Author: Starthief

After watching several demos, reading more reviews and thinking more about how I make music — and then seeing someone selling a MiniBrute 2S for considerably less than average — I wound up going for that.

It’s bigger than I was expecting, pretty much like the Microbrute was smaller than I expected when I got it. In the 2010s slang size scale, it’s not quite an absolute unit, but it is thicc. It feels really solid and good, though in appearance it’s a weird anachronistic smear of decades — faux wood sides like an 80s home appliance, but the big numeric LCD is blue rather than red, and there are 2010s style colorful light-up rubber buttons.

The sound is great, defaulting more to “beefy” than other things but there’s so much versatility there, it refuses to be pinned down. The patch bay is an extremely powerful tool compared to the extreme limitations of the Microbrute’s few patch points, and I haven’t even patched it to my Eurorack gear yet. Maybe I just haven’t used the right oscillators before, but its main VCO will do dynamic expo FM combined with sync without sounding gross, and that’s pretty notable. It also does linear FM, AM patching is possible, and this time you can feed any signal through the metalizer.

The patch bay does have some limits, and there are a few design choices that seem odd (but mostly reveal their purpose with a little experimentation). I’d gladly give up the Inverter for direct filter input and output — great for using the filter as an oscillator, patching the metalizer post-filter, filtering the square but not the triangle, etc. The two onboard attenuators have other inputs normalled to their outputs, so sometimes you need an extra dummy cable to rein things in. And for some reason pad velocity doesn’t affect volume unless you patch it through the extra VCA; it could have defaulted that way. But overall, it is hot stuff indeed.

The patch I have set up right now is pretty reminiscent of one of Isao Tomita’s “baritone singing voice” patches, and is quite beefy. It’s using expo FM, the metalized triangle, and lowpass filter with a lot of resonance and fair amount of “Brute Factor” (a sort of drive/feedback patch), with pad pressure controlling the filter cutoff. Just a particularly great sweet spot I stumbled into.

With its nifty sequencer, it’d make a fantastic friend to a groovebox, with mad 303-esque bass/melody lines (but a better sound than the 303 which I’m honestly pretty tired of). I’m unlikely to use that style in my own music, but it’s fun to jam with, especially given that the arpeggiator can interrupt the sequencer and keep playing in time with the rhythm, and you can also temporarily hold loops in the sequence, and tweak it live. It’s very performable, which is great.

The plan is to replace the Medusa. Now… there are things I like about the Medusa that I will probably miss:

• Medusa’s synth engine may be a lot more plain overall compared to MB2S, but that does kind of highlight its expo FM and filter FM possibilities. Which simply means that I need to show restraint sometimes with my synthesis techniques.
• Medusa is paraphonic with up to 6 voices, where MB2S is monophonic (or duophoonic if the oscs are separately controlled/sequenced, which is possible even internally). That being said, I still have the Microfreak and software synths, Just Friends can be paraphonic and many of my digital oscillators will produce chords or clusters or swarms.
• Medusa’s grid controller is very clever, with 8×8 pads that support X/Y movement and pressure, and selectable scales and adjustable layout. MB2S has just one chromatic octave of note pads, so it’s not something for solos with big leaps. I do like those leaps sometimes…
• Medusa’s sequencer is also cool, with its parameter locks. But they are also a little unfriendly to edit, and I wasn’t really using the parameter lock that stuff much in my music. MB2S’s more groovebox-like sequencer does offer a couple of extra CV channels that will give me a decent amount of variety though.

I appreciate that the synth engine on this is 100% analog, totally knob-per-function. The sequencer is digital of course, but its output is four signals available in the patch bay — pitch and gate, plus two more CVs that can be velocity and pressure (synced to pitch/gate) or generic unipolar CV, additional pitch and/or gate, AD envelopes (with adjustable attack/decay per step) or LFOs of various shapes (with adjustable speed and amplitude per step).

I’m going to ponder controller possibilities while I get to know this instrument both on its own and integrated with my modular.

I have latched onto a scheme for the next album: I will stitch each session onto the front of the previous, instead of the back. That is, the first song I record is the last on the album, the last song I record is the first, but it will blend into one continuous mix. It’s not really a theme, thus my choice of the word “scheme.”

Even before Stridulation-Yukon-Relay and Luminous Phenomena when I began stitching sessions together, I was already keeping the track order of each album pretty close to the order of recording because it mostly felt right to do so. Once in a while a track would really cry out to be first or last, or I felt like changing the order would improve the flow a little, and I’d renumber.

