STARTHIEF

Yesterday afternoon my left knee started giving me trouble. That is, the one that I hadn’t scraped a bunch of skin off of a few days ago, aka my “good” knee. Probably arthritis — it’s been raining a LOT lately, and it started as that sort of “doesn’t quite hurt, but doesn’t want to support weight” thing (moving gradually into actual pain).

We’d already called off dinner plans since my wife had a rough night with cold symptoms and I had too little sleep. We’d have had to anyway with this knee, I think.

I recorded the 8th track. It’s not as soothing and calm as some of its predecessors, it wound up expressing that anxiety and discomfort more than I’d originally intended.

I played Abzu last night, mostly ignoring election coverage and doomscrolling. It’s a beautiful game, with actual fish species (and prehistoric ones) to gawk at and an unusual SF/fantasy story that omits all narration or explanation and leaves a lot to the player’s imagination.

But that only occupied me for a while; it’s a short game. I had a quick glance at very early election results, winced and put it aside. Read myself to sleep in the comfy recliner downstairs.

Woke at about 3:30 AM and looked for news, knowing if I didn’t I was just going to sit there worrying instead of sleeping anyway. Have not been able to sleep since. It took about 2.5 hours before the crying began.

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I’m deeply disappointed in American voters, and humanity in general.

A department store mannequin should have defeated Trump. The fact that Harris — a competent candidate, who ran a pretty good campaign at least by conventional wisdom — did not, is really telling.

The most depressing thing is that he actually won the popular vote this time. He had about the same number of voters as he did in 2020 (despite being demonstrably less coherent, having a track record of doing basically nothing useful in his first 4 years in office, and threatening all kinds of horrible things for a second term), and Harris had about 20 million fewer voters than Biden did. 20 million is not some small fringe.

A weird thing that happened, according to exit polls, is that white men, white women, black men, black women, and Latina women all voted on about the same split they did in 2020. But Latino men favored Biden by 23 points in 2020, and Trump by 8 points in 2024. WTF?

I’m not a political analyst, and I don’t really trust political analysts. But my take is this:

• Harris did not inspire people enough. Her take on Israel/Palestine drove some voters away. She didn’t do anything to excite the left either. That doesn’t begin to account for a gap of 20 million, but IMHO, when a candidate loses what SHOULD have been an easy victory, you do have to ask what they could have done better.
• Plain old sexism. A lot of people willing to vote for Biden were not willing to vote for a woman. Sigh.
• As someone else eloquently pointed out, it’s the bully thing. Trump is a bully. A weak and ineffectual bully, but then many of them are. Some people are willing to make the world a worse place just to stick it to someone else to demonstrate their own “power.” Trump supporters like him because he is terrible; it’s the equivalent of buying a huge gas-guzzling SUV and modding it to “roll coll” just to trigger the libs, contributing to the poisoning of the air that they have to breathe themselves and wasting fuel that they have to pay for themselves. It’s an irrational, mean-spirited and short-sighted “I don’t take no shit from nobody” gesture. So of course, if his opponent is a woman, they just have to bully all the harder.

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Not sure yet how to cope with this. Poorly, so far.

In elementary/middle school my method of dealing with bullies was not super healthy psychologically. I was paranoid about the motives of everyone who interacted with me, and especially of friendly overtures. I walked close to walls in the hallway to make it harder to be surprised, shoved, tripped etc. I tried to ignore every other child around me as much as possible, while also avoiding them, and being aware every time someone laughed (because they might be laughing at me). Like I said, it wasn’t healthy and I’m sure I tormented myself with that more than any bullies ever did. The only real success came from moving from middle into high school, and then from high school into college.

But more abstract bullying is all around (capitalism for one) and there are certainly assholes on the road and online who engage in bullying behavior. And in politics… I really don’t know how one can stop them.

