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miraculous-band-nerd · 8 years ago

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92 Truths and a lie! (kidding about that, these are all truth)

rules: Write 92 truths about yourself then tag 25 people (you’re funny.)

I was “tagged” by @crashtacular

LAST… [1] drink: Water [2] phone call: My mother [3] text message: “I’m coming Friday” to my friend [4] song you listened to: Arabesque by Samuel Hazo (I’m a classical music kind of guy!) [5] time you cried: I dunno. I was close to crying a few weeks ago.

HAVE YOU EVER… [6] dated someone twice: Nope. Every single time has been once only. [7] been cheated on: Nope. [8] kissed someone and regretted it: No. As in I have not kissed anyone [9] lost someone special: Um, I haven’t lost anyone super close to death or anything. I’ve had friends come and go, but that’s about it. [10] been depressed: No, fortunately. [11] gotten drunk and thrown up: No, and no.

LIST 3 FAVOURITE COLORS: [12] Red (Scarlet) [13] Dark blue [14] Purple? I don’t really have a third favorite.

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU… [15] made new friends: Yeah, I have. [16] fallen out of love: Um, I think so? I don’t know tbh. My mind is a mass. [17] laughed until you cried: I don’t remember, but it was pretty recent I think. [18] found out someone was talking about you: No, but I’ve found out people were talking about other people, and people have told me that I said things that weren’t true. [19] met someone who changed you: Hell yes. My life kinda took a huge turn when I met this person. [20] found out who your true friends are: I think so? My biggest concern is losing them, and then being disappointed later. I always make an effort to at least talk to or hang out with them. But I think I have found some of my true friends, and I have about 5 or 6 of them [21] kissed someone on your facebook list: Well... no.

GENERAL… [22] how many of your facebook friends do you know in real life: Nearly all of them. [23] do you have any pets: Black Beauty is my cat, but we call her Beauty for short. [24] do you want to change your name: No, but if I did, it would be Riley. [25] what did you do for your last birthday: I went out to the Chromatic Dragon and then watched Rogue One with some awesome people. I appreciate them for that. [26] what time did you wake up: 4:30 AM. [27] what were you doing at midnight last night: Working on pre-calculus. I’m miserable from that. [28] name something you cannot wait for: Summer, so I can actually actively hang out with my good friends and I will have my license by then too. [29] when was the last time you saw your mother: earlier today. [30] what is one thing you wish you could change about your life: I don’t live to please others, but to please myself. [31] what are you listening to right now: Festivo by Vaclav Nelhybel [32] have you ever talked to a person named tom: No. [33] something that is getting on your nerves: People being fake as hell snakes and talking behind my friends’ back. Hell no. [34] most visited website: YouTube and Facebook? [35] elementary: Pretty much everyone hated me and thought I was really annoying. One person threatened me, so that’s fun. [36] high school: It’s been a rollercoaster, but I am also ready to get out. [37] college: Hopefully not too stressful. [38] hair color: Black [39] long or short hair: Short. [40] do you have a crush on someone: I don’t know. I get anxious when thinking or talking about my crushes, so tbd, I guess. [41] what do you like about yourself: I always find a way to get things done. I think of myself as a loyal person who tries hard to make time for people, and I play the clarinet. [42] piercings: No for right now, but my friends said I should get studs in my ears, so idk. [43]blood type: I don’t know. [44] nickname: DJ, Dave (no.), Oreo, Elmo (very special cases) [45] relationship status: Single as hell. [46] zodiac sign: Capricorn. [47] pronouns: He/Him [48] fav tv show: I don’t really watch much TV nowadays. [49] tattoos: Again, no for right now. [50] right or left hand: What kind of question is this?

