Day: March 18, 2024

For your patience y’all get two posts in one day. Exciting, eh? This is the one where I talk about music and music gear.

With everything else, the new album has hit a slowdown. But it’s got about 37 minutes of material and I have an idea for starting the next recording session.

Still waiting on the release of Madrona Labs Sumu and Dawesome MYTH, but I figure, given what’s been going on at work I should not be complaining much about software release delays. You never know what stupid thing that doesn’t even seem like it’s programming can hold things back. (In the case of MYTH, it’s being delayed by the publisher to allow another release to take its time slot.)

ALM Busy Circuits just released Cizzle, a Eurorack and VCV module that does phase distortion (similar but not identical to the Casio CZ-101 and related synths). I went for the VCV version; it’s kind of neat as an occasional thing but it isn’t going to be a staple for me.

A bigger deal for me: I’ve got AtovProject cDVCA and Rossum Morpheus on the way, planning to set aside Interstellar Radio and Harmonic Shift Oscillator to make the space.

I’ve got a page about Class D amplifiers, in which the last paragraph admitted cDVCA was better than my indirect patching attempts, and after rewatching a couple of demos, I put it on my short list of things I could get.

Morpheus is something I’ve been curious about for a while. It’s basically a zillion filters arranged into “cubes” where you can interpolate between 8 different topologies as well as modulating the frequency. It’s well-loved for resonator duties, as well as a particular 90s synth sound. Before, I was a little intimidated by the amount of stuff it has, thinking it’s almost preset-like in some ways, but now I think that might be unfounded. Worth a try anyhow!

So what of IR and HSO? IR is cool but I don’t see it as an essential for me. I don’t use it as an effect that much (modulating and demodulating a signal at low and differing frequencies to dirty it) because it’s just too dirty most of the time. It’s more fun as a unique sort of complex oscillator, but… not an everyday driver. I think I can approach those sounds with cDVCA and some other techniques anyhow.

HSO sounds gorgeous, don’t get me wrong. But the sound is honestly not so far off from all the FM options I have to make it really distinct. And part of my justification for the module was that it can operate above audio rate, useful for clocking IR as an effect (heh) or Drezno or… those class D VCA patches.

Mystic Circuits Ana 2 seems like it’s imminent too, with Eli posting a photo of… a box of something. That’ll be a small boost in both utility and weirdness.

I’m also pondering replacing my Xaoc Katowice with a Three Sisters. They have a little in common but 3Sis is much more flexible, and it’s a filter rather than an EQ, and I know it sounds lovely with FM (argh there I go, don’t I?) But then, it’s also a bit pricey so I’m not sure, and in terms of filter flexibility Blades and Morpheus are already excellent. Maybe I should just leave well enough alone. “Just because you can…” and so on.

Almost three weeks since my last update… wait a minute. I actually wrote a post on 3/8 and then completely failed to publish it.

Oops.

To catch up:

• We chauffeured TJ and Noelle (my parents’ cats) successfully and without harm. TJ does not like anyone but Dad, and the trip didn’t endear us to her at all. Noelle headbutted me right in the mouth the next day to show all was forgiven.
• Do not book a car from Enterprise through a third-party service, including Expedia, because they will screw things up. But we got a 2024 Hyundai Palisade, not quite a luxury SUV but a couple notches above what I’m used to in size and comfort and tech goodies. It has level 2 automation (adaptive cruise control plus automatic lane keeping), blind spot cameras, parking cameras etc. as well as heated seats/steering wheel, individual temp/fan controls per side, etc. but it burns more than twice as much gas as my Prius C, and I prefer the feel of driving a smaller car. Gimme those creature comforts and safety features on a sub-20K hybrid or fully electric car, please (yeah, right…)
• My parents arrived OK a couple days later, and their stuff in a POD a couple days after that. We’ve been over a few times to help with a few things and generally to visit.
• I thought we had things resolved at work but we encountered a couple of new showstoppers. (Also, I hate .NET and how Framework and Core have similar-looking but different version numbering schemes and out-of-order dates for how long they’re supported.) but Now we’re mostly just waiting on a 3rd party library vendor to fix an issue. So things have slowed down a bit for me and I’m doing a few long-wanted but low priority code cleanup tasks.
• My spouse is sick, probably allergies but it hit hard. I’m not feeling super great myself, but our symptoms are quite different and I’m at least getting decent sleep.

