Back to the homepage.
Back to the index.

Date: May 15th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 11:01 PM.

Weather: It was fine for most of the day, but during the evening a storm really kicked up. We were on a tornado watch until an hour ago. The rain was incredibly heavy, the most I've heard at once in a long while. It's been pretty dry the past few days.

Mental and Physical Health State: Feeling fine in both aspects of my health. Today was a pretty nice day.

Day Overview: I stayed up pretty late last night, hanging out until four in the morning or so. Ari just got Breath of the Wild and he's been playing it basically nonstop. I missed Animal Crossing today but to be honest I feel like I needed a day's break from it. I'm super burnt out. I'm not even good at that game. I can't organize towns for shit. Taking one day to just not do daily fossil finding and rock hitting and Nook Stop checking is probably fine. Ari had the AP Computer Science test and he feels really well about how he did. Like I said, today was a fine day. Nothing super special happened but all around it was fine.

On My Mind: I should start doing Yoga. There's a mat on top of some shelf somewhere in here for sure. It'd be great to keep me limber and flexible in here, because I feel like honestly that's what I need the most right now. Tomorrow I can see about maybe taking it down and spreading it somewhere, probably in my room. There's lots of yoga apps, I'll just pick one and get started.

Works Consumed:

• Set My Heart On Fire Immediately by Perfume Genius: I wasn't anticipating that this would be so good. The singles were delightful, a mix of art pop stylings and instrumentation with some ambient influences. There's a palpable sense of space, of letting things build over time, pacing and restraint, which I feel is very important in keeping an album interesting over a longer period of time. Nothing At All caught me off guard with this deep sort of snarling sound. This one was really entertaining and it spiced up what would have been an otherwise sort of dry listening session. 9/10
• Grae by Moses Sumney: I feel like I must have talked about this album at some point here, right? That's part of what gutted the hype around this one. The two part release strategy did the exact opposite of what was intended, I think. Maybe in a non Covid world it would have gone better. Anyway, Part One of this was familiar to me and greatly enjoyable. I won't rate it on its own but the highlights are on this side, as well as the lesser full length tracks. The interludes vary widely in quality. The best are interesting supplements to the themes of the album and the worst are bloat. Part Two was overall shorter and had less huge sounding highlights, overall a bit more introspective, on the whole it was a bit better than the first. Considered wholly these two work very well together, of course, because this is one album and not two. The orchestration on this is really great, it sounds not just lush but absolutely teeming with life and activity. The number score is a little misleading here, because if you trim the fat - and the fat is easy to spot - then this could be a 9/10 or even a 10/10, but that's not the album I have, and even though some of the singles and individual tracks might be worthy of that score, we have to rate how the album is presented. And it's presented as an 8/10.
• How I'm Feeling Now by Charli XCX: This is my first Charli XCX album, and I'm not really all that enthusiastic to listen to more. This is fine, for what it is. It's pop with a bubblegum bass twist, some PC Music elements, a bit of creative direction from internet based pop from the likes of Dorian Electra and 100 Gecs and that whole scene. But it lacks a lot of nuance and subtlety. It hews too closely to the roots of the sound it imitates. It doesn't branch off in any new or interesting direction, it does nothing to really advance the genres. It's a solid set of songs I guess, and any one of these has any number of uses in a playlist or mix or whatever, but I didn't really enjoy most of the songs. Some of them were good though. This album's best in the middle which is pretty much the worst way to be but whatever, I thoroughly enjoyed tracks four through seven with special emphasis on I Finally Understand. Charli XCX needs to get more ambitious musically. Different producers, maybe. It was okay overall. Averages are weird. This was average. 6/10.
• Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu Season Two animated by Studio Deen: A lot of what goes into art is context. As a show about art, Rakugo understands this perfectly, recontextualizing its titular descending stories to fit the lives of the protagonists who tell them. The past events of Season One are iterated on and explained incredibly well, and the twists and turns this story takes are very, very interesting. With the exception of one in the final episode that had me raising an eyebrow. A low point is the subplot with the gang, which felt like a somewhat interesting diversion conceptually but it was executed somewhat haphazardly in my opinion. Episode Eleven almost made me cry. The animation is janky at times still but overall this is an improvement from the first season. The soundtrack takes a backseat in this season in all respects except for the diegetic on stage fanfares of various performers, which resonate even more once you have a more concrete character to attach them to. This is overall a 9/10.

Works In Progress:

• Every work begun today was finished.

Works Produced: Several hundred more words. This too drew to a close.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading my blog. Going to set aside Sunday as the day that I actually go through and fix the site. I'm really lazy and see no point in pretending that I'm not, ahaha. I'll also implement the pageview counter or at least attempt to.