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.
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.
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.
The first one: the guy didn’t respond at all to his own web form. He did answer his phone right away and set up an appointment to look at it and make an estimate the next morning. But then he didn’t show, didn’t call and didn’t answer the voice mail I left.
The second one: responded to a Yelp estimate request in less than an hour, set up an appointment for the next afternoon. He said that the middle and top walls weren’t long for this world either and it made the most sense to replace it all in one fell swoop. Within a couple of days he had sent me the estimates for replacing the three walls, as well as a single tall wall (but we don’t like that idea as much as the tiers). And… ooof, pricey.
Then the first contractor sent me a text — he apologized but he’d gotten a really bad stomach bug that put him in the hospital, and he could come out today (Sunday!) to take a look. And I was impressed — not with technical stuff like the first guy explained, but with design ideas for improving things while also reducing the cost. And he was super enthusiastic about trees too, so I know he’ll take good care of the cherry tree that’s on the top tier. I look forward to seeing his estimate because I think it’s going to come in well below the other one.
About those albums I picked up on Bandcamp Friday:
Albums centered around the Buchla Music Easel tend to share certain things in common. This one is a bit unusual in its lushness; while there are absolutely some moments and some aspects that are very “Easel-ish” — the pings and beeps and bloops are not missing — there are also lush layers, and meta approaches to composition. It’s an Easel album that doesn’t come off as minimalist. Nice.
While writing this post I accidentally had started playing a track on the Bandcamp website as well the one I already had going in MusicBee, and… it worked 😉
This is ambient and experimental music written for the dance piece “Last Work” as well as some other recordings that the composer had made at that same time. Some of it involves cello and choral sounds, plucks and sampled instruments and noises, and some of it is more purely synthetic. Overall I feel like it’s deep. As if the composer had really studied the dance piece, absorbed it, and then reinterpreted it both musically and in visual art (the physical release comes with silkscreen prints), with some prototyping and experiments along the way. It’s the best kind of ambient music, where one can just put it on in the background and let it tease the subconscious, but can also listen more intently and find that it’s definitely not just mindless filler.
I find this release a bit odd, and not in the usual way that most of the music I like is odd. 🙂 At the start it’s really beautiful and immersive but not afraid to growl and howl. But by the time we’ve reached the end of the shortish album it’s moved through so many moods and aesthetics it makes one feel lost (as the title might suggest). There are moments of genuine funk, in what is otherwise an ambient work. It’s actually disorienting.
POB is the “Ambassador to the Stars” for Noise Engineering, and here he is with a live set at Buchla & Friends (a synth convention) with a mostly-NE Eurorack setup, doing live improvised techno with the sort of industrial flair you’d expect. Even if I didn’t know who POB was, I would hear this and think “wow, this person really likes Noise Engineering oscillators.” Lots of FM percussive voices sometimes pushed into noise, grindy wavefolding and distortion, big solid underlying bass drones, hard kicks, and delay/reverb gone a little bit mad. Yes.
Following that up with more badass industrial-flavored techno. A nonbinary DJ/producer and game developer from Chicago. I definitely need to pick up more of their stuff (listening to other albums, it goes well beyond techno).
Trovarsi is fairly well known in the modular synth world, for having founded (with Space Racer and Earth-626) the SoCal Synth Society and Frequency Shift (a streaming festival featuring female and nonbinary musicians), and working with Corry Banks’ ModBap Modular. She makes great techno and seems to be a neat person, though I only saw her in passing at Knobcon.
I don’t know if both literal and figurative meanings of “at sea” were intended in Moonminpapa At Sea (since the author was Finnish), but that feels right. Anyway, yes, he did continue to be kind of obnoxious, faking competence and confidence when both were increasingly shaky. His wife kind of just went along with things for the most part, but then also kind of disassociated, while also discovering her artistic talents. Their son fell madly in love with a seahorse (who in this world apparently is a magical horse (with four hooves, horseshoes etc.) that lives in the sea) who did not love him back or respect him at all, a very Faerie sort of vibe. There was quite a bit of supernatural oddity going on. I was really expecting the story to come to a point where everyone finally admits they really want to go back to Moominvalley and that none of them actually like the sea or wanted to move in the first place.