I decided arbitrarily that “Multiversal Solvent” — the first track I recorded — is number 7. I’m going to try to stick to that, just because. 6 and 5 have been recorded, and I have a good idea of what I would like to do with 4, as well as a name for the album and a possible album art design. So it’s moving right along!

I have been thinking about trading the Medusa. While I do occasionally like its grid sequencer/controller, I can easily imagine just not using it anymore and being fine with that. So I guess it’s sort of on trial now?

• I know a Make Noise Strega would fit my music extremely well.
• The Moog Grandmother was just plain thrilling to play when I tried one briefly. It is a simple synth but sounded so smooth and beautiful. And it’s Eurorack compatible, so it wouldn’t have to remain simple by any means. But it’s pretty large.
• Minibrute 2S would bring back that filter I liked from the Microbrute, plus considerably more features and more Eurorack connectivity.

In other gear thoughts, BoredBrain is about to release an ADAT interface called optx which improves on the Expert Sleepers ES-3/ES-6 combo, by being a single module and offering 8 inputs instead of 6, all in 8HP. From what I have heard, it doesn’t have the DC offset issues that ES-6 does. I’m strongly considering going that route.

I went for the custom XBox controller. This newer generation uses USB-C, but more importantly, has a better grip texture everywhere (only the ABXY buttons are slick, which works pretty well) and a slightly better overall feel to the trigger/throttle controls on the back. And of course, it doesn’t have a dead button.

Arriving on the same day was the Kenya update for Art of Rally, so that managed to distract me from Elder Scrolls Online for a brief time. But ESO is really good y’all.

I said before that I was done with Guild Wars 2 for a while. I’ve been playing some Dirt Rally with the XBox controller, and have found it a good time. Still thinking about whether to sell off the wheel or hang onto it.

I gave Rift another try, and didn’t last long in the tutorial before deciding it just felt too clunky and I wasn’t enamored with the idea of dealing with its skill system. I also gave Lord of the Rings Online a brief try with my spouse, and just wasn’t into it. I seem to measure every MMO against the extremely smooth and slick GW2 experience, and most of them come up short.

I wound up going for Elder Scrolls Online instead. Everything I’d read promised an experience similar to the single-player Elder Scrolls games: extremely solo-friendly, very strong in world-building and story, the right blend of action and not being too twitchy, interesting crafting and many ways to play. And it’s true. If anything the characters and plots are more interesting in ESO than I remember from Oblivion (I never played Skyrim for some reason).

I started three different characters on the first day, thinking I was going to stick with a staff-wielding orcish Dragon Knight whose direct approach to combat (and everything else) is the opposite of most of my prior characters. But then as I understood the systems a little better, I started a fourth, a bow-wielding Bosmer Nightblade, and I’m enjoying it quite a lot.

ESO’s combat system is a little unusual, and made to be console-friendly without being too dumbed down. The skill bar only has 5 skills plus an “ultimate”, but weapon(s) (including magical staves, which are primarily ranged) can do light and heavy attacks, blocks, interrupts, etc. Like GW2, enemy area attacks project red danger zone indicators onto the ground — but these can move, change size and shape, and spawn new zones, keeping you more on your toes.

The skill system is pretty open-ended; you can choose skills from a set of three class skill trees, or from weapons, armor, your race, the Fighters or Mages’ guilds, and so on. Not all skills are combat-related; some affect dialog, finding crafting materials, picking pockets and so on. Any class can use any weapon style, can freely train in Stamina, Magica and/or Health, and can set themselves up as a damage dealer, tank, healer / support character, etc. as they see fit. (Staves come in “destruction” and “restoration” varieties with different skill sets available on them.)

Overall the gameplay feels exciting without necessarily being as dangerous as many MMOs. Level scaling is in effect in most of the world, so you can just follow storylines and know you won’t be way over your head. This is also kind of a downside since you can’t really challenge yourself that much. But mostly it suits the way I want to play.

Downsides?

