I’m so frustrated with the gutter cleaning company right now.
On May 29, I contacted them via their web form, and filled in a bunch of info. I said I wanted a cleaning, and gave VERY SPECIFIC details about a very simple repair that needs doing (*), a modification that the basement waterproofing company is going to do for the drain in another corner, and that I would like them to look it over to see if they recommend any repairs.
I get an email… that I need to call them to schedule. What’s the point of the web form then? I call them, and mention, again, cleaning and repairs. I got scheduled for a free estimate two weeks later.
The night before that’s supposed to happen, at 10:30 PM, I got a text asking if the gutters had leaf guards. No, they don’t. They said they would do their estimate based on the Google Maps overhead view “so I don’t have to wait to get my estimate.” Uh… hmm. I got that in email the next morning, and paid. Within a couple more days, the work was scheduled for the week July 14.
The day came, and I got a text saying the crew was running late on another job and had to reschedule, this time for July 23. They’d arrive somewhere in a window of noon to 3PM. A couple of days in advance, I get the same confirmation request I’ve now seen three times before (with no response to texting back “C”).
The day comes. Noon passes, and I haven’t been contacted. 1PM. 2PM. 3PM… dogs bark, and there’s a truck with the company logo sitting across the street. Okay.
Nothing happens for a while, I don’t hear anything. No banging around, nobody on the roof, no power washer, no text, no phone call, no knock on the door. But the dogs bark again… the truck is gone.
The next morning I get a call. Apparently, the guy said “repairs were needed” which apparently took him by surprise, and that a crew would come out NEXT week and I’d probably be contacted by someone else from the office. Which I was last night in a weird generic-sounding typo-ridden email from their… sales department?
Couple of links to start off this post:
The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble — this shows what’s wrong with the “AI Trade” from a business perspective. Quick summary: 35% of the US stock market right now is held up by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Apple buying hardware from NVidia for their AI projects. They’ve spend $560 billion in the past two years and show maybe $35 billion in profit for it. 42% of NVidia’s revenue is selling stuff to those companies, their stock price relies on continued sales growth, and… that growth is showing signs of slumping. Nobody really has a viable plan to make AI profitable, there’s not all that much room in the market for different AI services, and there have been a lot of really questionable claims being made to convince investors. It’s all going to come tumbling down.
And of course, there are new stories every day about the failure of AI when people attempt to trust it. This stupid thing about AI wiping a database and then explaining that it “panicked and acted without thinking” and disobeyed explicit instructions… honestly it sounds like fiction, and I don’t know if it’s true. The FDA has a new AI that’s supposed to speed new drug approvals, but it just makes up studies that don’t exist and can’t find ones that do. An eating disorder help line, after the employees unionized, fired them and replaced them with a chatbot that gave people horrible awful harmful advice until it was shut down.
Why Anti-Trans Campaigns Keep Returning to the Politics of Meat — in American culture, beef and (white) masculinity are closely intertwined. (Cis people, are you okay?) The beef industry has been funding anti-trans political ads, some of which compare trans people and cattle.
Reading that has turned me back away from beef. For 7 years starting in my late teens, I was a vegetarian; even since then I generally have eaten less beef than most Americans probably, keeping in mind that beef is much more of a strain on the environment than chicken or vegetables. So this isn’t a hard choice for me. I’m not at a 100% boycott level, but can keep it for special/rare occasions. Recently we’ve had some recipes with Impossible crumbles instead, and I’ve steered clear of ordering beef when I’m out.
I’m slowly putting down replacement planks for the living room floor. The spare planks aren’t super flat, and the original adhesive is grossly sticky to the fingers but not really enough to keep the planks in place. I’m enhancing that with some Loctite spray adhesive, and trying to squash the planks flat as I go. So I’m only doing 1-2 planks at a time. Professionals use heavy floor rollers for this sort of thing, but they are expensive and useless for literally any other task — I’m just using my own considerable body weight and then a collection of random heavy things. A cast iron pan, the dog food bin, a big shopping bag full of Playstation games, the theremin on its weighted stand, the recliner… it’s absurd, but it seems to be working more or less.
