For each hobby, after decades of trying, some wisdom worth passing along Ronald Loui Ronald Loui Ronald Loui Published May 30, 2026 + Follow DIY AUDIO: there is no best speaker system. The best speaker system, someone says on youtube, is two very good speaker systems. I agree! It's all about compensating as much as possible for the studio engineer's mixing mess. If you're lucky you'll get a soundstage from enough preserved phase information. Use horn drivers for horn instruments, metal drivers for metal instruments, ribbons for strings, kevlar or pulp for woods, silk or amt for voice. Analog beats digital for a lot of reasons, but a good cd external d2a is what you really want and need. A good way to learn that satisficing beats optimizing. Try asymmetry, multiple sized drivers, horns pointed backwards, removing crossovers, turning two center channels vertical as L and R, socks in ports, smaller midwoofers crossed low with in-series low-pass filters, ... PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY: capture something about the person! Stop making the person into your prop. I did celeb fan photos of "normal" people. Make them feel like they deserve it. Let them breathe. Take the time and wait for their authentic regard of you, which usually is a thought in the eyes, not a smile as a mask. Schedule three sessions, grab the best shot at the end of the second. Light the eyes with nice shapes: i like to use a crescent moon shape on a white board reflector. I like a lot of selective focus. Digital changed everything except the one-on-one relationship that shows when it is done well. PORTRAIT AND FIGURE SCULPTURE: body language is everything! most past sculptors of figure do not even understand the head's relation to the shoulders, so it hasn't all been done before. Think of the portrait photo and do that head tilt. The result is a mix of the sculptor's understanding of his own anatomy, proprioceptively, so yes, in this form the artist actually matters as much as the subject! Don't pose your subject. Capture how gravity affects them naturally. Alabaster is the best because light pours through it. It's durable enough and worth the effort; harder stone is not. DANCE: should be seen at dancer level. Theater dance was a mistake. European ballet is an aberration in musical movement. Great poise training, but not really dance (and i have witnessed some of the best!). More like glorified renaissance fair. Study folk dance forms. Dancers should smile and be happy. Sad and profound movement can be art, but perhaps not dance. Think about why dance is one of humanity's earliest art forms, then think about how choreographer-centric company repertoire has been marketed as art, which is a big mistake. Instagram is the golden age of dance. Appreciate the dance of the face. Level-shoulders are boring. Societies that don't dance are not well. GARDENING: nature will tell you where it wants to grow what. The healthy, mature garden is the beautiful garden. That said, you can plan, but better to learn to transplant. Some think of colour palette. I want a garden that is sculptural and architectural. I like contemplation within, not imposing upon. Landscaping is a different thing: landscaping is for real estate agents; gardening is for making personal sanctuary. If a bunny eats your flowers, be proud, not vengeful. I like herb gardens. ARCHITECTURE: most buildings are terrible or will be soon enough. But they can have design integrity. And style. And purpose. Sometimes the best architecture is for looking out, not looking at. Unfortunately we have to look at while you are looking out. Midcentury modern architecture seems to be more about finding good locations for photos than putting up useful forms. Structural sense has innate beauty. I know a good architectural accomplishment when i feel its nobility in its presence. I still like Sullivan's function of ornament concept. SOFTWARE: it's inherently transitory. So maybe don't spend all your effort on perfecting non-essential aspects. To me, the best software iterates quickly under trial use and testing, then is declared complete as an artifact of its time. To evolve it from there is almost always to junk it up. Most people who view software production as an art actually working through their personality issues! Some like to build cages and straightjackets with software. These people should be hanged. The best software art is pragmatism. AUTOMOTIVE: each era has its own challenges. 60s fast cars were beautiful but unsafe. 70s sports cars were fun but not efficient. And so on. Designing for the challenges of the past just looks pathetic once the earlier problems are well addressed. Today the challenges are end-to-end footprint, longevity, simplicity, sustainability, usability, brand honesty, feature stupidity. Don't tell me about how fast your car is in 2026. The big market caters to idiots. The companies would rather advertise and replace than design and build well. Koreans looking better the Milanese. Toyotas designed better than Stuttgarts. China's going to eat them all up. Design integrity shows. Better to have two designed for specific purposes than one mongrel that tries to be everything to everyone. ANTIQUARIAN PAPERS: the problem is that old books have such good contents, but more as art than books. So they end up being cut to pieces. Hard to fight. Maybe they are just art. Books from the 1950s-1980s are now valued for their intellectual contents, not plates, penmanship, or page design. Imagine that! Save your small ephemera. Value all handwriting and manual typewriting. I am liking turn of the century postcards lately. I collect civil war tintype hotties, no kidding. Ambros are overrated; Dags have to be excellent to be at all good. Value the hand of a good old book, and think of foxing as a good thing. Remember that distributed storage is a kind of preservation; hoardes burn like libraries, taking whole genres, so don't feel guilty you have an old leaf. POETICS: so hard for ai to do this well. It can create "poems" but so can high school freshmen. I actually love a poem from a teen in a school literary biannual. To me, that's apex poetry. So honest and pure. What i really like is runs with internal restricted phonemic palette. Lots of interleaved consonance. Not repeated, but temporarily restricted. Or a turn of phrase that's clever, witty, erudite, innovative. I like quotable poetics: profound turn of phrase. To me, good philosophy should have a bit of poetics. 60s and 70s were bad poetry. In fact, most era-poetry is style, not sense. AI can do the meter and rhyme, but it can't do what i want to see, not yet, at least not to my satisfaction. I do like a good rap! That's more unexpected microcultural referential art and rhythmic fit than phonemic invention, but what's wrong with that?