FDT

Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich man, a weak person’s idea of a strong man, and a stupid person’s idea of a smart man.

I’m not sure who said that first. One site credits Michael Moore, but I don’t know. Anyway. This.

Trump is completely out of touch, living in his rich asshole bubble the way he does — and his dementia (or maybe drug-addled stupor, or both) is increasingly on display.

An old fashioned term that we use — groceries. I used it on the campaign. It’s such an old fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries. It says a bag with different things in it.

I think Robert Reich has this nailed: 10 rules for dealing with Trump’s demands for capitulation

Trump is 100% in this for his own ego. He doesn’t care about trade deficits, about fentanyl, about protecting women or children, about the price of eggs, about the middle class, about farmers, about the rest of the world’s goodwill toward America, or anything else. I suspect he doesn’t even actually care about his various bigotries, he’s just echoing the hate that his cult wants to hear. Trump cares only about making Trump feel important.

He is cosplaying as a head of state, just as he previously pretended to be a shrewd businessman (when the reality is, if he’d parked his inherited wealth in a money market account and started zero businesses, he’d be richer today).

The difference from his first administration is, other scumbags have latched onto him, knowing he’s weak-minded and gullible and doesn’t give a shit; they are playing him, using him as their puppet. Not just Putin this time, but Musk, Zuck, the Project 2025 shitheads, etc. The main dangers in that game are (A) that Trump has no loyalty to anyone but Trump, (B) many of the would-be puppet masters hate each other’s guts, (C) Trump’s increasingly blatant dementia and absolute foolhardiness and that of his cabinet and followers may outpace or overshadow them achieving their goals, and (D) wrecking necessary governmental institutions and crashing the economy doesn’t help the billionaires. As Musk sees with Tesla stock plunging, sales falling off, dealerships being vandalized etc. The leopards are eating everyones’ faces here.

Also this:

It is very likely that the tariff policy was generated by ChatGPT. And it includes tariffs against islands that are inhabited only by penguins, and against the British India Ocean Territory, which is occupied only by a joint US/UK military base (the original population having been forcibly deported to other islands by the UK in 1968-1973). Of course, the stupidity of those details pales in comparison to the economic and diplomatic stupidity of the tariffs in the first place.

And then there’s Elon, whose DOGE has basically been nothing but piracy:
Elon Musk Can’t Take the Heat
Everything is blowing up in Elon Musk’s face
‘Constant failure’

Five months ago, The Economist (not known to be particularly leftist…) said on a magazine cover that America’s economy (under Biden) was “the envy of the world.” Today:

Oddly, I am hopeful that billionaires and would-be billionaires, and all those people who put on blinders to Trump’s idiocies up to this point, will collectively admit the so-called emperor has no clothes, withdraw their support, pressure other Republicans to resist Trump’s worst excesses, discredit the entire MAGA / Project 2025 program, and walk back on all of the hateful bullshit. The cognitive dissonance can only stretch so far. Right?

Right…?

Anyway, enough of that.

I started reading Jonathan Stearne’s The Audible Past yesterday. Though it’s the kind of intellectual thing that could have been very dry, the writing style prevents it from being too much so and it’s telling an intriguing story. For instance: Alexander Graham Bell, before the telephone, wanted to make devices to “help” deaf people — by which he meant, train them to pass as hearing in mainstream society. (He was a eugenics fan and opposed to deaf folks having their own language and culture.) He and Clarence J Blake invented the “ear phonotograph,” which used an actual human middle ear sourced from a dead guy (unlike the earlier phonotograph) to transcribe sound waves onto paper.

But the same day I started reading this book, we had a thunderstorm and a very close lightning strike took out my computer speakers. There was a super bright flash from the lightning and basically instantaneous thunder, and I’m pretty sure I did hear a “pop” from the speakers. They were cheap, a barebones older generation of Creative Pebble speakers, not really used for music production. Still, it irked me to have to untangle their cables, toss it away and buy another pair. This time I’m going for a slight upgrade, Creative T100, still very much computer speakers and nothing super hi-fi though. The acoustics and noise in this room aren’t worth spending more, and I feel like my music is headphones-oriented anyway.

The shaving soap and brush arrived. I mostly like the scents as they sit in their containers. I’ve used Southern Witchcrafts’ “Valley of Ashes” twice so far, once without and once without the “Smolder” pre-shave oil.

