"You are a woman with film reels for eyes" and other notes

[whisperpeir]

Another week flew by in my neck of the woods. Here are a few thoughts:

• I'm pleased to report the audio tracks to help ease myself into sleep are becoming more sophisticated. Pixabay has seemingly endless audio clips to experiment with, and my Audacity skills are improving. Rather than layering all the sounds on top of each other as is, I've begun creating a sense of dimension with frequency filters and reverb. The most effective soundscape for sleeping is currently "Typing in an underwater lab while a sitcom plays in the next room."
  
  I began mixing my own audio to cut back on what I call THE SCROLL. Turns out the act of swiping late into the night engaged my mind enough to mitigate sleep preventing symptoms like uncomfortable tightness in my chest... while also delaying sleep because of light and the stickiness of corporate algorithms. Face palm.
  
  I've discovered mental visualization and simple math games have the same anxiety reducing effect as THE SCROLL without searing my poor retinas. On nights when passive listening isn't cutting it, I might visualize where the sounds are coming from and what those objects or beings look like. My ability to direct my attention ain't always stellar, though, so I wrote a script for incorporating these mental actives into the sleep audio. I spent a few hours working my way through NPR's sound mixing resources and look forward to learning more.
• I continue to de-tangle myself from Microsoft in support of Palestinians in Gaza and around the globe. Of the actions suggested by the BDS Movement, removing Bing from my search rotation and boycotting Game Pass and Microsoft owned game companies are the most straight forward. This has led to all sorts of wonderful discoveries like Kagi's small web feature and Fire Emblem for the GBA.
• Y'all, I've read some goodass poetry this week. Two favorites are Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich and The Aureole by Nikky Finney.
• Lookit, I made a gif using FFmpeg (mostly). I followed this tutorial on a little test video of aloe and incense taken with my phone. Unfortunately, the file size wasn't small enough for Dreamwidth, so I reduced the number of colors to 4 using proprietary software (and then discovered Dreamwidth doesn't host gifs which prompted me to finally make a Neocities account). Funny story, I uploaded a different test gif I'd whittled down to 700KB to Giphy. When I checked the uploaded file size it had ballooned to 3MB. What are y'all playing at, Giphy ?? !!


Until next time, friend.