Starbucks isn’t a habit for me, just an occasional thing. Forget PSL, for me it’s the chai. They are known for getting peoples’ names wrong, and this morning they decided my name is “Dae.” I’m finding it kinda cool actually. I’ve occasionally contemplated what I’d want to be called if I were really going to present myself as nonbinary (instead of just quietly being nonbinary and not really thinking about it that much) and that could maybe work. Maybe. But since I’m not really doing that, consider the idea filed away.
I’ve gone and bought a used Zorlon Cannon mk2. I’ve missed mine ever since dropping it for the Drezno — but as much as I like Drezno, what it does is too different to act as a substitute. All the older Harvestman stuff is hard to find and has only gotten more expensive, but this price was significantly less than what it’s been selling for on Reverb. I’m going to let go of the ALA Turing Machine trio, because it hasn’t turned out to be the continuous inspiration machine I’d hoped for based on playing with the VCV Rack version.
Once I manage to resell everything I’ve got posted, I’ll have spent less on synth hardware than software this year. But that reselling is going slowly — people aren’t buying nearly as much as they did during the height of the pandemic, and that includes used stuff. I’ll wait until after our Thanksgiving travel and lower the prices a bit more, but thankfully I’m not in that much of a hurry.
The next album is progressing, in fact I’m pretty close to done, I think. Even after a couple of tracks I decided not to include. I’m still thinking about how to handle Bandcamp, but the tentative plan is to go ahead and release this one there, while holding off on rereleasing my Ambient Online contributions.
My parents’ house purchase seems to be marching on. The details of the final walkthrough (with me) and closing (remotely, via notary) are arranged. I guess the seller did wind up responsible for some repairs as a result of the occupancy inspection, but I haven’t gotten the details on that. It’s unlikely they’ll move during the winter, so we’ll probably still drive down to Georgia for Christmas (and might end up hauling some boxes with us for them on our way back up).
In the world of games, I’ve been continuing to play the same old stuff. Art of Rally got its first (and probably last) DLC, Australian stages plus four new cars, as well as an update which fixes a few things — hopefully including the Unity crashes I occasionally experienced even after resolving the XBox controller driver mess. Soulstone Survivors got a huge update that reworked runes, the Chaos skills, and some interface quality-of-life stuff including the ability to assess skill performance in the midst of a game — so I’ve been remaking my notes on that. The new WRC game by Codemasters, unfortunately published by EA, has been released but I’ve held off — leaving it both as a wishlist item and something to grab once they’ve worked out more performance issues and bugs. And I’ve been thinking about doing another round of Guild Wars 2, probably not bothering to finish Heart of Thorns but I might jump into the third expansion and claim my boat. After that I might get back into Elder Scrolls Online, since I seem to recall they’ve got some new stuff.