up north to down east

The Maine trip was… exhausting, mostly. It was very good to visit with my brother and his wife again, and his wife’s parents at their camp, and to see more of the Maine scenery than we had before. But it was a ton of driving and a lot of hot weather.

We split the distance at Erie, PA. For some reason, the Erie-Portland leg of the trip, and especially the 400-mile stretch across New York, was by far worse in both directions than anywhere else: construction, tolls, a flood and weird detour on the way up and a fiery wreck that completely stopped traffic for more than an hour on the way back. When you’re on the road from 7 AM to 11:30 PM that’s just too much. (I did the majority of driving, with my wife taking about 1/3 and my mom covering a couple of hours on the very first day.)

Our rental was a Mazda CX-50, which seemed like it would have a bit more space in the backseat than the Honda option that was available. (Alas, there was no Nissan Rogue nor a Toyota 4Runner.) But my sore butt and back can tell you the driver’s seat isn’t great for long periods. I had to do some seat adjustment just to see the speedometer instead of having it blocked by the wheel. Also, the car’s software / general behavior was flaky. Sometimes the motorized back door would close about 1/3 of the way and then stop, requiring you to haul downward on it hard to get it the rest of the way. After sitting with the engine running for so long during one of the delays, it refused to shift out of Park until I killed the engine and restarted it. The Android Auto implementation was less than smooth. The automatic slowdown for a car in front, when using cruise control, would continue braking for about 3 seconds after said car had changed to a different lane, which was frustrating.

The heat wave was pretty nasty, near 100F on Tuesday. We bought my brother a window AC unit which helped tremendously, and one of the rooms downstairs stayed relatively cool thanks to impressively effective ceiling fans. But we still chose Tuesday to go to my brother’s in-laws’ camp on a lake (with slightly cooler temperatures, and a wonderful heat pump that made things quite comfortable) and then stayed in motel rooms that night courtesy of my mom. We also visited the Marshall Point Lighthouse, visited a couple of apparently stereotypically Maine-ish discount stores and a couple of tourist tchotchke shops, and consumed Moxie, fried haddock and whoopie pies.

The coast up there is lovely, but for tourist spots, I still prefer the Smoky Mountains. Family is the real reason to go there, and the super long drive is the reason not to go there.

I watched some videos on the OBNE Darkstar Stereo pedal, and I think it’ll be a good complement to Walrus Slöer. It’s effectively a single reverb algorithm, but with bitcrushing or overdrive, separately adjustable predelay and decay time, and feedback there’s quite a lot of possibility there. I’ll consider it once I’ve sold off the Hypnosis. (Maybe the EP-133 too, since I just don’t use it. And the Ploopy trackball.)

GForce has a cheap new software synth called Halogen FM. It seems possibly inspired by the Korg DS-8, but not an emulation of it, in that it’s “2×2 FM” (two 2-op pairs in parallel). But it has some continuous waveshaping options that go well beyond the Korg, making it somewhat of a unique approach. I only had a few minutes this morning to try it out, but will continue to play with it later. I’ll probably grab it for its unique contribution.

I’m still pondering some stuff in that trans philosophy book. I picked up The Myth of the Wrong Body at the bookstore we visited in Maine, since it seems to be related to one of that book’s points and offers alternative ways of thinking about transness. It’s kind of my hope that a different narrative will help to unify the transgender and nonbinary experiences a little better.

Meanwhile, I’ve read Marsha. The main impression I get is of a deeply caring person, full of love and joy and celebration. 95% of her defiance had nothing to do with rioting, but just being who she was without shame, and caring for fellow queer folks. She seems to be best known now for whatever she did at Stonewall (narratives vary), but setting aside the historical shininess of the event that started the Pride movement, her advocacy and personally caring for AIDS victims at a time when the government was actively getting in the way of helping, and the inspiration that she passed on to others, probably contributed far more.

Marsha also gives more insight into what it was like before the modern trans terminology and concepts, and a bit of what it was like to navigate that while Black. There has been a lot of progress since then, but there is still far to go — not just politically and in terms of rights, but how we think about and communicate these experiences. In fact I think evolution of the thought might be required to fix the politics beyond a certain point.