I don’t think it’s possible to so thoroughly eliminate the pee scent that a dog’s VNO couldn’t detect it. Nor to so thoroughly seal the planks to the floor that it prevents anything from seeping underneath. So we’re going to have to break Yankee of the habit of peeing in there, and if that means continuing to block access to the room with baby gates, so be it. To our surprise, he hasn’t made any messes in the kitchen or dining room since we blocked the living room — something he used to do on occasion. Fingers crossed. Usually when he stops one neurotic behavior he only exchanges it for a different one…
10 songs now done for Suspension. Since some of them are short by my standards, this comes to 40 minutes. I’ll be doing a few more.
Suspended chords made for easy inspiration for this one, but I’m definitely not sticking strictly to it. In some tracks the connection might be a bit tenuous, in that I have some complex cluster created by Multimod or the “Voice Chorus” detuning in Synclavier V, and then I have pitch shifters tuned to fourths and fifths up, or something along those lines. Or I’m doing a lot of complex stuff but have peaking filters set to resonate a bit more on a sus4 chord.
Current read is Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides. This book was written in 1987, and was the inspiration for LucasArts’ Monkey Island series. Disney bought the rights to the novel, but their POTC movie is a very, very different story with different characters and plot. What it has in common: (1) the Fountain of Youth (2) a daughter of another character (but not the same character), (3) Blackbeard as a Vodun practitioner, and (4) some other pirates, who happen to be in the Caribbean.
We listened to the book in audio form during a road trip several years ago. It only partially stuck with me, because that’s how audiobooks on road trips are… if you’re driving you’re putting more attention on the road, and if not driving you might be dozing. And also, this way I missed out some significant puns based on pirates’ illiteracy and minimal knowledge of Vodun. As with other Tim Powers books, it takes me a little longer to slide into enjoying it at first, for reasons I can’t identify… but I’m thoroughly hooked well before the halfway point.
I’d been feeling extra anxious lately, partly to do with all the house stuff I guess and partly perhaps from various current events.
But now I feel like it’s clearing up. Even though the gutter cleaning crew had to reschedule, the carpenter came today, and charged us a lot of money to quickly cut a hole that I honestly could have done myself in almost as little time. But he also looked at the deck, and gave a rough estimate much lower than we’d been expecting to demolish it and put up a 6 foot wood fence and stairs.
The stink in the living room is much less but not entirely gone. We’ll probably go another round of peroxide + dish soap and then baking soda, and not be surprised by needing to open the windows and air it out more.
I recorded 3 more tracks for the new album over the last two days. Right after finishing the second I thought, “here I can revisit that short one that I used, only reprocess it a bit” and so instead of making some notes, I simply got it done right then.
Part of the inspiration was the new Sofia’s Daughter module for VCV Rack. It’s inspired by expands significantly on Xaoc Sofia, which was an implementation of FOF synthesis in an analog module. FOF (fonction d’onde formantique). It’s a granular technique that triggers “ripples” synchronized with a primary oscillator, modeled somewhat on the vocal tract and used to create formant spectra (as well as oscillator sync-like sounds and some other timbres within a similar-ish general domain). Despite the technique’s origin in computer music labs, there’s no reason it can’t be done in analog circuits as Xaoc did. Of course, Sofia’s Daughter is implemented in code — and it adds hard and soft sync, PM and TZFM to the fundamental VCO, and PM and additional warp modes to the ripple elements, as well as three more outputs.
Without going into too much detail I feel like The Myth of the Wrong Body is just not the right book for our current time, at least not in the US or UK. Wrong battles being fought, apparent projection of the author’s own messy and complicated feelings about his past gender transition onto others, and a case of “the perfect is the enemy of the good” I think. While I prefer to give the author the benefit of the doubt, I also really don’t want to defend this book.
Dark Water Daughter is an entertaining fantasy with gentleman (and lady) pirates, scumbag pirates, and pirate hunters; women who can control weather by singing (and often are treated as slaves by pirates, navies and merchants alike); at least a couple of other kinds of mages; figureheads inhabited by tree spirits… None of the characters are especially grabbing me, but I’m enjoying the twists and turns of the story.
