What I was up to

Well… times are weird with COVID-19 keeping everyone in quarantine, although for my wife and I life seems to be mostly business as usual. We always work from home anyway, but we do miss cafés, hanging out with people, and eating out. Like anyone, probably. We did want to take a nice sunny vacation right about now (because the game my wife was working on, Ori And The Will Of The Wisps finished production after the usual crunch), but I guess that would have to wait.

Thankfully, we have Animal Crossing: New Horizons to pass the time, eh?

Work wise, a lot of the work I’ve done the last few months is on larger and long-running projects. I can’t really speak of them yet, but I’m excited about them!

I got myself a new looper pedal for my pedalboard, it’s a very nice addition, as it allows me to play two loops at the same time, amongst other things. For those familiar, it’s a Ditto X4 (another TC Electronic pedal). I use it mostly when I’m playing around with making Ambient guitar music. Now that my delay pedal is no longer my loop pedal, I might want to sell it in favour of a smaller pedal. But no rush…

I’ve also been working on a playlist generator for Spotify. Although Spotify’s curated playlists can be nice, I realised that sometimes my partner and I want to listen to something more familiar. We have a shared playlist, but we found the shuffle feature in that playlist to not always create a nice listening experience.

Inspired by radio formats and sitting in cafés, I made a small tool that creates a new playlist composed out of “clusters” of tracks fitting the same mood. Unlike shuffle functionality, it will often play a few tracks by the same artist in a row, more akin to playing an album for while. The tracks are picked from a couple of mood-specific playlists, which are mixed according to user preference (so for example, today I want a mix with 10% whacky, 40% upbeat, 50% relaxing).

Things I liked a lot recently:

Without elaborating too much, here’s a small list of shows and other entertainment I’ve been enjoying recently:

• 🕹 Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• 📚 Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series (currently reading Maskerade)
• 🎶 The new The Strokes album, The New Abnormal
• 📺 Brooklyn Nine-Nine Season 7
• 📺 QI
• 📺 Bojack Horseman
• 🕹 The Sims 4