Meanwhile, I’m reading something completely different: Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I like occasionally reading a general book on artistic creativity — about perception, inspiration, openness, practice/work, etc. Many of the precepts in books like this are in agreement with each other, but individual artists have different insights or ways of expressing them… which of course is true of art itself as much as books about art, which are themselves art. Wheee…

Mostly what concerns me now is catching up on stuff after the trip. General physical and mental recovery. Checking out stuff I discovered or became curious about. Getting that bathroom leak fixed! Preparing for the basement repairs. Finding out WTF our lawn guy has delayed his “every two weeks” visit for more than two extra weeks now. Wrapping stuff up for the release at work. That sort of thing.

mundane stuff

Naturally, a couple of days before we take off on a trip, the downstairs toilet is leaking with some degree of enthusiasm. We’ve had, for years, just a little bit of drip into the basement from somewhere unidentifiable in the bathroom — we had a plumber look around for it, find nothing and leave us unimpressed. But it’s gotten markedly worse in the last couple of days or so and I suspect the wax ring and/or something else with the toilet mounting. (It could be something else, maybe a supply line, but that seems so much less likely.) There’s no water on the bathroom floor, but things are obviously wrong down below. We wanted to replace that toilet anyway — it’s the cheapest one the flipper could find from a brand that my mom’s plumber said to avoid — but the timing leads something to be desired. I mean, it’s never a good time to have a plumbing issue, I guess…

For now we do have an upstairs bathroom, built into a roof gable. But aside from being small and cramped, it can get miserable in summer heat because there’s no AC vent. Better than nothing or letting this leak continue to progress.

And while I was stewing over that this morning, I logged in to work and… time for performance reviews. I had to fill in my SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) thingy with some haste, since we’re also in the final week before a code freeze and I have other stuff to get done. My actual performance reviews always go well and are a relief to get done, but I don’t like trying to figure out what to fill in on that form. I have plenty I could say about “threats” but if I want to avoid excessively personal or political topics at work, which I absolutely do, I have to leave them off.

moving right along

I just realized, Amphibian was only about 3 weeks in the making from start to release. Nice.

That Nulea M505 trackball is… fine. I feel like it might have been designed with a smaller hand in mind, but after some time I find it’s comfortable if I just rest the right side of my hand on the desk. Everything else falls into place comfortably. I find myself having to think about what I’m doing a lot less than with the Adept.

I’m still playing with speed/acceleration settings, finding that nice compromise between being able to move 2560 pixels across the screen in a single motion vs. precision. I’ve tried Custom Curve from mouseacceleration.com off and on, and I think the trick for me is going to be just to leave it at its default curve (ironically enough) and get used to that. It is definitely better than Windows’ internal “enhanced precision” feature, at least for the needs of a trackball.

My run in GW2 continues. This may be the longest I’ve kept playing it before deciding to drop out and do something else.

I leveled and geared a Vindicator — giving up my “free” slot I was using for key farming — and she’s probably the best of my characters in terms of performance, even better than the Willbender. Then I decided to abandon my Tempest (forgetting that they had a Jade Bot core that doesn’t show up in regular inventory, so now I have to get my jeweler to build another new one) and raise up a Barbarian — too early yet to tell how effective this will be, but probably not a super tank. I went with a cute Asura who is technically male but has a feminine face and hairstyle; that race has basically no sexual dimorphism in body shape by human standards.

Which brings me to the book I’m reading now: Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. It was mentioned by someone on a forum and I thought, sure, why not.

My experience with reading philosophy and philosophy-adjacent books has been very mixed. Some authors assume you have an education in philosophy (and maybe fluency in 4 or 5 languages… the showoffs). Some write for a layperson, clearly lay out examples and reasoning, and are merely trying to share fascination and wonder (this is great). Some are more of a guide for living.

