My Creative Odyssey: Chasing Dreams and Embracing Change
My Journey To Here, or What To Expect From This Publication
I’ve been chasing the notion of a purposeful, creative life for a very long time.
And along the way, I’ve often fought and failed to find that elusive concept of “balance”.
But I’m still trying…
I actually consider myself pretty lucky as I know that I will never be bored a day in my life. I just have too many interests, passions, hobbies, side hustles… From music writing and production to technology and coding to visual art and animation to travel and lifestyle design… I have too much curiosity. And I love it.
But I also get burned out easily, and have often been frustrated that I can’t find more time for my less financially generative passions of creativity and exploration.
I get frustrated that I haven’t created more, that haven’t had enough inspiring life changing conversations with peers and loved ones, and that I haven’t seen enough of the world. And at times, I get frustrated with how much life energy and time it takes to afford survival in this competitive world of technical miracles.
But again, I am mostly grateful. Because we live in THE most dynamically transformative time in human history, and that excites me greatly.
Advances in technology and artificial intelligence are happening at exponential speeds and new capabilities are being revealed every day. With that comes new possibilities for creativity, connection, business and lifestyle design.
But it also brings a lot of change.
For better or worse, the world as we know it is evolving right before our eyes at a nearly unimaginable speed and no one can predict what the future will bring.
Which leads to why I wanted to start this newsletter in the first place... Being someone who is constantly exploring creativity and technology, I wanted to better consolidate and share my thoughts to hopefully connect with more people and provide insight to those on similar journeys.
I have my stints in social media and continue to enjoy its new world of video (although its time consuming to create), but I recently received some good advice stating that consolidation of thought in writing is the entry point to any creative endeavor (thanks
), so I thought I’d finally give it a try.And in this endeavor I’ll work on overcoming perfectionism, procrastination, over-committing and under-executing to conquer presumably smaller, bite-sized publishing goals as I practice closing the idea to execution loop to receive its coveted dose of serotonin 😅.
I imagine this blog / newsletter to be a combination of technical findings and creative expressions with technically philosophical musings tying it all together. With it, I hope to share my journey and the knowledge that I’ve gained along the way while exercising the muscle of creative flow and holding myself accountable to my own endeavors and dreams.
I’m not sure how schedule and format will end up, but I will let iteration and time decide as I hope to commit to it for the foreseeable future to see how it goes.
Thank you for reading and joining me on this journey to dreams through a sea of change.
~ Michael Meinhart
P.S. Here is some cool AI technology that I’ve been playing around with lately followed by a short section about some of my past and present creative endeavors 😃
Exciting AI Tech
Meta (Facebook) MusicGen
https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/MusicGen
Meta (Facebook) has entered the Generative AI Music space in impressive fashion adding melody condition to the generative prompt. In short, this allows you to easily change the style of an existing melody. Their examples at the link impressively demonstrate the concept.
Kaiber AI
There has been a glut of new text to image and text to video tools pop up this year, but this one has been my favorite of late. I’ve been testing it out by morphing myself into video game characters for an upcoming YouTube video titled, “In The Game Of Life, Don’t Forget Your Side quests”, which I’ll be publishing soon.
Midjourney
If you’ve been paying attention to AI image generation in the last 6 months you’ve probably heard of this one. It runs in Discord chat, but provides impressive text to image results and I use it often for brainstorming image and video ideas. The image for this entry was created with Midjourney and edited in Photoshop (Beta).
My Creative Updates
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelMeinhart
I recently posted a live performance video of “Nothing Compares 2 U” on my channel which you can see here:
I’m also working on some video ideas around music, generative AI and some other ideas, so keep an eye on that channel for more in the future.
Solo Music
I did a 30 days of writing streak to start out the year which provided the seeds for an EP of solo music that I am currently working on. I’m about to start recording for it and hope to release a song or two by the end of the year.
Lumaphor (Ambient Music Project)
I finally released the first song entitled, “Celestial Harmonics”, for my ambient project, “Lumaphor” which I’ve had sitting unfinished in the archives for a long time. I love ambient music and listen to it while coding, so in my course of music creation I’ve created a handful of tracks which I’m passively releasing through this project. I also plan on using the project as a sandbox of sorts for Generative AI art and music video creation, so I will post more updates on that in the future!
Socionic
My old band Socionic has been inactive for some time, but I’m really proud of the music and art that was created during that era. I hope that one day it will rise from the ashes, but until then you can listen and watch here:
Apple Music - https://music.apple.com/us/artist/socionic/561094749
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Socionic
Website - http://www.socionicband.com
Spotify -
Nice one dude. Big respect.