Lead vocalists I like even though they are not great singers

And by “great” I mean they do not have soothing, melodic voices or are obviously not professionally trained, but I love ’em anyway, because their voices have…yep…character.

You may disagree on the alleged vocal greatness of some of the people on this list, either thinking them good enough to not be on this list or maybe bad enough to not merit inclusion. I also did not set out to make an exclusively male list, but every female singer I like has a genuinely awesome-sounding voice. Women are just better.

  • Stephin Merrit (The Magnetic Fields). Merrit has this wonderfully rumbly bass that often feels like it’s on the verge of going off-key but never quite does. “Papa Was a Rodeo” from the album 69 Love Songs is a great example of it.
  • Roger Waters (Pink Floyd). I compare Waters’ vocals to the dialogue of David Lynch’s Dune, where everyone seems to either shout or whisper. Waters is very good at the shout/whisper thing. The period around his second solo album, Radio KAOS, is the “highlight” of this where he seemed to be especially struggling to just sing in a normal tone. But he is very good at getting across venom and anger.
https://youtu.be/l5MigxIKovI
  • Robert Smith (The Cure). I went to a Cure concert in 1987 with a couple of friends when they played at the Expo Theatre (RIP). At the time I had no idea who the band was, confusing them with The Cult. The show was pretty good, though I was not entirely sure why girls (and some guys) kept throwing themselves at the lead singer, an unimposing man who looked a bit like Edward Scissorhands minus the scissors. Smith’s vocals are well-suited to the goth dirges the band is famous for, but I especially like his takes on their lighter material like “Why Can’t I Be You.” The video below has a bit of everything, from the regrettable use of black face to Smith dressed as a proto-furry.
  • Bob Dylan. I’m not even going to explain this one. Everyone knows Bob. That said, his vocals on the two Traveling Wilburys albums are strong and he clearly had fun with the material. “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” remains a favorite of mine.

More to come.

Art lesson 1: Intro to digital painting

I am treating my art lessons as if I am a beginner, as my last instruction was in high school, which was…awhile back

I have chosen to start this particular adventure with Ctrl+Paint, a site featuring copious free lessons provided by freelance artist Matt Kohr. It helps that Matt has a really calm, soothing voice in the videos, as opposed to say, Bobcat Goldthwaite’s.

I have completed the first set of lessons, Digital Painting 101, which comprises six videos. It introduces you to some key functions, features, and handy shortcuts in Photoshop.

The Ctrl+Paint videos highly recommend using Photoshop for ease in following the lessons, so I have temporarily renewed my subscription. I also dusted off my Intuos tablet and so far things are working as expected.

In time I will drop Photoshop, and transfer what I’ve learned to Affinity Photo and Procreate on the iPad. For now, I am following dem rules to keep things simple.

The initial lessons are traightforward, but the next set is where it will get interesting, as it goes back into traditional drawing instruction–using pen, pencil and paper. I have all three, so I am ready to start scrawling. I never practiced much in school because my attention was split among a bunch of stuff (as I mentioned in a previous post), so I may get somewhat better results this time. Or at least know sooner when to give up and go back to writing haikus.

I plan to start the next lessons tonight, so another update should arrive soon™.

Scrivener 3.0 for Windows: A puzzling non-release

For awhile Scrivener was my favorite writing application. It does pretty much everything you could want in a writing program and has excellent organizational tools that really help in planning and plotting out novels (or other projects).

A major new update to version 3 was released for the Mac in November 2017, with an equivalent Windows update arriving in 2018, then by end of Q2 2019, then for absolute sure by August 30, 2019. All dates were missed, with contrite apologies from Literature and Latte.

After the last missed date, they stopped saying when it would release and version 3 for Windows has existed since then as a perpetual beta and now, a perpetual release candidate. Users talk about how stable it is, how perfectly usable it is, but it’s still not officially released. You can’t buy it.

I am not a developer so I can’t speak to the challenges the duo working on the Windows version of Scrivener is facing, but it does seem to me that as we draw ever-closer to three years since version 3 came out for the Mac, that the Windows version ought to have been ready by now. I mean, if you originally project a release in 2018, re-calibrate and say, okay, second quarter 2019, then re-calibrate yet again and say August 30, 2019, then finally go silent on a release date and then still have not released almost a full year after the last offered date, I would submit that you are bad at estimating software release dates, and also very slow at developing software.