FIRST… [51] surgery: Tonsils and atinoid removal. Is that a surgery? [52] piercing: Being in the same room as a piccolo tuning. [53] best friend: This kid named Seth from when I still lived in Kansas. I don’t know where he is now, and I’m kinda sad about that. I miss him. [54] sport: LEAGUE OF LEGE-no. Tennis or soccer. [55] vacation: I do not remember. [56] pair of trainers: what

RIGHT NOW… [57] eating: about to eat some sweet potato casserole [58] drinking: Water [59] i’m about to: get some sweet potato casserole and work my life away. [60] listening to: Baba Yetu [61] waiting for: Junior year to be over. [62] want: Assurance of my future that it won’t be fucked over. [63] get married: No plans for it; it isn’t a necessity for me. [64] career: Some geeky, nerdy thing like data science or stats

WHICH IS BETTER… [65] hugs or kisses: I love hugs. I’m also kinda self-conscious, so yeah, hugs. [66] lips or eyes: eyes eyes eyes, omg I love eyes. I think that is one of the first things I notice in a person. [67] shorter or taller: Anything taller than me makes me feel sad, xD. So, shorter. They also seem more approachable. [68] older or younger: Older, yeah. [70] nice arms or nice stomach: Stomach; sometimes people can have TOO NICE of arms and it gets weird. [71] sensitive or loud: Sensitive. [72] hook up or relationship: Relationship, I think. [73] troublemaker or hesitant: I’m a lot of the last one, so the last one.

HAVE YOU EVER… [74] kissed a stranger? No. [75] drank hard liquor? No. [76] lost glasses/contact lenses? Nope! I almost did though. [77] turned someone down: No. I don’t get asked very often. [78] sex on first date? Nope. I’m not attractive. [79] broken someone’s heart? I hope not, no. [80] had your own heart broken? Not yet. [81] been arrested? No. [83] fallen for a friend? More often than you would think, yeah. Although, only one of those times it kinda worked out.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN… [84] yourself? I try to. [85] miracles? Ehh, this is a hard one. Sort of? I’m atheist if that means anything, so not in a religious sense. [86] love at first sight? No. [87] Santa Claus? hahaha......okay. [88] kiss on the first date? I mean, yeah. I don’t think it’s a rule that you should or should not kiss, it could just happen. [89] angels? No.

OTHER… [90] current best friend’s name: I’ll just name them here: Andy, Evan, Tobias, Michael, Sierra, Samantha [91] eye color: Dark Brown [92] favorite movie: Zootopia. Yep.

I’ll tag @mortimer-smith @itsagreatdaytobeacantalope @7chainsaws @heyitscalli @king-kael @mousester @whvtapunk @dandellionprincess

#???#I forgot my own tags rip #I remembered #questions

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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Skyman: Don Miggs Discusses Universal Sonics

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

The mock-documentary Skyman doesn’t tell the usual UFO encounter story. Director Daniel Myrick, who broke on the scene with the groundbreaking horror thriller The Blair Witch Project, does not put this together using found footage. The film examines the aftermath of an alien visitation, and the story is told by a witness and survivor.

Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) was seven years old when he saw the “skyman” in Barstow, a small town in California. The event changed him. He’s spent years obsessively collecting UFO magazines, as well as first-person accounts of other contactees. It made him the neighborhood “character.” Skyman takes place 33 years after the visitation, he is living with his sister, Gina (Nicolette Sweeney), and waiting on a promise the alien made to return on his 40th birthday.

The film was shot in Barstow, where there have been multiple real life reports of UFO sightings. Merryweather also takes the crew to a real UFO festival in McMinnville, Oregon, where the character is met with amused scorn by amateur enthusiasts armed with cellphone cameras.

The soundtrack for Skyman was written by Billy Corgan and Don Miggs. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman is a household name, and occasional appliance. Miggs is a studio veteran. He’s written with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty, and worked with such diverse artists as Boyz II Men, Paul Anka, Tyga, and the Plain White T’s. Miggs spoke with Den of Geek about the film, the universal language of music, and the OZ Paradigm.

DEN OF GEEK: Were you drawn to Skyman because of the subject matter?

DON MIGGS: You know, first and foremost, [I was] told I could do a film with the guy who wrote Blair Witch. Now I’m already interested, right? So you’ve already got me right there. Then a really strange chain of events happened when Dan Myrick approached me to do it. I had just had a crazy incident happen at my L.A. house that involves sort of like the supernatural. Right now, I can’t even believe I just said that because I’m going to tell the story. The person who built our home was Mickey Rooney, who was famous in the ’40s, but ’50s and ’60s, for sure. He was a child star and a long time he was with Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz.

