Useful trick that saved me hours of render, but if an application is stuck minimized and won't come back up, hover your mouse over it on the taskbar and right-click the preview to restore.

Oceans by Marcus Warner (@MWarnerMusic)

Lady of the Light by Bosa (@JonBabbLiberty)

It's not just similar but actually the same theme with just one note missing.
https://youtu.be/AoJ7iG4Mrd4

A man is working late in a museum with a white mask propped up on a table.  He notices the mask has very human-looking eyes, and when he gets closer to look, they suddenly move to look at him.  He quickly realizes this is a person wearing the mask behind the table, but when he shoves the table away, there is no one there, just the mask floating and staring back at him.  It starts to move, and when it turns, it goes invisible as if there is no back side to the face.

------

Another one that was a dream for me.

The following reads help give a full picture on the situation with Ukraine / Russia, since the media is omitting a lot of information and context.  
- https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion
- https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-russia-vladimir-putin-soviet-union-4619a72d1597673e4112b673a9f6fd9c
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/19/putin-russia-ukraine-nato-george-robertson/

In short, NATO expanded from 15 countries to 30 in the past 20 years, and now there is Ukraine trying to join, which is right next to Russia.  When a new country joins NATO, the US tends to put its missiles there in the name of defense and common good.  Basically the last 20 years has been slow-creep of getting and closer to Russia and now we're trying to add a country right next to them.  So in this context, it makes a lot more sense how things got here and why Russia wants NATO to commit to not putting more missiles or adding more countries....[More]

This is really infuriating and @FCC or @FTC really needs to look at this. I just bought a new phone because supposedly my old phone no longer works on AT&T after the 3G sunset (despite being a 4G phone), but shortly after activating a new sim card on the new phone, I simply moved the new sim card to my old phone and it worked fine like before - 4G and everything.  What made it worse was right before I bought the phone, customer support insisted the old sim card was still activated and that my phone simply was not up to spec, which was clearly a lie.  They had disabled the old sim card and just needed to turn it back on or give me a new one, which they didn't do until I bought a new phone.  If you do too many switches as a result of this trick, your data may stop working due to a block by AT&T and you'll have to dial 611 to ask them to remove the block on your data service - again something they want you to think is your phone's problem when they literally...[More]

     This is something I'm just throwing out there not for creators but more actually for fans to know how to best support their favorite artists.  It's counter-intuitive, but YouTube does not actually pay much, even if the following or view count is largest there.  This is why many creators have links to stores, merch, Patreon, and other platforms.  The ones that manage to make enough from YouTube directly to live on have to upload several videos a week, which is not feasible for animators or composers that take weeks or months just to finish one video.  Just for perspective, some of these animators/musicians I'm referring to have 10M+ views on multiple videos, but they still make almost nothing from YouTube.  For them, YouTube is more just a beacon to get followers but not actually make money - so if you do follow an artist that has links to other platforms, please do make sure to check those out.

     For musicians I know,...[More]

If you have G-suite for @Gmail and are getting repeat spam with the exact same phrases, you can make a filter to hard reject them by using compliance rules in the Google Admin panel.
1) Go to Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Gmail > Compliance
2) Add a rule under Content Compliance.
3) Check "Inbound" and "Internal - Receiving"
4) Set to "If ALL of the following match.." Add an expression to match and use advanced content match.  You can add multiple conditions to make sure it only affects spam messages.  I use the following as an example (this guy has been using the exact same name and message for repeat daily spam for years):
- Sender Header...[More]

Very interesting article on some people who see with a fourth color cone.  It's extra fuel for my God's Flashlight stuff about worlds in other light spectrums that may invisible to us (or us to them).

See: The Woman Who Can See 100 Million Colours

Extra cool is that I was very close in God's Flashlight on the notion that manmade lights in cities are unbearable to those in these other spectrums.  It makes me wonder if all the artificial light we're exposed to is slowly trimming away the extras in what we can see that we might not notice over time.  I did a bit more research and did find hints of that from an older article, specifically mentioning that we've painted our modern world so much in colors we are used to seeing that it may be that people who can see more don't even know it from lack of use.  

It took 20+...[More]

Reminds me of working on Koto Breaker and @WaterflameMusic being unable to stop trying to make the song happy and chill lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEylM0mJtlg
(or the quiet part out loud - old vs new Waterflame music bahaha )

I've been getting spam calls from different 916 area code numbers almost everyday.  It's the same robo-call message but a different 916 number every time, so my call blacklist just keeps growing.

Any ideas welcome. (and yeah, I got another call while typing this lol)

The call always opens with: "Hello? Hello, this is James..."

Below are...[More]

思い出かけら by @SweetDoveMusic and @AKAraxy

Opening credits with the beeping sound of someone on life support in a hospital.  Once the beeping stops and flatlines, there's a power shut-off sound, and things go dark one by one except the body on the bed, leaving a spotlight in the dark.  Everything is silent.  A glowing, formless, non-humanoid spirit rises from the body, and the body disappears into the darkness.  There's a moment of peace while the spirit looks at itself and its surroundings, like a child discovering the world for the first time.  There are faint specs of light in the darkness, like stars, as if having risen to the heavens.  It looks like a stylistic choice to only show the character in darkness, but we later realize it's not.

Suddenly, bright-white eyes appear one after another in the dark surrounding the spirit.   A green, grainy overlay appears over the scene, and a booming voice announces, "There it is.  Capture it."

Cut back to...[More]

短い未来を見たい by @SweetDoveMusic

Exile by @Shirobon

Stellar by @Lockyn

Edit: Easiest way is to just buy the TP-Link AX1500 Router or similar.  It's just a checkbox to turn it into an OpenVPN server.

Below is how to turn a Windows server into your own VPN using OpenVPN.  I pretty much spent the entire day piecing all this together.  The OpenVPN documentation is very out of date, so the steps on their site do not work for Windows - for example, the init-config command in their docs is not recognized.  Sadly, the devs/mods seem more interested in dismissing their users than actually fixing or providing help (ie here and here).

The steps I have in this post are sourced from the below links:
- Download...[More]

I write more detail on this issue in the Adobe forums here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/44629812-after-effects-2021-2022-export-slower-than-cs5-wit

Long-story short, it seems that something broke in the PSD layer importing process between CS5 and CC 2021/2022, as the same project file in CS5 only takes about 10 min to render but over an hour in the latest CC versions.  In the test project I have below, the slowness persists even though all the layers are empty.  Only way to fix it seems to be to delete the Photoshop layers, so that's why it appears to be Photoshop-related for now.

Test project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NW8cPQRbl3yMt9qCU0gLOodqYA_ZW3AR/view?usp=sharing

I admit I...[More]

Lately Gmail keeps asking me to change my password because it thinks my login patterns are suspicious.  I've probably changed my password 10 times now, and the worst part is I can't re-use old ones, making it harder to remember my login. 

The workaround it seems is to actually ignore the change password request if you get it and clear cookies in your browser based on the support thread here:
https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/73279572/my-gmail-account-kept-asking-me-to-change-my-password-every-time?hl=en