I will buy version 3 when it eventually comes out, and I might try it again (I have version 3 already for Mac but I have switched mostly to using Ulysses for my fiction writing), but I must admit, the pace of the Windows version’s development instills me with little confidence in the product or the company. One of the main points of the version 3 release was to bring feature parity (as much as possible) to the Mac and Windows versions. That cannot happen if the Windows version is constantly lagging well behind. I have every expectation that should version 4 come out for Mac, it would be years before the same version released for Windows. I might be wrong. I hope I am wrong!

Anyway, I do hope the Windows version releases at least before the anniversary of the version 3 release for Mac. Looking over the current issues in the forum thread on beta releases, it feels a bit like they are striving for perfection and holding up release indefinitely as a result. They report a single crash bug:

We are aware of one bug (listed below) that can hang Scrivener, and zero bugs that cause data loss, so if you are aware of any other bugs that can hang Scrivener, or cause data loss, please let us know. The only crash bug we know about is:-

Merging cells in table can crash under certain conditions

I can’t speak for all writers, but I have very few tables in my novels, apart from the actual furniture in various scenes. This doesn’t seem like enough to hold up release. I mean, what if they can’t track down the cause of this bug? Just hold off release for another six months? A year? At some point you have to accept that you’ve done all you can and put your work out there–like any good writer would.

Drawing trouble (offline and on)

One of the things I didn’t expect to happen in the past year (other than things like, uh, a global pandemic) was my rekindled interest in drawing. I took drawing and painting classes through junior high and highs school (five years total) and my only regret is that I never really got better–I simply didn’t practice enough, partly because my attention was split among a bunch of things–drawing. writing, acting, an interesting and bizarre turn at doing hurdles, along with all the usual distractions of youth–riding my bike, playing games (video and board), hanging with friends, figuring out my sexuality, stuff like that.

But last October I pledged to do Inktober and, to my own surprise, I completed all 31 prompts, nine of which brought back the Gum Gum People, to the delight of myself as well as others. After Inktober I let the drawing fall aside again, but the urge renewed itself on my vacation and I started digging into online resources.

I’ve settled on a few sites and their respective lessons and one of the key parts of each is that they emphasize and even require that you ground yourself in traditional drawing first–pencil and paper, not tablet and stylus. I like this because it goes against my first impulse, which is to just blunder about on my iPad, and “fixing as I go” without learning the proper lessons because when you go digital, you can skip a lot of proper technique in favor of brute forcing things.

Anyway, I’m starting the lessons now and will occasionally post my thoughts and perhaps a few sketches over the next little while. If this all ends in terrible failure, I will report on that, too.

And end the post with a single, badly-drawn tear.

Random deep questions

  • How many people would want to know when they will die if that information was available to them?
  • If the universe is expanding, it would only occupy so much space. What would you see beyond the edge of the universe?
  • Speaking of, what was up with the ending of The Black Hole, anyway? That was probably the most un-Disney ending of any Disney movie ever.
  • If there is “life after death” (a soul, etc.) why is it so hard for the two sides (living/differently living) to communicate with each other? Why *would* it be so hard? Is it because the living would be all, “Man, life sucks compared to the groovy other-side. I’m killing myself RIGHT NOW”?
  • What if we really are the only “intelligent” life in the universe?
  • What if we aren’t the only intelligent life in the universe but the other intelligent life finds it amusing to watch us screw everything up on our planet?
  • If multiverses exist, what are the other versions of me doing right now? Is at least one of them writing this same list, but maybe in some weird other dimension language? While waiting for his flying car to recharge?
  • What if we’re living a simulation and in a few short months we’ll find out that whole Trump presidency thing was just a test, haha. And all the horrible other things that have happened in 2020, too.

Photo of the Day, July 30, 2020 (Part 2)

I meant to post this yesterday but got distracted by other things–including weird errors on this blog. So here is a flowery field a day late.

