Starthief

RNG

I didn’t mention it before, but I’ve given up on the Zenowell Luna. I just can’t consistently find the right positioning and combination of water and gel to get it to conduct well and give me the right sensation… usually it’s nothing, sometimes it’s an irritating prickle. And I have no real evidence it was relaxing me.

I tried a “bee breathing” (Bhramari Pranayama) meditation and it was kind of weird, but that night I got some excellent sleep and my HRV was a little bit higher (21 instead of more like 16). The next morning I did it more, and my average HRV was a whopping 56! So I thought, maybe I’ve got something here. But I haven’t been able to replicate it. One important difference is the temperature in the house was fairly chilly — we hadn’t switched from AC back to heat because we weren’t expecting that much of a drop in temps. So maybe that was the entire difference. Cooler temps (down to some point) are supposed to be better for sleeping, after all.

I’ve seen that meditation before, but tried it because it’s in The Vagus Nerve Reset. But I’m not ready to recommend that book, because it goes along with polyvagal theory (which involves some not very good science; yes the vagus nerve is important in regulating stress/calm but there’s no evidence for some of the claims in the theory) and because the wording of the exercise was vague; to really understand how to do it I had to resort to YouTube videos. The book is also more focused on trauma than general anxiety etc.

Yesterday as I was leaving work, the silicone tip for my earbuds came off in my right ear and got good and stuck. I had to drive home so my spouse could help me get it out with a pair of tweezers. Not a pleasant experience. This isn’t the first time the earbud came out and the tip didn’t, but it was already partway out before and not nearly so troublesome. I decided to go for some replacement tips, and chose Symbio W for its silicone-coated foam, which apparently some people favor both for comfort and sound. I’ll find out soon enough.

I don’t know what got me thinking of this the other day, but I think I’ve realized why the internet isn’t “the information superhighway” anymore. Okay, four reasons: 1) it was never a good metaphor, 2) it’s unnecessarily long, 3) everyone was tired of hearing it, and 4) the internet stopped primarily being about information.

The internet really is about different things depending on who you are — it’s primarily about vacuuming up data and selling it to advertisers and governments, for the big tech types. But for the most part “content” has replaced “information.” There is probably more misinformation, disinformation, and non-information than information out there now.

And I had a flashback to how school libraries, in the age when they were relevant to me, had been rebranded “media centers” because apparently books just weren’t the future. It was all going to be microfilm/microfiche and films and recordings and maybe even involve computers someday somehow. 🙂 But “library” has the Latin word “liber” at its core, which is perfectly both “book” and “freedom”…

The long-awaited u-he Zebra 3 was released yesterday and… I’m not even looking at it. I made that decision at the end of last year and I’m sticking to it. I have enough stuff to work with, some of it’s pretty new to me still, and Zebra is a Very Big Deal that one could go really deep with, and I just don’t need that in my life. Maybe another time. I’m reserving my one synth plugin slot for the year for something smaller and more specialized, along the lines of Sine Machine.

I did wind up going for AudioThing Octaves, as one of the three FX plugins I’m allowing myself. It’s an emulation of a specific old-school passive bandpass filter than Hainbach likes, plus some extra features to turn it into a resonant filterbank. It sounded gorgeous in my testing, and it’s cheap.

I finally have the beginnings of work on the next album. Not a recording yet but a software patch and a plan to add some stuff to it. I just need to put in the time, when the focus and energy for it are there and I’m not lured away by walking in nice weather, playing Guild Wars 2, or a birthday dinner for a family member.

Speaking of GW2: I released my second Ranger from service, and finally got around to starting a Mechanist… which I’ve been avoiding because of the large numbers of weird green mecha-leading folks in the game. But now I understand the appeal. While some characters are really good at, say, heavy single target damage, cleaning up trash mobs rapidly, or sheer survival, these have it all while also being ridiculously easy to play the entire time. The big green thing zooming rudely through the camera’s near plane on a regular basis and standing in the way of things when doing “town stuff” with NPCs is still pretty obnoxious though.

calibrating…

After having about three frustrating days with higher blood sugar, I decided to go for the Dexcom Stelo. It’s an over-the-counter version of their continuous blood glucose monitor, a “patch” (with a small needle) that lasts for 15 days and transmits readings to a phone app. I’m told that hardware-wise it is identical to their G7, which is a prescription-only version, but for regulatory reasons the Stelo is “not intended for diabetics on insulin.” Okay whatever.