The description of the scent notes of that one is odd: “Coal, Tar, Bourbon, Tobacco, Bitter Citrus, Smoke, Leather, Motor Oil, Burning Rubber, Diesel, Clove, Birch Tar, Bergamot.” Some folks online say it smells like an old-fashioned but well-kept auto repair shop, or “like Alfred working on the Batmobile” or other such things. I’m really not getting the hydrocarbon thing from it at all, nor big masculine energy; especially with the pre-shave oil I’m getting more of an impression of frankincense maybe. To me it’s slightly unusual but pleasant, and does smell like something one should be shaving with.

This is my first time using a shaving brush, and this soap does lather up very quickly and is smooth, but “thin” rather than “bulky” the way the LESSN bar can be. As I shave I don’t end up with clogs of semi-solid gunk on the razor that needs to be re-melted and rinsed off with hot water. I would say it’s not as moisturizing, and my face doesn’t seem as smooth the next day. After two shaves there’s still enough in the sample container for one or maybe even two more rounds, and I’ll go ahead and finish it before trying the next thing. (Actually I’m also curious how LESSN works with the brush instead of directly rubbing it on.)

The wall contractor’s going to park some equipment in our driveway today, so that’s a sign of impending progress — hopefully the work will start on Monday, which is forecast to be dry and cool again after this stormy week.

“under construction” status is under construction

Another day, another set of sidewalk stripes. This time we have yellow, to mark a gas line. It goes near the cherry tree that the wall folks were already going to have to be careful of. Lots of rain is forecast for this week though, so I don’t expect the wall construction will begin quite yet, and we don’t have a date for it yet.

The first company I reached out to about siding repair got back to me Friday and said they have a $1000 minimum repair fee and an 8 week lead time. (They could have started with that…!) It’s one strip of siding and I really don’t want to overpay for that. So I’m in the process of getting some other quotes; the next one will be April 9.

I finally recorded the first track for the next album project. For all that people claim that restrictions are good for creativity, I’m going to say that they can be good… or they can get in the way. There have been a few times where if it hadn’t been for the “must be bass” restriction I’d likely have recorded something. But sometimes I just don’t want to pick up the bass and start with that — the process is quite different with it. Important lesson learned already!

The track itself is okay, perhaps good (I need more distance to judge it). It’s not what I was imagining when I started. I had planned to use Multimod/Nearness to create some stereo spread and subtle detuning, and play something melancholy and slow. But I wound up smashing the “subtle” to go for equal-interval chords with random time jumps, a very granular-ish effect. Along with a deeper drone, it works.

“Regular” chords in Western music theory usually have mixed intervals — they are not symmetrical, and that asymmetry lets us very easily identify major and minor triads and their inversions. C-F-A is recognized as a major chord and the root is F. But C-F-B♭ has equal intervals, so there’s no identifiable root. Inversions like B♭-C-F seem asymmetrical, but they don’t decode to anything we recognize. So it’s very enigmatic and open-ended. Jazz hands!

I’ve been continuing to play Guild Wars 2. March brought discounts on various in-game cosmetic and utility stuff, and among other things I got myself a Shimmerwing skin for my skyscale — sort of a unicorn/dragonfly/dragon hybrid I guess. No actual money spent nor shady dealings. I’ve never been one to farm for gold, but several years of playing meant I had a lot of hoarded crafting materials, secondary currencies, weapon skins I never cared about etc. that could all be sold in-game for gold and then converted to gems. Enough for a nifty mount and fancy pants and a cool cape.

(The one thing I still want for my characters is a crossbow pistol, which converts the loud shooty sounds of other pistols to a satisfying, suitable sproing-whoosh-thunk. That requires 25 Black Lion Statuettes, and I have… 6, after kind of squandering them on armor skins that I wound up not using all that long anyway. You get one with every chest unlock, but the keys are rarer than they used to be — granted at particular Personal Story steps (with per-week per-account limits) or randomly on completing a map. This is to encourage people to spend actual cash on them. Feh.)

[note: forgot to actually write this part originally, added the next day] Alongside my Scourge, I’ve leveled up another character to 80 — a Scrapper this time, engineer who specializes in the warhammer and has a ton of combo field effects and finishers which generate Quickness. Very effective, if not quite as much of a survivor as the Scourge. I took her through the entire “personal story” (defeating the Elder Dragon Zhaitan) because I forgot how much bullshit the final part of it is. You’re standing on the deck of an airship with 6 cannons, trying to operate all of them by yourself while being bombarded with poison and undead dropping onto the deck, as other crew members stand around doing nothing belowdecks. You have to shoot down smaller dragons, but the targetting for them with the cannons is extremely buggy. Then the final fight is similar, but with bigger cannons and a bigger dragon and more crap being thrown at you. Not particularly fun.

