J.K. Rowling, you bigoted, lying, smug sack of moldering dog shit, I hope you choke on your stupid fucking cigar, and may everything you eat and drink taste like ashes for the rest of your miserable life. You had the rare chance to bring joy to a lot of people as an author… and then you turned your life to bigotry and the denial of other peoples’ dignity. Does it make you happy to know that you have caused suffering, that you have increased the suicide rate of teens and young adults? That you’re now congratulating yourself on helping to have oppressed one of the most vulnerable minorities? You are, frankly, more of a one-dimensional villain than the ones you wrote; your motive makes zero sense, will not enrich you or enhance your reputation in any way, and seems to be simply evil for the sake of evil. You could have gone down in history as “beloved author of fantasy novels for children and young adults” but you instead chose “weirdly bigoted scumbag who condemned herself to irrelevance.”
Now that that’s out of my system…
A couple of things that are in my system now are Nudistort, a weird distortion-plus plugin that one really has to try for oneself to properly appreciate it, and Circa, a 6-layer looper plugin from Audio Damage.
Nudistort came out some time ago and I didn’t try it then. I just sort of dismissed it as “okay, it’s an extreme distortion that makes stuff sound weird, what else is new?” Many such plugins just don’t do it for me. But it got a mention over on Lines, and I took it for a spin — just playing plain sines with MPE pressure using Aalto — and oh wow, it’s fun stuff. Honestly now I wish I’d tried this first, I’d have skipped over Dawesome Hate.
Circa is not AD’s first looper. Enso leaned much more into tape emulation, which sounded great, but many people (including me) found it awkward and frustrating to work with, so it just sat unused. Circa has introduced some improvements, though a few aspects of the workflow are still a little unintuitive. It’s also designed more for freeform experimentation, in other words, my kind of thing.
It has a bit of anti-click going on but it’s far from perfect, especially (it seems) when you start using multiple layers that aren’t 100% synced to each other. Sometimes instead of clicks you get… let’s call them “fuzzy sound floofs” which are far more difficult to clean up. And though it’s meant to sound like a (semi-?)modern digital looper, the artifacts from slowing the replay speed aren’t as pleasant as on something like Jroo Loop or Phonogene. Still, I can work with its limitations, and just in a few short hours of demoing it I’ve had fun and made three different things I want to use in my music.
Previously, Audio Damage was one of the rare plugin developers that did not offer free demos. Instead, they had a no-questions-asked return policy. It was a hassle for everyone involved, as far as I’m concerned, and always made me reluctant. At this point I would absolutely not have bought Circa just to try it, so I’m glad they finally changed positions on this. Demos sell plugins.
I’ve just read Life Isn’t Binary, which as it turns out is less specifically about nonbinary gender and more about social binaries in general. In fact it begins with sexuality, and the erasure of bisexuality, asexuality and other things that… I’m not 100% convinced are really “sexual” as such but not entirely unrelated. Gender is next (considering not just male/female but cis/trans and even binary/nonbinary); relationships, bodies, mental health, conflicts and thinking itself are also covered.
Basically every social binary has emerged from there being a privileged group and a “lesser” group, or an “us” and a “them” or “normal” and “abnormal.” A sort of caste system if you will, where to question the binary is to question privilege, and to be outside that binary is to make one’s life inherently political (like it or not).
