It’s been a while since I shared anything personal on this blog. Dating apps don’t count.

About three months ago, I got myself a Traktor S3 DJ controller. At first, I wasn’t really into DJing, but a friend of mine thought I was kinda talented (and I am, apparently 🤷), so he kept trying to convince me to buy a controller and learn how to DJ. DJing is actually pretty easy. Maybe it’s all those years I spent as a producer that gave me the talent or whatever. It’s fun, and it works.

So I threw an open-house party at the office where I had been working for two years. And yes, I mean the actual office where everybody works every day. I invited around ten friends, plus a bunch of people from the company. At its peak, there were about 35 people in the room. I’m still in shock that my boss actually agreed to it.

35 is a funny number. If I released a song and only 35 people listened to it, I’d probably feel pretty depressed. But having 35 people in the same room feels completely different.

And they don’t even have to pay attention to you. They can scroll on their phones, talk to each other, eat and drink, or jump around to the music.

I did mess up once or twice that night. I hit the play button on the deck that was already playing, and it took me about a second to get the track back. Later, going from Lights Go Out into Levels, I brought the next one in a bar too early. Nobody booed. I only remember it because I was the one standing behind the controller.

And speaking of jobs, I changed mine again. I’m no longer at Flowith. I now work fully remotely, and you guys may think that’s a good thing. I’m not so sure.

you can work anytime, anywhere.

But for the most part, it’s pretty chill. I have more time to myself and more time to see people.

I started using dating apps again.

I know. I wrote one whole post, then another one, about how much dating apps suck. The last one literally ended with “Uninstalled.”

Well, reinstalled.

I still hate how every date feels like a business meeting. But now that I work fully remote, I’ve got more time to meet someone new, so yeah...

I’ve also picked up cooking, and the cooking part itself is not that hard. Heating the oil first made a huge difference. I used to just throw everything into cold oil, and the ingredients lost way too much water, so it always came out watery and tasted like nothing. Now I wait until the oil is actually hot and cook fast on high heat, and it’s so much better. The downside is that I get burned every single time, no exceptions, and I have to wipe the whole stove down right after, because if I leave it there, the oil turns into that sticky brown layer that takes forever to get off.

After doing this for a while, I stopped thinking of cooking and doing the dishes as two separate jobs. By the time I’m done with the oil jumping at my hands and all the prep, the stove is covered in grease and the bowls are piling up in the sink. And then there’s the secondary contamination, where a bowl wasn’t even that dirty until the water pushed grease from everything else onto it.

I think I’d already changed my mind about cameras by the time I went to Qingdao. I brought one with me, but I didn’t really want to, and I no longer feel like a camera has to come on every trip. A phone is a perfectly good camera, and I’ve taken a lot of photos with mine. The only thing I really hate is how aggressively Apple’s engineers sharpen everything. But with a little editing, they’re not bad. Tim from MediaStorm has said something along the same lines: getting the shot matters more than getting the perfect shot.