What I’ve been doing recently is checking my blood sugar before each meal, and deciding based on the reading and what I’m about to eat whether to take fast-acting insulin, and how much. So, three data points per day, with a process that can be awkward and sometimes a bit painful.

From Stelo, I get updated readings every few minutes. I can see when and how much my blood sugar dips in mid-morning. I can get a notification if it starts to spike because I’ve had too many carbs and not enough insulin — information I might otherwise miss because it might normalize before the next meal. I can see what it does while I’m sleeping, and how it responds to activity. I can make more informed decisions.

Integration with Oura (which was pretty much why I thought of trying this) is seamless and lets me correlate glucose with the other health data.

(None of this is useful to people without diabetes or prediabetes, according to dieticians and endocrinologists, despite claims from Dexcom and Oura and influencers. But it’s stuff I wish I knew years ago. For a diabetic, the two goals are to keep the overall average from being too high, and to keep things as even as possible without extreme highs and lows. A1C only measures the first… and managing the second can also help with the first as well as reducing hunger and keeping up a good energy level.)

I got a 2-pack, figuring that a month would be enough to either:

stop using it when those are done, having learned some things I can use in the future.
~~decide that it’s not that useful, but with a relatively small investment.~~ (It’s already proven itself useful.)
get a subscription and keep using it, hopefully reducing my need for finger stick tests.

Accuracy wasn’t amazing yesterday, reading about 20 points higher than finger sticks (except during a spike) — but still good for showing overall trends. Dexcom does say that’s expected on the first day. But this morning it was within 1 point of a finger stick, which is pretty great.

I finished reading that massive, weighty tome Full Catastrophe Living. Overall… I think I would recommend Fully Present over it, because it’s a much more reasonable size. If you want to read FCL, I think the first 40-50% or so that outlines the various meditation/yoga practices is best, and then any chapters from the rest of the book which might specifically apply to or interest you. The meditation techniques and overall theory are certainly covered elsewhere, though perhaps in less detail.

And I started but didn’t finish How We’d Talk if the English Had Won in 1066. I was expecting more humor and general geeky fun. Instead, it was extremely tedious. This is the third book I’ve set aside unfinished this year.

Now I’m reading T. Kingfisher’s Hemlock and Silver, which is WAY more entertaining. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read from this author, though this might be the funniest one yet. I’m going to have to grab the rest of her works, I think.

troubles

I haven’t gotten back to music-making mode yet or in-depth exploration of the new stuff. I did try out a couple of plugins, haven’t committed to anything yet though.

Audiority released free Pyros Versio firmware, based on its Pyros plugin. I was all excited to give it a try, thinking it might be competition for Lacrima Versio. But then I checked out the original plugin, which is an older one that escaped my notice, and… it’s quite good. I like the additional options and potential subtlety/control of the plugin more than the idea of heavier modulation or hardware location (*) in the firmware. But I think I might wait for a sale and to see if I change my mind.

Node Audio has a new microtuning plugin, Pitch Grid. More structured than Entonal Studio, it’s all about the 2D lattice, which is a part of the theory I still don’t quite grasp but it’s helping me appreciate it a bit more. You can stretch the octave/equave with one knob, and skew the tuning with another, using it to align your scale with markers on a pitch ruler that are calibrated to JI, the harmonic series or an EDO scale. There’s a button to optimize the stretch and skew to make selected intervals as in tune as possible, which quickly generates compromises such as meantone scales, perfect triads but stretched octaves, etc. It’s also helping me understand how limits work in Just Intonation on a more practical level. It emphasizes mapping a piano keyboard (or arbitrary number of notes per octave/equave) to a tuning, with a knob for a mode offset. Very nice. But there’s a bug where it destroys MPE pressure data, which is super important to me… so I’m holding out for that to be fixed.