This is hardly a uniquely American problem either. Moving to Canada wouldn’t really help in general. I guess if the whole ugly Project 2025 thing starts up, there are large numbers of people who might be safer in another country. I didn’t think we’d have refugees from America in my lifetime…

I found this article surprisingly good for the most part:

10 ways to be prepared and grounded if Trump wins

Particularly “Trust Yourself” and “Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor.”

Didn’t sleep well — weird intense dreams, no doubt caused by stress. We’ve had some heavy rain over thee past few days and the phone keeps alerting with flash flood warnings. Election day. Still dealing with cold symptoms; each time I feel like it’s getting better it gets worse and vice versa. This morning it’s headache more than anything. And then the cat demanded pre-dawn affection in his usual, in-your-face (literally) way.

I had the idea of taking my parents out to dinner tonight, partly because we haven’t visited them since before vacation and partly to get them away from TV news for a little while. Hopefully we’ll be feeling well enough to do that. After that… I’ll need other distractions. Maybe turn off the router for the night? Or start a new game (Abzu looks nice).

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Music is certainly going well, though. In my last post I had 4 recordings done; today there are 7. Shorter tracks than my recent average though, so that’s 29:33 so far.

The more minimalist nature of this project is going to make my gear usage stuff look weird. Some of these tracks consist of a single software instrument processed by software. Whatever 🙂

QPAS arrived yesterday. Missing the promised power cable, and with bent pins on the header from not-careful-enough packaging. I had spare cables and managed to get things straightened out, so it works fine.

At least to me, QPAS isn’t as much of an “instant wow” module as one that needs a bit of patience, the right material, and the right combination of settings and modulation. And then it really can shine… like slightly luminescent liquid sloshing in a beaker.

It’s funny how much it requires a different mindset to make it shine — but it really does help to think of it in terms of its peaks primarily, rather than as a standard multimode filter. Audio rate modulation of the !!¡¡ inputs is worth playing with, as is negative voltage into the Q CV input.

Thanks to playing with QPAS a bit while (slowly) writing this, I already have track #8 patched up and ready to record.

We kind of didn’t celebrate Halloween much. Some music playlists and wallpaper on our computers. Wir haben viel zu tun, as they say in DuoLingo (if you happen to be studying German), including getting over colds.

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One of those things to take care of was voting. I figured early voting would be pretty fast and smooth, based on the experience of voting during lockdown. But at the county building there was a line outside to get through security, and then another line to wait for a ballot. About 40 minutes later, we waited a short while for an open miniature voting booth, where we awkwardly filled in our comically large ballots that wouldn’t fit on the writing surface, flood-filling excessively large boxes completely with ordinary medium-point pens. (With me chanting “destroy isfet!” under my breath the whole while.) And that was after doing our homework on the numerous amendments, proposals, judges etc.

It’s done though, and now the challenge is not to spend the next week in a constant state of low-grade (or higher) panic. To not worry too much about the supposedly neck-and-neck polling — it’s statistically suspect just how many places are EXACTLY RIGHT ON THE EDGE, I suspect both political and media tomfoolery in play and maybe even Russians, who knows. With our votes cast, it’s now out of our hands, and serenity is called for.

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The next album does have a title already, and is trending more toward minimalism than other recent works — at least in terms of voice count. A one-voice synth drone can still be timbrally complex, spectrum-filling and full of motion and activity at multiple different timescales. Although with this observation, maybe I’ll also employ some very simple, pure sounds for contrast in a piece or two.

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Make Noise recently introduced its new ReSynthesizer system, a collection of modules that their team has been using in a lot of recent YouTube videos which they just felt works really well together. I’m not interested in that as a product myself, but the demos were lovely and there were two points of interest for me.

The first is that Spectraphon is getting a firmware update very soon, which adds linear array addressing in SAO mode — fixing what I’ve considered was the module’s biggest weakness. I love SAM and Chaos modes but the interpolation in SAO frustrated me, so this will make a great module even better.

