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Today's soundtrack is Society's Finest: The Journey So Far. This morning, I'm reading the sixteenth chapter of The Cartoon Guide to Physics by Larry Gonick and Art Huffman. If we take a battery, put a wire on its positive side, connect that to a light bulb, connect that light bulb to another light bulb, and connect that second light bulb to a third light bulb, then connect that last lightbulb to the negative side of the battery, we call this being wired in series. All three

This is my 200th blog post! Today's soundtrack is Tallah: No One Should Read This. Mike Portnoy's (my drumming idol) son, Max Portnoy, is the drummer for Tallah. The freshest metal I've heard in years. They call their genre "nu-core" and it's such an apt description. It's like Slipknot and Korn and Katelepsy and Spawn of Possession all rolled into one. Like seriously, proper grindcore vocals, nu-metal singing, blast beats, chuggy drop-tuned guitars, glitch synths, sweep picki

Today's soundtrack is Pentatonix: PTX Presents: Top Pop, Vol. I. This is going to be another short post, but I'm super excited about the progress I've made today. 1) My music now has its own site: everstormseve.com. 2) I've commissioned an artist on Fiverr to create the cover art for the upcoming album that I'm going to be tracking guitars for this weekend. 3) I just finished writing the lyrics for the sixth song on the album. That's the last proper song on the album! There w

Today's soundtrack is William Fitzsimmons: Pittsburgh, a beautifully melancholic and strangely nostalgic album. This afternoon, the Randomizer has decreed that I shall learn one lesson on freeCodeCamp. Today, I'll be learning how to use HTML to make checkboxes. Like radio boxes, checkboxes are a form that allows a site to receive user inputs; however, checkboxes allow for more than one selection at a time. To allow for accessibility features, we start a checkbox by labeling i

Today's soundtrack is Texas Hippie Coalition: Dark Side of Black, an album that sounds like the love child of Pantera and Black Label Society. I spent this afternoon's session writing lyrics for my upcoming metal album. I've now finished writing lyrics for five of the album's songs. Making good progress! #TexasHippieCoalition

Today's soundtrack is Frank Ocean: Blond. This afternoon, I worked on writing lyrics for my upcoming metal album. I've now completed writing lyrics for four of my songs. I'm enjoying the juxtaposition of themes that this album will feature: calculus, astrophysics, and gigantic world-eating cephalopods. Stay tuned for more details... #FrankOcean

Today's soundtrack is Fen: Winter. This evening, I'm reading the thirteenth (and final!) chapter of the first book of Aristotle's Ethics. Since we now know that happiness is "an activity of the soul in conformity with perfect goodness" (p. 51), what is goodness? More specifically, what is human goodness or happiness? It is a "right condition of the soul" (p. 51). There are two parts to the soul. One is rational; the other, irrational. The irrational part is the part that we n

Today's soundtrack is Bloodgood: Detonation, a classic hair-metal album with Christian lyrics and great musicianship. This afternoon, I'm working on making some sliding pixelated doors for my elevator game. I'm using Pyxel Edit for this project. I want lots of detail in this animation, so I made each frame 80x60 pixels rather than the regular 32x32. I wanted to make it look like the grate was being pushed from one side, so I tried to get an accordion flow effect by contractin

Today's soundtrack is The Ruins of Beverast: Rain Upon the Unjust, an epic atmospheric black metal album. This afternoon, I'm reading the fifteenth chapter of Larry Gonick's The Cartoon Guide to Physics, "Electric Currents." Alessandro Volta invented "the electric battery in 1794" (p. 128). He found that two rods made of different kinds of metals will show "a difference in potential" (p. 128) when partially submerged in an acid bath. Totally metal. He found that using a wire

Today's soundtrack is Panic! At the Disco: Pray for the Wicked, a fun album. I really enjoy the song "High Hopes" from it. Today, I'm working on writing lyrics. I've been jotting down a bunch of ideas over the past six months or so; now that I have my song structures established, I'll be working on fitting the themes and lyrics together with the music. It ended up taking me a fair bit longer than my allotted 30 minutes...but I got one song's lyrics completely written! It has

Today's soundtrack is Hank Williams, Jr.: Family Tradition. This afternoon, I'm continuing to learn about basic HTML and HTML5 on freeCodeCamp. We can nest things within other things: for example, a link can be put inside of a paragraph. <p>This isn't clickable, but <a href="www.example.com">this is</a>! If we are designing a website but don't yet know where we want nested text to be linked to, we can make a dead link with a hashtag inside the quotation marks. <h1>You can't c

Today's soundtrack is Immortal: Northern Chaos Gods, the grimmest and most frostbitten album that I've heard in years. It's an incredible return to form after the recent departure of co-founder Abbath, and can easily go toe-to-toe against any other album in their catalogue. The last time the Randomizer told me to do songwriting, I set up my gear for recording. Today, I worked at getting a tone I liked. I ended up turning my amp's bass down to around 25%, and I turned the dist

Today's soundtrack is Timothy Brindle: The Restoration, a rap album filled with hope, forgiveness, and solid reformed theology. It's quite a change of pace from his debut, "Killing Sin." I started learning Python solely because it was easy to pick up and I wanted to make games; however, I found that I preferred making actual functional programs to creating games, then realized that sharing Python programs with non-programmers can be quite cumbersome. The other day, I came acr

Today's soundtrack is Electric Sound Continuum: Songs Dissolved in the Dawn, a really cool experimental solo project that I came across on a Reddit post; some of the lyrics are in English, others are in Greek. Musically, it's beautifully structured; the overall vibe is very chill. It would be the perfect album to listen to on a warm summer evening. This morning, I'm reading the third chapter of the second part of Stephen King's On Writing. Once the writer has "settled on a da

Today's soundtrack is Elmo Karjalainen: Age of Heroes, a very cool album by this guitar virtuoso. Coincidentally enough, today's project was setting up my little studio for the next stage of my project: tracking guitars. I set up my amp and pedalboard for recording, ensured there would be no latency while recording in Reaper, and did a preliminary tone tweak. I'll need to do some more work on the EQ on another day when I have more time to focus on the task. All-in-all, though