Starthief

just a nibble

Schlappi Engineering Nibbler arrived yesterday and I’ve taken it for a couple of spins.

I’m glad I went for this rather than just a plain shift register. My very first patch was just plugging Just Friends outputs into various inputs — the gates, clock, shift, reset etc. — and playing with Intone, at audio rate. It created a wonderful variety of timbres — noise, obvious PWM stuff, sounds that would switch states periodically, etc. The dual R2R outputs with phase shift switches can generate some surprisingly nice stereo as well.

As a looping melody maker or rhythmic source it’s also fun too of course. As it turns out, the VCV Rack version that I have been playing with for a few days has a couple of incorrect behaviors, so some of the tricks I’d taught myself don’t quite apply to the hardware. But it makes logical sense (which it should, given that it’s a logic module) and the hardware is no less capable.

The anxiety seems to be easing off, with yesterday mostly being a really good day. But I had some discomfort this morning and wound up waking up early again.

Aside from medications and therapy, meditation and breathing exercises etc. there are a few tools which claim to help with anxiety. I’ve been looking into those. Some are no doubt snake oil or massively overpriced, and some companies like to flood the internet with paid influencers and “reviewers” who only parrot the marketing text, so I’ve been trying to sort all of that out.

One of them is simply a little tube, much like a straw or tiny flute, that you wear on a neck chain like jewelry and use for breathing exercises. It slows down exhalation, which can be calming. From what I’ve seen online it works pretty well, but a lot of people think the original one is overpriced if nifty. It was on sale at a more reasonable price, but then I found a cheaper (and neat-looking rainbow titanium) imitator online and decided that might be worth throwing a few bucks at to try out. There are also some electronic “exhalers” which help time breathing exercises, but those cost more and aren’t something I’d be likely to carry with me.

There are also tVNS (transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation) devices. These are non-invasive gizmos that give you a minor electrical jolt, much like TENS for back pain, intending to stimulate the vagus nerve. This runs from the brain (near the ears) down through the neck, chest and to the GI tract. It’s associated with the parasympathetic nervous system — the one that calms you — and regulation of heart rate, inflammation, etc. There are a lot of devices that make a lot of claims, and… some of them seem to be fairly legit. The worst review was from someone with no anxiety issues, who drinks and sometimes has hangover-related sleep issues, and also people reviewing an earlier version of a neck-worn device that was simply too big for some people. Also the experience of using such a device is apparently a bit weird, which given my experience with TENS is not a surprise. The vagus nerve is also said to be stimulated by deep breathing exercises, humming or singing, and other activities/techniques. So I’m not immediately rushing to buy such a device, but I’m curious what the psych nurse thinks about them.

we ain’t buying it

I only heard of this one this morning. But this was already the first year where I completed 100% of my online Christmas shopping without giving Amazon a single dime. (Is it weird to be proud of that? I have been on a sort of weak, semi-boycott of Amazon for quite some time, having dropped Prime — but I still tended to buy stuff from them if it was cheaper than elsewhere (which it often is) and did a lot of Christmas shopping there every year.) I also gave my relatives a non-Amazon wishlist which includes independent bookstores, small businesses, Bandcamp, etc.

This boycott targetting Home Depot because they ICE raids on their own employees got me researching the alternatives:

I will be avoiding Menards in the future, because their owner is a Trump buddy, union buster, and donated to Koch Brothers stuff in the past.
ACE stores around here aren’t great — okay for tools or fasteners but not the best choice for garden stuff, lumber etc. They donate quite a bit to Republicans and almost nothing to Democrats — but most of their stores are independently owned.
Lowe’s is something of a mixed bag. Like HD, they have a PAC that has historically donated about 70% to Republicans and 30% to Democrats. But in 2024 their employees supported Harris twice as much as Trump, and the total political donations are fairly small for such a large chain. Their executives just tend not to make those kinds of donations themselves. Also in 2024 they turned a little bit chickenshit in terms of DEI (“for legal reasons” or in response to a conservative boycott threat depending on who you ask), though they do still support it. They also stopped sponsoring stuff like (Pride) parades at the same time. Still, they come out looking less bad than HD, so I guess this is going to be my choice from now on, for the most part.
Harbor Freight, like ACE, is mostly about tools. Not super high quality tools, just “gets the job done but may not last forever” stuff in my experience. But their owners/employers donate overwhelmingly to Democratic causes. The nearest store isn’t very nearby for us though.

