Month: October 2026

while it lasted

We got our voting taken care of today. I would like to not hear anything about polling, horrible ad campaigns, conservative PACs disguising themselves as progressives to spread misinformation, fascist anti-democracy threats, Democrats who think their best bet is to imitate the right wing even more, etc. until the races are called, thanks. But we can’t always get what we want, can we? 馃槓

While I haven’t had another 4-songs-in-one-day day with the album project, it’s coming along. 7 finished songs, a start on #8, and three ditched attempts so far — a bit worse than my ratio has been for a while, but I can chalk that up to trying a tweak to my process that didn’t quite work out. No worries, I’m still on track to break my personal record for releases in a single year. Which really isn’t a goal in particular, it’s just something that’s going to happen unless I intentionally just stop recording anything for a while.

It’s Spooky Season, and the moon has really delivered. I have no photos because phone cameras are generally horrible at decent sky pictures — but from cloud-obscured Scooby-Doo full moon last night, to pumpkin orange full moon low on the horizon tonight, Luna clearly understood the assignment.

In our neighborhood, we’ve got a few impressively decorated houses. There’s one with a bunch of light-up inflatables including a dragon with red eyes and embers in its throat, but better still is the one with a kraken and a pair of sea serpents undulating out of the “water,” creepily lit after sunset.

I’ve started playing Halloween music — the creepier ambient kind, naturally — and started a thread on MW asking peoples’ favorite horror movie scores. It hasn’t gotten a whole lot of response, but there have been a few suggestions, plus there’s another thread about older electronic movie scores. I could maybe be in the mood for Goblin (who were behind several Italian horror movies) on occasion, but… not quite what I was looking for. S’okay though.

Speaking of forums, I may just give up on KVR. I’ve been a member since January 2003, when I was first getting into FL Studio and plugins. It’s always been something of a mixed bag — certainly a good place to keep up with plugin announcements, a little less so for useful advice and opinions. There is a lot of petty bickering, and one gets the sense that some people have something to prove. But there are some good eggs too.

But… AI.

KVR has no AI policy. They do have a separate subforum for discussions of machine learning/AI/vibecoding, which has been helpful to get most of it clear of the rest of the forum for those tired of it. But it’s done nothing to stem the shit tsunami of vibecoded plugin announcements.

I cannot find a reliable way to measure just how many of them have swarmed the place… one person claims “in the past two days, 17 new compressors have been added to the Marketplace.” I count 41 newer instrument plugins in KVR’s database then Chipsynth OPMZ, which was released a mere 28 days ago — but there are MANY MANY posts on the Instruments forum announcing things that haven’t made it into the database. And Effects might be worse than Instruments.

KVR also doesn’t have much else going for it, frankly. I’ve gotten inspiration from peoples’ questions and ideas on MW, and Lines leans toward more thoughtful and insightful meta-discussions. KVR has people trying to prove that their semi-informed opinions are clearly superior to everyone else’s, pedantry, threads that consist mainly of two people bickering, arguments about aliasing or 432Hz tuning or zero-delay filters, and what is “pro” and how to be a commercial success, and a surprising amount of the ol’ hardware vs. software. And a whole lot of “what is the best reverb in 2026”, “what is your go-to limiter,” “favorite VA synth?” etc. which turns into context-free lists of peoples’ favorites.

If I stop visiting KVR, I will miss out on… maybe a few actually good plugins once in a while? And a couple of people who are funny sometimes. And that’s totally fine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite glad to have picked up OPMZ, and Octaves, Pyros and Sinusoidal Run Rhythm and the free Anina have all been good to me. But I already knew I liked Plogue and AudioThing, and I’m pretty sure I heard of Anina through a different website. I think I’m okay just scrolling through more curated sites and occasionally checking up on what favorite developers have been doing.

While I’m complaining about websites where I was a regular… I gave MetaFilter another look today. I used to enjoy it quite a bit, for a wide variety of odd/funny posts and a certain take on news. But then Trump got elected the first time and the centrist Dems blamed leftists to the point where I just couldn’t deal with the bullshit anymore. Years later, I thought I’d give it a poke. And I saw several commenters with a “why are you picking on AI?” take that just made me nope out. I have another, much more sympathetic community, which went entirely private and is equally good or better at curating the weird world of the web as well as bitching about current events.

