Dispatch #17 (July 2024)

By David Eisinger · View original post

We welcomed baby Nico on June 12. He and mama are both healthy and well. Nev’s a great big sister, if a little vigorous with her affection at times. It is a big shift, going from double coverage to single, but Claire and I both grew up in four-person households, and something about adding a second kid resonates at a very deep level.

I took a few weeks off after the birth, but I’m back to work now (mixed feelings on that – could have taken a longer break). We’ve been able to do a bit of traveling – quick trip up to Richmond to see my family, long weekend at Lake Norman with Claire’s.

A coworker at Viget, Nathan Long, publishes a weekly newsletter, and he recently gave me a little shout and included one of my favorite book quotes:

Pay attention, that’s all … Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn our to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain.

– Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

My buddy Ken, who records as Carillon, released a new album called Venus. Stream it wherever you stream your streams. He also worked with an animator to make a music video for one of the songs which is really pretty neat.

We’ve had a mouse in our house for the last few months. It didn’t really bother me, seemed pretty cute and harmless, and I’ve got ZERO appetite for mouse murder. But eventually he did make his way into our HVAC system and start causing problems, so I did a little bit of research and ordered a few of these humane traps. Turns out our mouse was actually six mice and counting. Solid product, highly recommended.

I ordered a copy of Pouch magazine, “a new indie magazine for stationery lovers.” Really cool if you’re into pens and notebooks and things like that – just very well done. I hope the creator publishes more issues.

This month:

• Adventure: nothing major planned for the rest of July, but every day’s an adventure with a newborn and a toddler
• Project: finish Nevie’s art table – I’m a focused 90 minutes away
• Skill: I want to keep up the music stuff, but I’m not sure what to focus on; I’ve got a few good books about drum programming and theory I’ll dig into, and then just try to jam w/o any specific goals

Reading:

• Fiction: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan – big fan of this guy’s website and just overall vibe
• Non-fiction: Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers, J. Anthony Allen

Links:

Creativity

• Midyear in a mid year

  Writing books, making art, recording music … it’s all a lot easier when you don’t know what you’re doing. Better yet if you don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s when you know you don’t know what you’re doing that you’ve got to really get after it.

  This resonates with me – I’ve learned a lot about making digital music over the last few months, but in some ways I feel like I’m still trying to get back to the level of the very first thing I did.

• Cultivating A Space For The Doing

  Engineer for yourself the smallest possible environment, concentrated as densely as possible with only the highest quality inputs; explicitly re-route all potential distraction-avenues back to one’s chosen craft, such that even when you’re momentarily doing something else you cannot escape the focus of your craft.

Parenting

• Give yourself what you needed and your kids what they need

  On the influence of the unlived lives of parents.

• 10 Thoughts From the Fourth Trimester

  A newborn is not a baby. Babies are cute and roly-poly and can see and are conscious and are normal and a newborn is not any of these things. It is a bizarre human larva that acts super weird and would still be in the womb if it could be.

Gadgets

• My Month Without a Smartphone

  I’m open to be persuaded, but after living life without a smartphone for a month, the case for keeping them out of kids’ hands as long as possible is pretty damn compelling. After all, if adults are as addicted to them as they appear to be, what are the chances young and impressionable kids can fare any better?

  I found this pretty inspiring and I’ve been rolling with a pretty dumbed-down phone for the last several weeks. It’s cut my phone time pretty drastically (and increased my iPad time, though hopefully not as much).

• The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted

  It’s a better Kindle and a better iPod, all in one gadget.

  Seeing a lot of praise for this thing¹; it’s tempting but I’m skeptical the solution to my issues with technology and consumerism is another piece of electronics.

AI

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

  I shall answer this as politically as I can … there are those that have drunk the kool-aid. There are those that have not. And then there are those that are trying to mix up as much kool-aid as possible. I shall let you decide who sits in which basket.

• Dear AI companies, please scrape this website

  Really, take my work! Go nuts! Make your AI think more like me. Make your AI sound more like me. Make your AI agree with my view of the world more often.

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