Eh.
I started reading Sacred Gender and it’s better than I had feared. The book is sort of dual purpose: affirming one’s gender through pagan practice, and making pagan groups/spaces more welcoming and inclusive for trans and nonbinary folks. So there’s a bit of a Trans/Nonbinary 101 guide at the start and it’s really well done.
A lot of binary trans people don’t quite seem to get nonbinary folks, but it’s very clear that the author does. One metaphor the author likes, which struck me: “a platypus is not a beaver-duck.” Nonbinary people are not (necessarily) an awkward masculine/feminine blend. It’s just that our culture is so fixated on its model of gender that, when trying to describe someone for whom that model fails, it’s still done in terms of the failing model. (I’ve seen people say the word “nonbinary” is a bit unfortunate because it tries to define us by what we are not, but it’s difficult to come up with another way of thinking about it.)
Another fun one: in a hypothetical society with 12 genders, if there are more than 12 people then someone probably doesn’t fit neatly within the gender 12-arity.
The next part talked about the flaws in Paganism (e.g. Wicca and Wicca-adjacent, 20th century white people Paganism — something I was never a part of but had read about and knew a few folks in it). A lot of its feminist emphasis grew from 60s-80s second wave feminism, aka TERFs. Gender esentialism was baked right in, with strict gendered roles based on reproductive biological functions. This of course is not very welcoming to trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming or even “regular” queer people, and honestly is more limiting to cis people than it should be. Aside from that, there was a lot of ahistorical gunk adopted as almost dogma, and precious little attention paid to non-white, indigenous and folk spiritual practices. The book points out it really does not have to be this way.
The next part is about ancestor veneration — something largely neglected in the aforementioned style of paganism, but almost universal in most indigenous practices and folk religion. Honestly, the chapter could almost have come right out of Kemetic Orthodoxy, so it was all very familiar. This is an area where I also have been a little too white, so to speak, but I’ve been getting nudges about getting better with it and this chapter was timely for me.
I look forward to the rest of the book, it’s been pleasantly good so far.
It’s Bandcamp Friday, which I almost forgot. (This just means Bandcamp doesn’t take their usual percentage out of sales, so some people wait for this day to do their buying to maximize what artists get. Or in the case of And Yet…, maximizing what Lambda Legal will get.) I picked up a few things which I will review later.
I finished reading Body Neutral a few days ago. Or rather, I got most of the way through and stopped. I don’t actually have the sorts of body issues that the book addresses — dislike of some aspects of one’s body is totally normal!
The book is about people whose subconscious minds have created these body image issues as a response to trauma, abuse, fear etc. The author says that after years of treating people they found almost all their patients match with one or more of four “avatars” — ways that the subconscious views the body as the cause and/or solution of a problem.
Still, reading the book did have me considering my own thoughts about my body, and also some struggles I’ve had in the past (e.g. when I was a kid and paranoid about other kids bullying me) and how I dealt with them (mostly poorly). It was worth the read. I’ll keep those personal details to myself though.
In other books, Tales from Moominvalley worked better than some of the other books because each chapter was a little self-contained short story that primarily featured a specific character. Many of these characters are really quite neurotic, and the stories much more melancholy than you’d see in typical American children’s stories, but some of them are great in a sort of uniquely gothy emo way.
I am really not liking Moominpapa in Moominpapa At Sea though. He’s having a sort of crisis about his usefulness (or lack thereof) as a masculine protector figure, when things are generally fine and his family is capable of taking care of themselves. He ends up hauling the whole family on an adventure that they don’t seem to be particularly into (but they’re also not objecting, which… I think is bothering me more). Maybe things will shift a bit as the story continues, but so far it’s a bit ugh.