The other stuff I’ve tried has been easy to say “meh” to.

My mother-in-law had a serious health issue last week and had to spend a few days in the hospital. Now her mother in a tiny town in northern Missouri is in the hospital, with a heart issue and complications, and she’s in no condition to drive up from Louisiana for a visit. My spouse might go down and pick her up, but is waiting for the word. (Update: she’s been discharged and is at home now.)

We got the official diagnosis on my dad. He’s got frontotemporal dementia (FTD), from a buildup of the tau protein in the brain. Like Alzheimer’s and most kinds of dementia, there is not currently any cure, though there are meds that may slow the progression, and he’s on one.

FTD is more of a group of diseases, rather than a specific one with a single fixed set of symptoms. Information about it often talks about trouble with language, behavior changes, lack of empathy, and inappropriate behavior. But the main symptoms my dad has is trouble with memory (both failure to remember, and “remembering” events that never happened), general confusion, and making even simple decisions. He also has trouble with writing, though reading is okay and speaking/understanding people is fine. He seems generally happy and makes goofy jokes just like he always did, and if he’s had any change in his personality, he’s mellowed a bit and gotten a bit less inappropriate. He does sometimes notice some detail and then fixate on it, and sometimes false memories form around them — like a recent story about “black blobs of tar” left on a neighbor’s roof from some dispute between two roofing companies, which were just normal attic vents. He’s definitely reliant on my mom for a lot of daily life stuff, and that does put a lot of pressure on her.

As for my own health recently… blood sugar is going okay, with some days where all three pre-meal readings are below 100 or at least below 120, and some days where a couple of them might reach the low 130s. Taking less insulin makes my appetite easier to manage. Also, small quantities of nuts (peanuts, walnuts, occasionally pistachios) are a good, satisfying snack, as are small tomatoes or boiled eggs. Belvita cookies (not to be confused with Velveeta) for breakfast don’t spike blood sugar and do tend to be satisfying, although homemade bread seems OK too in moderation.

On the mental side, my calm certainly has been challenged by Trump and his threats of war crimes and genocide that hinted at a nuclear strike. It was another TACO Tuesday (Trump Always Chickens Out)… or was it all meant to manipulate the market, so he and his cronies could buy low during a bullshit panic and then sell after the stock market recovered on the news of a bullshit ceasefire? Regardless, I’m at least glad the doomsday devices are still sitting in their silos. But there isn’t exactly peace or stability either.

Trump started a needless, useless war with no goals, then seemed to set the goal of fixing the trouble that he started and he isn’t even getting that right. He’s succeeded in bombing a girl’s school, a “double-tap” strike on a bridge to kill the rescue crews who came to aid wounded civilians, the deaths of several US soldiers and severe damage to US military bases and allied bases, losing a whole bunch of aircraft, depleting US munitions, withdrawing some of the watch on North Korea, destroying a whole bunch of oil and infrastructure, disrupting global trade, ending sanctions on Russia, Iran charging new fees on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and showing everyone (who didn’t realize it already) just how low he is willing to go and how crazy he is. There are Republicans calling for his impeachment… although of course not the ones currently in office. A lot of former MAGA types and right-wing talking anuses have turned against him over this. There are articles of impeachment out for Hegseth too.

Maybe this will finally be the thing that ends his career and that of his flunkies. One can only hope it does so before even worse war crimes, tragedies and self-owns happen. He still has the nuclear codes. But how often have we heard “Republicans in disarray!” and “Trump is losing his support” and “rats fleeing the sinking ship” and all of that, and yet they’re back kissing his ass, covering for his crimes and blunders, and supporting his lies 48 hours later?

Anyway, this was supposed to be about my anxiety… I held on. I was worried but didn’t panic, I was a bit stressed but didn’t lose it, I got mad but I didn’t freak out. I’d really rather not face real-world existential threats as a test of my coping skills though.

released: XQSTCRPS

The new album is released!

Notes are here.

Something I haven’t thought about in a while is adding tags to my posts here… I stopped bothering quite some time ago, so if you try it you get very incomplete results. I really don’t want to go back and re-tag everything, so… if there’s some way to remove tags from WordPress entirely I might do that, when I get around to it.