My latest read: Martha Wells’ Platform Decay, the most recent of the Murderbot books. It just jumps straight into a mission without any intro or background, which was disorienting and made me wonder if I missed something, but it caught me up just fine. It is probably the most action-y and tense of the books so far, but doesn’t lack in personality or relatability at all. The whole series is recommended, as far as I’m concerned.

Have started on Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. I’m not sure that it’s going to be a big revelation for me, since it advocates for living with curiosity instead of setting and pursuing linear goals, climbing corporate ladders etc. and I’m already very much on that. (Now that I think about it, the whole “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” thing, and the need for so many KVR users to be “pro” and for music-making to be efficient, could be tied up in this.)

bits

My upper LCD monitor, which is the newer one by a couple of years or more, suddenly started flickering dimly Wednesday night. I knew it wasn’t some kind of settings/driver issue because it did it even on the “no signal” screen with the DisplayPort cable unplugged. The most likely culprit, I figured, was the power supply brick (which was, according to the manufacturer, intended for cash registers).

An exact replacement was going to cost upwards of $45. But I gathered the specs (including the barrel connector, which can be tricky because there are versions that are 2.1mm and versions that are 2.5mm!) and found a cheaper version for $16 that shipped the next day. And voila.

Which is great, except I don’t get to upgrade my monitors. Nobody seems to make 29″ 21:9 ultrawide monitors now — there are 27″, 30″ and 34″ and most of them are curved. A 34″ curved would most likely fit in the available space I have. But I’m OK with the ones I have, aside from them being from different manufacturers and the color never quite matching on them. Is that a “spend $600 on two new monitors” problem though? Not really.

Goals:

(“I’m not fat, my skeleton is well hidden.”)

Welcome to CompuServe

reticulating…

A healthy discount led me to go ahead and grab Thorn.Audio Splines without waiting for Budapeszt first.

Budapeszt should be shipping soon, hopefully, since Xaoc announced on Oct 1 that it had entered production. I’ll definitely pick that up when the time comes.

I’ve decided for sure to set aside Spectraphon, as well as Nibbler and Katowice; possibly Rings if I feel Budapeszt entirely replaces it. That gives me plenty of space to look at later, once I’ve explored the two new ones. I do want a button controller with momentary and latched outputs, and am intrigued by a couple of other modulation sources, but we’ll just see.

Last weekend the weather was actually appropriate for a Midwestern mid-October, and we took the opportunity to visit the St Louis Renaissance Festival (which is a ways west of the St. Louis metro area) for the first time in several years. It wasn’t super crowded in the morning, but was by lunchtime. We still got to hit up all the merchant booths we were interested in, bought a few nifty things (I have a new Spirit of Scotland tartan hat, because its colors suit me), watched a couple of performances, and checked out the coolest petting zoo I have seen in a while — it had an albino wallaby and several raptors. Also it was just a generally pleasant outing and we got to move around and be outside for a while.

Temperatures have been climbing back up, and may reach 80 on Sunday, but evenings and mornings have been cooler and there’s less humidity, so it’s not bad. It’s almost Halloween though and we should consistently have nice hoodie weather.

I’ve started reading Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Saw it recommended somewhere, and it was recently on sale. If I’d realized it was by the author of Eat Pray Love I probably would have dismissed it, but I am glad I didn’t. (And examining why that title makes me averse when I honestly don’t know anything about that book.) Anyway, this one has some excellent words of wisdom, and funny stories about the magical weirdness as well as the everyday effort and seemingly-uncomfortable-but-not-really truths of the creative process.

In a sense, it’s preaching to the choir though. I agree with pretty much everything she says: that people should pursue their creative interests, not set out to make a career out of it, not build up any expectation of success other than “make things”, do their own thing and ignore doubts and critics and popularity, put in the actual work, that perfectionism is a kind of self-doubt/block, etc.