House stuff:
Plumbers finally fixed the shower on Thursday (after a week of bucket bathing) but ran out of time to install the new toilet. And we have to hire someone to fix the wall and tile behind it (sigh) but that’s lower priority for now.
Another plumber from the same company installed the new toilet on Friday, with no drama or issues. So we don’t have a toilet sitting in the living room taking up space anymore. But about the living room…
We had a vinyl plank that was curling up at the end (due to our annoying little dog’s habit of peeing on it), and it was getting to be a trip hazard. So Friday after the plumber left, I thought I’d peel it up, clean up underneath and slap a new tile down. That turned into its own saga. I had to remove several more planks, and cleanup was not at all easy. Absolutely do not use Nature’s Miracle Urine Destroyer — the enzyme stuff has a short shelf life, and the scent (meant to cover the smell of pet pee) is overpowering, irritating and lingering. We had more luck with a couple of rounds with a hydrogen peroxide/dish soap mix, and covering the whole area in baking soda to absorb remaining liquid — and blowing the cloud out of a window with a box fan despite the day’s heat.
Right now the floor is still torn up and covered in baking soda — I need to shopvac that and glue down spare planks another time. But we resolved not to mess with it today, because we had to rearrange stuff in the basement, so another carpenter can cut out a section of interior wall to prep for the waterproofing folks.
Gutter cleaning is finally happening Wednesday.
We still have to get the deck demolished and new steps & fence.
We still have to get the bottom of the chimney repaired.
My brother’s cats, Fry (gray) and Dr. Markway (orange). Doc really loved lying on my shoes, but preferred it when my feet were in them. That last picture is on the one day we had of nice weather with the windows open.
Marshall Point Lighthouse & Museum. The cool lichen was on an oil storage outbuilding; the cool rock was looking down from the little bridge that leads to the lighthouse.
The camp on the lake. The first two photos include chipmunks, though that second one is especially tricky to spot.
Misc other trip photos. My brother collects cheap vintage records and thought this one would amuse me (it did, it’s pretty awful in terms of tastefulness while also very much in the vein of Isao Tomita in its raw sound design aspect). We got him the rug as a Christmas gift but I found it pretty startling in the dark. Those are my shoes, my dad’s lower 2/3, and some random stranger’s feet who we weren’t trying to take pictures of. I still don’t know what “raised castings” are but it sounds vaguely like necromancy…
And some non-vacation stuff. I had that Coke with my lunch the other day but it didn’t seem especially fateful. 365 days of DuoLingo (I am kind of considering switching from German to something else interesting… Welsh? Danish? Maybe I should just stick to the one language.)
The Book of Doors had a couple of fun twists, but also some instances of torture and body horror that I just don’t want to read anymore. There is enough cruelty in the real world not to have it in fiction too, especially when it doesn’t really contribute toward making the villains more compelling. On balance, the book was okay but I feel like it could have been more.
The second of the books I bought in Maine is The Myth of the Wrong Body by Miquel Missé. I’m only a little ways in, but I find I have to exercise patience with the translation, and the different culture the author is coming from. The word “transgenderism”, in English, is in the domain of bigots as an attempt to delegitimize trans people — so it’s weird to see a trans activist using it. And also, the basic premise the author has, that his body was “stolen” by transition, plays too neatly into the current transphobic penchant for bullshit stories about regret and detransition… but no transphobe is going to read the writings of a trans activist and latch onto this, they’re just going to continue making shit up from whole cloth.
I’ll have to read the rest of the book to judge better. I’ve seen some reviewers say they disagreed with some points in the book but overall found it a worthwhile read. I have not seen anyone saying the author is a transphobe or struggling with internalized transphobia. So far, it seems to me like the author’s heart is in the right place and I agree on key points.
Most people have only heard two or three trans narratives: the transphobic one that says it’s all lies, perhaps the equally transphobic “autogynephilia” narrative (that trans women are just gay men who want to attract men), and the wrong body narrative. But the latter can also be problematic, and that’s not a radical idea in 2025.
