I’m happy with Carefully Introducing Problems from a musical standpoint. I was hoping for a few more sales, but honestly — for the minimal promotion, my own obscurity, the limited audience for this genre, and being released with a lot of other new stuff on #bandcampfriday, I think it did okay. And I was happy to see a lot of people promoting black musicians’ work and a lot of other folks donating their proceeds too.
Speaking of current events, I have been swayed from my previous position of “cops have a serious culture problem — and Black and Latino people, the poor and the mentally ill bear the consequences. But abolishing the police can never work.” I thought that some amount of defunding made sense — take away the military hardware and most of the handguns for sure. But this twitter thread does a pretty good job of summarizing why rebooting the whole concept of policing makes the most sense.
we have taken almost every single one of our country’s most pressing social issues and handed them over to the police to fix with guns and handcuffs and charges and prison.
In some ways, the problem we have police is akin to the problem we have with health care and the environment: a sort of illusory cost saving that only results in eventual higher expenses, and more importantly, suffering.
For an example of how to do it right, apparently — as with health care — the Nordic countries have it figured out.
I’m happy that the Minneapolis city council, with a veto-proof majority, has resolved to disband the MPD and replace it with something else. Perhaps other communities will follow suit.
I have been on a big Brandon Sanderson kick since nearly the beginning of the stay-at-home orders. I read the extant books of the Stormlight Archive, and then continued to Mistborn. Reading various Cosmere books serially helps one piece together the (so far relatively sparse) connections. It’s kind of like finding out that not only are there whales living under the ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa, they havea different mathematical system than we do but they speak perfect French, and 500 years ago they were personally acquainted with Taika Waititi. I kind of expect something of a “grand unification” to happen by the end of those two series…
In terms of character-driven story and emotional weight, I think Stormlight is the better series overall, but before the end of The Hero of Ages things start falling together like a chain of “I” pieces into their slots in a Tetris game and it’s really something to behold. I was hoping to continue to the “Wax and Wayne” era of the Mistborn world, but I seem to have misplaced those books. For now I’m reading Warbreaker, which is one I hadn’t gotten to before, and am amused to see a little few more hints of connection between the Cosmere worlds. I haven’t read Elantris yet either, so I’m going to have to fix that.
As I’ve no doubt made clear, I am crazy about FM synthesis. One of the quirky things I like about it is how old Yamaha FM synths got kind of crusty and noisy on lower notes. It’s a bit similar to the character I love about Kermit and to a lesser extent Hertz Donut mk2. I think it has to do with low resolution sine lookup tables maybe?
Akemie’s Castle, despite using OPL3 chips and having several other odd and noisy characteristics, doesn’t do this. Hmm .
The SynprezFM app for Android phones does it faithfully. I couldn’t get MIDI to work with it though, so it requires resampling. I did that for one of the tracks on Carefully Introducing Problems, but the processing I did to it took the texture of that noise away again.
I was half thinking about acquiring a classic Yamaha FM synth. I used to have a DX100 back in the day; there’s also the little FB-01, or the YM2612-based DAFM Synth. But any of these would be one more thing to plug in and take up space, and these are not synths that are friendly or fun to program.
Plogue Chipsynth MD — a Megadrive/Genesis/YM2612 emulation plugin — sort of does it. It has selectable noise (and filter) impulses that change with the note frequency, but not quite in the same way. I think it’s probably an acceptable compromise, given that it’s less of a chore to design sounds with it (though got some quirks I don’t yet understand!) and it takes up no space and I already own it.