My brother Gideon recommended me "Buzzsprout", which is a podcast hosting service where you distribute and publish podcasts to listening platforms like Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, etc.

I created a Buzzsprout account to try to upload my own podcast, as the next step I want to take in my business is to offer podcast publishing as a service, this way I'm closer to taking care of everything for a podcaster.

I learned how to use Buzzsprout pretty easily, and learned about RSS feeds, which is a link that has your podcast info encoded, and what you give to listening platforms such as Spotify. I created a test podcast for a client and listed it on Spotify and Stitcher, but I had to wait a bit for both platforms to approve the podcast. Spotify accepted it pretty fast, but I'm still waiting on Stitcher to approve.

I was able to upload an mp3 file really fast, as well as artwork for the episode and artwork for the whole podcast (like a logo), and a description. Sometimes podcasts will have a whole blog post, show notes, description of a guest, or links to sources they mention during the interview for their listener.

Another great feature with Buzzsprout is that I can have multiple podcasts under 1 account, and save all the presets and artwork for the episodes. In the future I'd like to be publishing for tons of podcasts, so Buzzsprout can help me manage so many.

I've gotten a lot into hip hop music, and I noticed some of my favorite artists will get pieces of songs to put in their own songs, and mix it into their "beat". Usually it's a small clip of an already made song, just a few seconds, and then they loop it and add their own instruments with it to make it sound more hip hop.

Here's an example where Tyler the Creator, a famous hip hop artist, uses a sample from an old song from 1971 in "Get Down" by Monterey.

Here's the original sampled song, "Get Down" by Monterey: 

Here's Tyler the Creator's song "Boredom" where he uses the drums in "Get Down" at 1:11:

Some people see this as stealing music, but all art is inspired by art before it. Technically everything in any music has been "stolen" since people use pieces of music to structure their own, whether it be through lyrics or beats or chords. 
Tyler the Creator and Kanye West are my favorite artists to use samples in their music. 

Kanye West samples "My Song" by Labi Siffre in Kanye's song "I Wonder":

"My Song": 

"I Wonder": 


I love how Kanye and Tyler use samples to really give their songs life, especially with old vintage songs as they tend to do. It also really helps to build their own style and aesthetic but made modern.

The past few weeks I've been really impressed by some art I've seen of people painting sneakers of cool specific designs and patterns. I especially love ones that I've seen where they paint a comic on shoes. They usually have bright colors with a fun cartoon comic, like this one with Snoopy:


I thought it'd be really cool to have a pair of shoes with a picture of a Calvin and Hobbes (maybe favorite comic series) comic on them. I looked online to see if anyone has made any with Calvin and Hobbes on them, and there were a few although they were very expensive. 

Since I'm not willing to spend over $100 for a pair of shoes right now, I decided to see how easy it is to paint shoes myself. 

I then binged a ton of Youtube tutorials for how to paint custom sneakers, and decided I want to try. I then found an old pair of used shoes that fit me and ordered a specific branded paint set, Angelus, with 12 different colors as well as some sealers and brushes. I don't think I'll try to paint Calvin and Hobbes on the shoes yet first try, since I'm sure I'd mess it up because of how detailed they are, but maybe I'll do a pattern with a cool icon on the front or something like that.

I've been really interested in video editing in general, and I decided to search "Premiere Pro" on Youtube to see if any interesting videos about the software comes up. About the 5th video recommended to me was a tutorial on doing subtitles, which was something I was already interested in learning how to do. I watched the video and the guy teaching the tutorial went into the text settings in Premiere Pro. He added a black outline around the white text, as well as some background blur to help separate the text from the background footage. Then he showed how to line the text exactly in the middle. 

Then he added one more detail that I didn't expect. He pointed out that sometimes you'll notice in other Youtube videos, when the Youtuber has pop-up subtitles, they almost look like they pop in, with a sort of small animation. He showed how to do it quickly using keyframes. It took about 3 keyframes to make it have a little "pop" animation, but it made an impressive improvement! 

I went on a call with the Youtuber I edit for and he wanted to show me something that he liked in editing. He showed me a video someone else edited for him. He said while he didn't think that editor did the best out of all the editors he's worked with, he did like the way the editor smoothly zoomed in on parts of clips, rather than just a straight cut to a cropped version of a clip. At the time I didn't know how to do that (I didn't tell him that though), but I told him I'd try to implement that into his future videos. 

Before starting on his next video, I looked up tutorials on Youtube on how to do smooth linear zooms in Premiere Pro. One of the most annoying things in this process is fast-forwarding through unnecessarily long videos to the parts that are actually important, instead of sponsor segments and the Youtuber begging you to subscribe to his channel and like his video. I finally found a quick tutorial that was 3 minutes long and got straight to the point. I quickly learned the way the guy in the video taught how to do nice-looking linear zooms, and how to do it fast and easy. Then for the next video I edited, I sprinkled in the zoom edits I learned. Once I sent it to the Youtuber I edit for, he said I did a great job and copied the other editor's zooms just right. 

I'm very grateful for being able to learn these simple yet important tools and tricks so easily through Youtube and Premiere Pro, and I expect I'll be learning much more about video editing in the near future.