The “Tendan Old Temple Meiko Spicy Sandalwood Incense” is absolutely not the same as the old “Tendan Sandalwood” that I liked so much. It’s not unpleasant, but it smells kind of like… baby powder? I think the problem is the benzoin is stronger than the sandalwood and cinnamon (I don’t know what spikenard smells like). Anyway, it’s the wrong vibe. Maybe for general “make your house smell nice” purposes it’s okay.
The Kobunboku incense by Baiedo is also not particularly my jam. It’s apparently super popular but there are about a dozen different Nippon Kodo incense options that I like more. Ah well.
Speaking of things that smell nice, I have an order of soap and stuff from Native on the way. They kept getting recommended wherever I’d see people asking about gender-neutral soap. The body wash is actually a tie-in with Jarritos Mexican soda, and is watermelon scented. Hey, it makes as much sense as the “Stone” scented body wash I’m currently using.
A few weeks ago one of my donations was to an organization called Private Citizen. I now regret this.
While some of what they were talking about at that particular moment resonated with me… they have an awful lot of conservative buzzwords on their website. I get the feeling their idea of “government overreach” does not include any of the authoritarian, unconstitutional, unauthorized shit Trump has been up to.
They have something called the “Pardon Project” but their success stories are three people who were pardoned by Trump’s first administration — there is zero mention of anyone Biden pardoned, including Leonard Peltier, nor of the frankly embarrassing pardons that Trump handed out to the Jan 6 insurrectionists this time around. And looking at their board of directors: yep, they are conservatives. Well. Poop.
I have opinions.
I do not care about sports very much. But when supposed progressives like Gavin Newsom declare their opposition to trans people in sports… that’s not really about sports, nor is it about fairness or protecting women.
It’s a wedge, a slippery slope. If you claim that a trans woman isn’t a woman, in the specific context of sports, it’s not many steps from there to the Texan attempt to pass a law declaring that all trans people are inherently committing fraud with their bodies and identities at all times. (This has no chance of passing, but it does reveal the thought process behind transphobia and politician’s open willingness to attack trans rights.)
Everyone seems to assume that trans women have a huge advantage over AFAB women in basically every single sport. (I’m not going to say “biological women” because if you have been taking female hormones for several years, and it’s changed your body, it should be self-evident that this is biological.) There is no science or statistics that actually bears this out.
Testosterone during puberty does affect things such as hand size and other factors. Someone who completes puberty and then transitions, will be physiologically different — on average — than someone who transitions first, or a cisgender person. Going on E doesn’t shrink what has already grown. But yes, let’s look at hand size here; assume we’re talking about a sport where that matters (perhaps basketball). Here are the issues:
All trans women are being discriminated against in the same way here: those who have socially transitioned and aren’t on hormones at all; those who transitioned later after puberty, and those who transitioned before puberty.
Average hand sizes vary more with ethnicity than with gender. An average Filipino’s hand is 41% larger than an average Bangladeshi man’s hand. But within each ethnicity the average man’s hand is only 20% larger than the average woman’s. Would you support banning Filipino, Czech, Iranian, Jordanian, Turkish, and German cis women from womens’ basketball because of their unfair advantage…?
If the unfair advantage comes from hand size, why is biological sex at birth the criteria instead of actual hand size?
Testosterone levels (in both cis males and cis females) also vary a lot… and vary a lot by ethnicity. A lot of accusations against cis women with high T as “actually men” have been quite racist.
Hormone replacement therapy does change aerobic capacity, body composition, muscular strength and endurance. How much it changes them varies on a case-by-case basis.
