SITE NEWS:
I kept putting off updating the blog around the new year, but I can’t put it off anymore, since the first quarter 2021 is almost over already.
I finished this portrait back in June of 2020 but never got the chance to add it to my site. It’s the next one in my Loona portrait series, and this time, it’s the maknae, Yeojin.
Here are a few progress images:
NEWS:
Related to the Loona portrait, is the Etsy shop Elena and I opened up. It was mainly for her driftwood sculptures, but she talked me into selling art prints of my Loona portrait as well, since whenever I shared them online, I’ve gotten requests to buy prints. I initially rejected the idea because I did them just for my own enjoyment, but after numerous requests, I figured it they’ll bring other people enjoyment, then might as well.
Driftwood sculptures K-pop art prints by WalkingTreeBoutique
Here are a few of Elena’s driftwood sculptures. Aren’t they neat?
I love this one with cat under the lamp so I asked her to make my studio its permanent home. I currently have it atop one of my speakers in front of me.
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I was asked to create some online art classes for Skilpe recently, and I have create seven different art classes for their platform. It’s a new company so they’re still trying to figure things out. I just taught the first class for them yesterday and despite a little technical hiccup at first, it went very well and both the students and I enjoyed the experience very much.
You can find the classes I’m teaching here.
WEBLOG:
The other day, I heard someone mention a meme on a podcast, and goes something like, “My 7-day trial period of 20201 is up, and I want to cancel my subscription.” So in other words, 2021 may not be any better than 2020. But we carry on, because what else is there to do? With that said, I’m here to fill in the blank that’s in my blog since I last updated.
Each year it feels more and more like I really shouldn’t bother, as there just doesn’t seem to be any point. In this day and age, people in my social circle read my posts on social media instead of coming to my site to read the blog, and all the interaction happens on those platforms. Blogs feel antiquated now, and unless you focus on a very specific subject or have a big following, you’re really just writing it as a form of journaling for yourself. And that’s pretty much what I’m doing here. If you’re one of the people who actually do read my blog, and wonder why I post so infrequently compared to years in the past, then there’s your answer; I post far more in Discord, forums, on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
But having blogged for so many years, I still feel that need to at least post something each year, just so it doesn’t seem like I’ve completely abandoned my own blog and site. So here I am.
2020 was a pretty shitty year for most people around the world, so I’m won’t bother going into it–we all know what happened and how it affected us. So instead I’ll just fill in that blank I mentioned.
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Let’s start off with something mundane. Elena and both were forced to get braces because we have the exact same crowding in the bottom of our front teeth that ended up cracking/breaking our top front teeth. At our age we really couldn’t care less about how our teeth look, but because the only way to fix our top front teeth were to first straighten our bottom front teeth, we really had no choice. For those of you who have/had braces, you know how much they suck. We can’t wait to get these torture devices off and then go eat ourselves silly without the very uncomfortable feeling of having the food stuck between those sharp metal wires and brackets.
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Last year, I finished writing the first draft of Dream Diver, and the beta-reader feedback experience ended up being very traumatic due to reasons I couldn’t have foreseen. Despite all the helpful feedback I got, I had to put it on the backburner because I just wasn’t ready to deal with the rewrite. So I took a break for a few months to get over the traumatic experience, and then slowly got back on the horse and picked another book to work on, resuming work on Wings of Promise, a story I’ve been writing in various forms since around 1998.
It originally began as a one-shot graphic novel, and I did all the page layout sketches, but shortly after I got out of the comic book industry and entered the video game industry, so it never went anywhere. A few years later, I rewrote it as a short story, but never tried to get it published because I didn’t think it was good enough. Then in the early aughts, I rewrote it as a screenplay for an animated short film, but the funding for the production fell through. Finally, sometime in 2013, I decided to write it as a novel, and have been working on it off and on since. My word-count in 202o was far less than 2019, and I hope to make up for it in 2021. Ideally, I’d like to finish the first draft and get beta-readers’ feedback by the end of the year.
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I got back into playing guitar around July of 2020, after stopping for several years. I had been playing since my early teens, but I was never that serious about it. I played well enough to record some of my own songs, and that’s about it. Now, after focusing on writing for almost ten years, I started to miss playing, and decided that it’s not too late to not only get back in shape, but surpass the level I was at when I stopped.
Originally, the itch to start playing again was because of the bass (basically when I stopped playing several years ago, it was across the board for all instruments–keyboard, drums, guitar, bass, and harmonica). When I decided to start again in early 2019, it was just going to be bass, but around July of 2020, I decided to get back into playing guitar too, and have since slowly started to spend more time on guitar than bass.
It took some time to get comfortable on guitar again after focusing on bass for about 18 months. At first, guitar seemed so fiddly and dainty in comparison due to the much thinner strings, shorter distance between the frets, and closer spacing between strings. But back before I stopped, I had played guitar far longer than bass, so it didn’t take long to get back in shape, and now I think I’m playing better than I ever did before I stopped previously.