• The brief combat tutorial didn’t quite make it clear to me how the game signals which attacks can be blocked, which can be interrupted, and which require a dodge. Sometimes the game will prompt you with text popups, sometimes not. As a highly mobile ranged attacker, I often find stepping outside visible danger zones is more effective than blocking anyway.
• Kiting doesn’t work very well in some areas. I’m used to some enemies in GW2 giving up the chase and running back to home territory, healing rapidly; in ESO sometimes they just disappear instead. Sometimes their territory is significantly smaller than max bow range. There was one quest step where I had to resummon a particular daedra four times before my movement didn’t just make him vanish.
• Sometimes, the single-player aspect of much of the gameplay collides with the fact that it’s an MMO. Usually this works well and people see their own versions of events, NPCs present or absent as it should be for your storyline. Once in a while there are snags.
• Inventory space is limited, and like every Elder Scrolls game, you will want to pick up and carry a ton of stuff. In ESO this is mainly about crafting items. There’s blacksmithing, woodworking, clothing/leatherworking, cooking, alchemy, enchanting, and furnishings; each has different raw materials, style materials, trait materials, other enhancements, and the goods themselves which you probably want to save to break down into raw materials (which can also teach you how they’re made, increasing your skill). It’s very easy to fill your backpack and/or bank with this stuff. The crafting bag that ESO+ subscribers get may be its biggest perk, and indeed that makes me think crafting/items were intentionally meant to sell subscriptions. I’m considering it (you can pause and unpause the subscription if you go through periods of not playing, like I have with GW2).
• There are an absolute ton of quests, which is great. But the map system has some disconnects that make managing them difficult. You can’t zoom directly from a local map to the world level, and the name of your current region isn’t shown anywhere [I found it, it’s over in a corner; this does help a bit]. The list of locations doesn’t include city names but region names. Even major cities and points of interest aren’t labeled on the world map. So if you want to teleport to Vulkhel Guard, you have to know what region it’s in (it took a while before I remembered this) or at least start from where it is on the world map (I forget) or poke around randomly until you find it. To add to this, often quests will fast-travel you by cart, boat or portal to some other part of the world — taking you away from other quests in the area you also wanted to finish. And the quest journal doesn’t really keep a history of what you’ve done in the quest so far, just what your next step is. I guess taking copious notes might help, but mostly you just have to embrace the chaos.

ESO is fully voice acted, and oh boy is it voice acted. Malcolm McDowell and Lynda Carter are Daedric princes Molag Bal and Azura. Kate Beckinsale and Bill Nighy are royalty. John Cleese is a knight. Tara Strong is a few voices. And I’m sure people more familiar with Hollywood would recognize a lot more names.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, my previous job was as one of the main developers of HeroEngine (particularly the world-building tools, and several graphical elements). Zenimax, the development studio behind ESO, was one of our licensees. Apparently when it first was announced that ESO was going to use HeroEngine there were some gamers whining that it was going to be (A) just like Star Wars: The Old Republic and (B) horribly broken.

To that I respond: (A) the point of a game development platform is that the developers can concentrate on game content, which means all of the mechanics, all of the story, all of the sound, the GUI, nearly all of the art (they might use a few standard textures for grass or tree bark or something if they choose). (B) When BioWare Austin licensed HeroEngine, it wasn’t even ready for beta yet, we told them as much, they acknowledged it and were desperate to have it anyway because they wanted to get to market quickly; so they bought a source code license to our unfinished product, forked it and bolted on a bunch of other stuff in a half-assed rushed way, and never fully accepted any updates from us as we completed it and made drastic improvements. And that became their game, which was slowly patched into something more functional over the years.

And also (C) Zenimax started extremely small. They were using HeroEngine as a prototyping and area construction tool — which it was extremely suited for — while growing their staff and developing their own totally custom engine which used many of the same features and third-party libraries, but was entirely under their control. And they had the budget to make it really shine and work extremely smoothly. (HeroEngine always had a shoestring budget, and let’s also remember it was begun in the early 2000s several generations of hardware ago.)

However, playing ESO I recognize a few influences from HeroEngine and the sample content we had created for it. The triangular face/body shape controls in character creation. The way grass seems to work (they’re probably still using a variant of my shader). The strange way that characters jumping sometimes “hover” in a knees-up position until they find valid ground to land on (something we improved on later, as I recall). But there’s also no doubt that what’s in the game now is very polished and well tuned overall.

Howl’s Moving Castle is approximately tied with Spirited Away for my favorite Studio Ghibli Movie. (Princess Mononoke is probably next.)

When a recent post on Gizmodo discussed both the film and novel, I realized I probably should just go ahead and read the book, since I seem to be very much into charming and comforting reads at the moment.