Studies of military fitness tests have shown that in many respects, trans women perform more like cis women than cis men, and trans men perform more like cis men than cis women. Trans women did generally have faster 1.5 mile run times than cis women — but worse than cis men — and trans women were worse at vertical jump height, pushups, and aerobic capacity than cis women. (These were not long-term studies and some portions of the studies had fewer participants than one would ideally want, but still.) There’s also Lia Thomas, who was a star swimmer… whose times got 15 seconds worse within a year or two of transitioning.
In terms of sports statistics? There are no credible statistics claiming trans women have an advantage in sports. The Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport released a report saying as much. There are really very few trans athletes (one piece of data I saw said “less than 20 in international competition” and another claimed “0.04% of female athletes are trans women”). A group whose sole purpose is advocating anti-trans sports bans could only find five trans kids in K-12 sports in the entire nation. The NCAA says there are only ten trans athletes in college sports. Their presence has done nothing to disrupt opportunities for cis women to excel. In fact… in states that have anti-trans sports laws, there are fewer cis kids participating in sports.
It is well-known that most people who vehemently oppose trans women in women’s sports don‘t actually support women’s sports in the first place. Not as participants, not as parents, not as supporters of equal pay, not as supporters of racial justice in women’s sports, not as supporters of preventing actual harassment in women’s sports. In fact many of them advocate for humiliating tests to be carried out on all women in sports to prove they’re not trans.
Youth sports are not about performance, they’re about socialization and well-being. The American Medical Association says that the only effect of banning trans kids from sports is harming trans kids’ mental health.
Whenever I release an album, I experience a sort of sadness. In some sense it’s disappointment in the lack of attention — even knowing rationally that I make weird soundscapey ambientish drone music and I do zero actual marketing. I also know that the person who cares the most about a piece of music/art is nearly always the person who actually made it. And every time, any insecurity I might feel about it is immediately shut down when I remind myself, I like it and know it’s good, at least to someone with my particular tastes; I’d truly rather listen to my own releases than most of what’s on the radio.
This time I was a bit extra worried, since I kept it at the recommended minimum price instead of setting it to $0, and it had the trans rights message. But I’ve sold a few copies (including some that don’t show up as “supported” on Bandcamp, presumably because of users’ privacy settings) and every comment I’ve gotten on both the music and the message has been great. So overall I’m pretty pleased.
I think for my next project I am going to feature the bass guitar. I’m not a great player by any means, but I can noodle a bit and can certainly process the sound, using the strings as oscillators in a weird hybrid modular synth. Since I’ve featured other kinds of gear in the past, why not this too?
Bitwig 5.3, long in beta, was released while I was finishing the last couple of tracks of the album, and I didn’t want to install it and disrupt things.
Now that the way is clear, I went for it and played with the new features. This is the “Nice Drums!” update but I’m indifferent to the new drums.
There’s also a new master recorder, which just records everything live to a file independently of the transport, which is (theoretically) right up my alley. I’ve been using a goofy workaround to record live audio. I think there may be a slight UI bug if you don’t have the browser panel already open when you start recording, but I figured out workarounds.
The really cool things though are three new Grid modules: Freq Shift+, Pitch Shift, and Dome Filter (plus a Freq Shift+ device outside the grid). A frequency shifter is inharmonic, creating ringy new textures and behaving similarly to a ring modulator (this is what Xaoc Koszalin does). The pitch shifter here is granular and can be MIDI-controlled, making it trivial to create the EXACT thing I was wishing for the other day: a software synth that can take an audio signal and polyphonically repitch it in real time.
In this example I’m letting Braids drone in VCV Rack, using Poly Grid to split MPE notes to as many voices as I like, pitch shifting each and using the pressure to control a VCA. There’s no reason I couldn’t route a hardware sound source to it instead though. Also, the Voice Stacking feature works, so I can layer multiple Pitch Shift instances using different grain rates for instance. It’s pretty magical, and a distinctly different sort of modular patching than Eurorack. It absolutely does color the sound a lot, but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless.
