an intimate evening with nick

our eyes catch from across the bar. you’re wearing what you usually do on a saturday night, whatever that is. i’m wearing a dark green (#03350) cheap polyester suit with a clearly unironed shirt, my tie is nice though; a herringbone burgundy (#660033). tied decently enough. i pull out a cigarette case, slyly gesture you to come outside to join me. against better judgement, you do so. it’s raining. near the end of fall, winter revealing its hand a little early for year. you find me on the balcony, a semi-private lookout over the city. the streets aint what they used to be, toots. i light mine, hand you one, and light yours by shielding the wind slightly with you, our hands touch, and for a moment we’re not strangers engaging in filthy habits, but two kindred souls lost in each others company.

after a long exhale, looking wistfully out onto the sea of the metropolis, i turn to you and give a sly little smile as you mutter something.

“what? no, i haven’t played disco elysium or whatever it is. oscar keeps telling me to. yeah. yeah nah sorry.”

“what do i play? ah mon cherie. the game of life. far better entertainment than i ever derived from a screen. sure, i can queue you in a little bit - your funeral. let’s see… what have i been indulging in recently that aren’t your eyes… ah, of course-”

Daniel Sackheim White Squares 2021

a briefing of my financial decision process

i'm not an expensive person. i don't buy myself new clothes often, i don't have subscriptions to anything but spotify and nicotine, i never picked up any hobbies built around consumables / collectables with ever-shifting goals, but i do have hobbies that require tools, and if i'm to buy tools, i’m to spend the extra bit of money to get ones that are solid and last. not cream of the crop, not complete overkill, but enough that they make the job reasonably pleasant, and have durability that guarantee some longevity, and a few extra features so i'm not having to upgrade in 3 years time. every 2 years or so, i'll sit down, tally what i've been wanting to buy for 6+ months at least, and do as much research as humanly possible to make sure i get the right thing at a reasonable price. here's how that went down recently -

bike

i got a bike! i live and work in the city, but a lot of the social events i tangle myself in usually end up being within 5km of my place. i used to (and sometimes still can be) a massive fan of public transport, but a grievance i have with it nowadays is the scheduling. since i can usually walk most places i need to, i find the bottleneck of conforming to the schedules and whims of a bus of all things a bit cumbersome for me. i like the ability to set off whenever i’d like to rather than wait around and have my plans purely at the mercy of the metro system. usually this results in 15-20 dollar uber trips that take around 10 minutes. and so, a bike seemed like an excellent investment to maintain a more self-paced schedule, have fun, look kinda cool and expand my mobility without sacrificing time or getting kneecapped by paying the price of fuel. i specifically got a foldie due to all my other bikes having been stolen within a few years of ownership, the convenience of having it in my apartment rather than needing to go to the bike rack, the politeness in not taking too much space in shared locales and the general ability to take it in combination with other modes of transport if needed. also, it’s fucking cute!!! after spending 2 days in constant research and browsing my options, i found someone selling a polygon urbano 3i, basically never used, brand new tires for just under half the asking price of it brand new. it has an internal 3-speed shimano hub, 20” wheels, rim breaks and a pre-mounted bag rack. hardly top-spec, not the most sporty thing, but mid level components, durable gears and still reasonably versatile. and man. what incredible fun it has been. after getting it home, buying myself the essentials and retuning the breaks, it’s been fuckin mint. sure! i notice other cyclists with larger wheels can generally go faster than me, it’s not the easiest to do the hilly outer suburbs in, but it does exactly what i paid it to do, and i get to assert dominance over everyone else by switching between being a vehicle and pedestrian at will. get fucked all of ya’s. i've named my bike minami after the bike in tatami galaxy.

yamaha seqtrak

i got a yamaha seqtrak! for those not in the know, it’s an 11 track groovebox and sequencer that has an inbuilt yamaha dx engine, sampling, 2000+ awm2 presets, 128 note polyphony, onboard effects, a 5 hour battery life and a companion app for a full wavetable / visualiser / project storage. originally, i was looking to get a teenage engineering ko-ii. i’m deeply fond of my po-133, but after some consideration, i came to the conclusion that for the same money, i could buy something that isn’t specifically designed around sampling; something i don’t do a whole lot of honestly. it’s fookin banging.. after i got it, i became obsessed with achieving the perfect setup. for maximum swag. i landed on this.

essentially, i’m fucking steve jobs and created a full studio that can fit into a backpack and last long enough for even the heaviest of tweakers to cook beats up on. some might call this excessive, but consider i have uses for the individual devices, most of which i already owned, it was a fun experiment in modular design.

a big reason i purchased the seqtrak was due to a conundrum i have when making music. ableton is a piece of software that is so ridiculously powerful that i can’t help but feel guilty when i use it to sketch out ideas. it’s like driving a bugatti to mcdonalds. you know it’s capable of so much more, that it almost feels wasteful to use in such a trashy manner. the seqtrak however, is both powerful enough that i can create very competent ideas while also portable and accessible enough that it incentivises quick and simple ideas, rather than demanding or presenting me with tools to try and craft the perfect kick drum, the perfect reverb. fuck yeah!!!!!!!

other than that, i did a complete studio gear refresh. swap a behringer b1 for a rode nt2-a. some edifier 1280dbs for jbl 305ps. a focusrite scarlette solo for an audient id14. this wasn’t all at the same time, but it’s something i planned to do for a while. the b1 was too bright and cheap a mic now, the focusrite lacked stereo inputs, the ‘monitors’ were quite literal trash, and realistically all those purchases were all 8 - 10 years ago and came from a lack of financial leverage to do much better. no, i am a new man, with more means, more research, and larger projects that do necessitate better equipment, or at least more versatile gear.

