Korg’s wavestate and opsix (both 2020) are cute little 37-key synthesizers, but how easy is it to use them like a normal synth? I decided to find out.
Continue readingThese stories were posted on Mastodon in September 2021.
Continue readingThese are the stories posted to Mastodon during August 2021.
Continue readingThese are my Microfiction stories posted to Mastodon from July 2021.
Continue readingI’ve started writing microfiction, a self-contained story that fits in a single Mastodon post. Here are the stories I’ve written up to 30 June 2021.
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Hot on the heels of my quilted interpretation of Edvard Grieg’s classical composition Anitra’s Dance from the Peer Gynt suite, chronicled in Part 1, I wanted to get stuck into the next quilt in the series. My next quilt would be the first movement, Morning Mood, a piece of music known even to people with only a passing acquaintance of classical music. Morning Mood epitomizes Romantic era music, painting a picture in the mind. I intended for my interpretation to do the same.
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There we were: me, my partner, and my mother, having breakfast in the Savoy Hotel in London before our river cruise, and the conversation drifted to Maurice Ravel‘s Boléro, as it so often does.
I recalled a painting by Canadian artist Anne Adams, Unraveling Boléro, inspired by this evocative orchestral piece. This painting represents the music as a series of rectangles, one per bar. Each rectangle is coloured according to the dominant note in the bar. The height of the rectangle corresponds to the volume of the music. Other embellishments correspond to the rhythm and the instrumentation. It’s rightly regarded as Adams’s masterwork.
The three of us at breakfast that day all do quilting, and Unraveling Boléro looked a lot like something that could be quilted. But copying someone’s art didn’t excite me. Mum suggested another well-known piece of classical music, something out of copyright. How about Edvard Grieg‘s In the Hall of the Mountain King, from the Peer Gynt suite?
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Here at Ice Moon Prison, we have a habit of becoming fond of foods available only in other parts of the world. When we visited eastern Canada, for instance, we were introduced to poutine and Montréal smoked meat. When we visited Iceland, we were introduced to skyr. Skyr, a kind of thick yoghurt, proved impossible to get in Australia, until late 2017 when three different brands materialized at once. We purchased all three and reviewed them side by side.
Updated June 2019: Procal Dairies Skyr and nudie Icelandic yoghurt are no longer available. A new skyr from siggi’s is now available.
Here at Ice Moon Prison, everyone deserves a second chance. This applies equally to our vegetable scraps and grass clippings, so we have commissioned the bespoke official Ice Moon Prison Three-bin Compost System.
Here at Ice Moon Prison, we celebrate the winter festival of Christmas with traditional wintery foods. A few years ago we did a cooking course at Gewürzhaus in Toorak, and learned how to make Lebkuchen, a German spiced gingerbread.