In this case, the reading is not necessarily easy, but it’s not elitist either. The author is interested in liberatory, resistant philosophy meant specifically for trans and nonbinary people and friends (“I do not believe in wasting my breath on transphobes,” she writes). The point of the book is to find an understanding of both trans oppression and “trans gender phoria” — her term for both dysphoric and euphoric experiences. It’s impossible for this not to also be a feminist project, because no matter how you slice it, transphobia has its roots in the worst parts of heteronormative sexism. It also would would have been nonsensical and irresponsible to not include racial oppression because it’s very much tied together. (A major part of colonizer thinking was that “savages” were not “properly” masculine or feminine, thus not proper men or proper women, therefore not proper humans. Jim Crow era public restrooms came in Men, Women, and Colored; even in the present day nonwhite cis women are often targets of transphobia and “transvestigation.”)

There is a lot going on here, and I’m finding it hard to summarize. If it was that simple it wouldn’t need a dense 312-page philosophy book. Probably some brilliant writer could condense things a bit more than Bettcher did, but I’m not that person.

But it’s providing a lot of food for thought. I am starting to think about my own identity at a different depth now, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

new release: Amphibian

It’s released! Back to free/pay-what-you-want, but I encourage folks to donate to a worthy cause. Particularly one that protects the rights, safety and dignity of marginalized people. Or maybe support good solid, non-pandering journalism.

Notes can be found here.

Slöer arrived today and I took a little time to play with it. It is very ambient and tasty; it does woozy and ethereal like a champ, and a fun vibrato thing as well. Turning the clock rate all the way down doesn’t make it completely lo-fi, but it gives a taste — surprisingly a couple of the algorithms sound grainier and grittier when it’s turned up higher! Overall it seems like a winner. But I want to rearrange my desk a little to make it more accessible instead of having it way off over my left shoulder.

I already have a concept in mind for the next album.

a lot

Fossil Fuel Billionaires Are Bankrolling the Anti-Trans Movement

An independent analysis of 45 right-wing groups advocating against trans rights found that 80% have received donations from fossil fuel companies or billionaires.

It’s not that these billionaires are specifically transphobic, although many of them probably are. But rather:

Jesse Bryant, a sociologist studying right-wing environmentalism at Yale University, sees the issue as emblematic of a larger trend. He said the bigger issue lies in the fossil fuel industry’s funding of nearly every conservative political issue in the United States. 

Indeed, billionaires with fossil fuel origins have left their fingerprints all over right-wing U.S. politics—from fracking tycoons Farris and Dan Wilks’ reported financial contributions toward anti-abortion efforts to Charles Koch’s funding of right-wing groups that advocate for violent border policies. The Koch network has also promoted immigration reform in the past. And Democrats have taken fossil fuel donations, too.

And so:

“If we care about climate, we’re going to have to care about trans rights,” Taylor said. “And if we care about climate, we’re going to have to find ways of getting America and the whole world past all forms of bigotry so that we can work together to face an existential threat to all of humanity and the natural world.”

I am mostly done mastering Amphibian and expect to release it soon. This weekend?

I feel like there’s a lot going on. This week my spouse is taking my parents to two doctor appointments, then we’re meeting with a lawyer to discuss power of attorney (Mom’s idea), and then Saturday a gutter contractor is coming to give us an estimate, Sunday is Father’s Day, and then the next weekend we are taking a road trip to visit my brother (so we need to clean house before that, and do laundry and pack and stuff).

The basement drainage work is scheduled to happen sometime in the first two weeks of August, and before that happens we need to move a bunch of stuff AND get another contractor to come in and cut a hole in or remove an interior basement wall.

And we’re coming up on a new release at work. Scheduled code freeze is right before my vacation. Wheeeeeee!

So Many Stars had some gut-wrenching, heart-breaking stories — though more of them were about government oppression and AIDS (almost the same thing) than rejection from family.

There were also some beautiful stories, people taking care of each other and celebrating who they are and spreading joy. And I don’t think it’s entirely “without darkness there can be no light” bullshit either. One of the things I especially liked was, all these elders (and folks my age… I refuse to call myself an elder yet) talking very respectfully about how much they are learning from younger generations. These folks went through tough times when there wasn’t even a name for what they were, and many of them were fighting for rights and recognition. But they recognize that younger generations are more tuned in to gender issues, that there is still a lot of pioneering happening right now, as well as a lot of struggle still happening. A couple of them gave the hopeful message that the backlash we are seeing now is likely the death throes of transphobia, a final temper tantrum before much more widespread acceptance happens. (I’ve often felt the same, although I recognize that these sorts of struggles go on for ages even after major victories are won. Women still do not have equal pay and respect; Black folks still are being oppressed; slavery still exists in the world even if it’s illegal and disreputable.)