Back before I stopped playing, I always wanted a Parker Fly guitar, but I always felt like I didn’t deserve one because I thought only advanced virtuosos could justify expensive high-end guitars like that. I had played one once in in 1998 when I worked at Guitar Center in San Francisco, and it was a red Fly Deluxe. It was love at first sight/touch because the guitar was incredibly light at only around 4.5 lbs. (2.04 kg), and the neck was so thin and fast, not to mention the high-tech design. It embodied everything I love about forward thinking concepts that breaks boring traditional molds, advanced ergonomics, and has modern cutting-edge visuals. But I never could bring myself to get one because I felt like I had to first level up enough to deserve one.
Now that I’m middle-age, I realize I was wrong. You only have this one lifetime, and it’s far too short to not to allow yourself to enjoy things you really want, and if you can afford it, you should treat yourself to whatever brings you an immense amount of joy. So with that mindset, I got myself a Strandberg Boden Standard 6 Tremolo:
The Strandberg Boden line of guitars are basically today’s take on those ideals I value in modern design, and the fact they are headless makes them even more enticing than the Parkers (and Parker went out of business), as I generally dislike headstocks. I feel they get in the way and adds cumbersome weight and length, not to mention often causing neck-dive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bashed the headstock into things or knocked shit off my desk. The Strandbergs are slightly heavier than Parkers, weighing about 5.3 lbs. (2.4 kg) on average, but they are even more comfortable than Parkers because of the unique body shape and being headless. I usually play it in the classical position as that’s easier on my wrist, and Strandberg makes it very comfortable with the cutaway contour near the control knobs. And the general consensus among guitar players is that the Strandbergs sound and play better than Parkers ever did, and I agree.
I did get a couple of other guitars too–one is a cheap Chinese rip-off of Strandberg that’s not bad for the price, but it’s no Strandberg, being 1.3 lbs. heavier, and the tremolo system does not stay in tune. (It’s the one with the paint vomit finish in the middle.)
The other is a Line 6 James Tyler JTV-69 Variax (the black one), which is a more modern version of the first generation Variaxes I had in the past (I used to have three Variaxes–a 700 electric, 700 acoustic, and 700 bass). I like that the newer generation models have magnetic pickups too, so if the battery runs out you can use those pickups as backup. The digital models sound fine for the most part on the electric models, but I think for acoustic guitars, it still can’t model them with enough realism to be totally believable. The digital alternate tuning is very convenient though, especially on a guitar with tremolo. What I don’t like is that it weighs 8.6 lbs. (365 kg). For me, any guitar or bass over 8 lbs. starts to feel too cumbersome and uncomfortable.
At this point the herd is more or less stable and I probably won’t be buying/selling any more for a while. I kinda miss having an acoustic guitar though (I had two previously–one got stolen, and one got sold).
Ever since picking up the guitar again, I haven’t been playing bass much, and I’m already forgetting how to play some of the songs I was learning/practicing before guitar came back into my life. I should alternate between the two more so I get equal time in.
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Anyone who knows me knows that music is a huge part of my life. Here’s are some notable artists/songs I discovered or really enjoyed in 2020.
Holly Herndon’s layered vocal production with cutting-edge electronic stylings really blew me away. I can’t believe I never heard of her until now:
In 2020 I listened to a lot of prog and metal, and part of the reason is because I got back into playing guitar again (or is it the other way around?).
One of my current favorite guitarists is Plini, and his latest album is excellent, as all his past releases have been. This track from the album is particularly interesting with those creative muted notes in the beginning section:
On the metal front, some of the most interesting stuff I heard in 2020 were:
Speaking of Plini, I finally bought Neural DSP’s Archetype Plini plugin (as well as the Fortin Cali). I like the Neural DSP stuff so much that I barely use my other guitar amp sim plugins anymore.
Related to my renewed passion for guitar, is the totally unexpected plectrum rabbit hole I fell into. It started out innocently enough. I tried to look up what kind of picks Plini used, and before I even realized what was happening, I was buying expensive boutique guitar picks that cost up to $100 each (made of high-end engineering grade thermoplastic used on spaceships). Here’s the state of my collection (and I’m pretty much done–I really don’t want or need any more. Well, unless I come across some very interesting picks that don’t overlap with what I already have):
Those not familiar with boutique picks might balk at how weird, expensive, and huge (largest one is 25 mm thick) some of these are, but it’s one of those things where until you have tried them yourself, you have no idea what you’re missing out on. I’ve seen plenty of guitar players see these for the first time and make fun of them, saying how it’s idiotic to spend that much money on fancy picks when five bucks can get you dozens of cheap ones that work just fine. And then they played a high-end boutique pick and quickly realized they were wrong. Soon after, with a sheepish smile, they join the dark side.