Honestly the way I often talk about multiple subjects per post I’m not sure tags would have been that helpful anyway. Low encapsulation here. 🙂

easier than expected

GTE was delivered yesterday, and is pretty fun. I’m not entirely in modular experimentation mode because I’m wrapping up mastering of XQSTCRPS, but I gave it a whirl and did some crazy PWM stuff, the expected gate extraction from LFOs, and a bit of recombination of gates to alter sequences. It’ll get more of a play soon since I’m done with mastering and art and on to writing up the notes — I have a list of ideas and experiments.

Yesterday I did two interviews for potential new developers at work. It was the first time I was the (primary) interviewer rather than interviewee, and I had a sort of second-order concern that I was going to be nervous — either several days in advance, the night before, the morning before, or during. As it turns out, I faced it all with calm and had a fairly chill day. The only thing that went wrong was I forgot to take my meds in the morning, and found that Lexapro at 4 PM does indeed contribute to insomnia.

(This, after having a fairly bad time of it for several days when the previous team lead announced she was leaving and I’d be taking over. This work on dealing with my anxiety has really gotten somewhere.)

(Both of the interviewees did well, and I think either of them would likely be a good addition to the team. Choosing one over the other is a challenge; I have my opinion but it could be swayed in the meeting we’re about to have to discuss them.)

done and done

I went ahead and bought Make Noise GTE. This means, if I stick to my No New Gear Year pledge, there will be no more changes to my modular setup (aside maybe rearranging) for at least 280 days.

Honestly, that feels good. I hope it will continue to feel good later in the year if there’s something else really cool that I could use. But I repeat:

I definitely do not need another oscillator.
I don’t need another filter.
I don’t need another modulation source.
I don’t need another effect.
I don’t need another controller.
I don’t need more stuff to explore, to provide inspiration, or to get music made.
🎵 We don’t need another hero… (sorry)

I have also finished the recording phase of the next album, XQSTCRPS.

I’m not generally that big a fan of disemvoweled album names, and my process differed from the the surrealist game. But I did want album titles for every letter of the alphabet. 😉 Also I hope the album title makes more sense if you catch how the song titles work.

First I recorded something. Then I took that something and sampled it, borrowed bits of its rhythm, melody, and sound design, and made something new (in the same tempo and key). Then I took parts from those two somethings to make the third something, and so on. I started seeing it as imposed continuity, as the encrustation of momentary improvised phrases into a kind of norm or tradition, and also as a process of decay and evolution… plants growing in the mulch of their ancestors.

“Gee! No, GTE.”

My almost-no-new-gear pledge has been going great, and I haven’t been tempted by any new or old hardware or software… until now.

Yesterday, I had the thought that Walk 4, and to a lesser extent Nibbler and Clep Diaz, might benefit from a clock multiplier. Each of those modules takes an incoming clock, and uses it for partial steps toward a slower whole. Walk 4 divides the frequency by several octaves (or non-octave intervals) if you want more detailed, less steppy outputs… it’d be nice to generate harmonics and subharmonics rather than sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-subharmonics.

I started thinking maybe 4ms SCM (Shuffling Clock Multiplier) would be a good candidate for my one (not preordered in 2025) module acquisition of the year. With multiple rate outputs, and CV inputs to both mess with the rhythm and to rotate the multipliers around some of the outputs, it could be a little extra fun. But I thought: first I’m going to experiment with what I have, because I know some of my modules have a limited ability to multiply clock timing…

Today, Make Noise announced a new module in the NUSS line. GTE (Gestural Time Extractor, or GaTE) is an analog module that takes an input CV and switches on one of 8 gates depending on the level; it also generates a couple of extra outputs that can detect level changes, and has an optional clock input so the gates only change on a clock pulse. The Space knob changes the ranges of the 8 levels, so you can have it rapidly fire off some triggers and then go silent… lots of rhythmic control is possible. There isn’t any single prescribed usage for it, but there are a lot of possibilities. One of those happens to be clock multiplication, but only assuming your input is a linear saw or triangle wave. (Like the Triggers module in Bitwig Grid: a “phase” input is subdivided into trigger outs.) It’s also perfect for the NUSS index CVs, such as the one that Multimod generates.