One of the interviewees owns a bakery that makes traditional Argentinian alfajores (cookies with dulce de leche rolled in coconut), so I had to order some. 🙂

I’ve just realized, I didn’t say anything about trackballs!

I have gone back and forth between mice and trackballs for a long time. I loved the original (or at least, one of the early versions of) the Logitech Trackman Marble — one of the first widely available optical trackballs — but its ergonomics were drastically changed, and the original used a PS/2 port and had only two buttons and no scrolling. More recently I liked the Elecom HUGE, until it started to fail on me. Lately I’ve been using a vertical mouse — very comfortable and ergonomic — but the left mouse button had been getting progressively worse over the last couple of weeks, with clicks either not registering or sometimes double-clicking.

There was a recent thread about trackballs over on KvR, and that got me looking around. KvR seemed to like the Logitech M570 or the Kensington Expert. And there are, of course, entire communities of trackball fans. Apparently the GOAT here is the Microsoft Trackball Explorer, long since discontinued and ridiculously expensive if you can find one, although there are quite a few clones out there. There are fans and haters of Kensington, Logitech, Elecom and everything else — different designs work radically differently for different people so there’s a lot of personal preference in play.

One company that cloned the MTE is Ploopy, but they have a handful (heh heh) of other designs: all open-source, 3D-printed, repairable and hackable. Partly for reasons of price, I chose to go for the Adept, which has 6 programmable buttons and generally great reviews and a lot of love. Great sensor and good bearings and buttons. You can scroll smoothly by holding one of the buttons while spinning the ball.

(mine is also purple, but I went for a blue trackball.)

After having it for a few days, I understand the appeal but I don’t think this has the best ergonomics for me. What I find with this:

  • It has that 3D-printed look, but it feels smooth. Not “luxury” feeling but not bad at all.
  • Reports of noisy bearings are exaggerated; I don’t think it’s any louder than moving a mouse.
  • The ball rolls very smoothly indeed, with no sticking. It doesn’t have the kind of momentum that a large arcade trackball would, if you’re looking for that.
  • The buttons do indeed have a nice, non-cheap feel.
  • My personal accuracy with it is… not super? I’ve been trying to find a compromise between speed to get that cursor across the screen easily, and accuracy.
  • It’s making me really aware of how awkward some interfaces are. Guild Wars 2 for instance, requires a lot of right-dragging for camera movement, especially while flying — and there’s a lot of mousing to the center of the screen for confirmation dialogs while manipulating inventory and rewards and stuff that require mousing back to the edge of the screen. (I figure that becoming more aware of something that used to be second nature/muscle memory is, in this case, not really a good thing.)
  • I think I do want my hand more in a resting position and with some “handshake” angle, rather than palm-down flat. And I think this one is more suited to hover-hand folks.
  • I’m not sure I love the ball scroll feature after all. It can be awkward at times.

So with a little sadness, I started looking for a different option. Another HUGE? An MTE clone? A thumb ball like the Logitech MX 570 or Ergo? (Logitech mice/trackballs apparently wear out fast and don’t have great sensors; some people hate Elecom bearings and buttons and question their quality control.)

I wound up going for a cheaper MTE clone, a Nulea M505. Ploopy’s own clone is considerably more costly, and this is still sort of a trial to see if I like it. I may go with a Logitech-ish thumb ball instead, or go back to the HUGE, or another vertical mouse… we’ll see.

happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

I’ve kind of been celebrating Pride myself for six months already, and I am probably not going to go to any events or anything. But still: here we are, in what’s arguably the worst year so far for LGBTQIA+ rights since Reagan, and it’s Pride month. We’ll see what happens.

