Shaking It Off

Up until two hours ago I was in a really bad mood. I made the script and narration for the Patternflow intro video. I especially wanted a mechanical, fun sound, so I ran a TTS from Google AI Studio through a vocoder in Ableton. At lunch it was so much fun. Change a parameter just slightly and the timbre shifts completely, and it was this strange, novel sound I loved. I played with it for three hours. It seemed to have come out really well, so I even showed it off to the person sitting next to me. It felt like all I had left was to go home, shoot a few scenes for the video, and I'd have something great. I got home, played the sound again, and it was awful. Like I couldn't make out a word of it, and I just didn't want to hear it. So I wondered what I'd even done all day. If I'd at least studied sound, maybe, but was it because I didn't want to do that? It was the narration I'd made, and even that was so bad that my mood sank. To make matters worse, a problem came up on the community side too. Too lazy to make a separate one, I've been running the community server as a Discord channel, and someone says they can't sign up for Discord. Looking into it, some countries including Iran can't register for Discord. It wasn't intentional, but it felt like I was shutting people out, and I felt bad and uneasy about it. I thought about how to solve it, and honestly no real alternative comes to mind. Building a whole server of my own, I don't know if it'd even run better than Discord. And it'd take a lot of time and energy to make. On top of this, the anxiety from the recent slowdown in Crowd Supply subscribers and GitHub stars swelled up. It felt like my confidence that I can pull Patternflow off was slowly disappearing. Sound design study is so hard, I don't know if it's really what I want to do, I keep blaming myself for not doing the varied pattern-generation experiments I should be doing, and it's all just bad.

In the middle of the night I just went outside. It was pouring, so no one was around. As I headed for the park the way I always do, the wind and rain were fierce. It was so much fun. When I reached the park, so much water had pooled on the lawn from the rain that it was like arriving at a water park. Kicking through the water in the rain, I felt like I was at a water park. On the way back it suddenly struck me that it'd be more fun with someone. It's nearly eleven at night, but I ring up someone who lives nearby and ask them to come play. Sure enough, they say they're tired and to go play alone. A little disappointed, I drink some water and head back to the park. Went to the same spot and played alone, splashing the same way. My mood had flipped 180 degrees, as if it had never been bad. But then a chill ran down my spine. Physically I must have gotten cold from all the rain. The situation was: splashing in water, in a dark empty park, in the dead of night. So the thing that had been good, seen suddenly from another angle, was terrifying. It felt like there was a ghost watching me from somewhere, and it was so eerie that I fled home. The umbrella's clasp had broken from the wind, so I held it with both hands, moving fast, careful not to fall. I kept turning my head every which way across the empty park, checking whether something was there. Completely cold and tense, and all the more of a thrill for it. It was a novel experience, so I'm getting it into writing fast, before the feeling fades.

Thanks to that, the change of mood definitely took. I'll make Patternflow work out, one way or another. No need to rush, and difficulties and worries like these are bound to come up. I've already solved plenty of them well, and I will going forward, too. Or so I write, as a wish.