what are you into right now?

Getting this making done. Did 2 pairs of trousers over the last couple of weeks.
yellow and green tartan
& a lemony mustard multiwale pair of cords
Currently working on a frontier shirt I cut a few months ago. Now just cut the yokes.
Did most of a William Morris Pimpernel cossack shirt over the last couple of days.
PLenty more to go.

Podcasts a plenty. mainly been listening to them all day. Just finishing the 2nd part of a thing on Vlad teh IMpaler.
William Goldman's Adventuresin The Screentrade.
MIchael barnes' It was A New Day yesterday
flavoured sausages from Lidl
Dunnes soups still.
THink i'm going to have some scampi and sweet potato chips for dinner in a little while.
Hoping that mail will arrive ok on Tuesday.
Things and stuff

I am into

Baking cakes

classic Universal Studios monster movies

Reading about the immediate aftermath of WW2 re holocaust survivors, ie the journey from being “found” & freed from the camps into ‘normal’ life

satanic panic podcasts

Revolutions Podcast
History of Rock Music in 500 Songs Podcast
Cab Calloway
Django Reinhardt
James Joyce
ITV documentary series 'Hollywood' from 1980
Buster Keaton shorts
Watching The Simpsons and Doctor Who with the kids
Cleaning and fixing everything in the garden
Gochujang sauce on almost everything
Increasingly elaborate porridge, not with gochujang so far though

https://ianmaclarty.itch.io/if-we-were-allowed-to-visit
journaling (see 420 thread on 77)
Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes - Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar
painting
half-assing yoga stretches

Scavenger hunt pandemic cooking

Baking bread products with all the yeast i have because I always forgot if I if I had yeast so I would buy one of those three packs only to get home and realize I already had a bunch of them

Trying to play G’n’F’n’Rs “Mr. Brownstone” on the guitar cleanly at actual speed

Changing my custom Vim color scheme after 10 years or so

Eating a small amount of ABV every morning which does wonders for pandemic anxiety

My 5.5 year old learning to ride his bike and going on bike rides

Playing Uno and Sorry and Memory with the wife and kid

Playing Super Mario World on the Raspberry Pi SNES emulator combined with the videos and walkthroughs that exist now showing the secret exits that I never found 30 years ago

Facetime and zoom conversations with friends I never really talked to that often before a month ago

The Beastie Boys book

Basically corona lockdown has turned me into the video game and guitar playing stoned 16 year old I never quite was 30 years ago

Bon Appetit Test Kitchen
Super Mario Maker 2 videos
Quick breads
Polyrhythms
Moshe Kasher & Natasha Leggero's podcast
Youtube Yoga (under 20 min)

Playing Super Mario World on the Raspberry Pi SNES emulator combined with the videos and walkthroughs that exist now showing the secret exits that I never found 30 years ago

yesss

I too have SMW and a bunch of name games on a pi, should remember to play it more.

Counted cross Stitch, so pointless, so absorbing.

Bank holiday = no decent TV so catching up on foreign films.

Manic Miner data structures.

Wheeler Dealers. Can't drive, don't have a car, but like to see them being put back together, somehow.

Fixing OCR errors in obscure Dickens texts.

Mame games, that should be.

State authorised exercise in London’s golden late afternoon sunlight
The FT’s ‘how to spend it’ profiles of designers/fashion designers/perfumers
Reading online stories of travel to Iran, Afghanistan, and Nepal in the 60s and 70s.

Oooh Luna there's a particularly charming, touching travel memoir about Afghanistan in the '60s called LAND OF THE HIGH FLAGS. I'm sure it's out of print but if you can find a copy or a digital copy, give it a try? It's been a few years but I remember it being a gem.

Things I am into:

Cooking although the romance is waning now that I do it 94/7 for two people.
Bon Appetit Test Kitchen youtube content; see #1.
My garden, which is great but frustrating bc it's so early in the season and I want things to GROW. NOW.
Still, spring is here, and flowers are opening up, so: #4: Cutting flowers.
DIY projects like quasi-landscaping the back yard because we're crazy.
Cutting my own very short hair, debuting Thursday.

???

Being dirty and smelling bad
Watching miscellaneous movies
Stouffer’s Swedish Meatballs
Imagining buying a ThinkPad
Imagining hugging my friends

audiobooks
carrot chips
socialism

LIstening to podcasts almost all day.
Getting some clothing made. even if it is taking me longer than I thought it might. Have got 4 shirts done , 2 pairs of trousers. Now working on a jeans jacket.
MIke Barnes A New Day Yesterday.
reading the sewing machine manual The Sewing Machine Master Guide by Blodgett and hoping that it will translate to my knowledge in a practical way. But I think that might take a lot more hands on experience of working with the various parts of the machine not just sewing with it.
looking forward to some new music arriving. Guerssen have their mailorder facility back up and running after it wasn't for a couple of weeks. So finally bought a package that I'd been meaning to for a while might go back for more. Nice middle eastern stuff.
hopoing that every ache and pain isn't the rona.
& that the good weather isn't making people spread it further than necessary.
Paying a bit more attention to the plants on my balcony.
Going back to the multiple veg chopping thing i was doing up to autumn last year. THink I was not getting the health benefits from the air frying roots thing I was doing since. But may need to go back to cutting back on the meat.
Was getting into dance before teh pandemic , probably should get down to springcleaning so I have a space to doing the zoom classes in.

staying sane, tbh

catholicism/early christianity. as an object of study rather than a faith

and the pre-socratics

^ as a faith rather than an object of study hopefully

Naps
Madden 19
Fleetwood Mac
Rachel Cusk
Trying to finally properly learn to play guitar with Fender Play
Going to the grocery store
Watching all the goofy Tik Toks my wife shows me

duolingo franch
citrus, i feel i have mastered the peeling process after a lifetime of diffidence
pasta with tuna, spinach, olive oil, capers, chili flakes
masoor dal
chickpeas
move d & benjamin brunn
succeeding with my new instant pot
listening to the radio on my phone, the dj-less, canned radio
???
health and healthfulness

building a recording studio
woodworking (to build things for the recording studio)
handing out with cute babes who are too young for me but still cute and fun to talk to
more recreational substances than i should be taking

Oo - any pics of the build process? I just bought a new house and am thinking of building out a studio at some point.

