When I was younger, and had all the free time in the world, I loved not only to write, but to make music, draw, paint, create worlds and adventures for Dungeons & Dragons, write programs to generate silly sentences, create Hypercard stacks, and make goofy video games. I no longer have that kind of free time. I have so many more responsibilities, and when I do have free time I spend most of it with my wife, doing things we both enjoy. As a result, I have to be a little more judicious with the time that is wholly my own. If I pursued all the creative endeavors I wanted to, I would master none of them, and would finish no major projects. For me, that just wouldn’t work. But I still love all that other stuff, and wish I had time for it, too.
This is a place for me to give some insights into the fun non-writing stuff I enjoy.
Biden Time App
Created by me and my friends Shawn Simmons, Adam Setala, and Nathan Loring, this free app will be a fun way to count down to the 2021 inauguration. Biden Time is a light-hearted countdown calendar that celebrates democracy each day of 2021 leading up until Joseph R. Biden Jr. is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. Starting on January 1st, a new door can be opened each day to reveal a quote artfully illustrated by Adam Setala to remind us of the importance and sanctity of the American political system — without forgetting that it’s okay to laugh at ourselves once in a while, too. A daily notification will help you count down the days. And with each new illustration, a link is included to our Redbubble store, where you can purchase items featuring Adam’s artwork.
Available on Android and iOS. (I did all the development work for the Android app.)
Music
Going much further back, there was music. When I was in high school, I spent well over a thousand hours on my father’s Macintosh SE, using an application called Studio Session to painstakingly write music. It was entered note-by-note on a staff, and at any one point in time it could generate only six sounds — including sustain! If you spent half those on a simple three-note chord, you had only three left for percussion, bass, melody, atmospheric sounds, etc. Oh, and it didn’t support triplets, so I had to emulate those using ten or eleven 32nd notes joined together into a single cluster-note. (If I remember correctly, there were also 64th notes in the mix, to get closer to a true triplet.)
I compiled over 270 minutes of music, and recorded it onto cassette tapes. The original Studio Session files were all lost, due to the corruption of data on floppy disks, but I kept the cassette tapes. My friend Nate later digitized them and cleaned them up.
I called myself Marcus Homegrown. Here’s a sample of what I consider my best work. Written on a home computer in 1988 and 1989, recorded to cassette, digitized, and compressed… I hope you can forgive the sound quality.
These are my five-song foray into jazz, from the collection I called “Under the Lights”. I imagined them being performed by three old second-tier cats named Elder, Doc, and Nash, in unassuming settings.
This is a song from “After the Rin”. I don’t recall the significance of that album title, and the name of the track itself is lost to history, as I didn’t write it on the cassette “liner notes”. It’s now just “Track 12”, and represents what was probably my best effort at something more prog.