Category: Art
My Creative Bucket List
I came up with a couple things that I want to do before I die - things I want to do before I “kick the bucket”, so to speak. I want to go to a lot of places and experience a lot of things, but these are some of the creative things on my bucket list.
In no particular order:
- Write, sing and do production for my own R&B album. I’ve been taking a lot of inspiration from The Weeknd‘s “House of Balloons” mixtape. It’s simple, brilliant, and it seems like something similar to that could possibly within my reach to accomplish. My stage name, if/when I do this: Pistil.
- Give this website, lukemcreynolds.com, a makeover. I just realized it’s had the same design since 2008. :-/
- Write a science fiction novel about alien Christian missionaries. The concept sounds silly, but if it’s properly executed, the novel won’t be. I just had this idea about half an hour ago, so it’s still in its infancy, but I think it has a lot of promise. Basic premise: several hundred (thousand?) years in the future, humans make contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. Many of the extraterrestrials believe in a Messiah, similar to the Christian messiah, Jesus Christ. I would likely be taking a lot of inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy series, and from Madeline L’Engle’s books.
That’s the idea anyway. Or at least, three of them. We’ll see which ones I accomplish. :-)
Posted on Jul 30, 2011 - 08:49 PM
MiracleBlue, New Trance Artist/Producer from Australia
I’ve been talking with MiracleBlue, a.k.a. Nicholas Kircher, for some time now. We both love electronic music, reddit and travel, and our personalities are similar enough that we get along quite well together.
Anyway, it turns out that this guy is a very, very good trance producer. He’s a 23 year old from Canberra, Australia, and while I’m not normally a trance fan, he makes some slick, exhilarating and deep music.
Check some of his stuff out below. When I listen to it, even though I don’t really seek out trance music, I forget that this random Australian kid makes this music, and just assume it’s some 20 year veteran of the European club circuit who’s making it.
Distant Signals (Original Mix) by MiracleBlue
Into The Sun (NEW and IMPROVED mix!) by MiracleBlue
MiracleBlue has an EP out on Omerta Records out of Vancouver, but they’re really not promoting it the way they should. You can buy his EP on iTunes (MiracleBlue - Into the Future) or Beatport (MiracleBlue - Into the Future), or you can like MiracleBlue on Facebook right here.
Posted on Feb 15, 2011 - 12:13 AM
Two Farrar Wilson Paintings
I love these. Thanks to Andrew Patterson-Tutschka for the hookup and the gorgeous photographs, and although I haven’t met them yet, Farrar Wilson for creating these and his partner Judy for her support given to the artist.
Neither of these have titles, at least that I’m aware of. The grey, white and black one is hanging above my desk now, and the collage/oil one will go in our bedroom once we have it framed.
Thanks again to Andrew and Farrar.
Posted on Jan 27, 2011 - 09:52 PM
Dubstep Artist Popularity Based on DMCA YouTube Takedown Notices
I created and continue to run dubstepp.com, a music (YouTube video) aggregator for dubstep and reddit’s /r/dubstep community. It and /r/dubstep have been fairly successful - dubstepp.com is currently keeping track of more than 2,000 songs submitted to reddit by /r/dubstep members.
Anyway, I need to go through the submitted tracks and remove dead links every once in a while. The vast majority of those dead links are caused by YouTube taking a link down due to a DMCA request done by a record label or artist. I’ve kept track of those dead links, and made a list and tag cloud-style graphic of the words which pop up most often in removed links.
(Click to view larger. I used wordle.net to make this).
Based on the idea that more DMCA takedowns = greater popularity and greater record label support, we can see that the most popular/best-supported dubstep artists are Rusko, Borgore, Burial, Datsik, Flux Pavilion, and Benga.
You can check the data out for yourself: download deadstep.ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) or deadstep.csv (comma separated values file) for the source data. In the tag cloud I created above, I exluded the words “dubstep” and “remix” from the cloud, as they weren’t artist names and they were the two most-mentioned words in the data.
Posted on Sep 15, 2010 - 12:53 AM
Desktop Wallpaper - 100+ images!
I’ve been collecting cool-looking desktop backgrounds for a long time, and I’ve just decided to put them online to share with everyone. You can check them out at http://lukemcreynolds.com/wallpaper/.
Let me know what you think, or if you know the source for one of the images I wasn’t able to find a source for.
Posted on Apr 20, 2010 - 12:47 AM
Song from a friend - Nicholas Kelsay sings “Saturday Morning”
Here's a song from a friend of mine. I've posted his stuff before, but I particularly like this new track of his. It's called "Saturday Morning." Download it in high quality here: Nicholas Kelsay - Saturday MorningPosted on Jan 12, 2010 - 06:55 PM
Creative Commons Quercus Lobata/Valley Oak Leaf Scans
I’m doing a website project for my grandfather, Robert Edminster - once I finish it, I’ll be sure to mention it here. To make a long story short, the design involved an oak leaf motif. So, I went outside, picked a small branch from the Valley Oak outside, and scanned them three of the oak leaves that were in the best shape. I’m releasing the original source image as well as a couple of edited/cleaned-up versions of the original image.
I believe these are leaves from a Valley Oak, Quercus lobata, but I could be wrong.
You can download all of the derivations I made of the original scanned image, including the original image and a transparent PNG GIMP .xcf file, here, in a .zip file: oak leaves zip. As well, here are the individual files:
And a single oak leaf, GIMP .xcf source.
Feel free to use these for any project, commercial or non-commercial, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. All I ask is that you send me an e-mail letting me know if you do so.
Posted on Sep 24, 2009 - 11:07 PM