The dome filter (or Hilbert Transform) is an odd one. The math is well beyond me, but somehow it splits an audio signal into real and imaginary number versions of itself, along with (in this case) amplitude and phase signals. All I know is, I can mess with the phase signal, then multiply it back with the amplitude signal and get some kind of waveshaping as a result. Or use the phase signal to modulate another filter or something.
I’d be writing about that Nearness module I ordered too, except the day after it arrived in St. Louis, it got sent off to Los Angeles instead of my neighborhood post office. Typical USPS incompetence.
I just got my passport card in the mail. They did indeed put “Sex: M” on it. This is technically correct, since they insist on having sex rather than gender on it. They haven’t done me nearly as dirty as they have a lot of trans folks.
I’m still not sure why the government cares so much about which type of half-formed genitals a person had when they were an infant. It doesn’t seem like it should be relevant to anything except for nefarious purposes.
Card goes in sleeve. Sleeve goes back in envelope. Envelope goes in drawer. Middle finger goes up. Another donation goes to the ACLU.
In our front yard, there’s what would be a bit of a hill if it hadn’t been leveled off into three tiers with knee-high concrete block retaining walls. The lower level of these developed a bit of a tilt over the past several months, and was one of the things we were going to have addressed after other concerns. But a corner of it collapsed onto the sidewalk, and it’s become the priority.
These sorts of walls — in much larger sizes — are supposed to last 50-100 years or more if engineered correctly (mostly, the wall needs to go down far enough to not be shoved upward by frost, and there needs to be sufficient drainage). I’m not sure how old this one is, but the blocks are identical to ones currently sold by Home Depot, so the answer could be “about 15 years.” Wouldn’t be the first thing that the house flipper half-assed.
My hope is that wall can be rebuilt without having to dismantle tiers above it. That will make a huge difference in the cost. I used the contact form for the most likely company I found based on some reviews; hopefully they will get back to me soon.
I’ve been interleaving the Moomin books between other reads. I’m through five of them at this point, and… hm.
I would still place Moonvalley in November — the one I read a few years ago, and the last of this set — at the top of the list. It had maximum Snufkin. Snufkin is a wanderer, a lover of nature and of music, a friend to Moomintroll and all small beasts, a foe of cops and park rangers. He’s a sort of Diogenes figure, or Thoreau without quite so much privilege.
Comet in Moominland, the first of this set, is probably second.
A lot of what goes on in the other books is just sort of random. There are beautiful moments and thoughts in them — often but not always delivered by Snufkin. Being Finnish, these are not all bright rays of sunshine all the time; there are natural disasters, and no shying away from depression.
Moominland Midwinter might be the darkest. Moomins normally hibernate through the winter, but one year Moomintroll wakes up, can’t go back to sleep, and is all alone (with his family and friends all soundly sleeping or traveling). When he starts meeting other people, they’re strangers and this makes him even more lonely. The sun won’t rise at all for weeks. He’s depressed, and even angry in a surprisingly realistic way. The personification of Winter comes along and touches a ditzy squirrel, killing it, and they hold a funeral and bury its stiff frozen corpse. Children’s book, remember!
Most recently I’ve started reading Body Neutral by Jessi Kneeland. I wasn’t sure about this one when I bought it, but just from the introduction, I am eager to read the rest. The author once worked as a personal trainer for already conventionally beautiful people, mostly women, many of them actresses or models, who were obsessed with perceived flaws. Jessi took a journey through “body positivity” before realizing it had been co-opted from a more political movement meant to be inclusive of disabled, black, trans and other less privileged bodies. Through working with a nonbinary client, they realized that they, too, were nonbinary. They became more interested in the justice angle, and also came around to promoting “body neutrality” — not the failed “love your body despite its flaws” but de-emphasizing the importance of beauty and conformity to self-worth in the first place.
The writing’s been pretty engaging just in this first chapter, and… the book might be less dark and depressing than the children’s books I have been reading to try to inject a little levity. Heh.
To be quite honest, I think the nonbinary pride flag is ugly. 3/10.
