I started listening to the Magnus Archives again (started but never finished) while I work on various sewing projects.

I made a cloth coffee filter out of unbleached muslin and cotton thread over the weekend. I got the idea from coffeesock filters. They're so damn pricy! $17 for one at a local store! I already had the thread from an old project, and it only cost $5 for enough fabric to make at least a few filters. Today or tomorrow I've gotta make some cold brew concentrate to try out the filter.

Calico demmands pets!

Doing OK today.

Learning portuguese and playing guitar. Trying to work on this thing called audiation consciously, which I think it something every good musician learns but is never explicitly taught. Had some interesting experiences so far. Like, there is one song I can sing in my head while I play on the guitar. That's new.

On my list for today is Silvio Rodriguez Ojala, though I'm just going o get the timing and melody down with simplified chords before I do all the fancy stuff he does.

One thing I've noticed about audiation is that it allows you to slow a song down. When I'm learning a song, I have to learn it almost at the same speed as I hear it, because what I'm doing in my head is ECHOING the song. Once I absorb the melody internally, I can slow it down.

I also started experimenting with playing major melodies as minor melodies, to see what would happen.

Happy birthday!

Oh yes- mostly guitar, but I've played drums, keyboard, and bass in bands too. I've been in choir and the lead singer of bands. I've been able to pick up and play things like mandolin, banjo, cello, and even clarinet on occasion.

In bands i'm usually known as "the resource". The guy who knows how to play that part or what part comes. I've been in the awkward position of reminding people what they themselves wrote.

When I first started learning guitar, any time I wasn't playing I was doing "mental reps", imagining the process and result of actually playing. I would practice with an unplugged electric guitar (for noise and convenience reasons) and imagine what it would sound like with distortion or effects.

When I was a drummer in a band, there was a kit in our practice space but I have never had a kit of my own, so I was 100% reliant on mental reps for my individual work. Still worked out pretty well.

I remember back in my senior year of high school, 8th period English class, getting bored one day and deciding to attempt to write a song right there. No instrument, no computer, not even able to hum out loud. I came up with a fun riff with some weird time signature stuff going on, fleshed it out into a song, and kept it in my mind on the bus ride home. Then I was able.to grab a guitar and figure out programming a MIDI version of all of it. Every now and then if I find i'm stuck writing things on guitar or piano I try to do that just to get a spark.

Happy birthday! Please forgive my post. I do have severe ADHD, but wanted to comment on the tortie <3 <3 <3 I hope you have a lovely say and please tell Hazel I said "ps ps ps" and that she's a good girl :)

Yay surprise vacation! It's back to school today. Everyone was all smiles and happy to see each other. I am already procrastinating and unenthused. Except for one course on Friday that we'll see how it goes.

Just complaining into the ether

https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/u-of-ts-law-school-wants-to-have-laptop-free-classrooms-where-students-handwrite-notes/

I graduated uni in the early 2010s and had a cute lil netbook in my final year for word processing. All actual computing was done in the computer lab. A beloved thermodynamics professor used overhead transparencies for lecture notes. I didn't use a computer for class notes and until COVID made virtual meetings more common I would still take meeting notes by hand and type them up later for meeting minutes. So I'm old and old fashioned lol. When I am doing modeling I still write out my assumptions and equations by hand (and draw system boundaries lmao).

(Side note: I didn't have typing class but I did use a typewriter in elementary school. Now where did I put my walker???)

I find it ironic.gif how rigidly people cling to what they think is best for developing thinking skills.

With many students using laptops to take “copious and comprehensive notes,” Stacey says they cannot critically engage with course content. That sort of engagement nurtures the “rigorous thinking about the law” that Jackman Law graduates are known to have, he wrote.

While Stacey acknowledges taking notes by hand is slower, he notes that pacing helps students “process information critically in real time and make higher-order analytical choices about what to write down.”

I'm going entirely on vibes so I welcome being corrected but have we even had time to study how learning has changed as technology has changed? Do kids who had laptops in elementary school classrooms learn the same way as those in generations before? Or is old man yelling at cloud and being controlling because it worked for him?

Of course, this is ableist as fuck and wildly condescending in a graduate program. The article mentions accommodations will still be respected but that's a huge burden to put on people who are being asked to change the way they engage with classrooms. How do they know they need an accommodation if this is a they have known for their post secondary career?

Also:

“Faculty members have expressed concern about the impact that increasing use of technology during lectures, including sophisticated AI tools and laptops used for near-verbatim notetaking, can have on this aspect of our academic mission,” Christopher Essert, dean of U of T’s law faculty, said in a statement to CP24 on Saturday.

Each laptop-free classroom will either provide AI-generated notes, a roster of rotating student typing note-takers, or class slides, speaker notes, or a similar record of the material covered in class.

Make it make sense lol.

It poured rain today. I add up at 4am because thanks body. I planned on just putting on my hat and going outside at 615 but I opened the door, went nope as I saw it wasn't raining, it was fucking pouring. Couple hours later, fine. Grabbed two tomatoes.

I won't have enough home grown at the same time to make enough sauce, but that's life.

The kitten continues to go eeeeeeeeeee a lot. I love her.