Saturday, Twenty Fifth of July

25 july 2020

I thought of giving my post titles some more original names, so I considered putting random stuff there. Went to wikipedia, clicked on "random article", first it came up with Carnlough, then Scott Crichton (American football), then Light Opera of Manhattan, then 

Phaeosaces compsotypa .

Then I had to look up the etymology of the word "phaeosaces". Wasn't easy. It's a moth, so I assumed it had something to do with the descripiton of its wings. It's clearly made of two words - "phaeo" and "saces", obviously greek. I'm supposed to be at least acquainted with greek. So I went to google translate. Didn't bother with straight googling anymore, since it was taking me to long to find the origin in the first search result (which, funny enough, was also wikipedia, so, basically, I made a circle in my search). After coming across "phaeodactylum tricornitum" I changed my opinion and came to a conclusion that it might be latin. I always thought myself to be better at latin than greek. Obviously, "phaeo" refers to the shape, which is like a squished rhomboid, or rather a spindle. Google says that "phaeo" means "nymphs". I know for a fact if I look further inside of wikipedia I'd be able to find my answer. But I just had my coffee, which was

83 beans over 4 small cups, dark roast. I wonder if I should note the brand as well. Probably not needed.

I'm actually getting a little frustrated at how hard this is. You look at something, you know it has meaning and you can't find it.

No, it's definitely greek, what is wrong with me.

"Maylandia phaeos" is a striped fish, so maybe phaeo means striped?

It's almost 5 pm, so I'm running out of time before my training session. Today I'm benching 80 kgs for max reps - i.e. I'm restarting my mini-cycle and, once again, working up from high reps to power volume. My wrist hurts from shredding on bass with a pick yesterday. I need to figure out an efficient way to hold it. Not sure if holding it with a side of my index finger is right. I bought "big stubby" a few months ago, so now it's my only pick, I stopped using a homemade credit card pick, although it was pretty nice. Thinking of buying super thich strings, but I wouldn't want to just change them for no reason. I haven't got any drop tuning songs I'd like to play. BTW, I plan to straight up finish my vocal recording today, since I'm probably not going to get too dehydrated from benching. And possibly start recording one of my other songs, since I haven't touched my electric guitar in a while. I end up often playing on my super cheap acoustic. It has momentous action only two types of strings on it, so they're all more loose than one another. I've gotten too used to double fingering everything like it's a bass, but I can't play quickly like that, and the sound doesn't satisfy me. That's why I'm thinking of buying thinner picks as well, to see if I can't produce some more aggressive sounds. So far I found a curious complect named "Dunlop PVP119 John Petrucci", it's supposed to have all kinds of different picks. I used to listen to prog in 2011 and 2012, not much since then though.

I'm thinking of asking a question about "phaeosaces" on Quora, there's definitely a language specialist that knows it.

So, I made a question on Quora and made sure to tag 25 people. After all, it's only one request per person.

Off to the garage.

Back from the garage, quora couldn't answer my question so far.

25 july 2020

"Tiny bench" press

80*27 - PR :D

80*27

80*16

JM press

40 for some reps

40*17

A lot of floor supported pullups on rings - working around my pulled teres major. You never think about those small muscles and how much they contribute. At my bodyweight it probably makes sense to do much more stretching and warming up before pullups.

And that was. Now I'm gonna rest and try to do some vocal warmups, maybe some bicep curls too.

Also I'm starting to suspect that "phaeosaces" might be sort of a made up word with no ancient origins. Can't really accept that though, not now anyway.

Doing the vocal warmups and I'm feeling seriously dehydrated. I should perhaps post some clips or something. But that would be a vlog then, don't want to overdo it. Remember when we had the "vlog pandemic" about five years ago? Feels like a long decade.

Well, I think I succesfully recorded vocals. I brought up all the forbidden emotions and made sure to concentrate a part of me on rhythm. Put a lot of expression in them. Now I have to master the track and fix a thousand mistakes. Ideally, I'd like to rerecord guitars and bass. That would probably turn into an endless cycle. So, I guess, it's acceptable to release the song as a "demo alpha" version right now, sometime soon.

Also, did I write about Sitala? How I decided to use samples of all sorts of metal objects - mostly an anvil for the ride bell - and use it as a unique drumset. Couldn't find proper replacements for bass drum and snare, so I just used old from from a vynil set, that Daniel from Soundshock sent to me in his newsletter. I got most of the samples from https://freesound.org/ Made sure none of them had ridiculous copyright demands. And, I think, just putting this extra drumset behind a normal drumset really creates a unique sound. I settled on a SI Drumset that comes with Cakewalk. Also tried Steven Slate drums and PowerDrumSet, one was too RAM heavy and I didn't like the ride bell from PDS. Actually, I came up with an idea to try a sampler after using SSD (funny that you need an SSD to run it quickly lol).

I really wanted to upgrade my PC in 2015, but after actually saving money I ended up spending them on food in 2017. I used ot be obsessed with buying massive pork chops and consuming them, hoping to bring back old gains. And I actually was pretty strong in 2017, before I started to "medicate" my "depression" with insane amounts of beer. But in august 2018 I stopped doing that and have been dry ever since. Not real alcoholism, but something to be slightly proud of, I guess. Now I take a spoonfool of alcohol in the morning with my adaptogens. Can't do it regularly for that reason. One spoonful is, arguably, a noticeable amount.

I forgot to do my accumulation squats today, and I still want to do some bicep curls. Maybe I'll use the EZ bar once again.

Some time later

Accumulation squat

60*10

80*5

100 - 2 sets of 10 - loading up my right leg more, interesting

EZ bar curl

29*5

39*5 felt pretty exhausted in general

50*20 pretty EZ, PR+3 reps - got inspired after watching Rick Bugenhagen's latest video https://youtu.be/wRihhqANjQQ

Also found a curious little channel - Uncle Judy Music. He's also an amateur musician. There's a lot of these small channels, like this one and Farvann that are just tiny gems of interesting content, at least to me.