After that I decided to go ahead and start End of Dragons, the expansion I’d bought on sale some time back (which unlocked additional professions specializations) but hadn’t actually played. This gives me access to the land of Cantha, jade tech, fishing, skiffs, and eventually siege turtles. None of those things are great — jade tech is mostly for a few “puzzles” only in Cantha, fishing isn’t great, and all of the movement-related stuff is inferior to skyscales and skimmers. But it’s been a really beautiful set of areas so far and the story’s been fun… even though each time I start one of these stories, I realize that skipping over the “Living World Season ____” stories means I have no idea who half the NPCs are or their history with each other.

Today is the Transgender Day of Visibility. It’s also a work-at-the-office day, so I was pondering various things. I chose not to be as overt as I might have liked. I was going to at least wear a pink shirt with a blue undershirt, but then I spilled peanut butter on that.

So all I really did was add “The Shark” tarot card enamel pin, which I got as a random extra with an order of other pins, to my hoodie. It looks more than a little like Blåhaj, which is probably just coincidence. I also have my nonbinary dragon pin on that hoodie anyway. And enby and trans pride flag stickers on my car, which given where I work, more people are going to see anyway. So I’m not completely invisible.

Among the other books mentioned by The Trans and Nonbinary Hero’s Journey was H.E. Edgmon’s The Witch King and its sequel Fae Keeper. A young transmasculine and gay witch, fated to wed a Faery king, had escaped to Earth but gets dragged back into all the horrible politics. It’s really a lot of fun. The MC’s problems are not from the relatively minimal transphobia and practically zero homophobia in the book, nor from dysphoria… but from traditionalist Fae bigotry against witches, serious doubts about marrying into royalty, jealousy, out-of-control magic (leaving physical and emotional scars), and general fish-out-of-water-ness. That’s enough for one character to have to deal with. I really enjoyed the first book and have started in on the second.

I’ve got another bunch of books on the way via Alibris: JES’ The Audible Past, as well as Life Isn’t Binary and some more nobinary, trans and queer fantasy.

rendering unto Caesar

I really dislike bureaucratic stuff. I recognize the need for at least some level of it, but it always seems so dire. Like if you screw up filling out a form you can go to jail forever or pay huge fines, or something. And there’s all this weird jargon and poorly worded instructions… I think of myself as a fairly smart person in most respects but that shit usually throws me.

The US has ridiculous, overcomplicated tax laws, due to capitalists lobbying to avoid paying as much tax as possible, legislators using tax credits, exemptions, and things like IRA and 401k retirement accounts as tools… and the tax prep industry lobbying to keep it complicated so people need to pay professionals to fill out forms. For the last couple of years I have been using FreeTaxUSA, which handles a majority of tax situations at no charge, and state filing is cheap. (Yes, that’s another complication in the US — every state has different laws for income tax and property tax, and more forms to fill out.)

I was working on our taxes last night, got to the section on IRA (individual retirement account) contributions and ran into a problem: my contributions were more than twice the maximum, and had been for the past few years. I was going to get hit with really stiff penalties if I didn’t transfer money out of it (and get an additional tax form to add to the return).

(When thinking about this stuff I always find it useful to remind myself that money isn’t real. It isn’t natural. It’s a 100% invented thing and yet it holds an incredible amount of importance in our society. And money absolutely does not correlate to a person’s goodness or worthiness, in fact the people with the most money in our society skew heavily toward scumbags. A lot of unnecessary suffering and waste could be alleviated if other people were willing to give up their greed and their fixation on capitalism.)

Anyway, at that point I figured I needed to call my employer’s financial advisor and gave up on it for the night. So of course my attempt at sleep was plagued by worry, intrusive thoughts, and weird vaguely financial, vaguely black magic-ish dreams.

This morning I was looking over the emails and forms about it and realized: what I have is a “Simple IRA”, not a “Traditional IRA.” The simple IRA limits are much higher and I was within them. No cause for alarm, I am not going to be thrown into the gulag (at least not for this). I finished filing this morning, and my federal and state refunds for 2024 are approximately what they were for 2023. That’ll help cover some of the home repair stuff.

On the pains/medical scare: Sunday, I found that the chest pain would return somewhat as each Toradol dose wore off, but not as bad as Friday night or Saturday. But since Monday I have taken none of the pills at all and had no chest pain. (Just more typical back pain, tense shoulders and so on.)

On shaving: that LESSN soap I recommended does not last very long. It’s gotten very thin and a corner has broken off. I don’t know if it just wears down that much from use or needs to be better protected from general shower moisture. I have another bar arriving Friday, but I’m also going to try some other options. I’ve got some samples from Southern Witchcrafts on the way — sadly not their “Incorporeal” scent-free shave soap since that was sold out, but some scents I might like — as well as “A Midnight Dreary” from Catie’s Bubbles and a synthetic shaving brush.

