What creative projects have you been working on?

My hobby is photography, and last Saturday I gave myself a small challenge: I wanted to make a walk in the forest, but only using my macro lens. This was one of the results.

I am currently working on series of songs for a friend's video game. I can't speak much to the game but the songs are all original compositions that are in the vein of the Sovietwave playlists I was jamming hard at the beginning of the pandemic.

I make drum & bass, 2-step, house, and other electronic music in my spare time as well.

I'm working on a virtual pet sim sandbox game with idle/incremental elements called Pocket Kitten 💕

Progressing a lot on my cross stitch. Talked about it the last time this thread was posted and it is still annoying as hell to actually make, but at least I'm nearing the end now. Not buying more patterns from this designer though, that's for sure 😬

Two weeks ago

Today-ish

Working on finishing a wood shop (shed) in my backyard. Currently all I have left for exterior is the actual door, which is currently on my bench getting a Spar Urethane finish. After that it's ready for me to move in all my tools and my wife can have the garage (well, half of it) to park in.

Recently I've been getting into building guitar pedals and amplifiers. A few years ago, I built a 5W Fender Tweed amp. A few months ago, I built a klon overdrive pedal. I'm building a Tremolo pedal next.

You can buy the kits online that come with all the parts and instructions. When you get it, its basically just Legos but with a soldering iron. I'd like to get to the point where I can start designing my own, but that requires knowledge at a level of essentially being an electrical engineer (which I'm absolutely not anywhere near).

It's still fun nonetheless. Especially when you paint the box for the pedal. It's a really satisfying feeling when you turn it on and it works AND you don't electrocute yourself....

I started recording a playthrough of a game I like, both to get at some personal goals and to learn new software.

I'm trying to frame it like you've come over and we're working through a game together. Because that's what my best friend and I used to do. That friend is far away and in a very dark place. My secret hope is that he actually sees it, and that when he gets to the end the message for him lands. I haven't gotten to it yet but I know what it'll say. But for everyone else, the point here is to not be a product. I'm not advertising it, I'm not setting up a "community", there's no greater ambition behind it like that. It's to recapture something I had, share what I can of it.

I linked the sixth part because alongside all that I'm learning the software a bit and made a silly intro for it. I need to plan things out a bit better. I totally goofed on where the opening credits appear, but they all say shit like "Idiot man made a video" and "have you ever seen a live bird?" so I'm not too bent out of shape on it.

I have a few small pots on the fire.

One of my close old friends has 2 kids that bracket my kid's age by 1 year each way. We have run two prior tabletop rpg campaigns, and are starting a third. I find the worldbuilding a lot of fun. Even moreso than the playing. This is my primary creative outlet.

I was a pro photographer back in the 80s. These days it's a distant hobby. But my sister now needs some publicity headshots, and I've dusted off the old studio equipment and started planning a shoot for over the fall/winter.

I also do Genealogy. The site "Find a Grave" has folks request photos of remote (to them, local to me) headstones. With the cameras out again, I'm looking at some cemetery shoots while filling the requests.

Genealogy is in itself a bit creative. A bit like writing a mystery novel and solving it at the same time.

Finally, as a nerd, I find smarthome tech interesting. With a disabled relative and a teen kid in the house I try to find ways to make everyone's life a bit less hard. It has involved some "off-label" uses of items and a bit of trial-and-error.

I'd like to spend more time on music. But I'm a perpetual beginner and have never put in enough time to get good at anything.

All these things need to remain small - I have almost zero free time.

I created a 3 hour, one-shot stream of music for bonequest.fm to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the webcomic BoneQuest.

It's called Farts of Space and it has a science fiction theme. Lofi, ambient, psybient, some popular tunes, and a few surprises. It airs on bonequest.fm on Friday the 18th at 3 p.m., Sunday the 20th at 9 p.m., Tuesday the 22nd at 3 a.m., and Thursday the 24th at 9 a.m.

All times are eastern daylight time.

I just finished a mobile fish-cleaning station that is intended for gutting and cleaning big fishes or a lot of fishes outside. It's my brother's design. If I were to make it again, I'd make a few changes for sure.

Just yesterday, I put 5 arrows to seal in a drying cabinet for a few weeks. I've been wanting to do these special 5 for a while now, so I'm nervous about how they'll weigh out.

On the August long weekend I went camping, and for the trip I left my phone in the car and carried my camera around instead. Carrying a physical camera around led me to search for more photo opportunities that I would have walked past without a camera. The goals I had for this trip were to unplug, consume less, and create more.

For the past two weeks in my free evenings after work I have been editing the pictures. I shot in manual focus a lot of time with a really shallow depth of field, so sadly some are composed nicely but out of focus. However, I got multiple cool photos out of it. Just need to finish editing the last few photos

In the next week or two I will have a suite of handheld music gear from my Dirtywave M8, Polyend Tracker Mini, and Analogue Pocket (I mostly got it for LSDJ, tbh, but plan to blow it open with OpenFPGA stuff). I'm thinking of doing creative sprints, even just one night a week, where I write a full track in 30 minutes, and then give myself time to fatten it up with effects (where they exist), mix/master it locally ITB, and release it. The Pocket will be the rough device, but I've got some tools I can work with for that. The goal isn't to make masterpieces, but to just be creative for a bit with tools that are relatively fast and intuitive for doing so (to me, at least).

This was the inspiration, where I just sat down and cranked something out on my Dirtywave M8.

I'm in the process of writing my second novel. Its the middle part of a trilogy I've had in my head for more than 20 years, and two years ago I was finally able to get the first part written, edited and on to Amazon.

The story is about three friends who find themselves with nowhere left to go after a rescue of an ex leads to a high speed chase and a rolling gunfight. Something they found while on the run offers them a different choice, however.

It's beach read level science fiction/adventure, and can be found at the top of my site - https://cartelincorporated.ca

Officially finished my final grad class this month and am slowly dipping my toes back into hobbies. I used to crochet all the time and made some little opossums for a colleague at my previous job. I recently received a request for another one and it was a great excuse to bust out the hooks. It turned out pretty cute! I tried out a fluffier grey yarn for the body and while it is delightfully soft, it was such a pain to work with because it's impossible to see the stitches. Lesson learned

I have a whole slew of digital art projects going on. The one I'm working on is potentially the most challenging, and the oldest... I'm trying to whittle away at it in pieces between other non-art but related endeavors. I finally wrote down my ideas for aspects of the project and got approval from my collaboration partner, so I'm a bit more on-course than I was, but it still might be a longer journey than I hope.