The second… is noticing yet another video where QPAS is in play where I just love its sound, and realizing that QPAS is the same size as Morpheus, and acknowledging that Morpheus (cool as it is) has some issues that don’t thrill me. QPAS is just a more immediate, hands-on experience and its simultaneous filter outputs and ability to “radiate” the peaks differently on left and right channels allow a lot of flexibility and patching possibilities. Some of those QPAS sounds were similar to what I liked in the Djupviks Box of Angels demos as well, so… two birds.

In my memory I was thinking the reason I let go of QPAS is that I didn’t appreciate its resonance characteristics. Looking back at what I actually said at the time, that wasn’t it — I did say I preferred to keep res very low for typical lowpass use, but that going high had its uses otherwise. What really concerned me was two things:

• Power consumption. QPAS needs 190mA from the -12V rail, more than anything else I’ve had aside from Double Helix. The power supplies in my case are weak at supplying -12V… however, with some care to balance modules between the two of them, it’ll be fine.
  
• FOMO at the time. I wanted to try Joranalogue Filter 8. I burned through that one and 6 others since then, so… yeah, let’s just go back to QPAS!

Found one on Reverb and bought. The first change I’ve made to my modular in 4 months, so I’m kind of breaking a streak of stability there. But it’s a pretty direct swap for another filter and not some kind of major upheaval.

So yeah. I’ve gone from “I will hold my nose and vote for Biden because the alternative is horrible” to “I’m actually pretty glad to be able to vote for Harris.”

I guess I need to revisit this statement, a bit.

I am not okay with her stance on Gaza/Israel. Or her statement that she will never call for a ban on fracking. Or some of the other things she’s said lately. It makes this election less comfortable than I would have liked.

However. I very much agree with Bernie on this.

On every issue where I find Harris’ stance weak or unpalatable, Trump is inevitably worse. He is a walking disaster, a liar and a criminal, a racist sexist homophobic transphobic xenophobic ignoramus, a weird disgusting moronic con artist, a clearly sick old man who should be in prison, not in office.

I have tried not to pay attention to the polling, tried to stay away from doomscrolling. One still absorbs things, and this race is way closer than it should be. TFG is so bad, he should have less than the “crazification factor” level of support, and yet here we are, people supporting a man that they know is awful, that they’ve been repeatedly willing to say out loud in front of the press is awful.

Mitch McConnell Called Trump “Stupid,” a “Sleazeball,” and a “Despicable Human Being,” Then Endorsed Him for President

He doesn’t have the qualifications to manage a lemonade stand, to be the captain of a one-person tiddlywinks team, or to get to decide what his family is having for dinner. He doesn’t have the integrity of a wet sheet of one-ply toilet paper. He can’t be reasoned with. He can barely string words together into a coherent (if inevitably wrong) sentence; whatever low cunning he may have once had has surely fled, whether it’s dementia or decades of drug abuse or just getting high on his own ego.

See also: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles. (Not just more scathing criticism but some insight too.)

Harris isn’t perfect, but if you had to negotiate with someone about condemning genocide, would you rather do it with a moron who can’t spell “genocide” and during his previous term literally told his own staff he wished he had Hitler’s generals because they wouldn’t stop him from using military force against US citizens, or with someone who, at least, supports humanitarian aid for Gaza?

I protest-voted Green in one election. I felt really twitchy about voting for “a lesser evil” and felt like I should vote with my heart. The thing is though… this doesn’t work and it doesn’t help. Yes, I hate it that Democrats can get away with a minimalist platform of “at least we’re not the other guy.” But protest voting is an utterly ineffective form of protest, in our system.

The Democratic party doesn’t care about courting leftist votes; they have written us off as crazy. They would rather try to steal votes from Republicans and those (inexplicable IMHO) undecided voters. Which isn’t great news for their policies/politics generally. But while they have drifted rightward in some respects, in others they’ve stood fairly firm and they do the right thing once in a while. I’ll give the Biden administration some credit for doing some good, even if I feel there was a whole lot more good that really needed to be done.