I would add that creativity is like a lottery: you can’t win if you don’t buy tickets, and you probably won’t win anyway but the more you buy the better your chances — and by “buy tickets” I mean “make things,” and what it means to “win” can only be defined by yourself. My expenses are considerably more than my income (partly just because I like the stuff) and I have a limited set of fans, but I still feel like I’m winning because I’m making music that I like to listen to myself and having great fun doing it.

I’m starting to cool again on Guild Wars 2, even though right now the Halloween event is going on and 20 Candy Corn on the Cob items are within reach, with which… see I kind of don’t care about the thing I was looking to collect those for anymore.

I got Over the Hill on Steam — a cozy, almost leisurely, but challenging offroading exploration game from the makers of Art of Rally and Absolute Drift. It’s not a race, it’s about finding stuff on the map and getting to it over mountains, bogs and other natural obstacles. And taking animal photos. And hauling meteorites out of the ground with a winch. And getting stuck and unstuck. Often it’s a kind of physics puzzle. All of this earns upgrades and cosmetic stuff to mount on your Jeep/Bronco/whatever. There’s no rush, and in fact it encourages going slowly and carefully, picking out your route, and stopping to smell the roses (or find that moose you can hear in the distance). It’s refreshing.

lurch

I might hesitate over things but when I decide to move, sometimes I really move!

Two days ago I had nothing recorded toward the next album, just two DAW projects with Plogue Chipsynth OPMZ patches in them. Yesterday… a bit with a note that it might be a transition between two other songs.

Today, I have the first four songs of the album done, with continuity between them inspired by Spooky Season, and a note for how to begin #5.

I will give partial credit to a very slow workday. 馃檪 The timestamps on those songs range from 1:29 PM to 3:46 PM, after a morning of forensic attempts on a particularly stubborn long-standing but rare bug. Mostly at this point I am waiting on a big feature drop that I need to contribute a change to, and any other bug reports or code reviews or “help please” requests. We’re getting close to a code freeze and this isn’t a good time to start something new — so slacking a bit and musicking felt like the thing to do. Tomorrow if it’s slow, I’m going to attack some of the test automation backlog for a while instead to feel useful, but I won’t be surprised if I record at least one more song…

Aside from OPMZ, I’ve got Akemie’s Castle, Toros Iteritas Alia, some Odessa FM, K-Accumulator and Spectraphon all doing FM here, so it does live up to the “index” theme, plus a bit of work from Absynth 6 and Walk 4. And there’s the kind of modulation that makes me think Splines is certainly going to be a welcome addition (and maybe Orphiser or Undertow; still considering those).

I’ve warmed up to Dungeon Crawler Carl. There’s a weird logic to it that isn’t apparent at first (beyond the “everything is game mechanics” angle), the humor keeps getting better, and I care more about the characters and conflicts than I did to start. So I’m thinking I’ll probably hunt down later books in the series, as either library ebooks or deep discount stuff.

YOLO

I’ve been holding back from starting on the next album. Part of that is fatigue, since my sleep patterns have been more than a little bit weird. (For last night’s 4 hours of sleep and apparently only 15 minutes of REM sleep, I can probably blame the coffee milk boba tea I had after dinner combined with researching something on my phone when I should have been settling down.) But I think part of it has to do with not really feeling motivated to work with the project parameters as I laid them out, which is why I kept kind of changing my mind about it. I thought I’d settled on all-FM, including using FMd LFOs as my rhythmic source. But… meh.

The last project worked really well for me, and part of the beauty of it was simplicity. Zeroes also worked really well for me, and it was a more open and abstract concept. So, my decision for this next one is to call it Index and work with that as a theme in whatever way calls to me on a per-song basis. It’s likely still going to be a lot of FM and PM, but lookup tables — either for wavetable synthesis / waveshaping or for sequencing — are an obvious option as well, and I don’t have to be strict about it.

Very important election coming up in the US (in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, and honestly I can’t blame you…). The stakes on a federal level are pretty obvious, but state and local politics make a difference too. Here in Misery Missouri, we have a number of state amendments up for a vote and most of them are bullshit. As one slogan goes: “Yes on 6, the rest are tricks.”