We bought that house. In between us, there was another artist, Rick James, from, “She’s a very kinky girl.” It’s the house that Rick did all that crazy stuff. He’d been arrested at one point because he and his girlfriend locked another girlfriend in a room and tortured her. They were doing things like meth or heroin or something. He was sort of crazy. We bought this house and maybe it was haunted. I don’t know. But when Dan called me about doing the movie, we had just had an incident where a book was off of a bookshelf that couldn’t have fallen where it fell. Someone would’ve had to take it down.

I walked by for a few days. Finally I said to my wife, “Is it down here for a reason.” She’s like, “I was going to ask you the same question.” I pick up the book, this is before I knew about Judy Garland, and it’s The Wizard of Oz. I’m like, “That’s kind of weird.” Someone told me the book was on the ground because Mickey Rooney was with Judy Garland in this house. This is where they stayed.” I’m like, “Wow,” and so I flipped through. I’m looking through Google and I go into a deep search and I see this photo of them in our house where the piano is and it kind of freaks me out.

So as that’s happening, I’m telling this to my friend and my friend says, “I didn’t want to tell you this. I was in the movie room and I heard clinking of glasses in the kitchen. Then they put them down on the counter, and I was like, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” and nobody was there. Then his girlfriend was in the kitchen and turned and looked to the right, and said, “What do you want?” Because she thought that my friend was standing there. The friend, by the way, is the third writer that wrote the music on this, Greg Hanson. Greg wasn’t there, he was in my studio.

So all this stuff happened, and Greg and I are having this conversation about the supernatural and what do we believe in, life on other planets, all this stuff and we’re coming to all these conclusions then Dan calls me and tells me about a movie about a UFO, about an alien. I’m like, “That’s the craziest thing.” A week later, Billy Corgan comes to stay at my house. We know that he’s had some history with UFOs and believes, and I tell him about it, and he’s like, “That’s crazy.” I said, “Does it make you nervous to stay in the house?” He goes, “No, not at all.”

So all that stuff is a long way to say it felt like it was supposed to happen when Dan called and said “Do I want to do the film?” Because it felt like I was sort of on the brink of changing my whole belief system.

You own vintage guitars. I was wondering if the guitars can be haunted, and if you ever caught someone else’s riffs?

Of course, the way I look at everything is energy is out there. We’re all the same age in the end. Right? Because we’re all just energy and it’s all floating. I own Hendrix’s guitar from when he played with the Isley Brothers. One day, his brother Leon came to the house, and wanted me to record him, but it’s not something I wanted to record. But as he was holding the guitar, he said something like, “This guitar is the guitar that Jimi dreamed in before he became … This is when he was James Hendrix, and he was basically playing guitar for the white man and dancing in the back and doing all this stuff, and then it’s the guitar that he emerged as Jimi Hendrix, which is the guy with the Afro and larger than life.”

Whenever I play the guitar, and I play it all the time, I feel that life in there, and I think it’s sort of in everything. People tend to be scared by it, but there’s this root beauty and the whole thing that we’re all connected. That’s kind of what the movie, ultimately, is about for me. When Dan explained it, I didn’t see one piece of it when I started writing music to it. The first thing I wrote was “Are you real Skyman?”

When he was describing to me what it was about, I said to him, “This is not really a story. This to me isn’t even a UFO story. It’s the story of a person trying to connect with his father and his father is no longer around. This is his connection. It’s really a story about how we’re all connected and it’s about family.” If you look at your main character, he’s on this journey and he’s very much alone, but he has his sister and his best friend still show up, they might think he’s a little crazy, but they show up because it’s important to show up. I think it makes the story a little bit more beautiful than “there’s a UFO, let’s go chase it.”

You’re one of the authors of Dad’s Know Best. What do you tell your kids about UFOs?