Symbolically, it’s pretty solid. Yellow represents genders that are off the masculine/feminine axis. White represents pangender/all genders. Purple represents a blend of masculine red and feminine blue. Black represents agender/no gender.
But it’s a graphic design nightmare. Just try putting some white text over it. Or black text. Or making text itself that’s in these colors. It’s gaudy and there’s extreme contrast. It violates the ancient ironclad rule of European heraldry that you never put “metal upon metal” — white next to yellow — for reasons of legibility.
I have seen these colors used tastefully — a sunrise/sunset scene in the mountains for instance, or accents of purple, white, and/or yellow with black clothing. But it’s a challenge.
But the transgender flag is… really nice! I appreciate the symmetry. The colors are complimentary, and there’s just enough contrast difference without it being glaring. It’s legible even in a tiny form, such as the official emoji 🏳️⚧️. You can put dark text over it, no problem. 10/10.
Blue is for transmasculine people, pink for transfeminine, and white can be either for other gender identities or those who are in the midst of transition. That’s pretty good symbolism too.
Then there’s this one which combines the trans and nonbinary flags. It’s a nice sentiment. It still has problems (including the white on yellow), but adding more colors kind of softens the blow a bit, maybe? 5/10.
The next album is now just short of 63 minutes long, so I’m declaring the recording process done. I’m pretty happy with the sound and feel of it overall, and there are some moments that I happen to think are particularly excellent. Time for mastering, art, and notes.
…and picking a title. I have 10 song titles and a general theme but I still don’t know what I’m going to call the thing overall. Petition to Launch Donald J. Trump Into the Sun With a Giant Trebuchet has a certain ring to it, except I don’t want that fucker’s name associated with my music. 😉
Silhouette has been great for me — it’s on 6 of the 7 tracks I recorded since getting it. Multimod is also amazing, used on the final two tracks, once for audio processing and once as a modulation source to swoop through several related sounds as well as using its Index output to sequence pitch. These modules are good companions for each other, and they both were designed with an open-ended, non-prescriptive creative vision.
With Silhouette, you can kind of see an obvious connection to other Whimsical Raps modules, particularly Just Friends (six outs from JF -> six ins on Silhouette). Multimod is a bit more of an outlier for Make Noise. Many of their modules do have a fair number of targets for modulation, but they’re not particularly parallel ones like, for instance, Silhouette’s multiple inputs or the level controls of a harmonic oscillator or a fixed filterbank or a polyphonic bank of VCOs. But then, the heart of the design for the module was to do something with many, many uses but no clearly obvious intention, to encourage the musician toward creative uses. Having 8 related outputs is almost like calling Marty McFly chicken, just to see what he’ll do.
That said, I’m thinking about that parallelism. And about granular synthesis — because if you run audio through Multimod, it becomes almost a kind of granular processor where each grain is a separate output. Merging them together in Silhouette is satisfying, but so is merely mixing them back together but perhaps in different places in the stereo field, or branching out to different processing. And if you have this rolling cascade of the same signal with different phases, a natural thing to want to do (if you’re me) is use them to open different VCA channels with related audio signals. The notes of a chord or harmonic series, for instance.
I can do that with the gear I have, but it’s awkward. Stereo is one thing, but if I have an octopus-load of audio signals to route into the DAW, that’s every input on my OptX used up. That leaves me with a mere 4 analog inputs that are easy to get to, plus the dedicated channels normally reserved for the Minibrute, bass-or-whatever, and stereo pair for Hypnosis. If I want to do the VCA thing in Bitwig, it also requires 8 channels of my Sweet Sixteen to convert those to MIDI CC. Which I did, but it was like the time I shoved a queen-sized futon mattress into the backseat of a Mitsubishi Lancer — there wasn’t a lot of room left for air.
