Making "ART" or "CONTENT"...

Fake Kyoto FM Radio Stream MIX10. Something I prepared a few weeks ago, but ended up posting more interesting to me MUSIC+COMICS that almost no one were shown. In recent months, one of these simple "Japanese DJ chat/my music mixes" did better than anything I spent much more time on.

And that is a downer.  

And after 30 minutes can see MIX10 is doing much better than my typical shorts

"But this is music, why aren't you happy about that?" you might ask. Because this has Japanese chat in it, and guess that is the attraction to this video, not my music.

And I have seen that isn't just me either. 

Musicians being "forced" by the YouTube algorithm into not making the music videos they want to, but "content" with personality, gear reviews and making of stuff.  The YouTube algorithm prioritizes a type of content so that if you don't make it, your videos will not be seen.

That is the world we currently live in. Now being retired, it isn't that my lively hood depends on my channel, and building my channel isn't important in the way it is for many others.  

14 years ago my YouTube channel was monetized, and I had AdSense on my website. For the first few years that paid for the hosting fees I had. I also had reasonable views for my videos.

But Googles continuous Bait & Switch with creators meant that after a few years, my videos were demonetized for not meeting their changed requirements, there was no point in disfiguring our own website with Google Advertisements when the return for doing so was nothing, other than Analytics that our site has with more traditional tools that don't spy on everyone anyway.

The rise of FACEBOOK and it's walled garden approach to the Internet websites outside it had a lot to do with that too though. Wasn't Google alone at all. 

Mark Zuckerberg: “Social media started out as people primarily interacting with their friends. And now… at least half of the content is basically people interacting with creators.”

What Zuck didn't say though was this was ALL due to their algorithm's insistence on engagement as the important metric.  It wasn't the users that set that!

Unless a video is a SHORT now, it gets so few views it isn't worth the effort, if the making of them wasn't the main thing to me.

So the algorithms driving social media are now all about engagement. Pushing creators to produce stuff like the hideous posts under FOR YOU in X 😱, what ever the latest crass reality TV show is with toxic people being terrible, or whatever Mr. Beat does.  

Other Things

Related to that, Denmark where they had gone all in on digital tablets and PCs in schools instead of paper books, have now gone back to real books and lock up kids phones during the school day and supervise use of PCs. Education and child development had gotten worse with the all digital approach. The glorious future talked up by Steve Jobs and the tech companies was not true at all in practice.

Australia has tried to ban kids under 16 from social media. They have gone about that the wrong way though.  It is now known how manipulative social media and big tech are, so the problem is actually what the tech companies do that is the problem, not the users at any age.

Just like the sugar and smoking industries before, that instead of removing the problem, like limiting sugar and outlawing smoking, they focused on the user side to not hurt corporation profits.

So same old same old. The politicians/law maker are not working for the good of the people...

ARTEMIS2 is amazing, but an NHK story on it brought up something I hadn't realized.

We all know now the MOON RACE 50 years ago by America was all about Beating the Russians, and once that was "done", the Apollo missions soon stopped and we didn't get the future we had expected.

This renewed rush back to the moon is about Beating China. China has already brought moon rocks back to Earth in their own moon program and has a schedule for commercial mining of the moon in place.

Because of that, America is back to the moon for commercial exploitation, before China.  😞

Same old story...

And after over a week of not making any new music, have just done this. Think of it as a DRAFT I will change a lot before making it a YOUTUBE SHORT in a couple of weeks.

Rhythm guitar amp is actually a Red Lead rather than ANVIL patch.  The gnarly synth lead VITAL patch called BLEEDING ERROR.

I hadn't felt like trying to make any new music as it all seems like variations on the same thing to me now, and the algorithms around SHORTS limit reach. I know Irving Berlin only ever used the black keys on the piano (until he got mechanical transpose), so just 5 notes and wrote over 1500 songs with them.  

So thinking about that, I just call what I do my style, or is that genre?  

Not everyone needs to create stuff, but it is something I need to do, and always have. Recently very focused on the MUSIC+COMICS but it doesn't have to be. These just seem the best thing to do at the moment. 

Netflix offered up the TV Series Lucifer. Characters from Neil Gaiman's DC comic. It is simply written, with most of the guilty just confessing at the end, but it is wonderful, uncomplicated fun.  With lots of singing and music too. There are some standout episodes for me with Bloody Celestial Karaoke Jam, Daniel Espinoza: Naked and Afraid and It Never Ends Well for the Chicken being so unexpected. Sharon Osborne even has a brief part as herself in one episode.  

Really think there should be controls introduced related to Engagement focused algorithms, Disinformation, Privacy and Addiction but expect that is hard to quantify to be legally meaningful, but mostly if Google, Facebook etc. don't want to make things better, forcing them too will be hard with their unlimited cash. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Reflections: Where Were We Again?

 

Our hearing isn't what it was, I don't get to check my mixes in a car I know well any more and barely drive at all, so depend on a SPECTRUM analyzer in slow MASTERING MODE to see how balanced things are. I listen too, but that is all so deceptive.

The above is an OBS capture of the later part of STORY SHAPED BEATS showing the SPAN SPECTRUM analyzer I rely a lot on.

Is the mix great? 

Probably not.

But it sounds okay to me at the moment, and better than stuff I did 2 years ago, but will probably find it lacking if I look back at it in 2 years time. But as myself, and maybe, 5 other people will bother to listen to it for more than a few seconds, it really doesn't matter.  I came to realize the mix and mastering in cases like this isn't something to worry about. 

I found my structure of STORY SHAPED BEATS and how it makes me feel really interesting. The lyrics are personnel, but the word salad nature of them gives them other meanings depending on how I am feeling. I have no idea what anyone else thinks of it, other then being "original".

