Music gear stuff first: Audiority Big Swarma is super cool. (Of course autocorrect wants to change that into big shawarma, which I would also appreciate when lunchtime comes.) While its heart is a nice “swarm” detuning effect, the extra features really make it transcendent. As kraster on the KvR forum said, “You can use as a unison generator, pitch destabiliser, weird FM distorter, sound sweetener, sound fattener, sound destroyer, overtone generator, filter screamer, Lofi effect, stereo expander, flanger, pitch doubler and chorus.” I’m finding it well suited to this sort of psuedo-shoegaze thing I am getting more into.
Bigger news than that though: preorders have opened for Noise Engineering’s Mimetic Digitwolis, and I’ve put in mine.
The original Mimetic Digitalis was pretty nice — like an extremely compact Make Noise Rene, with four channels. The one thing I didn’t like about it is there was no visual feedback about the sequence.
This has that feedback, in the form of a teeny little screen. But also, where MD was effectively one sequencer with four CV channels, MD2 is four independent sequencers which can be CV, quantized notes, gates, triggers, or a quantizer for external signals. Sequences can be 1-16 steps, or 8×2, 4×4 or 5×3 Cartesian grids, addressable with assignable CV or triggers or another trigger channel. There’s MIDI input for sync, specifying the scale, or controlling step values with CC, and output for MIDI notes and CC.
It seems super flexible, and I’m trusting the good folks at Noise Engineering that the interface is not too cumbersome. And hoping that microtonal quantizing can be implemented, although there are no promises.
Labor Day weekend: we didn’t go to the Japanese festival. Usually the combination of a lot of walking and hot, humid weather really takes it out of us, so we have a tendency now to wimp out. The weather might have been nice enough for it to be okay if we took things slow. That’s OK though.
We did, though, go with Mom when she went to pick up her new 2025 Camry. (My parents’ old car was a… 2002 Camry I think? Maybe older? Technology-wise there is a huge difference, and style-wise it’s gone from beige and bland to relatively sharp-looking. But the paperwork wound up taking about 2.5 hours because her insurance company wasn’t answering the phone and they had to try 3 other companies before they found one that didn’t want to rip her off.
Monday morning I was up early and feeling well enough, so I took a walk around Mallard Lake while it was still fairly cool. That got me realizing that I really, really should go for wider shoes. I’ve been wearing these two pairs of Chucks since Black Friday of last year; sometimes they feel fine and sometimes they squash the toe area from the sides. So this morning I went ahead and ordered wide ones, which limits the choices a bit. I was still able to make these custom enby wizard shoes (there are little embroidered white stars on the opposite side, I just failed to take a screengrab while editing).
The other thing I did this weekend was play a lot of Guild Wars 2. The Janthir Wilds expansion was discounted, and after trying the spear briefly on beta characters I decided to go for it.
The thing about GW2 “seasons” and expansions is that the stories are a huge mess. The overarching story isn’t bad, but it’s very tangled. You are expected to already be familiar with everything that happened in every previous season, expansion, and additional-content-added-after-expansion-release as well as the various dungeon stories. And every time, they want to catch you up on the lives of 73 different NPCs. Imagine if every MCU movie had to show you what everyone from Ant-Man to Zuri has been doing and how they feel before getting into the plot.
Janthir Wilds is particularly egregious with this; there is a new alliance with representatives from multiple different cultures, and you have to check in on everyone’s situation and feelings before discussing the specific threat which you’re there for, and checking in on everyones’ opinions and feelings again afterward. Then you travel to the actual site of the story, and are introduced (again, slowly) to the “camp” and another subplot. Then you meet the locals, and are introduced their extremely long-winded, slow-talking chieftain and their ruling council. Later on there’s about 10 minutes of listening to that chieftain slowly, sadly talking about his family before you have the opportunity to… clean a house. Also some of the local quests are super tedious chores… picking up dung in a farmyard. Yay. And another council meeting to argue about a suddenly-introduced strategy and then checking on their reactions to the vote. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some actually fun stuff and interesting things buried beneath all this, but it really needed to be slimmed down and kept exciting and heroic.
With all of that story stuff, there’s one intriguing rebellious wizard who I’m curious about. The only other thing I’m wondering about is why Queen Jennah, of all the dignitaries at the alliance meetings, goes barefoot. This is apparently never explained but there are many fan theories. I’ll also note that “Invisible Shoes” are one of the most rare and expensive armor skins in the game. Maybe it’s a weird status thing, and/or a reference to the emperor’s new clothes…
The spears are pretty great. I’m going through the story with my oldest Mirage character, who I’ve kept around to collect birthday rewards, and partially re-specced her to take good advantage of the spear. My Berserker and Willbender both are also using spears now as a drop-in replacement without needing to change up skill choices. With other characters, it doesn’t feel very smooth or would require starting from scratch.
Also nice are the warclaw mounts, updated from the original release. They can now multi-jump in midair and take no falling damage even from considerable heights, and move almost as fast as the Raptor mounts. There’s some new uses for their mounted attacks, and they can be remounted in combat with a much shorter cooldown than skyscales, for a quick escape or buying yourself time to heal up. There are a few more mount buffs in the progression, and… I’m kind of mostly continuing in JW just to get the rest of these, not sure I care about the story enough to see it all the way through.
A homestead is the other new thing players are given. I’m not into it. From anywhere in the world, you can teleport to a house (which includes a farm, mine, lumber mill etc.) which you can customize and decorate. But like other instanced content, it strips away important buffs, and it offers no utility at the beginning and limited utility if you build it up. You can’t even lie down on the bed that you have to build as part of the JW storyline, though you can go into strangers’ lodges and sleep in their beds like Goldilocks.
At this point, I’m mostly continuing in JW to unlock the rest of the warclaw mastery, see what other rewards and scenery come up. I’m just not in it for the story, I’m afraid… but I’ll probably stick with the story because that’s how you get to the good stuff.
I’m currently reading Devoted to Death, which is about Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint. She’s been around longer than most people realize, but has grown in public popularity in the 21st century. My interest comes indirectly, through Kemetic Orthodoxy — there are some commonalities in ancestor veneration in ancient Egypt and Mexican culture, and a few between the goddess Nebt-het (who is an aspect of my Parent deity) and the Mexican death saint.
There’s this simplistic notion when looking at various religions that you can reduce a god (or saint, spirit, whatever) to “X, god of Y” and the rest is just trivial cultural window dressing. But Santa Muerte’s boom in popularity isn’t from a cultural obsession with death, but rather, her reputation for (A) absolutely no judgement, and (B) granting swift, effective miracles. She’s petitioned much more frequently about matters of love than for “black magic” purposes; there’s also prosperity, release from prison, protection, healing, etc. She is beloved by both outlaws and cops, and by all kinds of marginalized people.
The “no judgement” thing of course is a double-edged sword. She’s got devotees on both sides of the drug war, but the media likes to sensationalize the criminal aspect. The Catholic church calls her heretical and satanic, and the Mexican government occasionally sides with them because of the whole narco thing and destroys Santa Muerte shrines. I’m sure the Catholic church isn’t super happy with other unofficial folk saints either, but they have specific bones to pick with the skeleton saint.
I can appreciate that there’s someone for people to pray to who feel abandoned by the religion they grew up in and are surrounded by. But you can have radical acceptance of people, while also not enabling the working of more harm. If I pray for something that is going to hurt innocent people, I want to be called on my bullshit. What really drew me into Kemetic Orthodoxy was the concept of Ma’at — at its most basic, this is translated as “justice” (but the mysteries go deep). The way it was first described to me made me feel like: this is the purpose I’ve been missing in every other religion I have looked at.