solutions

My doctor appointment was yesterday. For all that I stressed over it, rehearsed it, and made myself stop rehearsing it over the last couple of weeks, and then worked up a bunch of nervousness about it in the couple of hours prior to it… it was easy. I probably didn’t talk to the doctor for more than ten minutes. The nurse asked me some questions while filling out a form (probably the official evaluation). The doctor had me talk about it a bit, asked very few questions, and diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) — no surprise at all. She prescribed Lexapro, which is a usual first-line treatment for GAD because it has relatively few side effects and tends to work well for many people. She said it was good that I had an appointment with a therapist, and had me schedule a follow-up visit in eight weeks. That was it.

I stopped taking the ashwaganda supplement because it and Lexapro might interact, or the effect might stack up too much. There isn’t evidence that they do, but there haven’t been enough studies to show they don’t. Too much seratonin in your brain (like too much of anything) is bad too. The Lexapro will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to really take effect, but just being on it and being in the process of addressing my anxiety, already makes it easier to tolerate the symptoms and calm down the worries.

Also the reassurance that my heart rate and blood pressure were both fine, even while I was sitting nervously in a doctor’s office, has been very helpful.

Today’s my birthday. It doesn’t seem to be something to be excited about anymore, but hey, some well wishes and going to a nice dinner are pleasant things. 🙂

We’re now in that time of year when we inevitably look back. I’ll start with my list of goals/quasi-resolutions for the year…

1. Keep my head held high and my joy intact.
Yeah, definitely had some trouble with this one at times, at least the “keep” part of it. I’ll say instead, I’ve been able to restore the joy. When I got knocked down, I got up again…

2. Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor.
I don’t think I did the best at this either. I got scared. In my defense, it was scary. Anxiety or no, I think it’s gotten less scary since the blue wave in the election and the evidence that even other Republicans are now distancing themselves from TFG.

3. Trump has no power over me. He is poison.
This ties into #1. I definitely did let the news bother me several times. But remembering this was still a useful strategy.

4. Donate to trans causes.
I have been.

5. People are wrong on the internet, it’s not my job to fix them.
I *have* been better about this one in 2025, I think.

6. Gear:
I had some specific plans here, which (naturally) wound up changing. I did stick to “no more desktop synths” and didn’t get any more controllers. But I did get into effect pedals, and did make some software purchases on a whim. No actual regrets.

7. Get the deck taken care of.
We had to DIY it, but that’s done.

8. Clean up and organize some around the house
Well… we did take care of the living room floor, and have maintained it by keeping Yankee out. We did get a pantry that helped organize the kitchen a little better. But we didn’t have the spoons to get done everything we wanted to.

9. Walk, maybe swim.
I did walk some, when the weather was friendly enough. The neighborhood swimming pool turned out to be more for kids than adults and we didn’t wind up getting memberships anywhere else.

I am only now beginning to ponder goals/resolutions for next year. Take care of myself is certainly one.

The quick summary of what happened this year in my life:

got more in touch with… whatever my gender identity is
shaved off my beard/mustache and kept them off (and geeked out a bit about shaving soap)
reacted to a lot of bad political news
got my blood sugar down to 6.5
saw a total lunar eclipse
got lots of home repairs done
went to the emergency room with chest pain that turned out to be nothing dangerous
picked up a new approach/technique in modular synthesis
played a lot of Guild Wars 2 and Soulstone Survivors
took my family on a loooong road trip to Maine
read… a lot
kept making music, listening to music, thinking about music, writing stuff about music etc.

I’ll do favorite new stuff of 2025 too…

Software synth: Kontrast. Runner-ups: Sine Machine, E370 for VCV Rack.

Software effect: Futureverb. Runner-up: Big Swarma.

Eurorack module: Multimod. Runner-up: Mimetic Digitwolis.

Other hardware: Mesmeriser. Runner-up: Slöer

Book series: Sir Callie, The Shadow (Wake of Vultures etc.), The Witch King

Standalone fiction: Chlorine, The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, High Vaultage, The Kindest Embrace If Firm Enough Can Suffocate

Nonfiction: In Transit, So Many Stars, Trans/Rad/Fem, The Audible Past

Albums: Belief Defect Desire & Discontent, Abul Mogard Quiet Places, Bowery Electric Bowery Electric (hey it was new to me)

My own album: Suspension (at least if you ask me this morning)

fresh air, but chilly

Partially to help with the anxiety, and partially just because it’s good for me and I like doing it, and entirely because the weather has been much more suitable recently, I’ve been walking a bit more. My favorite, the Mallard Lake trail, as well as the local park which isn’t nearly as picturesque but is a much closer and more casual walk.

