Getting started

It’s time I started to learn my limitations. Trying to do everything at once is not cutting the mustard. But if I am going to get to the 1st of April 2026 with absolutely nothing to show for my endeavours this is going to be a miserable failure. And I have a lot of limitations. But I do have a lot skills as well. Not particularly well developed ones but I have interests and abilities which I am sure could be vastly improved over the space of a few years. 

One of my big problems is my inability to focus on one thing for more than a short amount of time. My book shelves are littered with half read books, Udemy with half completed courses, instruments half learnt and then gathering dust. That is a big issue. 

Something I started to do a short while ago is try and get rid of stuff. This has two advantages. It removes clutter and boy, do I have a lot of stuff cluttering my life up! The more stuff I have, the more distracted I am. The other advantage is i can sell a lot of this clutter and raise some much needed cash. So there’s a new project for me. SELL THE CLUTTER. 

So having removed my clutter I want to focus on the following items:

• Programming
• Game Design and Development
• Music
• Writing
• Philosophy

So my two year project will encompass all four of these items. Maybe they will give me some focus and help alleviate my current mental health issues, something that everyone on this planet seems to be suffering from now to some extent or another. What connects the items in the following picture?

This is a Teenage Engineer OP-1 field, a Monome Norns and a Playdate. The Playdate and the OP-1 field are linked to the fact That Teenage Engineering did the design of both. The Playdate and the Monome Norns are linked because they can both be programmed in Lua. The Norns is a music computer (in reality it’s a Raspberry Pi hooked up to much goodness.

The above also displays the messiness of my desk. To my left is much desk space with music stuff on, which I rarely use. I have Ableton and I’ve had it for years and never learnt to use it beyond noodling around like an idiot. I have a Push II, a very nice controller for Ableton which I can use but once again, I’m just noodling. The reality is the only instrument I can really play are the drums and although I know a little theory and can play a guitar with some basic commands, I just noodle.

So get rid of Ableton. Don’t turn it on and start noodling. Get rid of it. And learn to make music with code on the Norns. Which involves learning Lua, a language that doesn’t make me very excited but it’s good to learn because

• It is similar to Python in many ways which I know very well
• It’s what you program the Norns with
• It’s what you program the Playdate with

So that’s where we are going.