I have spent since November 2025 producing a piece of music to go with a comic animation about once a week for my MUSIC + COMICS.  So at the current time my album on Bandcamp ASSORTED BITS 3 has 23 tracks in it.

Maybe I should say that album is now compete? I feel an ending.  

I render out a DJ MIX of my tracks and will often have this on repeat when out and about.

It doesn't take long for me to completely forget that I made the tracks and can be objective about them.  I like much of many of them.

I think they all genre MEGACURVE.  And that is fine by me. 

Until 2 years ago I was doing a JUST THINKING comic weekly. Much of those were about living in the time of COVID just after moving back to Japan. I did them for myself.  I put them together in a CBR book for download. I still do one sometimes, but that project is pretty much finished.  I spent about 2 years on them, then I moved onto doing something else. It felt like the thing to do. There was an ending.

So the MUSIC+COMICS combined a comic strip with music into a short video. 

I really liked this Speed in Manga one but it only got 133 views. Most didn't even bother to listen to the music track it seems.

They seemed the thing to do. Have I found what I was looking for doing those? No, not really. 

The views for standard videos are so poor.

Better for Shorts, except most only see the first 2 seconds which is just enough to swipe away.

So all really terrible results if it was all just an attempt to get an audience.

Some work better than others and they were a reason, an excuse, to do a weekly comic AND music, even though, mostly one had nothing to do with the other.

What I found, doing my guitar and synthesizer stuff is that an 8 string doesn't give me anything I didn't already have with a drop tuned 7 string.  I have done tracks that are rock/metal drums and guitars but feel most "at home" with synths, sequenced synth bass with heavy guitars.

Not sure I have anything else musical to say at the moment though. Feel that the last tracks are all variations on the same few chords and melody with different instrumentation. The last two tracks even used spare guitar out takes from the tracks before them. 

Is this an ending?

I have spent much of the last 2 months mostly at home recovering from regular, minor, medical procedures, and have one more to go. Being uncomfortable changes my perspective on things. But that kind of feels like an ending soon too.  Or is that just a change of my mood with Spring being here and the ending of the really cold weather?

Is that just looking for a pattern in random, unconnected things?

Will probably do a bit more reflection on what I have done recently, then set out again on another art project. 

Other Things

ARTEMIS II has done their fly around the moon and are on the way back now. This epitomizes what the world admires about America!

The RIGHT STUFF, not the white house.

Hadn't done anything with my SoundCloud for years. Just put 2 recent tracks at the start of this playlist here: 

I had a work colleague once that was so condescending about non classical music and musicians. We developed a music production system 99% used by rock and pop musicians, and I was a rock guy myself, so his distain was voiced often. 

The company had staff lunch time performances sometimes. The guy could sing, but when he played the violin at one he seemed like a poor beginner. The way he always talked, that just didn't make sense. 

Now 42 years later I saw a post on Social Media that put a different focus on that. His mother had run and taught the music department at a private high school he attended. In his final year he was the "Captain Of Music" (which was the first time I had heard such a term).  Classical music/ opera/ singing/ violin.  I worked with him for 6 years, and he had never mentioned that.  I guess he was always praised about his (one sided) music education at school, even when it hadn't really been appropriate.  

Myself, I wanted to learn guitar when I was in High School but my mother though that was a stupid idea and why would anyone want to do that. I focused on my interest in audio electronics after working out car designer wasn't realistic. Music was non existent for my parents and they didn't even have a record player till just as  I started High School. I bought my first guitar after I left school so started the playing side of things quite late in life... 

The choices you make, or get made for you can have a really big impact.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Online Portfolios and the AI Issue: Website Update

 

So I updated our ArtAndTechnology Website today. I hadn't updated our portfolio pages for a while, as I wondered if I should or not any more. But if the page hasn't been updated for a while I get asked in emails do I still do the illustrations or not.

I decided to do "the last" gallery update with an image with a text overlay explaining the AI issue. The description also contains the same text. The images behind the text are new, but it says the 6 pages of illustrations already here should be enough to see what our stuff looks like.

I feel close to being really retired now. Had only 3 clients since 2024, doing some 11 illustrations, which isn't very much. As I saw previously, that seems the way Illustration has gone globally now due to Google search changes, the focus on advertisement delivery, and generative AI.   

But that is okay. I am happy making my own music and comics. 

In the website update, I also directly linked to some popular Blog posts I've done.

ASTERISM with Support Dr.Capital Kyoto MOJO: 2025/10/10.

Urasawa Naoki Rhythm & Drawing, Yes Theater, Osaka 2025-9-23.
Freak Kitchen & Rikugo LIVE! Club Quattro Osaka 2025-9-16 Behind The Scenes.
The BOTS are Listening.
Mid 2025, and has AI changed it all? And Other Thoughts..
Car Comics: Pen on Ink, Black and White.
SQ Quadraphonic - A Dead Surround Audio Format.... or is it?.
The Naim Audio Game....

 

The views from the last 6 months are:

The ones in red are mostly years old.  Not blockbuster numbers at all, but that is fine. 

I have been paying for the website hosting and url since 2008. I will still be keeping the email addresses we use for some time to come but not so sure about the website itself, and doing freelance illustration.  Google keeps on making up new excuses for why pages that have been indexed for 18 years don't comply any more. Heard the same thing from other site maintainers as well. Google would rather push sponsored content.

Will having a website be of any value in 12 months or 36 months?  We will see and determine what to do then. 

Other Things

IN EAR MONITORS (IEMs) were a custom fitted to the ear set of isolating earbuds for musicians, but I recently discovered that definition has changed in the last few years. 