If people don’t vote for Harris — if they stay home and abstain out of moral outrage, disgust, laziness, or whatever reason, or if they vote third-party or write in AOC or Bernie Sanders as a protest vote, the asshole is going to win. I hate that our system works this way, it’s not right at all. In an ideal world, one should be able to vote one’s conscience, to truly express oneself, to choose a person who would lead with the principles you want them to have. But that’s not the system we have.

Trump must be stopped. And the smarter but equally vile politicians who ride on his bandwagon must be stopped — perhaps even more so. The only way we can do that with the system we have is to put the Democrat in. And then, we work to hold that Democrat accountable, make her do the right thing, and work to change the system so better things are possible in the future.

We had our first non-family-visiting-based vacation to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary (delayed by a season for nicer weather).

I discovered about 4 hours down the road that I was wearing my computer glasses, and had left my regular glasses at home. This worked out better than I expected it would (given that they’re meant to focus at about 3 feet!) but there were times when I really wished I’d had the right ones.

Gatlinburg was beautiful. The most mountainous of mountain vacation spots I’ve ever been to, aside from Pike’s Peak. It is a small town by necessity since it’s nestled in a relatively narrow valley, and it was clearly not designed for the amount of tourist traffic that it gets. But they have a free trolley, areas that are very pedestrian-friendly, and overall it works. Our motel was a small one toward the outskirts but still in town, and the lady behind the desk gave us the first of many warnings about the local bears.

The symbol of Gatlinburg, black bears are normally shy of people and are peaceful mostly-vegetarians. But idiots feed them (quite illegally — think $10K in fines plus over a year in prison) and they start to associate humans with food. This makes them bolder and more aggressive, and they have been breaking into cars, mauling people, etc. They’ve unfortunately had to put down a record number of bears this year and there was one human death. We didn’t see any ourselves during this trip, except from well above on the Ober tramway.

We had a couple of nice breakfasts at Pancake Pantry — delicious food but if you don’t show up within the first hour or less of opening, you may find yourself waiting outside in line for literally two hours — and one at a more humble but solid Southern breakfast place. We got to see Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies — a large and impressive aquarium with a massive tank that features a long underwater tunnel and a nice variety of animals. We visited several shops in the Great Smoky Arts & Crafts Community, and tasted and bought some great cider from Tennessee Cider Company. Ober Mountain and the supposed fall festival that was happening there were an expensive letdown, but we made up for it with a trolley ride to Waffles de Lys after dinner, and the fantastic Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail (especially the Place of a Thousand Drips).

If you’re ever in or near Pigeon Forge I heartily recommend The Local Goat, a large and busy (but worth it) restaurant that serves locally-sourced food. Everything was super delicious and I had probably the best burger of my life, as well as great fried green tomatoes, a very good side salad and a wonderful peanut butter cheesecake.

The next day we drove through Great Smoky Mountain National Park, a wonderful scenic mountain road, and then onward to Myrtle Beach. Our hotel was right on the beach and as we arrived, our balcony overlooked the tail end of sunset. The city itself had much less traffic than Gatlinburg, or rather more space for the traffic it had, despite a Jeep Jam that was just getting started. (Given that it was the end of October, they should have called it Jeepers Creepers.)

The beach was nice and clean, not terribly crowded (being in fall), and the water wasn’t super cold but the waves were rough enough that I only waded in about knee-deep. We spent a fair amount of time in the pool and hot tub, shaded from the sun by a neighboring hotel — high-rises aren’t all bad. We visited the other U.S. Ripley’s Aquarium (there’s a third in Toronto), a bit smaller than the Smokies location but still very nice and with some animals we’ve never seen elsewhere, like a zebra mantis shrimp and sloths. We had lunch at The Hangout (good food and piña coladas, but gets more loud and obnoxious around dinnertime) and dinner (with funnel cake) on the boardwalk.