Here’s some photos from yesterday. It was 47 degrees, damp and windy, which I made it a bit more effort than the previous week (when it was mid-50s to low 60s and I almost didn’t work up a sweat on the 2.6 mile loop). I’ll still take it over 80+ degrees though.

I’m not a great photographer by any means, just a casual with a phone camera — this didn’t quite capture the light and mist like I’d hoped. This isn’t too far after my starting point, the Lakehouse Bar & Grill parking lot where walkers and bike riders often start.

This probably wasn’t the biggest leaf around, but still almost a foot across.

Every once in a while you’ll see deer in this area, but it’s slightly more likely in the unpaved “back half” which gets less human activity.

Big bridge (MO-364 aka Olive Blvd) and small bridge. This leg of the trail that runs parallel to the road is shared with the Creve Coeur Lake trail and tends to get more walkers/joggers/cyclists, but the colder weather kept it sparse today. Once you get to the embankment at the end of this section, that’s about the halfway point of the Mallard Lake Trail and a right turn takes you off the pavement to the less traveled gravel/dirt section. I doubled back yesterday because recent rains tend to make it muddy.

View from the small bridge.

Sometimes the entire wooded section looks a lot like this — things can get pretty swampy. But this is just a finger of the lake.

Yesterday I watched a video on the Lorre-Mill Double Knot V3, which explained and explored it very well. That got me almost wanting one, though for my purposes it’s a bit limited, more than a little expensive, I don’t really have room, and its patch points are not Eurorack compatible.

So instead I started thinking about shift registers. The DK has two simple 8-stage binary shift registers which it uses for rhythms and sequencing. Not Turing Machines, not runglers, not a Benjolin, not an LFSR, just a simple chain of bits, and a simple R2R (*) output for pitch/other modulation. You can patch your own loops, psuedo-random input using an audio source, or cross-patch them as desired. And this makes it a simple but cool, flexible tool, more so than I found the Turing Machine or Zorlon Cannon. Especially in the context of a full modular system, where I could use a matrix mixer to derive different CV patterns from those bits.

(R2R = a resistor ladder network, so named because it’s just a passive set of resistors that assign one bit a certain voltage, the next bit half that, the next half again, etc. This makes a simple asynchronous digital-to-analog converter, and is also how Nearness works to mix signals at different levels.)

There aren’t many simple, SIPO (serial-in-parallel-out) binary shift registers in Eurorack, but there are a few, and I started looking into them. I wound up fascinated by the Schlappi Engineering Nibbler. While it only has 4 stages/bits rather than 8, it’s not just a shift register but a binary counter, and you can set the register bit values directly. The shifting and setting can be synchronized with the counter clock or not. There’s a Carry output which can be used to reverse the counter, for symmetrical up-down patterns. There are two R2R outputs, one of which can have a phase offset. Like Xaoc’s Liebniz series, it’s pretty abstract but there are a lot of possibilities — both for rhythm/modulation patterns, and for audio.

I decided to go for Nibbler, setting my Planar aside because I really haven’t been using it. I could also pick up a Holocene Electronics SIPO, a small 8-bit shift register, but we’ll see how I do without it — and maybe use Bitwig Grid patches if I want a second SR, although that involves latency and being careful about clock rate. I think Nibbler will interact in all kinds of fun ways with my other stuff without a second shift register, particularly since MD2’s sequences can be modified with trigger inputs. That means I get to keep my Gliss around, and try to take more advantage of its fun, instant gestures to create modulation loops.

there’s always a smaller Lego brick

I’m not sure where people got the idea that “the concept of modular synthesis” is to take the longest, most meandering possible path to creating a sound, or that if you’re not constructing everything from basic building blocks, you’re doing it wrong.