Amendment 3 repeals the vote that we just had in 2024 protecting abortion rights, and additionally prohibits “gender transition procedures for minors” (which are already illegal under state law). They’ve largely been using the second part as bait and not mentioning the first part — it’s 100% “overturn the will of the people” crap much like the state legislature tries to pull all the time.

Amendment 6, on the other hand, prevents the state legislature from negating measures that were brought to a ballot initiative by petition, and protects that petition process. It’s the opposite of the Amendment 2 we killed in the August primary election, which would have made that sort of referendum effectively impossible by requiring it to succeed in 100% of districts.

Amendment 7 is some crazy bullshit to replace all state taxes with some kind of weasely, non-specific “permanent endowment fund.”

Amendment 8 has the most deceptive language of any of them, but effectively it prevents anyone but the state attorney general from removing elected county sheriffs from office… no matter how corrupt. Given that our state AG is himself an absolute slimeball, how about no? Apparently this one’s ancestry goes back to the Republican furor over county mask mandates during the worst part of COVID. (We live in a very stupid timeline, y’all.)

Mutable Instruments Beads was just yesterday made open-source. Nobody seems to know what 脠milie’s reason was for not doing this earlier, or the thought process that specifically went into this decision now — but it comes on the heels of someone who was planning on using AI-assisted reverse engineering to create an alternate firmware and was conscientious enough to ask permission to distribute it. 脠milie said no, and then quietly committed the code to GitHub with the same open-source licenses as the other stuff.

Since she didn’t offer commentary on it, one can only guess — but it looks like her hand was forced. It was a choice of making the firmware open-source, matching her other work and hopefully the people who care can learn from good quality, well-commented code — or watch as someone else just rips it off with AI and doesn’t ask for permission.

AI has made things very, very messy and chaotic and it’s hard to guess how things will go. I’ve been fending off anxiety about it most of the day, to be honest. This isn’t anything like the singularity that futurists predicted — our machines are still dumber than us — they’re just faster, and capable of pattern-matching stuff that would take massive human effort (but without the benefit of common sense, wisdom, ethics etc.) But we’re still in kind of a weird place in history I feel like. It likely means the end of some things, and we don’t know what yet. It could potentially be a massive social change, and those are seldom smooth sailing even when they are necessary.

Just a month ago I wrote about how hardware had an advantage over software in that there was less AI slop flooding everything now. But THIRTY-TWO AI-generated unofficial firmwares appeared so far for the cheap little M-VAVE FM1 synth, in about the course of a week. And some of them, apparently, are decent. What the hell?

Here’s Synth Anatomy’s take on this subject, also from today.

A bare majority of adults avoid “AI” chatbots, and not because of ignorance about how to use them (as some have projected) but because of intentional rejection of the technology — disinterest and distrust.

Travis Alabanza’s None of the Above was certainly not the happiest book on nonbinary gender identity that I’ve read. It’s a memoir about what it’s like to be very visibly gender-nonconfirming and Black in the UK, written during the pandemic lockdown which was also when anti-trans sentiment was really starting to boil over.

They have a lot to say about the uncertainty that we’re not allowed to express and have trouble sorting out for ourselves and each other; about the sacrifices made to the gender binary (by everyone, not just trans folks); about how there is no way to be safe as a trans or feminine person (especially when Black) and yet enormous pressure to pass, including from within the trans community. It was very well written, and an important book, but… I recommend also reading something with more trans joy in it for balance.

Now I’m reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s nuts — aliens, the end of the world, and a galactic reality show competition that resembles a fantasy RPG. I don’t think I’m going to be a superfan or even continue with the however many other books there are in the series, but it’s entertaining me enough to keep going through this one at least.

extra-long weekend

My brother and his wife were in town for the last 6 days, and I took time off work to hang out. Hot weather and potential storms conspired against some of our plans, and folks not feeling 100% conspired against some others, but we still managed to have a good time overall.