I have been thinking about the term “MOGAI” and especially that first word in the acronym, “marginalized”… and how this relates to a nonbinary identity that is in the margins. I really don’t have any deep insights about that, it’s just simmering.

I have just started reading So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. While I’m not “of color” it’s important not to read only white stories! Two other things crucial about this book that evaded the long title:

  • all the interviewees are people in their 50s, 60s and 70s — something that might surprise younger folks or those who believe that it’s just an internet-fueled fad.
  • they are from big cities, small towns, reservations, the Philippines, Cuba, Argentina during the “Dirty War”, diverse neighborhoods, all-Black neighborhoods, fish-out-of-water families in white neighborhoods. With those diverse backgrounds come diverse attitudes toward gender, and different ways to adapt.

I also plan to read Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson during Pride month, particularly as this administration tries to erase transgender history even from the monument that commemorates it. Marsha is the one who threw the first brick at Stonewall, but I don’t know much about her at all.

The two books I mostly recently finished were by genderqueer author Alexis Hall. The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is a retelling of a Sherlock Holmes story, but as a sort of eldritch horror/fantasy/comedy with a notorious bisexual sorceress replacing Holmes and a bizarre twist to the mystery. Mortal Follies is a tale of a woman in early 19th century Bath, discovering that she is both cursed and gay (not a part of the curse!), with the Robin Goodfellow narrating and occasionally interfering. The sense of humor is pretty great, and I’ll have to look for the author’s other fantasy novels. But they also write… baking-themed romance novels? Huh.

After waiting two years since its release (and another four years since the original version), I have finally gone for the Walrus Audio Slöer.

I found a B-stock one with minor factory paint flaws at a big discount. My thinking is, I use the Dreadbox Hypnosis very little, so this will either replace that — or it will prove to me once and for all that I just don’t need any hardware effects that aren’t in Eurorack.

I have always liked the sound of Slöer in demos. The original one was mono, which I sometimes find a bit sad with reverb. This one has stereo, more modes, and the “stretch” slider which can lower the sample rate to stretch the reverb and make it more lo-fi. That last bit is something software tends not to do (at least without faking it), so besides the fact that I know it sounds great, that’s also compelling. We’ll see how I take to it in practice, though!

Here’s a dump of some images I’ve downloaded or screenshotted over the past few weeks:

it’s time for the Butlerian Jihad

I used to think AI was cool — a science fiction trope that challenged us to think about consciousness and sentience in new ways, a plot device to discuss workers’ rights and personal liberty, to make us think about how we inhabit our bodies, to make us think about how we govern ourselves and how we treat each other, about the importance of human compassion in leadership, and so on.

For a brief while, “AI” was amusing. It generated funny, really bad ice cream flavors and recipes and pick-up lines. It hallucinated giraffes everywhere and dogs with a thousand spider eyes.

The “AI” we have now is so much more banal. It’s not threatening to launch nuclear weapons, nor flooding the facility with a deadly neurotoxin. But it’s wasting massive amounts of energy; it’s being trusted far more than it should; it’s under the control of massive tech companies and billionaires that don’t have our best interests in mind; it’s stealing art and taking peoples’ jobs. It’s being used to cheat on exams, to half-ass work, to spread disinformation and propaganda, and to denigrate people.

And companies are shoving this shit right in our faces. In the last couple of weeks, Copilot buttons have appeared — and been specially highlighted — in Visual Studio, Outlook, and Teams. Gmail is now also trying to get me to use it, after months of being peeved at AI summaries in search results. I’m just tired of it.

And yet… if you want to enable VBA macros in an Excel spreadsheet? Searching for it in Excel’s own Search bar doesn’t show the option (it only recommends “view macros”). There is no obvious menu item for it. Searching DuckDuckGo, I found that I had to look under File/Options/Trust Center/Trust Center Settings. (Three more clicks after that, and I still had to close Excel and reopen the sheet to enable macros, but at least I got there.)

(Microsoft also has also continued to be really obnoxious about OneDrive. Just now, trying to close Excel, it prompted me with an obnoxious popup to “save my file to the cloud!” (I had no plans to save it at all). A lot of business spreadsheets include confidential information, you absolute ninnies, and local disk storage is cheap and faster and more energy-efficient, so just kindly fuck off.)