The first modular synths were… sort of that way, of necessity. Circuits were mostly quite simple. But even in those earliest days, the need was recognized that combining simpler circuits to serve a coherent musical function, as a module, made sense. Thus, oscillators with multiple shape outputs, instead of separating the waveshaping from the core — one never sees a complaint that the oscillator has built-in pulse width control instead of forcing you to use a separate comparator to convert triangle or saw waves to pulses. Or the sequencer, which combines a sequential switch (itself made of flip-flops made of logic gates) with a set of attenuators and a mixer. Or the frequency shifter, a complex network of ring modulators and phase shifters. These modules were designed for musical utility. My argument is, so are modules like Rings, Plaits, Entity Ultra Perc, Pamela’s New Workout, etc.

And there’s nothing stopping one from taking those more complex, comprehensive modules and using them in a patch with fundamental building blocks. Or processing the audio, modulating them, sequencing them in uniquely modular-ish ways.

I’ve started reading Your Anxiety Beast And You. The premise is familiar at this point: anxiety is a vital survival mechanism, but as with other things, human social/technological process has outpaced human evolution. So we should treat anxiety not as an enemy to avoid and dread, but as a well-meaning, vigilant but obnoxious and irrational primitive friend who’s trying to look out for us.

It’s like pain. You absolutely do want to be able to feel pain when it’s an appropriate warning that helps you prevent or minimize injury. But any pain that lingers after you already are aware of a problem — especially chronic pain — is extremely unhelpful.

reflection

I listen to my own music quite a lot, and have some favorites and some that I don’t revisit very often.

This is how bad I am at marketing: I’m going to say, right after its release, that Kintsugi is not something I want to listen to for a while. Not because I think it’s bad, but because it expressed my feelings — and my feelings got worse over the course of the album. Listening to it tends to pull me into anxiety. What I need right now is soothing, uplifting, settling music. As Cesar Cruz said, “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” — and I’ve definitely been more on the disturbed side.

I’ve written before about making a successor to Float — not featuring any particular gear, technique, bit of music theory, or even sound, but just the mood. I am more serious about it this time. That’s my goal: make soothing but not vapid ambient music.

The emotional outcome of listening to music though, as I’ve also written about before, is sometimes counterintuitive. Like how listening to the blues makes one feel better, or heavy metal can be relaxing. I definitely get that with some dark ambient stuff (including my own) where the intent seems to be weird and mysterious but I can just slip into it and it’s cozy. Maybe just because I’m weird. 😉

I mentioned that low blood sugar moment yesterday. I stood up for a bathroom break, felt weird and kind of swimmy/dizzy. I thought of checking my blood sugar, and it was 70. That’s not super low for a non-diabetic person, especially if it was fasting. But it’s quite low for me, given that it was after breakfast and I wasn’t exerting myself; I would expect somewhere around twice that number. I ate a brownie and drank a not-sugar-free ginger ale and felt better.

After lunch it happened again, with a reading of 76.

Anxiety and diabetes interact with each other — diabetics have a higher prevalence of anxiety than non-diabetics, hypoglycemia can feel a lot like panic or can trigger panic, and I’m sure there are other links as well.

Caffeine also interacts with both, through stimulating adrenaline and binding to adenosine. It can reduce both insulin production and sensitivity in diabetics (though it doesn’t have signficant effects on it in non-diabetics… and for some diabetics it may even have the opposite effect). While caffeine doesn’t directly cause anxiety, its physical effects are similar to anxiety’s and can compound them, and it can trigger panic attacks. And I’ve cut out caffeine. (To little effect so far, but then, caffeine withdrawal also can have effects for about 9 days.)

And then there’s inulin (not insulin). It’s in the probiotic supplement I started taking, and also in the decaf/chicory coffee I started drinking. It’s known to lower cortisol and also blood sugar, as well as being a prebiotic that affects gut flora balance, and the gut-brain connection is another complicated factor.

So I need to watch my blood glucose carefully for a bit. I’m not generally in the habit of checking it regularly, because it’s a literal and figurative pain and I don’t generally tend to learn much from occasional samples anymore. Today after breakfast it was 135, which is pretty normal, and just now 86 when glucose should be mostly cleared and I drank some of that chicory coffee.

Awareness of what my body is doing and how I might help it is good, but worry is not helpful. I’m telling myself “the doctor appointment is next Tuesday” whenever those sorts of thoughts come up.

Today and yesterday have indeed been more tolerable overall. I don’t know if I’m simply learning to cope better, getting used to it, or the ashwaganda or inulin or lack of caffeine are helping, or what. It’s certainly not to the point where I feel like I have it under control and help isn’t needed, but “less miserable” is always good.