The idea behind it is that trans people, through no choice of their own, were “born in the wrong body” and the fix is to change the body. The problems with this are:
It makes transness a disease to be cured, a source of unhappiness; only cis people are allowed to be happy. Medical transition effectively makes a trans person into a cisgender one.
The model is very much rooted in the gender binary and gender essentialism, including the narrative that physical sex and psychological gender must be in alignment.
It also confused gender with sexual orientation. Historically, any whiff of queerness or nonconformity in front of the multiple psychiatrists, doctors, judges etc. involved in the process was grounds for denial. They “reasoned” that if a trans woman loved women, she must not really be a woman.
Likewise, any sign that it was a choice or a desire on the part of a trans person was grounds for denial. Proof of suffering was required, pursuit of happiness was not enough.
Anyone who just wanted to live as their gender identity without medical intervention was invalidated. People were divided between “transsexual” and “transvestite” (making it about physical sex or physical clothing, not about gender).
As far as I’m concerned, none of this denies that medical transition is extremely helpful for a lot of trans folks and that it saves lives. But the wrong body narrative doesn’t fit everyone. I don’t recall now whether it was this book that said it or I saw it elsewhere, but “I wasn’t born in the wrong body, I was born in the wrong society” resonates with me. (If I could magically change several things about my body to suit my specifications, I sure would! But I’m neither dysphoric nor interested in the hormones and/or surgery route. And frankly, genitals are low down on my list of concerns no matter what.)
I’ve made rapid progress on the next album project… three tracks done. One recorded yesterday morning; when it was done I decided a previously recorded snippet could stand on its own as a short whole track, and a recorded the third today.
The theme, title, and name of first track is “Suspension” — as in, both suspended chords, and sound suspended by frozen buffers, long or infinite reverb, spectral capture, etc.
Suspended chords have no third, replacing them with a second (sus2) or a perfect fourth (sus4), which are inversions of each other — so they’re neither major nor minor. They are described as sounding “open” and have an interesting combination of consonance and tension, and can do some fun things with distortion. They’re not super weird or unfamiliar — appearing a lot in modal jazz and some pop songs, though they typically resolve to something else while I’m using them as ongoing drones and arpeggios.
I’m not treating these as strict rules, though, but as jumping-off points, ideas for inspiration. As usual with my modular stuff, I’m tuning some bits by ear so they fit or clash in a way that pleases me, without regard to the theory.
The plumber came on Thursday, but the toilet we’d bought ran late. He quickly determined that the leak was really our shower valve, and he installed shutoff valves to stop the immediate problem. Fixing the shower — replacing the old 3-knob mess — requires a second guy, about 3-4 hours, cutting tile etc. and will be scheduled after the new toilet actually arrives.
To access the supply pipes for the shower, he knocked out a section of drywall that had gotten wet, grungy and moldy. It revealed more mold on the opposite drywall panel, so I figured I better get that out too. (This is the section of wall that I’ve often banged my head on, which seemed to create a psuedo-doorframe… I’d be happy to see that whole section removed but I need to consult a carpenter I think.) Knocking it out and cleaning up the mess afterward was some hot sweaty work in a protective mask, goggles, big hat etc. so I definitely wanted a shower…
…unfortunately, the knob for the upstairs shower — which is small, cramped and dark so it has gone unused for years — is completely stuck. So until phase 2 of the repair job, it’s either the sink, or going over to my parents’ to use their shower.
The Rick Rubin book was pretty good, but I think after reading Art & Fear and The War of Art it doesn’t hold quite as many surprising revelations. But I wound up highlighting a lot of quotes. Here are a few favorites:
Not all projects take time, but they do take a lifetime. In calligraphy, the work is created in one movement of the brush. All the intention is in that single concentrated movement. The line is a reflection of the energy transfer from the artist’s being, including the entire history of their experiences, thoughts, and apprehensions, into the hand. The creative energy exists in the journey to the making, not in the act of constructing.
Whether it took months or minutes does not matter. Quality isn’t based on the amount of time invested. So long as what emerges is pleasing to us, the work has fulfilled its purpose.