This is the “picnic” area at Burnaby Lake, near the Cariboo Dam. I put that in quotes because until this summer this small grass field was mowed regularly and used by people and poopmonsters alike. At some point, perhaps due to budget concerns in these pandemic times, they stopped mowing the grass and in a few short months it turned into a healthy mix of weeds and tall grass. But it looks pretty for now.

July 2020 weight loss report: Down 2.6 pounds

July was like June in reverse. Instead of being up 2.6 pounds, I was down 2.6 pounds. My body fat also dropped by half a percent and actual fat itself by half a pound. I am up three pounds on the year, but that’s down from a peak of nearly six pounds.

I am still fat.

But all signs are trending in a positive direction now and I’ve made real progress on curbing ye olde snacking, so I am reasonably confident the weight loss will continue.

I’m not going to aim for anything crazy like dropping below 170 by the end of August, but at least such a goal is no longer implausible.

Stats:

July 1: 177.4 pounds
July 31: 174.8 pounds (down 2.6 pounds)

Year to date: From 171.8 to 174.8 pounds (up 3 pounds)

And the body fat:

July 1: 23.4% (41.5 pounds of fat)
July 31: 23.1% (40.5 pounds of fat) down 0.5 pounds)

Everybody do the dinosaur

In my quest to draw more, I asked for a subject and was told to draw a dinosaur. As a kid, I drew approximately five million dinosaurs–and this was almost two decades before Jurassic Park.

Here’s an example of one I found in an old sketchbook. Is Godzilla officially considered a dinosaur? I’m not sure. But you know what they say, great artists steal. This is one of four drawings I did detailing my take on the Godzilla story, inspired by watching every Godzilla movie from the 1950s on KSTW’s Science Fiction Theater, noon every Sunday. Those movies were terrible, and wonderful.

I don’t know why I had Godzilla frozen in a glacier, but it seemed like a cool idea (ho ho). I considerately recorded the year he emerged, which means I was 14 when I sketched this particular masterpiece of terror.

My Godzilla still has small arms, but they are like bodybuilder arms, so he obviously worked out before getting trapped in the glacier.

Disco was at its peak in 1978, but I would argue we’ve had stranger years since.

Here in the strange (and undeniably more horrible) world of 2020, I drew this quick sketch of some generic dinosaur in Procreate, using the technical pencil brush. The only fixing I did was to erase some of the extraneous lines. It’s not bad for a quick sketch. But no glaciers. Or background of any kind. Sad dinosaur walking a barren landscape.

Book review: The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech

The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech: Computer, Consoles & Games by Peter Leigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Retro Tech provides just what it says on the tin. Starting with systems in the early 1970s, it provides a summary of virtually every video game console and personal computer released up until the debut of the original Xbox in October 2001.

Each summary includes a generous number of photos, sometimes including controllers or oddball accessories, or more mundane things like the power supplies. Leigh offers both an historical overview and also his own personal assessment on each device, which at times stands in contrast to how I saw some of the systems, accounting for the differences in reception between the UK and North American (and in particular U.S.) audiences.

Each summary concludes with a look at three games from each system: The Must-See, the Must-Play, and the Must-Avoid. A lot of the Must-Avoids are typically obscure fare (no, E.T. did not make the list for the Atari 2600–though it does get mentioned alongside the “winner”).

Leigh keeps the writing light and at times droll, never being afraid to call out lemons and questionable marketing of years gone by.

I was struck by the sheer number of systems that came out in the 70s and early 80s. It seemed that nearly everyone tried to get a slice of the video game pie before the famous crash of 1983. While there are systems that never sold well here in Canada that I was aware of–like the MSX computers, there are many listed here that I was utterly unfamiliar with, even leaving aside the UK-specific machines that never made it over here.

For anyone who grew up when these machines were coming out (as I did), this is indeed a heady dose of nostalgia. For others, it serves as a brief and well-illustrated history of the early days of video games and personal computers. In fact, my only real knock on the book is that each write-up only amounts to a page or so. I would love to see a more in-depth look at the same topic. As it is, I was able to tear through the book all too quickly.

Still, this was an enjoyable look back and an easy recommendation for those who would enjoy seeing the sometimes wacky products that came out in the quest for the early gamer’s dollars (or pounds).

View all my reviews