In the temple, our Discord server gives us daily, annotated, translated entries from the 19th dynasty Cairo Calendar, as well as the list of various feasts/festivals/processions/etc. from antiquity. Yesterday’s had the admonition “Do not start anything” as well as “Do not […] today.” We had some fun with that in the chat of course, and it coincided with some other funnies in a completely unrelated forum.
But with the mowing cancellation and needing to set up with another service, that was on my mind because all the bids that came in were either 4x as expensive, or kind of sketchy or unreviewed, so I was hesitant to choose any of them. And my parents’ service gave me web errors and then didn’t answer their voicemail.
This morning, the message is “It is favorable to do anything” — and I got a much more promising bid. I sent some details in text and they asked a couple of relevant questions, so I’m hopeful.
Following my thoughts about crosspanning, switching etc. in the modular I started thinking again about quantization — particularly microtonal quantization.
It’s a feature I have often gone without. Sometimes I tune only by ear. Sometimes I’m playing 12TET stuff in software and by ear in the modular. Sometimes I use Marbles sequences. It’s more rare lately that I use Univer Inter, but it can handle microtonal stuff via Entonal Studio. But this is a thing I’d like to be able to do more readily.
Right now there’s only one correct answer where it comes to a dedicated microtonal quantizer module: Tubbutec uTune. But given that this isn’t something I will always want to use, perhaps I should look at a module that also can do other things for me?
Two options are the open-source Ornament & Crime (O_C), or Expert Sleepers Disting. Both of these offer multiple different functions, in some cases simultaneously. O_C has spawned a whole ecosystem of successors, including Hemispheres, Phazerville and Squares & Circles. Disting went from 8 LEDs to a 5×7 LED matrix to an OLED display like O_C, adding more functionality and complexity with each step. But all of them have interface compromises because of that lack of specialization. I’ve had a Disting mk4, an original O_C, a Hemispheres, and a Disting EX and resold them all because they were fiddly and/or redundant with Bitwig Grid integration. Getting one mostly for quantization would give it purpose, but not entirely fix the fiddliness.
But! The good folks at Noise Engineering have something in the works, Mimetic Digitwolis, the successor of their cool sequencer Mimetic Digitalis. Like Disting, they went from an LED matrix to a (tiny, but color) screen. It adds MIDI in/out, and quantization of external CV signals (with Scala tuning support), and possibly some other things. They’ve only teased it online and showed it a bit at a synth club meet in LA, which I’ve heard little bits about. So I’m extremely intrigued, and am holding out for this now. It looks to still be 10HP like its ancestor, which will fit in my setup just fine if I pull out Univer Inter, which will probably be made redundant anyway.
I blazed through reading High Vaultage, because the Victoricity universe and characters are utterly hilarious and entertaining. Having come from the radio show/podcast first, I could hear most of the characters in the voices of their actors. Chief Inspector Keller, the ever-sarcastic and furious police chief, is no doubt my favorite.
Having finished that, I moved on to the enby indie book bundle that I got from itch.io before their recent controversy, and… uh-oh. The first one I tried was not the book by the same title I had heard of, but an apocalyptic novel full of torture and body horror and I noped right out of it and wanted to wash my brain clean. As a rule, I don’t like apocalyptic, survivalist stories especially when it’s an excuse for brutality and (all too often) toxic hypermasculine fantasies. And that’s when they’re well-written. This one started with an unexplained wave of fire tornadoes, to unexplained lack of any help from the rest of civilization, to a group of people suddenly going from maybe friendly and cool to kidnapping, murdering and torturing people without any apparent motive. And that torture was some of the most misanthropic, human-body-hating foulness I have ever been exposed to. I noped out fast.
The next one on my list looked cute. I got a few pages in and gave up, because cute was all it had going for it. The writer needs a mentor, more experience, and a stricter editor.
Opened up the third one, it started with a content warning similar to the (relatively mild seeming at the time!) one that the first story had, I thought about the implications of the title, and noped out without even going any further.
I’m just disinclined to try anything else from that entire collection. It’s a little too indie I think.
Thankfully there’s a new Charlie Jane Anders book, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, plus one from a couple of years ago about being creative in difficult times, Never Say You Can’t Survive.