Noisy Deadlines

music

  • 🍂 I love this season of the year. I like the colors, the cool air, the golden light at sunset. There's something so peaceful about this transition into winter. With no trips or major commitments ahead, I'm really looking forward to a few quieter months.
  • 🍁 This week also marks eight years since my partner, and I immigrated to Canada! What an adventure it’s been! 🥳
  • ✏️ Lately, I’ve returned to private journaling with 750Words. The interface is beautifully simple, and I love how the stats gently nudge me to write every day. I’d fallen out of the habit, and I’ve noticed how much that affects my mood. So, I’m committing to the November 750Words challenge!
  • 🏊‍♀️ My aqua fitness class has also resumed after the summer break, another small joy!
  • 📖 I am re-reading Neuromancer by Willian Gibson for my local Book Club. I first read it 12 years ago, and honestly, I remember finding it confusing. This time around I think I'm grasping more of it, but still, I don't know what exactly is going on half of the time. I can see how this book is a cultural reference to the whole cyberpunk genre, but, wow, it is a strange ride.
  • 📅 One thing I've noticed this month: I stopped doing my Start of the Day review with time blocking. I was being more relaxed on how I plan my days. I was still getting things done at work, but I noticed I stopped taking breaks and I was completely skipping my shutdown routine. Even the lunch break was affected, with me not properly stopping for lunch. That's not how I want my work routine to be. So, I’ve gone back to time blocking. On paper. That tactile process makes all the difference for me. It's the only way I will mentally prepare myself for the day and I will remember to pause.
  • ✉️ I received a couple of lovely messages from readers sharing their feelings about listening to full albums in response to my blog post. Thank you! 😊
  • 🎧 I am still listening to Nightwish albums, there is so much to unpack there.

📌 Cool online reads:

  • Career Snakes & Ladders | Kev Quirk: I loved this post about career and identifying what’s truly important in life. This quote is perfect: “As a result of all this, I’ve realised that success isn’t just about upward motion. It’s about endurance, purpose, and perspective. It’s about being content in the work we do. Being challenged but not overworked. And most importantly, being in a position to spend time with loved ones.”
  • Listening to Full Albums Again by Joel: he also wrote about listening to full albums! We share similar feelings.
  • Music Monday by Nick Booth: I loved this idea of randomizing the act of choosing a full album to listen to, and the doing some reflection about it. I will try it.

📺 Videos I enjoyed:

I discovered a channel with an opera singer analyzing vocals in metal songs: The Charismatic Voice by Elizabeth Zharoff. I’m loving her enthusiastic approach, and I’ve been learning a bit about the art of singing. Oh, I found her channel because she has some cool videos with Nightwish music 🤗. And she interviewed Bruce Dickinson and Floor Jansen.

#weeknotes #music #heavymetal

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

🎧 This year I realized that I had stopped listening to full albums. I have been using Deezer for 11 years now (yes, I checked). Deezer is a music streaming service, not as famous as Spotify, I guess. One of the main reasons I subscribed was its great selection of Francophone artists. I was learning French at the time, and music has always been one of my favorite ways to learn a language. It also had albums from all my favorite bands, including many that were hard to find back home in Brazil.

Before that, I also went through the mp3 phase: Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa. I burned my own CDs, made personalized covers, and curated playlists long before streaming platforms existed.

I also had physical albums from my favorite bands such as Metallica, Iron Maiden, Queen, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Angra, to name a few. Finding CDs from European metal bands like Stratovarius, Blind Guardian, Grave Digger, or Nightwish in Brazil was not easy. So (ahem, illegally, I know) downloading mp3s was the only way to listen to some of them.

After the mp3 boom and the rise of streaming, something changed. I almost stopped listening to albums as complete works. I was missing that feeling of sitting down with a cohesive experience, where each song connects to the next and the order matters.

I have been listening to the same playlists on Deezer for years, with almost no changes. So, this year I decided to return to full albums. I started manually choosing what to play and listening in the order the artist intended, without shuffling or letting algorithms take over.

Streaming services do not make this easy anymore. Albums tend to be buried under playlists, mixes, and endless recommendations. It requires a bit more effort, that's for sure. But it's still possible!

I also use Deezer's option of showing the lyrics while I listen, which is cool.

