photo: Honda S2000 (AP1) Engine Bay

2026-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

Here's a picture I took at a local car meetup last month that I think is pretty good (click for full-size image, but be careful since it's 30 MB):</p>

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This one's off my 2x3 Speed Graphic (one of my favorite cameras) with Ilford HP5+ in a 6x7 roll film back. I suspect I need to adjust the rangefinder since I doubt I purposefully focused on the brake reservoir (and many other shots from this session are focused slightly too far), but, y'know, it's close enough.</p>

I haven't shot medium format in a couple years, so I was happy to finally have the excuse to dig my medium format scanning setup back out. It's a Nikon LS-8000 with a custom control PCB based on a modern microcontroller, which probably deserves its own post here but I don't have the energy to write it up today. It's been sitting in storage for a while, but thankfully I was able to get it working with a bit of effort, and I think it gets me much better results than DSLR scanning.</p>

The S2000 is a neat car, by the way.</p>

Track 1

2026-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Check it out, I wrote a song.</p> </audio>

One of my goals in starting this project was to have an excuse to write some music. For some reason I absolutely need</em> a reason to compose, if I just sit down at the computer and say "hmm, what if I wrote some music today", it doesn't happen. Writing some music because I need something to put up on here, though? That, apparently, works fine.</p>

Process-wise, I programmed the whole track in MuseScore, then rendered it out with Logic Pro using a bunch of its default synth presets. I feel like I'm getting a little more used to writing drum parts in MuseScore, that's always felt like the part where traditional music notation is the most limiting. On the plus side, the notation makes it clear how goofy this build-up is in a way that piano roll doesn't:</p>

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As usual, I started with the bassline. I both play and sing bass, so it's a natural starting point for me, and it really sets up the whole harmonic and rhythmic structure of the rest of the track. For some reason this time I found it pretty easy to mix in fills and variations. I'm pretty fond of this one at bar 50:</p>
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and this off-key walkup to the IV chord at 33:</p>
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The pad synthesizer came next, I believe, and then the melody and drum part. It took me a bit to get the structure right (one early draft just ended after the middle eight), and then I took a couple passes at mixing some more variations into the bass part and cleaning up weird spots in the harmony, and I decided that was enough.</p>
I did show a couple friends an earlier version of this piece a couple days ago and one said it reminded them of Wayne Lytle's work on Animusic</em>; that wasn't an explicit inspiration when I started composing it, but... I used to listen to that a lot. It's gonna be in there. This actually caused me a bit of a funny realization –– I don't always have a lot of confidence in my ability to compose music. I have a strong music theory background, but it's mostly "as applied to performance", I haven't studied much at all of what goes into writing a piece down in the first place.</p>
But after my friend said that, I listened through it again, and on this draft I didn't have the bass fill leading right into the ending yet, it was actually a bar earlier (final version pictured):</p>
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And I thought "wait a second, if I'm gonna lean into Lytle's style here, I should have the bass fill go all the way to the end, he loves doing that one". I can't remember if I had the B♯ in there yet, but that's another thing that's very much "that sound", it really calls attention to the bass.</p>
And then I just kinda sat there for a moment thinking about how within a few minutes of each other I'd posted "jeez, I kinda think this sucks and that I'm a fake composer" and also "oh, yeah, it does sound like the work of [other musician] and I can articulate exactly what I'd have to do to better match their style". I get the feeling that if I really didn't know anything about music I wouldn't be able to tell you how Mr. Lytle likes his bass fills, y'know? So hopefully that'll give me a bit of confidence to do more of this in the future.</p>
Here's the MuseScore file</a>, by the way.</p>

It's like some kind of a blog in here

2026-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

So. A few years ago now, I decided I was done being on public social media. This has generally been good for me, but I realized the other day that it kind of leaves me without an outlet for a lot of the creative work I want to do.</p>
And then my immediate next thought was "wait, isn't that supposed to be the point of a blog?" I've wanted to Have A Blog as a thing to do for a while, but I've always struggled to consistently find anything to post about, because I guess I have some idea in my head about what a Blog Post ought to be like that I don't feel like I can live up to frequently. I'm not sure why it took me this long to realize that's silly and what I should do is post whatever random thing I'm working on, but that's how it goes sometimes.</p>
So here's the plan: I'm going to commit to posting something on here once a week, probably on Fridays, that I consider to be art. I'm not</em> going to make any commitment to genre, medium, style, length or quality; this blog is not intended to be "about something" and I fully reserve the right to phone it in. I have a couple posts queued up in advance, so I'm hoping that'll at least get me over the hump into "posting regularly" rather than making yet another blog with one post that's about blogging.</p>
Anyways, I figure I'll go ahead and tell a little story here in the first one. I want to say "to set the tone" here, but that's explicitly not the point. This is one of the posts that appears on this blog.</p>
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This Olympia SM4 (click for larger image) was my workhorse typewriter throughout high school. I wasn't particularly nice to it at the time, because I wasn't really aware that a SM4 with a script typeface was, like, worth money, so when it developed the common issue SM3s and 4s get with the bushings that hold the body to the machine chassis wearing out, I just took all the body panels off. Then I lost them. Then I left the machine (still missing all the covers) on a shelf at a relative's house for eight years after becoming estranged.</p>
About a month ago, I was finally able to get it back. It was completely covered in dust, still latched into the bottom half of the case whose top half was lost before the typewriter even came to me in the first place, still with the piece of wire tied around the frame to stop the spacebar from popping up that interfered with the X key (normally, the spacebar is retained by the front of the body).</p>
It also still worked just as well as it did when I left it. All I did was blow the dust off, and that's apparently all it needed. Put a new ribbon on and I was typing pen-pal letters on it the next day. I wasn't quite happy with that though, so with the help of a friend from the online typewriter collectors' community (of course there is such a thing), I was able to get the case and body panels from a parts machine, and now it really looks like it ought to.</p>
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As I said, this typewriter has a script font. RaRo 75 was used on a variety of different machines throughout the '50s and '60s (including the Hermes 3000, examples of which fetch astronomical prices), and I think it's one of the nicer monospace fonts around. I've been having a lot of fun using it for correspondence.</p>
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It really uses every available part of the type slugs. Those tall capitals are actually more than a quarter-inch tall, which means that they take up over half the ribbon height, and therefore this machine can only use a single-color ribbon.</p>
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It's kind of a shame since I like having the two-color option for a couple specific use cases and therefore I can't use this typewriter for them. More on that in a future post, though, if that's what I decide to do.</p>