I tell them that I’ve never seen anything, but the likelihood that we are the only thing out there seems pretty slim to me. Maybe it’s not happening at the same time, maybe it’s because of time and space. The thing I always say to my kids, they’re 11 and nine, is I just say that anything and everything is possible. Your job is to be open enough for it to happen. I don’t believe in God, I feel like there’s something bigger than me out there, but I don’t know if it’s God. I’ve never said that really out loud like that. I don’t know if I can even say I don’t believe in God, but I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong, and I’m looking forward to being wrong. I tell my kids that the fact that we’re here sort of almost demands that there must be someone somewhere else.

What key best captures the abductee experience. Is it A minor? Is it mixolydian?

I love that you would ask that question. It certainly has to be a minor. This is so geeky of me. For me, it would probably be like a minor seven. I literally just wrote a song before I got on. I had a client and we’re doing a record and I just did a Skype with her, and I made sure the whole thing is sort of about, in the end is that it’s going to be alright. It all really stems off of this one minor. It’s a B flat minor seven that comes at the end and just playing that chord leads everything up to a question like, “Is it going to be alright?” But I would say, if you have to say what the best minor chord is, it’s probably E minor and that’s the key of tension for sure. E minor, I’ll say.

Close Encounters taught us music is the universal language. So are different modes more effective at communicating if we were to communicate with another species?

I would think that. I would think that we see things very much in, [hums major scale], right? If I play Indian music, there’s going to be more chromatic notes than there would be in Western music. So yes, for sure, everybody’s going to have a little bit of a dialect when it comes to what’s going to work for them.

I find it interesting actually, when I’m thinking of Close Encounters, “[sings theme], nu, nu, nu.” That resolve, which makes very much sense, it’s very nice for our American ears, but I don’t know that the [sings last two notes of theme],” which is four/five, “Duh, nah, nah, nah, nah,” would be soothing to someone from another planet because I don’t think that “Duh, nah” would be soothing to someone from necessarily another country.

What do you think extraterrestrials would pick up from what’s going on in music right now?

The best thing about music today for me is sonically, it’s amazing. The sounds are really exciting. It’s thinner. It’s more shrill. It would be heard better, probably. If I were an alien, I’m going to say that I think they would pick up that it’s a little more vapid. If we’re talking about popular music and I just dated myself, that’s a dumb thing to say because the ’50s music was as vapid as vapid could be, same chords, same melodies.

You mix some pretty etheric sonics into the theme music. I was wondering what tells you how to capture that? There’s one part that sounds like you caught feedback off of a stick across a snare drum.

You’re right. I hit a drum and then I literally grabbed the feedback from it, and I might’ve supported that with some other instrument in there. Then yeah, and that wound up being a part of the sonic scape for a lot of different parts.

I equate music writing with you’re in a field and some days you’re pulling weeds, and other days you’re picking flowers and the job is to stay in the field and keep picking. That’s what I do all day, every day. With this soundtrack, we had a crazy thing happen where Dan Myrick came into the studio and was like, “Well, what are you going to do?” And this idea just hit me on the piano. I went and hit the three notes, came back to the patrol room, and I just said to my engineer, “I need everything on. I need the drums on. I need guitars, I need everything on.” And literally, I just kept going from thing to thing and adding, and it was like I had nothing to do with it.

No joke. I mean that for most of this record, what was so cool about doing Skyman, I didn’t do it to film, I did it to my idea of who these characters were, and what their stories were, and that’s a difference than with Billy. So Billy stays with me sometimes when I’m in LA, in my house there. So he was there and I said, “Hey, if you want to come out to the studio, I’m working on this thing for the film and I think it might be of interest to you.” He comes into the studio, probably at 10:00 a.m. and my studio is on the property, and I could see him walking up, I said, “Hey,” and I had started a thing. For the next three hours and I might be generous, it may have only been two and a half. We wrote five things. Like we were vomiting. Literally it was coming out of us and no discussion about it. I said, “Here’s one idea.” He goes, “Oh, it might be cool on piano.” So he goes down and starts playing the piano to it, and I’m playing the guitar.

