I’m writing this more for posterity, but this weekend there’s a massive winter storm affecting a lot of the US. Right here, the current temperature is 2°F (-17°C) and -9°F wind chill (-23°C). Light snow began a couple of hours ago — we’re expecting 1-3 inches today, 5-8 more tonight and another 3-5 tomorrow morning. It’s going to be 10 days before the temperature goes above freezing, with a low of -4°F tomorrow night.
Sunday night is our usual grocery run, but we’ll be all right if that gets delayed a few days. Monday my spouse has a doctor appointment but they called yesterday to say it’s been switched to telehealth. Monday’s also my usual day to go to the office, but I can work from home with no problems. We were hoping to catch the 25th anniversay Fellowship of the Ring rerelease Monday night (and the second and third movies the following nights), but that still gives us a bit more time to dig out.
I had my first therapy session yesterday, on a Zoom call during my lunch break. As the “intake appointment” it was mostly general questions about my mental and physical health, living situation, history, social stuff etc. as well as asking what my goals for therapy are.
(At one point she asked if I’m indecisive, and… I had to think about it. 😉 I wound up saying “here I am being indecisive about how to answer, so I guess that’s a yes!”)
My “homework” is to make note of when I experience panic / anxiety and what was happening that might have triggered it. Since this is a very busy therapist, we weren’t quite able to schedule weekly, but the next three appointments are booked at least.
I feel like the increased dosage of Lexapro is helping. While I was feeling a bit nervous before the appointment I think it was probably a normal level of nervousness, and I haven’t had any reason to take notes yet. Fingers crossed! This is one piece of homework I hope to fail at 🙂 If I end up ending therapy because the meds are enough, that’s actually great.
NAMM is here, and (thankfully) I just don’t find myself tempted by any of the new music gear announcements. Korg Phase-8 is now an actual product, but it seems so much less interesting (especially for the price) than the electro-magnetic-acoustic experiments Korg Berlin first started showing off about 3 years ago. I’m not interested in picking up a hardware polysynth, so I can ignore ASM’s big deal. Noise Engineering has a new trigger sequencer that’s definitely cool, but for my needs I have plenty of tools for the purpose. OBNE has a new pedal collaboration with Emily Hopkins, which can sound pretty good at times but I’m not excited for the random glitching or yet another reverb-into-bitcrusher (it does make me want to play more with tremolo though). Make Noise announced an announcement, but (unless there is more to it) Thomann has already leaked the surprise and it’s not something I need.
Pretty good article from Cory Doctorow on the AI industry here. I like the “centaurs” vs. “reverse centaurs” metaphor for whether machines serve humanity or vice versa. Of course the concept of bullshit jobs fits the latter as well. As a worker, nobody wants to be the person who babysits a machine that’s usually right but sometimes catastrophically wrong in a way that looks at first glance like it’s not. As a customer, nobody wants to get wrong answers and badly designed products from that process. As a wise or decent businessperson who actually cares about their people and their reputation, nobody wants to sell those wrong answers… but as an investor who wants maximum ROI, they definitely want to replace expensive labor with cheap machines and (if they must) a couple of low-wage interchangeable humans whose job is to be responsible for the errors.