STARTHIEF

Since I record my music live, rather than either solely or primarily sequencing/automating it, controllers are really important to me.

It was replacing a dead MIDI keyboard with a Microbrute that got me back into synth hardware after going software-only for so long.

The Soma Lyra-8 got me thinking about touch/pressure controllers, leading to the 0-Ctrl (as well as the loosely-related Strega and the more closely related Elmyra).

The Polyend/Dreadbox Medusa was my introduction to grid controllers and MPE, which led me to the Novation Launchpad… which wasn’t MPE but had poly aftertouch, but it didn’t feel satisfying or precise. Which led me to the Roli Seaboard Block, where both pressure control and pitch slides are very precise and satsifying…

…except when the pressure drops out or goes intermittent as it does on my unit. This must not be a common problem because I haven’t heard of this specific issue anywhere else online, and I did buy mine used so I don’t know how it was treated or what abuse it may have suffered in transit (though it seemed well-packaged). I have heard some general gripes about the reliability and longevity of Roli stuff though.

With Black Friday November discounts in mind, I started thinking about replacing my Seaboard. A new one isn’t that expensive and might solve my problems. Or it might develop the same or other problems after a couple-few years of use. Meanwhile it would have the same limitations:

• Slides on the Y axis don’t feel natural, so I rarely take advantage of them. The whole playing surface could be about 2 inches from front to back (accounting for black keys and at least one non-key slide strip), as far as I’m concerned.
• Two octaves is usually fine, but a bit limiting at other times. However, I do need to keep things compact to fit in the available space.
• The squishy playing surface feels pretty good for pressure-oriented playing like I tend to prefer, but not so much for percussive, velocity-oriented playing (which I might want to do once in a while if the controller was more amenable, at least for jamming).

The Aodyo Loom was going to be my alternative controller. Compact and still just two octaves; relatively cheap; not squishy but apparently both velocity- and pressure- oriented, with a couple of extra playing areas/ribbons for other purposes. Alas, the production costs exploded, the money may not have been spent wisely, and the Kickstarter fell through and disappeared its backers’ money.

The Erae II, whose production was delayed, is supposed to finally ship to its Kickstarter backers in December, and they have opened general preordering as well. But I am more suspicious of how this technology feels to play, after disliking Roli’s little Blocks, and at the price I would certainly want to try one in person before committing. The original Erae Touch had some loyal followers but it was more of a niche thing I think.

Based on its looks, descriptions and reviews I bet the Haken Continuum feels great to play — a sort of smooth mesh fabric surface that squishes a bit differently than the rubber of the Roli instruments. It’s quite large and very expensive though. Even the Mini is pretty expensive, and too long to fit in my available space — and is merely duophonic.

The Linnstrument though… it comes in two sizes, the smaller of which fits my space. The price of a used one is a bit less than a new Erae II. The instrument has been around for 10 years, with minor revisions to the playing surface, mature and stable firmware (which is also open-source and has a robust community), and a track record of reliability. It is loved by most of its users (*), sensitive and configurable, and its designer, Roger Linn, has been one of the better-known names in electronic instrument design since the late 70s (and personally supports the instruments and community in a way that’s great to see).

The Linnstrument is a grid controller, inspired by string instrument fretboards, with a default interval of a 4th between rows, like a bass. That allows isomorphic chord shapes and options for alternate fingerings. You can also split into two zones, or use the bottom row for alternate control purposes. The surface is a thin silicone mat, not squishy like the Roli or Haken instruments, but reviewers say the pressure response is very precise and playable anyway (and some but not all say it’s also well suited for percussive playing). There are configurable LEDs and also subtle Braille-like bumps to identify note positions and scales, but unlike many other grids you can smoothly glide pitch like a fretless instrument (or, I’m told, with a light touch get a sort of fretted feel to slides).

I have heard from a few reviewers that the Y axis on the Linnstrument is not amazing, and… honestly I think that’s more because it’s just not as natural a motion as side-to-side or downward pressure, and it’s probably true of every MPE controller. It doesn’t much matter though. The grid layout seems like a much better use of vertical space than the Seaboard, extending the playable range and encouraging a different kind of melodic exploration.

