I’ve seen two total solar eclipses, but now I’ve seen one total lunar eclipse.
Lunar isn’t nearly as dramatic and awe-inspiring as solar, but it’s still very cool. At first it just looks like an ordinary crescent moon, if you haven’t been paying attention to the phase. But as totality draws nearer, you can see the rest of the moon in a dark rusty red. (How well and how soon you can see it probably depends on how much light pollution you’re dealing with, and your eyesight and corrective lenses…) I was expecting the bit of “highlight” around the top edge to flatten out within a few minutes into totality, but it still kind of looked like a three-dimensional, slightly rounded button or piece of candy.
My photos were not good. While the technical specs of the Pixel 8a camera are decent and the software is probably quite good at taking portraits of people, it’s really not the right tool for astronomy photos. (The Open Camera app was recommended to me, so I’ll check that out.) These were the best of a bad bunch:
(Some of what we’re seeing there is thin tree branches. Lights from other houses were quite bright, and I was trying to find a place to stand where they could be eclipsed by trees.)
I didn’t much care for Dawesome’s effect plugin LOVE when I tried it, but they’ve just released a wavetable distortion plugin called HATE.
Wavetable distortion isn’t super innovative in its own right, and is quite easy to do in Bitwig. For the most part it offers few advantages over more traditional distortion options, but there are some fun techniques with it. One of those techniques is to mix an LFO with your audio, phase-modulating the wavetable. Unfortunately, HATE not only has no internal modulation, it has a DC-blocking filter on the input so you can’t pre-mix it yourself.
What HATE does have going for it, aside from a few tools to manipulate the table to make it a little more distortion-friendly, is an effects chain similar to its MYTH and KULT synths. Especially at the intro price, this chain and its unique and handy set of effects makes it worthwhile.
This is somewhat marred by a really unfortunate UI choice. Each effect initially shows a comically wide wet/dry mix slider with fancy textured artwork (as ssen above) and a preset selector. If you click a tiny gear icon, it’ll show the actual controls except for the wet/dry mix — you have to bounce between those two pages to tweak the effect. It’s really obnoxious to work with, but not quite enough to kill the vibe because it can sound super cool.
I’ve found that the LSSN shave soap bar is WAY better than any foam, gel, cream or oil I have tried to shave with. I just rub it directly on and it forms a dense lather that stays where it should. Less it of it goes down the drain before I even pick up the razor than with anything from a can or tube. (It does require fairly hot water to re-melt the shea butter when rinsing off the razor.) I seem to get a smoother shave with it — although stubble is back the next afternoon anyway — and there is no irritating menthol (especially when I get a little up my nose or it runs into my eyes from shaving my head).
A lot of these bars make a big deal of the environmental friendliness of their minimal packaging, which is nice but I don’t feel like I go through so much shaving cream is that much of a big deal, no more often than I need to replace them. You should see the pile of insulin pens and pen needles that I have to throw away instead of recycling…. sigh.
On that subject of insulin, for the first time since I was diagnosed with diabetes, my blood glucose is officially “under control” (meaning not currently high enough to be toxic, not that I’m “cured”). Here it is for the past few years:
For years it stayed around 7.5. Very intense, unsustainable and depressing diet/exercise effort in the summer of 2011 only got it down to 7.1, along with temporary, very minor weight loss. And then my A1C shot up worse — I suspect, because one of the meds I was on at the time that forces increased insulin production had damaged my pancreas.
The turning point in 2022 was going on Ozempic, and then going to the max dose last year.