the ritalin report

god where the fuck do i start. ritalin single handedly ruined my life for like 2 months. i was naive. deeply naive.

so! ritalin. methylphenidate. i got some. and let me tell you WOOO WHAT A WOMANNNN. ritalin was fucking awful. truly. i’ve been grateful for many years that adhd hasn’t been a particular barrier to living a ‘functional’ life. i’m working full time, i’ve lived independently. my room is generally always clean, i don’t struggle fulfilling any one need in my life. it’s alright. ritalin completely stripped that from me. see, when i ate or slept alright, it worked! kinda! not really! idk! but as an amphetamine, it actively disincentivises sleeping or eating. i would sleep 4 hours a night, eat one meal a day, and generally feel so tired i couldn’t function, but unable to stop doing things. i’d get home from a night out, and instead of dealing with the consequences and reset my room, i’d chuck my clothes somewhere, sit down, and doomscroll for 2 hours. at some point, all of my energy came from ritalin. cut to me absolutely crashing the fuck out, too tired to eat or engage in simple emotional regulation, my life constantly revolving around the next dose, flipping between states of hyperactivity, depression, agitation, excitement, numbness, every extreme of the human emotional spectrum. i did not have any sense of stability.

in essence, i’ll sum it up as so -

day to day your emotional state is generally speaking influenced by your needs being met. have you eaten? what sleep debt are you in? who are you being social with? are you giving yourself enough mental downtime? day to day, we all probably are lacking in one place or another, but the consequences are manageable. ritalin made me unable to regulate any of those needs, then gave drastic consequences. fuck ritalin.

thankfully i was able to go back to my specialist and grab myself a fuck tonne of vyvanse instead. and holy FUCK is that the shit. most of the time, idk. i’m still not perfect, i still need to form habits like every other bucko, but the ability to do things isn’t offset by becoming a fucking crackhead. as your local dj on their facebook page with 79 likes says, big things coming soon…

tid bits

shadow of the colossus

shadow of the colossus is a game that i have absolutely adored ever since hearing about it. i nearly bought the hd collection on ps3, i tried to emulate it on pc and bought the ps4 remake which eventually drifted out of my possession, but i never took the plunge. that was until i was talking about it in great detail to oscar and let it slip that i'm a poser. oscar stared at me wide eyed. i nearly shat myself out of fear, and he demanded we played it together. luckily, i have a modded ps2 that has the iso sitting on it. i brought it over next time, and oscar and i set out to revive momo.

and what a fucking game.

i knew going in what it was, it’s a lonely trek through desolate but beautifully detailed work slaying majestic beasts while meditating on grief, wrath, but what i didn't expect is just how exhilarating it is to cling for dear life on the wingspan of an eagle as it barrel rolls through the sky, desperately trying to not kill you, but escape from you. the music kicks into high gear, your trying to find pockets of movement where you can stand up and catch your stamina. its instantly one of my top 10 gameroonis of all time!!!

but unfortunately for me, and more unfortunate for oscar, i had a broken r1 button. you know? r1? the grab button? one of the 5 buttons in the game, arguably the most important action. yeah. that one. randomly let's go at certain points.

for the first 15 colossus, it was tolerable, i could imagine it was a deliberate design choice to let go once in a while to accentuate the unpredictability and panic of the situation, but the last colossus. oh fuck. the last fucking colossus. every other colossi took around 20 minutes to an hour. the last one? 2 and a half hours. cue me getting more and more ragebaited to the point of nearly quitting. i didn't, i did beat it, but it was not pleasant.

all in all, amazing game. if you have any interest in the premise, understand the game knocks it's core concept out of the park. it doesn't try to do a wide variety of things, but what it does try it runs absolute circles around other games trying to realise a ‘concept’.

gorillaz

jumped back into gorillaz on a whim. i really do like the gorillaz! but unfortunately i have a very hit or miss relationship with their work after plastic beach. song machine is lovely, and meanwhile is a banger, but i also really don't care for humans or the now now. this time however, i actually decided to try and listen to laika come home after knowing what it is but not giving myself exposure to it. its a very interesting project that has a lot of the grungy and cross-cultural sonic textures i love with early gorillaz. it’s the perfect stoner music to bong on to.

daft punk

daft punk is something i always had an ephemeral relationship up until my first friend in highschool, lakshay gave me a cultural education in funk. since then, i keep finding more and more songs over the years i get steadily obsessed with, but a certain one always stuck out. touch. i need something more.

>the start of every new semester at uni, i would listen to touch on the train there. it’s funky, it captures the magic and pure joy of music, it’s heartfelt, and above all it’s reaffirming with the simple message “if love is the answer your home, hold on”. also helps that the last third of the song feels like both jumping into lightspeed, floating through a river of pure life, and a culmination of daft punk’s work. recently, at oscar’s we both got onto the topic of this exact song, and spent a night listening to all the weird and wonderful tunes of random access memories. subjectively? i enjoy listening to other music more on a daily basis. objectively? it’s one of the greatest pieces of art i’ve ever listened to.

“anyway…” i trail off, a bit lost as to what else there is. my cigarette has a nearly impressive amount of ash on the tip. “ah, it’s gone. just as well i suppose. and yourself?”

you’re slightly astounded with the lengths you have gone to trying to score a bump of ketamine for the night - and you have a feeling i am far too financially irresponsible to have the money required to possess some right now. oh dear.