The next day we drove a ways out of town to the Prince Frederick Chapel ruins, a Gothic revivalist church from the 1840s that had been torn down in the 60s except for its facade and bell tower. There’s a fence and security cameras to deter vandals, but we took several photos and drank in the quiet forest sounds and feeling. When I texted my mom about it, I found out that this is where Cousin George was buried!

But I was feeling increasing cold symptoms at that point. I got through a decent enough (second breakfast) lunch and some good no-sugar-added butter pecan from Kirk’s 1890 Ice Cream Parlor but with increasing fatigue from trying to breathe. I wound up spending the afternoon trying to get some rest, and then back to The Hangout for dinner.

My spouse thankfully took over most of the driving the next day, since I was feeling pretty miserable. We got ourselves to Chattanooga and decided against trying to do anything that evening.

The next morning I thought I was feeling a bit better, and we went ahead with our plans to breakfast at the Bluegrass Grill (extremely good, small breakfast place, highly recommended, again it’s better to come early than later in the morning if you don’t want to wait). I had the best cinnamon roll ever and a half “fancy bacon flight” (one big piece of Jamaican jerk spiced bacon, and one piece of surprisingly subtle orange clove bacon). We visited the Tennessee Aquarium, which is two separate buildings for “River Journey” and “Ocean Journey” and got to pet sturgeons as well as rays. Lunch was at Thai Smile nearby. At that point I was exhausted and we retired to the motel room to rest up, rather than visiting Lookout Mountain or either of the caverns we had as possible destinations. My spouse also started having more serious symptoms as well, and by the next morning, I was the one in better shape so I drove us home. Lovely fall colors in Kentucky and it would have been a generally pleasant and low-stress drive, if not for those colds.

Very glad that I had also taken today off for recovery purposes, otherwise I’d have called in sick. Also this morning I managed to trip over my own pantsleg and blanket getting out of bed, half-caught myself on the bed but slid to the floor and scraped the skin off my knee; then I cut my forehead shaving. I decided there will definitely be no chainsaw juggling today. Perhaps we will go do our early voting, and take care of renewing drivers’ licenses though (this needs to be taken care of soon since they’re closing DMV offices for software updates).

My father-in-law is visiting this weekend, so hopefully we’ll get better soon and not pass this cold on to him too.

Religious stuff: going very well overall. Bringing me a lot of joy and satisfaction, but some confusion, impatience and moments of anxiety too (hopefully resolved, but… anxiety is what it is).

Music stuff: going well too. I was going to wait until post-vacation to start recording material for album 42, but this didn’t actually happen. The two I’ve recorded so far are on the shorter side but have a consistent sound; the real question is whether my creative direction in a couple of weeks is going to match it. But it’s not a serious worry.

The expander for Auza Wave Packets is available for pre-order, allowing more CV control over things. I’m of two minds about it, which means I’m holding off. To make room I’d have to let go of something, and I have a couple of candidates for that, but… changing my setup is not really appealing to me at the moment.

Probably the biggest news in the modular synth world is that Joranalogue released a wild new module in collaboration with Hainbach, the Collide 4. Based on a retro piece of lab equipment, the lock-in amplifier, it adds a few additional features… making it effectively a filter, distortion, TZFM sine/cosine oscillator, and frequency shifter in one panel. It reminds me a bit of Synchrodyne, which also took the approach of “obscure circuit + additional goodies = something weirder than the sum of its parts. It was interesting to find out about but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing I would get along with all that well.

Vacation stuff: Reservations and time off were settled a while back. Cleaning is mainly done (inevitably there’s a last-minute round of floor mopping thanks to the little brat dog). Road drinks and snacks are bought. List of stuff to pack is made. Pet-sitter is coming over to hang out and pick up the key.

The impact of Hurricane Helene on our route was up in the air until a couple of days ago. Some roads are washed out, some areas are restricted. There were disagreements between Google Maps, NCDOT, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But now it looks like we can follow almost our original plan, going just a little more south from Cherokee to join the designated detour route around Asheville.