Then there was another one where I’m like, “I have this idea [sings]. You could have that very cinematic. And he goes, “Oh, I think we’d do this.” That two and a half hours became four of the tracks, two of which made the record, then which made the movie, and two others that we have for something else. It all fell out, which is what the whole movie did. Every time I thought I was going to tell it what to do. So I had to listen back through it because I had to put the songs in an order. I could remember being there for all of it, but I couldn’t remember how I came up with some of those sounds because all the drums are real, all the guitars and all the instrumentation is me playing it. Unless it was Billy, he plays an acoustic on two, and piano on another, and I think Greg Hanson plays a guitar in one part of something, the rest is just me.

But I have no idea how it all came out and how the sounds came out like they do. But I’m so damn proud of it. I think it’s a freaking cool record and it takes all these twists and turns, which is why I kind of feel like someone else’s driving.

But you never jammed to visuals?

I think at one point I got a scene that was on my phone, and I think I showed Billy the scene. We were already playing. The visuals were in our head, man. I’m telling you like it was really crazy. First of all, Billy is one of the most gifted, incredible artists of our generation. There’s no doubt. I’m cocky enough to feel like I belong in any room, and I’ve written with some big people. But I knew that the most talented guy I was ever in a room with was Billy Corgan. He’s humble. But also, he’s an encyclopedia, knows exactly what he wants to do, and we had the visuals in our head. When I told him the story that it was really to me about a guy wanting to reconnect with his father, and then we talked about the abduction thing. I don’t think we needed to see anything to know where we were going with it. I don’t know that seeing the movie would have helped, but maybe would have hurt. It’s a weird thing to say.

You said everything was done with instruments. What about that bagpipe, was that sampled?

It’s not a bagpipe. That was me playing a combination of a guitar and a keyboard, and then me altering the sound to turn it into what it sounds like. There’s a couple things like that on there that are really cool. I wrote to the feeling and the nice thing about that is I could stretch these things out. As you listen to some of these tracks, some of them take so many turns and twists that I don’t know that I could have done if the movie was playing in front of me. I might’ve been almost too sympathetic to the character as opposed to sympathetic to what he couldn’t see. I wanted to play it from the point of view sometimes of the alien looking in on the story. So it’s not always the story. It’s sometimes the music is supporting what you don’t see.

I couldn’t have done that if I was just using the visual because that’s not part of the visual. You don’t ever see the alien. So my job was to sort of make the alien come to light. Dan didn’t tell me to do that. It was something instinctually. I felt it had to be done because you don’t ever really get the payoff. This is one of those movies. It’s the last two minutes of it where you go, “Oh. There’s the Blair Witch thing happening.” So I needed to sort of create that for the rest of the movie and didn’t know that I needed to, and then there it is.

There seems to be a lot more piano on Skyman than guitar. What can you say on the piano that you can’t say with those strings?

I had a theme that started when I did, “Are you real?” There’s that little piano thing. I considered the piano a character. I wanted that character to make sure he resonated throughout the piece, meaning throughout the movie. So I couldn’t abandon him almost at any point. He was more vulnerable. So the piano became the real vulnerable side, I guess, of all the characters really, including the alien. Then the guitar was then allowed to be more of the Goliath to Davey, which was the piano.

If you were asked to play a concert for extraterrestrials, would you change up your set list?

I tell you what, I’d be damn proud. Billy actually said to me, “We should play live.” There are two songs that I really wish would have made the movie and kudos to Dan for not putting them in because one of them has Billy singing a little bit, he’s humming, and it’s eerie and beautiful and so great, but it wouldn’t have fit the movie. It would just serve the purpose of being sensational because there’s Billy Corgan singing. But the only change up I would do, is I would do “Time Will Melt Us,” which is the one where he was humming on, and then this other one that we didn’t put in that he and I did for the movie. But I’d play that soundtrack. I love it.

Would you host an alien on the “Miggs and Swig Show?”

Damn. He could live in my house for a while. I’ve had some alien-like people living in that house at different points. So yes.

What would you ask them?

Are they laughing at us? Do we seem comical to them? Do we seem intelligent? I mean, I wonder so many things about what we do as a human race. If there is a God, he’s laughing at us too. And then I’m always a sucker for what’s the secret of life. Are they happy? Does that even come in to it? If you are more enlightened than we are, is happiness even a factor? Do questions like we’re asking right now matter?

