Month: November 2025

getting help

What I wrote yesterday about feeling better? The feeling didn’t last throughout the day; I had a bit of a rougher time in the evening. Sometimes it’s hard to disentangle physical discomforts of various kinds. Was it something I ate? Did I worsen my back with poor posture? Am I just tired or actually feeling depressed? Too much caffeine or too low blood sugar or neither?

I didn’t make it an official resolution for 2025, but I did make a promise to myself if I felt like I couldn’t handle my anxiety I would get help. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had multiple symptoms showing up, and I just feel like I don’t want to and shouldn’t have to handle it without proper help.

I took an anxiety “risk assessment” questionnaire through my health provider and it says, no surprise here, that I’m high risk. It also offered a little bit of advice on things I can do to help myself but also said, make an appointment immediately.

I contacted my primary care doctor’s office to ask whether it made more sense to make an appointment with her, or to just get a referral to a specialist. The LPN said the former, because I haven’t seen her since 2016 and need to re-establish care. (I have an appointment now during Thanksgiving week, when I already took some time off.) But she also sent along a long list of providers, including a Behavioral Urgent Care that I could go to if I felt I needed it.

On the list I found a practice that has three PMHNPs (*) who seem ideal: they get excellent reviews from their patients, and they specialize in both anxiety and gender identity. While I’m not going for gender-affirming care per se, it reassures me that they’re sympathetic and understand gender issues, and it may be relevant to helping me. (I also searched for someone who’s nonbinary, but all I can find are therapists who can’t prescribe meds, don’t take my insurance and/or aren’t currently accepting new patients.)

I’m trying to decide whether to wait to see how the primary care appointment goes, or to go ahead and make an appointment with one of them now too. And if so, whether to schedule that for after that doctor, or before.

Just deciding to do this at all has been something of a step. Just making medical appointments, figuring out what to say even in a short message, triggers anxiety. But having gone this far I already feel a little bit better about things, at the moment.

(*) Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. Like a psychiatrist, but rather than “doctors” they are at the top level of nursing, with either master’s or doctorates and a ton of practical work experience and certifications. In 27 states including Missouri, they can practice autonomously, prescribe meds, etc.

Work has been crazy-making this week, and I’m sure that doesn’t help the anxiety situation. I’ve been trying to test some update libraries & legacy Fortran compiler and it’s been throwing the weirdest errors. There’s been entirely too much uninstalling, reinstalling, updating, being unable to download the specific versions of things that we want, reconfiguring, testing, tracking down DLL dependencies, trying stupid things just in case, thinking I finally found it, discovering that the same errors persist on a different machine, etc. And almost none of it is coding. Blech. But hey, the weekend is imminent now.

I’ve got about 40 minutes of music recorded for the next album now, and ideas for at least two more tracks I want to do. So that’s good!

breathing room

There weren’t very many elections yesterday in the US, it being an off year for any sort of federal elections. We had none where I live, for instance. But some of those elections will have a big impact. Redistricting in California that balances against Texas’ gerrymandering. Pennsylvania keeping its Democratic state Supreme Court, which may play a role in the midterm and next Presidential elections if there are legal challenges. Maine voters rejected a proposal meant to disenfranchise voters. JD Vance’s half-brother was absolutely humiliated in a race for Cincinatti mayor, against the child of an Indian immigrant and a Tibetan refugee. And the next mayor of New York City is a Democratic Socialist, a Muslim, and a strong supporter of trans rights — and he won by a huge margin.

That last bit is huge. 38 out of 50 states (and something like 90 nations) have a smaller population than NYC. That is a lot of voters, and a real chance to change the course of American politics.

All Republicans offered was anti-trans attack ads (in Virginia the candidate spent 57% of their campaign budget on that alone) and other culture war stuff. Democratic messaging focused on peoples’ actual needs and rights. The winners seemed to know what people actually want… unlike the so-called strategists who were, up until yesterday at least, still on the “everyone needs to move to the right” train.

Trump, of course, had a hissy fit on social media. But, damaged as his brain is, he seems to be fully aware that people are not buying the shutdown strategy of “punish the people and blame Democrats for it.” He’s distancing himself from “Republicans” in general, because in his mind he’s not a loser and nothing is ever his fault. But my prediction is, he’ll tell his pet senators to put health care back on the table and get things moving again, and then attempt to claim credit for ending the shutdown because “art of the deal.”

