My now page as of Apr 12th '26
It's inspired by Derek Sivers'nownownow project, and is meant to capture a point-in-time snapshot of what I was upto at the time. I've written about how I built and maintain ithere.
Listening
Music: Trying Times - James Blake
Reading
Watching
TV: Bait
Movie: My Octopus Teacher
Weeknotes
- Finally committed to my migration from Logic to Ableton a couple of weeks ago. Been smoother than I expected, but still requires me to look up how to do a lot of things. Some of the biggest differences that have stood out for me so far:
- Ableton’s emphasis on Performance-oriented composition - Not a controversial opinion to say Ableton’s Session View is just plain better than Logic’s Live Loops. But I’ve still been surprised by just how much better it is almost across the board (latency, out-of-the-box key mappings with MIDI controllers, etc.). But beyond the UX, the Session View seems to subtly encourage a more playful approach to composition, by putting together a performance of sorts by playing clips and scenes across the session grid. It’s going to take some very intentional practice to be able to meaningfully utilise it. A great by-product: this would also double up as a way to get a nice live looping setup in place. I’m excited!
- Racks (Ableton) vs Channel Strips (Logic) - Logic’s concept of a track boils down to 2 main abstractions, the instrument and the signal chain. The instrument is, well, the instrument generating the input signal, and the signal chain is modelled as a “channel strip” that the signal traverses from top to bottom. Tracks in Ableton are more like placeholders which have the usual track controls, but all the good stuff lies in the concept of the Rack attached to the track. A Rack is a more expansive abstraction and can include both the instrument and the signal chain. Additionally, it can also act as a recursive construct allowing you to place racks within other racks, so on paper, there’s a lot more possible with it.
- No native features in Ableton for idea generation - I used to heavily use Logic’s Session Player (esp. for drums) to get the ball rolling on the bass/percussion section for a new project. If you’re coming into the project with specific ideas, it can help lay out a very simple beat with zero effort, but the best use of it was to generate more complicated beat ideas by playing around with the parameters for the drummer. Ableton has nothing as usable. Until I find a plugin replacement for it, I fully see myself reaching for Logic when I want to generate percussion ideas.
- Decided to read Project Hail Mary before watching the movie this past week. I liked both, but I found them to be spiritually quite dissimilar. This was strange because the entire book felt like a story begging to be adapted into a hard sci-fi procedural, but instead the movie gives you a buddy-adventure in space. The choice of rendering Rocky more as a pet-like companion (as opposed to the alien colleague from the book) made the movie more entertaining, but it came at the cost of a lot of the science exposition and the back-and-forth problem-solving that Grace and Rocky do in the book. The movie also made a hash of Grace’s redemption arc by trying to make Stratt more likeable. Still hits you in the feels though, and I guess that’s what you want at the movies.
- Just coming down from that Monte Carlo final. What’s remarkable is that Sinner beat Alcaraz fairly convincingly without even playing particularly well by his own standards. His serve may never quite be in the serve-bot conversation, but the fact that he needed only 75 deliveries to Alcaraz’s 94 tells you everything about the gulf between them in the service department. Barring his recurring issues in hot conditions, I think the serve ends up being the differentiator between the two over the long run.
- F&B wins from the last few weeks: Cheeseburger at Brine, Vishu Sadhya at Coracle and the Bhaat & Bitters cocktail from the Sienna bar takeover at Dali & Gala.
- I’ve always found it awkward to process sports news that impacts me emotionally. The Salah & Robbo departure announcements hit me harder than I expected. It was especially surprising given the numbness I’ve summoned through all the false dawns this season has served up. I can claim to be intellectually aware of the fake stakes in sports, but that awareness offers surprisingly little protection in moments like these. Enough shared history with some players and they stop being footballers. They become the people your memories happen to be about. Just cannot deal right now. Emotional processing scheduled for May. Executing postponement protocol.