????

?

yes, do tell

oh my bad i forgot to bookmark, let me up a couple pix right quick

this is the studio's centerpiece, a desk i fabricated and finished over the past few weeks. it's a DIY version of the Platform desk, designed by Output (which is a company that also makes some very cool audio software).

i would've had to wait 4 months and paid an ungodly shipping premium to Honolulu if i'd bought it from output, so I was thrilled to find a DIY instructional vid on YT, which linked to a schematic on patreon. it's my first ever woodworking project so i was thrilled that it came together with only one piece re-cut.

https://i.imgur.com/L1ztfF6.jpg

^^^ fits 9 units of 19" rack gear

THRILLS!

now i'm building bass traps for all 4 corners of the room from floor to ceiling. it's less precise work than the desk but they are hueg, and i have an odd angle in one corner, a 3-ft recess in another (which is going to be filled in as a single, very large trap), as well as a window in the middle of the last corner. so i'm still designing those, and it's gonna take all week to build prolly. we also have some diffusers and broad spectrum dampening panels to fabricate, but the latter are very simple and the former i might just purchase.

anyway TIL how to use an air gun, and the crew and i finished piecing together the enclosures for the simplest of the traps. they're gonna be stuffed with R-19 insulation and covered in fabric in the next day or 2. these are 11 feet tall, stacked one on top of the other.

https://i.imgur.com/yFOxIkK.jpg

(apologies if that f0t0 also doesn't embed)

side note: wandering into the very technical field of acoustical architecture has been bewildering at times. we had been subleasing the same room previously, unable to make any changes to it, and it sounded terrible without any acoustical treatments. levels varied enormously in the low-end throughout the space, and it was too live. now we have the run of the place, but we don't have the resources to model our room in CAD programs and figure out precise expected effects of treatments, or design bespoke diffusers for the space. but i've learned the rule of thumb is to get as much bass trapping as you can, and add broadband absorption and diffusers at certain strategic points, then adjust as needed. we are keeping our fingers crossed that the treatments we've set out to build will tamp down the more problematic nodes in the room.

building everything ourselves is saving thousands of dollars cuz acoustical products are expensive af. so having saved a grip, i went overboard and bought a pricey pair of monitors from Focal's Trio line, arriving this week. rlly exciting.

https://www.focal.com/en/pro-audio/monitoring-speakers/sm6/monitoring-speakers/trio6-be

apologies for the huge derail btw

no apologies necessary, you are obviously very Into It

thank u

I love all of this!

I actually bought a platform desk, but have to wait a while til I get it. For now, I have to settle for using a spare room for a mini-studio, so i probably won’t go nuts with the sound tuning, but I’ll probably buy/make some sound dampening panels. Once I have enough dough, I’m hoping to build out something more substantial in my basement/garage.

Keep posting photos!

wow, super cool

forward folds where i extend my tailbone and rotate it upwards as far as possible, pushing my upper legs back, molding my lower body around a strong, extended spine, releasing deep hamstring tension
shoulder mobility exercises, especially locking my fingers behind my back and extending my arms up and back, keeping them straight. i had almost no mobility there and it's suddenly solving a lot of tension problems in my torso (also firing up mid back muscles that were languishing).
my new cush trail running shoes
holding on to the feeling of affirming and loving myself
breathing in through my nose when i exercise
continuity as opposed to effort and collapse

breathing in through my nose when i exercise

i have been doing a lot of this, in tandem with breathing out the mouth, when i wear my mask outside! the nose part doesn't matter, but the mouth exhale is to help keep my glasses from fogging up with every breath.

i am a lifelong nasal-dominant breathers, so switching to the mouth exhale is a conscious exercise. into it!

i'm a lifelong mouthbreather haha. i think because my nasal passages have always been a little constricted. but breathing in through one's nose is supposed to be a more efficient way to get oxygen into the bloodstream. i can usually tell the difference but sometimes i have to switch back to mouthbreathing because of those constricted nasal passages.

absolutely everything i know about it comes from one summer of cross-country training, when the coach was constantly screaming at us to "breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth!!!!"

i quit just before school started in the fall

while we're on the fitness tip

playing tennis almost every day is the best thing i've done for myself in years
sticking to a manageable routine of pushups, pullups (finally having a pullup bar is amazing,) squats, and a bit of free weights most days
drinking significantly more water than i used to, especially when i wake up in the morning

indoor plants
dub & dancehall
morning yoga practice
shaving my head & face
the trees in our backyard
smoothies
getting high
getting on my bike
being cute tbrr, it's a nice feeling
being gay, being more comfortable with self-identifying as gay (even if "bisexual" is more accurate) understanding that i have been gay my whole life, acknowledging that i have been afraid to say that i am gay, & the reorienting of my sense of self & sexuality in light of this!

Woooooooo!!! yayyy for gayyy

I've been trying microdosing, but with cider

ginger-scallion sauce
Final Fantasy 7
playing my way through the top-tier Sega Genesis canon
slow-blinking at my boyfriends cats to tell them how much I love them
brining tofu instead of pressing it
boxed rose

ginger-scallion sauce otm

all otm probably but that stands out also hi stevie

Stevie D!!!!!!!

I was just lamenting on the slack about how much I missed you

Come to the slack!