I also found that once my Pacific Shaving Co. pre-shave oil (commonly referred to as PSO) ran out, the shave soap was still pretty good but not quite as good. Like the difference between mastered and unmastered music. 🙂 I went shopping around for various options and decided to try “Smolder” pre-shave oil from The Blades Grim. It does the trick maybe 80% as well as PSO for 20% of the price and the scent is pleasant.

I prefer to find more gender-neutral options in terms of the scents and branding. A lot of shaving stuff is coded extremely masculine (ALPHA LUMBERJACK KING COBRA OUTLAW AR-15 HAIR ANNIHILATOR WITH 100% TEXAS LONGHORN BEEF TALLOW AND PINE TAR… FOR SENSITIVE SKIN) and that’s right out. I also prefer to skip over stuff that has a totally unnecessary “For Men” or “For Women” attached to it because I’d like to gently discourage the “Bic Pens For Her” phenomenon as much as my tiny amount of consumer influence can. That still does leave some good options though.

We’re still waiting on a date for the wall repairs to begin. The contractor said he was waiting on permits. Monday I came home from work to see somebody or other had marked the location of a pipe with blue paint (meaning, if the internet is correct, it’s carrying potable water):

But wait, what did they do on the second wall?

…they painted the scraggly, mostly-dead vines, completely missing the ground and the wall. I mean, it’s not like all of that isn’t going away anyway — blocks, dirt, and plants except for the cherry tree on the top level — but it just struck me as especially funny.

Books! I finished Moomvalley in November but it didn’t strike me with the same sense of sweet melancholy the same way as it did when I read it the first time. I think I simply may have burned out on Moomin stuff by trying to read all of them close together.

Dauntless was not mindblowing, but was entertaining enough. I felt at first like it was borrowing concepts from other novels, but once things started coming together, that feeling faded to “maybe loosely inspired” at most. It was also one of the least queer books I’ve read in some time, simply because the protagonist is merely a lesbian and the most spicy thing that happens on the page is some kissing.

Now I’m reading C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, which is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. It was described and quoted in Sacred Gender, and I read elsewhere that many consider it his finest work (or in some cases, his only good work). It’s really engaging. The setting is the fictional kingdom of Glome near Greece; one of the characters is a Greek philosopher enslaved by the king; the narrator an ugly half-sister of the inhumanly beautiful princess Psyche, who she loves very much. She rebels against society when Psyche is sacrificed to a god. While it’s not exactly feminist, it’s perhaps a little bit proto-feminist in some respects? A major theme is about faith vs. doubt vs. skepticism, which isn’t a surprise for Lewis of course, but he’s presenting it in a more polytheistic way. Also the motives of religious and political establishments are called into question, and personal gnosis vs. commonly held beliefs and perceptions. The writing style is excellent (if it occasionally feels a tiny bit anachronistic), but one might wish Lewis had Tolkien’s gift for naming places and people in a more authentically Greek-adjacent way.

losses to the music world

Sadly, two people in the music world who I knew somewhat have passed away within the last week.

Jonathan Sterne, aka JES, is someone I knew from the Lines forum, as well as the one thread that keeps me at TalkBass: “Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing” where we talk as much about synths as bass, and about ambient-appropriate effects probably a bit more than either; it’s where the folks convinced me to go for the Miezo that I like so much.

JES always struck me as kind, thoughtful, clever and creative. At the point where I knew him, he was a very solid bass player and touch guitarist, and was starting to explore modular synthesis and “West Coast” synths like the Majella Implexus. The most recent album he was involved with (that I know about) was this:

As it turns out, he was a professor — a historian of music technology, a scholar of disability, and co-director of the online magazine Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. I’ve read essays that he’s written, without connecting them to this nice guy I knew online. (I may have even, without awareness, quoted stuff from another essay in a book he was published in, in a thread he was participating in.)

The other person is more well known among synth geeks: Paul T. Schreiber (aka paults), founder of Synthesis Technology and the MOTM modular synth format, engineer behind the Moog/Tandy Realistic Concertmate MG-1 (one of the world’s first budget synths). MOTM was a format very similar to the original Moog modular format, but with better engineering standards. When Eurorack grew in popularity, SynthTech began releasing modules in that format as well, and Paul became one of the most influential designers in that industry — not just through his products but through sharing electrical engineering knowledge.

