New personal cards! I decided to lean into how like 90% of why I hand them out is tuba related, and even did a QR code link to kirk.is/bands which might simplify my shpiel to people who might want to start playing in one of the groups I'm in.





Based on the bottom photo here which remains one of my favorites though it's not a look I go for very often now. In retrospect i should have touched up Alien Bill's pupil to make it bigger.

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While most of my tuba playing is for community and activist bands, I play with a few others that pay. Not a ton, mostly I'm in it for the community more than the cash - but when I am helping them scrounge for tuba players for a gig I can't help them with, I think about this quote from a 2012 TIME article on a rash of tuba thefts from SoCal schools:

The New York Times reports that teachers are pointing to the popularity of banda, a traditional Mexican music form, in which tubas serve as the anchor. Tuba players in these bands are paid sometimes double what the other banda musicians play, and Chaves-Rasas says she's had students come to her asking to learn tuba so they can be in a banda, adding, "people will pay top dollar for a banda with a sousaphone player."

I don't want to deprecate the other horn players (most of whom, frankly, are likely to be more skillful players than me) nor the percussionists, some of whom are carrying around as heavy an instrument as I am. But I could get behind tubas deserving a double cut :-D

Oh, even cooler NPR piece (with transcription) talking about Mexican Bandas and the Tubas in them...

No matter what instrument you are playing, you can't miss the first beat or you're through.

Reminds me too of Bootsy's Basic Funk Formula

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Some time ago, the tenor saxophonist Frank Foster was playing a street concert from the Jazzmobile in Harlem. He called out for blues in B-flat. A young tenor player began to play "out" from the first chorus, playing sounds that had no relationship to the harmonic progression or rhythmic setting.
Forester stopped him.
"What are you doing?"
"Just playing what I feel."
"Well, feel something in B-flat, motherfucker"

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I'm glad my pistachio shells a forming a relatively happy community, but not quite the amount of diversity I'd like to see.

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Chuffed with the "duck" theme for my iPhone, to go along with its new yellow silicone case.



(did a little coding to get the layout right)

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14 years ago I made "Conway Ice", seeing what happened if you plotted Conway's Game of Life in 3D... each generation is plotted one level higher than the previous. Turns out it makes cool, plant-like structures!

click to run But I didn't port this from Java Processing to P5.js until now (not sure if P5 was doing 3D when I started.) I had to rewrite the 2D engine, but that's easy enough these days. (Getting around to making the the port inspired by Andy Wallace's Pac-Tracer that also uses 3D, in this case to chart Pac-Man ghost's sophisticated movement behaviors.)

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Christianity neither is nor ever was a part of the Common Law.

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Religion & Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

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The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

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RIP Norm MacDonald

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I'm pretty sure, I'm not a doctor -- but I'm pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That's not a loss. That's a draw.

Damn, that is one sexy biting lip emoji

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Hah, reminds me of this weirdly sexy ad for a russian dental office I saw in 2006:

I'll tell you the thing Nikki Sixx said in the Mötley Crüe Behind the Music. "You gotta date your wife."

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For my devblog I did a deep dive of the animation shown here - a lovely bit of code snuggled in a 280-max tweet!
New person to follow on tumbler and Twitter... I love microfiction.





That one about the forests is gonna stick with me...

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Every snowflake is special, until you need to make a snowball.

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The forest wanted to beg for mercy but knew precious little about us. Pine trees roared like chainsaws, hoping this was the language of man.

(Just wanted to get a few here in searchable text form) Some shots from last weekend, and this one.