MIGGS recorded their first album in 50 hours. Would that be easier now because you’re a studio veteran or harder because you’ve learned so many tricks?

There’s such beauty in being naive. There’s this not knowing. I’m working with three different 16 year old artists and I was working with one today, a girl. Every single option is possible in her mind, and I’ve learned the rules. There’s a song called “Girl” by The Beatles. John Lennon goes from a C to an F to a D major. But you’d think the song is in C, and if it’s in C, it would have to be a D minor. There’s something that’s so beautiful about it because he was so early in his career. But once you know them, it becomes more difficult. So I could certainly make the record.

I said to Dan, doing this movie, “Could I get one more chance to remix it?” And he’s like, “It sounds perfect to me.” I had to let that be. It does, it sounds great. There’s always something you want to tweak, but that’s the beauty of stopping, of moving on, is that if you can let it go, then you can also have a real time stamp for where you were at that as opposed to making everything perfect so it all sounds the same, no matter where you’re at.

You were the last artist to work with Phil Ramone. I just want to know what that was like and what you learned from him?

You want to talk about someone who haunts me in the best way? Phil Ramone worked with Ray Charles. Phil Ramone recorded Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday to JFK. Phil Ramone did Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney’s Ram record. He did Blood on the Tracks with Bob Dylan. He did Paul Simon. I grew up on Long Island. He was such an icon, and he stayed with me for three weeks to do the record. I didn’t know it was going to be the last thing he did. He sings on the last song. I did like a little tribute to him by saying it was a tribute to Billy Joel. I mean, I respected him, but on Long Island Billy Joel was a God.

Phil had 15 Grammy awards, and the hope was that maybe he gets 16. Then after we did the record, he died and then no one was interested in my record until he died. Then everybody wanted to interview me and I declined all of it. I didn’t want to make that sensation, it was a really personal thing. But he was such a wonderful man, and so incredibly otherworldly. He could be falling asleep, he would make his record wait, and he could be falling asleep and look like he’s out, and you would hit a wrong note. He’d go, “It’s a B flat,” under his breath, like he was still listening the whole time. The last five years have worked out incredibly well. I feel like I’m on a really good path, and things just keep getting bigger and better. I feel like Phil really started on that for me.

The post Skyman: Don Miggs Discusses Universal Sonics appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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bossymarmalade · 1 year ago

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Escorts don't normally kiss, do they. I am not like most escorts. I am not like most anybody.

#chromatic geeky #acs versace #the assassination of gianni versace #darren criss #mike farrell #queer culture

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bossymarmalade · 5 months ago

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#the fucking waste of a perfectly good turkoman#it could also be baluch#both of which you could argue are persian#persianate#the mina khani pattern is certainly persianate#so#i’m a little bit like#does lestat even know what kind of rug he is currently rolling a corpse into#does he think turkoman means turkish#(it doesn't)#is this just lestat spewing mindless pretentious twattery#i mean probably#anyway if you get a lot of blood on a wool carpet esp one with a high kpi#you can totally clean that#there’s no need to throw it away unless you’re just trying to impress your new husband with your wealth and worldliness#in which case i guess carry on - @ceeturnalia

Interview with the Vampire After the Phantoms of Your Former Self

The first time is the most unwieldy. Soon you'll be a natural. You'll come to enjoy it, its variations, little surprises.

#chromatic geeky #iwtv #interview with the vampire #cee you sound like one of the queen of the damned vamps

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/im-aurelia-moser-community-lead-at-mozilla-and-this-is-how-i-work/

I'm Aurelia Moser, Community Lead at Mozilla, and This Is How I Work

Aurelia Moser is a developer, teacher, author, and also a bit of a cartographer. She works at the Mozilla Science Lab with researchers to collaborate on open source projects and is also a mentor at Girls Develop It.

The Mozilla Science Lab is a community of coders and scientists who work together to share their data and collaborate in the same open-source spirit you probably associate with Mozilla. Along with her teaching at SVA-DSI and Parsons, Aurelia is one of those people who seems to have ten gigs at once but somehow stays organized with a system of color-coding, text editors, and IRC. Here’s how she works.