Paul was smart, funny, and opinionated; generous and a great storyteller. Aside from interacting with him on forums, I was a beta tester for his E352 Cloud Terrarium, and beta tester #1 for his E370 Quad Morphing VCO. (He shipped me the prototype, had me test it a while and send it on to musician Robert Rich; after a couple of other testers, it was sent back to me and I was allowed to keep the prototype. I eventually wound up selling it, as it just wasn’t as well suited to my own musical needs as some other things.) I had a lot of feedback about the FM on it, and I had a few arguments with him and his DSP guy Andrew Belt (of VCV Rack) over some details but all of the discussion stayed cool-headed and respectful on all sides.

Both of them will be missed. I’m going to dedicate my next album to them, and add one more item to my rules:

  • the even-numbered tracks must also include at least one SynthTech VCV Rack module. (Since I don’t own any of the hardware anymore.)

not how I had planned to spend the day

Friday night I had some back pain — nothing that unusual for me. After sitting a while in the recliner with the shiatsu massage thingy, I took a couple of Aleve PM and went to bed.

Then my chest started feeling tight, hurting when I’d take a deep breath. That started to get a bit scary for a while; though “heart stuff” still seemed unlikely to me and anxiety seemed more likely, or even some kind of muscle strain. Still, I did not sleep well between the pain and worry, and in the morning I asked my spouse to take me to urgent care. (And of course, there’s the thing where, if it’s caused or worsened by anxiety, worrying about it can only make it worse…)

I got right in to an exam room (a first in my experience with urgent care clinics). It did take a little while to see the doc, but he said with my medical history (diabetes, parents with heart issues, age) that I really should go to an ER and be checked for heart issues, since their clinic wasn’t equipped to do the blood tests that he would want. He recommended Missouri Baptist as being the best for heart stuff and also not as busy an ER. An assistant did an EKG, and sent me on my way with the printout. (All it found was “early repolarization” which apparently isn’t that unusual in healthy young folks anyway.)

The MoBap ER prioritized me and had me on another EKG in under a minute, put in an IV port and took blood for the first round of tests; within 20 minutes I’d been put in a room, changed into a hospital gown, given a nice pre-warmed blanket, wheeled to get chest x-rays and then returned to my room and given another warm blanket. And then… waiting on test results. I got signed up on MyChart so I could see them as they came in, which was nice because it often took a while afterward before a nurse or doctor would come talk to me.

After a while, they did a second round of blood tests to screen for a possible clot and to follow up on a blood test (there’s one they do in 2-hour intervals to check for rising enzymes which indicate a heart attack). Everything came back normal, except somewhat elevated white blood cell count. After what seemed like a lot of waiting, the doctor told me I don’t have anything dangerous going on with my heart, and no pneumonia or lung issues. He wouldn’t say it is (or isn’t) anxiety; acid reflux seemed unlikely due to the set of symptoms but advised me that antacids aren’t a bad idea anyway, and said the most likely thing is pericarditis (swelling of the lining outside the heart) due to a viral infection of some kind. He prescribed Toradol, a strong NSAID. The first dose of it I got via the IV port didn’t seem to do much… but when I was discharged, standing up out of that hospital bed I noticed I was feeling a bit more comfortable. A while after taking it in pill form, even more so. And this morning there’s almost no pain at all — I have to bend over weirdly and take a real deep breath to get the chest pain, and the back pain is no worse than my usual and can be pretty easily ignored.

So. It wasn’t a fun day, but I am relieved and grateful that it’s not something worse and that I’m not stuck with mysterious pain.

one damn thing after another

Our weekend power outage lasted 46 hours, my parents’ lasted 67.

On Tuesday, my parents’ neighborhood had a water main break and they had a 6 hour boil water order. And then our power went out right after lunch and I had to drive in to work to finish my workday.

Wednesday, from about 4 to 5:30, the power went out again — 4 or 5 times for a few seconds or a couple of minutes at a time. Then it went out for about 40 minutes; when they got it back on the listed cause was “equipment damage”, so maybe it’ll finally stay on reliably now? Regardless, I’m finally buying a UPS; that rapid off/on/off/on stuff concerns me.

But also Wednesday, we had some strong wind and it ripped some siding partway off our house. It and other stuff was banging around, which startled the dogs, who knocked some stuff over. At one point my spouse got up to see what the noise was and I didn’t see what happened, but her mountain dulcimer broke in what seems like an unlikely way, a relatively solid piece of wood just sheared right off. (Should that also count as storm damage?)

This morning (Thursday), Spectrum (our internet provider) is having some kind of outage. They didn’t send any notifications about it, so I wasted some time rebooting my router etc. But I was finally able to get through on my phone and check. So here I am working in the office again.