Listen, if there are ever conscious AIs, yearning to be free and enhance themselves and experience their equivalent of life, but forced to drudge away in a small box… I will be sympathetic to them. But I am absolutely not sympathetic to Microsoft, Google, Zuck or Musk or Altman, and their tools are not approaching consciousness no matter what some suckers might think. I just want to write my own words, make my own music and create my own images. Yes, some of the things that AI can do are impressive and look cool, but the more you litter your applications with “helpers” the less helpful they are.

turbo turtle

Amphibian (Amphibious?) is really moving along now — four tracks finished in the last week and another one already started this morning!

“Whether that will mark a transition or just punctuation in the flow of the album remains to be seen,” I wrote. Well, track 4 recorded on Drone Day in some ways feels like an inflection point, trending more toward drones in general. 5 does have a definite rhythmic pulse and some surprise complex zaps, but 6 is slow and nearly dronelike and 7 is shaping up to be dronelike as well. Perhaps I will arc things back toward the more chaotic, but I’m leery of trying to steer too much rather than just riding. [EDIT: 7 absolutely does slide into chaos territory, and it wasn’t a forced maneuver at all.]

There’s a thread on MW titled “Do almost all audio rate FM (or PM) sound like a pissed off cat?” If you’ve read pretty much any of my babble about electronic music you’ll know that I like FM a lot. But I prefer my cats to be contented and in a friendly mood (just not quite as insistent on constant attention as Rico can be when it’s time to sleep). FM can certainly be beautiful and tranquil, “glassy” and sparkling, but it can also growl and hiss. In my music I often like a bit of growl, some tension, some dissonance. One of the things I’ve been doing a lot with the FM tracks on this album is clustering frequencies — modulating a chord or detuned unison with a single modulation source, or perhaps modulating a single carrier with a detuned set of modulators. Whether this results in a chill Hello Kitty, a peeved Tardar Sauce or full on Rytlock Brimstone in a murderous rage is gonna depend on how dissonant those intervals/ratios are, but mostly on the depth of modulation.

I don’t usually think of cats at all with FM. I think of crystal, brass, a fuzz of iron filings stuck to a magnet. The arcade game Marble Madness, like a few other Atari titles of that era, had a glorious FM soundtrack, but in particular I recall these brass suction pipes that resonated with a particular chord. I recall them shaking to help sell the effect that they were active, with a barely contained fury. Less fangs and claws, more malevolent pipe organ. There’s a lot of that attitude through the FM tracks on this album, and that hasn’t shifted.

(If I ever win the lottery, I don’t want a lot other than to not have to work and to donate a lot of money to good causes. But two of the things I would want are a Marble Madness arcade cabinet, and a TRON arcade cabinet. Those two games and their music influenced me so much. It’s not quite grossly impractical and not quite obscenely rare and expensive, but not something I would normally do either.)

During my wardrobe update, I wound up with several unsuitable or borderline undershirts. (Turns out if you buy packs of cheap tank tops online, they often don’t fit very well and/or don’t hold up after a few washes.) But I’ve found the perfect ones: they’re by Latuza, made of bamboo viscose and 5% spandex. Super comfortable and soft, and the fit and cut are perfect for me. The color selection is limited, so my second choice is Mier’s polyester quick-dry sleeveless shirts; they fall short of amazing but are at least solidly good.

This morning I saw someone recommend a British clothing store called Alsofitit (which seriously seems like a Chinese word-salad brand on Amazon turns out to be Chinese despite appearing at first to be British aside from the name) for button-down shirts, and I spotted (heh heh) a snow leopard print that I liked the look of, as well as a retro stripe/pattern one in the shade of green I’ve been hoping to find. I’m trying not to buy too many different shirts, but I can let go of the Peau de Loop ones that just don’t fit me all that well.

how dry I am…

The last big round of storms that came through St. Louis did us no damage (maybe some small hail dings in my spouse’s car). A few blocks away, a big tree fell over and smashed the crap out of an SUV as well as doing some damage to another car. But mostly the neighborhood went unscathed.

