Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Keyboard Meetups, Memory & Randy Cano

Weekly Update 2017-08: Attending a mechanical keyboard meetup in the basement of a craft beer bar near my house, an amazing tofu sandwich, and the unbelievable work of Randy Cano.

Music: Cigarettes After Sex
Quite a provocative name you've got for a band there. Well, I suppose it sort of works, as this band produces a sound that is consistently calming and perfect for listening to on grey, rainy days when you don't want to leave your house. Which actually was not the case for me on this lovely, sunny Family Day weekend, though their sound is excellent nonetheless.

Classified as ambient pop out of Brooklyn, I suppose the draw of the music is that it seems really genuine to me. I feel like I can imagine the people that the songs are written for, and they are people who deserve to have songs written about them. Anyway, before I jump off a huge tangent, take a listen.



Accomplishment:
I'm so happy to get the FriendCanoe project up and running again. I met up with Sasha last week to discuss our next steps, and I'll be digging back into it this week.

I spent this long weekend exploring not one but two abandoned buildings on a whim, which led to a rather nice set of images in a cold, empty community pool changing room. Some real hipster stuff right there.








I also ate an amazing tofu sandwich while brunching with a friend at Bloomer's on Bloor, which is noteworthy because I would like to eat many, many more of them. I might be becoming a tofu fiend.

On a different sort of whim, I also attended a mechanical keyboard meetup in the basement of Wenona Craft Beer Lodge, which was quite an experience. Imagine a small room filled with nerds (meant only in the most loving of ways of course), showing off their homemade DIY keyboards outfitted with RGB LEDs, custom 3D printed key caps with all sorts of lovely textures and shapes on them, and weird angled keys that are supposedly more ergonomic. It was quite a display. More on that in a future post, as it was quite a time. Here's a teaser:


I also worked on cleaning my hard drive so I can be a real human with good skills. The simple task of organizing all my photos has taken quite a while, but at least they're all in the same place now.

Goal:
This week I'll be working on a better, less extreme colour scheme for FriendCanoe, and finishing the organization of all of my photos. I'd say there's about another hour of work to do there (the pictures from my China trip are a mess).

Random Thought:
I've been feeling rather low on memory fuel lately. It's been happening a lot, so I started to think about memory and memory loss. I realized that old people like to tell stories because it shows that they're still with it and their brains still work. It's a mini brag accomplishment.

Maybe that's why I like to tell stories? I know for sure that I am a nostalgia addict so perhaps the two are connected somehow.

Inspiration: Randy Cano
I honestly can't even remember how I found this amazing motion designer on Instagram, but you MUST follow him.


A post shared by Randy Cano (@randy.cano) on


Weird, sometimes a little scary, and always wiggly, the works of Randy Cano are the epitome of surprise and delight. They seem like they're real, but really everything is made digitally. Which somehow makes it even more weird? Check out more:

A post shared by Randy Cano (@randy.cano) on

A post shared by Randy Cano (@randy.cano) on

And what's more, his website has even more awesome stuff on it. Specifically, a sort of vending machine for Essie nail polish is quite lovely. And I could definitely see it being used at an airport. The perfect place to try out a new colour while you wait for your plane, and then you have the bottle for touch-ups when you reach your sunny destination.




Genius! Follow him on Instagram.

No comments:

Post a Comment