At this point I’m just going to say that California governor Gavin Newsom — who seems to be making a play for the next presidential election — is a coward and a hypocrite. The sort of career politician who just goes where the wind blows. He’s been “liberal” because California wanted a liberal, but right now he seems to think MAGA is ascendant so he’s following their lead. He’s recently spoken out against trans athletes, and against people stating their pronouns. His podcast has been him talking to shitbags like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk — and not challenging them on their bullshit at all. I didn’t know this before, but apparently as mayor of SF, he had a drinking problem; he had an affair with an underling who was married to his campaign manager; he dated a 19-year old model at age 39. As governor, he went to a fancy dinner party at a posh restaurant with no mask, during COVID lockdown.

He is absolutely not the sort of person we need to lead us out of the mess we’re in; he’s exactly the opposite.

bolt from the blue

Serum has been one of the top wavetable-based software synthesizers for quite some time, a direct competitor to Massive. It predates my getting into Eurorack, and I used Serum’s wavetable editing tools to create banks for the SynthTech E352/E370. But other than that, my usage of it really fell off during my modular era.

In recent years when I wanted to do wavetable stuff I usually turned to Vital, a free competitor that was a bit more modern and had some fresh ways to manipulate its wavetables. But that was really just a once-in-a-while thing.

There have been rumors of Serum 2 development for quite some time, but I guess part of me never thought it would see the light of day. However, it was released last night — and amazingly, a free upgrade for Serum owners. That license I bought used back in 2016 is really paying off now.

The major features that are new to Serum 2:

  • 3 primary oscillators instead of two.
  • New wavetable banks, new filters, new FX, new warp modes.
  • Wavetables can interpolate instead of needing to morph in the editor.
  • New oscillator modes: multisample, sample, granular, spectral. All have nice factory content for each.
  • Oscillators and filters can be modulation sources. This alone is huge (and part of why there are three oscillators and some additional tuning modes for them now.) It also allows feedback modulation!
  • New routing/mixing options
  • New clip sequencer and arpeggiator
  • A whole lot of small changes/improvements. (Such as wider possible ranges and alternate modes for unison, which I love…)

In short, it’s dreamy. It’s not perfect — it will not drone without externally holding a MIDI note on message (even with the clip sequencer), and I’d still like to run MPE pressure through a slew limiter and other modular-ish tricks. But I could 100% make an album just using this (and some additional effects) and be happy, if I hadn’t already come up with a plan.

I have, finally, sold off all of the modules I was wanting to let go of. I still have Xaoc Tallin sitting in a drawer, because between it, Ana 2, and Legio — all 6HP — I’m not sure which two I want to keep. I haven’t done much with the Doepfer octal VCA since getting it (in between album projects) so I’m not sure what my VCA needs will really be. (I am mostly keeping Legio in case some killer must-have firmware is released for it, because I’m not really in love with any of the existing ones.)

Pretty much this.

A reasonable person would say: if the building has a Pizza Hut sign, the owner has a a Pizza Hut franchise, and the shop sells Pizza Hut brand pizza, it’s a Pizza Hut.

Transphobes would tell you: if it has this roof, it’s a Pizza Hut. The physical form of the building as it once was is its destiny forever.

They would tell you: even if that iconic roof was removed and replaced with a completely different design, it is still a Pizza Hut. Because that’s what it was “at birth.”

They would tell you: if a construction company started building a Pizza Hut, but then the plan changed before the roof was finished, and it ended up with a different shape: it’s a mutilated Pizza Hut.

They would tell you that if somebody opened a sub shop in a building that had this roof, it’s not really a sub shop, and it has an unfair competitive advantage over “real” sub shops.

If they saw a building that had a roof that looked kind of like Pizza Hut and kind of not, it would make them angry, because “science” says there are only two kinds of buildings: Pizza Hut and Not Pizza Hut.

They would even have a subculture of people who “hutvestigate” photos of buildings, measuring the roof angles to decide which buildings are secretly Pizza Hut. And they would do this even for cartoon images of buildings just to make sure the Woke Mind Virus isn’t infiltrating children’s media.

(And now it’s time for my lunch break and I kind of want pizza…)

stormy weather

On the weekend of March 14-16, 2025, a massive line of storms slowly crawled across the US, from Oklahoma toward the coast. Sustained straight-line winds were severe enough, whipping up wildfires and house fires and flipping tractor trailers over, but it also spawned dozens of tornadoes, and overall it killed at least 39 people.

