Monday, April 10, 2017

Moss of Aura, Shirt Buttons & Paper.io

Weekly Update 2017-15: Moss of Aura (Future Islands side project), button position deciding the gender of a shirt, and an addicting new phone game.

Music: Moss of Aura
After purchasing tickets to Buffalo's Kerfuffle Festival (featuring Future Islands), I've been noticing traces of Future Islands everywhere. First, vocalist Sam Herring was featured on one of my favourite BadBadNotGood tracks, and now I realize that a great indie one-piece I've been getting into is the brainchild of another member of Future Islands, Gerrit Welmers. The music reminds me of Discovery's LP, also an offshoot of a great indie dance band (Vampire Weekend). It's got great synth beats and just makes me happy. Listen:


Accomplishment:
Somehow, after four months of toil, I got my custom email address back up and working. And just in time, because the Analog Contact show was this past weekend. My business cards were up on the wall for everyone to see and collect at an art gallery in Parkdale. It was quite a nice thing to see.


I've also started planning my trip to Portland/Vancouver, most likely for June. I follow a really cool art gallery in Portland called Nucleus, and on a whim sent them a message asking for some cool design-related things to do in Portland. A nice lady named Stella responded and is currently compiling some stuff for me! So excited.

Passover begins tonight at sundown, though my family cheated a little and had our Seder last night instead (don't tell Moses). This year a couple of cool things happened: I gifted my sister with the special Passover Haggadah I had secretly bought for her on Amazon about six months ago, and added a few footnotes to our usual scripture. I spoke about the addition of the orange to the seder plate, which signifies inclusion and acceptance of all kinds of people. Since Passover (and really all holidays) act as an excuse to bring friends and family together to share and celebrate together, it seemed fitting. Further, we also discussed our feelings about eating kitniyot (foods which are closely-related to Passover-prohibited foods but are technically not forbidden). Considering my family are not big into the whole song and dance of the holiday, I think we made good progress.

Goal:
This week, I'd like to figure out how to send email as [email protected] from my Gmail. I had it set up before, but the whole domain/hosting switch kerfuffle messed it all up.

I'll be working on the FriendCanoe branding for my meeting tomorrow with Sasha.
I'll also be continually reminding myself not to eat bread, which is a task in and of itself.

Random Thought:
I was buttoning up a shirt I had just traded for on Bunz when I stopped and wondered if it was a ladies' or men's shirt. I then remembered that women's shirts have the buttons on the left side and men's have them on the right. I wondered if there was any reason for this, other than the obvious issue of getting the proper-cut shirt. Since doing up your own buttons (by looking down) is actually reversed from doing up the buttons on someone else's shirt, I had a really weird thought that perhaps this would draw a similarity between a person buttoning up their own shirt and buttoning up someone's shirt of the opposite sex. In the case of the most common couple (a man and a woman - at least in this stage in society), for one person to button up their own shirt and that of their spouse, the reverse design means that the buttons would run the same way and the person wouldn't have to learn a new muscle memory. Yep, that was pretty weird. You can read a more factual approach to this mystery here.


Inspiration Paper.io
I was standing on a crowded subway - sadly no elbow room to play any iPhone games. But luckily, standing over sitting riders allows me a good vantage to see what they're doing on their phones (hey, it's the price of getting a seat, ok), and I happened to see a very addicting-looking game called Paper.io.

You're basically a snake leaving a trail like the classic game, but you're competing against other people who can kill you! It's very addictive.



The onboarding (four simple panels) is pretty good, though I feel that the game is so simple that you don't need to read through a bunch of static screens. But to each his own.





It's been a while since I have found a truly addicting phone game (been playing Solitaire for quite some time now), but this one may make the cut.

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