I’m most of the way through, and enjoying it, but am on team The Movie Was Better in this instance.

• The art and animation are super-charming and creative and sharp-looking. I like that the movie brings Ingary from “generic fantasy countryside” to a steampunk-while-still-fantastical setting, with flappy-winged airships and a very clanky castle.
• The music in the movie of course fits it very nicely.
• The WOTW’s minions in the movie are so much cooler than a scarecrow. And Turniphead is so much better as the cursed Prince Justin than as an evil minion!
• Howl in the movie: a good-hearted but extremely vain young wizard, struggling with the depression caused by having to fight in a war but trying to put on a brave face. Howl in the book: lazy and a womanizer.
• The stair scene is so much better in the movie, with Sophie and the WOTW both struggling but Sophie managing it better. Not to mention, the hilarity of Sophie thinking Heen is Howl in disguise, when Howl’s disguised as the king, but not actually fooling Suliman at all.
• Heen is better than some weird cursed dog-man. (Who… might be the missing prince? I haven’t finished the book yet but that’s my suspicion. Justin = Gaston isn’t a huge leap.)
• Wizard Suliman as a competent, shrewd woman rather than a dead guy.
• In the book, the WOTW is the Big Bad. In the movie… she’s certainly mean at first, and puts her own desires above others’ autonomy and well-being. But it’s war that is the real evil.

On the side of the book:

• “Markl” is a pretty awkward name and should have remained Michael.
• The movie didn’t have to take away Sophie’s magic. I really like the idea of her infusing hats and clothing with magic by talking to them, and it gives the WOTW an additional motive for cursing her.
• Sophie’s family relationships are almost nonexistent. She talks to Lettie a little. There’s no amusing Martha/Lettie swap (or Martha at all). There’s no eldest-of-three misfortune which is an amusing thing in the book. Her stepmom who owns the hat shop has approximately three seconds of screen time, and their relationship isn’t particularly clear.
• The ending is exciting and fun! (…now that I’ve finished it, a few hours after originally writing this.)

Mixed feelings:

• Wales. I kind of think Miyazaki made the right call; it feels more escapist and fantastical to not have any connection to the real world.
• The Donne poem as the curse. It’s thematically appropriate… but I don’t think that would work without the Wales connection. And the mermaids and mandrake root encounters in the book seemed awfully random, not particularly clever. And perhaps the poem as puzzle didn’t come across as well in Japanese.
• In both the movie and the book, there are points where events stop making much apparent sense and the plot just sort of meanders for a while.

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Next up I’ll be reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. This apparently isn’t what it sounds like! I watched a bookstore’s interview with Becky Chambers and Martha Wells about their recent novels and how “hopepunk” is getting to be a thing — science fiction and fantasy where instead of terrible people and grim settings, it’s sort of comforting and cozy, full of kindness and diverse characters all mostly getting along. Like I wrote a few days ago, it’s not entirely without conflicts and problems to solve and regular human (or alien, or robot) worries. But it’s optimistic — even if its rise means that stories about people not being dicks has become an increasingly popular form of escapism.

(Apparently some people have a different definition for hopepunk, and would include things like Lord of the Rings… basically anything that pits hope vs. despair. That can be good stuff too, but it’s not really the sort of thing I am most looking fro right now.)

The office is closed for at least the rest of this week, possibly longer, because an employee tested positive for COVID.

Officially, management does not get to say who the person is. Unofficially, I was given a clear hint. It’s not somebody I ever have contact with and I think my personal risk is pretty low. Given the timing, I would have shown symptoms if I was going to. So the most likely thing is that I don’t have it. The less likely thing is, I have it, my spouse probably has it and we’re both asymptomatic. And less likely still is it wasn’t Delta, but broke through to infect an unvaccinated person anyway and then the chances that I have it are even less.

Anyway. I’m not worried for myself. I hope my coworker gets through OK and nobody else in the office has it.

But my parents are concerned and think it’s best if I cancel my trip to visit them next week. Which is a bummer, but of course I will respect their wishes. I could simply have not mentioned it, but I don’t think that would have been fair or right.

My expectation is I’ll just take the vacation days anyway and stay home.

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The time between an album release and the start of the next one often feels awkward to me. It’s been less than two weeks since the release of Pulse Code but I haven’t felt ready to start recording something new yet. I told myself a few times I was going to wait until after my trip, but with that not happening, it seems like those vacation days would be a good time to work on it.