The story of spontaneity can be misleading. We don’t see all the practice and preparation that goes into priming an artist for the spontaneous event to come through. Every work contains a lifetime of experience.
(A similar thought is expressed in those other books, and elsewhere. When an expert makes something look easy, that doesn’t mean it’s easy, it means they have a lot of practice.)
Part of the beauty of creation is that we can surprise ourselves, and make something greater than we’re capable of understanding.
That is so true, I surprise myself all the time!
When the work has five mistakes, it’s not yet completed. When it has eight mistakes, it might be.
In the creative process, it’s often more difficult to accomplish a goal by aiming at it.
Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way.
We have stories about ourselves, and those are not who we are. We have stories about the work, and those are not what the work is.
There are a lot of these Zen-like quotes scattered throughout the text.
I’m currently reading Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors, which I picked up in Maine. To be honest I feel like it’s not entirely my kind of story, but I’m still enjoying it and will finish. One thing that bugs me is the magical books that various groups are seeking (either for nefarious purposes, profit (but I repeat myself) or to prevent those nefarious purposes), are given credit for some historical wonders and events which happened before the invention of the codex. Aside from the anachronism, it smacks a little of racist “it must be aliens” pyramidiots. But why I’m concerned with that but can suspend my disbelief about the magic part — which also includes some time travel — I don’t know. 🙂
I picked up What The Car? in the Steam Summer Sale. It’s super wacky and endearing. You control a car with legs… or too many wheels, giraffes for wheels, a jetpack, covered in bouncy springs, a monowheel, a Roomba, a surfboard, and other bizarre variations in something that is usually racing- and/or stunt-driving-adjacent but sometimes is a puzzle or sports mini-game instead. It’s got as much goofy charm as Katamari Damacy.
Unfortunately it also sets off my motion sickness. It was pretty minor until this afternoon when it hit me really hard, like Half-Life 2 airboat level sick, feeling bad for at least a couple of hours.
Before I start in on it again I’ll have to see if there are FOV settings or anything else which might help. I’m not inclined to play it at all anymore today though.
The Maine trip was… exhausting, mostly. It was very good to visit with my brother and his wife again, and his wife’s parents at their camp, and to see more of the Maine scenery than we had before. But it was a ton of driving and a lot of hot weather.
We split the distance at Erie, PA. For some reason, the Erie-Portland leg of the trip, and especially the 400-mile stretch across New York, was by far worse in both directions than anywhere else: construction, tolls, a flood and weird detour on the way up and a fiery wreck that completely stopped traffic for more than an hour on the way back. When you’re on the road from 7 AM to 11:30 PM that’s just too much. (I did the majority of driving, with my wife taking about 1/3 and my mom covering a couple of hours on the very first day.)
Our rental was a Mazda CX-50, which seemed like it would have a bit more space in the backseat than the Honda option that was available. (Alas, there was no Nissan Rogue nor a Toyota 4Runner.) But my sore butt and back can tell you the driver’s seat isn’t great for long periods. I had to do some seat adjustment just to see the speedometer instead of having it blocked by the wheel. Also, the car’s software / general behavior was flaky. Sometimes the motorized back door would close about 1/3 of the way and then stop, requiring you to haul downward on it hard to get it the rest of the way. After sitting with the engine running for so long during one of the delays, it refused to shift out of Park until I killed the engine and restarted it. The Android Auto implementation was less than smooth. The automatic slowdown for a car in front, when using cruise control, would continue braking for about 3 seconds after said car had changed to a different lane, which was frustrating.
The heat wave was pretty nasty, near 100F on Tuesday. We bought my brother a window AC unit which helped tremendously, and one of the rooms downstairs stayed relatively cool thanks to impressively effective ceiling fans. But we still chose Tuesday to go to my brother’s in-laws’ camp on a lake (with slightly cooler temperatures, and a wonderful heat pump that made things quite comfortable) and then stayed in motel rooms that night courtesy of my mom. We also visited the Marshall Point Lighthouse, visited a couple of apparently stereotypically Maine-ish discount stores and a couple of tourist tchotchke shops, and consumed Moxie, fried haddock and whoopie pies.
