Second post while blog is still was locked down.
Someone has pointed out that the Girl Scouts of the USA would most likely qualify as “Transgender Ideology Influenced Violent Extremists” by Project 2025’s standards. Teen Vogue definitely does. So does the American Medical Association. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The American Academy of Nursing. The American Academy of Pediatrics. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. The Child Welfare League of America. The National Association of Secondary School Principals. Several more.
Everyone seems to be talking about this stupid Tylenol thing. There is no new, and no old, evidence that acetaminophen has any link to autism. But this sure has been an effective distraction, for better and for worse. Something the dumb people will buy, and the smart people will have a good laugh at.
I got a 3d-printed, 2-tier stand for the pedals (it’s not perfect but it’s OK), and reorganized the cable mess a little bit. It’s much better. There is room for one more small one…
Maneco shipped me a replacement Mesmeriser and it should arrive tomorrow. No request yet to send the broken one back — I wonder if he’s just going to say international shipping isn’t worth it. Like I said, there’s room for one more pedal 🙂 Or maybe the new one will have a return shipping label, we’ll see. I did have to pay a customs fees on the second one too.
And my Mimetic Digitwolis arrived yesterday. I played with it for a while without needing to look at the manual; then later in the evening I updated the firmware, hooked up MIDI and really dove in to try (almost) everything.
To really quickly summarize the features: 4 independent sequencer or quantizer channels; for each channel the length/dimensions and clocking/addressing can be individually assigned (to an input, internal transport, or one of the other channel’s outputs) and steps can be overwritten on the fly (with triggered commands, CV or MIDI). You can limit the quantization scale via MIDI in real time, like an arpeggiator with superpowers.
And all of this is in 10HP with a postage stamp-sized screen… but it’s so well designed this isn’t a problem. Almost everything is entirely intuitive; there are some button combos, but not a ton and they’re likely to become muscle memory.
It’s a winner for sure.
Mastering is coming along, albeit a little bit slowly because of a lack of focus. See the aforementioned stuff about pedals and MD2. It’s a little challenging too, because it’s alternating between heavy noisy drones (yet with a lot of subtle detail!) and highly dynamic stuff with a lot of open space and quiet bits. Trying to decide on levels, amount of compression etc. is a bit tricky but I generally don’t want to go overboard with it. Except where overboard sounds good, of course…
Recent/current reads:
- Brandon Sanderson, Isles of the Emberdark: once I got acclimated I got more and more drawn in. As anti-colonialism stories go it was certainly better than Avatar. It was not entirely not derivative (hello Moana) but also original, and it fits into the Cosmere quite well. As for how “the Scadrians” wound up as space fascists: it’s because there’s more than one culture on the planet, as the Mistborn Era 2 books showed. It’s not about the revolutionaries and kind scholars turning bad at all.
- Rowan Alexandria Bennett, The Kindest Embrace if Firm Enough Can Suffocate: this was recommended in a Kaz Rowe video my spouse was watching. A trans main character in an arguably cyberpunk story; really well written with compelling and relatable characters, and exciting challenges in an interesting setting. The long title is because there’s a poetry-as-resistance subplot. I’m really not big into poetry for the most part, but I appreciated the sentiment (creativity against tyranny) if not the actual verses. I liked the book well enough to also order Symphony of the Sojurn before I even finished. Bennett is herself trans and a therapist for LGBTQ+ clients.
- Dex Anderson (formerly Dianna E. Anderson), In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies. I’m about halfway through and would say it’s quite possibly the best book on nonbinary identity that I have read. It deals with the author’s own journey and experiences — not just navigating nonbinary identity, but doing so as a fat person, which I especially appreciate since I am too. It also covers some history of the terminology, gender theory and queerness itself. It’s readable, down-to-earth stuff, not in the philosophical deep end even though the contributions of a few philosophers are relevant to the understanding we’ve come to. I even learned a bit more about Public Universal Friend, the most famous nonbinary person in early American history: one of the first court cases about separation of church and state was when PUF was accused of blasphemy, and the court said “we don’t do that here.”