Saturday morning I got the new Moderna Covid booster, and also a flu shot and Tdap shot. The combination pretty well wiped me out for the rest of the weekend — chills, muscle aches all over, fatigue, elevated heart rate. I was glad to have Labor Day off for a little more recovery time, but even Tuesday morning my Oura ring said I have “major signs of strain” and should take it easy today. (I’d read that the Moderna update is somewhat more effective than Pfizer but has worse initial side effects, and chose that particular tradeoff.)
Our cat Rico, meanwhile, has been having serious digestive issues again. About the same as what he suffered from last fall, which seemed to be resolved by switching him to different probiotics. The problem is, the packaging is the same for their probiotics and their hairball treatment, and I’d accidentally picked up the latter and given that to him for several days. But he’s been back on the probiotics a couple of weeks and it doesn’t seem to be fixing the issue. I’m also transitioning him to a grain-free fish-based food in case it’s either chicken or grains that he has a sensitivity to.
I keep going back and forth about whether to take him to the vet. Last year he had an abdominal ultrasound which didn’t find anything, so it’s not some kind of bowel obstruction or cancer. I’d also think that if he had chronic IBS from a food sensitivity that would have shown up, but maybe not? They were more concerned with tachycardia, which I’m almost certain was due to the stress of going to the vet. But that was the series of events that led to a panic attack about my own heart, and wound up getting the anxiety treated.
[Update: a few fellow cat owners have chimed in elsewhere. IBS or IBD honestly seem likely, with protein allergies apparently being a common cause of them. Based on a description of symptoms, I’d guess colotis particularly. Actual testing for it can be quite expensive, but the most likely effective fix is going to be a diet change and the right probiotics. Since the probiotic I’ve had him on both seems to be less effective now and contains chicken, I’m switching to a hypoallergenic option instead. It can take a month to clear up if that’s it, so it’ll require some patience. If I did go to the vet and they determined what it was for sure, maybe they’d prescribe anti-inflammatory meds temporarily or a course of steroids, maybe not. Either way they’d probably suggest an elimination diet anyway.]
In the world of music production plugins, this has been a banner year for AI slop. Quantity over quality for sure. Most of these plugins wouldn’t be interesting even if they had been coded by humans — it’s stuff that we have already seen a thousand times before anyway, without any particular quality to distinguish it. I believe that the technical skill required to write DSP code is a very close relative to the knowledge about DSP that leads to original ideas worth pursuing.
I think that same thing must be true in music itself, and visual arts, and writing. “An idea” isn’t enough for a novel — you need a well of inspiration, a vision. Not a spark, but a flame. A plot that makes sense, a setting (place and society and history etc.), characters with motivations and quirks and styles, an overall writing style… thousands upon thousands of creative decisions, large and small, conscious and unconscious.
Anyway, this shit tsunami has made it especially easy for me to stand by my resolution. I’m not really willing to take the effort to wade through the sewer to find the good stuff. There are, currently, two plugins I would maybe consider buying if not for that resolution. One of them has a bug with MPE in Bitwig, which they are blaming on Bitwig despite the fact that the same developers have another one that works fine. The other is a reverb, and though it’s a cool reverb I have plenty of those anyway and would rather get really experienced with a couple of great ones than add more.
Eurorack has bigger barriers to entry, and thus, less garbage. It’s true that there are many brands that make fairly uninspired versions of basic modules that don’t really bring anything new to the table, and there are several that do nothing but clones of open-source Mutable Instruments modules, or unauthorized clones of other brands. There are some firmware DIYers who might or might not use AI assistance for their coding. But there’s a higher ratio of creative stuff — different takes on common functions, integrating paradigms from other formats into Eurorack, or completely novel designs.
Spectraphon was certainly on the more original side. Taking design ideas from two very different Buchla instruments, it married them in a unique way to create something new. But in practice I find myself mostly using the Chaos mode, which is effectively a 2-modulator, 1-carrier FM patch which I reproduced successfully in Bitwig Grid, K-Accumulator, and JF into Odessa, and nearly with Toros Iteritas Alia. (To be fair, there’s also a pitch offset on L/R channels and additional FM from the opposite side, so it can be more complex.) Granted this is super easy to dial in on Spectraphon, but that’s a big flagship module for just that single usage. I am looking to probably replace it in 2027.
A strong candidate for part of that space is Thorn Audio Splines. This is a clever module that acts as an LFO, VCO, envelope, step sequencer and quantizer (with some combinations of functions being semi-independent). There’s real-time CV over KB-spline parameters, which interacts in fun ways with the clipping modes. It accepts Scala files for quantization, which covers a weak spot that MD2 has. And the interface has gotten the highest praise from reviewers. I feel like one of these plus leaving space for its expander and some other interesting thing later in the year, would be a good move for me. But again… that’s for 2027.