But there’s no “publish or die” pressure, no contract or deadline or anything. Any feeling of guilt that I’m not constantly turning out products is entirely unwarranted and I’d like to purge that… but not with the obvious step of “don’t make any music!”

Maybe more jamming with the Model:Cycles, the uke, mandolin, bass guitar etc. are the answer? Or maybe, just start doing stuff with the modular and don’t worry about it. Eh.

I’ve played through several character classes in Guild Wars 2 over the past few months and the shine is wearing off again. It’s probably time to uninstall.

I really haven’t been playing much Dirt Rally though. I don’t know if the wheel controller — its increased difficulty, requirement to set things up, extra physical tension and (minor) exertion — is the real culprit or if it’s simply that I like Art of Rally more. Some of each? Art of Rally has a very nice balance between casual friendliness and tricky simulation. Dirt Rally is a bit more hardcore to begin with and the wheel makes it much more so. Maybe I’ll try playing it with the XBox controller again and see how that feels for me, and sell the wheel on eBay if it makes me happier to do so.

Speaking of which, the “RB” button on my XBox controller is dead. This isn’t a problem for Art of Rally, but it is for some others. The cost to have an XBox controller repaired is more than the cost of a new one. I guess I will poke around for third-party or used controllers to replace it, or consider going all-out on a custom color one from Microsoft.

The best thing I saw online yesterday was some advice to a musician full of self-doubt:

destroy the notion you are competing.

I think it’s great advice for all sorts of things in life. Driving would be much more pleasant if nobody on the road felt like they had something to prove, for instance.

Oddly, I kind of feel like this applies to the Olympics… possibly the most competitive thing ever. It makes me happy that athletes at this level, under this much intense pressure, are willing to say “nope, for mental health reasons I am going to bow out now.” Far from cowardice, I feel like this is a much more important kind of strength.

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My TipTop Fold Processor arrived yesterday and I had a little bit of a go with it. It’s got a very different tone from the folder in Shapeshifter — not really as nice, a bit buzzier and with more clear emphasis on some harmonics. But useful for some things. The real magic comes in modulating it, and/or from the divisions on the SubDiv output. It’s a simple patch: wavefolder output goes through a comparator, turning into pulse waves, binary essentially. Then those pulses go through flip-flops to divide them by 2, then 4, then 8, and you can mix them together. Thanks to some odd harmonics and just the extra “bumps” in the signal generated by wavefolding, the divisions are not necessarily octaves below the original signal and can kind of crawl around relative to each other in the coolest ways. It’s a great way to thicken up and complexify sound.

It’s DC-coupled too, so an envelope run through it can generate partially synchronized but unusual gate patterns on the Subdiv out and simultaneous smooth wobbles on the main out. And that’s a good time. 🙂

Pulse Code has been doing pretty decently by my standards. I’m glad people like it! I don’t really know yet what direction the next album will go in, but right now I’m leaning toward making it something a little less gloomy.

Work… well. Some days are frustrating or annoying, but some of them bring some satisfaction and accomplishment, even if it’s not the same sorts of accomplishments as before. I think I am past the worst of it.

But COVID trends are disturbing again. Community transmission is high, cases per day went up by 47% in the last week (and back up from almost zero in early June!), positivity is above 10%, hospital admissions and ICU beds are halfway to the previous peak. Deaths are still low but I guess we can expect those to climb in the next few days. There’s a new mask mandate locally, for everyone — contested by Republicans and the County Council, because of politics not any sort of compassion or sense — but few that I’ve seen have actually been masking up. Everyone seems determined not to go back into lockdown, but I wonder if that tune won’t be changing in a couple of weeks.

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Talking about more pleasant things: Becky Chambers writes lovely books! I tore right through Psalm For The Wild-Built, which possibly the kindest book I’ve read in quite some time. I’m chasing that with The Galaxy and the Ground Within.

Conflict in stories doesn’t have to be involve villainy or even rivalry. It can be entirely internal, about mental health and finding one’s way in the world. It can be about trying to survive and thrive and be a good person, in a universe where some of the people are weird, things can simply go wrong, and situations can be kind of ridiculous.

I’m not saying all Becky Chambers books are populated solely with kind and thoughtful people. In previous books there were certainly systems of oppression, warmongers, cheats and thieves. But it’s so nice to have a break from that, especially now. Maybe TGATGW has a villain, though so far it seems to be people willing to cooperate and be courteous, and an accident that’s either nobody’s fault really or bureaucratic failure.

