I didn’t mention it before, but I’ve given up on the Zenowell Luna. I just can’t consistently find the right positioning and combination of water and gel to get it to conduct well and give me the right sensation… usually it’s nothing, sometimes it’s an irritating prickle. And I have no real evidence it was relaxing me.
I tried a “bee breathing” (Bhramari Pranayama) meditation and it was kind of weird, but that night I got some excellent sleep and my HRV was a little bit higher (21 instead of more like 16). The next morning I did it more, and my average HRV was a whopping 56! So I thought, maybe I’ve got something here. But I haven’t been able to replicate it. One important difference is the temperature in the house was fairly chilly — we hadn’t switched from AC back to heat because we weren’t expecting that much of a drop in temps. So maybe that was the entire difference. Cooler temps (down to some point) are supposed to be better for sleeping, after all.
I’ve seen that meditation before, but tried it because it’s in The Vagus Nerve Reset. But I’m not ready to recommend that book, because it goes along with polyvagal theory (which involves some not very good science; yes the vagus nerve is important in regulating stress/calm but there’s no evidence for some of the claims in the theory) and because the wording of the exercise was vague; to really understand how to do it I had to resort to YouTube videos. The book is also more focused on trauma than general anxiety etc.
Yesterday as I was leaving work, the silicone tip for my earbuds came off in my right ear and got good and stuck. I had to drive home so my spouse could help me get it out with a pair of tweezers. Not a pleasant experience. This isn’t the first time the earbud came out and the tip didn’t, but it was already partway out before and not nearly so troublesome. I decided to go for some replacement tips, and chose Symbio W for its silicone-coated foam, which apparently some people favor both for comfort and sound. I’ll find out soon enough.
I don’t know what got me thinking of this the other day, but I think I’ve realized why the internet isn’t “the information superhighway” anymore. Okay, four reasons: 1) it was never a good metaphor, 2) it’s unnecessarily long, 3) everyone was tired of hearing it, and 4) the internet stopped primarily being about information.
The internet really is about different things depending on who you are — it’s primarily about vacuuming up data and selling it to advertisers and governments, for the big tech types. But for the most part “content” has replaced “information.” There is probably more misinformation, disinformation, and non-information than information out there now.
And I had a flashback to how school libraries, in the age when they were relevant to me, had been rebranded “media centers” because apparently books just weren’t the future. It was all going to be microfilm/microfiche and films and recordings and maybe even involve computers someday somehow. 🙂 But “library” has the Latin word “liber” at its core, which is perfectly both “book” and “freedom”…
The long-awaited u-he Zebra 3 was released yesterday and… I’m not even looking at it. I made that decision at the end of last year and I’m sticking to it. I have enough stuff to work with, some of it’s pretty new to me still, and Zebra is a Very Big Deal that one could go really deep with, and I just don’t need that in my life. Maybe another time. I’m reserving my one synth plugin slot for the year for something smaller and more specialized, along the lines of Sine Machine.
I did wind up going for AudioThing Octaves, as one of the three FX plugins I’m allowing myself. It’s an emulation of a specific old-school passive bandpass filter than Hainbach likes, plus some extra features to turn it into a resonant filterbank. It sounded gorgeous in my testing, and it’s cheap.
I finally have the beginnings of work on the next album. Not a recording yet but a software patch and a plan to add some stuff to it. I just need to put in the time, when the focus and energy for it are there and I’m not lured away by walking in nice weather, playing Guild Wars 2, or a birthday dinner for a family member.
Speaking of GW2: I released my second Ranger from service, and finally got around to starting a Mechanist… which I’ve been avoiding because of the large numbers of weird green mecha-leading folks in the game. But now I understand the appeal. While some characters are really good at, say, heavy single target damage, cleaning up trash mobs rapidly, or sheer survival, these have it all while also being ridiculously easy to play the entire time. The big green thing zooming rudely through the camera’s near plane on a regular basis and standing in the way of things when doing “town stuff” with NPCs is still pretty obnoxious though.