Daily Slow Chat

4 comments

1. I bought a tablet for the first time! It’s such a funny thing, like a giant phone. I have a flippable laptop, but the screen got a hairline crack and the touchscreen doesn’t work that well anymore. Which isn’t a big deal, I don’t really use my touchscreen so much… except for reading sheet music. If I can’t change pages, it’s a bit useless. I thought I can deal with it, after all, I played long before laptops were a thing, but it turns out I am not terribly eager to dig out my sheet music from whatever box it’s in (I don’t even know if I have what I need). So I thought I would buy a tablet, and I love it. I also installed the IMSLP app, which is great for keeping notes etc. It turns out I am about as keen to read paper sheet music as I am to carry around paper books, so, not very much. I think ipads even have a nifty accessory to change pages with a pedal (which may not be terribly practical if you’re playing piano)

   What I do still buy printed though are art books. I treated myself to two books of [Japanese urban paintings](https://www.amazon.de/-/en/dp/B095BMFWLD?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title) by Mateusz Urbanovicz (I was talking about him a while ago). And they are such a treat! For every scene there’s also information and art notes in English and Japanese. He wrote in the foreword that when he first went to Tokyo, even the most mundane neighborhoods both fascinated him and gave him a sense of nostalgia, as it seemed like all the anime he watched just sprung to life. This is exactly how I felt when I was there, too.

   How much printed material do you guys still buy? Newspapers, magazines, books?

2. Do audiences in your country clap in synch? I heard to day that Scandis clap in synch. I think Turkish people only do that if they want an encore.

3. I decided to go forth and publish my android app. It’s a small free tool for learning and using Tarot cards, and I used my wife’s art for it. Currently I am pestering friends and family to try it out, as I need a dozen people willing to try it out to pass closed tests (Google Play Store requirement). In the future I plan to expand it with more knowledge about cards, add runes and I-Ching to make it a free repository of divination trivia for anyone who wants to have such fun at parties.

   It’s partly a hobby passion project and partly a proof of my android skills, a test if I can go with a project from start to finish.

   If anyone wants to give it a try – I need e-mail addresses to send invitation to closed beta, and country of origin because Google Play Store requires that too. I can’t promise app is in your language though, currently I have only English and Polish languages supported.

   Otherwise – if you heard about some interesting forms of divination (not from goat guts please, it’s hard to implement for smartphones) mention them! I may add them in the future.

4. I went to a 2nd hand store today that’s basically called something like “guy flea market”, where they mostly sell real dude shit like car parts and tools and old jerry cans and shit like that. It’s probably one of the top 5 hetero-masculine places on earth. Everybody had a beard there and immediately when you stepped in you felt like shotgunning a beer and scratching your balls.

   I went to see if I could find cassettes for my car, and oh boy did I. This was the last place I thought I’d find them, but they had three Mariah Carey albums on cassette there! Emotions, Music Box, and Daydream. I bought the shit out of them, they’re all three in my top 5 Mariah Carey albums. Unfortunately they didn’t have her self titled debut, which is my favourite album from her. It was funny though, buying Mariah Carey albums from this place. It felt more like I should have bought Metallica and Black Sabbath.

   For the record, my top five Mariah Carey albums in order:

   1. Self titled
   2. Emotions
   3. Daydream
   4. The Emancipation of Mimi
   5. Music Box