(*) Where people don’t get along with the Linnstrument, it’s generally because they find they really want a piano style keyboard layout or action. I’m not worried about that.

So, I have a used one on the way now, in hopes that this will be the “keyboard” for me as it is for a lot of others.

No thanks to DuoLingo (and some thanks to a search that found a post on Quora), I finally made a grammatical connection in German, and it amuses me.

• “es tut mir leid” is always translated as “I’m sorry.” Obviously not quite a literal translation, otherwise it’d be “ich bin something”…
• “mir tun die Beine weh” is translated as “my legs hurt”. “I something the legs something?” Hmm.
• “Ich habe viel zu tun” is translated as “I have a lot to do.” This makes some sense, but there’s “tun” again.

As it turns out, “tun” is a plural form of “do”, and “tut” is the singular. But it’s apparently kind of a specialized “do” unlike the more general one in English; in German you’re more likely to “make” stuff (like homework or yoga, or even fun) than to “do” it.

“Es tut mir leid” is “it does me sorrow.” Which just makes me think of can has cheezburger. “It do me a sad.”

Even better, “weh” is apparently “ouch,” and so “mir tun die Beine weh” is “I do my legs an ouch.” (You could also say the simpler “meine Beine tun weh”, my legs do me an ouch… but of course that’s not what DuoLingo teaches.)

On the music software calendar, the month between October and December is named “Black Friday.” (I’ve already complained about the terminology in previous years, so…)

Arturia threw a big discount on their V Collection. Stacked with the discount they already offered me for owning a couple of individual items in the collection, they finally made it tempting enough for me.

V Collection is a ridiculously large set of software synthesizers. Originally confined to a handful or so of emulations of vintage analog synths, it has grown into a true collection encompassing analog, digital, electromechanical and even some acoustic instruments, as well as the software version of their own Minifreak synth.

It’s that last one that got my attention. As a previous Microfreak owner, the slightly larger sibling is mostly familiar territory. The hardware Minifreak is 6-voice polyphonic (or 12-voice paraphonic) vs. the Micro’s 4-voice paraphony. It also adds a stereo effects chain and a second “digital engine” which can be an oscillator or a processor. The software version is a faithful emulation of that (as well as a controller and editor/librarian for the hardware). While part of the fun of the Microfreak was its small physical form and fun controller, the synth engine can do some fun things and the Micro, more so.

With the discount it was cheaper to buy all of V Collection than just Minifreak V, so I did. That meant also getting some other great instruments, which I spent the weekend playing with:

• CS-80 V. The 200 lb. organ-like synth monster, famously used for the soundtracks of Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, the 1980 version of the Dr. Who theme, “Africa” and “Rosanna”, “Born in the USA”, “Billie Jean” and “Human Nature”… and sadly, McCartney’s yuletide abomination whose title I shall not utter here. It’s a unique and quirky design with a ton of performance-oriented controls for things that a really detailed modern software synth might allow you to adjust deep in some menu or other, and some unusual routing options you’d otherwise have to go modular to get. The software version feels pretty ridiculous in terms of UI, but hey, it makes nice sounds.
• Jup-8 V. The one classic Roland analog synth that I actually find interesting, because of its FM ability. While I’d never buy a real one due to the hugely inflated prices and the need for expensive restoration work on most of them, to play with it in software every one in a while is fun.
• SQ80 V. An early wavetable synth from Ensoniq, it’s got a lot of limitations, but has some neat sounds I’ll find useful.
• CZ V. An emulation of the budget Casio CZ-101, which I actually have one of in the closet (but the power adapter connection is loose and it’s not the funnest interface to work with anyway). The software version adds a lot more capability, including custom phase distortion functions. Very cool.
• Mellotron V. A very good emulation of the tape-based “sampler” famous from “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Space Oddity”, heavily featured on a couple of Tangerine Dream albums, and a bunch of 60s and 70s prog rock. It has a distinctive sound (or three) and can also be bent beyond TD’s usage into even more ambient purposes. I’ve used cheaper, more limited emulations of this before, but this is the best yet.
• Solina V. An early string synthesizer, used heavily in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and several songs on The Cure’s Disintegration, a lot of disco and funk tunes, and by Jean-Michel Jarre. I already have the Waldorf Streichfett, and this sort of sound isn’t too hard to emulate with any analog-style polyphonic synth and a phaser… but this does open a couple of doors (I don’t think The Doors had one though).
• Vox Continental V. A transistor drawbar organ which can get surprisingly growly, and — most fun for drone purposes for me — offers the ability to retune notes of the octave.
• Augmented Voices, Augmented Woodwinds, Augmented Piano. Based on combining sampled acoustic instruments with complementary granular and wavetable synthesis plus effects. I don’t find designing sounds from scratch particularly fun with these, but they each have several included presets which, with slight tweaks (or not at all) and maybe some external processing, are true gold for drones and ambient work.
• (I already had Easel V and Synclavier V; those are pretty great too.)