(The name reminds me of the old telephone company. Apparently through a couple of steps it was absorbed into Verizon.)

The more I thought about it, the more fun I started to think this could be. Not necessarily to use with Multimod’s index output, but for all manner of other things.

I tried that clock multiplication experiment. Stages was my best bet, and it operated okay but can only multiply by 4, and only if the input frequency isn’t much more than 1KHz. Marbles had a lower maximum and seemed less stable. Mimeophon also wasn’t too good at multiplying clocks, even though it’s capable of short enough delay times to generate nice audio itself. But K-Accumulator…

Yes, it’s overkill to use a mega-flagship oscillator as a clock multiplier. But its tracking mode is adept at keeping up with audio rate input and responding a few octaves higher. And then you can do some extra tricks with the patch anyway. So I think for no more often than I would want to use multiplication, I’ll stick with that.

Giving serious thought to declaring GTE as my 2026 module though. On the one hand, maybe I should wait to make sure there isn’t something even more amazing that I will want. On the other, isn’t that just another kind of FOMO? Hmm. I really don’t need other oscillators, filters, modulation sources, controllers etc., and this is exactly the kind of interesting, multi-purpose/no-purpose experimental semi-utility module that is probably the only kind I should even be looking at.

Speaking of music, I now have about 42 minutes recorded, a plan and material to record the final track, a nice progression of track names that fits the theme, and some general ideas about artwork. If I didn’t have to sleep last night and work today I might have recorded two tracks in a single night and had it finished. But there is no rush other than a creative rush 🙂

On the diabetes front, I am not quite as liberated from insulin as I hoped I might be. What I’ve settled into is checking my blood before each meal (or before we go somewhere for dinner) and making a decision based on that number vs. what I’m probably about to eat. Sometimes my fasting or pre-meal number looks great, and if unless I’m going for something very carby, I can skip the shot. I might take less than my old dosage if things seem intermediate, or make a different decision about what to eat.

This has the side effect of keeping me more aware of what I’m eating and what it does to me. Ideally, I’d count carbs, and either use a continuous glucose monitor for a while, or measure at intervals after eating as well as before, and use a formula to determine dosage the way folks with Type 1 do. But I think this is going to work out fine.

I’ve now had my Oura ring for a month, and the first subscription payment went through. I’m actually OK with the subscription fee, though of course I’d love to not pay it and still get all the features 😉 There are minor software updates approximately weekly. While sometimes advice/insights conflict a bit, I feel like it does a pretty great job with the data it can get just by shining some lights at a small amount of skin. The sleep tracking is especially good, and is leading to better habits that have led to better sleep. The heart data it gives me has turned out to be more reassuring than not, once I got used to a few surprises. And it confirmed that yes, I absolutely was overdoing it the other day when I cut down the remaining unhealthy bit of tree in my parents’ back yard and helped break it down to put in yard waste bags.

I’ve noticed a couple of other people wearing them now that I have one. They’re a little discreet but not that discreet. My doctor was one of those people, which is kind of encouraging.

a winner is me

I had my diabetes checkup yesterday. Check this out:

6.1. This is the lowest it has been since… probably since I was diagnosed actually.

6.0 or less (or 5.7 according to a stricter version) is considered totally normal. Up to 6.5 is “prediabetes” if you haven’t been diagnosed yet, “well controlled” if you have. Above 6.5 is where there is risk of complications in the long term.

This doesn’t mean I’m “cured” or almost cured. But my doctor said I don’t need to take fast-acting insulin anymore. (Or “as needed” but he thinks I won’t need it.)