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And another positive thing: Mannequins Just Friends is a fantastic module. As I said before, the core concept is very much like Tides: a slope generator that rises and falls, with the cycle time and shape as separate parameters (as opposed to classic slope generators with rise time and fall time). But JF’s emphasis is very much on the collective action of six of these slope generators, at different frequencies. The Mix output, rather than “Identity”, feels like the main one. The design choices that are different on Tides vs. JF were appropriately chosen for the overall gestalt of the thing.

As an audio source, it is tasty and swarmtastic. There’s plenty of shaping available. The “Intone” control (which sets the time ratio between slope generators) is freeform and can be dialed from gentle detuning to fierce detuning to clusters or perfect harmonics. Also, it does linear TZFM — either from an external signal, or internal oscillators. You can also set FM to modulate the Intone parameter, so you can self-patch Identity to FM. It’s all good! And you can do some crazy things self-patching sync into some of the trigger inputs but not others.

As a modulation source, it’s also great. Again, the fun comes with the relationships between the different slope generators. Because of the module’s retriggering behavior and the fact that some slopes are slower than others, a steady stream of triggers can generate really neat polyrhythmic results.

The weird things about JF are the Run jack and Just Type.

JF has two mode switches: Sound/Shape (determining the frequency range, and bipolar vs. unipolar outputs) and Transient/Sustain/Cycle (determining whether the slopes rise and fall once when triggered, hold while gated, or continuously loop but reset when triggered. The behavior of those combinations is pretty intuitive.

Where some modules have hidden button combos or menus to access their options, JF has a CV input called “Run.” For that, you need to consult the manual, because what it does is different for each of the 6 possible combinations of mode switches. And the manual gives these “Run modes” cute and not entirely helpful names. But generally, they do sensible things relevant to the mode, rather than arbitrary and surprising behavior, and thus aren’t actually that hard to memorize. For instance, if you’re using Sound/Cycle, plugging in a cable to Run changes the FM mode from external to internal, and the voltage into Run sets the ratio. If you’re using Shape/Sustain, the Run jack sets the sustain level. If you’re using Shape/Cycle, the Run jack sets the number of times a cycle will repeat when triggered. If using Sound/Sustain, the trigger inputs will gate individual lowpass gates for each output and the Run voltage sets the shape/time.

It is a little unusual to control all of this externally rather than having a knob on the panel, but it works.

Just Type is a whole series of commands for Monome Teletype (if connected on the back via the i2c pins) which give access to a whole lot of extra functionality. Some of it is just “skip the patch cables” stuff: sending triggers or pitch or Run jack “voltage” without patch cables. But you can also use “velocity triggers” to adjust the relative levels of each slope generator — which is great when mixing them — and you can retune the ratios for each slope generator using integer ratios.

You can also activate additional modes, turning JF into a polyphonic 2-OP FM synth with MIDI-like note commands, or into a rhythmically cycling quasi-percussion machine.

In a lot of ways this seems preferable to hidden menus and Easter Eggs. It all feels like it’s within Teletype’s typical usage (which requires occasionally hitting the syntax reference anyhow). But it’s so different from how many modules work that it kind of blows peoples’ minds.

I’m generally not interested in using it as a polyphonic synth in general, but certainly as a fun range of modulation, and a clustery, swarmy, harmonic oscillator and FM machine, I expect to get a lot of use out of it without it feeling like it’s stealing the thunder of my other gear. It’s what I should have chosen rather than the VHO in the first place.

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Plancks was a good choice too I think. Not great, but functionally good, and probably better for me than going ahead and dedicating the full 18-20HP to Frames or Morph4.

It doesn’t really feel too crowded for the most part, but I’d have preferred to put the jacks on top and other controls beneath. Since updating the firmware on it is apparently fraught, I’m not going to try reversing it myself. The color-lit Frame knob is satisfyingly and uniformly bright, but feels very “lightweight” — a bit wobbly and with very little turning resistance. But it certainly does the job. Feeding four of JF’s outputs to it and sweeping across them is satisfying, and that’s the main sort of thing I intend for it.

That smaller form factor gave me room for the TipTop Fold Processor, which should arrive Friday. I predict much distortion and cross-modulation of audio, and a bit of shenanigans with CV as well.

The new album I’ve been talking about is now released!

