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Date: April 13th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 9:38 PM.

Weather: Windy, if I remember correctly, or maybe that was yesterday.

Mental and Physical Health State: It's Homestuck day, so I'm in pretty high spirits. Good update today, on that front. I don't really know how to track Homestuck 2, so I don't, but I've been keeping up with that for a bit.

Day Overview: Decided to make a tough call and drop a class today. I've been thinking about it for a bit, and that class has been causing me a lot of stress that has made getting any work done, not just for that class, but in general, really stressful. It was a Gen Ed, but I can easily find another course to fill that hole in the future. The rest of the day was spent doing work for other classes, and then just taking some time to engage with some hobbies that I dearly needed in order to recharge. In less than two hours I'm going to host the first weekly listen along for the music discord server I'm on, which should be interesting. Maybe I'll get some extra work done while I listen.

On My Mind: I tried to start a list on RYM a while ago where I rated mixes on YouTube, but my problem was that most of the mixes I found were uninspired and uninteresting. I haven't updated my backlog list in a while. I keep meaning to make a list of my favorite albums by year, but keep putting it off. There's a lot of these little maintenance things that I'm keenly aware of, but don't possess the time or energy to properly get rid of. Maybe now I'll finally have the spoons (I hate how limiting spoon theory is but whatever) to do it sometime soon now that I've gotten rid of this class, but I doubt it. I still have a full time courseload, and efforts still need to go towards two big projects due next week. I've only bought myself some time.

• The New Abnormal by The Strokes: This didn't impress me that much. I haven't been keeping track of The Strokes all that much, but I know enough about them and heard enough of their stuff that this pivot towards what I can call something of a more mature sound falls pretty flat with me. The last track is a highlight, as is Bad Decisions, but I was fairly bored with this. It sounds less mature and more just old. The synth textures do nothing for me and most songs don't really go anywhere. Instruments sound too separate in the mix on some tracks, very sterile, very clean, uninteresting. And the attempts at breaking that up through the studio chatter isn't the worst idea but when it's slapped on the ends of tracks instead of being put in separate skits it annoys the shit out of me. Do these guys spare a thought to playlist builders out there? More importantly, do The Strokes count as dad rock yet? 5/10
• Song For Our Daughter by Laura Marling: A few tracks here (Only the Strong and Hope We Meet Again in particular) blew me away, and the rest was all around pretty good. A little samey instrumentation wise, but a pleasant, comforting sort of samey. I like the lyrics here, the whole I'm singing this song as a character thing feels incredibly played out most of the time at this point but it's subtle enough here, attention isn't called to it, it works very naturally. I've found an artist with a sizable discography to dive into, at the very least. 7/10
• Freetown Sound by Blood Orange: I'll say upfront that the whole conceptual framework of this album, the sort of flipping through channels thing, has been done better on other albums. The spoken word segments aren't that interesting to me. However the rest of the album more than makes up for that. It's incredibly lush, and flows from song to song incredibly well. The production is incredibly varied and each song pops. There are a few tracks in here that I'd trim out, and too many candidates for that for me to list, which sounds really harsh on its face but that comes from a lot of these tracks being good until you have too many of them. It's like having too much candy. Diminishing returns. Best To You is really great. Definitely check that one out. The more stripped down tracks I'm not a big fan of, Hynes' vocals are really thin and sickly sweet, pitch perfect to the point of sleep-inducing, and tracks that don't have much else suffer. This album is at its best when it serves up tracks with layers upon layers of production. 8/10.

• Worm by Wildbow: Arc 7.7 thru 7.12.
• Hinamatsuri animated by studio feel: Episode Nine.

Works Produced: A few hundred words of something, but I'm not sure what. I can't tell what I have or haven't done since the last post. Last night was a bit of a blur.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading my blog. It's time for the Other Thoughts section of the blog. I don't have anything to add here, really. I'll keep the party hat up for the week, or until I hit 11,000 views. Quarantine Machine playlist will go out Wednesday night as scheduled. I'm taking requests for themes for the following weeks, so please hit me up if you have one.