A zillion Chinese hi-fi wired earbud manufacturers use that term now too with a slightly different meaning. They aren't custom fitted or just for musicians. A more HiFi wired earbud.  I have been using JBL ENDURANCE RUN 2 wired earbuds for a few years when out and about and have learnt, the slightly more expensive IEMs may offer a better sound, in a less durable package.  Things like the USD$50 Linsoul Kiwi Ears Cadenza II.  

And with the surveillance we are now constantly all under, I get nothing but IEM YouTube recommendations and advertisements!  😠

If I am not in a noisy environment, and need to hear what is happening around me out and about, I use my SHOKZ OPENFIT. I do wish they made a wired set though.  All wireless earbuds are disposable in a few short years, with unreplaceable batteries. Having said that, the thin wires of wired earbuds don't last real long with a lot of travel time and being stuffed in bag pockets either.  

The JBL ENDURANCE RUN 2 wired earbuds have proven to be pretty durable, and cheap. The magnets in the earpieces help with storage and less tangled wires too.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

To The Moon, Like it's 1969!

 

The Artemis II mission kind of caught me by surprise. Think all the SPACE X pr, let alone the Orange Felon doings must have stopped it from getting any air around where I am.  

Like it is 1969 in another way too. Back then there was Vietnam...

The music in this is a more ambient version of the last Sewaritei Walk I did.

Other Things

As a kid growing up, I believed the lie, the propaganda,  of our western systems of education and law, that the most appropriate people become our leaders and managers. 

Not true at all, where in reality money and nepotism play the biggest part. 

Not going to go on about current international events though, but back to a 5 month engineering gig I took in the early 2000s. 

It was a city infrastructure project that took us about 2 weeks to realize that the company that had won it was in no way suitable for it.  Everyone on it was a short term contractor. There was no experienced company with a great reputation behind it. Just a single investor with government friends!

But this story isn't about the guy at the top. One of the things I had to do in the gig was reverse engineer the interface on the companies green box used all over the city.  

Why do they need that for their own product?!

Turns out the green box was developed during some previous project many years earlier, and when it finished and they sacked all that developed it, and all the documentation, source code disks, manufacturing information, mechanical design files were boxed up and left for the next project.

Those boxes ended up in the corner of a room that some time later was assigned to a project manager on a later project. Without even looking at what the material was, the new project manager just threw it all out!

The manufacturing information was out at a contracted manufacturer, so that wasn't lost, so they could build more but not update or do anything new with it. 

To me, this is typical of Australia, and the people that become leaders, such as project managers.

The arrogance and ignorance was staggering.

I have no idea who that idiot project manager was, but am sure his confidence lead to him being a company director on the board of a big company. And being just as confident and wrong.

Those that know nothing are the most confident. More so than any one experienced in the field. Their I CAN DO THAT! is from ignorance.  Not knowing enough to know what they don't know. 

There was a NHK early evening story yesterday on a current boom in RADIO CONTROLLED CARS in Japan. The first boom was in the 1970s, and they were very expensive back then. This second boom is guys in their late 60s and 70s who couldn't join the first boom due to that expense, but who are retired and have enough spare money. The cars aren't any where near the cost they were back then, with an entry level car now around 30,000yen.

The 290m Tamiya Kakegawa Circuit was central to the story

 

One guy 67 was into the racing, another 74 was into the building of the cars. You need different interests when you get older. Both indoor and outdoor hobbies are good to have then.

The last complete figure I sculpted in epoxy putty was this character from one of Dave Deal's Phony Car illustrations a few years ago, to go with a few of the Dave Deal car kits I had in storage and finally built and painted. 

Rocky from Project Hail Mary is such a great character. I thought I could sculpt a little Rocky myself, then realized that getting enough reference images wasn't possible. So complicated to get accurate.

Then this morning the film makers posted the STL files for Rocky! This is the parts imported into Blender.

I don't have  a 3D printer, but could use a 3D printing service, or use this as reference for a sculpt in epoxy.  Does seem too much trouble at the moment though...

Did a variation on the Sewaritei Cherry Blossom Walk Yawata Kyoto using portrait video I also recorded as a MUSIC+COMIC YouTube SHORT.

Keep seeing posts from YouTube channels with large followings and lots of views explaining how their views have dramatically dropped recently. But Google has used their bait& switch strategy forever to limit their payouts to a smaller and small number of channels since the beginning.  Nothing "recent" about it at all.

Still surprised Google hasn't killed Blogger yet, what I use here.  I could put a blog on my own website, and may do that in the future.  

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

CREATIVITY v SKILL, Again

 

So I revised this older 1 page comic into a slightly longer 5 page MUSIC+COMIC.

As a short it may get heard by a few more. Or maybe not. It certainly isn't the kind of music or subject in any TOP 5 list you will find.  

It seems most English VBloggers in Japan are now posting their stuff at 7AM Saturday morning, an hour earlier than it was a couple of weeks ago. It must because of Daylight Saving change in the USA which must be their main audience. I tried that scheduled time myself this week, even though I aren't making Weeaboo Japanese content myself.

I am still searching for my best mix of synth/sequencer and heavy guitar riffs. 

I keep on using the same 6 or so drum patterns and never more than 16 tracks, so I think I am just a minimalist. Minimal automation and effects. Just enough to "solve the problem" and no more.   Only one track for rhythm guitar and one for melodic guitar (I would not call it lead guitar, as it isn't flashy enough).

I put this track on Bandcamp and called it CREATIVITY V SKILL.