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(I have more thoughts about my work situation, and about the fantastic Just Friends module which I played with for a few hours last night, but I don’t want to write it all up just now. Plancks should be arriving today too, and completing the trifecta of new stuff, a Tiptop Fold Processor.)

I’ve been reading Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time, which sounds like it could be pretty much any fiction genre but is nonfiction. It’s gone from entropy to the formation of stars, heavier elements, the organization of molecules, life and its possible origins, consciousness, storytelling, and religion so far. A lot of it is in service of confronting not just individual mortality, not just an eventual end to our species, but to thought itself — and appreciating the wonder of the moment, whether the moment is a personal “right now” or the universal “this period when consciousness exists.” The sightseeing along the way is pretty breathtaking too.

It amused me to be reading it when the final episode of Loki Season 1, “For All Time, Always” hit. It wasn’t perfect, but was highly entertaining, more philosophically fascinating than most MCU material, and I liked the particular villain once we finally met them. It may have been the best of the three Disney+ MCU TV series so far, though I did like WandaVision quite a lot too.

And I guess it’s as good a time as any to announce that my next album is now in the mastering phase, and will be tentatively be called Pulse Code. It has a steady 49 BPM tempo throughout, never falling away to a pure drone. Why 49? It sounded good, matches my age, and as a square it’s maybe a little more interesting than 48 or 50. 😉 The rhythmic values vary though; it’s not a relentless beat every 1.232 seconds the entire time. I’m curious to see how it feels once it’s all put together.

My plan right now is, after assembling it into a continuous mix, I’ll break it apart into individual tracks again with the expectation of seamless playback. While there’s some overlap between tracks, the distinct beats make for generally clearer transitions than my last few releases. But I may also include the continuous mix in the download as well, so people can pick their poison.

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Thursdays’ infrared massage bed was mostly very pleasant, with just a little “ugh why are you doing that, robot” and a bit more “you could just stay on that spot for the next ten minutes.” But the only deep tissue massage I’ve gotten from a live person was… grueling, and I’m not entirely sure it was as helpful. This actually had my back not hurting or feeling tense for several hours. By Sunday I had managed to tangle and jangle the wires in my back again, but I still feel more resilient, somehow. Anyway, I’d do it again and probably spring for the far IR sauna afterward too. Sitting in the heat isn’t a lot of fun but I have to admit, my muscles were very relaxed afterward, the last time I did it. And their setup has nice pleasant scenery and music, not just staring at the wooden walls for an hour.

Perhaps it was that, perhaps not, but Friday at work was much more tolerable than it had been. Today’s been okay too. Maybe from this point I’ll just be able to roll with it, or maybe the scope of things that people are expecting has simply slowed its expansion enough.

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On the gear front, I think I’m moving on from the Verbos Harmonic Oscillator after all. It’s featured heavily in Pulse Code, but I’m feeling again like I have too many oscillators. The other superstars are all sitting on the bench fuming “put me in, coach!”

VHO has some mojo of its own, but honestly? I think I was better off with software implementations, where cleaner sines but phase modulation and waveshaping gave me more flexibility. And I only used those on occasion, so dedicating 36HP and a chunk o’budget to it is probably not my best choice.

Again, I don’t have any particular weak spots in the modular that need shoring up, so it’s a matter of fulfilling curiosity and looking for opportunities. Right now what I’m considering is Xaoc Zadar and/or Mannequins Just Friends, and Plancks 2.

Zadar is a vector-based, sort of wavetable-ish quad envelope generator. The shapes are presets, but can be warped and scaled, and a section can be designated as a sustain section. (The latter was something they argued with me about before release, because it would ruin their whole design vision, and then they realized it was a good idea after all and added it in a firmware update.) It can also repeat, like an LFO, and run at audio rate like an oscillator. And people mostly seem to love it. The one exception is people who don’t like menus, so… it remains to be seen how I’ll feel. But I should probably at least try it.

Just Friends is sort of super-Tides. 6 slope generators which can be envelopes, LFOs or oscillators, can be individually triggered/synced, and the rates are all ratios. It has a few alternate behaviors, including a polyphonic LPG-based mode, and a whole bunch of additional stuff that can be accessed via Teletype. It’s kind of surprising I’ve never tried it before. And in addition to all the modulation and audio it can do, people often use it as a harmonic oscillator 🙂 So maybe I should have chosen this all along.