There are several other instruments I either didn’t try due to lack of interest, or tried and rejected. Like I said, it’s a big collection! Previewing and playing with all of that stuff is what I did with my weekend, for the most part. While playing with Augmented Voices, I managed to improvise something I liked so much that I’ve planned to use it as that starting point for track #9 on the next album. (But I heard so many great drones, I could have had any number of starting points. In fact I was starting to prepare to record one with the Vox Con when its demo timer expired and it stopped making sound. That was the point where I decided that I better just buy the collection.)

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This cold is now about 2.5 weeks old, and I’d say that it has overstayed its welcome except of course that it was never welcome in the first place, ruining most of the vacation day when it first struck. But… I have stuff to do! I want to visit my parents, which we haven’t done since before the trip. I want to take my spouse out for her (belated by illness) birthday dinner, and I want to be okay when my own birthday rolls around in a bit. I want to walk around the lake while the weather is so perfect for it. I want to get that shrine back together and properly practice the religion I’ve come back to. I even want to do a bit of other cleanup (not too much though).

I do feel a bit better today, and have done some gentle walking around the plaza. But I’ve had other moments where I felt like I was pretty good, only to be brought down by a coughing fit, or an entire day of groggy fuzziness.

Posted elsewhere:

During his last reign of terror idiocy, I had nightmares featuring convicted felon and insurrectionist Donald J. “Small Hands” Putin-Trump, and my overall level of anxiety increased quite a bit during that time.

There’s this phrase “living rent-free in one’s head.” I’ve decided that this is not going to happen. Agent Orange is hereby evicted. He is an unimportant, insignificant little rat turd of a man, and he has nothing of interest to say.

Granted, I’m still thoroughly disappointed in the gullibility, mean-spiritedness and stupidity of voters. I’ll just have to let the scar tissue grow over that one.

Overall, I’m going to do my best not to be bowed by the weight of …things. I’ll make music and play games and pet the dogs and continue being my weird, nonbinary, pagan(-ish), leftist, environmentalist self. I’ll do what I can to be kind and understanding, and for everything else there’s spite. (This is something my spouse has been championing for years. I understand it more than ever, now.)

I just donated money to the Trevor Project, a thing which it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to do today, if it weren’t for The Guy Who Fell Asleep At His Own Trial.

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I’m no longer going to read Metafilter. It’s been entertaining and interesting at times, but I cannot stand the political commentary (everything is the leftists’ fault, everyone is an armchair quarterback where it comes to running a campaign, etc.) and based on past history, the next four years will be pretty gross. There’s a filter option to disable political posts but they don’t always catch everything, and I just think it’s time to move on.

I’m also disengaging from a few political threads elsewhere. There’s this tendency for reporting on TFG to turn into this outrage-baity gossip column thing (what he just said will shock you! …not after all this time it won’t) and who needs that?

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 it looks like he probably won the popular vote this time. Not all the votes are counted yet and I won’t rule out some sort of shenanigans. This is despite being demonstrably less coherent than he was then (which wasn’t very), 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. It looks like Harris had significantly fewer votes than Biden did 4 years ago.

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.