Other Things

Visited the Clinic (Ohgaki Clinic, Shijo Kyoto if you are interested) yesterday for what I thought would be the last time. I even got reservation #2. Doc said the largest of the internal hemorrhoids he used Band Ligation on is only half gone, and it needs another go. I am still recovering, some 5 weeks now, from the external things he removed and wasn't up for that yesterday. Internal band ligation isn't painful, but it does effect me for a few days, so I will go back in a month or so for that. Have to take the cat across town again for his hair trim in a few days time and need to be in better shape to carry him on public transport there and back.

Not painful now at all, but it kept me up half of last night as it just is not comfortable sometimes, especially at night. So a bit of a downer to be not over it all yet, but still a much better experience than 9 years ago.  

A week since seeing PROJECT HAIL MARY and so much PR across Social Media and YouTube on it now.  A great, positive movie. A masterpiece even. Dolby YouTube channel even has an interview with the soundtrack composer, even if the soundtrack isn't something that struck me as amazing.  

Then there are the YouTube videos explaining it, but that doesn't seem to be for non native English speakers, but for the extremely stupid. No need to mention who they must be! 

Was expecting that with the early Cherry Blossom Blooming across Japan, that my local Sewaritei walk would be on my todo list for today, but no. I saw from the train coming home yesterday from the clinic that the trees had barely started to bloom, 98% still brown.  

So probably something for next weekend. For the last few years doing this 2km walk under the blossoms, with music in my earbuds ( TANGERINE DREAM last year), then getting a KEBAB and other food from the stalls along the river on the walk back to the station has been a great experience for me. 

The location with the music is a magical Visual & Auditory experience.  

A video I made on it last year:

It seems the first weekend of April 2026 will be the days to visit this year too. 

UPDATE 2026/3/29: And I was wrong. The warm weather meant today was the day for the Cherry Blossom walk. Not at full bloom, but with rain from this evening, getting heavier over the next few days (if the forecast is correct), they will probably be all washed away by next week end.

Have seen at least one other Neil deGrasse Tyson video on the same topic. In the other he talks about himself not getting good school grades. I didn't get great school grades either and found it all really dull and stopping me from actually doing more interesting and worthwhile self study of electronics or something. Except in a Geography exam once I did color pencil diagrams as well as words to answer a question and that was used as an example to the whole geography year of a great way to answer a question. I did the most original answer they had ever seen.

But original answers is not what school is about at all. I hated school.

It is so strange to the rest of the world how, to Americans, GOFUND ME has become normal. And this AI summary seems spot on to the rest of us. And that these pleas are now a constant thing on Social Media. Understand the reason, but not that nothing is being fundamentally done to fix that places issues, that go way beyond the felon in chief.  Propaganda around "freedom" has worked a treat to the advantage of the 1%. 

UPDATE: 2026/4/2 This mornings YOMURI SHIMBUN Kansai has a short front page article on Sewaritei Cherry Blossoms were in full bloom yesterday, in the rain.

Artemis II launched with a crew to go around the moon this morning! It caught me off guard that this was a thing. I assume Mulusk's SpaceX BS has taken all the space stuff coverage and something real didn't get to poke its head out.

A bit like all the Japanese prime time TV news coverage of the figure skating and High School Baseball, but nothing on the Japanese GP in Suzuka last weekend.  

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

IN THE NEXT DIMENSION: First 4 pages as Music+Comic

 

First 4 pages of my 2022 comic as a music + comic. The whole 18 pages as a .CBR file downloadable from our free comics page.

Had started an extended version of the Hail Mary music a week or so ago, but with not feeling great, didn't come back to it till yesterday.

And this morning thought to do this first 4 pages with 2 minutes of music to see what it looks like. Of course realizing that doing that Monday morning is when no one will see it.

I then added that DUAL progress bar. RED for MUSIC duration and GREEN for when pages change. Seemed like a good idea. 

This and my other comics are being constantly accessed by AI scrapers in Singapore and China, so it would be nice if a human, or even an alien, took a look too.  

I'm not blocking the scrapers though. Think that is a pointless struggle now and I just give these away anyway as something I wanted to do.

Makes me realize I haven't done a multipage comic since 2022 too.  Found them really interesting to do, but isn't something anyone else bothers to look at as far as I can tell.  

And most people only look at the first 2 seconds of the MUSIC+COMICS on YouTube I have made. 2 seconds. That is immediately determining they don't want to see it.  YouTube is broken in so many ways now.  In the time this got 8 views on YouTube, it got 80 on Facebook REELs. 

Other Things

I see they are announcing Dune PART3. I have no interest in seeing that at all. Still think the REDUX fan edit of David Lynch's DUNE is a better movie.  

Friends are not posting like they did on Social Media, a few have stated they are trying to get away, and stay from it.  Even those that are actually good people can post far too much. A few others are using it to promote interesting things.  Recently I mostly post a music+comic, and maybe something else on my mind once a week, but that isn't what the algorithm wants and my time line is filled with orange garbage.

Like watching the end of Sumo Haru Basho in Osaka yesterday afternoon:

Since I started the medical procedures end of January, our cat hasn't wanted to sit on my lap like he always does. I assume the medicine/ointment and his empathy just makes that not something he wants to do at the moment. Instead if I am lying on the bed, he will lie next to, or across my ankles. The physical connection.   

Kirishima had already won outright the day before. Onosato had pulled out at day 3 of the 14. Aonishiki, who had been unbeatable the last 2 bashos, wasn't this time, and even Hoshoryu beat him for the first time, after loosing the previous 4 attempts. Not much for watching sports, other than some motorsport, but I find Sumo really interesting, even if I can only remember the names of about 8 wrestlers at any given time.  Favorite is Ura, just as he often does the most entertaining moves, even if he only wins about 50% of the time.. 

