I dunno I dunno I dunno...

Just had another look at the ending of The MAD Doctrine. Still can't tell if it's a proper ending or not. Gah.

Going to bed now. I'm trying to teach myself to go to bed at a reasonable time. (Yes, I know 2 a.m. isn't exactly the definition of reasonable. But it's pretty good for *me*.)

Guitar update

I still don't do more than ten minutes of practice a day, and I still don't know more than six chords, but I'm getting better at changing between those six chords. Wanted to get to a reasonable degree of accuracy and speed with all the chord changes that are possible with these six before I go on to the next new chords. I'm currently somewhere near 50 changes per minute for the changes I've been practicing the longest, and around 30 for the ones I've only been practicing for a couple of weeks. Or I was, when I last bothered to count; most of the time I don't bother.

I still don't know a single song, though. I don't have a capo (yet), so I'm limited to songs that *really* only consist of E, A, D, Em, Am and Dm, and I'm not sure how to find any. Let alone how to find songs that feature only those chords *and* that I like well enough to want to learn to play.

What worries me a bit is that my brain seems reluctant to attach sounds to motions. What I mean is, I don't automatically know in advance which sound will be produced when I, what's the verb here, fret(?) a chord - and, vice versa, when I have a sound in mind I don't automatically know which chord it is, let alone which finger motions would produce it. I feel like my brain *should* be attaching these two different types of information to each other by now, but it doesn't.

Then again, five-or-so weeks of practice at ten minutes a day or less probably simply isn't enough to produce that kind of automatic association, in someone of - at best - average (perhaps even slightly below average) musical talent. I seem to remember this kind of association came to me more quickly when I was learning the recorder - but I was two and a half decades younger then. (And also, maybe, the way sound and motion are connected when playing the recorder is a bit more intuitive? A lot of it, I seem to remember, was just kind of "lift/put down one finger for a higher/lower tone". Whereas with the guitar, a lot of the time you really rearrange your entire left hand on the fretboard for every new tone. And you have to remember how many strings to play with your right hand on top of that.)