(pardon my French)

I’m not following the news too closely for rather obvious reasons, but this momentum on releasing the Epstein files really does feel like the beginning of the end for MAGA. 417-1 vote in the House and 100-0 in the Senate. That’s a lot of people no longer willing to risk their own careers to hold the line for Trump. Not even the ones who are not personally looking at re-election themselves.

Fingers crossed.

released: Kintsugi

As usual, it’s free/pay-what-you-want. The notes are here. Enjoy!

That lo-fi ISD sampler arrived and I played with it a little bit. It is indeed satisfyingly crunchy and gross as a sample recorder, with loop points that have a gap and a pop. There’s also a “feedback” mode which acts as a lowpass filter (and downsampler, but that filter is dark enough to hide most of the artifacts) with feedback.

The internal mic doesn’t disengage when you plug in to the input, which at first annoyed me but I think I’m just going to take that as it is; if I want to process Eurorack stuff with it I’m going to accept the extra noise. I can always wrap it in a towel to muffle things a bit, or intentionally stick it next to the desk fan or run a finger over the case.

I’ve been doing my best to cope with the anxiety and physical symptoms. Right now the worst thing is getting caught up thinking about it, rehearsing what I’m going to say to the doctor, etc. I’ve been telling myself, there’s no reason to dwell on it now, the proper time is when I’m at the appointment and that’s only a week away now. I’ve been distracting myself, further reducing the intake of bad/political news, and getting a bit of walking in.

This morning I actually felt pretty good to start, but then had a blood sugar crash after a breakfast of oatmeal with (no-sugar-added applesauce). Things certainly do vary.

Just for the fun of it, I memorized the rune chant in Heilung’s In Maidjan, the part that begins at about 3:54 in this live performance:

I can’t read or name most of the runes by sight, but it’s very satisfying to be able to chant this along while listening. Their music goes right to my heart, lifting my mood and giving me comfort. Having looked up translations I know a lot of it is about protection, healing, courage, and the types of love that the Greeks would call agape and philia (and perhaps storge). (You know, all the stuff that MAGA is opposed to…) It’s not all just about a badass image.

A couple of books arrived. The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America is about some key electronic music creative pioneers of the 60s and early 70s: Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Don Buchla, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra. I saw the announcement over at ModWiggler and it sounded pretty fascinating. At the same time I ordered Your Anxiety Beast And You.

First I have some library ebooks to finish. I’m currently reading The Jasmine Throne, a very India-inspired fantasy where several cultures have been jammed together uncomfortably into an empire and one, which used to rule through magic and terror but was socially liberal, is now heavily oppressed by a misogynistic socially conservative tyrant. There are rebels who want a return to form and bloody revenge, and fewer who want a better and more equal world. Interpersonal, cultural, class and political relationships are a tangled mess. It is fascinating, but unfortunately I don’t entirely like anybody. I do kind of want a couple of the main characters to just kiss already though. 😛

After that, I have A Sorceress Comes to Call, about a girl whose mother is an evil sorceress. Seems like it’ll be fun. [UPDATE: my library loans are expiring too quickly because I made the mistake of checking out a couple of long books plus this all at once. I’ll come back to this one later.]

Starless held my attention throughout, unlike what some reviewers had said. The relationship of the two main characters was weird; it was obvious that they deeply loved each other immediately due to the whole fate thing, but they didn’t allow it to become romantic love until late in the book for reasons that mostly felt like story convention. I liked some of the characters and enjoyed the weird magic, but overall I think maybe 7/10?

Zukunfthall

After eight years (!), Valhalla DSP released a new plugin. FutureVerb combines a “too clean” high-end reverb with a characterful “echo” section which itself can spread delay taps and diffusion into reverb. Just the Echo portion alone would make for a fantastic plugin as far as I’m concerned, with features that don’t overlap that much with the also-incredible Valhalla Delay — some granular/reverse pitch shifting, a Spread control that does all kinds of interesting things, etc. Like many Valhalla plugins, controls have macro effects depending on models/modes selected, and it’s all really well thought out.