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I’ve been playing a lot of Guild Wars 2 lately. The “Realm of Dreams” update for Secrets of the Obscure landed just before the cat taxi run, bringing additional story chapters and the long-awaited expanded weapon proficiencies.

The story for SOTO is an absolute mess that I won’t even try to summarize, though it does have some intriguing bits. And almost every new combat mechanic and set-piece boss fight are SUPER ANNOYING (some encounters make it inevitable that you’re going to die and get resurrected over and over and over, others slow down your movement to an excruciating crawl). Nonetheless, I got the new goodies unlocked. Pistols for Guardians are OK, not amazing with my greatsword-focused guardian who was doing the story. Axes for thieves are pretty great (but maybe not better than staff, aside from having a little range). Pistols for Elementalists struck me as extremely meh. Maces for rangers are awesome, and I wound up leveling up a new ranger to 80 and going Soulbeast with them. (Also risked going to the SOTO area with them at level 63, avoiding all combat, to find a Sky-Chak Striker to tame. One aspect where SOTO does beat Path of Fire or Heart of Thorns: once you get a certain distance into the story, you have access to a portal there for all of your characters and don’t have to play through the story again to let them in.)

I also found some better guides and have been working on unlocking the skyscale mount in Tyria as well as SOTO. It’s overly complex, with game design clearly leaning on the availability of wikis and tutorials and online automated exchange rate tools. I now have all of the collections done, but since I wasn’t training the right Masteries on that Guardian, I still have to do more experience grinding stuff to fully unlock it. At least that’s straightforward.

Guild Wars 2 has coins, gems, karma, spirit shards, laurels, transmutation charges, research notes, astral acclaim, racing medallions, festival tokens, provisioner tokens, geodes, bandit crests, 16 expansion-specific currencies, 3 guild currencies, 8 PvP/WvW currencies, 8 raid/dungeon currencies. None of those require inventory slots and are shared between your characters. But then there are also inventory items: 11 keys, 16 core tokens, 16 Living World tokens, 3 expansion tokens, 14 festival tokens and 2 special event tokens. Plus some oddball crafting materials that are not that different from tokens. And some discontinued currencies and tokens which one might run into on occasion.

The skyscale’s saddle collection requires 30 provisioner tokens, which have to be acquired from scattered NPCs in exchange for other tokens/hoarded materials (or in a couple of cases, items from the auction house). But each NPC only allows buying one or two tokens per day per account. How is that fun?

This is *after* finding an egg (random drop in one of a few only-searchable-once-per-day locations; I got it on day 3), Skyscale Egg Infusions quest (which takes you all over the world and some of the steps require specific timed events, giving you about a 5-minute window during an event that happens every 3 hours), and the Skyscale Growing Comforts collection which required items dropped from specific enemies around the world).

For comparison, the raptor mount in Path of Fire happened right after the first running battle, and in fact is given away at an early level to all players now even without the expansion.

One of the reasons I have stuck with / come back to GW2 so many times over other games is how well it eases the friction that other MMOs present. Don’t want to join a guild or look for a group? No problem. Kill stealing? It doesn’t exist, everyone who does damage gets XP/loot. Penalties for dying? None. Inventory management? Smoothed. Don’t want PvP? It’s completely separate. Fast travel? Easy and fast. Account-wide currencies and bank vault? Yes. But the crafting and the different tiers of items get insanely complex, as do achievements/masteries/etc.. I suppose some people like that, though, and it does add some longevity to being at max level (in theory. In practice, how many new characters have I started?)