Whether these high-end picks are worth it is a very subjective thing, but people who buy and use them love them. Some people obsess about pedals, or amps, or strings, and for me it’s guitar picks. And I’m not alone–there are others out there, such as this guy:
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If prog and metal are one extreme of my taste in music, then I guess K-pop and City Pop would be the other extreme. Here are some amazing releases from 2020 I loved:
Yukika’s “Soul Lady” is one of the best City Pop songs I’ve ever heard:
I mean, just listen to that awesome arrangement. In fact, the entire album is amazing, because it’s a concept album with a narrative, dialogues, voice acting, sound effects, etc., and of course, great City Pop songs:
Not only is this my album of the year, it’s probably my favorite City Pop album of all-time.
Another awesome City Pop release comes from a Korean band that most people never heard of, and it’s “Romantic” by Daybreak:
Side note about City Pop: Having grown up on anime, manga, J-pop/rock, and J-dramas/movies in the 80’s, City Pop is deeply ingrained as part of my musical DNA. If you ever listened to “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi due to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, then you have some idea what it is. But back then in the 80’s we didn’t call it that–it was just part of the Japanese pop landscape. It’s only decades later that someone coined the term City Pop to describe that specific sound those groups of artists and songs shared–namely a blend of jazz fusion, funk, soul, disco, and synthpop.
City Pop went out of style in the 90’s (and maybe not coincidentally, J-pop took a nosedive in quality around that time and never truly recovered). Before the term of City Pop was coined, I used to refer to songs with that specific vibe as “vacation pop,” because the imagery I see in my head while listening is driving down the street with the shimmering beach and crisp blue sky on one side, and gleaming skyscrapers on the other, on a summer day, or through the night streets with the neon lights scrolling past. For many years I mourned the death of City Pop and 80’s J-pop/rock, because that magical sound of the era was never captured again by subsequent eras in Japanese music. It was only when I discovered K-pop that some of that magic was recaptured, as 80’s J-pop is one of K-pop’s influences.
Flash forward to the modern era, when music fans of the younger generation are discovering classic City Pop from the 70’s and 80’s on YouTube and marveling at how amazing this music from their parents’ generation is, and lamenting how today’s pop music simply cannot compare. And often, the comments section are filled with posts about how the music makes them feel nostalgic for a time before they were born, and a place they’ve never been to, while listening to a language they do not know. This indescribable magic, is City Pop.
If you had told me in my youth that one day in the future, decades after City Pop had died out, it would enjoy a revival and get adopted by the younger generation who grew up on the Internet, I would have been extremely skeptical. But here we are, and I’m so thankful it has become a reality. And I couldn’t be happier that the revival has resulted in younger musical artists picking up the torch from the previous generation and making City Pop music in the 21st century.
Okay, back to the year 2020.
From the K-Indie scene, one song I really loved is “Fairy Tale” by Seori. Just listen to that combination of the ethereal vibe and edgy electronic production:
On the K-pop front, I had already posted about Loona’s “Number 1” and “Daeng Daeng Daeng” in a previous post, so I won’t repeat them here.
Oh My Girl and Weeekly both released amazing songs I consider masterclasses in upbeat and catchy songwriting that expresses the cute concept extremely well:
Not only is “Tag Me” one of the most impressive rookie debuts in K-pop girl groups history, it’s also got one of the best choreographies too with great use of the school desks as props, and the girls absolutely killed it in their performances.
To keep things more balanced, I need to include the badass side of K-pop with two of Everglow’s stunning releases in 2020:
“Everglow, forever, let’s go!”
And I’ll wrap up this segment with a beautiful release from Sejeong. Love the expressive delivery of her voice:
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I get emails now and then from people who want to know if I’ll be posting more Kitty Cat Diary entries. The reason why I haven’t been posting updates is because we’re too busy, and our lives have shifted towards other areas of interest and focus. I still take photos and videos of her all the time, but they’re for our own private enjoyment and not for sharing with the public. Then there’s also the braces–they just make your mouth/smile look really awkward. We have no idea if we’ll ever start posting new entries again. I mean, she’s just turned 50, so it’s reasonable that we stop around this age. In fact, we used to think we’d stop when she turned 40, but we just kept going. Don’t get me wrong–she still looks amazing for her age, but it’s a logical and expected evolution to focus less on capturing exterior beauty at our age. Yes, older women are beautiful too, but I think generally speaking, in this age of Instagram and influencers, not many people would care about middle-aged folks posting photos of themselves–including other middle-aged folks. 😀 But who knows? Maybe after she gets the braces off we might start posting updates again. Gotta represent the middle-aged folks, right?
I did upgrade my Olympus E-M1 to the Mark II model though, for all the casual shooting of Kitty Cat. For professional work I’m still shooting the Sony a7RII.