Seen a few advertisements for EL CLAPO, a hand clap and foot stomping vst.   On special at the moment. Seems to work pretty well, but I don't need to do a version of QUEENS - WE WILL ROCK YOU, and that makes it kind of limited to me. Cool, but kind of a one trick pony... 

To come up with the next thing I want to do, I need to be offline and just think about stuff without distractions.  That is actually the same for anybody...

Of the things I have done recently, I feel STORY SHAPED BEATS means the most to me, despite getting few views:

I was visiting a medical clinic regularly for a couple of months, listening to old and new John Foxx and spending even more time with our cat. Or rather he was spending even more time with me as I didn't go out much during recovery from each small procedure. 

It is 3/4s synthesizers and sequences with a spoken lyric and a late section with heavy guitar. I spent 25years of my tech career developing systems to make music with synthesizers, so it doesn't have to be all guitars. 

It is a complete, non traditionally formatted song that tells a story to me of the time I made it.  Most of what I do, with the MUSIC+COMICS is about some kind of "story", or says something. To me at least.

Most people I follow on social media aren't about songs. They shred a solo or something. Very skilled, but it doesn't "say anything".     

 

But I think about that kind of thing a lot, and reposted this old comic I did this on the subject CREATIVITY V SKILL.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

PROJECT HAIL MARY: And other things

 

Saw PROJECT HAIL MARY first session and really enjoyed it. Lots to think about. I was kind of shocked to be given the PROJECT HAIL MARY patch going into the cinema. Was it because it was the first session. or does everyone get one?

Easily saying "lethal injection with a shot of heroine", was a line that really hit me.  Going out on a high, and being okay with that as an option shows how desperate the situation was. 

But it is such a positive, NOT dystopian film!

I did this piece of music a couple of weeks ago and tried making a music comic with different subjects since then. This is the 3rd version. Previous attempts were Ricky vs BIlly, then MINT LINUX 22.3 CINNAMON, but both were dull...

Other Things

About a week after having the stiches out, and consistently healing,  things started to swell and get painful again Tuesday last week. Wasn't well at all. So went to the clinic and he said a thread that should dissolve seems to have caused and issue, so he took that out from under the skin. Anti infection cream with some tablets, an oozing sore and later that evening and all good again.  

Spent much of the last week playing with the Mint Linux laptop and evaluating what I really want from it.  Thing is I don't really need a laptop at the moment, only if I have to visit Australia in the future sometime, or something like that.

I found Inkscape, THE Linux vector illustration program is very weak compared to my 23 year old CorleDraw12  I used since 2003.  I bought CorelDraw2024 last year, and it is a bit more polished, but doesn't really do anything new that the 2003 version didn't! What I mostly use in the new version  is the presets for saving PNGs directly.

So I spent a few days learning Inkscape and trying to get CorelDraw12 to run under Linux wine. Corel installs and runs, but can't open a template so is useless. Tried all the options found in the Linux forums on the subject.

Eventually installed older VirtualBox, Win10 HOME in it without an internet connection, and put CorelDraw12 in that, and the fonts I use for my comics. Can drag and drop files between the systems and it all works. A Laptop for Internet use and a safe to use Win10 isolated from the Internet for CorelDraw12.

But I also made up a JUST THINKING comic template in Inskscape that easily allows me to make that series of comic natively in Mint Linux to.  Adding topic based images and text balloons works well enough in Inkscape.  

  

I found KRITA on Linux seems good enough that I don't need to install Photoshop in the windows VM too.

I went and installed REAPER DAW, to see how that works too, but using only cockos plugins isn't an option for me, and putting my windows VSTs in via wine is way too much trouble.  I'm not going to be making music in this. What I did do is bring over the stems from a project. Could do "mastering" on it, but don't need to.  So far REAPER works, but doesn't seem it will be useful for music.

Now this Lenovo ideapad520 is from 2018 and I used it daily on my desk here from end 2019 till October 2023 when I upgraded my 4GB 32bit Windows XP machine to 64bit Win10 with 16GB memory. and 2 displays. I hate the fan noise in the laptop and keyboard, and moving to the Desktop meant I didn't hear that any more, and had big screens and a way better keyboard.

But before the PC upgrade in 2023 during summer the Lenovo started to overheat, fan on fastest and the keyboard would stop working.  So I opened it up expecting it would be full of cat hair and have all the vents blocked.  Up until this point, the laptop had never overheated that way. It wasn't filled with dust and hair at all. Some pictures of cleaning out the dust. The machine is very easy to open up.

 

I found that if I turned the performance of the machine down, the overheating stopped, and for non CPU intensive things, didn't slow the machine either.

I now know ideapads and some other slim Lenovo models can overheat with age as the heatsink compound on the CPU wasn't done well, or hasn't lasted. 

I might replace the compound sometime, but at the moment, PowerSav and Balanced in the MINT Linux Power Manager Options handle the issue.  In PowerSav the fan noise is never a problem, even if the machine runs noticeably slower.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

New Life for Lenovo Idea Note 520 Laptop with Mint Linux Cinnamon

 

I bought this 17" IdeaPad 520 i7 16GB RAM Windows 10 128MB SSD 1TB HDD Laptop to be my carry on luggage and computing system for when we landed back in Japan end of 2019.  It was 2018 and my desktop PC was still Windows XP. It takes months for your possessions to arrive when you move to another country, and taking what you really need on the plane with you is our approach. I did a similar thing in 2001 with a Cannon Win95 laptop when we moved Japan to Australia, 

I used the Lenovo for about 2 years before upgrading the old PC to be Windows 10  with 16GB ram and become my main system, The Lenovo has been pretty much left in a laptop carry bag since. Taking it out every so often to keep it up to date with security updates.