It took a while for that to sink in. Instead of 29 injections per week, now I probably need just 8. I don’t have to take an insulin pen, a needle and that bulky needle clipper with me to restaurants. I don’t have to reject spontaneous “let’s stop for dinner on our way back” ideas. I don’t have to lift up my shirt and inject myself in public or go do that in a bathroom. I don’t have to carry used pen needles around in my pocket until I get it home, or risk tossing it in regular trash. I will have to deal with 75% fewer of the stupid little foil tabs and plastic dingies that like to scatter everywhere. The supply of pen needles I just restocked is going to last almost two years. The supply of Humalog I have… I just restocked it recently too, and if I end up going a few weeks without needing it I’m going to donate it.

(Notice how pain isn’t even really a factor here? The injections almost never actually hurt. In fact, I’m going to be testing my blood sugar more at least for the next few days just to make sure things are fine. So far though, things are indeed fine.)

Whatever mud people want to sling at Ozempic, or people taking GLP-1 agonists solely for weight loss… it was meant for diabetes first and it works. (It also helps protect against stroke and cardiac events as long as you take it, which its competitors don’t.) That 2022 number is when I first went on Ozempic, and 2024 is when I went on the higher dose. Far more effective than just “exercise more and eat a healthier diet”. I did a pretty intense few months of exercise and diet (10 hours of taiko rehearsals a week plus jog/walking with ankle weights, low-carb and calorie restricted), the improvement was limited and temporary, and I was also kind of miserable and felt like I had little time for myself. Such things work better when you don’t force them too hard. The actual weight loss effects of Ozempic have been minimal for me. I was actually planning to ask my doctor about going to Wegovy instead (the same thing in a higher dosage) but when I saw that test result and he said drop the insulin…. I’ll just leave it where it is.

Since A1C represents about 3 months worth of blood glucose, I also wonder if dealing with my anxiety (and also gut health issues) has helped with blood sugar. It’s very possible. It’s good to know all the bread I’ve been making hasn’t messed me up 😉 It’s quite possibly healthier than other things I was eating anyway, carbs or not.

accumulated awesomeness

I didn’t end up doing much last week because I was feeling a bit under the weather. (And we did have some “interesting” weather… gloom, then a really lovely couple of hours, then strong winds and thunderstorms and tornado warnings followed immediately by a band of snow. This week it hit 15 degrees and it’s aiming for 81 by the weekend. But that’s neither here nor there.) But I’ve recovered, and I recorded 3 more tracks.

Full Catastrophe Living, that massive tome about mindfulness, is at least a pretty swift read. It’s pretty much the book version of the 8-week MBSR program (Mindulness-Based Stress Reduction) — and either other mindfulness books have borrowed from the same material, or they share enough common ancestry that it’s almost reading like a review of the same material. But it’s kind of encouraging that multiple books are in agreement about the fundamentals.

The void in my rack has been filled; K-Accumulator came on Monday. It is as amazing as I had hoped, and probably the most complex of complex oscillators while having a very knobby, minimal-fuss interface. No cheat sheets!

First, the feels: I like the sound quite a lot. As I explore it, I’m delighted over and over again by the surprises it has in store, but it also does plain simple workhorse tones readily enough, and plenty of the sorts of things you’d expect from FM/PM and pulsar synthesis if you’ve worked with them, and chaos and growls and weird formant-y things. While I don’t feel like having it will cause a huge shift in my music, it will fit in well into my toolbox, and offers me much more than what I’ve given up to fit it in. The minor design/feature nitpicks I have are super minor. Bravo, Fancyyy & grrrwaaa.

A typical “complex oscillator” configuration consists of a primary oscillator that does the main business, a second one intended mainly to affect the timbre of the primary, and a waveshaper. In K-Accumulator, this is one of 8 different options in a matrix of phase modulation and amplitude modulation, which you can dial in and crossfade between with a Morph knob and CV input. Other positions in the matrix are either variants of that scheme, or feed back the primary oscillator’s own output as its own modulation source.

Normally, if you FM a sine wave oscillator with its own output, it bends the shape of the sine toward a more sawtooth-like shape (while also disrupting the tuning), but that’s all you get. Here though, the primary oscillator has harmonic shifting and stretching as well as harmonic wavefolding — novel features which make feedback more interesting and varied. (These features make me wonder if internally it’s using some specialized kind of additive synthesis.)