🤘 And since rediscovering Nightwish, this experience has become even more enjoyable. Listening to their full albums from start to finish has made me genuinely happy. Their music reminds me of why I fell in love with albums in the first place: the storytelling, the emotion, and the sense of being transported somewhere else entirely.

Listening to an album from beginning to end feels like reconnecting with the artist, and also with the version of myself who used to sit with the CD booklet, reading lyrics and discovering hidden tracks.

Maybe that is what I was missing all along: the feeling that music is not just background noise or mood filler, but a complete experience meant to be lived from beginning to end. 😊

I found some pictures of my old CD’s. I don’t have them anymore; I sold them all before my move to Canada. I don’t regret not having them anymore, since I can still listen to them via streaming services.

#NoisyMusings #music #heavymetal

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

  • 🤘 I created a project to listen to the entire Nightwish discography. Yes, I’m obsessed with this band right now. I started with the first five albums, which mark the end of the Tarja Turunen era (1996–2005). Then I moved on to the two albums featuring vocalist Anette Olzon (2007–2012). Now I’m exploring the albums with the current vocalist, Floor Jansen and I’m still amazed by her. I’m not done yet!
  • 🎧 It was a lovely surprise to finally receive the audiobook I’d placed on hold at the library nearly a year ago. I’d almost forgotten about it: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, narrated by Stephen Fry. I listened to it with my partner, who’s also a Douglas Adams fan. It’s excellent!
  • 🎧 And then we started the second book in the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, narrated by Martin Freeman. It’s also excellent. It’s impressive how Freeman voices all the characters so distinctly. Highly recommended!
  • 📖 These audio experiences have sparked a new interest in audiobooks. I don’t usually listen to books, but another title I had on hold was delivered this week, and I’ve started it. It’s a nonfiction book: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. I’ve been listening during my commutes and in the mornings before work. It’s been interesting so far!
  • 🌳We also went for a 7km hike this weekend along Lime Kiln Trail and Beaver Trail to enjoy the fall colors.

📌 Cool online reads:

📺 Videos I enjoyed:

This list will exclusively include stuff related to the band Nightwish, so get ready (or skip it)!

#weeknotes #music #heavymetal

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

  • 😇 I’ve been quiet lately because there’s a lot going on at work, and I’ve mostly kept myself away from the computer at home. The past two weeks at work were intense and completely drained my energy. I’m still recovering.
  • 🦿 I ordered custom orthotics to help with the pain in my knees. They should be ready for pickup later this week. I was planning to get a new pair of running shoes, but I’ll wait until I have the orthotics so I can try new shoes with them.
  • 👟 I’ve been going out for walks instead of running, because, yeah, my knees. I don’t want to push through pain just for the sake of routine.
  • 📕 I finished reading “Mirror Dance”, which is #08 in the Vorkosigan Saga (by publication order). It was excellent! I’m reading the series in internal chronological order, so my next book will be “Memory”, which is #10 in publication order.
  • 📖 I started reading “The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind” (The Frost Files #1) by Jackson Ford for my local book club. I’m enjoying it so far!
  • 📒 I’ve also returned to using my Happy Planner to organize my week. I’ve decided to finish 2025 with this planner and choose a new one for 2026 later on.
  • ⌛ One thing I noticed over the past couple of weeks is that not doing time blocking made me feel overwhelmed and unsatisfied with my day. I tried using my digital calendar again, but it just doesn’t give me the same results. So, this week, I’m going back to time blocking on paper.
  • 🎮 I’m also trying to get back into gaming, so I started a game I bought a while ago called “Citizen Sleeper”. I like it because it feels like a text-based RPG set in space, with beautiful art. There’s no action stress or need for quick reflexes and coordination. It has interesting characters and great storytelling.

📌 Cool online reads:

📺 Videos I enjoyed:

—

Post 99/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #weeknotes #music #heavymetal

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I was listening to the radio this morning and the song playing was “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times before, but something struck me today that made me curious about its origins. It’s one of the band’s most iconic tracks and the 1985 video clip is groundbreaking with its computer-animated characters.