Then Windows 11 came along, and the i7 CPU in it wasn't supported. 

This forced obsolescence was all purely a cash grab by Intel/Micro$oft to offset a decade plus of intel idiot CEOs who spent money on stock buy backs rather than less on staying competitive in their market, and also allows Micro$oft to force subscriptions or such Enshittafacation onto customers in the future. 

My big i7 PC suffered the same no road to Windows11 fate, so I bought a Japanese MOUSE PC, spec'ed as I needed it, as my new Windows11 PC late last year. 

Been thinking about what to do about the laptop since Win10 support stopped though, as not connecting it to the Internet made it pretty useless. Finally decided to keep the Laptop usable, I needed to install Mint Linux 22.3 Cinnamon on it. Made a bootable USB memory stick, added a 33GB SDD partition, dual booting, and away we went.

After playing with it for a few hours, and more great application, found that wasn't enough disc space.

So deleted the Windows partition and gave it all to Linux with the Gparted tool.

I had been involved and developed a few things using Debian Linux on Raspberry Pi's in the last years before I retired from the tech world, so I wasn't a complete stranger to low level shell Linux, but this is the first time I have used a GUI with it on a PC.  MINT Linux is so like windows. File drag and drop, file Explorers and usable applications.  Except really fast and light, so far. It will eventually fill up with a gazillion log files, but that is an issue for later.

When I set up my MOUSE PC with Windows 11, I didn't reinstall my very old versions of WORD and EXCEL  and used LibreOFFICE instead. Been using that the last months and have gotten used to them now. They are part of the MINT Linux install too, and so familiar.

Amazed to see LibreDRAW open and display my CorelDraw .cdr files and the Xreader can display my comic .cbr files too.

Discovered today KRITA opens Photoshop files and has all the layer and filter type effects I ever use too. But it was the first to show a problem that must be all over linux, that the open file dialogue doesn't have a way to get to other mounted drives in the system.  The other Applications all have a + to get to away the the drive the application booted from.  

The editor KATE is similar to Notepad++ .

Spent much of last 2 days playing with MINT Linux, and being really impressed.  There is a version of REAPER DAW for linux, but that isn't much good to me without matching linux versions of instruments and other VSTs I use.  

I use CorelDraw and work in CMYK.  I see Inkscape, THE Linux vector app only works in SVG RGB space, and that is very limiting, but okay for making a comic for the web or an animation. So it seems I could run CorelDraw in VirtualBox in Win10, but that isn't my idea of fun.  Years ago I used VirtualBox with various Win XP images for different development environments on a Windows XP Dell laptop and it is was okay.

Having said that, I don't intend to do any graphics or music on it anytime.  I set the Laptop up with Internet tools, web and email, text stuff, to be useable as a computer (rather than just use our smartphone) if I need to visit Australia, for events such as the eventual funerals of parents.  

My big old Win10 PC is currently unplugged from the internet and is just a MOVIE file player attached to the TV, using the KODI media center.  Yet to decide if replacing the Window10 on that with MINT Linux Cinnamon is worth it or not yet. 

I moved to web based email years ago, so accessing that stuff from a laptop, phone or desktop is all the same now.  I made the mistake of using THUNDERBIRD on Windows 7 many years ago and discovered the difficulty of moving that to a new PC, and issues of access from a phone is just not worth it.

Found this video very useful about installing MS Fonts, regular back ups to a Linux partition and setting up TRIM to look after the SSD. 

 

 

Other Things

Two and a half weeks since surgery and improvement seems to be getting slower. Haven't been out much last weeks, but intend to go to the cinema Friday first session.  Sometimes I get a shot of pain more than before, but I may not have been as careful recently.  

Update: 2026/3/18  It seems to be getting worse, and maybe infected, so off to the clinic again. A setback, so maybe will not get to the Cinema this week after all.

Update: 2026/3/19  Seemed I had swelling around one of the threads that was supposed to eventually dissolve. Taking that out, it drained yesterday, and really good today.  

Also the MINT Linux 22.3 Cinnamon issues came to the fore with not being able to install VirtualBox or get something to run properly under wine. Those version incompatibility issues are more prevalent, when moving away from what just comes in the box. Not a deal breaker at all, and MINT Linux 22.3 Cinnamon is actually fun.  Ends up installing an earlier version using the console and resolving conflicts is way to go:

And it works.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Masks | AI Uses

 

Interesting John Foxx (his stage name and performing persona ) interview on Identity, and that he thinks some performers he knew died because they didn’t separate their real self from the their stage performer. They tried to live out their larger than life stage persona all the time. 

Masks allow a performer to be more than themselves too.  

Andreas Katsula loved his G’Kar make up  

J. Michael Straczynski: “Andreas Katsulas loved the G'Kar makeup. He was a big fan of Greek theater (no surprise there) and he said many times he found the mask element to be liberating, rather than imprisoning. Behind the mask, he was truly free. “

There is a saying about Japanese people from a Jesuit Priest from way back when that says they have "three faces" .

1.The First Face (Public Persona): The mask you show to the world

2.The Second Face (Inner Circle): The face you show to close friends, family, and loved ones.

3.The Third Face (The True Self): The face you never show to anyone.

But why would you believe anything a Jesuit Priest said?

Also I think that pretty much applies to me as well, and I am not Japanese. 

Many Social Media users use a mask too, curating their feed. Not being their “warts and all” selves. Like that white American being the X expert on all Japanese Culture, or the like, and being the only thing they ever post on, while wearing a kimono.  

This music+comic uses as a background the tracks music visualization from  MilkDrop3.  Grabbed that using OBS. Formatted using Handbrake.  The comic animation done as usual with MOHO, but with a green background.

