Insomnia strikes again… in the form of some Starcraft II with Jason, a new templated music feature for this blog, a ton of bug fixes and visual tweaks that I’ve been meaning to do, and I also reworked the About page. Basically instead of posting music inline at the bottom of other blog posts, they’re going to be their own posts… quite similar to tumblr, except sexier. Download the song by clicking on the album artwork.

This way, I’ll be able to post new music often without having to have a storied blog post to accompany it. I enjoy spending an unreasonable amounts of time on things like this that seem somewhat inconsequential. I think it’s because the obsessive fine-tweaking of how colors and layout work eventually will allow me to make the correct guess the first time.

I’ve spent some time and finished my work history page– take a look. Eventually I’ll have dedicated pages for each project.

The point of the page is, I think, an exercise in reminding myself of the hundreds of long forgotten, logged hours. I need to remember past successes, failures, and progress. Recently I’ve began to think that keeping a verbose log like this is one of the best ways for me to become more motivated during my time off.

I’m currently working on Elan’s website for his music, and the task is getting more exciting as the trivial tasks start to go away. He’ll be touring with Modeselektor this fall in Europe. Geez. I cannot think of someone who “made it” with music as Elan has, and it’s well deserved! He’s been making beats the age of 16 and I can relate because I’ve been programming since the age of 16. I guess if you put in the time, good things do come.

Don’t you hate it when your asshole friends tell you the truth about shit like your misdirected attempts designing a website? Well after fielding some biz with the Syntheshredder Project, I got feedback from j.chorng about my previous design… it was too clean, too corporate… looked like a template. He was right.

Now I’m not saying this one right here is complete or amazing or anything, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. I’m calling it a night well spent. There’s a shitload of personality in that bouncing orb, oh yes there is.

I got around to giving Watch the Throne enough honest plays through (I think its like 7 now) and I definitely love the album. Kanye is really getting good at making cross-genre influenced beats… he’s no longer somewhat “stealing inspiration” from the EDM overload of the past few years. I’ll definitely have this record on repeat for a while and pick up a physical copy.

It’s nice to be able to switch back to rap & hip-hop  until Tycho drops his massive new album Dive this November and we get our ambient summer groove on. Check out the first track below.

Goodnight, internet.

Tycho – Hours [Dive LP - Nov. 2011] by Tycho

Well, it had to happen at some point. I can no longer hide behind the comforting blanket of minimalism and greyscale design for my blog because, well, I knew it would take hours and hours to make anything reasonable that used color. Gaze your eyes on the new monospectra (version 0.8-something-someshit)!

I’m planning on adding dedicated static sections for particular content, similar to what j.chorng has set up instead of only having a blog here. I’ve also change the way I format my blog posts to be more concise at a glance so that I can show more posts per page, and have retrofitted a lot of my previous posts. If you ever want to read the full text, it’s dynamically rendered in front of you like magic.

Alas, there’s still a lot of work to be done.