The routing is simultaneously serial and parallel — you choose whether the echo or reverb goes first, and its 100% wet output is the input to the other side, while a Level knob affects how much of the output is audible. This makes it super versatile, and useful even for effects that aren’t echoes and reverbs. (Of course, I could route this in Bitwig with separate plugins easily enough. But when you come down to it, this thing sounds great.)

So it’s definitely a winner. KvR being what it is, it has its detractors: someone who thinks you can’t use the word “realistic” to describe a reverb if you don’t specify the room size/shape and materials in a physical manner and place sound sources and microphones inside it; people who failed all reading comprehension and didn’t try the demo who think it’s just a “dumbed down” version of their delay and room reverb combined in one plugin; people who refuse to use any reverb that doesn’t have built-in ducking; people who simple say “I have enough reverbs.” Okay, whatever. For me it’s a very strong candidate for new effect plugin of the year.

Make Noise has formally announced Multiwave, shown its release video and is taking preorders. I think it’s pretty neat and I could use it to make the kind of music I want to make, but I’m unwilling to sacrifice anything else for it.

I still think they’ve made a tactical mistake in how they introduced Polimaths, QXG and Multiwave as a group, even before they were ready to share the details about Multiwave. It gives the impression you need 4 modules (two QXGs) to make the most of any of them, while also making Multimod and Jumbler feel like they don’t quite fit in. I think there’s actually a little truth in that, but also either Polimaths or Multiwave would be a fairly powerful part of any modular system without the whole set.

There’s new firmware for the Elmyra 2, with cleaner oscillators, improved delay and reverb and filters, a comb filter and some other stuff. At first I was like “why would I want it to sound clean, when dirt is part of the charm?” But with the analog distortion on board, and general stacking of potentially complex voices, and comb filtering etc. I think it’ll be more than fine. But I want to go ahead and get Kintsugi finished and released before I mess with that.

I got my first quote on chimney stuff — or rather, I didn’t. The company that seemed most promising wants to charge me $230 just to look at it (visually and with camera scopes) to determine what needs to be fixed, despite my saying we don’t use the fireplace and just want exterior leaks fixed. That should be a free estimate. My preference would be honestly to not have a fireplace at all and reclaim that entire wall.

So I used another company’s web form, while not holding my breath for an answer given how most contractors are about those things. It’s looking increasingly like I will just slap a panel on the bottom myself, which will be extremely simple but won’t fix the leak that caused the rot in the first place. Maybe a siding company is more appropriate for that?

Urr the Bearsmasher

It just so happened that Neatorama posted this video yesterday. It’s very relevant and describes what’s going on with me. (And yeah, there’s a just slightly subtle dig at Trump.)

Anyway, I went ahead and made an appointment with my #1 choice from among the PHMNPs. That’ll be mid-December, while the primary care doc is in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile I still need to deal with things myself; I do think things are getting a little bit better than they were but I need to keep taking it easy. Here’s what I’m doing:

no caffeine
less soda. Carbonated beverages can contribute to bloating, which is one of the symptoms I’m having. Also there’s the “gut-brain connection”; beyond just the discomfort or worrying about symptoms, what goes on in the gut biome influences mood. (There is a lot of feedback between mental and physical health.)
trying to eat healthy and gently in general, to make it easier on my digestive system and reduce blood sugar extremes.
drink herbal tea. Lemon+ginger is good for digestion. “Tension Tamer” has some things which may be beneficial for both the gut and nervous system and is pretty tasty too. Chamomile isn’t my favorite, but it’s also calming.
I’m considering some supplements. Fish oil, ashwaganda, probiotics with inulin.
Stay hydrated. We do have a whole-home humidifier that stops our skin from drying out too terribly, reduces static electricity and is better for our musical instruments, but it’s still definitely drier this time of year, as my cracked lips will attest.
I’m going to try to get at least a little exercise. On days when I’m at the office taking a couple of walking breaks is easy; at home we’re not in the best neighborhood for walking but there’s a park nearby I can drive to. Sunlight also is beneficial for mental health, both the vitamin D and the effects on circadian rhythms, and my religious side reminds me it’s Ra-Horakhty’s year.
Distracting myself. Hobbies and creative pursuits are supposed to be really helpful against anxiety and I find that’s true.

I had a dentist appointment Monday, and honestly it was relaxing for the most part. Is that weird? I mean, getting stabbed in the gums and having my gag reflex triggered a couple of times wasn’t great. But just lying back in the comfy chair and closing my eyes and letting someone else take care of me for a bit? Yes. Plus, I had already had a fairly pleasant drive, sunlight and music on the way there.

