Here are some things that I did in 2014:

#EVERYDAY project

Last night marked a full year since I started the #EVERYDAY project. So far, I’ve created 365 new things that didn’t exist last year, which is more than you can probably say you goddamn loser. Unless of course you also created 365 (or more) things this year. Then I say to you: “What the hell, man? Are you trying to make me look bad? Calm the F down.”

For the most part I created one new thing a day but there were some days I missed and had to create 2 things the next day. Then there was the time the power was out for a week so I was pretty busy not being able to cook food or flush the toilet or maintain a normal body temperature so I phoned in a couple of things but I still have a thing for every day of the year which is 365 things, like I said. That’s 365 new things. Coincidentally that’s also the same number of days in an Earth year. That’s a fun fact for you.

When I first started this project I was bouncing around between different types of things: videos, still images, photos, animated GIFs, etc. but I pretty quickly settled on looping 1-2 second animated GIFs. Those make up the majority of the things I created in 2014.

I found that the limitation of having to loop the animation and keep it under the 2MB limit for GIFs on Tumblr really helped me focus on just trying a new technique or visual style every day without leaving it so wide open that I had trouble deciding what I wanted to create in the first place.

The “perfect loop” requirement also meant that I had to think a certain way about setting up the animation. It’s an interesting challenge and I think the end result is really well suited to the infinite looping nature of the GIF format.

I plan on continuing this project in 2015 and probably any other years that come after that. I’ll probably stick with the looping GIFs because I think, even after doing them for a whole year, there’s so much potential there and I feel like I want to keep pushing the GIF format to see where it can go.

While I haven’t tried it out yet, I’m pretty excited about the potential of things like the x-gif web component, which allows looping gifs to be sped up, slowed down and even synced to audio.

I’d like to start writing music again this year so I need to figure out a way of incorporating that into this project. I did exactly one audio-based thing in 2014 and it’s not even music (unless you use a really, really loose definition of the word music). I was pretty happy with it though. It’s a Terry Gross interview with 99% of the words removed so it’s just all the little sounds she makes in between saying things.

So, not exactly more of that. But more of that. Except music. Sometimes. Other times it might even be weirder than that.

I Read Some Books

I feel like I read a lot this year, but I’m not sure if I did. GoodReads told me I only read 10 books but that includes the last three Game of Thrones books so that’s like 50 regular books right there (approx).

It would be more accurate to say that I read a lot of pages this year. I’ll have to add them up and see how many there are. But I think it’s a lot. Some of those Game of Thrones books have like 50,000 pages or something so it’s probably more pages than anyone else has ever read in a year.

Here are all the books I read this year with a helpful 1-100,000 rating for each one so you know if I liked it or not.

• A Storm of Swords – George R. R. Martin – 94,322/100,000
• A Feast for Crows – George R. R. Martin – 81,999/100,000
• A Dance With Dragons – George R. R. Martin – 90,980/100,000
• Mars – Ben Bova – 60,112/100,000
• Flawed Dogs – Berkeley Breathed – 68,456/100,000
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman – 71,877/100,000
• Hallucinations – Oliver Sacks – 89,911/100,000
• Desert Solitaire – Edward Abbey – 86,228/100,000
• Earth Abides – George R. Stewart – 18/100,000
• Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About – Mil Millington – 92,912/100,000
• Schroedinger’s Cat – Robert Anton Wilson – 76,767/100,000

If you’d like to see what books I’m reading in 2015, while I’m reading them, for some weird reason, you can do that by following me on GoodReads – a site for showing everyone how smart you are because you read a lot of books and you also plan on reading like 85,000 more books in the near future.

I Listened to Some Music

This is my best albums of 2014 list. Except it’s not a list of the best albums that came out in 2014. It’s a list of the best albums I listened to in 2014. Some of them didn’t come out in 2014. Other albums that are probably good came out in 2014 but I don’t think I listened to them. Or if I did I wasn’t paying attention enough to realize I was listening to one of the best albums of 2014.

Black Map – …And We Explode

36 Crazyfists – A Snow Capped Romance

Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

††† (Crosses) – †††

Aphex Twin – Syro

Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest

Mastodon – Once More ‘Round the Sun

Future Islands – Singles

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This list is probably missing 84% of the best albums of 2014 so please let me know what they are so I can listen to them.

I Watched Some Movies

I can’t remember which ones though. I think there were some good ones. I liked Guardians of the Galaxy a lot.

There were also a lot of movies that I didn’t see. I’m not sure how good they were.

I Made Some Beer

I should have made more beer last year. But I didn’t. I made some though. Just not a lot. In 2015 I’m gonna make more beer than I did this year. Probably like 50 times as much, or wait, that’s a lot. Maybe like twice as much.

Things I Didn’t Do in 2014

Here are some things I didn’t do in 2014. There’s obviously a lot of other things I didn’t do but these are things I wanted to do but either kept putting off or just totally dropped the goddamn ball and didn’t do. They’re things I want to do in 2015.

Write

I used to write more. Mostly it was for the Sinch website, especially when we were doing the music thing full time. I had way more free time and being on the road and in the studio, a lot of material to work with.

My plan for 2015 is to write more on this here website since that’s kind of what it’s for. I don’t know exactly what I want to write about, but I think that’s OK. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t been writing much over the past few years but I think it’s kind of a dumb excuse. You don’t need to know what you want to write about. You can still just write. Even if it’s about the fact that you don’t know what you want to write about or that you think the stuff you’re writing sucks super hard or what have you.

Redesign This Website

This site has had the same design for a while now. I think I launched it back in 2009 or 2008 or one of those years with the numbers in it. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on design and have never really been happy with it. It’s good enough that it works and you can see the content and it doesn’t look like complete garbage but it could be way better.

When I look at the code that’s running this site I feel like I’m looking at a picture I drew when I was 12 and half asleep and pissed off because I still had homework to do.

I’ve learned a lot of things since 2008 or 2009 or whatever it was and web technology has advanced quite a bit since then as well. I’ve been using a lot of this new web stuff for work but never seem to get around to updating my own site. It’s like that story about the shoemaker who made shoes for everyone in the whole town and he was always busy so he didn’t have time to update his shoe website. I think that’s how it goes.

So there should be a new version of this site somewhat soon-ish, depending on how you define “soon” and “somewhat”.

Show My Work

I haven’t added much to the Work section in the past few years. This would lead most people to believe that I am no longer producing any work because I invented some insane new technology and sold it to Google for a thousand dollars and don’t have to work anymore.

Well, if that’s what you think, you’re wrong.

I have been producing work the whole time. I just haven’t been posting any of it here because of that same story about the shoe website. Same deal.  Some of my recent work isn’t even complete garbage (depending on how you define “garbage”), so my plan for this year is to add some of it to the aforementioned Work section so you can see it. You might think it’s complete garbage or maybe just partial garbage, but that’s fine. You might also like some of it which would be a much better scenario. Either way, you’ll be able to see it which is the most important thing.