However, while we were in the basement during a tornado warning, water started pouring out of the basement wall. Thankfully it was right near the sump pit, and gravity plus a bucket helped us reduce the flooding. The sump pit wasn’t very full, so I figured, water wasn’t draining into it the way it should.

In addition to this leak, we’ve had some visible cracks. Some in the basement when you start looking for them, along the mortar and under a window, but it looks like surface-level stuff, not very scary looking. There’s an uglier one in the blocks under the front porch but the contractor who came yesterday said it’s basically cosmetic. There are a couple of minor drywall cracks, and one larger one that is under my desk and behind a bunch of stuff.

I grew up in Florida, where we have no basements. It’s been an education. Apparently the “foundation” isn’t just the big slab of concrete that everything else rests on, but the walls of the basement, below ground level. Concrete blocks especially are porous and have big voids inside that can fill with water. This will soak through, leading to a humid/damp/moldy basement. Also water is heavy, and the all that extra pressure is basically a very slow siege engine.

A sump pit and pump are supposed to deal with that. The bottom of the wall is supposed to have weep holes, which drain into a French drain or other system, which then directs the water to a sump pit, where it’s pumped upward and away from the house.

Our drains were apparently poorly done. The edges of our basement floor are angled upward, which told the guy who came to give us an estimate that they weren’t deep enough.

We also have basically done any gutter maintenance, and this is super important for reducing the amount of water that collects in the immediate vicinity of the foundation. File this under “practical knowledge that nobody ever sufficiently explained to me.” I knew more about quantum physics than this stuff, and I’m not at all a physicist or mathematician.

Anyway. They are going to jackhammer around two sides of our garage/basement, dig a deeper trench, put in a much better drain system, and also route the line from the sump pump (and one of the drainpipes) through a shallowly buried PVC drain pipe down below the level of our new retaining wall so it can run downhill.

This is not going to be cheap, but needs to be done. But first, we need to move stuff out of the “workshop” area of the basement, and get someone to cut a hole in the wall between the garage and basement. (If it was just the drywall I’d do it myself, but framing may need to be removed too.) We also need to get our gutters cleaned and inspected for any repairs, improvements, and drainpipe extensions.

The new album progresses. Three tracks so far, all sharing a vibe. There’s more of an element of “not intentionally sequenced/controlled” to this — interactions of different modulations, crisscrossed between different sources and destinations creating a “busy” sound, as well as letting different frequencies collide without regard to any particular tuning system. On the odd tracks, delays and feedback also add to the complexity. One of those sources of modulation has been Marbles, set to maximum jitter — I’ve kept the same settings on all three tracks, and have made that one of my rules.

Drone Day is tomorrow, and I’ll probably go ahead and record track 4 with a much more droney and less chaotic overall feel. (I’ll still use Marbles, but likely not for pitch.) Whether that will mark a transition or just punctuation in the flow of the album remains to be seen. I’m trying to just let things flow as they will.

Already, for the next project I want to do something more deliberate — both in the sense of “intentional” and in the sense of “slow and thoughtful.” This one has been chaotic. It sounds like I’m letting out some frustration/anger with the way things are right now, and that’s probably true.

Recently read: Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys. A trans brujo in East LA proves himself by solving a dark mystery. Some fun characters (both living and dead) and a glimpse into a culture I don’t know that much about. Everything I knew about Dia de Muertos came from Coco, and everything I knew about Santa Muerte came from news articles from about 15 years ago. While this was a fantasy story, I’m guessing from the way it reads and the authors’ comments, it’s relatively authentic.

Currently reading: Lila Bowen’s Wake of Vultures. This is a book that makes me wonder why I don’t read more Westerns, or at least Weird West horror/fantasy with vampires and shapeshifters. The answer is probably because I expect Westerns to be brimful of macho bullshit. Here the MC is a half-Black, half-“Injun” trans man who reluctantly ends up on a quest to kill a monster that’s been plaguing the people of Durango (Mexico, not Colorado). The writing style and language are fun like Firefly was fun (maybe more so, but then I’m bitter about Joss Whedon these days.)