I’m thinking about two things here. One is Nearness, a very simple, 2HP wide module with 9 jacks on it. The top and bottom are “left” and “right” outputs, and the 7 in the middle are panned L/R based entirely on proximity. (Of course you don’t have to use it for stereo, that’s just the obvious thing. You could pass it 7 gate patterns and get two complementary CV sequences from it.)
The other is the Doepfer A-130-8, which miraculously packs 8 VCAs (with no knobs) and three mix outputs (1-4, 5-8, and 1-8) into a single 6HP module.
My thinking earlier today was to replace my Xaoc Tallin and Mystic Circuits Ana 2 with these two — leaving a small space to be considered later. But after today’s recording, I realized that leaves me with almost zero utility VCAs for other purposes. I need to tread carefully and not rush anything. Meanwhile, I can rise to the McFly challenge and find less-parallel ways to work with the module (and continue to sacrifice much I/O the DAW when I choose that path).
Yesterday I got a notification from the State Department that my passport application was accepted and the card was being printed, and then shipped. Today I got a second notification that it was accepted, oddly enough. I don’t know if it never went on hold and was just slow, nor if it’s going through with “Gender = X” or “Sex = M” on it, or what. I hope not to have to use it regardless.
I’m reading Ink Blood Sister Scribe now, and was thrown off for a bit. It’s nearly set in our world, it’s just that there is a particularly difficult and rare and dangerous form of magic that requires writing books in ink made of one’s own blood. There’s a kind of conspiracy against people with this power. I’m sort of into it and sort of not; I don’t mind a good “hidden society of occultists in a familiar modern world” setting but this feels somehow like it was written by someone who’s not a fantasy author. I don’t especially love the writing style but I’m also intrigued enough to keep reading.
The shirts I bought from Geek Tropical arrived, and they’re great:
They look even better in person. That butterfly one is by Episodic Drawing, who has a lot of really gorgeous designs on the site. There are all kinds of other neat designs as well, it’s just that I really don’t need to collect a ton of button-up shirts. I do have two more I have reserved to put on a wishlist someday or wait for another sale, though.
(From the instructions on a car/electronics vacuum I bought.)
I ordered cookies from a trans Girl Scout. Apparently the organization has been supporting trans girls and nonbinary kids for years now. It’s great to see this list and be able to support them as well as give a message of encouragement, while keeping them safe from harassment.
I’ve now recorded songs 5 days in a row. This feels pretty great after my dry spell. Arranged Coincidences was released on December 1, and then I went 58 days before my next recording. That technical study, the holidays and travel, illness, the allergic reaction to Trump, etc. meant music wasn’t happening. But I’m back. Or rather, as one of the song titles says, “still here.”
Album’s at 48 minutes now. I want to add one or two more tracks. My Make Noise Multimod just showed up, and we’ll see what kind of shenanigans that will drive this evening (haven’t played with it except to turn it on, but the LEDs sure are pretty). Silhouette has definitely led to some inspirations — it’s been in every track since it arrived. I’ve been using it to combine signals, drive motion and rhythm, add dirt and space, and play with feedback.
Things are generally more chaotic on this album (which I think fits with the times). In addition to Silhouette naturally leading to that, I’ve adopted its attitude with other sounds and modulation sources as well. In some ways this is a continuation of what I was doing with Tin Birds, but more so. There’s nothing Berlin School about this one. The opening sounds of the first track sound like a simple sequence, but it’s actually a sample of a 1950s sci-fi spaceship sound resynthesized in Dawesome Myth, with scan speed changes as well as the sample’s contents combining into a spontaneous melody. There are multiple layers of sound — dripping, small animalistic sounds, something bumping clumsily into other objects in the sub-bass range, all before I even bring in additional voices which just blend in with it.