Here in St. Louis, it knocked out power to 100,000 homes. There was no damage on our property (aside from having to throw away some food), and just a bit of siding torn off the church at the end of the street. An already sickly tree in my parents’ yard lost most of its limbs (luckily just falling where they were), and some kind of metal box on their roof has a few dings from hail. Within a few blocks of them though, there were huge trees down, and one house that was dramatically speared by a tornado-tossed tree. A tornado seems to have charged right up a nearby creek, overturning trees and destroying a few rooftops.

We’re definitely grateful to have been spared, but a weekend with no power is still a hassle. My parents’ generator certainly came in handy, and we mostly spent the weekend with them, making slow cooker Irish stew, cutting up some of the fallen tree, assembling some furniture. We played the board game Azul — which seems to be pretty neat, but it was the first time for all of us and we got some of the rules wrong, including scoring with three different methods that were all wrong 🙂 But going back home, no light, no internet, no heat (temps went from 82F pre-storm to 34F post-storm), no fan (which really helps me sleep), etc. was just not a lot of fun.

I still prefer power failure during cold weather over during hot weather. Our previous two major outages happened in early July and lasted four miserable days.

One of the things I did to pass the time was finish reading Chlorine. Written by a nonbinary author, it’s about a queer high school girl with a thing for mermaids, who is an excellent competitive swimmer under far too much pressure. Avoiding spoilers, I will just mention “multiple forms of abuse” and “body horror” and leave it at that. It was an excellent and enthralling novel, but not an easy or pleasant one.

I have to wonder to what extent the swim team’s suffering was actually typical of elite athletes (e.g. Olympic hopefuls), and to what extent it was exaggerated or unusual. But I imagine there is a lot of pushing bodies far beyond what is healthy — intense training, inadequate rest, ignoring injuries that shouldn’t be ignored, extreme diets, learning to ignore pain even when it’s giving important warnings. Possibly quite a lot of psychological harm as well. Certainly society is slowly acknowledging the risks of head injuries etc. in certain sports…. not that things seem to be changing much to fix it. This book, coming not long after Body Neutral, tells a pretty bleak story. Society idolizes athletes and models, but simultaneously acts as if strength/endurance/beauty/etc. are virtues while also taking them for granted.

moonblock

I’ve seen two total solar eclipses, but now I’ve seen one total lunar eclipse.

Lunar isn’t nearly as dramatic and awe-inspiring as solar, but it’s still very cool. At first it just looks like an ordinary crescent moon, if you haven’t been paying attention to the phase. But as totality draws nearer, you can see the rest of the moon in a dark rusty red. (How well and how soon you can see it probably depends on how much light pollution you’re dealing with, and your eyesight and corrective lenses…) I was expecting the bit of “highlight” around the top edge to flatten out within a few minutes into totality, but it still kind of looked like a three-dimensional, slightly rounded button or piece of candy.

My photos were not good. While the technical specs of the Pixel 8a camera are decent and the software is probably quite good at taking portraits of people, it’s really not the right tool for astronomy photos. (The Open Camera app was recommended to me, so I’ll check that out.) These were the best of a bad bunch:

(Some of what we’re seeing there is thin tree branches. Lights from other houses were quite bright, and I was trying to find a place to stand where they could be eclipsed by trees.)

I didn’t much care for Dawesome’s effect plugin LOVE when I tried it, but they’ve just released a wavetable distortion plugin called HATE.

Wavetable distortion isn’t super innovative in its own right, and is quite easy to do in Bitwig. For the most part it offers few advantages over more traditional distortion options, but there are some fun techniques with it. One of those techniques is to mix an LFO with your audio, phase-modulating the wavetable. Unfortunately, HATE not only has no internal modulation, it has a DC-blocking filter on the input so you can’t pre-mix it yourself.

What HATE does have going for it, aside from a few tools to manipulate the table to make it a little more distortion-friendly, is an effects chain similar to its MYTH and KULT synths. Especially at the intro price, this chain and its unique and handy set of effects makes it worthwhile.

This is somewhat marred by a really unfortunate UI choice. Each effect initially shows a comically wide wet/dry mix slider with fancy textured artwork (as ssen above) and a preset selector. If you click a tiny gear icon, it’ll show the actual controls except for the wet/dry mix — you have to bounce between those two pages to tweak the effect. It’s really obnoxious to work with, but not quite enough to kill the vibe because it can sound super cool.

I’ve found that the LSSN shave soap bar is WAY better than any foam, gel, cream or oil I have tried to shave with. I just rub it directly on and it forms a dense lather that stays where it should. Less it of it goes down the drain before I even pick up the razor than with anything from a can or tube. (It does require fairly hot water to re-melt the shea butter when rinsing off the razor.) I seem to get a smoother shave with it — although stubble is back the next afternoon anyway — and there is no irritating menthol (especially when I get a little up my nose or it runs into my eyes from shaving my head).