Plancks is a micro version of Mutable Instruments Frames. Frames was pretty neat when I had it, but I mainly underutilized it as a mixer, attenuators and simple DC voltage knobs. I think in a smaller format, as long as I stay away from the hidden button combos for deeper configuration, it’ll be useful as an interpolating scanner/multi-way crossfader or to reshape modulation signals. And — something I didn’t really realize at the time — there is no shame in using a complex tool in simple ways when that’s what’s called for.

I don’t want to dwell on it too much, but my hopes that the stress would dissipate after jury duty haven’t worked out so far.

There were videos a few years ago of Boston Dynamics testing their BigDog robot’s balance by shoving and kicking it while it was trying to walk. It would stumble and catch itself each time, but one couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the robot and frustration on its behalf. “This is how the robot uprising began,” some said.

I feel kind of like that robot. Each time I’ve felt like I caught my balance at work and was making progress, someone would want something else.

The actual work isn’t horrible, don’t get me wrong. Some of it is outside my previous experience or perspective but nothing I can’t figure out eventually. It’s more the frequent interruptions and the general pile-on.

Before:

• One dev meeting per week or two, typically less than 20 minutes.
• Either a well-defined list of tasks for each 2-week sprint — some assigned specifically to me, some unassigned but to be done when I’ve finished the specific ones — or a general list of things from which I have free picks — or a bit of the latter after finishing all of the former. 100% of it programming, mostly C++ and a little C#. Mostly in areas of the code that I’m already familiar with!
• Occasional code reviews for K. (whose code was usually immaculate and didn’t require any commentary), or for M. (whose code is usually pretty good) if K. happened to be on vacation.
• Occasional questions from an engineer via email or chat. But not very often, and almost always about something I’ve already worked on.

Recent changes:

• Dev meeting that I am supposed to host 1/3 of the time. Longer because we have to coordinate more.
• Product Team meeting, 1 hour a week, where I’m supposed to offer a long term perspective that I have never had to worry about before.
• IT meeting, another hour a week?
• We may need to have semi-regular meetings with QA as well.
• Reviewing half of M.’s code and half of P.’s code. P. is new (to us; he’s an experienced coder) so his code needs a closer eye and more commentary; he also has questions about how things work and needs occasional help. Also I feel like my own checkins need more commentary from me for the benefit of M. or P. reviewing it rather than K.
• Reviewing code from the engineers.
• Answering pretty much all the questions Engineering has for development about support issues etc.
• On a rotating basis: running the Dev meeting, adding tasks to the sprint schedule, monitoring the automated build/test servers and diagnosing failures/coordinating with IT to fix issues. (This is one thing that got me pulled into the IT meeting.)
• A project to configure new build/test servers running on a different platform, which I specifically expressed that I did not want to have to deal with.
• A contract project that I volunteered for because I like that it’s a medical application that will directly improve some peoples’ lives, but then I learned that it’s going to be kind of an ugly series of mostly-not-programming puzzles to work out. If/when we do get the contract (it’s kind of a strong rumor at this point).
• In a few months we’re going to try to hire another developer. Which is good, but that puts me on the spot as the primary person screening them and training whoever we hire, and I cannot express how much I don’t want to think about that right now.
• On a good day I might have a 2- or 3- hour stretch to work on the actual programming tasks that are assigned to me.

I’m also frustrated that the one thing I was known for — getting a lot of programming tasks done quickly and efficiently, including debugging some difficult stuff — is not going to be possible anymore because my time is so divided.

Mental context switches take time and energy. If I’m working on a logic problem or rebuilding a user interface, and I have to stop for 10 minutes to answer someone’s question about an unrelated thing, it probably takes another 10 minutes after that to get back up to speed on what I was originally doing.

I don’t have any ideas for dealing with it or adjusting to the new normal any faster.

I’ve booked time on an automated massage bed this afternoon. A fancy thing that scans your spine and does all kinds of massage techniques with heated rollers, which has been getting pretty good reviews. The place is less flaky than some of the other massage/sauna/float places around here — no paying $40 to sit in a room full of pink salt and breathe, no non-medically-necessary IV “therapy”, no cryo fat removal or whatever, just some far IR saunas and these massage robots. While it probably won’t do much for shoulders and neck, my back has been a mess for a while and maybe this will help reduce some tension and pain.

And in a month I’m going to take a few days to drive down to visit my parents, who I haven’t seen in ages. Hopefully that will be relaxing too.