I just want to say again, a lot of this happens spontaneously as I’m patching. My subconscious is doing some work, but it’s overall kind of a psuedo-Taoist “let things take care of themselves” approach. I don’t overthink it until afterward. 🙂
One of the songs is named “The Beginning is Always the Hardest,” which comes from a fortune cookie that started with “Be patient” or “Don’t lose hope” or something like that, which very much applied to the current US administration. For no particular reason, I recalled that in the I Ching there’s a hexagram named “Difficulty at the Beginning” (it’s not like I have all of them memorized…) One might think this name would place it first on the album, but I felt there was one that should be before it. And then the plan changed again, when I recorded the Myth-based one mentioned above, which demanded to be first regardless of name themes or the story of how these came about. So now “Beginning” is the third track. As it turns out, “Difficulty at the Beginning” is Hexagram 3.
Some incense from India and elsewhere is made with cow dung, or uses artificial scents. Dung has been burned as fuel by people for centuries, it’s not particularly weird. But this is unsuitable in my religion, which uses incense (A) to purify the air and (B) as an offering. One doesn’t clean things with poop, nor give poop as a gift.
So, most of us turn to Japanese traditional incense — no dung, mostly natural ingredients, less smoke. Nippon Kodo is one of the best known brands, especially their Morningstar line which is cheap, relatively common worldwide, and still quite good quality. (Their “musk” does use artificial synthesized fragrance but isn’t something I would have chosen anyway.) They also have excellent mid-range incense and pricier luxury stuff as well.
The one that always went over the best in my shrine was this:
It’s lovely and more sharp and spicy than a lot of sandalwood incense tends to be. I have been using it sparingly but finally burned the last stick. I didn’t even know it was discontinued — I can’t even find information on it (at least, not in this packging). There is, confusingly, a store named Tendan which sells Nippon Kodo incense, but not this.
However, I’ve been able to find this package at several places, just not directly from the NK shop:
“Tendan Old Temple Meiko Spicy Sandalwood Incense” — Mysore sandalwood with cinnamon, spikenard and benzoin. That sounds like it could be it! These are boxes of 300 sticks for $29, not bad at all. So even though I have literally thousands of Japanese incense sticks from wanting to try all different kinds, I’m placing an order. Unfortunately the shop I’m buying it from only has ONE box left. There are 300 sticks, but if this turns out to be The One, I might have to find another one elsewhere.
Because the shipping isn’t cheap and I might as well make the most of it, I’m also grabbing some Baeido Kobunboku incense, which is another sandalwood blend that comes highly recommended, as well as a hinoki-mint blend.
I read Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada in two days. This is “a road trip novel that refuses to go anywhere” and tells the story of a trans woman who’s a loser, going on a road trip either to figure her shit out or to escape it, and meets a guy who’s even more of a loser who she thinks is an “egg” (trans person who hasn’t realized it yet). She tries to talk to him about it. The whole think is awkward, messy, I don’t really want to say “gritty” but kind of like that. And relatable, even though I’m not a stoner, never lived in New York or a horrible little cowtown, am nonbinary rather than a trans woman, and only figured it out later in life.
James, like me, encountered the idea of “autogynephilia” online and kind of went “that’s me” — even though it wasn’t quite! I think that may have been a common pitfall for people who weren’t quite cisgender but also didn’t experience dysphoria, early in this century. As Maria pointed out to him, “autogynephilia” was part of an awful narrative about trans women which (intentionally? ignorantly? both?) confused gender, sexuality, and fetishism.
The book leaves a lot unresolved. Does James actually take anything Maria says to heart? Is James actually trans or was Maria off base?
And so when I put the book down, I had to have a good think. Again: am I really nonbinary? Or a trans woman in denial/fear of transition (the process, the stigma, not getting the results I want, etc.)? I went to shrine contemplating this, figuring I’d be writing several pen-and-paper journal pages but I had my answer before I even started writing — the same answer I got in shrine 13 years ago. My gender is “a thing of borders”, I was made that way on purpose, and I am whole and complete. But also some of the way I have been thinking of it has been an oversimplification and I owe myself a bit more contemplation at some point.