One thing we did a lot of was book shopping. We visited a couple of indie bookstores in downtown St. Charles (Main Street Books which was decent, and The Book Worm which had a pretty great collection but high prices), and then the incredible Left Bank Books in St. Louis as well as a Half-Price Books. I picked up a few at Main Street and then went a little nuts at LBB. This was my overall haul:

…and at the same time, Bookshop.org had discounted several items on my ebook wishlist, so that’s stocked up a bit too. And I still have some books left from my last Alibris purchase. And my dad gave me The Throne of Saturn which is a big thick novel he enjoyed. So there’s quite a queue now, probably enough to hold me over until J贸lab贸kafl贸冒.

(On this pile, starting from top: a chapbook by a local author, a book about wildlife in P猫re Lachaise Cemetery in Paris which is also a nature preserve, a Southern Gothic horror novel that caught everyone’s eye, a graphic novel about trans history, a novel I read on loan from the library that I’ve always wanted to buy to reread and support the author, a novel I keep hearing good things about, a book I was looking for after a chat about that very subject, a book on music that grabbed my attention, a graphic novel that looks fun, and a graphic novel by an artist who I used to work with.)

At LBB we also bought a couple of t-shirts, plus magnets and stickers, and we’ll be back. “Literacy and Justice For All” is their tagline, they are very much into progressive activism and local community solidarity; they had plenty more featured books that I’ve already heard great things about, they have multiple interesting book clubs, and I feel like their employee recommendations are super on point.

I’m currently reading Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, which has been pretty entertaining so far. In the near future, California has seceded from the not-so-united States and there was a whole war and everything; intelligent robots theoretically liberated from slavery who don’t actually have full rights (obvious historical parallels much?) start their own business.

What with the visit, I haven’t started on the new album yet. But I have some additional ideas. I might go all-FM this time as well as carrying a constant rhythm and no echoes.

I’ve also been looking at a couple of other module options for later:

Orphiser, which is based around an accumulator similar to one of the four on Walk 4… but it also has a “reflect” mode, slew, CVable min/max range, a CVable probability of taking a reverse step, momentum/gravity (which can interact with reflection for bouncing ball patches), and a “Shadow” output which can take on different duties depending on the selected mode. It seems like a lot of fun, though it’s a module where a cheat sheet is probably helpful.

Undertow, which was announced at Superbooth and isn’t out yet. It’s something like Kermit it that it’s a dual, syncable wavetable LFO/VCO. But instead of two outputs it has 15 — a span of 5 across which interpolate the waveshape and frequency between the two sides, and 3 down which have different “mod” settings (additional modulation of the shape) — making it also somewhat like Just Friends and Multiwave, just with a different philosophy. At this moment I’m leaning more toward Orphiser, but will keep my options open.

The plan is still Budapeszt first, then Splines. I’m also wanting a gate/latched switch of some kind — I might go back to Ladik for a basic one (dependent on another module as voltage source, but that’s no problem) or perhaps go for proper arcade buttons. And then quite possibly one of these two.

Speaking of gear acquisitions, I broke my “no more plugins” thing for the sake of Plogue OPMZ — a bit-accurate, meticulously researched emulation of the Yamaha OPM, OPP, OPZ and OPZ2 chips — as found in the Yamaha CX5M computer, several arcade and pinball machines (including my favorite, Marble Madness), the DX100 (which I used to own), Korg DS-8 (which I also used to own), FB-01 (which I borrowed from a friend for a while), TX81Z, etc. I watched their video on the years-long labor of love that was researching and reverse-engineering the chips and the hardware that controlled them, and was convinced to grab it. It’s very much the sound of my teens and early 20s, and yet it’s more than that. Unlike the OPS7, you can tweak stuff while a note is droning which is PERFECT for how I want to operate with it. Absolutely no regrets with this.

Plus, on that last album I got more use out of Sinusoidal Run Rhythm and Pyros, two of the effect plugins I bought this year that I started to doubt afterward.

I still think the overall strategy of limiting my gear purchases has been a great approach to take, and plan to continue that in some form in 2027.