Yep.
I’m a sensitive person, and nihilistic hatred and bullying bother me deeply. Almost more so when directed at someone else, especially if they’re already in one or more oppressed classes. And especially when it’d done with as much obvious hypocrisy and dishonesty as has been happening right now.
My coping strategy is to classify Trump, and everything that comes from his putrid mouth or his tiny hand, as poison and deal with it accordingly. Avoid exposure and remove/neutralize it immediately in case of accident. Meanwhile I’m just going to be me and do my things, and wait. In the end, he loses.
Democrats reportedly have no plans to introduce articles of impeachment, claiming they have another strategy. I suspect that strategy is to let Trump do whatever he wants while wringing their hands and asking for donations. But I did write to my ostensibly Democratic congressional representative (who, after promising he wouldn’t run against the more progressive Cori Bush, ran against Cori Bush in a campaign funded by Republicans). I said: Trump has been violating the oath of office ever since he took it, he’s not defending the constitution, he’s merely spreading disinformation, hatred, chaos and panic for his own narcissistic ends, and he needs to be stopped.
Anyway, enough about that!
Monday I was starting to feel a bit better for a while, and I made some music. (Right now I think this is what I need more than finishing the Spectraphon project.) Perhaps I’ll fire up the synths again tonight and keep that going.
I tried the beta of MIDI Guitar 3, and… yuck. This thing has been in development for the last 7 years (after MIDI Guitar 2) and the interface is much messier and more confusing and the tracking is worse, at least playing in higher registers on my bass that are well within guitar range.
MIDI Bass 3 is also in beta, but straight from the developer’s mouth, it’s not really usable. No kidding… it was spewing nearly-random MIDI data regardless of whether I played notes. So I basically have no hope for this being released or relevant to me anytime soon. My best bet for bass stuff is still just sound design through effects.
The new firmware for Elmyra 2 is also in beta, and I gave it a try. It’s got some promising new features and a rewrite/cleanup of both the saturation and delay, but it’s also a bit of a mess right now. Modulating the delay time with CV works very poorly. The mode that switches the Wave knobs to level controls works, but switching it back doesn’t. Not ready for prime time.
Also, let me just say I dislike the update process for the Elmyra and hope I don’t have to do it too many times. You can’t update via the USB-C port on the back, instead you have to remove the panel from the case, switch a jumper, and plug in a micro USB cable to a hidden port. And the panel screws go into square nuts just loosely held by flimsy plastic tabs, and every one of them fell out of their slot from 1-4 times during the process. I think it’s a great instrument for the price in a lot of ways but that wasn’t a fun time.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by beta testing stuff for Noise Engineering, and going back a few years, Mutable Instruments and Synthesis Technology. All of their products were put into testers’ hands already in a pretty good state. I think I was only ever able to report one or two actual issues with Mutable stuff across four different modules, although ALL of the testers missed a bug in Beads for months that buyers encountered days after release.
Most of what I read is fantasy or science fiction, with the occasional bit of science or interesting history or psychology thrown in. But this year I’m probably going to read a record amount of nonfiction, a lot of it relating to gender. Last night I started the newly published Trans/Rad/Fem, and… the author does not pull any punches. She’s from India, home to many different cultures but overall it is far more conservative and patriarchal/misogynistic than even ours is in this moment. It’s gripping reading though. And in her description of growing up with the world expecting her to be a boy and become a man, even though my circumstances were very different, I recognized some things.
It’s another book where I’m gonna need some nice escapism afterwards. Maybe I will make a project of reading all of the Moomin books. I read Moominvalley in November 4 years ago and really liked it, despite its melancholy. And some aspects of it might be good for this kind of time in history.