That was then chroma keyed over the visualization using my video editor MOVIE STUDIO. 

Image of composite layers:

Music Ion Storm can be found on Bandcamp

Other Things

A week since had stitches out and getting better faster now.  But Doc did indicate over 4~6 weeks to get back to "normal". Was out to local supermarket yesterday and walking with a shorter stride is more comfortable at the moment.

Rick Beato did a video on using AI locally using LM STUDIO and QWEN3.5.  His video is about  private, secure local use is better than using an on-line subscription service. Such services probably don’t have much of a future, in the same way Recording Studios didn't.  

The latest version he used wouldn’t install on my 32GB i7 Win11 machine ( some funny business by Microsoft I wonder?),  but I did find an older version and MODEL Qwen2.5 that did install and run.  Not the latest and greatest, but that doesn't matter without an idea of what I would use it for.  It is chat/text based and isn't the kind of thing I had bothered to look at at all previously even though it has been in the news for what seems like ages now. I have never bothered to touch ChatGPT either. Being "retired" being the main reason though I expect.

So I asked Qwen2.5 what it can help me with: 

So could it come up with better rhymes than I currently have in my track STORY SHAPED BEATS? 

It can.  

THAT is interesting.

I don't want to use what it suggested here, but will see what it comes up to improved what I do with spoken words and lyrics next time.

An interesting new application to me. I can't live without a spell checker, and a tool that comes up with alternate rhymes sounds useful to me, as an assistant or something to bounce ideas off.  It isn't the kind of function in any word processor I know of, like WORD or Scrivener.  

I later loaded the larger 8GB MODEL and enabled the OPEN CL for the PCs AMD graphic card:

Haven't done enough to know if this is better and faster or not. Just dipping a toe into the waters here. It remind me of sitting at a 300 baud terminal, as the text comes out at about that speed. And you wait a bit as it thinks about the request.

Of course you can just type this into Google AI and get results, and instantly, but that is feeding the art stealing machine that the AI industry is with your new work. (Yes the model being used stole lots of work before it was bottled too, but that isn't about to be undone from what I can see). Googles AI lets you upload a file, like an image, and get it to do something with it. So far the local system doesn't support that.

Most uses of AI are really bad for society, programmers and artists.  But I was interested to see that artist Takashi Murakami used AI to come up with variations to his own lion line art.  I have nothing against that use at all. 

This week I updated a large vector cartoon vehicle illustration that had 2 pets in it, as a minor but important part of the illustration.

The customer had sent me pet photos and one of them a cartoon done in AI they liked.  So trying AI is what I did too. GEMINI AI in this case.  But first I reduced the number of colors in the reference photo and made the background white. Uploaded it to GEMINI AI asking for a cartoon, and it gave me a PNG file. I then loaded that into COREL TRACE and it made a VECTOR image out of it, after optimizing the conversion settings. That produces a RGB vector file, so convert that all to CMYK with global color model search and replace in CorelDraw.

The AI made a few mistakes though, so I edited the resulting CMYK CorelDraw images, added more high lights, teeth, fixes to color and changed some of the colors to make the pets more visible in the final illustration.

I think this was worthwhile for a small part of the illustration, where the customer can complain about likeness etc. in this case.  

 

I did this with the help of AI last year to generate 3 different JOKER DANCING ON THE STEPS images. I had to edit the images quite a bit to have the same hands on each one, and I think I changed a head too. But for a quick throw away music animation it did cut down the effort required to do it a lot.

I read that many companies have laid off 1,000s of programmers and replaced them with AI.  Having been involved with a few large software projects, and that AI lies a lot, I expect that will not go well for the companies!

I had been using the cheap Microsoft mouse from my Laptop bag with the Win 11 MOUSE PC till today. Replaced it with a Logitech G203 gaming mouse and this is so much better. It doesn't flex and creak like the cheap one did. I turned off the lighting, set DPI to 180, Mouse speed to 10 and disabled the DPI change switch.

Not sure what to do with the extra assignable buttons yet, but I have no rush to do that.

Our Lenovo Laptop has been unused in its bag for the last 2 years since getting back up and running with desktops after the move to Japan. Only used it to write music files to a SD CARD for my wife end of 2025.  It is stuck with Windows 10, and doesn't support Win11. Thinking making it dual bootable between Mint Linux Cinnamon and Win 10 the thing to do. Win10 for offline and Linux for Internet access, when a phone doesn't do. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

2 Weeks Down | Music YouTubers

So last surgery was 2 weeks ago tomorrow and not back to normal, but much better, mostly. Good to be on the mend.  I may start going out for coffee at a cafe later this week, again.  

There haven't been any nearby exhibitions announced this year so far that interest me. Kind of glad for that at the moment as I recover.  Last year thought the Osaka Expo had sucked all the air out of rival exhibitions for the first half of the year, but things sure picked up later. 

Expect the same this year, and that the GHOST IN THE SHELL: ANIMATION FILM exhibit will come nearby in a few months time.  

Wife and sister-in-law went to the cinema yesterday (saw RENTAL FAMILY) and brought back these coming film adverts.

I expect to go to PROJECT HAIL MARY opening session next week.  The Mandalorian ,edited to a film version, in May would be good too, as I don't have Disney+ and haven't seen it.

Music Youtubers. Did a draft  music+comic a couple of days ago featuring these two.

I had done a colored rough pencil sketch of Rick a couple of years ago and did a similar one of Billy on Saturday. The Rick one is a bit caricatured, Billy isn't.

That  music+comic  seems too simple at the moment, and doesn't say enough, in an interesting enough way. I wouldn't release it for a couple of weeks yet, so I may come up with something completely different by then. 