Work stuff: we are still waiting on certification for the previous release, but are moving forward into development on the next version. We each have our to-do-list and mine is actually almost finished… but I saved the biggest, stickiest problem for last. And there will always be more to do anyway.

Book stuff: Currently reading The Telescope In The Ice, about the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole (and its construction, the people involved, and astroparticle physics generally). It’s a big array of strings of super-sensitive light detectors, dropped into 1km deep holes drilled in Antarctic ice by hot water jets. It detects when neutrinos passing through the Earth (like they do the time in vast quantities) just happen to collide with matter within a certain range of the array (which they do relatively extremely rarely). And being located where it is, getting people and equipment to it, and living there, is an adventure/hassle in itself.

The previous book was After On, a science fiction novel involving the collision of a shady social networking company, spies, quantum computing, augmented reality and a self-aware artificial intelligence. Very much a story for our time, a satire of tech bros, venture capitalism, the related type of toxic masculinity, and military fetishism, and and it was absolutely hilarious, and almost plausible most of the time. Post-cyberpunk, sure.

The new album, Tin Birds, is now released! 🙂 As usual, it’s free/pay-what-you-want.

Enjoy!

So, yes, we are back in the temple now. I expected having to do some refreshing of my memory, getting used to a new forum organization, catching up on some minimal number of changes (many of them social) and getting to know a lot of new people and catching up with old friends.

What I didn’t expect was a big change that happened about a year ago, which affects the structure and traditions that had been firmly established. Some of these traditions need something new to replace them, and no rush decisions are being made. So things are in a state of transition. It’s a lot to take in, but that means everyone is disoriented, not just newly returned old folks.

Also speaking of chaos, they use Discord now. The internet is quite a different place than it was in the late 90s or even 15 years ago. I’ve mostly been ignoring Discord in other contexts since I find it a sort of weird hybrid semi-persistent chatroom with some awful interface choices, and forums are just better for certain kinds of things. (Particularly for catching up with long-running topics.) But now I have sufficient motivation for dealing with it and I’m starting to not be completely lost there. It definitely does have advantages over IRC or AIM chats, but… holy cow does it need a “jump to first post” button somewhere. I don’t want to read an entire 3-year long discussion backwards.

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Also I have an album to release. I’m really happy with how it turned out! I just need to spend the time concentrating on writing up the info and then publish it.

My “Mastering Chain 9-24” template that I’m currently (literally right now as I type this) using for the next album release looks like this:

I’ve mentioned TB Equalizer Pro before. It’s become my go-to equalizer, and it’s getting more use than I ever had for all my EQs combined thanks to its Transient/Sustained, Direct/Ambience and various dynamic options, as well as a very effective brickwall highpass filter. So it’s no surprise I prefer it for mastering as well as on individual tracks. That said, so far it’s had very little to do because everything’s already in pretty great shape.

Just released yesterday, Waves Curve Equator is a dynamic auto-EQ tool in the same neighborhood as Gullfoss, Soothe, TEOTE, Wavefactory Equalizer and others. Despite the marketing speak, none of the tools in this category is as effective at fixing truly obnoxious resonances as manually setting up EQ is. But many of them successfully add a bit of polish and clarity. You may or may not be able to consciously notice a difference between the “before” and “after” but things just sound 5-10% nicer. Equator, so far, has been doing a great job at this (offering a bit more sculpting than many and some handy additional options.

DDMF MagicDeathEye is an official emulation of the coveted Magic Death Eye tube-based compressor. I like it because it’s basically foolproof, or “respectful of the source material” as they say. Unless you just crank it up too loudly and it distorts in something further down the chain, you can’t make it sound bad. Sometimes, like with Equator, stuff just sounds better after having run through it. The goal though is to get a bit louder. In my recording process I tend to record at safe levels, quiet-but-not-too-quiet, and normalize to -3dBFS true peak as a starting point. Having done that, I can typically just use some default settings on the compressor and it’ll be good.