Did I mention, my album Suspension was accepted by the St. Louis County library for their “Listen Up STL” program? They’re making a bunch of local music available for free listening. Not that it wasn’t already free on Bandcamp, but still.

I’ve decided to hold off on further modular changes for a bit. I did some fun things with Wave Packet’s F-Sync input which none of my other modules can do. Plus there are a couple of potentially interesting things I have my eye on: Tom Erbe is working on something new for Make Noise, and Fancyyyyy Synthesis teased a new “21st century complex oscillator” which is super intriguing. I mean, this description is catnip for nerds:

Harmonic wavefolding, blended harmonic frequency shifting, damped feedback and asymmetric phase modulation, harmonic stretching, damped sync, and a universal function generator with multiple trigger responses that can drive pulsar synthesis — all combined in a CV-controllable matrix that can smoothly morph between states. K-ACCUMULATOR also features variably spaced harmonic, just-intone or equal temperament quantization, a unique root frequency architecture, and a new type of delta-sigma pattern generator.

That said, the first demo, which has blown a lot of minds, actually didn’t grab me that much sonically. I hear some potential in between the lines, but it also sounds broadly like software synths I already have, and there were no particular moments where I absolutely loved the sound. A lot will depend on the next few demos, and the size and price.

queen of pu….trescense! Boo!

I am deeply disappointed in the cowardice, tactical stupidity, and utter uselessness of the ~~eight Democratic~~ seven Democratic and one Dem-leaning independent senators who caved in and gave the Republicans everything they wanted after a 40-day standoff. They got no concessions at all, not even a promise of a future vote on funding health care again (for whatever that’s worth).

Angus King, Tim Kaine, John Fetterman, Dick Durbin, Maggie Hasan, Jeanne Shaheen, Catherine Matso, and Jacky Rosen, and also Chuck Schumer who coordinated this: fuck you very much, you spineless worms.

Every single one of them was already not going to seek re-election so they personally had nothing to lose — but it undermines confidence in the party for future elections, and it undermines the recently demonstrated knowledge that we all knew the shutdown was Republicans’ fault all along. Editorials are popping up from furloughed forest rangers who’ve been living in their cars, people who were losing their SNAP benefits, etc. that they wanted Democrats to keep fighting, not render this entire thing moot. Shaheen’s daughter, herself a politician, was calling for standing firm a couple of days ago and now has publicly disagreed with her mom’s decision. I will note that the big victories last Tuesday were not brought about by the centrists and fossils of the party, but by progressives and by outraged, engaged voters who properly appreciate what’s at stake.

Yet another example of how we live in the stupidest timeline.

Now, there’s still some debate and amendments and more voting in the Senate… and then it goes to the House. Which means Johnson has to finally reopen the House. Which means Adelita Grijalva finally gets sworn in, and adds the 218th signature to the discharge petition which triggers a vote to release the Epstein files. Which is all well and good… but this would have happened inevitably anyway.

Meanwhile, people will lose their healthcare coverage, and will suffer and die needlessly. Remember the “death panels” scare when public healthcare was being debated? …yeah.

I’ve decided to quite caffeine cold turkey, at least for a bit, to see if that helps. No coffee, no soda with caffeine, no tea except herbal. The anxiety stuff and what I believe are physical side effects of it are really kicking my ass, and caffeine definitely does play with anxiety. Except during my worst previous round of anxiety in 2020, I had a habit of maybe a couple of cups of coffee and a couple of Coke Zeros per day with seemingly no ill effects, although maybe they were just not bad enough to notice. Sometimes caffeine will fix a headache or give me an energy boost, but mostly it’s just a habit. So far today’s been a bad one for anxiety anyway, but let’s just not compound the problem.

On a more positive note, I’ve finished recording Kintsugi, which will be my sixth release for the year. The entire theme is about piecing together broken shards. Of course there’s the philosophical side of kintsugi, which I find particularly appropriate both personally and nationally right now, and “broken but beautiful” describes a lot of the timbres and textures that I enjoy. But there were many separate recording sessions where I’d just create a single drone, or a simple sequence or something to loop. These were put together with a little extra material, to make 14 individual named parts. After mastering I’m going to merge those to three final tracks, totaling a bit under an hour.