The coast up there is lovely, but for tourist spots, I still prefer the Smoky Mountains. Family is the real reason to go there, and the super long drive is the reason not to go there.
I watched some videos on the OBNE Darkstar Stereo pedal, and I think it’ll be a good complement to Walrus Slöer. It’s effectively a single reverb algorithm, but with bitcrushing or overdrive, separately adjustable predelay and decay time, and feedback there’s quite a lot of possibility there. I’ll consider it once I’ve sold off the Hypnosis. (Maybe the EP-133 too, since I just don’t use it. And the Ploopy trackball.)
GForce has a cheap new software synth called Halogen FM. It seems possibly inspired by the Korg DS-8, but not an emulation of it, in that it’s “2×2 FM” (two 2-op pairs in parallel). But it has some continuous waveshaping options that go well beyond the Korg, making it somewhat of a unique approach. I only had a few minutes this morning to try it out, but will continue to play with it later. I’ll probably grab it for its unique contribution.
I’m still pondering some stuff in that trans philosophy book. I picked up The Myth of the Wrong Body at the bookstore we visited in Maine, since it seems to be related to one of that book’s points and offers alternative ways of thinking about transness. It’s kind of my hope that a different narrative will help to unify the transgender and nonbinary experiences a little better.
Meanwhile, I’ve read Marsha. The main impression I get is of a deeply caring person, full of love and joy and celebration. 95% of her defiance had nothing to do with rioting, but just being who she was without shame, and caring for fellow queer folks. She seems to be best known now for whatever she did at Stonewall (narratives vary), but setting aside the historical shininess of the event that started the Pride movement, her advocacy and personally caring for AIDS victims at a time when the government was actively getting in the way of helping, and the inspiration that she passed on to others, probably contributed far more.
Marsha also gives more insight into what it was like before the modern trans terminology and concepts, and a bit of what it was like to navigate that while Black. There has been a lot of progress since then, but there is still far to go — not just politically and in terms of rights, but how we think about and communicate these experiences. In fact I think evolution of the thought might be required to fix the politics beyond a certain point.
Meanwhile, I’m reading something completely different: Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I like occasionally reading a general book on artistic creativity — about perception, inspiration, openness, practice/work, etc. Many of the precepts in books like this are in agreement with each other, but individual artists have different insights or ways of expressing them… which of course is true of art itself as much as books about art, which are themselves art. Wheee…
Mostly what concerns me now is catching up on stuff after the trip. General physical and mental recovery. Checking out stuff I discovered or became curious about. Getting that bathroom leak fixed! Preparing for the basement repairs. Finding out WTF our lawn guy has delayed his “every two weeks” visit for more than two extra weeks now. Wrapping stuff up for the release at work. That sort of thing.
Naturally, a couple of days before we take off on a trip, the downstairs toilet is leaking with some degree of enthusiasm. We’ve had, for years, just a little bit of drip into the basement from somewhere unidentifiable in the bathroom — we had a plumber look around for it, find nothing and leave us unimpressed. But it’s gotten markedly worse in the last couple of days or so and I suspect the wax ring and/or something else with the toilet mounting. (It could be something else, maybe a supply line, but that seems so much less likely.) There’s no water on the bathroom floor, but things are obviously wrong down below. We wanted to replace that toilet anyway — it’s the cheapest one the flipper could find from a brand that my mom’s plumber said to avoid — but the timing leads something to be desired. I mean, it’s never a good time to have a plumbing issue, I guess…
For now we do have an upstairs bathroom, built into a roof gable. But aside from being small and cramped, it can get miserable in summer heat because there’s no AC vent. Better than nothing or letting this leak continue to progress.
And while I was stewing over that this morning, I logged in to work and… time for performance reviews. I had to fill in my SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) thingy with some haste, since we’re also in the final week before a code freeze and I have other stuff to get done. My actual performance reviews always go well and are a relief to get done, but I don’t like trying to figure out what to fill in on that form. I have plenty I could say about “threats” but if I want to avoid excessively personal or political topics at work, which I absolutely do, I have to leave them off.