That is essentially the core of the module. There are three more things, all very well integrated in the interface: the UFG (additional super-useful source of modulation, with a dedicated knob for AMing the main osc), Delta-Sigma pattern generator (like a mini Turing Machine), and a pitch controller which offers useful quantization options, flexibility for however you want things to track or be independent of each other, and makes finding FM ratios easier.

words on pages

So, The Untethered Soul overall didn’t turn out as bad as I thought it would when the chakra stuff first came up. But I’m not particularly going to recommend it, either. In the way of some self-help books, it tended to be repetitive, making a few points several times over from just very slightly different angles. And it didn’t do much to present practical advice or exercises like most books on mindfulness do, but a sort of mindfulness end goal that… honestly I’m not sure is a particularly good one for everybody.

I found myself questioning the premise that the “observer” self — the self that is aware of sensations, thoughts, feelings, as opposed to the noisy commentator that we don’t want to dominate everything when practicing mindfulness, is the “real” or “true” one. I thought about how several psychology models and religions believe in multi-part selves in one way or another — none of them consider any part “false.”

Moving on…

Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary is a short book, but also my second DNF of the year. It describes… figured stones, which seem to be small rocks with interesting shapes and patterns and textures eroded by natural processes (and in some cases, enhanced by human artists?) Supposedly a “masterpiece of natural philosophy”, I found it light on introduction and explanation, and just… poetic and fanciful in a way that didn’t really grab me, for the most part. There was some stuff about erosion, water and time that… let’s say had a nice flow to it. But it didn’t tickle my sense of wonder like reviewers suggested it might.

Next up was a book by a senior colleague of mine. I’ll remain vague to preserve anonymity, but it was intended for a particular specialized segment of an industry, which has been relying on habits formed when the science was in its infancy. I was not in the target audience, and I did a lot of skimming because I was only going to get the vaguest of general ideas from it anyway.

Now I’m reading Ice Massacre by Tiana Warner. A desperate group of North Pacific islanders (I don’t think the island exists in our world, but it’s apparently south of the Aleutians but not part of North America), whose fishing industry is under siege by human-eating mermaids, trains a group of teen girls to seek out and massacre the “sea demons” with the assumption that they won’t be seduced the way male fishermen and warriors were. But of course the protagonist is going to discover that she’s not heterosexual. It’s been pretty good so far.

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 a bit more lately; I decided to reroll my Scrapper who didn’t get that much playtime and start up a greatsword-wielding Reaper. It’s gone quite well; she’s easily one of my top characters for soloing either lots of trash mobs or the tougher champions. She’s been downed zero times so far.

There’s been an update to Soulstone Survivors, with two new titans and a bunch of classes getting their weapon #5. I haven’t found it in me to be that excited about it though — I’m losing my enthusiasm for the game. I’ve had a good run with it, I guess. But I feel like the introduction of the relatively overpowered Blacksmith, capable of going much further into Titan Hunt than anyone else but only with specific, limited types of builds and yet without any real motive to push further, signaled a sort of end. The new weapon skills that I’ve tried so far don’t feel like they are different enough to make them exciting.

My spouse is on a road trip to visit her family for our young nephew’s birthday. I’m gonna hang out with my parents a little bit (tomorrow night at least), might go to the frame shop Saturday to get this cool Egyptian-style mermaid print framed, and otherwise will try to get myself back into a solid music-making habit. I let the momentum go a bit, though I do have a solid foundation for launching into the 4th track.

Bitwig 6.0 released, and… I’m not even going to do the update until after I have finished this album, I think. There are no features I’m excited about, and I don’t want to risk disrupting things — especially now that I’m actually working on something where I do want to revisit “finished” project files to reuse and reinterpret pieces of them.

My K-Accumulator is, if the tracking is correct, somewhere between the UK and US right now. The sooner it arrives, the better. Fancyyy posted another video where it’s all just no-commentary knob tweaking and self-patching. A lot of it feels like there’s so much going on that it’s hard to follow, but there are some amazing gorgeous tones as well as a lot of chaos and complexity — and incredible potential. I’m still hoping they publish a real manual soon, but there will be no substitute for getting my hands on it and exploring.