Last night I read another article that speculated on plausible scenarios involving the November election. Overall, it seems clear the Trump campaign strategy has been to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election — an old GOP favorite, where “voter fraud” is used as the excuse to disenfranchise voters in Democratic-leaning areas (who are proportionally more black and poor than not) but cranked up to 11. And of course this fits right in with the cultish, Orwellian strategy of calling the news media and science into question so that the Regime can lay sole claim to the truth. Trump, unless defeated in an absolutely crushing landslide, is almost certainly not going to concede but will attempt to bend space and time around the black hole of his ego.
Reading the article was a mistake.
I dreamed last night of being at a college for some kind of artist residency thing in electronic music — COVID wasn’t a concern in the dream world — when it was announced that the school was closing due to widespread outbreaks of election-related violence. It was perpetrated by right-wing militias and by police forces (which are not that far from being the same thing), but of course blamed on antifa and George Soros…
The scene changed to the school’s auditorium, and the woman in the seat in front of me pulled a small pistol from her purse and started pointing it at people and waving it vaguely around while spouting off some QAnon garbage and accusing me of being an anarchist. And that’s when I woke up. (I realized later it was Patricia McCloskey, of the couple in St. Louis who threatened protesters by waving guns at them illegally.)
Sigh. 40 days until Election Day. 118 days until the next Presidential term begins.
I went ahead and traded my Lyra-8 to someone directly for a Medusa. After both were en route, I got a really weird set of messages from USPS about how the Medusa’s address had been changed and it was being held for pickup in the post office in the sender’s city. So that was another recent worry: had I been scammed or something? After a few moments of thinking about it, it didn’t really make sense. I figured it was a mistake, and yes: the sender had accidentally reversed the To and From addresses when buying the label, someone from USPS figured it out and fixed it, and that looked really bizarre to their tracking system. I’ll still be relieved when it arrives, and also happy I hope. I think Medusa is going to work out very well.
I have also gone for a DAFM Synth Genesis, which sports the Yamaha YM2612 “OPN2” FM chip — as found in the Sega Genesis, and also that MegaFM synth I had been thinking about. This is smaller and significantly cheaper, and though it doesn’t have a dedicated slider for every parameter, I’ve heard it’s pretty friendly to work with. I’ve already familiarized myself a bit with how the synth engine works, since Plogue Chipsynth MD is an emulation of it. It’ll be nice to have the real deal and all its wonky fuzzy noise for drones and textures. If I seriously fall in love with the sound, it might be worth reconsidering the MegaFM (and possibly setting Akemie’s Castle aside).