It was music that came first built around a sequenced bass part.  Guitars come in briefly in the center. Just love the sound. I am using the Hans Zimmer Zebra and many of his presets, and that is significant as to why synthesizer first recently. Sounds amazing. 

It was Rick's What Makes This Song Great? episodes  with the songs STEMS, so he could play individual parts and talk about them was what made me notice him. He hasn't done that for years now though and is mostly interviewing his music industry heroes.   

Billy is all about interviewing Creatives, many who are musicians but also actors.  Some who probably aren't even on Rick's radar. 

But there are many other Music YouTubers. Most shilling some product or another, like Ola with his guitars.  I guess I have more time for Glenn Fricker than most of the others.  He talks about interesting things, often, and is 100% right about Gearspace (formerly GEAR SLUTS ) that is full with people just think some piece of gear is the important thing (and big opinions). 

Speaking of Hans Zimmer. Mattias Eklundh posted he attended the current Hans Zimmer concert, helped by his friend Guthrie Gotham, who performs in it, and was amazed by it all.  I previously posted on the HANS ZIMMER: HOLLYWOOD REBEL documentary and how that was really inspiring to me. But when I saw the Japanese Zimmer Concert ticket prices I couldn't justify the ¥36,000+ price for a seat without a blocked view. Or the ¥50,000 VIP tickets. So I didn't go.

But the documentary is something I watch every so often, especially the bits on his approach.  Really simple themes, lots of 5ths, not chords, that repeat, adding another layer of complexity as they do. All being not at all what you learn in Music School.  

Back updating a complicated 6 year old vector design last few days. The only other thing I did last year was from a previous customer from years before too.

I think it is just another indication how broken Google is with their Search and AI now. The good Internet is gone. 

Saw something that mentioned how blogging is just so dead now yesterday. I had thought so myself until a year or so ago when I started posting here again.  Seems some, maybe just bots, access this, but it is really for myself, as I can't stick pictures and videos in my paper diary.  I just wonder exactly when Google will finally kill it,

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Appleseed(S) | Recovery

 

MUSIC+COMIC on another artist picking up the APPLESEED world and characters with 3 volumes of manga many years later in 2011.

The music used in this is in the Assorted Bits3 album on Bandcamp.

I had bought the English GHOST IN THE SHELL manga around 1995 and was amazed. All the tech foot notes! I had watched the Japanese language ANIME many times before that, but I could never catch all that was being said. Didn't matter a whole lot.  

It wasn't till we moved back to Sydney in 2002, and I had a 6 month contract working at Town Hall and discovered the 4 volume APPLESEED manga at the nearby KINOKUNIYA BOOKSTORE, that I found out about APPLESEED.  I had seen the main characters, especially the Cyborg with the bunny ears antenna earlier but hadn't made the connection. 

The 3D animated films look great, but aren't. The second is particularly dull. Even if the action directed by John Woo. 

Other Things

A week and a half since surgery today and the wound isn’t weeping any more. Had the stitches out yesterday, and that is so much better.  They hurt coming out though!  A relief, even if not 100% yet. Didn't sleep well last night though. Even though the area wasn't painful, there was enough discomfort.

Had hoped to be back to normal after 7 days, but that didn’t happen.  Still had a weeping wound, probably from the ointment applied daily. Not painful, but sensitive, and when you moved and walked, the stitches could pull.  Made a small improvement daily though.  Great to not have to schedule going back to the clinic and can now get onto other things.  

Such a better experience than 9 years ago, as FB reminds me today, that was going to last 4 months and really take a year to get over.

Sometimes I set out to make a piece of music and think “this will be VERY METAL”, and end up finding a cool synth patch in the Zebra VST synthesizer that takes me somewhere else.  I may even start with a series of heavily distorted Guitar riffs, that would be metal on their own, but when I add pop-ish elements the result isn’t.  At least I don't think so.

I enjoy making the music I do, but you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it. It is all simple and unsophisticated riff and sequence pattern based stuff, but that is fine.  I aren’t a “composer” and make my stuff by improvising a bunch of things, then editing them together, that then suggests something else that I overdub on top.  All made in my REAPER Digital Audio Workstation, which is like a word processor for sound and music. Never had any interest of being a performing musician or be in a band, just creating music and sound in a studio alone. It is just like drawing and painting to me which are both solo activities. My early technical career was about designing and building such studio music production systems.

I see other people I know repairing and renovating old music electronics or synthesizers. Some I designed a long time ago! That is something I was "good at", but have NO INTEREST in doing now in retirement! That was a job! Even if it didn’t start that way for me.  I am not that person now.  

Hay Fever is really bad around here now. Eyes stinging and nose running. Every morning have blood caked inside my nose. Even the cat is sneezing. And the amazing thing is, the troublesome trees where planted by the Japanese government decades ago.  They just didn't select a tree without a nasty side effect. 

Visited HANDS (used to be Tokyu Hands) just around the corner from the clinic in Kyoto Shijo yesterday for the first time after my visit to the clinic. 4F is my stop with stationary and art supplies.  Found and bought 2 A5 20 page clear files I use for printing my manga that aren't available any more at my usual ARC OASIS. 

Project Hail Mary hits the local TOHO cinema here Friday morning March 20th. This is the one with Ryan Gosling, to separate it from another movie of the same name, with same plot. Stop the sun expanding and save earth. I expect to be there opening session.

YouTubes current AI algorithm is showing me 80% garbage.  Facebook is 95% sponsored or sponsored Orange pile of Shit  content I have no interest in. A friend recently just gave up on Facebook. X is only saved by the Japanese content, which isn't manipulated the way the English is.  Haven't found any need to visit Bluesky often, and have stopped visiting MASTODON completely. 

Things change...

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