Location: Brooklyn, NYC Current Gig: Mozilla Science Lab, Community Lead + Developer, Girl Develop It, Chapter Leader + Teacher, SVA-DSI + Parsons, Visiting Professor One word that best describes how you work: Continuously, cartographically? Current mobile device: iPhone 6 with a cracked screen Current computer: MacBook Air (2015) with the camera covered

First of all, tell me a little about your background and how you got to where you are today. How’d you end up at Mozilla?

My background is pretty colorful, academically and professionally. I went to grad school for art and media conservation, including resuscitating born-digital and new media art projects for persistent display and viewing by library and museum patrons. It was a pretty rad introduction to tech forensics, diagnosing code problems and working backwards to develop emulators and solutions for broken applications, defunct data storage formats, and deprecated APIs.

I worked at some creative tech agencies and then applied to be an Open News Fellow with Mozilla and Ushahidi, an East-African tech company working to build software for crisis mapping at global scale powered by both feature and smart phone data. From there I got really geeky about maps and worked for Carto and some geospatial software startups before circling back to science and applying to work at Mozilla Science Lab, a part of the Mozilla Foundation and broader network that works to support scientists who want to open source their research (open data, open access publishing, open science practice). It feels fun and fulfilling and not totally tertiary to my initial education in science conservation; open science and open source provide some avenues to promote and preserve research findings… giving scientists some agency to share ideas and iterate on them faster, informed by feedback from a broader research community on the web.

What apps, software, or tools can’t you live without?

Sublime Text – Text editor of choice, with a custom color theme that I change every few months.

Mou – Side-by-side markdown preview app, where I take notes and store text docs.

Firefox / Chrome / Safari – All the browsers for testing, sometimes for simultaneously running multiple accounts on the same platform.

Colloquy – App for IRC, which we still use internally at Mozilla, though Slack/Gitter/MatterMost/Adium are pretty popular these days.

Shifit – Love this app for setting up keyboard hotkeys for shifting windows and apps around your screen, useful for anyone who has a small screen and serious economy of space.

LICEcap – Animated GIFs are an entire computational language for me and I use them to illustrate bugs, document pull request functionality, demonstrate programmatic concepts, and capture delightful everyday interactions. This app helps you do that for any screen; no accounting for the weird name of the app but the utility is just ace.

Mail – I don’t like a lot of local mail clients but I use Apple’s Mail (and previously Thunderbird) for PGP encrypting communications.

Alarm on iOS- Probably the thing I really can’t live without: my phone alarm. I set multiple alarms, with lots of tones to scare me into stimulation.

Boomerang – A lovely app for scheduling email communications. I’m an inbox zero hero but I don’t like to impose my strange hours of operation on other people.

I also install a “dark theme” on every application I can, so that I relax my eyes a bit. I don’t really like f.lux, or anything that federates coloring on my screen because it skews a lot of color and design considerations, but I do think that taking a visual break from backlight is good.

What’s your workspace setup like? Coffee shop with laptop and headphones? Home office with a standing desk?

At Mozilla we have the blissful privilege of working remotely, so I work from home a lot. My twee apartment with a small desk in the living room is my typical work habitat. Mozilla also has a tiny co-working space in DUMBO, Brooklyn that I can bike to if I want slightly faster Wi-Fi. Headphones all day/always; I’m on a one pair per month diet, which is probably more a sad indictment of the poor quality of most headphone hardware than it is my over-usage of earbuds.

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?

I tried the Pomodoro planning but sometimes find it adds unnecessary stress to my day. As a modification of that, I usually try to do anything that takes less than two minutes immediately, and I compete with myself in cute ways to try to maximize my productivity during those two-minute sprints. I also keep multiple browsers open, and thematically spread tasks between them, so if I need to focus on a task, I’ll shut down the browser with my email clients loaded to avoid distractions and notifications from email.

What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

I really like Taskwarrior, mostly because I can customize and color code it, and I’m big on color-coding. It’s local to your terminal though, so best for private to-do lists, and the entry is manual so upkeep can be challenging.