Anyway, I knew the lyrics were a criticism of rock stars “easy” fame and luxurious lifestyles. What I didn’t know is that Mark Knopfler actually wrote the song while he was in an appliance store in New York, standing in front of a wall of TVs tunned to MTV. A delivery guy at the back of the store was making sarcastic comments about what he was seeing on the channel. It turns out the narrator of the song is this man who works in the store, and I had never noticed that!

I read that the album in which this song was released is one of the best-selling albums of all times, and that led me to browse the list of top albums. That search brought me to another classic: “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to that song. Released in 1977, it has such a wild, theatrical energy, even though the lyrics are about a guy who dies in a motorcycle accident.

That led me to a video clip of “Bat Out of Hell” and then to a YouTube channel by a classical musician analyzing rock songs. The channel is called Virgin Rock by Amy Shafer. She started the channel in 2022 and it is her personal journey into rock music, a genre she wasn’t familiar with. I watched two videos in a row:

And I just loved her videos! I looked at her back catalog and now I want to watch most of them.

And that’s what I really wanted to mention in this post: I love this kind of serendipitous discovery—how one song on the radio can lead me down a rabbit hole of music history, unexpected connections, and interesting perspectives.

—-

Post 94/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #NoisyMusings #music

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

This weekend marked the 40th anniversary of Metallica’s album “Ride the Lightning”! I decided to listen to it again from start to finish and was pleasantly surprised to rediscover that “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “Fade to Black” are both on this album. These two songs are among my all-time favorites and laid the groundwork for what would later come in the “Black Album” (which is wildly successful). For the record, “Ride the Lightning” is the band’s second album, released in 1984.

This weekend my local rock radio station, CHEZ 106, did a Metallica weekend special, and they played “Ride the Lightning” and the “Black Album” in full, which I loved!

I was trying to remember how old I was when I first heard about Metallica. It must have been in the early '90s. I remember copying Metallica songs onto cassette tapes to listen to them. It just struck me that when “Ride the Lightning” was released, I was only 5 years old! So, when I listened to this album for the first time it was more than a decade after its release. Yet, it felt quite recent and new at the time! When the album came out, Brazil was still under a military dictatorship and many things (including international music and some movies) weren’t accessible till later in the 90s.

Anyway, I later got all their CD’s and I had posters of the band on my teenager bedroom walls. Metallica is still one of my favorite bands of all time. I particularly enjoy their phase up until the Black Album, so I’m not 100% caught with their newer stuff.

I found pictures of my old CD I got in Brazil. I sold it (along with the other albums I had) to collectors before I moved to Canada.

—

Post 26/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #heavymetal #music

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I've created a music playlist called “Folk Metal, Viking & Celtic” to group my new favorite discoveries.

I don't remember how exactly I discovered these bands, but it could have been by launching a track mix based on other bands I like (like these ones) and also from friends recommendations. All the songs I've listed here give me some sort of calmness but also this powerful energy boost, stirring something inside me, giving me literal goosebumps.

Read more...

💾For a complete summary list of my blog posts grouped by year, click here.

🎈 Things I write about :

Sections:

🎨 #NoisyMusings: a little bit of everything 📂 #Productivity: organization, methods, apps, GTD 📚 #Books: everything book related

Some Topics:

#apps | #Nirvana (the app, not the band) | #Todoist | #GTD | #MSTodo | #notes | #journal | #journaling | #BookReview | #ReadingList | #Reading | #ReaderGoals | #BookWyrm | #TheStorygraph | #weeknotes | #podcast | #GTDnotes | #100DaysToOffload | #projects | #goals | #DnD

#internet | #socialmedia | #attentionresistance #minimalism | #digitalminimalism #outdoors | #Hiking | #winter | #iceskating | #music | #heavymetal | #puzzle | #health | #tech

I have been listening to a lot more music recently.

I usually have my own playlists and rarely rely on AI generated lists based on my “taste”. I mostly listen to rock music, going from 60's/70's rock classics, heavy metal, a little bit of progressive and symphonic/melodic metal.

I saw a playlist on my music streaming service called “Swords & Sorcery” and gave it a try. I ended up discovering cool metal bands and songs and immediately created my own “Epic Metal” curated playlist. For some reason this playlist is now my “work mode” soundtrack: I listen to it when I need to do deep work and it puts me in the zone!

Read more...