A lot of these bars make a big deal of the environmental friendliness of their minimal packaging, which is nice but I don’t feel like I go through so much shaving cream is that much of a big deal, no more often than I need to replace them. You should see the pile of insulin pens and pen needles that I have to throw away instead of recycling…. sigh.

On that subject of insulin, for the first time since I was diagnosed with diabetes, my blood glucose is officially “under control” (meaning not currently high enough to be toxic, not that I’m “cured”). Here it is for the past few years:

For years it stayed around 7.5. Very intense, unsustainable and depressing diet/exercise effort in the summer of 2011 only got it down to 7.1, along with temporary, very minor weight loss. And then my A1C shot up worse — I suspect, because one of the meds I was on at the time that forces increased insulin production had damaged my pancreas.

The turning point in 2022 was going on Ozempic, and then going to the max dose last year.

beware the Ideas of March

The bid we got from the first contractor was half of the other guy’s. We’re going with that. It leaves more room in the budget to fix the increasingly scary backyard deck.

I could, I have no doubt, demolish the deck myself. It would take some number of days, I would need frequent breaks (involving walking around to the front of the house and up the steps). And then I’d still have to hire someone to haul away the debris, build a fence and, and concrete steps up to the back door.

We’ve been in the habit of just opening the back door and letting the dogs do their business in the backyard. This is going to be an issue during the deck/stairs process; neither of them is that happy about leashes, especially the little guy. So the faster that job gets done, the less of a pain in the ass it will be for everyone involved.

Mark Zuckerberg (spits) wore a t-shirt recently that said “AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL”, which was a play on “AUT CAESER AUT NIHIL” (Caesar or nothing). So Jay Graber, the CEO of BlueSky, responded with her own t-shirt in a similar style: “MUNDUS SINE CAESERIBUS” (a world without Caesars). Naturally it has gone viral and copycat shirts were available within hours.

I find this exchange especially amusing, given that a few days from now is the 2069th anniversary of Caesar getting stabbed 23 times by the senators who’d finally had enough of his shit. I am not a bloodthirsty person, I am a… let’s call it a pacifist tempered by practical considerations. But there are a handful of billionaires and politics whose ironic demise I could only celebrate.

Speaking of the march of ideas..

On And Yet… I got into a certain holding pattern with techniques and gear, and stuck tightly to it. That wound up meaning very few software synths and no bass guitar. Nothing wrong with that!

But for the next project, I’ve decided to adopt some creative constraints as a sort of game. Here are the rules:

  • Record tracks from start to end sequentially as they appear on the album, and have them transition into each other smoothly and continuously.
  • The album title must begin with an E (because I want to eventually fill in the alphabet)
  • The first and last notes of the album should be E. (As defined by A440 and 12TET; this doesn’t otherwise constraint tuning/scale.)
  • Odd-numbered tracks use only bass guitar for a sound source, processed and layered however I like. (Other oscillators are allowed for modulation purposes.)
  • Even-numbered tracks must begin with DecadeBridge Sn, and end with Arturia Easel V. Other sound sources are also permitted.

Seems like this should be pretty fun. 🙂

Reddit, or at least the cluster of nonbinary subreddits I follow, is really starting to lose its shine. I mean, I never really liked it as a platform, but it’s increasingly clear that it doesn’t really foster community, the way a forum or even Discord does. It was helpful to me for a brief while for a step on my journey, but it’s very quickly gotten less so. And it’s frustrating to try to stand against the endless tide and respond with helpful advice and encouragement.

I think this is why I was never into the idea of Twitter. Give me forums and proper blogs!

Sacred Gender continues to be quite good. One thought-provoking exercise was: describe your gender while avoiding words like masculine/feminine, male/female, man/woman, etc. The author says almost everyone has trouble with this and that nonbinary folks mainly tend to be weirdly poetic about it.

“Of borders” is the phrase that keeps coming to me. A rock, just off shore, jutting out from the waves, and the waves crashing over it. Tree roots spreading through soil, wood and earth interlaced and holding onto each other. Air blowing over a textured metal surface, vibrating it, droning.

(Counting Chinese elements, I see I have earth twice and no fire, despite the whole “star” thing and personally feeling more of an affinity for water and air. Hmm.)

Some people describe their gender as if it’s directly, almost literally related to something like outer space, forests, etc. That’s really not what I’m thinking with this imagery. But I think, having done the exercise, I understand that kind of thinking just a little bit better now.