GitHub project boards are awesome; I’m neurotic about organizing my issues and tasks in GitHub so I often move my to-do lists to GitHub repos, and have a new repo with a task log for every job I have.

What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What’s your secret?

Buying weird domains, laughing at inappropriate times, whistling and humming at the same time, snorting (corollary to laughing at inappropriate times).

But seriously, I’m obsessively over-organized and really good at color-coding. I group and color my phone apps, the clothes in my closet, my book shelves… there’s something eminently pleasant about ROYGBIV distributions, for me at least. It probably sounds fake, but I have a chromatic memory: I can easily recall things by associative color, the location of things in my apartment, their function and utility… like a useless synesthesia or mnemonic.

What do you listen to while you work? Got a favorite playlist? Maybe talk radio? Or do you prefer silence?

I layer music with Coffitivity, often other people’s playlists on Spotify. I like the strange serendipity of finding people across the world who assemble a music collection that intrigues me, more than the algorithmically generated preference playlist that you can get by training Spotify or Pandora through thumb buttons. If I need to focus, it has to be classical or instrumental; but otherwise I typically lean on shoegaze, twee indie, French and Spanish rock music from the 60s/70s/80s.

I loved Songza for their creative and highly specific playlist themes, Radiooooo for its spacetime tracks, Pandora for casual playlist generation. I only have a few playlists on Spotify; this is probably my favorite of those right now. I have a pretty strong emotional attachment to music, so if I listen to a track while doing a specific thing, that activity imprints on the music and it’s hard for me to listen to that same track casually. For example, pretty much anything on my running playlist is a “safe” track that is impossible for me to listen to without triggering a kind of heart jolt or mild panic attack.

What are you currently reading? Or what’s something you’d recommend?

The Story of Your Life and Others, Cosmicomics, Lab Girl, and The Recompiler (online inclusive tech mag).

How do you recharge? What do you do when you want to forget about work?

When I want to unplug I do yoga, or sometimes ballet classes, or I take a bath. I’m a terrible meditator, though I’ve tried many times. My sleep schedule is laughably erratic so I can’t claim that I recharge much that way, though I am a fierce and violent dreamer; I feel strangely energized by the few lucid dreaming experiences I’ve had.

What’s your sleep routine like? Are you a night owl or early-riser?

I would call myself a “low-level sleeper;” in more euphemistic terms, I might qualify as “more evolved.” I operate on about 5 hours of sleep a night though I really do try for more. I have little routines for sleeping; sometimes they include ASMR YouTube videos, hot tea, night yoga, melatonin gummy bears. I really love getting up before 8am, and will privilege that over almost any late-night activity.

Fill in the blank: I’d love to see _________ answer these same questions.

Penny Lane, Ian Webster, Robby Kraft.

Lots of people interested in open science, new media, and visualization … too many to suggest.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“The time you spend is not your own.”

From Paul Ford’s 10 Timeframes, a really excellent graduation speech where he discusses how, as a creator or developer, you have an obligation to consider the time-suck implied in your applications and designs. You should think about how many hours you waste of another person’s life when they use your creations, because that waste, if sloppily structured, is so toxic to human progress and such a sad debt to build with humanity. The pragmatic programmer is one who respects other people’s time.

I’m really interested in time abstraction and research into how we process and comprehend the passage of time, our most frustrating non-renewable resource. I’ve proposed conference talks on timezones and have lost so many hours to programmatic time-related bugs.

So that line, about being considerate of time, </slant_rhyme> has always stuck with me.

Is there anything else you’d like to add that might be interesting to readers and fans?

If you’re an early-career researcher, you should apply to our Mozilla Fellowship Program, open through May 14th.

If you’d like to teach more women how to code, you should reach out and join our non-profit, Girl Develop It. I co-run the NYC chapter with a few friends but there are many local chapters across the US and probably in your local area if you’re US-domestic.

Feel free to tweet at me or reach out with any questions; I love making friends on the internet: @auremoser.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The How I Work series asks heroes, experts, and flat-out productive people to share their shortcuts, workspaces, routines, and more. Have someone you want to see featured, or questions you think we should ask? Email Andy.