…

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I feel physically better today. For a couple of weeks now I’ve had a combination of back pain, a tendency toward anxiety, and let’s call it an uncertain digestive system. Perhaps a lot of that really is driven by anxiety, so a little emotional relief brings some physical relief as well.

My current read is Starless by Jacqueline Carey. I haven’t read any of her other stuff, so I have no idea how it compares. It’s certainly very tropey, in a quite stereotypicasl desert setting that has a couple of clever worldbuilding twists to it. I’m a little bothered by the idea that one of the tribes/cultures is very much associated with thievery, and everyone (including those people) just goes with it — this isn’t too much different from real-world racist tropes about the Romani for instance.

Despite that I’m enjoying it so far, but I see a lot of reviews saying it will start to drag and feel slow later on. We’ll see.

This book no doubt wound up on my list due to the trans angle — the main character is bhazim, an “honorary boy” because boys bring families more status than girls — and for some reason he was raised in ignorance of that fact at first. At ten years old he’s been living his whole life since infancy in a monastery training in martial arts, never even seeing a woman. He’s destined to be a bodyguard for a princess, which would have required castration if he’d been born with those parts. So, individuals vs. sexism is definitely a theme here, as well as class struggle.

triple word score

The album seems to be coming together piece by piece. That is, I’ll do a short session, record a drone or a looped sequence on its own, and move on… then find parts which match up, and introduce the glue that binds them together. This has inspired the name I want to use for this release, and it begins with one of those unused letters.

CVz is good. It does The Thing that I wanted it for, and more. Rotating the inputs/outputs of the matrix mixer with CV enables all kinds of additional scanning possibilities.

I’m thinking of this patching technique as “split-and-merge.” Philosophically it’s a little different from the Make Noise NUSS concept I think, but it’s a close cousin.

Multimod makes a great splitter, creating variations in phase (timing) and rate (pitch). Small pitch variations serve as unison detuning, like a fancy chorus effect, and sound really lush. Larger ones can create chords, clusters, and harmonics.

But Multimod is not the only option. Filters are good for this — multiple different strategies, whether it’s complementary filters that mix back together to fill the original spectrum, or groups of bandpass or vocal filters, or fancy spectral filtering. Delays… well, actually a straightforward delay being panned around just sounds like plain old ping-pong which isn’t that much fun. Slightly weird delays can make things interesting.

I should keep in mind that software does this technique quite well, and it’s not always necessary to do it all in Eurorack. But if I were going to dig this particular hole just a little deeper, I would primarily be looking at Three Sisters — a lovely filter I had before, with three bands which can be low/mid/high or triple bandpass, and with the option to use separate inputs for each band. Root Locus would be another strong contender. I think the smart play right now is to wait though; I have heard that Tom Erbe is working on another non-NUSS module for Make Noise which might be exciting, and if not there are always new and interesting things to try out. I don’t really need to specialize in split-and-merge — and there’s a lot of room for experimentation that these modules have opened up.

I didn’t mention this before, but I’ve also ordered a lo-fi sampler from a maker on Tindie. It uses a really cheap, bad chip originally meant for digital voice memos or greeting card messages. But as cyberpunk tells us, “the street finds its own use for things” and people have made little musical devices from it, with a pleasant lo-fi crunch. Usually overpriced, and often with waiting lists because they’re only built a few at a time, but I got lucky with this one and the price was right. I’m a little surprised that nobody has taken it a little further and made it into a really dirty delay, but perhaps the chip’s functions are too fixed for that.

A couple of nice bits of software I’ve picked up this week:

Aberrant DSP Cataclysm is a multi-effect plugin with several sections and an experimental bias. There’s a “hum” generator which can sound like 50 or 60HZ interference… or it can use a pitch detector on the input and attempt to follow along. The amplitude modulation section and resonator can do that as well, but can also drop down into echo territory. There’s a drive section with gated/octave fuzz, which you can also modulate from an envelope follower. It’s capable of quite a lot of fun strangeness, and has a vaguely 80s spy equipment/paranormal research vibe.

Lese Smear is a spectral multi-effect, a little bit like UA SpecOps in a very loose sense. My short general review is, it’s a bit less universally useful and versatile than SpecOps, with a bias for detailed frequency resolution at the expense of poor time resolution, giving it that blurry/smeary sound. But between this, the choice of effects, and the very nice system for specifying how the effects apply to different frequency ranges, it’s well suited to slower ambient and drone applications and its sweet spots are very sweet.