SideMinder Max makes sure the stereo image isn’t too wide anywhere (phase correlation issues) while letting me enhance or restrict the width if I want to across four different frequency ranges. My goal is a good stereo image in headphones. Usually by this point though, I have already taken care of any real issues so this is just a last safety measure.

Elephant is my limiter. A chance for a small bit more volume boost perhaps, and more importantly, a guarantee that the peaks of my signal stay below -1dB to make sure whatever compression algorithms Bandcamp uses don’t glitch out.

Span, Correlometer and Youlean Loudness Meter are visual tools for analyzing the results, making sure levels are right and I don’t have anything weird happening. These are no substitute for using one’s ears of course, but still helpful.

Not shown here: OVC128. More often than not I run the output of Bitwig’s mastering pass through this one in Sound Forge. It oversamples 128 times, boosts the signal, clips the peaks and then re-cuts — all of this lets me increase the overall volume some more without introducing anything nasty.

Yes, there’s a lot of redundancy here in terms of getting levels and EQ right. But this is a process that works well for me, and most of the time I can do it on autopilot with my saved template settings. With the music I make I am very much not looking for “pure” sound — I don’t worry about converters, EQing too many times, noise floor etc. but I am picky about certain things, and this setup lets me get it right.

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I do have a name for the album — I realized there was a certain theme to some of the titles and sounds, connected by an obscure quote from another musician, and a general vibe. The cover art is really not my mental “picture” of the scene I associate with all of this, but I think it works.

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What does not work is the Kickstarter for Aodyo Loom, the ribbon-style MPE controller I was so looking forward to. They have spent all the money, they have found that manufacturing costs are out of their reach, and they’re very likely to just go bankrupt and be unable to refund their backers, unless an investor swoops in to bail them out, which seems unlikely.

This is a known risk for Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc. and in my experience, things do usually work out pretty well. (I’m a little more leery of backing indie game developers this way because I’d rather have a playable demo to know I’m going to enjoy the game, but still, a good majority of them do release something.) So I’m not super upset about losing the money this time — it wasn’t that much — just disappointed in not being able to have this seemingly ideal controller.

What I want in a controller is:

• not hideously expensive (this eliminates several “Serious Instrument” options)
• compact, preferably in the 12 inch wide range.
• full support for pressure control; I usually want to use pressure rather than gated envelopes to control levels/filters/etc.
• allows smooth pitch glides.
• reliable.

I guess my hopes are now on the Erae II, which was running under its own Kickstarter and is supposed to be released Any Day Now. There have been public demos and several YouTubers actually playing them, so unless they’ve reached the same manufacturing wall that Aodyo ran face-first into, the outlook seems to be pretty good. This is fancier, and at the non-Kickstarter price, more than I would have liked to pay (but maybe I could snag a used one) but seems worthy from what I’ve seen so far. I might decide that I just don’t need it though… we’ll see.

Operation Write Stuff In Ink has been a great success, not just in that there is ink on paper forming words, but in that I’m finding spiritual clarity and inspiration. I am making connections between experiences and insights from years ago, and some of those connections are to more recent stuff as well.

I’ve decided to reintroduce myself to the temple again, at least on the forum. I was officially part of it from 1998 to 2011, so I’ve been out again as long as I was in. I don’t know yet to what extent I’m going to commit, and don’t feel a need to rush into it.

In that previous phase, I wanted to connect to the Divine and to the Unseen, and I wanted to make myself a better person with a better life. This time, I feel like I have the connection, I just need to do things with it. One can always keep fixing oneself of course, but right now what I’m thinking about is connecting my spiritual practice more deeply to my music in some way that makes both better. An interesting challenge.

Speaking of music… album #41 is now at 53 minutes, assuming I keep all of the material (so far, I think I will). I do still want to record at least one more thing for it though. Preferably to release before we go on our vacation…