TwinCat OMC & Snoozefest
Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
34F and a slushy mess this morning.
The precipitation out there looks like snow, but sounds like rain, and the streets & sidewalks are covered in watery slush... and it's supposed to keep going like this all day.
I stayed up too late last night creating this...
A new logo for TwinCat Studios, to use with the new TikTok of the same name.
The name, TwinCat goes back to early 2001, when Jet & Mauli were kittens and I bought the Boss BR8... my first (and only) digital 8-track recorder... along with other new equipment like a dual CD burner that had a fiberoptic MIDI input.
TwinCat recorded three of the four existing albums, and produced all four... with the first one being analog recordings that were digitized with the equipment.
The cats outlived the studio, by better than 10 years, but now I have Snoop & Prowly, who are also twins, so the name lives on.
Of course, I'm already out here under the guise of Snoozefest Audio, but that's not a very good name for a music studio.
Snoozefest Audio was originally gonna be called, "Old Man Cricket's Field Recordings," to bring back my original online alias of, Old Man Cricket.
Recall that back in 1994, after starting a job at the public library, and buying a stereo recording walkman, I decided to start recording sound effects as a hobby... which then lead me to recording back yard crickets, while stoned, and having a cosmic experience.
That collection of sound effects tapes, which included crickets, were called, Old Man Cricket's Treasury of Basic Sounds.
And the name, of course, was meant to evolk the same vibe as, Old Farmer's Almanac, of which I was also a fan.
So when I first got online, in 1997... my first Geocities home page was a self-styled web portal called, "Old Man Cricket's Hole in the Ground," which featured a column, written by me, mostly about the change of the seasons and other folksy things.
But at the time, it was impossible to upload either sound effects or music to the web, because the MP3 did not exist yet, and nobody had the connection speed or drive space to deal with a WAV file of even a minute's duration.
Now recall that just this month I rediscovered the song, Bed in the Suburbs, written in 1996, the year before I first got online.
This song is sung from a cricket's point of view, singing such lines as, "I spend my nights in stridulation, singing my heart out to the one I love."
But just before the chorus he sings, "And I'm very thankful for my hole in the ground, down here in the grass, in the middle of town."
So... this song was an intermediary step between the conception of, Old Man Cricket as a character, and the appearance of his Geocities page in 1997.
And that song is now being produced by TwinCat Studios!
So, yeah... Snoozefest should've been called, Old Man Cricket's Field Recordings, but in 2018, when it was created, I decided that, "Snoozefest," sounded more modern and cool, for some reason.
But then I had to change it to, "Snoozefest Audio," because all the domain names for Snoozefest had been bought up by a mattress company!
And now, of course, the whole dream of a Snoozfest Audio SoundCloud page, where people could listen to hours of crickets for free with no adds has been completely destroyed.
Because not only have the classic field crickets been driven out by hordes of bush crickets and other species that aren't very pleasant to hear...
But SoundCloud now forces people to listen to adds, unless they pay a subscription... even though they charge me money to host my shit!
So the only good thing that came out of that, was this blog.
Which is now the closest thing in modern times to... Old Man Cricket's Hole in the Ground!
All of this just goes to show that all the enduring parts of my identity were formed in my twenties... the crickets, the music, the obsession with calendars and the seasons...
The writing online... the working of a humble job in a small academic institution... the graphic design.
The only other enduring facet of my personality that came along later, in my 30s, was all the handyman skills... which are pretty important these days, for maintaining this old house and property... which it was also probably inevitable that I'd inherit.
So that's the story of how TwinCat begat OMC, which begat Snoozefest.
And like I said, making that logo last night kept me up too late, so I've got no energy to deal with BMO today.
And besides... it's garbage night.
Okay, the garbage is out, and the bins are sitting in the slush on the parking.
I also went around and checked my three litter boxes; two upstairs, and one down in the living room.
None of them have been used at all in almost a year!
But I did freshen up the cat litter because it's possible they may use them next week when it's so bitterly cold outside.
So... still prepping for that, and waiting for the new transformer to come on Saturday.
Well, it snowed the whole way to work and continued on for five hours or so, but it stayed just above freezing the whole time.
So, the snow did win out a bit, and accumulated... but not nearly as much as it would've if it had been, say 30F.
Only other news tonight is that I bought one of those six-outlet things you can stick into a normal outlet... for on the porch... because I'll need it for where this new transformer needs to plug in.
°¦}
