Hey!

This is my first newsletter. Hope you enjoy it! You can read more about my motivations for it here.

This edition features a fun fact, synthesizer stuff, some preschooler art, some of my art, and a few cool WWW links.

Fun Fact

Here's the fun fact:

While several species use tools, crows are the only non-primates that make new tools. In addition to using sticks as spears and hooks, crows will bend wire to make tools, even if they have never encountered wire before.

source

This blows my mind! I had no idea.

Music Stuff

Jamuary

In January I took part in "Jamuary," where I made a new jam almost every day of the month. Naturally my jams were synth jams! Here's a video playlist of my jams.

I built a new synthesizer

In February I built a new synthesizer I'm calling the "Interstellar Boolean Logic Exploration Device," or "IBLED" for short. Here's a video.

The World Wide Web

My homepages

I updated my main website to be weirder and hopefully more interesting. I updated the music section to show most of my discography (and if you want you can get basically everything for free). Check it out here: https://chrisbeckstrom.com/music

I also joined a thing called tilde club that is sort of about retro Linux computing. I built a really retro webpage here.

Check out my growing collection of gifs.

Cool WWW Links

Speaking of GIF's, I stumbled upon GifCities, which is a search engine to find GIF's extracted from old MySpace pages.

Here are a few interesting websites I've seen recently:

• Kicks Condor - Probably the most unique site I've ever seen
• The Deep Sea - scroll down to the bottom of the ocean and learn some things
• Always Judge a Book By Its Cover - these books really exist. I think this is hilarious!

June Stuff

Feather Collection

My daughter is pretty cool. The other day around 9:30pm (well after her bedtime) she came into my bedroom, pounded on the bed (because I was listening to music with headphones on and my eyes closed), came over and whispered that she had a feather in her coat pocket.. she didn't remember which one but it's for me for my feather collection. Then I asked if mommy was asleep (after cuddling for bedtime), and she said "yes" and walked away. I said "good night!" and she whispered "good night"

No Ice Cream Art

Yesterday at 10am she asked if she could have ice cream and I said no. She was very peeved by this, stomped into her room and slammed the door. A few minutes later she emerged with two brand-new crayon drawings. One was a self-portrait with a big frown, and the other was a picture of me smiling. Both were signed with "JUNEX." The "X" indicates she's angry. She slammed them down in my lap and walked away.

I'm really proud of her for expressing her frustration in such a healthy way. Plus I love her art.

Also

Here's one of my favorite pictures she's made recently. I think it's a unicorn koala hanging out on a rainbow.

Art

Speaking of art, a while back I wrote some code that makes art. This one generates an array of robot heads. Each time you reload the page you'll get a new set.

The End

That's all for now! Thanks for reading.

What have you been up to? If you want to, shoot me an email and let me know. You can just reply to this email. I'd love to hear from you!

Bye!

Chris